Inside January/February 2018 Volume 17, Number 1

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 VOLUME 17, NUMBER 1

INSIDE

Shanghai: Its Galleries and Museums Conversations with Artists in the KADIST Collection Artist Features: Pak Sheung Chen, Tsang Kin Wah, Zhu Fadong, Zhang Huan

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTED IN TAIWAN 1 Vol. 17 No. 1

VOLUME 17, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018

CONTENTS 30 4 Editor’s Note

6 Contributors

8 Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Art Museum: Shanghai and Its Biennale John Clark

30 (Inter)Dependency: Privately Owned Art Museums in State-Sponsored West Bund 46 Xing Zhao 46 Out of Sight: Conversations with Artists in the KADIST Collection Biljana Ciric

66 Pak Sheung Chuen: Art as a Personal Journey in Times of Political Upheaval Julia Gwendolyn Schneider

80 Entangled Histories: Unraveling the Work of Tsang Kin-Wah 66 Helen Wong 85 Zhu Fadong: Why Art Is Powerless to Make Social Change Denisa Tomkova

97 Public Displays of Afﬂiction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2 Chan Shing Kwan

108 Chinese Name Index 80

Cover: In memoriam, Geng Jianyi, 1962–2017. Courtesy of Zheng Shengtian. Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu Mainland China’s museum and gallery scene FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Yishu EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian 84 opens with two essays examining Shanghai, EDITORS Julie Grundvig a city that is taking strategic approaches Kate Steinmann in its recognition of culture as an essential Chunyee Li CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde component of a vibrant urban experience. John WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li Clark focuses on the influence the Shanghai ADVERTISING Sen Wong Michelle Hsieh Biennale has had on galleries and museums, INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL and Xing Zhao looks into the phenomenon of the Junjun Liu private museums that have recently populated Chris Mao Bing Yang Shanghai’s West Bund district, both writers Vivian Jianhui Zhang taking note within this growth of the challenges ADVISORY BOARD faced by the art professionals who must fulfill Judy Andrews, Ohio State University the programs. These two essays build upon Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden John Clark, University of Sydney those presented in earlier issues of Yishu by Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Biljana Ciric and Julie Chun and exemplify our Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator aim to encourage ongoing discourses. Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Next we present conversations Biljana Ciric Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome carried out with six Chinese artists who Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster are included in the collection of KADIST, an Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive organization based in Paris and San Francisco Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator that believes in the freedom of creativity. Lu Jie, Long March Space The artists Ciric selected are for the most Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator part relatively young, highly experimental, Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and make work that operates outside of the Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator art mainstream. Julia Gwendolyn Schneider Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District and Helen Wong discuss a Hong Kong-based ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. artists, Pak Sheung Chuen and Tsang Kin Wah, 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 respectively, who also take non-conservative Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 approaches to their artwork. What is E-mail: [email protected] distinct is their mix of the poetical with the VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu political, which results in a disconcerting and MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin provocative aesthetic experience. CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu Yishu is produced bi-monthly in Vancouver, Canada, and published Denisa Tomkova examines Zhu Fadong’s in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission Identity Cards project, which began in 1998, inquiries may be sent to: and Chan Shing Kwan focuses on Zhang Huan’s YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY seminal 1994 performance 12m2. These two 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 artists, whose work in the 1990s reflected their E-mail: offi[email protected] discontent with the implications of mainland DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian China’s urban renewal for migrant workers and SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing the disenfranchised, explore the idea of what RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 constitutes full participation as a citizen. (per copy) SUBSCRIPTION RATES Our cover features a portrait of artist Geng 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD Jianyi in recognition of his recent passing 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): in December 2017. Geng Jianyi was an Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD uncompromising artist who made an 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD indispensible contribution to contemporary 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD Chinese art beginning with his first exhibition in DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group the mid-1980s. He was recipient of the 2017 Art CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah Award of China as Artist of the Year. ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com WEB DESIGN Design Format Keith Wallace ISSN 1683 - 3082 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. 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17卷第1期‧2018年1–2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）總策劃：鄭勝天 4 編者手記主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 6 作者小傳黎俊儀網站編輯：黎俊儀 8 當代藝術和當代美術館：上海及其行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 廣告：謝盈盈雙年展黃晨 John Clark 國際委員會：劉珺珺茅為清楊濱 30 依附與共生：國有西岸文化區中的私張建暉人美術館顧問：王嘉驥趙幸田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 46 視線之外：與KADIST基金會收藏的范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 藝術家對話洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) Biljana Ciric 胡昉侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 66 白雙全：作為政治動盪期個人歷程姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞的藝術費大爲 Julia Gwendolyn Schneider 楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 80 糾結的歷史：曾建華作品試析 Katie Hill 黃煜真（Helen Wong） Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 出版：典藏藝術家庭有限公司朱發東—為何藝術無力推動社會副總經理：劉靜宜 85 高世光變革行銷總監：林素珍 Denisa Tomkova 發行專員：許銘文謝宜蓉地址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 97 備嘗艱苦：張洹的12m2 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 陳承焜（Chan Shing Kwan ）編輯製作： Yishu Initiative of Contemporary Chinese Art Society 加中當代藝術協會 108 中英人名對照會長：鄭勝天秘書長：陰晴地址： 200 - 1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 電子信箱: offi[email protected] 訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與Yishu Initiative聯繫。設計製作： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 創意總監：馬偉培藝術總監：周繼宏設計師：黃健斌印刷：台北崎威彩藝有限公司本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，台北印刷出版發行。一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。網址： http://yishu-online.com 管理： Design Format 國際刊號： 1683-3082 售價：每本12美元 / 9歐元 / 350台幣一年6期（含航空郵資）：亞洲94美元 / 亞洲以外地區104美元兩年12期（含航空郵資）：亞洲180美元 / 亞洲以外地區198美元一年網上下載： 49.95美元一年6期加網上下載：亞洲134美元 / 亞洲以外地區144美元版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。封面：耿建翌（1962﹣2017），攝影，鄭勝天提供本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Chan Shing Kwan is a Hong Kong-based (2016). She also curated Encounters with researcher and an aspiring art historian who Pompidou within the exhibition Museum On/ recently graduated with a master’s degree off, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016). Ciric in the history of art and visual culture was a research fellow in 2016 at the Henie at the University of Oxford, United Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway. She has been Kingdom. Supported by the Arnold, Bryce, and a jury member for a number of awards, Read Fund and the St. Cross Travel & Research including Hugo Boss Asia Art Award (2013), Fund, his master’s dissertation examines and she is on the nominating council for Vera abjection, resistance, and Chinese performance List Prize for Art and Politics (2014–15). art in the 1990s. A copy of his dissertation She was nominated for an Independent is kept at Oxford’s Sackler Library. Chan is Curators International (ICI) Independent currently a research assistant at his alma mater, Vision Curatorial Award in 2012. the University of Hong Kong. His recent academic interests include twentieth-century John Clark, Professor Emeritus in Art History Chinese art, consumerism, and visual culture. at the University of Sydney, is the author of ﬁve books and editor or co-editor of another Biljana Ciric works as an independent curator. ﬁve. His book Asian Modernities: Chinese and Her recent exhibitions include When the Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s (Sydney: Power Other Meets the Other Other, presented by Publications, 2010) is a cross-disciplinary Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); Proposals for inter-Asian comparison of modern art and art Surrender, presented by McAM in Shanghai worlds; it won the Best Art Book Prize of the (2016–17); and This Exhibition Will Tell You Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Everything About FY Art Foundations, at the in 2011. His other published works include Frank F. Yang Art and Education Foundation, Modernities of Chinese Art (Leiden: Brill, 2010) Shenzhen (2017). She was co-curator of and Modernities of Japanese Art (Leiden: Brill, the 2015 Third Ural Industrial Biennale for 2013). His most recent book, Contemporary Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, Russia) Asian Art at Biennials, is scheduled for and curator in residence at KADIST Art publication by National University of Foundation (Paris), where she recently curated Singapore Press in 2018, and Clark has recently the exhibition Habits and customs of_____are completed a draft of a two-volume study, The so different from ours that we visit them with Asian Modern, 1850s–1990s, with two volumes the same sentiment that we visit exhibitions of materials forthcoming.

6 Vol. 17 No. 1 Julia Gwendolyn Schneider is a Berlin-born Development Ofﬁcer at the Contemporary art critic and editor. She studied American Art Gallery and the Fair Coordinator for the Studies, Cultural Sciences, and Aesthetics at Vancouver Art Book Fair. Humboldt University, Berlin, and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, London. She Xing Zhao is a Ph.D. student in Art History, has contributed to books on contemporary Theory, and Criticism at the University of art and artists’ monographs, and her essays, California, San Diego. She studies modern interviews, and exhibition reviews have Chinese art in comparative frames. She is appeared in Camera Austria International, particularly interested in transnational cultural springerin, die tageszeitung, Yishu: Journal of exchange and the history of collecting and Contemporary Chinese Art, and LEAP, among display. Prior to entering the doctoral program, others. She is an advisor to the Institute for Zhao worked in Beijing and Shanghai, focusing Uncertain Knowledge, Berlin. on archiving, curating, and writing.

Denisa Tomkova is a Ph.D. candidate in the Film and Visual Culture Department at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom, researching participatory and socially engaged art in central-eastern Europe since the 1960s. Her research interests include contemporary art, participation, community, biopolitics, national identity, and post-communism. Since 2015, she has been a member of the international research project “Comparing WE’s. Cosmopolitanism. Emancipation. Postcolianity,” based at the University of Lisbon.

Helen Wong is a Vancouver-based art writer. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Art History. She is currently the Interim

Vol. 17 No. 1 7 John Clark Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Art Museum: Shanghai and Its Biennale1

Prehistories No doubt there are varied and rich prehistories to modernity in the art worlds of many Chinese cities apart from Beijing—Tianjin, Nanjing, Chengdu/Chongqing—but it is in Shanghai in the 1850s and 1860s that a patronage culture, for art at least for guohua (traditional Chinese painting), began and continued into the 1910s. Imbricated within this patronage culture were intense artistic exchanges with Japan and Europe, from the 1860s to the 1930s, effected through sending Chinese artists abroad to study. There were also a number of Japanese artists who exhibited in China, particularly at the ﬁrst National Fine Arts Exhibition, in 1929. At the same time, the advent of modernity, beginning in the 1920s, was associated with a broad consumer culture that articulated new desires and, in particular, new roles for women—producing a new culture of visual representation in contemporary magazines, cinema, and advertisements. Thus, from the mid-nineteenth century onward the urban space of Shanghai increasingly constituted a foreground for the modern in China. This was physically upended, if not entirely destroyed, during the murderous, politically myopic conﬂicts between Nationalists and Communists in 1927, and in the long, bloody struggle with the Japanese in 1932, which was followed by a pause and then continued as all-out war from 1937 to 1945. Even then the caesura was not complete, and the civil war lasted from 1945 to 1949.

One of the problems with divorcing contemporary art from art history involves actual and potential types of modernity, some existing in parallel to, some in conﬂict with, each other. What is happening now could have happened earlier and might still happen later.2 When we consider modern Shanghai art and its institutional framework from the 1980s to the 2000s, we are looking at the possibility of what could have been consolidated much earlier if there had not been historical conﬂict and destruction. This raises a question: at what level of consciousness has the modern been absorbed, without it rising to the surface of obvious cultural expression, especially when few physical traces of this projection are now present save for some architectural heritage?

The problem in understanding what continuities of the modern may exist in Shanghai and how they were articulated in artistic discourse, institutions, and artists’ lives, comes both with the period of stabilizing the new Communist regime in the 1950s and in the deliberate undoing of its results by a group within the regime during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Because Beijing was the capital and because the two major national art academies of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing and the

8 Vol. 17 No. 1 Zhejiang (later China) Academy of Art in Hangzhou were under the direct control of the Ministry of Culture until 2000, and despite Hangzhou being relatively close to Shanghai geographically (before the advent of high speed rail, it was about three hours by express train), the extensive local modern art teaching base that potentially survived in Shanghai was not as developed institutionally as at the two national academies. Artists who deserve major national prominence and who, after the ten-year hiatus of the anti-Japanese and Civil War, could have re-ignited Chinese modernism in Shanghai to mention a few, include Liu Haisu (1886–1994), founder of the Shanghai Technical School of Art in 1912, later reconstituted at Shanghai University in 1983; Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), ﬁrst head of the then National Art Academy in Hangzhou, who, in the 1950s, lived a kind of inner exile during his imprisonment through the Cultural Revolution and subsequent exile to Hong Kong from 1977 onward;3 and Wu Dayu (1903–1988), possibly the greatest national impressionist oil painter from Hangzhou, who from 1965 was at the Shanghai Painting and Sculpture Academy, and underwent privations during the Anti-Rightist campaign (1957–1959) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).4

Importantly, these artists in Shanghai were not in Beijing and, therefore, did not have the support base of those like Wu Zuoren, who, though technically an overseas Chinese trained in a mild form of Belgian late impressionism, took up the mantle of Soviet socialist realism from Konstantin M. Maksimov, who was in charge of the Oil Painting Training Group in Beijing from 1955 to 1957. One may speculate that if the Shanghai oil painting establishment was too vulnerable to political swings and changes for it to support a younger reaction against it—that is, if it was too ideologically rigid and insecure—then the onset of an artist and artists’ space-led type of contemporary art might have occurred earlier in Shanghai than Beijing. In Beijing in the late 1970s to early 1980s, administrators like Jiang Feng, academic painters like Jin Shangyi or Hou Yimin, and even Soviet-trained art historians like Shao Dazhen were quite content to explore academic subjects they had not been allowed to before, and could tolerate or afford to ignore the reaction of younger academy-trained artists and artist-critics as well as those from outside the academy. This was also possible in Hangzhou from 1985 to 1986 with, for example, the artist collective Pond Society. So, except for the work of curator Biljana Ciric, the history of post-Mao contemporary art in Shanghai remains understudied.5

The Spaces of Art It might seem that biennials are attached afresh to, or are newly inserted into, a particular urban site. Actually, they are part of a complex internal expansion of institutions within the art world that claim afﬁliation with movements of international or transnational cultural circulation, but they also reposition dynamics that are already internal to a particular nation, or a quite local set of art discourses. In the post-1949 world, museums such as those in Shanghai appear to constitute a hierarchy of spaces beginning with the Shanghai Museum, founded in 1952, whose new building in the shape of an ancient bronze ding vessel opened in 1996. Among other 1950s institutions there is the Lu Xun Museum, founded in 1956, with its large collection of pre-revolutionary prints. There are museums that feature

Vol. 17 No. 1 9 individual artists based on family collections such as the Liu Haisu Museum, which opened at his former residence in 1995 (although it apparently had earlier incarnations) and was given a new purpose-built museum building in 2012. This now holds one-person shows or retrospectives in addition to a changing display of Liu Haisu’s work.

Former Shanghai Race Club (shown in purple box), aerial photograph, after 1934.

The mid- to late-1990s marked Wu Ershan, The New Land, 2004, installation and the next cycle of museum building performance, installation view at 2004 Shanghai Biennale. after the 1950s. The Shanghai Art Photo: John Clark. Museum was located in 1955 in the renovated former Shanghai Race Club building (originally constructed for horse racing by the British in 1934), and became the ﬁrst home of the Shanghai Biennale during the period 1995 to 2012. The Biennale then moved to the new Power Station of Art on the West Bund. It is my understanding that the Shanghai Art Museum building will be reconstituted as the Shanghai History Museum. Close by, the Shanghai Grand Theatre, or Opera House, opened in 1998 with ancillary exhibition spaces.

The early 2000s also saw another Exterior views of Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2016. tier of temporary one-day to Photo: John Clark. one-week exhibitions in housing block basements and some then- unoccupied real estate apartments. These may be linked to fifty or more commercial art gallery spaces and many artist studios that emerged in a disused textile factory area at Moganshanlu around 1999/2000, which became popularly known as M50 Art Zone. Among the first galleries to locate there was Eastlink Gallery with artist director Li Liang, who published the catalogue for the Fuck Off exhibition in 2000 that was mounted parallel to the Shanghai Biennale, which was the first Biennale to include international artists.

10 Vol. 17 No. 1 Exterior views of Power Interspersed with these galleries in Station of Art, Shanghai, 2016. Photo: Keith Wallace. M50 were non-commercial spaces, some of which were artist-run with ﬂexible and informal support structures.6 Most non-commercial spaces had local membership only, whereas some, such as the present Chronus Art Centre, list a stellar array of Euro-American specialists on their international advisory board and a mandate directed to the most high-end new technology in media art.

MoCA, Shanghai, installation view of exhibition Shan Shui Within, 2016. Photo: Keith Wallace.

MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai. In 2005, another wave of construction commenced with the privately funded Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), ﬁnancially supported by Taiwanese gemstone dealer and designer, Samuel Kung, who remains its chairman. Hong Kong-based Oscar Ho-Hing Kay, who was widely experienced in curatorial professionalism and had extensive international art curator and critic contacts, was the ﬁrst chief curator, but he soon resigned.7 Later, in 2015, in order to allow for direct shop-front visibility with a passing public—in a former Starbucks café on the busy Nanjing West Road—MoCa Pavilion was founded, and it runs a separate program of performance and visual art that is intended to appeal to younger audiences.

The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art was founded earlier, in 2003, as a public museum of contemporary art with extensive local district involvement on the board and with its exhibition policy. The website for

Vol. 17 No. 1 11 Five years of Duolun—Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition (2008), states that the museum is a:

multifunctional institution of culture and art, providing services to the development of Chinese contemporary art and a platform for the international exchange of contemporary art. It takes “originality, academic [sic] and internationalism” as its guideline, and “inheriting historical culture, renovating contemporary art” as its aim.8

Early exhibitions seemed to be adventurous—I remember I ﬁrst saw Sun Xun’s William Kentridge-like animations there in 2007 before he became famous. Duolun also felt the direct hand of authority and soon lost its remarkable foreign curator, Biljana Ciric, in 2007, who had both curated and written extensive catalogue essays.9 The eventual resignation of Oscar Ho-Hing Kay from MoCA and Biljana Ciric from Duolun may indicate that not merely were the local authorities and communist party leaders unwilling to give their curators the freedom they required to work, they did not know how to operate outside the sphere of favours offered and received, which constitutes many of the entrepreneurial dealings between party and enterprise in Shanghai.

State Owned Public Museums, Recurrent Exhibitions The opening of a state funded museum of contemporary art together with private museums displaying contemporary art as well as the owner’s own collection demonstrates a further wave of museum development in Shanghai. Art world professionals in China see these spaces as falling broadly into two categories: those led by their exhibition programs and those led by their funding structures or dependency on a particular type of donor, whether government, corporation, or private collector.10

The Power Station of Art, which Huang Yongping, Thousand- Armed Kuanyin, 1997/2012, opened in 2012, was “the ﬁrst installation view at 2012 Shanghai Biennale. state-run museum dedicated to contemporary art in mainland China. It also became home to the Shanghai Biennale.”11 The Power Station of Art, no doubt because of the enormity of the building, was preoccupied with works of scale, including Huang Yongping’s huge multi-storey Duchampian wine rack, the arms bearing the items of Chinese consumerist desire, which redeployed a motif, or iconographic armature, of the pre-modern icon the thousand-armed Kuanyin.

The Biennale’s curatorial leadership has included Chinese art dignitaries such as Fan Di’an (then Director of the National Arts Museum of China, Beijing) and Xu Jiang (President of the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, nephew of former President of China, Jiang Zemin). A four-to six-person curatorial committee has included international or overseas Chinese luminaries such Hou Hanru and Shimizu Toshio in 2000, Yuko Hasegawa

12 Vol. 17 No. 1 in 2002, Sebastian Lopez and Zheng Shengtian in 2004, and Jens Hofmann and Boris Groys in 2012. In 2016, the three members of the New Delhi- based Raqs Media Collective,12—Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta—were jointly given the title of Chief Curator.

The Power Station of Art, as a building, is a studied imitation of the turbine hall at London’s Tate Modern, but perhaps after the curatorial control difficulties of MoCA and Duolun, those running the Power Station have also studied the value of curatorial freedom. The building, the former Shanghai turbine hall—like that of the Tate Modern, and somewhat in the same way as the Water Mall in the Asia-Pacific Triennale (APT), Queensland—requires very large pieces to fill up the space. Such conceptual scale is part of the plan of large and self-avowedly “global” museums to produce spectacle on a level that absorbs their audiences, and which practically forces engagement with the grandiosity of the work despite the sometimes intellectual poverty of the artwork’s physical conception.

Top left: Cai Guo-Qiang, At times the phenomenon of grandiosity and the curatorial demand for Inopportune, Stage One, 2004, installation view at “destination” works in huge halls, often a former factory, led in the 2000s Guggenheim New York, 2008. to the display of the same or very similar piece over a variety of sites, such Top middle: Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune, Stage One, 2004, as Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune, Stage One, which between 2004 and 2012 installation view at MASS MoCA, North Adams, New was shown at Mass MoCA North Adams, Guggenheim Museum New York, York. Biennale of Sydney, and Seattle Art Museum. Top right: Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune, Stage One, 2004, installation view at Seattle Art Museum. This repetition of essentially the Right: Ai Weiwei, Boomerang, same work with different fabrications 2006, glass lusters, plated steel, electric cables, and, thus, predictability, in part may incandescent lamps, installation view at Asia Paciﬁc account for the fame of, for example, Triennial, Brisbane, 2006. Photo: John Clark. works by Ai Weiwei such as the water mall chandelier, Boomerang, at Asia Paciﬁc Triennale V (APT) in 2006 (which resonated with tourist hotel lobby decoration from the Gold Coast Hotel located nearby APT of which Ai Weiwei may well have been aware), at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in 2008, at his exhibition with Andy Warhol at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2015 (upside down in this case), and at Spring Gallery in Beijing in 2016.

Manifestations of such grandiosity also appeared in the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, where there was a curatorial necessity to create a destination piece that encoded the audience experience even before any encounter with smaller works, and this may have contributed to the exhibition concept as a whole.

Vol. 17 No. 1 13 Ai Weiwei, Chandelier, 2008, metal and crystal, installation view at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2009. Photo: John Clark.

Left: Ai Wewei, Chandelier with Restored Han Dynasty Lamps for the Emperor, 2015, steel, crystal, lights, installation view at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2015. Photo: John Clark. Right: Ai Weiwei, Chandelier, installation view at Spring Gallery, Beijing, May 2016. Photo: John Clark.

14 Vol. 17 No. 1 Internal staircase at Power Station of Art, Shanghai, September 2016. Photo: John Clark.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Far Away, 2016, installation view at 2016 Shanghai Biennale. Photo: Keith Wallace.

Corridor at Power Station of In addition to such grandiose works Art, Shanghai, installation view of Huang Yongping exhibition that tend to overwhelm, there is, Bâton Serpent III, March 2016. Photo: Keith Wallace. past the grand staircase in the main hall of the Power Station of Art, an architectural device also found at the Minsheng Art Museum in Beijing, where one finds more intimate spaces further down corridor-linked floors. The floorplan of the Power Station of Art—the Chinese title translating more directly as Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum—presumably was designed to allow for considered thematic and carefully historical exhibitions such as the excellent Ordinary Metropolis Shanghai: A Model of Urbanism, curated by Zhang Liang, which showed historical maps, memorabilia, and architectural models in addition to thematic photographs. Indeed, the Power Station of Art, again a bit like Tate Modern, is one of the few large official institutions able to provide for such extensive thematic and retrospective exhibitions.

The Shanghai Biennale is not the only exhibition of its kind in the Jiangnan area, and it has served as a precursor and model for other recurrent exhibitions. In particular there were biennials debuting at Wuzhen and Suzhou in 2016. The latter, called Suzhou Documents, was curated by Zhang Qing, a founding director of the Shanghai Biennale, and Roger Buergel, an artistic director of documenta 12 in 2007. Interestingly, Suzhou Documents was keen to distance itself from other biennials by stating its intention in the press release “to move beyond the largely exhausted biennale-type exhibition model with its bouquet of arbitrary themes and emphasis on spectacle.”13

Vol. 17 No. 1 15 Privately Owned Museums Top: Isozaki Arata, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, In Shanghai, the “Biennale” effect of with Envision Pavilion in background, 2013. Photo: John large exhibitions engaging the viewer Clark. in spectacular ways has spread to Left: Isozaki Arata, museum at Central Academy of Fine Art, other kinds of venues. Perhaps the Beijing, 2003–08. Photo: Keith Wallace. most remarkable feature of the Shanghai art scene, in addition to the institutions mentioned above, has been the establishment and rise to prominence of six privately owned museums that feature contemporary art. One of them, Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, moved to its new site in 2013 (its predecessor was Zendai Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 2005), and its two other adjunct sites at Wuwei Creative Park in northeast Shanghai for the study and exploration of experimental and avant-garde art closed in 2016 while the Zendai Zhujiajiao Art Space remains as another offshoot. The former Zendai Museum of Modern Art was a fairly interesting, medium-scale museum of contemporary art supported by the Zendai Property Company, which presented solo exhibitions of Song Dong and Wang Jianwei in 2008 and Yang Fudong in 2009, but in 2013, at its new site, became a behemoth with signature architecture—massive ground-level pillars like elephant feet—by the former international postmodern bad-boy architect Isozaki Arata. Among many other art museum projects, Arata designed the Mito

Sou Fujimoto, Envision Pavilion, scaffolding plan, 2016.

16 Vol. 17 No. 1 Xu Bing, Background Story, 2016 version, installation, 400 x 994 cm.

Cildo Meireles, Title Unknown, 1990–99, ﬂowering plants, plastic ﬂowers, excrement, plastic imitation excrement, enamel bowl. Photo: John Clark.

Liam Gillick, Shanghai Schlemmer, 2016, digital mock-up of site-speciﬁc installation.

Art Tower (1986–90), as well as the new museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2003–08). From late 2015 to early 2016, the Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, according to an interview with the director Lee Yongwoo, held the ﬁnancially successful Silk Road exhibition based on academic collaboration with the Dunhuang Research Institute. It was followed in late 2016 by the even more ambitious large-scale exhibition of contemporary art—rather like a mini-biennial—that was curated by Lee Yong-woo and Hans Ulrich Obrist and titled Envision 2016: Shanghai Project, First Edition, Phase 1. This project was supported by the Envision Energy Company in an external pavilion designed by Sou Fujimoto, also the architect of the Yuz Art Museum, Shanghai. In addition to signature

Vol. 17 No. 1 17 modern architecture and crowd-pleasing heritage exhibitions, the museum intended to put itself at the forefront of contemporary art with sponsored exhibitions of celebrity contemporary artists including works in a group exhibition with Xu Bing, Cildo Meireles, and Liam Gillick, This intriguingly combined a concept of a new urbanism with artworks such as Xu Bing’s Background Story (2016), made from rubbish but looking like “traditional” Chinese landscapes, Meireles’s trash/ordure culture work that included ﬂowers and bowls of actual human excrement, and Gillick’s Title Unknown (1990–99) and anti-selﬁe posed drawings, Shanghai Schlemmer (2016), after the work of Oscar Schlemmer.14

Thus, the Shanghai Himalaya Art Museum presents one modality alongside which other company- or individual collector-owned museums can present conceptual surveys of recent contemporary art, such as Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, part of a national bank-owned chain of the Minsheng Bank. The Shanghai version was founded in 2010 and is housed in the former Spanish pavilion at Shanghai Expo. It recently presented the survey show Turning point: Contemporary Art in China Since 2000.

Guo Xi and Zhang Jianling, The Grand Voyage: A Man Upside Down, OCAT Shanghai, 2016.

Another similar chain, in this case Guo Xi, installation view of exhibition The Reenactor, supported by another property Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, 2016. Photograph of John company, is OCAT, the OCT Clark. Contemporary Art Terminal,15 which founded its main museum in Shenzhen in 2005 at the same time as the Zendai in Shanghai, but it at some point decided to develop a chain of museums, in which Shenzhen was followed by OCAT Shanghai in 2012, OCAT Xi’an in 2013, and OCAT Beijing in 2015. OCAT Shenzhen had leadership under its now deceased director Huang Zhuan, the eminent curator and thinker about modern and contemporary art. OCAT Shanghai’s building is currently undergoing redevelopment, but in 2016 it exhibited the work of Guo Xi and Zhang Jianling, The Grand Voyage: A Man Upside Down.

In this exhibition, the link between projected video, banal furniture, and sound projection made reference to a world cruise on the ship Costa Atlantica. I was not quite sure if this exhibition was a record of a true voyage turned into a fiction through its video and aural treatment, or an elaborate fiction masquerading as a true story. An equivalent cognate form of conceptual and physical ambiguity also could be found in Guo Xi’s first solo exhibition at Vanguard Gallery in M50, The Reenactor (2016) where everyday images and objects—a reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with a

18 Vol. 17 No. 1 Pearl Earring and an unbalanced heap of squashed Coca-Cola cans— were positioned so that one was never sure whether the image faded into the title, The Renactor, or the title was written as some sort of universal instruction whereupon the image/object bent or distorted away from its original motivating desire. I asked Guo Xi if the rise of new museums of contemporary art had any impact on the kind of work he made, but he thought not. The artist creates the work ﬁrst and this is then taken up by the exhibition site according to its need, or to the evaluation of the importance of the work, or to the timelines of the artwork’s conceptual underpinnings.

Rockbund Art Museum, Like OCAT Shanghai, another museum Shanghai, 1932, remodeled in 2016. Photo: John Clark. with a real estate project company as its financial base, is Rockbund Art Museum, which opened in 2010 and has recently taken over and had renowned architect David Chipperfield restore an impeccable 1932 Art Deco building. The Rockbund aims to present three or four exhibitions a year and to put considerable effort into research and education. As an interesting example of contemporary art museum PR copy, a statement about the 5th Anniversary Exhibition in 2015 suggests how a real estate project can fit into the project of building a cultural milieu:

The Rockbund Art Museum is the ﬁrst contemporary art museum in China that is fully devoted to supporting contemporary art production and creativity. The museum was founded as an important part of the Rockbund Urban Renaissance project, which aims to renovate heritage buildings and revitalize the cultural milieu for the north end of the Bund through arts, fashion, business, and leisure programs. Thanks to substantial ﬁnancial support toward the production of original new artworks, the Rockbund Art Museum conceives and organizes temporary art exhibitions, paying the utmost attention to professionalism and quality content in curatorial practice.16

Endorsements can also be found on the Rockbund website such as that of Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore, of May 2015:

The Rockbund Art Museum is bringing cutting edge projects by international artists to Shanghai, especially the commissioned one person exhibitions that offer artists the rare opportunity to create site speciﬁc works for this unique historical building. This is exciting for artists and visitors alike.

Bauer is on the advisory committee not only of the Rockbund Art Museum,17 but also the Chronus Art Center.18 I slightly digress to bring

Vol. 17 No. 1 19 up an added underlying issue—the apparently seamless transferability of personnel at the curatorial advisory level transnationally between the curatorial advisors’ base institutions. Although the network is rarely publicized, its members often sit on committees that choose the curators and curatorial teams for biennials as well as help with support for artists where support is required via foundations or government cultural bodies. Bauer also has been president of the Biennial Foundation, which is based in New York and London.

While this interlinkage rarely comes into question, it should at least be mentioned. Certainly some writers want to see the more isolated regions or peripheries identified as centres, so that under some dispensation of postcolonialism these peripheries might acquire a countervailing status.19 This position seems too convenient for the existing centres of, say, New York or Tokyo (think Guggenheim or Mori art museums), that benefit from constructing the peripheries in this way. There is feedback among curators on advisory committees who need the peripheries to constitute the context of their desired conversation and the works circulated to be regularized according to a newly conventionalized taste. Whether increasingly monotone transnational art will be countered by an increase in the number of biennials, thus reducing the ability to circulate the same kind of art, or further rigidified by the institutionalization of biennials, and the notion of professional curatorial practice, remains to be seen.20

The advisory committees for many of these new institutions have multiple overlapping memberships such as those with Ute Meta Bauer’s own institution in Singapore.21 It is inescapable to conclude that by 2015 or so, major and largely new contemporary art institutions were integrated into and adopted the values and practices from “transnational” specialists from Euro-America.

This has major consequences for the kinds of contemporary art the local institutions receive and exhibit as well as increases the importance of choosing international and local artists from those with name or celebrity value. To take prominent recent cases, How many more Yayoi Kusama or Rirkrit Tiravanija exhibitions can the international artworld absorb? Terry Smith thinks the art so produced cannot produce a movement because the transnational is only transitional.22 In short, artists such as Guo Xi, as we have seen, may make work that has local and, via the work’s circulation nominated by international advisors, some kind of international prominence, but it does not mean at the outset that this work is commissioned in a certain way by the institutions; rather, it is placed by commercial galleries or international curators. Real estate companies and high-end consumer goods manufacturers like perfume and clothing companies, through purpose-built foundations, often intervene in the art economy of artists by their use of artworks to promote their products. Markets of prestige are frequently supported by art foundations owned by the luxury goods companies; that is, they extend their cultural capital so that “Chanel” becomes a synonymous with “perfume,” or “Gucci” becomes synonymous with “shoes and handbags.” They thereby secure art exhibition and sales opportunities for actual artists by altering their media visibility,

20 Vol. 17 No. 1 SHE: International Women and this promotes the artists’ work that are actually sold by art galleries or Artists Exhibition, 2016, installation view at Long selected for biennial exhibitions. Museum, Shanghai. Photo: John Clark. As mentioned earlier, some museums act as display centres for the owner’s collections, such as the Long Museum, both in West Bund and Pudong, which holds the acquisitions by Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei of Chinese traditional art, Revolutionary art, and modern and contemporary art. Liu Yiqian is a former market stall holder, taxi driver, and now a billionaire real estate and insurance company owner.23 Nearby, also in West Bund, the Yuz Museum shows its owner’s collection of contemporary art, as well exhibitions imported from outside of China such as an exhibition of Giacometti curated and organized by the Fondation Giacometti, Paris. Both have extensive museum sites in or near the newly developing West Bund Cultural Corridor composed of converted industrial buildings; in the case of the Yuz Museum, the airplane hangars that previously served the site are still identiﬁable. The Long Museum also shows externally curated shows such as in September 2016 with SHE: International Women Artists Exhibition, and a retrospective of the early work of Yu Youhan. It is notable that the 2013 academic advisors of the Long Museum were all Chinese, including the renowned art critic Li Xianting.24 This may mean that collectors’ museums are more susceptible to local artistic consensus in the choice and exhibition of works than some transnationally curated spaces.

The Yuz Museum presents the case of a highly involved collector, Budi Tek, an overseas Chinese who formerly was a clove cigarette billionaire in Indonesia, who has been collecting since 2004 with a focus initially on contemporary Chinese art but later expanding to Euro-American artists like Anselm Kiefer and Anthony Gormley. How and why he made the leap to providing a museum that makes his collection available to the public is not clear, but he started the Yuz Foundation in 2007 and the Yuz Museum

Vol. 17 No. 1 21 Alberto Giacometti Retrospective, 2016, installation view at Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Photo: Keith Wallace.

in Jakarta opened in 2008. This Yuz Museum, Hangar 101 East Wing before renovation. is said to shortly move to a new large park in Bali. He keeps his collection in storage in Shanghai, importing works to Jakarta under Sou Fujimoto, design proposal temporary licence to avoid a 34% for Yuz Museum, Shanghai, May 2013. import tax. Budi Tek also explains succinctly how private museums are set up and run in China without an autonomous foundation. With some rare exceptions, the establishment of private foundations is not allowed under the Leninist principle of party-ordained organizations of the masses, and this status is enshrined in law that privileges wenlian afﬁliates (the Federation of Literary and Arts organizations).25 The government rents land to a company, who rents the space to the museum, and there is no legally recognized, organizational way of instituting a foundation.26

Budi Tek offers useful insights into the way he as a collector and perhaps other collectors operate. They obtain the approval and recognition of signiﬁcant persons; former President Megawati Sukarnoputri opened his exhibition in Jakarta. They start a serious intellectual examination of the ﬁeld they are to buy in. Budi Tek began a long series of academic conversations with Wu Hung (Professor Chinese Art History, University of Chicago) and continued these via the Bali Conversations, held on an annual basis, some of whose proceedings the Yuz Museum has published. Moreover, despite such high level advice and intellectual engagement, collectors like Budi Tek continue to rely on their own taste, evidenced by his evaluating works as “important” and “most important.”27 This appraisal by the value of “importance” seems like an aesthetic one, but since it is not yet art historical—that is, founded on the consideration of many artworks over a period of time—it easily slips into agreeing with or opposing the actual market, rather than reconstructing market choice by the longevity or breadth of the collector’s viewpoint.

22 Vol. 17 No. 1 Before we leave our consideration of major art institutions, there are some obvious features of their interaction that should be taken up, at least partially. The ﬁrst is inter-institutional competition. With seven or more contemporary art museums now in Shanghai we cannot expect them to remain neutral about each other’s exhibitions, programs, and services, especially when the Shanghai Biennale is sited at the only major public museum. It would seem there are three routes to follow (and which, by and large, have been followed).

Redza Piyadasa, Entry Points, One is to promote and exhibit art 1978, National Gallery of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. that is not found elsewhere within the Photo: John Clark. Chinese art system, and the easiest and, if politically permissible, simplest way of doing this is to import “new” artists from abroad virtually in the manner of biennial canonization, if not directly imported from biennials elsewhere. As we have seen with institutions as diverse as Rockbund and Chronus, these institutions are likely to involve showing foreign art that already has achieved fame or some cachet outside China. Against this, new or, alternatively, recent neo- traditionalism (modern ink painting for the masses) can be introduced as a counterweight, but also as a way of politically balancing presentation and brand in a local cultural market that is still latently not highly politicized, unlike in their different ways the USA or Korea or Malaysia, such as in the Arabic calligraphy ﬂourishes of Syed Ahmad Jamal.

Syed Ahmad Jamal, Tulisan (Writing), 1961, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 73.6 cm.

A second way is to assemble national “talents” or “treasures” as deﬁned by recent contemporary art practice and, perhaps, to draw sometimes simple comparisons between pre-modern and early modern art, such as the comparison between early postcolonial landscape with 1970s conceptualism in the work of Redza Piyadass in Malaysia.

The third possibility is to engage with generation-deﬁned art fashion and link this to lifestyle consumption or to trends found in popular music. This can appear “new” but, at the same time, be intrinsically dated because the comparative examples are all prior historically.

Another set of issues at the interface of contemporary art museums and

Vol. 17 No. 1 23 biennial circuits concerns the way the audience for contemporary art is assembled and the way collectors are positioned—that is, how they are included to make certain value choices via artworks through exhibition. As the Power Station of Art and Rockbund Art Museum have demonstrated, there is a potentially large cultural market that wishes to be educated in contemporary art through programs beyond the exhibition itself. This is a consumer lifestyle deﬁnition found in Chinese cities since the twelfth-century southern Song dynasty, but the audience now arrives in differentiated scales for different kinds of exhibitions, from the spectacular works by Cai Guo-qiang to Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s various assaults on the senses. The audiences are not one but diverse and often clearly segmented by age, income, humanist or anti-humanist ideologies and expectations, and numerous other features of self-positioning that are mediated by the medium chosen for the work, especially web-based ones.

Left: The Art Newspaper, Chinese editions for July 2016 and October 2016. Right: Yishujie/LEAP, October, 2016.

Finally, one should mention that unlike before 1995, or perhaps even before 2001, when it was clear a cultural opening would take place before and following the Beijing Olympics in 2008, information about the art world outside of China has volumetrically and qualitatively changed. Indeed, the international periodicals Art Newspaper and Artforum now have Chinese language editions, and some journals like Yishujie/LEAP are published bilingually.

Such international art media circulation now means that on the level of visual and written information, the kinds of gaps and time lags that once marked the distribution of information between China and the outside world have collapsed. There is still, however, institutional closure within China by art school curricula and control of opportunities for exhibition and state patronage, but these are considerably less constricting.

Moreover, although it is not my intention to handle the question of art markets in relation to the canonization of contemporary art, the art market inside China has gone beyond the canonization of artists and works through their association with recurrent institutionalized, domestic art exhibitions, and even the transnational art exhibition of the Shanghai Biennale. Sales of art both domestically and to foreign buyers no longer depend on

24 Vol. 17 No. 1 consecration by institutions or even by commercial gallery representation, although these may now form an initial mode of canonization by market price. The increasingly frequent recurrent exhibitions of sellable art via local art fairs such as the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, West Bund Art & Design 2016, and even the International Photograph Fair in 2016 (which occupied three large spaces of the Soviet style Shanghai Exhibition Center), means that artworks can circulate via price and taste considerations as well as by coterie nomination, which is no longer that of a government body but of a group of artists and their entrepreneurial art world peers.

Biennials ignore this art market at their peril because the market represents kinds of circulable taste criteria even as the market effectively canonizes an artwork by selecting it and then can bring to it higher market value. Biennials may dangerously have to follow trends established by art fair consecration because the tastemakers for art fairs increasingly intermix with transnational curators whose opinions are listened to by collectors. It would be far better for artists if the market function of biennial consecration— which does not always work without other kinds of curatorial hype—were countered by the exhibition at biennials of non-marketable works. There are many mid-career artists in Australia, China, India, or Japan who rarely are shown at biennials and who could on grounds of quality be included. Repetitive nomination of the club of well-known “transnational” players is really like internationally circulating opera or Hollywood musical productions. The work may be good—that is, it agrees with a certain notion of taste or importance—but, in the end, circulation clogs the exhibition system and the work shown overall can tend toward a conventionality that becomes banal. Any artist or work shown at more than two Biennales should not be shown at a third to avoid this conventionalization, which might be better performed through art market sales.

But the amalgamation of many different types of institutions at the West Bund Cultural Corridor means that the functional distinctions between artists and their coteries, commercial galleries and their artist stables, free art entrepreneurs and independent curators, contemporary art museums and their links to transnational trends and coteries, shows that domestic and international exhibitions are increasingly overlapping, while the audience is becoming more diverse. Stratiﬁcation of both can take place within this cloud of possibilities.

In order to glimpse the intermeshing of artistic work with biennials I will conclude with a brief look at MadeIn Gallery, established in 2009 by artist Xu Zhen. This artist became prominent with a 1998 video work Rainbow— exhibited at the 2000 exhibition Fuck Off in Shanghai and then shown by Harald Szeemann at the Venice Biennale in 2001—in which Xu Zhen’s back was being whipped and turning increasingly red but the viewer saw only the skin getting redder and heard the sound of the whipping, but no whipping was actually shown. This work, as an allegory for the way China’s economy was forcing physical changes which could not be directly perceived but whose resulting pain could be sensed was shown overseas apparently unproblematically after Venice and then slightly later in 2001 at the Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition, Living in Time.

Vol. 17 No. 1 25 In the early 2010s, Xu Zhen was exhibiting MadeIn Gallery, West Bund, Shanghai. Photo: John Clark. bizarre sculptures, made by a team of studio Left: Xu Zhen, Tianlongshan assistants that combined Greek with Chinese Grottoes Bodhisattva and Winged Victory of Samothrace, Buddhist sculpture. The atelier now has a 2013, mineral composite, marble, steel, 460 x 230 x collective gallery space that moved from M50 626 cm. close to the Yuz Museum on West Bund, and to where ShanghART has also opened a new gallery (while still retaining their space at M50). In the work of Xu Zhen, who was originally a ShanghART artist, ﬁfteen years after his Venice debut and seven years after he established his workshop and stable of artists, works ﬁt for biennial exhibition and works sought for collector consumption imperceptibly blend into each other, even as the physical sites of sale are fused between biennials and commercial galleries.

Indeed, if there is any problem with city government support for zones such as the West Bund Cultural Corridor, where most of the audience who are looking at the works will never buy them, it is in the substitution of supermall taste for careful but sometimes necessarily uncontrollable interactions with art that can support the artists. Zones such as M50, Beijing’s 798, or now the West Bund Cultural Corridor, provide a social leisure space, which, in effect, “biennializes” or renders into a transnational form an art that is only absorbable as spectacle, despite some artists and even some gallerists trying to use the occasion to subvert this new kind of institutional closure.

26 Vol. 17 No. 1 It would be very difﬁcult to examine the consequences of the links among museums, less formal and sometimes transient art spaces, and artists’ practices. Whether this means the horizontal overlapping of art space functions and art actor roles, between artist and curator or gallery director, and the de-institutionalization or the re-institutionalization in a new structure of art practice and audience reception remains unclear. One hopes this rearticulation retains room for the autonomy of artistic practice, which is at the edge of all creation—and it doesn’t have to be new—even as it plays with a different set of physical and social constraints and with the formation of a new kind of virtual image space by the latest electronic media.

A shortened version of this paper was presented at the symposium for the Singapore Biennale, January 2017, and the full version was presented at the China Studies Centre, University of Sydney, March 2017.

Notes

1. I am grateful to the China Studies Centre, University of Sydney, and its then director Professor Jeffrey Riegel, for ﬁnancial support toward my research visit to Shanghai from October 7 to 15, 2016, prior to my participation in the 34th World Congress of the History of Art (CIHA, Comité Internationale d’Histoire de l’Art) in Beijing. I am also grateful to the following people who kindly agreed to meet, discuss the role and development of contemporary art and art museums in Shanghai, or offer materials: Lorenz Helbling (ShanghART Gallery), Zhou Tiehai (former artist, Director West Bund Art and Design Fair), Karen Smith (Director, Shanghai Center of Photography and Director, OCAT Xi’an) , Biljana Ciric (independent curator), Josef Ng (Managing Director Asia at Pearl Lam Galleries), Larys Frogier (Director, Rockbund Art Museum), Chen Dongyang (Education Manager, Rockbund Art Museum), Lee Yongwoo (Director, Himalayas Art Museum), Maurizio Bortolotti (Director of Research and Public Programs, Shanghai Project at Himalayas Museum), Guo Xi (artist), Ma De (Artist and Director, Forum for Art Installations), Mathieu Borysevicz (Director, Bank, MAB Society) Carol Yinghua Lu (independent curator), and Li Zhang (Director, Shanghai Gallery of Art]). 2. One formulation of the line between art history and contemporary art is Su Wei, "Constant Rethinking Toward the Faces of 'Others',’’ in Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding, eds., Little Movments II: Self- practice in Contemporary Art (Bolzano, Museon, and Köln: Verlag der Buchandlung Walter König, 2013), 144.

3. Zheng Zhong, Huaweile Lin Fengmian Zhuan, (A Restless Heart: Biography of Lin Fengmian) (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2016), 86. 4. Wu Dayu was dismissed as head of the oil painting studio at Hangzhou in 1950, and, along with Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang, Chen Yanqiao, and Shao Keping, was sent to the countryside to take part in labour in March 1958. He returned to teach in the Oil Painting Department of Shanghai Art College in 1960, and after 1965 was an academician of the Shanghai Painting and Sculpture Academy, among other art world posts. He became known in Beijing after the exhibition of Shanghai Oil Paintings in Beihai Park in 1982. 5. See Biljana Ciric, A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006 (Manchester: Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, 2014). She has also gathered documentation on exhibitions that did not take place: see Biljana Ciric, Rejected Collection/Beiqiangbi de fangan (Milan: Charta, 2008). 6. The relationship between public art and artist-run spaces in Shanghai is discussed in detail by Julie Chun in two papers, “Being Out There: The Challenges and Possibilities of Public Art in Shanghai,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 6, (November/December 2015), and “Public and Independent spaces in Shanghai,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 15, no. 6, (November/ December 2016). See also Bao Dong, “Rethinking and practices within the art system: the self- organization of contemporary art in China, 2001–2012,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, no. 1 (2014), 83–95. 7. In a personal e-mail to the author, March 8, 2017, Ho states: The greatest challenge was cultural differences. Running a museum requires perfection in all aspects of the operation. The team of staff [there] could never get it. It’s like you want a 100% white, but they could only give you 80% white, when you say: “Hey, this is not a 100% white”, they would say: “What are you talking about ? This is the 100% white we see.” Then the conﬂict starts and they see it as due to some arrogant, fussy Hongkonger coming over and telling them what to do.

The sense of distrust was strong. At meetings, there were times they talked Shanghainese to each other, to highlight their differences and imply there were some secrets from me.

Corruption was common, making an operation such as building the museum extremely complicated; the quality of material used might be compromised. Take the construction of the building, for example, in addition to hiring a quality control company to check the building material, we had to hire the engineering department of a university to double check.

Vol. 17 No. 1 27 To print a catalogue, we had to print in Hong Kong, fearing a violation of copyright by the Chinese printers. To get a catalogue printed, you needed approval from some head office which looked after publishing in Beijing. They never gave you a schedule letting you know, nor how long it would take to get approval, they wouldn’t let you know who was looking after the case. The only reply was "We will let you know when the decision is made." The only way to get the work done efficiently was to hire a consultancy company, which was normally run by powerful people, or by the staff of that publishing office. Then you could get the catalogue on time.

I didn’t trust my mainland China staff because they were all only looking after their own interests. Before I started working there, people from Hong Kong told me not to trust the middle-age group because they had all gone through the Cultural Revolution. They had seen sons ﬁghting their mothers, fathers killing their sons; it’s a really messed-up generation.

One of the main reasons I left was the way people treated each other. At one time I was asking the construction workers to hurry up with their work, politely. Then my staff told me I must not talk like that. For people lower than you, I was told I had to yell and scream at them, to humiliate as if they were some sort of sub-human creature.

Then I realized this was not the place I wanted to stay long. 8. Duolun Museum website description of Five Years of Duolun, 2008. See www.duolunmoma.org. 9. Ciric graduated with an MA in art history from East China Normal University in 2004 and went to work at Duolun shortly afterwards. In an e-mail to the author, of March 11, 2017, she states:

We all left Duolun for one reason. Duolun at that time supported an artist-organized exhibition titled 38 Solo Exhibitions in 2009 and the exhibition was closed on the opening day by the authorities. Two artists were jailed. As the only state-funded institution involved in supporting [contemporary art] exhibitions we suffered the most and the director was asked to resign within the month. Politicians came on board to run the museum and it became impossible to work so I resigned with all the curatorial team. 10. Robin Peckham, in an e-mail to the author, February 4, 2017, states:

. . . if you read [the structure of exhibiting institutions] against the grid of funding models versus programming models at play in these institutions: you get Power Station of Art being publicly funded and programmed by nepotism; Rockbund and OCAT both being developed, funded, and programmed by independent professionals; Long Museum and Yuz Museum being collector-funded and collector-programmed; and Himalayas and Museum of Contemporary Art falling perhaps somewhere between these latter two categories. This diagram is not particularly neat if you overlay [the funding models with] the programming models they are using, and I did try once to draw it out, but certainly interesting to think about.

11. Power Station of Art General Information brochure, 2016. 12. According to the group’s interpretation, the word raqs in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic indicates “kinetic contemplation” via Sufi or dervish body-spinning practices. 13. Press release at Randian Magazine website and at http://johannjacobs.com/en/event/90345- suzdocpreview.html/. See also http://encn.blouinartinfo.com/photo-galleries/suzou-documents-2016- suzhous-first-biennale-/. 14. See the bilingual catalogue, co-artistic directors Lee Yongwoo and Hans Ulrich Obrist,, Yuanjing 2116/Envision2116 Shanghai Zhongzi Shouceng/Shanghai Project, first edition (Shanghai: Shanghai Project, 2016). 15. For further details on the OCAT museums chain, see the bilingual website www.ocat.org.cn/. 16. From the Mission Statement at www.rockbundartmuseum.com/. 17. The 2015–17 Advisory Committee is composed of five distinguished museum professionals and curators: Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator of Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Hou Hanru, MAXXI(National Museum for XXI (21st Century) Arts) Artistic Director; Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore; Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Founder and President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. 18. The names of the following advisory members for Chronus Art Center are a veritable Who’s Who of new media prominences: Ute Meta Bauer, Chris Chafe, Casey Reas, Rudolf Frieling, Ken Goldberg, Amy Heibel, Horst Hortner, Sabine Himmelsbach, Chrissie Iles, David Joselit, George Legrady, Marina McDougall, and Christopher Salter; http://www.chronusartcenter.org/en/about_cac/the- international-steering-committe/. 19. See Nicola Trezzi, “Are the art world’s peripheries becoming new centres? Western museums are expanding their acquisition strategies,” artnet com/Nicola-trezzi-347, June 29, 2016. 20. Terry Smith, “Biennials: four fundamentals, many variations,” mentions what he calls a “complaint” (not a critique) in the 1990s and early 2000s: See http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2016/12/biennials-four-fundamentals-many-variations/.

A small cohort of curators was regularly accused of sequestering opportunities for their signature cadre of artists, dominating what was perceived as a ﬁnite circuit, excluding other worthy artists, and boring audiences with repetitions and variations of the same kind of art. As biennials increase in number, size, range, and kind–way beyond the capacity of any individual to monitor–this complaint is less often heard.

28 Vol. 17 No. 1 Despite Smith’s arguing that the number of Biennials has increased so far that repetition and predictability no longer apply, it is still remarkable how the same curatorial players appear everywhere in the “biennial ﬁeld,” including the advisory board of the Biennial Foundation itself. According to the Biennial Foundation website, the Biennial Foundation has an advisory committee, whose members are: Caroline A. Jones, Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Co-Director of World Biennial Forum No 1 (2012); Elena Filipovic, Director Kunsthalle Basel, Curator of the 5th edition of Berlin Biennial (2008), Co-editor of The Biennial Reader (2010); Ursula Zeller, former Director of Triennale Oberschwaben, Germany; Khalil Rabah, Artist and Founding Director of Riwaq Biennale, Palestinian Territories; Hou Hanru, Artistic Director of the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, Co-Director of World Biennial Forum No 1 (2012); Yacouba Konaté, Curator, Artistic Director of the 2006 Dak’Art—Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, Senegal; Bose Krishnamachari, Founding and Co-Director Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India; Jorge Antonio Fernández Torres, General Vice- Director of Bienal de La Habana, Cuba, www.biennialfoundation.org/2016/12/.

The Center for Contemporary Art, Nanyang Technological University, director Ute Meta Bauer, lists the following members of its international advisory board on the website http://ntu.ccasingapore. org/about/international-advisory-board/: Professor Nikos Papastergiadis (Chair), Director, Research Unit in Public Cultures, and Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Australia; Ann DeMeester, Director, Frans Hals Museum, The Netherlands, Chris Dercon, Director, Tate Modern, London; Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI National Museum of 21st-Century Arts, Rome; Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Professor, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts; Professor Sarat Maharaj, Visual Art and Knowledge Systems, Lund University, Sweden; Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, China, Dr John Tirman, Executive Director and Principal Research Scientist, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 21. Terry Smith, Contemporary Art, World Currents (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 82. 22. On the curious personal history and aesthetic values of Liu Yiqian, see Jiayang Fan, “The Emperor’s New Museum,” New Yorker, November 7, 2016. 23. Academic Counsellors of Long Museum (Long means "Dragon" in Chinese) for 2012–13 were listed at http://thelongmuseum.org/en/page/detailed/a8ddr/: Li Xianting (art critic & curator); Shan Guolin (director of painting and calligraphy department, Shanghai Museum); Chen Lüsheng (Associate Director, National Museum of China); Wang Huangsheng (Director of CAFA Art Museum); Lü Peng (art critic and curator); Zhao Li (Professor of China Central Academy of Art).

The Academic Committee at OCAT Shenzhen is also all Chinese or China-based: Feng Fan, Fei Dawei, Huang Zhuan (deceased). Karen Smith, Marko Daniel, Pi Li, Sui Jiangguo, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Wu Hung, and Zhang Peili. 24. Budi Tek states: “The art museum will deﬁnitely be run according to the regulations of the Civil Affairs Administration. In China, there is a big problem. It’s not like in other countries, where you have a foundation, and the foundation has a museum operator’s licence, and a space for the museum, and it can raise funds across society to sustain the museum and its personnel. It is different in China. We have a cooperative agreement where we must establish a company, and this company rents the land from the government in order to build the museum. In this way, the museum facility, the museum itself are licensed and operated as entirely separate organizations” (2012). Wu Hung, ed., Bali Conversations: Special Issue on the Planning and Opening of the Yuz Museum Shanghai (Guangzhou: Lingnan Meishu chubanshe, 2013), 69. 25. According to my earlier private conversations in the art world, it was proposed to the government in 1991–92 to establish autonomous foundations for art, but this was turned down because it would violate the Leninist principle of organizations of the masses. The private museum collections can be owned by an individual or for them through a business enterprise. 26. Budi Tek states: “I would just buy artworks because I thought they were very good, and I would buy something every season. Before, a friend would tell me a particular artwork was good and I would buy it. I’m quite careful now, because there are a lot of good artworks on the market that aren’t quite that important, artworks that aren’t the most important. Even if an artwork is important, I won’t touch it if I already have a similar work in my collection. I seek out artworks that other people haven’t noticed.” Wu Hung, ed., Bali Conversations, 57.

Vol. 17 No. 1 29 Xing Zhao (Inter)Dependency: Privately Owned Art Museums in State-Sponsored West Bund

oughly a century ago, fan shops in Shanghai started commissioning art for the nouveau riche, representing and marketing artists, as Rwell as reaching out for potential collectors, which made the shops by all means a prototype of a commercial gallery. This not only led to a flourishing art scene, but also, more importantly, introduced an alternative type of patronage, and the result was that Shanghai became a leading site for art in modern China. Today, the former treaty port that has grown into a megacity and a global financial centre always seeks to materialize the intangible values in stimulating consumption from its unique urban culture. However, up until ten years ago, there were not many exhibition spaces dedicated to the arts, especially those housing contemporary art. Urban residents and tourists barely frequented commercial galleries until several clusters of galleries became must-see attractions. Under a national five-year plan to promote culture by building more museums, the latest grand state-run project is called the West Bund Cultural Corridor. The government’s decision not only to have more art museums, but also to create spatial proximity among the new institutions, is understandable because “first, cultural industries have important economic and social impact; and, second, the social milieu is a decisive means by which economic transactions occur both in cultural industries and knowledge- intensive sectors more generally.”1

This essay analyzes the West Bund Cultural Corridor as a newly emerging destination for arts and culture, with a focus on the relationship between the state-planned nature of the area and the privately owned art museums established at the founder’s will (there are no tax exemptions or other beneﬁts associated with running a museum or donating artworks in mainland China). I will show that the Xuhui District government of Shanghai, which is in charge of the West Bund project, has learned lessons from failed examples of other arts districts, and, so, by putting a considerable amount of thought into selecting the founders rather than interfering in their managerial and artistic conduct, the project has attracted top collectors to launch their institutions. Driven by a consumption-based, high-end lifestyle and life experience promoted in the West Bund area, the museum founders are enjoying the hybridity of arts and commerce, which will partially and potentially pay back the high cost of running a museum—a problem for museum founders worldwide. However, it is too early to give a round of applause to the long-criticized cultural personnel and private art museum founders in China. A lack of professionalism shown in the newly opened art museums will eventually prevent the institutions from evolving into a sustainable public space that beneﬁts society.

30 Vol. 17 No. 1 Long Museum, West Bund, Shanghai.

Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai. Courtesy of Yuz Museum, Shanghai.

West Bund Art & Design, It is commonly agreed that the 2016, West Bund Art Center, Shanghai. determinant, if not sole, force that is causing the current museum fever and the pursuit of the West Bund project is the government’s plan. As critic Barbara Pollack puts it, “Shanghai’s impulse to build so many museums is the direct result of a governmental ﬁve-year plan for the city to become an artistic centre on par with London, Paris, and New York. Not satisﬁed with the large number of museums already in existence, the Shanghai government has decided to develop a section of the Huangpu River as the West Bund Cultural Corridor.”2 While the government is in charge of the urban plan as well as improvement in infrastructure and transportation, the vision is largely being realized by individual collectors, entrepreneurs, and foreign investors at their own initiative and for various reasons. A few privately owned art museums have laid the foundation of the area, differentiating West Bund from a typical state-run cultural site or another cluster of commercial galleries. Long Museum West Bund, which opened in 2014, is on the former site of a wharf for coal transportation. It was founded by collector Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei as their second location for art exhibitions. It is designed by Shanghai-based architects from Atelier Deshaus and features a cantilevered structure bearing a vault- umbrella with independent walls. The building covers an area of 33,000 square metres, reserving up to 16,000 square metres for exhibition space. Opening in May 2014, the Chinese-Indonesian tycoon Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum Shanghai was the second major privately owned art museum in the West Bund area. Housed inside a former hangar of the Longhua Airport and repurposed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, the venue boasts a total area of 9,000 square metres, Initiated in 2015 by world-renowned photographer Liu Heung Shing, the Shanghai Center of Photography

Vol. 17 No. 1 31 (ScôP), the first public art space Façade and interior view of Shanghai Center of in Shanghai dedicated solely to Photography, West Bund. Courtesy of Shanghai Center photography, is one of the latest of Photography. creative additions to West Bund, and is next door to the West Bund Art Center, which houses West Bund Art & Design annually. SCoP’s unique space is designed by the US-based architectural duo Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee and contains a number of elliptical-shaped exhibition spaces. Collector Qiao Zhibing runs two institutions in the West Bund area, Tank Shanghai and Qiao Space. Tank Shanghai is not in full operation at the time of this writing, although it was planned earlier than some of the other enterprises. Some sources have said that a number of international artists have received commissions and agreed to create works for the five buildings of Tank Shanghai, which is scheduled to open in 2017. Qiao Space consists of a two-story studio next to the West Bund Art Center, along with a few commercial galleries as well as artists’ and architects’ studios.Qiao Space opened in 2015 and hosted a show of paintings by the Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal in cooperation with the commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth and held simultaneously with the 2015 West Bund Art & Design. In addition, the state-owned West Bund Art Museum, designed by David Chipperfield Architects, which is famous for its designs of cultural and civic buildings, is under construction and is planned to join the artistic panorama soon.

The planners of the West Bund Cultural Corridor took the advantage of moving forward later than other either state-planned or naturally formed arts districts within and outside China, and they learned lessons from it. This seemingly more sustainable plan does not anticipate a decline and has attracted collectors to jump into the adventure and risk of opening and running an art museum. The intended nature of the district promotes a lifestyle and a multidimensional urban ecosystem rather than focusing on an arts agenda derived only from idealism. This encourages collectors to believe that they can experiment with this hybridity and the merging

32 Vol. 17 No. 1 Entrance to Qiao Space, Shanghai, 2015. Courtesy of Qiao Space, Shanghai.

Wilhelm Sasnel, exhibition view, Qiao Space, Shanghai, organized in cooperation with Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy of Qiao Space, Shanghai.

Proposed site of TANK SHANGHAI, West Bund Cultural Corridor, Shanghai. Courtesy of TANK SHANGHAI, Shanghai.

Open Architecture, rendering of TANK SHANGHAI. Courtesy of TANK SHANGHAI, Shanghai.

of art and business, which will provide a brighter future for the museum’s sustainability due to possible proﬁtability. Besides multidimensionality and lifestyle as selling points, the role played by the government is more service-

Vol. 17 No. 1 33 than authority-based. All these reasons contribute to the formation of the infrastructural clustering and how it currently looks, although time is still needed to test the sustainability and the comparative advantage of the West Bund Cultural Corridor.

Left: Songzhuang Artist Village, Beijing. Right: Entrance to 798 Art Zone, Beijing.

Shockingly pessimistic titles given to media articles about arts districts, private museums, and once-passionate collectors in China may be exaggerated, but they are not mere click bait. In October 2015, a commentary titled “Starving Artists from Songzhuang Artist Village (Beijing) Became Homeless and The Art Village in Nanjing Is Now a Ghost Town” appeared on the website of China National Radio.3 This was roughly a decade after Hu Jiebao, secretary of the Party Committee in Songzhuang from 2004 to 2012, announced the seemingly feasible and creative plan to let “culture form a town.”4 Similar articles on the decline of Songzhuang have come out in recent years, among them, in 2014, “Unescapable Rise and Fall: Original Art Gradually Disappears in Songzhuang,”5 which accused a local government of over-involvement that quickly resulted in commercialization, an influx of official art and artists, and a loss of originality both in the artwork and in the community’s artistic milieu among Songzhuang artists. A similar question was posed about the 798 Art Zone in a 2013 article, “Can 798 Overcome the Destined Collapse of the Art Zone?”6 798 is a different case from that of Songzhuang. Songzhuang’s vitality, recognized by its more senior residents, comes from the excitement of the non-institutional and non-official—the satisfaction of seeming to be alternative. It is a subcultural community that suffers and benefits from its distance from mainstream culture and commercialization. In Songzhuang, the sense of exile, marginalization, poverty, and lack of recognition is believed to be the soul of the place, which explains its vulnerability to influence from commercialization and its opposition to government intervention into art. In contrast, according to the article on 798, the government played the role of protector in a few cases; for example, when the property management company abruptly shut down an art festival in 2004 because “the organizers did not complete proper application paperwork” as printed on the “open letter to all tenants.” The 798 Art Zone became a must-see at the edge of the city during the 2008 Olympics, and it was even called by officials a “cultural name card of Beijing.”7 The anonymous author of the 798 article lays out the destiny of an art sector whose earliest residents were poor artists, followed by commercial galleries, then the design and fashion industry, and finally a leisure sector of high-end restaurants, boutiques, and art museums. This evolution is exemplified by a few historical recurrences worldwide, especially in Europe and the United States, in that they are forerunners who introduced art sectors into the urban scene. Thus, the author calls for stronger and more direct government support to protect all art zones from

34 Vol. 17 No. 1 Gao Brothers cafe, 798 Art replacement by other businesses. Zone, Beijing. Coincidently, a few commentators have viewed 798 in its future phase as similar to that of Songzhuang, presumably in the case that both fall into the destined path of an art zone’s life cycle. This is clearly demonstrated in the word “yet” in a CNN commentary, “One thing to know about Songzhuang is it is not, yet, a 798, the famous, and some say overly commercialized art district in Beijing often overrun with tourists, expats, and posh hipster Chinese.”8

‘85 New Wave: The Birth of A very simple and self-explanatory factor—rent—helps us map out the Chinese Contemporary Art, inaugural exhibition at Ullens nomadic art scene at 798 in a comprehensive way, and rising rent is one Center for Contemporary Art, November 5, 2007, 798 Art of the most crucial actions anticipated by art professionals from the Zone, Beijing. government. Reportedly, back in 2013, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art received a discounted rental price from the property owner at little more than three yuan per square metre per day for six years to reward the centre’s distinguished contribution to the 798 art zone. This was half of that paid by many commercial galleries in 798.9 Today, an artist’s studio in Huantie Art City, located not far from 798 in Beijing, and often enjoying a lower price than other art related spaces, rents for around two-and-a-half yuan per square metre per day. In 50 Moganshan Road, popularly known as M50 Art District, Shanghai, the price is said to be surging and exceeds four Yuan for a commercial gallery, so gallerists and artists are moving out quickly. Comparatively, in the newly built cluster of art spaces at the rear of the West Bund Art & Design venue, Qiao Zhibing, founder of

Vol. 17 No. 1 35 Entrance to M50 Art District, Shanghai.

ShanghART Gallery, West Bund, Shanghai.

the Qiao Space, feels relatively satisﬁed about the one-and-a-half yuan rental rate. Clearly, this rate is not market-driven and shows government interference, but in a positive, supportive way. Established artists like Ding Yi and Zhou Tiehai, along with insightful gallerists like Lorenz Helbling of ShanghART, although not worrying about rental rates very much, sensed the support and consequentially moved their spaces from M50 to the West Bund. This permanently changed the map and centre of attention in Shanghai’s art world.

An often-overlooked detail in an interview attracted my attention. In the interview it was suggested that Budi Tek was planning to build a new centre for contemporary art in Songzhuang, Beijing, back in 2008, but the new Yuz Museum eventually opened in 2014 in West Bund, Shanghai. What changed Budi Tek’s mind was not mentioned, but I was later told

36 Vol. 17 No. 1 by an insider that Budi Tek was serious about his plan for Songzhuang or somewhere else in Beijing, which was considered the absolute centre for contemporary Chinese art at the time. However, when he tried more than ten times to register to have this institution sanctioned by the government, the name of the museum failed to gain approval, because, according to the interviewee, who does not want to release his name, “First of all, naming after the founder celebrates private ownership and personal charisma, so obviously it does not appeal to the authorities in charge in Beijing. Second, it is not only about the name. The Ministry of Culture in Beijing have inherited the bureaucratic style of yamen (the administrative ofﬁce) from the Qing dynasty. Their lack of service awareness drives people away.” The government’s role as a service provider versus an authority may offer a means of understanding the difference between West Bund and a few of its predecessors and contemporaries in both Shanghai and Beijing. The lesson learned by the West Bund Development Group is about the role that government plays in forming the cultural district and the amount of control imposed upon the district residences. The Xuhui District government in Shanghai obviously does not leave art professionals in competition with other more proﬁtable businesses without providing a certain amount of support, as with 798. Nor does it decide what should be on display in the institutions, as happended with the governmental over-involvement in Songzhuang and Nanjing’s artists’ villages. Instead, content-wise, after selecting the right, or seemingly right, people, the Xuhui District government allows relative freedom.

Running a privately owned art museum is expensive, regardless of whether the institution receives government support and how much it receives. Most museums are founded by wealthy collectors, but many have proved to be unsustainable. Therefore, in the Private Art Museum Report (2015), the interviewer cites the commonly used metaphor “an empty box that burns money” to find out the museum founders’ experience and awareness of their financial and managerial risks.10 The lifespan of many private art museums that are now closed was determined merely by how much money the founder could continue infusing into the organization. Many forerunners have vanished without a trace, among them the Shanghe Museum of Art in Chengdu (1998–2001). Shanghe was adapted to high academic and professional standards since the very beginning, strictly following curatorial practices common in Europe and America. The structure of the museum was simple, but there was no marketing or event planning team that would bring money in. The budget came out of the founder’s pocket, and once the businessman filed for bankruptcy, the museum faced its end.11 Idealism is a much favoured term to characterize the establishment of these museums, which tend to operate as vanity projects, turning a personal endeavour into a gift to society, with the collector pursuing an intended immortality through his or her artistic creation. Thus, the idea of making the museum profitable has not been welcomed. A few museums, in order to avoid falling into Shanghe’s fate, started renting out their spaces for exhibitions and events after the first few years of high-quality self-supported exhibitions, as did the Today Museum of Art, Beijing. This unplanned compromise can lead to an overly commercial image of the museum and, to some extent, keeps good exhibitions away.12

Vol. 17 No. 1 37 Learning the cruel lessons from Top: Today Art Museum, Beijing. predecessors, the founders of Left top and bottom: Yuz recently opened museums do not Museum store and cafe, Shanghai. hesitate to at first discuss money and profitability. This does not mean, however, that these spaces are designed to be rented out. Instead, the founders, most of whom are businessmen at their core, keep the idea of sustainability in mind from the planning stages, and the state-owned Shanghai West Bund Development Group supports this idea by promoting high-end consumption and lifestyles with a variety of activities and facilities. In other words, the visitors’ activities in the West Bund area blend together art and daily routines. Moreover, studies show that “cultural goods attain their value through cumulative collective consumption, whereby people lower their search costs by consuming the same cultural good as everyone else.”13 Also, because “a particular place being ‘branded’ as an important social milieu may be linked to the more practical matter of where such activities can logistically occur,”14 people who think of themselves as living a quality life gather, find their community, and build their social bonds through consumption of the arts and cultural products. Therefore, the commercialization of art or art as a selling point for other products is naturally accepted; for example, the Long Museum produced 10,000 replicas of the record-breaking “chicken cup,” a humble but delicate piece of mid- Ming imperial porcelain. Although the main galleries of the Long Museum are reserved for grand exhibitions from the founder’s collection or from the international art scene, Gallery I, located in a separate building, is for rent. So far, a few art fairs, solo exhibitions, and events have taken place in Gallery I, and it reportedly has a good market. Speaking with an interviewer, Budi Tek said, “I hope my art museum is profitable—of course, it is not for

38 Vol. 17 No. 1 myself. What I want to see is that the institution can cover the costs of its operation and become self-supportive and sustainable. I am still exploring the potential for selling tickets, housing events, finding sponsorships, as well as running a cafeteria, cafe, and museum store.”15 Qiao Zhibing refers to his Tank Shanghai project as an “art centre” instead of an “art museum,” because “it is harder and more restrained to run an art museum.” He added, “an art centre is more flexible and has fewer social duties and concerns. An art museum sounds more academic-focused. What I am thinking about is how to fit into the West Bund cultural and artistic milieu. We have green space for performances or even a concert. We can put sculptures and installation art in it. The art centre can perform as a traditional white box for art exhibitions. It also makes sense to bring a good restaurant to the space. We can experiment with some new ideas that will be popularized in a cosmopolitan area, such as being environmentally friendly and focusing on a healthy lifestyle.”16

Open Architecture, rendering of TANK SHANGHAI. Courtesy of TANK SHANGHAI, Shanghai.

Art professionals in Shanghai frequently have come across the hybridity of art and business, which has resulted in, unlike the residents of Songzhuang, and even 798, actually welcoming such a win-win collaboration. If one visits Shanghai’s most luxurious shopping malls in the heart of the city, such as Réel, New World City, or K11, one is quite likely to see an art-related fair going on. Sometimes the exhibitions are serious, such as Monet: Master of Impressionism (2014) or Media Dalí: Major Exhibition of Surrealism Art (2015), both at K11. The founders of the West Bund museums are also practitioners who fuse art and business. For instance, before moving his focus to the West Bund area, Qiao Zhibing was famous for his Shanghai Night—a night club providing karaoke and featuring world-class artworks by artists such as Damien Hirst. He also owns Art Restaurant, whose specialty and business are self-explanatory by its name—a place providing food and housing the owner’s art collection.17 Surprisingly, it is not only gallerists and artists who enjoy the setting, but art professionals, art lovers, and club goers also enjoy this hybrid experience. The opening banquet of the ﬁrst West Bund Art & Design was hosted at Shanghai Night, proving the club to be an inseparable part of Shanghai’s art scene.

Vol. 17 No. 1 39 Monet: Master of Impressionism, installation view, 2014, K11 Art Mall, Shanghai.

In “Private Art Museum That Burns Entrance to K11 Art Mall, Shanghai. Money: What to Be Put in the Empty Box,” Qian Mengni vividly visualizes a private museum with a draining swimming pool.18 The wave of museum building, especially private museums, is considered to be blind by Qian Mengni, “The top leader likes grandiose projects, and the super wealthy collectors pour money into building new art museums.” Bruce Altshuler, Director of the Museum Studies Department at New York University, commented in 2014 that, “Shanghai’s push is representative of the next stage of major museum development in China, with local governments putting all this money into contemporary-art facilities. The scale is consistent with everything else you see in China—huge. The overall capacity for presenting contemporary art is now immense, and the problem is in ﬁlling it. I mean, who has that much stuff to show?”19 Besides the shortage in exhibition content, another lack, in ironic contrast with the massive building construction, is people—the professionals. Li Xu, a curator and critic now based in Shanghai, adds, “The private museums founders [namely Budi Tek of Yuz Museum and Wang Wei of Long Museum] are willing to pour money into the hardware [building and artwork], not the software [professionals].”20 Freelance curator Li Zhenhua agrees that the curators are not given enough respect, and sometimes the chief operating ofﬁcer—at most times the founders themselves—does the curatorial work.21

With the tremendous record of art acquisitions by Liu Yiqian, Wang Wei, Budi Tek, and Qiao Zhibing, one should not worry too much about there being no permanent collection to ﬁll the empty spaces in West Bund, but it is the absence of a professional curatorial team or a senior curator or academic consultant with museum studies or an art history background that has long been criticized. It demonstrates the lack of expertise in these newly founded museums, corresponding to Li Zhenhua’s aforementioned complaint and Li Xu’s comment that they are “strong in hardware and weak in software.” In July 2016, an article questioning the disrespect for curators was widely circulated among art professionals in Chinese

40 Vol. 17 No. 1 Xu Bing, Tobacco Project— social media like WeChat. I brought up this question to a few museum Tobacco Intervention, 2004, 660 thousand cigarettes, founders, studio owners for both art and design, and museum staff in installation view in Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of the West Bund. Surprisingly, they contested the criticism because, firstly, Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Photo: for major exhibitions in the Long and Yuz museums, guest curators with JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum, Shanghai. strong academic backgrounds have been invited to organize them, as well as to provide academic and conceptual interpretations. For example, Budi Tek has collaborated with Wu Hung, an art history professor at the University of Chicago, for a few of his most important exhibitions such as the first exhibition Myth/History (2014) and Twin Tracks: Yang Fudong Solo Exhibition (2015). Publications and conference discussions were taken care of in a professional way in the two exhibitions curated by Wu Hung. Additionally, Wang Wei invited the world-renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to create a show, who decided to have an artist to curate a show from the permanent collection. Obrist concluded that the curatorial process and, ultimately, the show, became the work of the artist. The result was 1199 (2014), curated by Xu Zhen, founder of MadeIn Company, which in 2016 moved to West Bund from its former location at M50. This approach of inviting a guest curator instead of establishing a permanent curatorial position in the museum is understandable in the current context of China; one of the reasons lies in the fact that there are not enough professionally trained curators in China. Although a few art institutes, such as the Central Academy of Fine Art, China Art Academy, Sichuan Art Academy, and Guangzhou Art Academy recently added a curatorial program to the curriculum, the graduates are not yet established in the field, and the limited opportunities prevent them from advancing their professional skills.

On the one hand, this gesture results in a founders’ vanity that looms too large. For the Olafur Eliasson exhibition Nothingness is not nothing at all (March 20 to June 26, 2016), Wang Wei’s role was that of co-founder and chief curator of Long Museum. No “curator” or “curated by” was

Vol. 17 No. 1 41 listed in a media release or on the exhibition webpage. Wang Wei gave her interpretation of Eliasson and his work during the opening, in the media release, and on the webpage of the museum, followed by Eliasson’s brief self-introduction and artist statement. Eliasson’s artistic achievement makes it seemingly unnecessary for local critics in China to further exploit any underlying signiﬁcance embedded within the works other than translating some existing, canonic texts. Thus, neither a curator nor critic was included in the curatorial team, and Wang Wei, who invited the artist and paid for the production, and whose space housed the exhibition, partially assumed the role of a traditional curator. In a more recent exhibition, SHE: International Women Artists Exhibition (July 22 to October 30, 2016), Wang Wei is the self-proclaimed curator.22 She wrote the curatorial statement, which was used for the media release and webpage information; presumably she also selected the works from her own collection and decided on the placement of the works in the exhibition hall. The exhibition consisted of artworks from thirteen countries spanning over ten centuries by one-hundred-and-ﬁve artists, which fell into four parts: “Self-annihilation,” “Self-liberation,” “Self- introspection,” and “Self-expression.” Basically, the four parts were installed in a chronological convention and presumably followed a linear progression of women’s roles leading to better social and artistic recognition.

Obviously, compared with SHE: International Women Artists Exhibition, 2016, Eliasson’s survey exhibition, installation view with Mona Hatoum's Suspended, 2011, SHE: International Women Long Museum, Shanghai. Artists Exhibition, curated by the Photo: Andrew Stooke. co-founder of the Long Museum, is more problematic if it is meant to be “complete.” By “complete” I am not referring only to a full set of exhibition components including the press release, curatorial statement, publications, and a conference. Instead, because this show is an assembly of artworks from a wide range of historical periods, and under a generic but thematic title, professional viewers might expect an in-depth and thorough discourse rendered in texts covering history, art history, gender studies, or other disciplines. These parts are missing, or, perhaps, dismissed. However, this exhibition is safely presented because Wang Wei is aware of the absolute advantages of the Long Museum as an art museum located in West Bund and in Shanghai, as well as the supreme quantity and quality of the collection. The strategy to let the artwork speak for itself is simple and effective to some extent, and if this is the rationale for the exhibition, then the very linear and evolutionary curatorial statement exists for no reason. This imposes a question on the founder, as well as the founder’s will and vanity in relation to a privately owned art museum and its future. The following case, though different, also touches on this issue.

42 Vol. 17 No. 1 Olafur Eliasson, Nothingness There is an unspoken competition is not nothing at all, 2016, installation view at Long between the Long and Yuz museums Museum, Shanghai. and the collectors that is not helping them to establish their own brand in West Bund and in Shanghai, especially for Budi Tek and his Yuz Museum because the budget is less of an issue for the Long Museum and the collectors behind it. For instance, Olafur Eliasson: Nothingness is not nothing at all opened on March 19, 2016, attracting everyone’s attention within and outside the art world. Due to the strong visual presence of the work, it served as a good photographic backdrop for its visitors, so it naturally it received popularity across social media. On March 22, 2016, Alberto Giacometti’s Retrospective had its opening reception at the Yuz Museum, branded as “the world’s largest Giacometti’s retrospective” in all media imaginable.23 The wall label for the Giacometti exhibition reads, “It is not only the first Giacometti exhibition in China, but also the world’s largest retrospective to date, after Paris at Centre Pompidou (2007).”24 And the text for the Eliasson exhibition starts with, “The Long Museum, Shanghai, is pleased to announce the first survey exhibition of the work of world-renowned Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in a Chinese museum.”25 A quick read through the introductions posted on the museum websites, which were also used for media circulation, shows the ambition of both museums to be the “first,” the “biggest [in number],” and the “most [of different qualities].”

Alberto Giacometti’s What is the cause of this competition? Again, as with Wang Wei, who Retrospective, 2016, installation view at Yuz appointed herself the curator of the SHE exhibition, the founder of the Museum. Courtesy of Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Yuz Museum assumes multiple leadership roles and enjoys the vanity of it. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the founder’s high standards and willingness to provide world-class exhibitions that maximize the museum’s artistic, educational, and intellectual potential. However,

Vol. 17 No. 1 43 deciding which exhibition to host for the sake of competition, or in consideration of rivalry with a neighbour, could affect a museum’s own sustainability and specialization. At the Yuz Museum, although a manager was appointed to lead the curatorial team, I was told by museum staff and other art professionals, “Mr. Budi Tek is the sole decision maker.” The founder not only fully controls the acquisition of artworks, but also extends his power to the exhibitions and public relations, even though the staff consists of experienced professionals from other art institutions and event planning companies. Again, I was told that this sometimes “frustrates the staff because all the efforts put into realizing a show or event can abruptly cease based on the founder’s preference or interest.” For sure, this air of uncertainty affects the initiation and self-motivation of the staff, which would eventually affect the museum’s sustainability in a negative way. Entering 2016, Budi Tek shifted his primary focus from his business in Indonesia to his museum in Shanghai, which resulted in an even more intimate relationship between the founder and the institution. But this attitude is, to an extent, rooted in his personal attachment to the collection. Collectors become attached to their collections as if they were their own children, watching them grow and develop over time. Collections simultaneously legitimize and reafﬁrm the reputation of the collector and his or her exclusive role in collecting art. Art historians, however, do beneﬁt to a certain extent from museums being built around a private collection of art, as this exclusive collection-based museum experience offers some insight into the personal history of the collection.

It is the curator’s job to ensure the continuity of a collector’s original mission and assist the institution to fit into the changing and heightened demands and contemporary cultural trends affecting the museum field globally. A few founders have expressed their admiration for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which started as a privately owned art museum reflecting the founder’s own taste and vision, but later evolved beyond that. Nowadays, “Guggenheim” has become a brand that cities worldwide can embrace and thus use the Guggenheim’s name and collection. One of the most famous examples is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, resulting in the phenomenal “Bilbao effect,” in which a branch of the Guggenheim, with its exquisite “starchitecture by Frank Gehry,” regenerated a whole city. Maybe the Long Museum’s recent opening of its third location in Chongqing follows this logic. The presence of a museum professional will often ease the transition between collecting for personal pleasure and operating a public museum. As museum standards impact collectors more directly, we likely will see more collectors seeking the advice of professionals in the field, resulting in collections that are better prepared to long outlast their founders or curators.

Artist Zhou Tiehai, appointed director to the West Bund Art & Design, dismissed the derisive reference to blind “museum fever.” He asked me whether the 1930s and 40s in the United States would be viewed meaningless since many private museums did not manage to survive to today.26 The answer is obviously “no.” The ongoing and upcoming projects and museum construction depict the West Bund Cultural Corridor, an arts district in formation, as an urban success story of Shanghai with improved

44 Vol. 17 No. 1 transportation and infrastructure, as well as photogenic and picturesque settings that are both contemporary and nostalgic. The “museum fever” has caught global attention for years. Every six months, people see new museums coming up and some older ones disappearing. Some founders learn from previous failures, while others repeat the wrong decisions. If the West Bund Development Group and the stakeholders together can make the institutions and facilities an evolving artistic, educational, and entertaining place for public enjoyment and consumption, there is hope that the West Bund Cultural Corridor will be a real gift to society.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Currid and Sarah Williams, “The Geography of Buzz: Art, Culture, and the Social Milieu in Los Angeles and New York,” Journal of Economic Geography 10 (2010), 430. 2. Barbara Pollack, “Shanghai’s Tricky Museum Transformation,” Art News, http://www.artnews. com/2014/03/17/shanghais-tricky-museum-transformation/. 3. Anonymous, “Starving Artists from Songzhuang Artist Village (Beijing) Became Homeless and The Art Village in Nanjing Is Now a Ghost Town,” originally posted by China National Radio (2015), http:// society.people.com.cn/n/2015/1006/c1008-27666513.html/. 4. Anonymous, “An Interview with Hu Jiebao: Making a Town through Culture in Songzhuang,” sina.com (2016), http://ent.sina.com.cn/y/2006-09-18/11281252576.html/. 5. “Unescapable Rise and Fall: Original Art Gradually Disappears in Songzhuang,” originally posted by China Times (2014), http://art.china.cn/zixun/2014-10/10/content_7286135.htm/. 6. Anonymous, “Can 798 Overcome the Destined Collapse of the Art Zone?” Art Bank (April 2013), http://collection.sina.com.cn/yjjj/20130412/1444110333.shtml/. 7. Anonymous, “798: Beijing’s Cultural Name Card,” Economic Daily (2008), http://news.xinhuanet.com/ politics/2008-08/04/content_8939622.htm/. 8. Lara Farrar and Mitch Moxley, “The Rise of China’s Songzhuang Art Village,” CNN Travel (2010), http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/none/chinas-song-zhuang-art-village-744184/. 9. Zhang Guisen “New Era? 798 Art Zone in Post-Ullens Time,” artron.net (2016), http://news.artron. net/20160726/n853268.html/. 10. AMMA and Larry’s List, Private Art Museum Report (2015), http://amma.artron.net/reportDetail. php?id=26 11. Chen Guo, “Shanghe Museum of Art in Rashmon,” Art World 49 (2015), http://www.yishushijie.com/ magazines/content-4126.aspx/. Dai Zhuoqun, “The Reality and Difﬁculties of Privately-Owned Art Museums in China,” Artlinkart (2016), http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/cafaxwpp/ about_by2/D/a86aAyqj/. 12. In 2016, I was trying to assist a curator to bring a show to China. After talking with a few art museums about renting their spaces, the curator decided to go for somewhere “less commercial,” and declined a relatively generous offer by Today Museum of Art. This made me rethink how an art museum might ﬁnd a balance between reputation and sustainability. 13. Currid and Williams, “The Geography of Buzz,” 427. 14. Ibid., 425. 15. Qian Mengni, “An Interview with Budi Tek: It Makes Me Sad That No One Comes to Such a Good Show,” yicai.com (2014), http://m.yicai.com/news/3892324.html/. 16. Qiao Zhibing in discussion with the author, August 2016. 17. Barbara Pollack, “From Palace to Tank: Art Collector Qiao Zhibing is Parlaying His Shanghai Karaoke Club into a Museum-Cum-Recreation-Space,” Art News (2016), http://www.artnews.com/2016/09/07/ from-palace-to-tank-art-collector-qiao-zhibing-is-parlaying-his-shanghai-karaoke-club-into-a- museum-cum-recreation-space/. 18. Qian Mengni, “Private Art Museum That Burns Money: What to Be Put in the Empty Box,” originally posted by China Business News (2014), http://art.people.com.cn/n/2014/0606/c206244-25111645.html/. 19. Pollack, “Shanghai’s Tricky Museum Transformation.” 20. Qian, “Private Art Museum That Burns Money: What to Be Put in the Empty Box.” 21. Wang Huangsheng, “An Interview with Wang Huangsheng: The Biggest Problem of Curatorial Projects in China is the Absence of Standards,” http://www.cces2006.org/index.php/Home/Index/ detail/id/6285/. 22. “SHE: International Women Artists Exhibition,” Long Museum, http://thelongmuseum.org/en/ exhibition/overview/7caeoA/. 23. “Giacometti Retrospective,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, http://www.yuzmshanghai.org/giacometti- retrospective/. 24. Ibid. 25. “Olafur Eliasson: Nothingness is Not Nothing at All,” Long Museum, http://thelongmuseum.org/en/ exhibition/overview/d81dwA/. 26. Zhou Tiehai, in discussion with the author, June 2014.

Vol. 17 No. 1 45 Biljana Ciric Out of Sight: Conversations with Artists in the KADIST Art Foundation Collection

arie Martaire from the KADIST Art Foundation, knowing my way of working and engagement with artists through interviews, Minvited me to conduct a number of interviews with artists from China. She sent me a list of about forty artists from China that are included in the KADIST collection and asked to select six to engage in conversation.

Gao Mingyan, Hu Yun, and Li Liao are artists with whom I have worked with on number of occasions and I have followed their practices closely, so engaging in conversation with them was important for me in terms of building upon an archive of their practices, which perhaps otherwise are not so present within the mainstream of contemporary art.

I worked with Lu Chunsheng back in 2009 on a project titled History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2009 and I literally lost track of him to the point of not even knowing if he still was based in Shanghai. I was interested in reconnecting with him to better understand his practice now, as his work is not often seen in exhibitions. Qiu Anxiong is an artist I have followed closely, and I am interested in parts of his practice that relate to thinking about institutions and institutional structures, as well as forms of engagement within the art system that exists parallel to his individual artistic practice. The Yangjiang group and its way of working within the art system from the outlying city of Yangjiang is simply unique and I strongly believe that the project Liao Yuan by Zheng Guogu (Yangjiang group member) and the Yangjiang group is among the most important coming from China during the past few decades.

These six artists, although they have very different interests within their practice, share one thing in common that I ﬁnd valuable to bring up in public through conversation. It is that they consciously take the margins as an active position to work from as a form of critique of the art system. Their way of working is slow and process-based, and resists the growing production demands that are inherent in the art system. At the same time, they challenge the common understanding of an artwork as being only an object. Gao Mingyan

Biljana Ciric: Let’s start our discussion with the video City Golf (2007). This was the ﬁrst collaboration between us. I suppose it was the ﬁrst time that you played golf? Was it also the last time?

Gao Mingyan: I never worked in this collaborative way, or in public spaces,

46 Vol. 17 No. 1 Gao Mingyan, City Golf, 2007, video. Courtesy of the artist.

until the exhibition Interventions (2007) that you curated in Shanghai. I would say for me this exhibition was an opportunity to do something directly in society; that’s how I defined the work. Video is just a way of recording something, but what really matters is the process. Before City Golf, video was also part of my practice, but at that time what mattered was the video rather than the process. Back then, the exhibition you curated featured “interventions” within the context of public spaces in Shanghai. The idea of taking a walk in the city occurred to me; I wanted to take a walk. I don’t quite remember whether I learned this from TV or a magazine, but I suddenly realized that golf involved a lot of walking. This fit my original intention. Each hole along the route of my piece meant something to me; hence I swung the club. And, yes, it was my first time playing golf, and also my last.

Biljana Ciric: A decade ago, golf was the new fashion among China’s new so-called rich.

Gao Mingyan: Right. At that time golf was “in.” Back then only rich people could play golf, but now it’s not so upper-class. I thought it would be cool if I could use this exhibition as an opportunity to play golf. I felt proud of myself when I went to buy the golf club that I would use.

Biljana Ciric: I think you played all day. I went to your home with the ﬁlming team, and you swung the ﬁrst club at your doorway. And then you went on to Xintiandi, a car-free shopping and entertainment district in Shanghai. When did you call it a day?

Vol. 17 No. 1 47 Gao Mingyan: It was quite late. Almost 11 p.m. It’s quite funny. While it was the first time I produced a work like this, during the process I found it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I had assumed passers-by might have various reactions, but they didn’t; they took for granted what I was doing. They thought it was normal, perhaps thinking we were making a commercial. Originally I wanted to finish the project after eighteen holes. But by 11 p.m. on the first evening, I only finished half of the holes. So we gathered together again the next morning to continue playing.

Biljana Ciric: It had to be eighteen holes, right?

Gao Mingyan: Yes, it had to be eighteen holes. There were particular places I wanted to go, so I planned the route. I wanted to go to Pudong, so I took the ferry. I hit the ball onto the boat, and while the boat was moving, the ball remained stationary until the boat arrived at the other side of the river. When it docked, I swung my club and hit the ball toward the land of Pudong. Then we returned to the Puxi side of Shanghai. The project came to an end when I swung the ball toward the railway station, giving the impression that the ball was leaving Shanghai from there.

Biljana Ciric: The project was eventually presented in the form of a video?

Gao Mingyan, A Struggle Between Physical and Mental Strength, 2012, video. Clockwise from top left: Chin Ups, Running, Boxing, Sit Ups. Courtesy of the artist.

Gao Mingyan: Yes, a video. The ﬁrst swing, which started from the doorway of my home, was recorded in full. And then I edited some interesting and typical scenes into the video such as playing golf in the metro and crossing the Pudong River by ferry. But the eighteen scenes featuring the ball going into the holes that I discovered and chose at each site were kept in full in the ﬁnal video.

Biljana Ciric: I believe that piece is unique within your overall artistic practice. Certainly it had something to do with the framework of the exhibition Interventions, where all the works were live interventions within public space over a period of three days. But I wonder if it had any inﬂuence upon your later practice, and, if so, in what way?

48 Vol. 17 No. 1 Gao Mingyan, What Else Gao Mingyan: It has had a Can I Do?, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist. profound inﬂuence on my later practice in that it enabled me to try a new mode of working that is very different from before. City Golf broke through my previous perception of artistic practice. Take, for example, my solo project What

Gao Mingyan, What Else Else Can I Do? (2012) as part of the Can I Do?, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist. exhibition Alternatives to Ritual at the Goethe-Institut Open Space, Shanghai. In this case, too, you were my curator, and before this exhibition, I did only one thing: attend a lot of job interviews. In this respect, it was similar to City Golf. The only difference is that this time I made only an audio recording. Prior to the interviews, I had spent several years working in the studio, painting and making installations. I had the use of my studio for free, and then it was taken away from me. After that, I wanted to rent another studio or a ﬂat to live in. I didn’t have much income. I didn’t have a job, so I needed to make money, which meant I needed to work. As I am an artist, I wanted to look for a job while maintaining my identity and perception as an artist. I wanted to see if there was any industry or company that would need an artist to work for them. When I submitted my resume online, I didn’t pick particular companies or positions, I just applied for all the jobs listed on the top ten pages of a website. The project I’m planning now—I want to take a walk along the railway—is also similar to the golf-playing piece. I want to experience an everyday place or a thing, and then make something out of it. Li Liao

Biljana Ciric: Why do you often consider A Slap in Wuhan (2010) your ﬁrst work?

Li Liao: That work was presented later at exhibitions; hence, I was recognized by people as an artist.

Biljana Ciric: Did you graduate from art school?

Li Liao: Yes, A Slap in Wuhan was conceived ﬁve years after my graduation from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. I was very emotional due to some incidents that had occurred in my life, so I recruited a stranger on the social media platform Douban. I told him when and where to meet, and then I waited for him to give me a slap, with my eyes closed. I felt it was quite an absurd action, and back then I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. To me, such absurdity was quite poetic. There was a sense of limit in this piece, and it was a limit that was both ordinary—that it could happen to anyone of us—and absurd. This sense of limit, in my view, was beautiful.

Biljana Ciric: Did you pay this person to slap you?

Vol. 17 No. 1 49 Li Liao: No. Once the online call was Li Liao, A Slap in Wuhan, 2010, performance. Courtesy of the launched, many people signed up to artist. slap me. “Someone asks for a slap, and I will let him get his wish”—I guess that is what they thought. However, I had certain criteria. I wanted this someone to have a certain social status, and this someone should not be a student or a woman. This was an aesthetic consideration.

Biljana Ciric: Any special reasons for choosing the entrance to the Optical Valley walking street as the venue?

Li Liao: Yes. That place was a new business centre in Wuhan. I chose it because many universities and colleges have moved to that area, and it has become a gateway for college students to go to school. It has developed into a business centre very quickly and naturally because students are a big consumerist group. Now it is one of the most densely populated areas in Wuhan.

Biljana Ciric: Did you consciously delve into the social identity of being an artist in your work?

Li Liao: I have to clarify that during the early stage of my practice I never thought of myself as an artist because I was never recognized as an artist. I still think being an artist or not isn’t something you can decide for yourself. It’s more the result of both external recognition and self-recognition. During the earlier stage of my practice, I made work just because I personally needed to. I had no idea where my work would be presented once it was done. I just wanted to do it. So my reﬂection upon identity was not from the perspective of an artist but from that of an ordinary person.

Biljana Ciric: After A Slap in Wuhan, what was the next important work for you?

Li Liao: While A Slap in Wuhan is an important piece for me, a work that can compete with it is I Am Justice (2015), in which I punched a girl. I did that piece four years after A Slap in Wuhan. I resort to a very simple and ﬁgurative methodology when it comes to judging if a work has special meaning for me. If there is something in a work that the maker cannot explain but is obsessed with, then I think that work is intriguing.

Li Liao, I Am Justice, 2015, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

50 Vol. 17 No. 1 Li Liao, Spring Breeze, 2011, Biljana Ciric: In many of your video installation. Courtesy of the artist. earlier works, like someone slapping you or you locking yourself up for eight hours in an ofﬁce building in Spring Breeze (2011), you have used yourself as the subject of your work. Could your later interest in corporate structures be traced back to these works—the ways that corporate values turn into public values and how they inﬁltrate our daily lives, thus becoming the norm?

Li Liao: Deﬁnitely. I always say that I shall not allow myself to be trapped in ideological struggles. That kind of thing is always either right or wrong; it’s too simplistic. I’m more interested in things that you can actually observe and that have real impact on your life rather than things that are metaphysical or ideological. Honestly, I think it’s beyond an artist’s ability to delve into those kinds of issues.

Biljana Ciric: In your work I can feel the sense of helplessness of an artist. In your earlier works these feelings were particularly prevalent. In Chinese society, it seems artists do not have a role to play.

Li Liao: I need to clarify again that my work is not about the sense of helplessness of an artist.

Biljana Ciric: Right. I feel that you intentionally touch upon awkwardness; instead of hiding this awkwardness, you demonstrate it to us.

Li Liao: I intentionally show people awkwardness, and I have two purposes. One is that when someone who is in an awkward position is not able to conceal his or her awkwardness. It would feel less awkward if he or she used this awkwardness to one’s advantage, as a weapon. The other is that I suddenly realized that art, as a weapon or a tool, manages to transform awkwardness into art. Generally speaking, people tend to avoid awkwardness, but art is able to tolerate it. I think we should thank Marcel Duchamp for that. A principle within my work is that it has to be contextualized within something that is ordinary and common, but, at the same time, I can also ﬁnd something wild and absurd within it. I believe that’s where the tension I look for lies. If what in front of me is something too literal, like a big mountain or massive wasteland, it’s too straightforward, and I don’t see the power in it. All I can do is to acknowledge it. Instead, what I like is something that is hard to deﬁne and cannot be easily recognized.

Biljana Ciric: You chose to move from Wuhan to Shenzhen and to live and work in a more marginalized position. Although Shenzhen is a big city, it’s different from Shanghai and Beijing in that it does not have the same reputation as an art centre. I feel that the choice to live there is not just for the sake of a career. To some extent, it’s an intentional choice to be in a marginalized position to remove yourself from the hype of the art scene. What’s your take on that?

Vol. 17 No. 1 51 Li Liao, An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth, 2016, performance installation, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist.

Li Liao: Psychologically speaking, it’s an intentional choice. In terms of practical considerations, my wife has a job in Shenzhen. However, the fact that I truly want to live here and to continue my practice here is also an intentional choice. I feel this place is better. If I live with a bunch of other artists and rent a studio, I feel that’s too much like playing the role of being an artist. I often comment that Shenzhen is a typical representation of the new China. If you go to other cities, you will see that they are either very old school or a peculiar fusion of the old and the new. Those cities would consider Shenzhen provincial; although its provincial nature is different from a rural village’s sense of the provincial. The provincialism of Shenzhen is the real provincial: It is rich, meticulously planned, and completely deprived of culture. I feel this will become the future image of the whole of China. It doesn’t matter if I don’t use Shenzhen as a literal symbol in my work, but I consider it my source of inspiration.

Biljana Ciric: The works you presented in the exhibitions we have collaborated on recently touch upon some interesting issues. The non- materiality is something I like about your work. In a sense, it’s not possible for it to be owned or collected in the traditional sense of an artwork.

Li Liao: The “object” is never my main consideration. It is something that has to be let go of. The “object” I’m talking about is the real object, real things. I spend most of my time on my balcony, doing nothing; I can be in a state where I don’t feel a strong impulse to work. But I resort to two things to maintain balance. The ﬁrst is exercise and the other, well, I want to keep it a secret. But I can give you some clues. Last year my wife’s

52 Vol. 17 No. 1 boss shared a secret for being successful. The success he referred to is very straightforward: fortune and fame. What he advised is a practical method. I cannot tell you right now what it is. It has to wait until the artwork I am currently engaged with on a daily basis is done. Now I have no idea of how to do it. A couple of days ago, my wife and I kind of drew a conclusion— leave darkness to art and light to life.

Lu Chunsheng

Biljana Ciric: In speaking about your work, many would mention your video The History of Chemistry. It can be considered your magnum opus. The ﬁrst part was shot in 2004 and the second in 2006. What was the idea behind it when you initially started it, in 2004?

Lu Chunsheng: Once I went to a bookstore, and in a publication, I don’t remember the title of it, I saw a chemical—not really a chemical equation— but a symbol for a chemical. It was a very simple design. I also saw an image that touched me deeply. It featured an offshore drilling platform, and it seemed enormously tall. I bought that publication, and I showed the image in the video.

Lu Chunsheng, source image for The History of Chemistry 1, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 17 No. 1 53 Biljana Ciric: Why would that picture touch you so deeply? Lu Chunsheng, The History of Chemistry 1, 2004, video, 26 mins. 33 secs. Courtesy of the artist. Lu Chunsheng: It was the ﬁrst time I had ever seen this kind of structure, and I didn’t know how to describe it. Why did it touch me? It’s hard to say. Sometimes when you see something, it stays in your mind and is beyond description. It was stunning—it was purely man-made but rooted in nature. It’s like China. For over a century, China has been longing for modernization, for catching up with the West in terms of industrialization and urbanization. This country is always looking for development. We now call it the rise and revival of our nation. This is what motivated me to produce The History of Chemistry. But it was hard for me explain to the actors who participated in the video what I wanted. They didn’t know what was on my mind. During the process of walking aimlessly around the site, I hoped they would gradually feel something. Under the sizzling sun, I almost thought they were sleepwalking. They wandered around and were silent. But slowly they felt something within themselves; they had their own emotions. I could sense it.

Biljana Ciric: You were trained as a sculptor, but you continue to work with painting. You have produced many watercolours on paper. I saw some a few years ago. And now you have started a new series of drawings on paper. To me, it’s also a kind of painting. In essence it’s the same. The same materials and same tools, but the process has changed.

Lu Chunsheng: Yes, my process has changed. You have to slow down and stay patient and focused. You have to take your time and not rush; today, everything is so instantaneous. I think what I’ve made is quite coarse; too coarse, actually. I tried to make the drawings look like they were printed by a machine, but this is an impossible mission. I could only partially simulate the effect of a machine. If you don’t have anything in particular to do, why don’t you just take your time and slow down? Just ﬁnd something to do; it’s not a big deal.

Biljana Ciric: What is the world you are looking for?

Lu Chunsheng: I’m not looking for any particular world. I’m lucky to have my own little psychological space. I don’t have to go out. I can just stay in my own world. The status quo of China, which we see all the time, is that everyone is in a hurry, without clear direction. This status quo has lasted a century. You see things that are frustrating, irritating, and beyond your reach. Such is the status quo I’m talking about. I wanted the actors to be in such a state of mind. The video was not about a narrative but about a state of mind, which is supposed to be vague. I often imagine that I’m a good writer and storyteller, but I’ve never written a novel.

54 Vol. 17 No. 1 Lu Chunsheng, from the series Lower the ﬂag at night, 2001–09, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, 109 x 109 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Lu Chunsheng, from the series Lower the ﬂag at night, 2001–09, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, 109 x 109 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 17 No. 1 55 Lu Chunsheng, from the series No Discussion Of Eternity Till You Stop Eating Soup Quietly And Pee Quietly, 2014–15, watercolour and coloured pencil on paper, 109 x 78 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

I feel that the slow process of drawing is a way for me to divert my attention. By sitting at a table and drawing, I can imagine I am writing; my process of drawing is connected to writing.

In my view, Chinese people are not free. Previously I didn’t clearly see this, but now the level of free speech has improved. But I still feel that Chinese people are not fully eligible to speak about freedom. What is the artists’ standpoint? First of all, freedom. If you make art for the sake of making a living, it’s okay, but for me it’s a bit hard to accept. As an artist, if you create art for the sake of survival then you will have to do things that you do not want to do. If you are forced to do those things, to compromise, then you are not free.

Qiu Anxiong

Biljana Ciric: Can you discuss the work Portrait—Clean and Cover?

Qiu Anxiong: The multi-channel video animation Portrait—Clean and Cover (2011) was made for a collateral event organized by Sifang Art Museum during the 54th Venice Biennale. Curator Zhu Tong invited Jia Aili, Qiu Xiaofei, and me to participate. The show was presented in a church. Basically, the work was determined by the conditions of the space. But at that time I already had an idea of making something on the topic of portraiture. The idea could be traced back to when I was working on a piece titled Minguo Landscape (2007). In that piece, a selection of images, portraits that were printed in the newspaper, were shown. The images featured factory workers. I used these images to make an animation. When that work was done, I felt portraiture was a direction I could pursue further. What you see as an image is actually the embodiment of a person from history. But these are ordinary people rather than big names in history. The image might make you feel that they are real and powerful, but as individuals, they are insigniﬁcant. Previously, I had never produced work from the perspective of portraiture.

In that space in Venice, in that church, there were several windows, six in all on a single wall. It seemed to me that each window was like a screen.

56 Vol. 17 No. 1 Qiu Anxiong, Minguo Landscape, 2007, video animation, 14 mins., 27 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

I treated the work as a kind of painting that morphed from one portrait to another. During the process, changes in facial expressions from one to another could be perceived; for example, to a stone or to an object. It all came to me quite naturally. Within such a large framework, the portraits kept changing. I didn’t do much research and just followed an inner logic. I didn’t write a script. I didn’t see the work as experimental. It’s like when you have a formula and the formula will do the calculations automatically. It follows its own logic. You can anticipate what the next portrait looks like when you are working on the previous one.

Biljana Ciric: There were six animated paintings in total?

Qiu Anxiong: Yes, there were six. I think there was something in the method of painting that was very suitable for an animated portrait, in which one portrait inﬂuences and covers up the next one. What I wanted to explore was a person’s place in the course of history, or in the course of time. She or he must have left something behind. Some people leave behind something remarkable, while others seem to simply vanish and leave nothing behind, as if they never existed. But over time the content matches perfectly with the method of painting.

Biljana Ciric: Does Portrait—Clean and Cover have sound?

Qiu Anxiong: Yes. The sound part was composed by a musician, Jin Wang. I’ve worked with him several times.

Biljana Ciric: What are the ideas behind the work in terms of sound?

Qiu Anxiong: I told him I wanted to use the sound of people singing. The ideal version was for each screen to have the sound of one person singing. Hence there would be the sound of six people in the six screens, all singing in harmony. It’s like the polyphonic structure of Baroque music—six voices in harmony.

Biljana Ciric: I’m interested in what you once said about having no moral judgments. From your description, there are no moral judgments in these portraits, right?

Vol. 17 No. 1 57 Qiu Anxiong: I think the content of the work would be too speciﬁc if Qiu Anxiong, Portrait—Clean and Cover, 2011, 6-channel we start to make moral judgments. Different eras have different moral video animation. Courtesy of the artist. judgments. In these portraits there is no speciﬁc era that is referred to or critiqued. Certainly I have my own judgments, but I don’t want to impose them on my work. I don’t think it’s moral to impose judgment on your work. To me, artwork is something beyond personal judgments. It’s not a vehicle for expressing my own opinions. What I want to demonstrate is a state of being “real,” of being “factual.”

“Cleaning” and “covering” are metaphorically the painting methods I used and they are also brimming with political implications. Take “cleaning,” for instance. During the Great Purge period in the Soviet Union, during the 1930s, Stalin carried out a house cleaning campaign. “Covering” also has political implications, as it means to make someone disappear in history. “Cleaning” is to physically wipe someone out, and “covering” is to erase all the traces they leave behind. With the animation and the transformation of one portrait into another, Portrait—Clean and Cover is like cleaning and covering.

Zheng Guogu

Biljana Ciric: When did you establish Yangjiang group?

Zheng Guogu: It was conceived in 2001 and established in 2002. It’s been ﬁfteen years now.

58 Vol. 17 No. 1 I had founded several architecture collectives, and later I wanted to start a calligraphy collective. There had never been such a thing before in China. Calligraphy is something very personal. There is yaji (an elegant gathering), but it’s a temporary event. There has been no collective speciﬁcally engaged in calligraphy. That would be considered ridiculous by the traditionalists and hence is unheard of in the conventions of calligraphy. But the timing for the establishment of our group was quite good, making it possible for ridiculous things to exist and make sense. Within a collective, group members are supposed to complement each other, and when they cease to complement each other, they break up. Many collectives in China are temporary, and they often disperse when members are mature enough to work alone. But for us, it seems the longer we work together, the closer we become.

Biljana Ciric: Why did you decide to establish a group working speciﬁcally around calligraphy as a medium?

Zheng Guogu: Nowadays calligraphy in China has become a somewhat outdated medium. Writing is hardly mentioned as a contemporary medium. That’s why I think it is interesting to include it in contemporary art.

Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang Today many people don’t care about Group, After Dinner Calligraphy, n.d., food. writing at all. Nor do they care about Courtesy of the artists. what we do. It’s hard to evaluate. In China we do have a calligraphy association; it boasts itself as the inheritor of the orthodoxy and the guardian of a great tradition. In their view, we’re excluded because we are wild, grassroots, and hard to categorize. For example, we make “After Dinner Calligraphy” (fanhou), where we make calligraphy out of leftover food—pieces of vegetable or bone form a structure like that of a Chinese character—which they think is different, crazy, and ungrounded. What they don’t get is that the true development of writing or calligraphy lies in the capacity to break through the restrictions of the tradition in order to have the potential to become the new tradition.

Biljana Ciric: What was your ﬁrst calligraphy experiment?

Zheng Guogu: The earliest calligraphy work we did was the one with wax beginning in 2002. We sealed calligraphy works in wax and created a landscape with over one thousand pieces of calligraphy. There were different elements of writing represented as we invited different people to write.

Vol. 17 No. 1 59 Biljana Ciric: How would you Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang Group, Inner Courtyard, 2005, describe the state of elegant installation. Courtesy of the artists. gatherings, known as yaji.

Zheng Guogu: Yaji is the state in which I write, rather than what I write. Yaji is a process. For instance, if you write a piece of calligraphy and present it, people will talk about it. And after they are done, maybe someone else will write another piece of calligraphy and put it on top of yours.

Biljana Ciric: When did the fanhou calligraphy series start?

Zheng Guogu: Ofﬁcial records date it back to 2009. It was not very formal. Back then we mainly thought about how to preserve work in the form of calligraphy. Then suddenly we realized we could resort to photography to record the work. We took a picture one day and made a photographic record. If we just left the calligraphy there, it would become very oily and messy the next day.

Biljana Ciric: How do you deal with these everyday rituals and their performativity when they enter the museum or exhibition context?

Zheng Guogu: It’s been six years since I quit drinking. Since then, I have paid more attention to tea drinking. Tea for me used to be a cure for a hangover. Gradually, however, I found that tea has a positive inﬂuence on one’s mental health. Now, if one were to call tea drinking a performance, I think it is an invisible performance. If you drink tea, it is good for your body. It helps your inner system reach a natural balance, enabling you to focus and to meditate. Thus, tea provides its own performance within the body, and that is more important than the context of an exhibition.

Biljana Ciric: What is the role of calligraphy in this?

Zheng Guogu: Tea drinking is a kind of invisible writing. It will ﬂow into your body, and, hence, “write” in your body. That’s very interesting. Sometimes we match tea drinking with fanhou. It’s all about qi (force), as calligraphy is about the motion of qi, and in China there is an emphasis on this ﬂow of inner qi. The combination of tea drinking and fanhou juxtaposes invisible writing and highly visible writing.

Biljana Ciric: How about the role of architecture in your work?

Zheng Guogu: We made a building, the Yangjiang group studio, look like a piece of ice. The origin of ice is water, and we wanted to trace the origin of calligraphy, to return to nature. Chinese characters originated from nature. For instance, the character for a mountain looks just like a

60 Vol. 17 No. 1 Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang mountain. What we did is use Group, Yangjiang Group studio. Courtesy of the artists. architecture to imitate a piece of ice or nature. We wanted to tell people that before characters were invented, there was just nature. To help us remember, nature was transformed into a kind of symbol through Chinese characters. What we presented with the studio was also a kind of symbol. It’s a place for living, for yaji, and it could also function as gallery, studio, and archive. It’s an integrated architecture where you can live or entertain friends; or you can use it as an art museum. I designed it.

Basically, architecture is like the human body. How do we prevent it from the interference of different energies? How do you arrange the ﬂow of qi within this architecture? How do you deal with feng shui? After all, it’s all about comfort. Though the architecture looks quite explosive and Western, its heart is very Eastern.

Biljana Ciric: I deeply respect your choice of staying at the margins and maintaining your working base in Yangjiang.

Zheng Guogu: That was in 1993. There were no computers back then. People made phone calls and sometimes even had to write letters. But at that time I felt it was not necessary to travel to so-called centres for the sake of resources or information. Places didn’t make much difference. The key was the work. You needed to focus on the work and present good work. In other words, you should let the work speak for you. It should speak with people on its own.

Hu Yun

Biljana Ciric: You often say that travel is a very important part of your practice.

Hu Yun: Yes, this relates to the people and things that I am interested in.

I usually follow the paths of certain people. I wouldn’t say that I am doing research but, rather, following. And the characters that I am usually interested in have travelled and moved about their whole life, moving from one place to another.

Biljana Ciric: How would you describe these people?

Hu Yun: I think they could be categorized in two ways.

The ﬁrst are people, such as missionaries, who arrived very early in China, South Asia, or Southeast Asia. They were foreigners, not locals. And the others are people who have grown up in China but have a yearning for the outside word. At the same time, part of their work and life is ﬁnding somehow their own understanding of contemporaneity.

Vol. 17 No. 1 61 Biljana Ciric: How do these people and the contemporaneity they have deﬁned for themselves relate it to a current moment in local content? Or how does if relate to you?

Hu Yun: They attract me because of their relation to the current moment. These relationships are not only in an art context, but reﬂect many different aspects of everyday life and social structures. I want to understand how different phenomena that currently appear in a local context came about. The construction of the museum or art museum is a typical example. These kinds of institutional structures didn’t always belong to a local context because previously we didn’t have these kinds of institutions.

Biljana Ciric: In the exhibition Our Ancestors at Goethe-Institut Open Space, Shanghai (November 2 to December 1, 2012), you used for the ﬁrst time your grandfather’s material as a point of departure for your work. From then on he kept appearing in your work.

Hu Yun, Everything Is Possible in the Darkness, 2012, ten sets of photos from personal archive, installation view of Our Ancestors. Courtesy of the artist.

While I was working on Our Ancestors I realized that my grandfather had a desire to share his stories and his experiences. I started to listen to things that he would talk about, and that slowly raised my interest in his life experience. In Our Ancestors I used a number of details from his life as a point of departure for the work.

Biljana Ciric: From these two groups of people that you have described— the ones you follow—which group does your grandfather belong to?

Hu Yun: His role is bit more complicated. He can’t really be described as belonging to either of these two groups of people. His role usually is not so clear; within the roles of these two groups he is like a connecting point.

Biljana Ciric: In the exhibition Lift With Care at Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai (April 13 to April 30, 2013), there are two parallel narratives.

Hu Yun: Yes, we could say there are two narratives—one is related to an expedition that happened in the early twentieth century. It is Sterling Clark’s expedition in 1908 to northwest China. The other one is related to my grandfather’s memory of his home village.

62 Vol. 17 No. 1 Hu Yun, Everything Is Possible in the Darkness (detail), 2012, ten sets of photos from personal archive, installation view of Our Ancestors. Courtesy of the artist.

Biljana Ciric: Why were you interested in this speciﬁc expedition?

Hu Yun: It is coincidence. I was actually interested in one of the members of the expedition; he wasn’t the main ﬁgure but he was in charge of collecting information related to the natural sciences. His name was Arthur Sowerby.

I was interested in Sowerby as he remained living in Shanghai for over a decade. At that time, he was director of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Museum, Asia. This museum was situated in what is today’s Rockbund Art Museum. This building was constructed back in the 1930s by the Royal Asiatic Society, and there was a museum on the third and fourth ﬂoors. It was the ﬁrst Natural History Museum in China, and Sowerby was its director. It was through this expedition that I understood how Sowerby actually came to China.

Biljana Ciric: How did you exhibit this part of the work within the exhibition?

Hu Yun: Historical facts related to this expedition weren’t exhibited. What I just explained wasn’t presented.

Hu Yun, Revisit Memory 1908– I exhibited a piece of linen cloth 1909, 2013, embroidery on linen, 108 x 138 cm. Courtesy because linen was very often used of the artist. in long-distance travels, especially if one was travelling by horse. On that piece of linen, I embroidered the route of the expedition that they actually managed to accomplish. On this embroidered route dots can be found. These red dots symbolize the locations where they used the most advanced instruments to collect necessary data. One dot is one town. In the exhibition, this aspect of the work becomes more of an abstract image.

Another part within the exhibition related to this expedition was an old suitcase. In the suitcase was placed a paper rubbing from one of the steles

Vol. 17 No. 1 63 in Xi’an. This forest of steles is of great importance for the whole of China. When the expedition team entered Xi‘an they went to visit it. The steles came from all over China.

Their expedition notes also mention this stele because it archives the story of how Christianity arrived in China. It used to be called Nestorianism. Christianity came to China from ancient Rome around the sixth century. On this piece of stone you can read the story of how Christianity entered during the Tang dynasty from Persia.

At the very entrance of the exhibition there is Lift With Care (2013), a Left: Hu Yun, installation view of Lift With Care, 2013, Aike- photograph of my hand and the branch of a plant. This photograph could Dellarco, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist. be understood as an independent work. It reﬂects my focus on natural Right: Hu Yun, Lift With Care history as all the people and things that I am interested in are also related (detail), 2013, rubbing of the Nestorian Stele, Xi’an. to the natural sciences. So that’s why I took a photograph of my hand and Courtesy of the artist. a branch. The photograph also references the creation of Adam, so it could also have certain religious implications.

I placed this photograph and some drawings within the exhibition. They have the role of illustrative plates within the narrative. They could exist independently, but within exhibition context, they interrupt the visitor’s reading or imagination of the narrative.

Biljana Ciric: Within the exhibition there is an important part, which is a live component of the work.

I reconstructed the ofﬁce entrance of the gallery. I turned it into a bar table with a bell on it. When a visitor came to see the exhibition, he or she could ring the bell, and a gallery staff member would come out to give him or her a tour around the exhibition and at the end would tell the story. Before the exhibition, I told this story to each one of the gallery staff, including the owner. This story was never written down and it exists only in my head. Every time I tell it, it is a bit different.

Biljana Ciric: Why do you emphasize this oral aspect of the work?

64 Vol. 17 No. 1 Left: Hu Yun, Lift With Care, 2013, archival inkjet print, 44 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Hu Yun, installation view of Lift With Care, 2013, Aike- Dellarco, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist.

Hu Yun: The reason for it is that all the content related to my work I gained through oral transmission.

Biljana Ciric: This exhibition is part of the Kadist Art Foundation collection. If it is to ever be re-exhibited, how will the live component be activated?

Hu Yun: Even now I still haven’t written down this story.

Biljana Ciric: So the foundation doesn’t know the story?

Hu Yun: No, they don’t know the story yet. No one contacted me to tell the story. The installation and acquisition instructions are clearly written down.

I also forgot some details, but I would probably add new ones, so the story also will change.

Biljana Ciric: One more thing is that the whole exhibition can ﬁt into the suitcase.

Hu Yun: Exactly; the whole exhibition can ﬁt into the suitcase that is part of the exhibition.

Biljana Ciric: This exhibition has one more interesting aspect. It is very difﬁcult to remove one work from the exhibition.

Hu Yun: Lift with Care is an exhibition that consists of a few parts. To me it is more radical if it can be considered one piece that is presented as an exhibition.

Biljana Ciric: Also, you usually revisit your previous works, edit them, and exhibit them in different or new contexts.

Hu Yun: The reason for this is the way I work. The people that I follow also change. My understanding of one person or an event in one period is this, but in another period it could change. I would sometimes feel doubt or move forward or totally neglect my previous understanding. This is also interesting for me. My previous works do not have stable results but are more about my own understanding of persons or events now.

These interviews are a series published as part of a collaboration between Yishu and KADIST. All interviews were conducted by Biljana Ciric and produced by KADIST. The interviews are also available on video in Mandarin with English subtitles at kadist.org/.

Vol. 17 No. 1 65 Julia Gwendolyn Schneider Pak Sheung Chuen: Art as a Personal Journey in Times of Political Upheaval

ak Sheung Chuen, one of Hong Kong’s most respected artists, Pak Sheung Chuen, Familiar Numbers, Unknown was its representative at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and has Telephone, 2005, published in Ming Pao, June 19, 2005. Pparticipated in many exhibitions and biennials abroad since. His Courtesy of the artist. work often reﬂects upon contemporary Hong Kong through personal observations and conceptual engagement with everyday life in the city and on the conﬂict between an ideal world and reality, which he tries to address with poetic solutions that strive to merge both worlds.1

Pak Sheung Chuen’s artistic practice developed through weekly art projects he published in the Sunday edition of Ming Pao between 2003 and 2005. In order to create these works for the local newspaper, he would walk around the streets until something struck him and an idea emerged. Ming Pao’s circulation of over 100,000 offered him the possibility of reaching a huge audience and he has never completely stopped to use it as a platform for his art. Between 2015 and 2016 he again created artworks for the newspaper on a weekly basis and continues to make contributions once a month.

66 Vol. 17 No. 1 A prominent example of Pak Sheung Chuen’s deconstruction or deliberate misuse of existing systems is Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone (2005). At a bus stop the artist often passed by, he noticed that the numbers posted on a sign indicating the four bus routes read like a local Hong Kong telephone number. “On my way to Sai Kung, I saw a familiar set of numbers on the bus stop: 91 91M 92 96R. Shortly after, I made a phone call to an unfamiliar number: 9191–9296.”2 A man picked up the call, and they had a short conversation. The man was curious to ﬁnd out how and where exactly his telephone number was displayed. When Pak Sheung Chuen answered him, he said: “That’s very strange, I don’t understand it, but thanks a lot.”3

Pak Sheung Chuen called the man “Mr. Bus” and published the story in Ming Pao alongside a photo of the bus stop. Additionally, he combined a still image of the bus stop with the recording of the telephone conversation. This artwork was ﬁrst shown in 2006 as part of the group exhibition Asian Trafﬁc at the Hong Kong Visual Art Centre. Mr. Bus, like many other works by Pak Sheung Chuen, is based on the artist’s belief that through his artworks he can bring to the fore the interwoven nature of reality and the imaginary. In a 2009 statement Pak Sheung Chuen made about his Hong Pavilion exhibition in Venice, Making (Perfect) World, he explained, “I like to make the strange worlds around me into my world . . . but you can’t change the worlds, so you try to change the way you see it. This is basically how I work and live. I am creating a world, a perfect world.”4 The artist believes in art’s liberating force and hopes that it can “make the world a better place.”5 But what happens to this belief during times of political crisis?

After Hong Kong’s Occupy Central (also known as the Umbrella Movement), “the largest, most civilized civil-disobedience movement [the city had] ever seen,”6 which took over the downtown streets from September 28 to December 15, 2014, ended without achieving its goal of universal suffrage and greater democracy, Pak Sheung Chuen, like many others, felt disillusioned. To make things worse, his state of inner confusion and emotional lows culminated in a period of depression, which lasted several months and left him devoid of enthusiasm to work. Furthermore, he had started to question the impact and relevance of art for society during the Umbrella Movement. Pak Sheung Chuen perceives himself more as an observer than an activist, a stance toward his artistic practice he wanted to stay true to. He found it difﬁcult to see how his working method could be meaningful in Hong Kong’s situation of political impasse and trauma.

Before his solo exhibition That Light, which was presented at Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou (December 17, 2016 to February 26, 2017), Pak Sheung Chuen had not exhibited in any major way for some time. The exhibition included nineteen artworks made over the last few years, among them a series of works he started in 2015 titled Nightmare Wallpaper. This series marked a turning point in that it allowed the artist to enter “an aesthetic pilgrimage of self-healing after the failure of the Umbrella Movement.”7

Of this ongoing series, Nightmare Wallpaper (No. STC2360-15/a) from 2016 was the ﬁrst I encountered. It was presented in the group exhibition The

Vol. 17 No. 1 67 Left to right: Pak Sheung Chuen, Nightmare Wallpaper (No. ESC2615-15/h): Picture of the Slumbering Horse, 2016, No. ESC2615/ZP02, 2016, and No. ESC2615/AP40, 2016, exhibition view of Pak Sheung Chuen: That Light, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Pak Sheung Chuen, Nightmare Wallpaper (No.STC2360-15/a) (detail), 2016, wallpaper, framed document and photograph, dimensions variable, exhibition view of The Mulberry Forest Becoming Ocean, Esther Schipper, Berlin 2017. Photo: © Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

Mulberry Forest Becoming Ocean, held at Pak Sheung Chuen, Nightmare Wallpaper (No.STC2360-15/a), the Esther Schipper gallery, Berlin, from 2016, wallpaper, framed document and photograph, January 20 to February 25, 2017. Here, dimensions variable, exhibition view of The Mulberry Forest Pak Sheung Chuen’s elegant wallpaper Becoming Ocean, Esther Schipper, Berlin 2017. Photo: covered a whole wall. It consisted of © Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of a purple, amorphous shape inside a the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. brown oval highlighted by a yellow line around it, which was repeated as a pattern over the entire surface of a purple background. The abstract motif inside the oval attracted my attention and reminded me of surrealist automatic drawings of the early twentieth century, perhaps best represented by the work of André Masson. The drawing begged to be interpreted and to be given meaning. For me, I asked myself, “Doesn’t it look like a ginger root, and isn’t there a teardrop falling down, and aren’t there two ghostlike ﬁgures emerging from the root?” It felt easy to come up with associations, but there was no way to fully grasp what this bafﬂing image was actually depicting.

At the far right of the wallpaper-covered wall, two small frames were hung. One was a portrait of a man—a video still taken from a local TV news report—and the other presented a text written by the artist about the court case of a Mr. Tsang, a citizen of Hong Kong who is shown in the

68 Vol. 17 No. 1 TV image. The text explains how in 2016 Mr. Tsang had tried to pelt Chief Executive of Hong Kong Leung Chun-ying with ﬁve eggs. One of the eggs hit a woman working for the Jockey Club. “Forty eggs were found in his rucksack when he was arrested and searched. He was convicted of common assault.”8 Pak Sheung Chuen’s description points out that the defendant is a former university research assistant, with a master’s degree in psychology, counseling, and philosophy. In addition, he had been a volunteer for ten years at Hong Kong’s Samaritan suicide prevention and crisis hotline service. The artist states his confusion about the fact that a man with this type of professional training, “chose to end his problem in a ‘violent’ act.”9 According to the artist, the case in point leaves one wondering what must be going on in society to stir such anger and lead to the described behaviour.

I was able to gain more insight into the Nightmare Wallpaper series when I met Pak Sheung Chuen in Hong Kong in March 2017. Without planning it, and before we started our conversation, we found ourselves in attendance at a court case at the District Court in Wan Chai. Since that court is located opposite the Convention and Exhibitions Center where Art Basel concurrently was being held, Pak Sheung Chuen had gone into the court earlier that day to give himself a moment of rest from the busy art fair.

On June 15, 2015, he accidentally walked into a trial at the Kwun Tong Magistrates’ Courts, and, since then, became obsessed with attending court cases. In addition to following speciﬁc cases about political activists who are being prosecuted by the government, it is the peculiar atmosphere of the court room per se that attracts Pak Sheung Chuen—inside that environment, he can easily concentrate and let his pen travel rapidly across his notebook without conscious control. He has remarked, “I found peace when I was immersed in the cold, whitewashed, silent, and solemn atmosphere of the courtroom. During the proceedings, I would take out my fountain pen and make automatic drawings in my notebook. These drawings brought me into a Daoist Cosmology trance-like state.”10

In fact, going to the courtroom on a regular basis helped lift Pak Sheung Chuen out of his aforementioned state of depression. It was only when he began to attend daily court proceedings that he could regain inner stability and become fully active again as an artist. While the ambience of the courtroom helps him to concentrate, it is also—according to the artist—the activity of drawing during the trials that creates a meaningful connection between him and the society he lives in. In a further step of his artistic process, Pak Sheung Chuen scans his notebook sketches and enlarges them on his computer screen. Through this method he can study each little detail of his subconscious depictions, analyze his own emotions, and enter into a process of psychological healing. “I would read them [the images] and allow myself to be immersed into a meditative state of mind. . . . Month after month, my inner chaos gradually shifted, and I was ultimately able to return to the complicated world outside.”11 The ﬁnal step is the creation of an abstract, decorative wallpaper design—sometimes by using only a fragment of the initial drawing. His choice depends on what he found to be the most important visual intervention relative to the court case he had been listening to.

Vol. 17 No. 1 69 Pak Sheung Chuen’s first court- Pak Sheung Chuen’s first Nightmare Wallpaper, related artwork, part of the published in Ming Pao, November 8, 2015. Courtesy of Nightmare Wallpaper series, the artist. was published in Ming Pao on November 8, 2015, and referred to a trial related to the Umbrella Movement. Here the artist provided a description of the visual scenario and what he recognized inside it. “I made two rounded circles in the drawing, like mirrors reflecting from one to another. In the drawing, you can see countless living organisms hidden within the wood grain on the spheres. A child’s face floated on the surface of the upper circle, palms joined together in the lower circle, vulva revealed; when the two circles are viewed together, they resemble a Buddha statue in deep meditation.”12 Pak Sheung Chuen’s surrealist assemblage of psychologically and symbolically suggestive images provides a lot of room for interpretation within the viewer’s imagination. It presents a puzzling complexity that deliberately does not offer any clear message. Yet the artist remembers how he drew the image when he encountered a prominent figure from Occupy Central in the courtroom—a man who went on a hunger strike during this important moment in Hong Kong’s democracy movement. For the artist, it is “the hunger strike fighter” who “appears like a statue of Buddha that exists in [his] sub-consciousness.”13 That comment reveals one of the interpretations—the artist’s—that can be applied to this multilayered drawing.

For Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Pak Sheung Chuen, display table with archival materials, Chuen: Two Exhibitions at Para exhibition view of Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Site, Hong Kong (September 23 Exhibitions, 2017, Para Site, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the to December 3, 2017), in which artist and Para Site, Hong both artists offered “a mediation Kong. Left: Pak Sheung Chuen, on power through diverging display table with archival 14 materials, exhibition view of approaches,” Pak Sheung Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions, 2017, Chuen presented the outcome of Para Site, Hong Kong. Photo: Ducky Tse. Courtesy of Pak his observations collected from various court cases through the use of Sheung Chuen and Para Site, decorative wallpapers, grafﬁti-like wall-paintings, and objects, as well as Hong Kong.

70 Vol. 17 No. 1 his personal notebooks, all shown for the ﬁrst time in his hometown. The centrepiece of his contribution to the exhibition was a huge display table that exposed Pak Sheung Chuen’s interwoven personal contextualizations. The aforementioned newspaper contribution, among other newspaper based works, was part of this archival installation, which also contained photographs, collected objects, artworks, and descriptive texts by the artist. Within that setup, a lot of insight could be gained into Pak Sheung Chuen’s conceptual pieces, as well as into his attempts to bring meaning to his automatic drawings. The display table and all the material encased within it allowed for an intimate encounter with the artist’s personal journey, one that at the same time holds strong connections to public political events.

Pak Sheung Chuen, Nightmare At Para Site, six colourful wallpaper Wallpaper, 2017, six wood panels, wallpaper, each 125 x works were prominently featured on a 320 x 1 cm, exhibition view of Chris Evans and Pak Sheung wall erected opposite the entrance of Chuen: Two Exhibitions, 2017, the exhibition space. They shimmered Para Site, Hong Kng. Photo: Ducky Tse. Courtesy of the under the warm light from the ceiling artist and Para Site, Hong Kong. and confronted the visitors with their seductive beauty and opacity. This most recent manifestation of the Nightmare Wallpaper series relates to the Mong Kok riot trial, a very long case that took about three months. The case was based on a protest against a ban on street food vendors in Mong Kok during Lunar New Year in February 2016, which turned into an outbreak of violence between protesters and the police.

In contrast to the presentation at Esther Schipper, these wallpaper works did not have any information directly attached to them. On the display table, however, Pak Sheung Chuen provided the background material, which gave visitors greater access to the seemingly decorative artworks on the wall, with their shiny surfaces. But what becomes clearer through this chosen mode of presentation is precisely the fact that the wallpaper is not meant to create a direct statement about the court cases to which they refer. For Pak Sheung Chuen, wallpaper is “the medium related to his emotions,” which he believes has a psychological healing energy.15 By transferring his personal automatic drawings made during the hours spent in the courtroom to the mundane medium of interior decoration, generally associated with domestic space, Pak Sheung Chuen creates a thought-provoking artwork. This work poignantly addresses the relationship between state power (the court) and the individual (the artist) in a situation where freedom of expression is under pressure. Viewed from this perspective, the Nightmare Wallpaper series can be associated with what critic-curator Jasper Lau has pointed out about Pak Sheung Chuen’s artistic practice in the artist’s ﬁrst monograph: `“As rare works that ‘respond’ to our society, Pak Sheung Chuen’s work is even rarer for it touches upon politics, but never loses sight of the singular personal being.”16

For the exhibition at Para Site, Pak Sheung Chuen created another very distinct series derived from his automatic drawings, entitled Seals (2017). They are enlarged versions of his small notebook scribbles, painted directly onto the wall, which appear like black-and-white stencil grafﬁti. Unlike

Vol. 17 No. 1 71 Pak Sheung Chuen, display tables with court drawings and archival materials; on the wall: The Seals, 2017, acrylic paint on wall; on the ﬂoor: Mong Kok Incident (No. MKI815-17#2), Brick, MKI815- 17#2/170815(11:17-11:23)/ MK(SYCst-Sst)/PSC/Moving- A-Brick, 2017, video, 5 mins., 25 secs., exhibition view of Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions, Para Site, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong.

the drawings, which are occasionally obfuscated by the Op Art aesthetics of the repetitive wallpaper patterns, the Seals keep easily recognizable the images from the original drawings. Both grafﬁti and seals are mark-making media, but they have very different agendas. In connection with court cases, seals are easily linked to law-enforcing documents stamped by government authorities, while Pak Sheung Chuen’s highly personal symbols, in stencil style, undermine any bureaucratic code system. Instead, their grafﬁti-like appearance lends them a touch of dissent; as imaginary signs they form a subtle revolt of ambiguity.

Pak Sheung Chuen, court drawing for The Seal (No. CAAR4-16#ST): Nine Prophecies, CAAR4- 16#ST/170817(12:42-4:46)/ HC/J:YCK-PSC-PWC/P:YKK(SJ)/ D:WCF-LKC-CYK/Review- Sentence: Unlawful-Assembly, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong.

In the midst of Pak Sheung Chuen’s archival materials on the display table, a small cast iron sculpture stands out. Titled The Person Walking with His Head Covered (2017), it is another artwork that takes an automatic drawing related to the Mong Kok riot as its source. The artist interpreted his depiction as a ﬁgure walking with its head covered. Through this small sculpture the artist comments on his own position in relation to the accused. In a note on the display table, Pak Sheung Chuen describes how, by coincidence, he encountered a defendant from case No. DCC901-16 (the Mong Kok riot) on the street in Hong Kong on the eve of the defendant’s

72 Vol. 17 No. 1 Pak Sheung Chuen, court drawing for Sacred Object (No. DCCC901-16 # 12): The Person Walking with His Head Covered, DCCC901- 16#12/170616(11:49-1:56)/ DC(WK)/J:KWK/P:HKSAR/ D:MJT-XXX-CCH-HKS-FTH- CWC-TKC-LCH-LWW-YCF-XXX/ Riot, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong.

Pak Sheung Chuen, Sacred trial. He followed him and a friend Object (No. DCCC901-16 # 12): The Person Walking with to a restaurant, without them His Head Covered, DCCC901- 16#12/170616(11:49-1:56)/ noticing. After they ﬁnished their DC(WK)/J:KWK/P:HKSAR/ D:MJT-XXX-CCH-HKS-FTH- meal and had left, Pak Sheung CWC-TKC-LCH-LWW-YCF-XXX/ Riot, 2017, cast iron, 45 x 10 x Chuen moved over to their table 3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong. and took a straw home from the tray the defendant had used.

During the trial the following day, Pak Sheung Chuen thought that he might be recognized and tried to conceal himself from the defendant. He noted about the drawing he was making during the trial:

I drew a figure of him [the defendant] and wrote down the events from last night, together with a few lines to form the shape of a flower. As I filled the middle part in black, a profile appeared in the left half of the drawing, while the right half began to look like a melon, or a severed hand with a hook. But as I turned the drawing upside down, the part I had filled in with black became a walking person: he looked as if he was trying to wrap his upper body in his coat in order to protect himself from a heavy wind, and there was a soldier following him from far behind. That was certainly me, but the person walking with his head covered was also me.17

This episode shows Pak Sheung Chuen’s ambivalent relationship with the accused. To a certain extent he felt an urge to create a connection with him, and, mainly, he did so indirectly, when, for instance he picked up the defendant’s straw, and later displayed it as part of the archival material in his exhibition. Bringing an object into the exhibition space, like the straw that is linked to one of the defendants, adds a layer of intimacy. At the same time, he did not want to leave his role as an observer, even if at times he may have felt like a spy. Pak Sheung Chuen’s methodology demonstrates how, after all, his artworks are never just conceptual abstractions of his observations, but intermix conceptual wit with personal experience.

Vol. 17 No. 1 73 Pak Sheung Chuen, court drawing for Nightmare Wallpaper (No.DCCC901- 16#8):170612(11:28-3:07)/ DC(WK)/J:KWK/P:HKSAR/ D:MJT-XXX-CCH-HKS-FTH- CWC-TKC-LCH-LWW-YCF-XXX/ Riot, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong.

Spiritual references often appear in Pak Sheung Chuen’s automatic drawings. His Christian upbringing and beliefs might explain why he is guided toward various religious symbols. These symbols serve as an emotional support for the artist and become agents of subversion in relation to the court trials he has encountered. There is, for instance, a wallpaper work called An Angel in Conversation with a Young Lady (2017) about which Pak Sheung Chuen says: “The pattern is composed of a kneeling angel and a lost puppy: a young girl hides in the empty space between the angel and the puppy, and the words coming out of the angel’s mouth in black become the girl’s eyes.”18 The selection of drawings he chose to present as Seals is often connected with religious interpretations as well, which are mentioned in the works’ titles, like Redemption, Bride of Christ, and Nine Prophecies.

A strong relationship to Christian Pak Sheung Chuen, LXB-573.07-7263- symbols can also be found in Pak ZGDDZZYZGZSFZ-42- A1A10, 2017 archival Sheung Chuen’s Adult Library Series: inkjet print, 60.2 x 106 cm. Courtesy of the artist LXB (2017). The black-and-white and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong. prints, which were featured in the group exhibition Tale of Wonderland (September 19 to November 11, 2017) at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, are based on the same surrealist technique as the automatic drawings from the court trials. LXB stands for Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese poet, intellectual, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and democracy activist who was jailed in China in 2009 and died in 2017 without ever regaining his freedom. In this case, Pak Sheung Chuen’s subconscious images acted as a commemorative gesture, and it seemed as though he was trying to communicate with the recently deceased writer. The drawings convey dark undertones of death, foreboding, and burial. In one scenario appears a bird, often seen as a symbol of freedom, but this tiny creature is tied on a long leash to a dead body—it does not look like it could easily spread its wings and ﬂy away.

Freedom of expression is, after all, a major question that lies behind the works Pak Sheung Chuen presented at Para Site. It is not that the artist does

74 Vol. 17 No. 1 not believe in the legal system per se, or that he thinks there is no justice at all; he tries to capture a changing atmosphere he detects within society that is often related to how the law is being made in Hong Kong. Indirectly, he addresses the fear of Hong Kong residents that Beijing has been intensifying efforts to erode the liberties still enjoyed by the former British colony since it was returned to China in 1997.

It is in this context that the term “White Terror” appears, which is now quite commonly used in the Chinese language. It originates from a period of “White Terror” in Taiwan, between 1947 and 1987, during which the Taiwanese government did not allow one to speak about anything related to communism, and when people did, they would disappear. Even though this situation cannot be compared to Hong Kong directly, the term crops up more frequently nowadays. It refers to circumstances in which anti- government voices are more and more suppressed, and, especially since the Umbrella Movement, people fall more easily under suspicion and are more frequently put into prison.

A strong case regarding this development was the disappearance of five Hong Kong book publishers who were detained in China after having sold books exposing the private lives and financial affairs of mainland officials. This incident was condemned by the Hong Kong public and by international human rights advocates. On June 16, 2016, after having gone missing for several months, Mr. Lam, the founder of Causeway Bay Books, managed to escape from China and held a press briefing in Hong Kong, during which he revealed his illegal abduction and confinement by the mainland officials. This incident “exposed for the first time the mainland Chinese authorities’ active cross-border law enforcement, which stirred up anxiety amongst the Hong Kong public and doubt over the supposed ‘one country, two systems’ principle.”29

Pak Sheung Chuen’s red dot sticker action during June 17, In relation to this episode, Pak Sheung Chuen 2016 solidarity demonstration for Mr. Lam, published in Ming conceived of a secretive act in a public space. Pao, June 19, 2016. Courtesy On June 17, 2016, when a political group of the artist. launched a solidarity demonstration for Mr. Lam near the Liaison Ofﬁce of the Central People’s Government, the artist positioned himself next to Joshua Wong Chi-fung of the Demosisto party, who was one of the leaders of Occupy Central, and, without him noticing, carefully applied a red dot sticker to his back. Full documentation of Pak Sheung Chuen’s action was published in the June 19, 2016 issue of Ming Pao. In a metaphorical way, the red dot refers to China’s power, which overshadows that of Hong Kong. The idea behind the work is to warn that besides Mr. Lam, “anyone could easily fall victim to surveillance and attack,”20 something Mr. Lam actually stated as well.21

Following this thought, Pak Sheung Chuen continued his performance the next year at the annual pro-democracy march on July 1 and at random placed red dot stickers on demonstrators’ backs. To his surprise, he came across Mr. Lam and included him in his secret mission, which changed how he perceived his own activity: “I walked over to him with my umbrella and

Vol. 17 No. 1 75 Pak Sheung Chuen’s red dot sticker action during July 1, 2017 pro-democracy march. Courtesy of the artist.

held it over his head for a short walk; during the walk, I stealthily left my last red dot sticker on his back before I took off. At that moment, I too felt like a perpetrator.”22 That Pak Sheung Chuen felt momentarily like a delinquent after he fulﬁlled his secret mission indicates just how embedded issues of surveillance and power relations have become.

In this case Pak Sheung Chuen is the observer, Pak Sheung Chuen, Liaison but, in another work shown at Para Site, he is Office of CPG Incident (No. LOCPGIxx3-17#3): Flag the one being watched. On a small monitor painting, LOCPGIxx3- 17#3/17xxx3(xx:xx-xx:xx)/ a street scene is shown, filmed with a static WD(160CNrd)/PSC/White- Terror, 2017, video, 15 mins., camera. At first glance, it is hard to tell what is 10 secs. Courtesy of the artist. going on. People pass by, and in the background Pak Sheung Chuen himself is standing, waiting, and fulfilling a task. He is looking up and down repeatedly while mainly standing at the same spot. It is not only the distance that makes it difficult to see what is happening; pedestrians are walking by almost all the time and frequently block the view.

Exercizing some patience and the desire to find out what is happening, a viewer can begin to understand the scenario. To understand it fully, though, it is best to read the artist’s note on the display table. Here, the discreet performance, which takes place at the entrance of the Liaison Office, is explained. In front of the building, from where the Chinese government in Hong Kong is extending its political power over the city’s autonomy, Pak Sheung Chuen used white paint to draw the national flag and the national emblem of China on a piece of cardboard. He performed two sketching sessions. “The security guards and policeman were closely observing my actions, and complimented my drawings as ‘so abstract!’ On the second day, I returned, and the female guard warned me, ‘Please don’t spill the bottle again today’.”23

The artist’s performative act emerged from a Found drop of paint on the ground in front of the Liaison discovery he had made on the ground in front Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong of the Liaison Office: a drop of white paint S.A.R. Courtesy of the artist. was spread out in the form of a jellyfish with an umbrella-shaped bell and trailing tentacles. It spurred Pak Sheung Chuen’s imagination and he decided to conduct an artistic experiment to examine how a bit of paint could possibly end up on the pavement in this high surveillance area. The image he discovered prior to his performance is documented by a photograph on the display table, where Pak Sheung Chuen’s related drawings can also be seen. In addition, an enlarged yellow copy of the found “jellyfish” was painted on the wall next to the video.

In a similar spirit, a much older work was conceived in the context of a debate over Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. A Present to the Central

76 Vol. 17 No. 1 Pak Sheung Chuen, The Seal Government (2005) presents itself not with a (No.LOCPGIxx2-17#2): Golden Jellyfish, 2017, acrylic paint grand gesture of dramatic intervention, but on wall, exhibition view of Chris Evans and Pak Sheung as a gentle public ritual. For the first part of Chuen: Two Exhibitions, Para Site, Hong Kong. Courtesy of this work, Pak Sheung Chuen spread a yellow the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong. cloth on the street to collect the footprints of marchers during the annual July 1 civil rights march and afterward cut the cloth into small strips. For the second part of the work, he took these strips to Beijing and “symbolically delivered Hong Kong’s people’s concerns to the heart of the Chinese capital.”24 Here, Pak Sheung Chuen walked around the periphery of Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City “as if in a ritual of circumambulation”25 and tied yellow ribbons—an internationally recognized sign of hope for democracy—to various objects like tree branches, signposts, or guardrails, while his film crew followed and a friend removed the ribbons immediately afterwards, “suggesting the limits of such representative politics in the PRC.”26

Pak Sheung Chuen, A Present to the Central Government, 2005, published in Ming Pao, December 4, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

According to Tobias Berger, who curated Pak Sheung Chuen’s exhibition for the Venice Biennale: “It was a very political work with a religious aspect . . . [I]t has this calm and Zen-like attitude.”27 While Pak Sheung Chuen is a Christian, he would not object to this interpretation, even though he might consider that this aspect was an expression of his Christian beliefs. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but Christians meditate on the meaning of the Bible, we call it ‘spiritual practice.’ I still remember a cold morning at a gospel camp about ten years ago. . . . I was looking at the sea, and suddenly I felt contentment and peace. I try to capture the same feeling in my work. . . . [M]any people have told me it is Zen.”28

For him this link to spirituality has to do with how receptive and attentive we are toward our surroundings.29 Just as a religious system of faith can help to provide purpose and meaning in life, Pak Sheung Chuen, through his art, wants to make daily life more meaningful. “Art . . . becomes a

Vol. 17 No. 1 77 necessity as it slowly assumes the role of religion. It makes me ecstatic Pak Sheung Chuen, Meeting with Mr. Bus After Ten Years, 30 if I ﬁnd a new discovery through my work.” This approach to artistic 2015, published in Ming Pao, December 20, 2015. Courtesy production has not changed after the Umbrella Movement. At the same of the artist. time, a shift can be observed in his court-related works. Against the backdrop of a disturbing political situation, Pak Sheung Chuen’s process of meaning production has become more abstract, based in the imaginary, and at times perhaps even visionary. He says that he now interprets his automatic drawings as something closer to religion, like a vision, whereas in the beginning they were related more to his anxieties or emotions.31

One work Pak Sheung Chuen produced in 2015—a continuation of the Mr. Bus series—is very much related to his faith.32 Ten years after his short telephone conversation with Mr. Bus, the artist saw that the number at the bus stop had changed so he decided to create a different ending for this work. He called Mr. Bus and asked him to meet him for an extensive interview at the bus stop where this work originated. In Meeting with Mr. Bus After Ten Years (2015), Pak Sheung Chuen revealed the personal story and family history of Mr. Bus with related documentation and archive materials; this work was exhibited as part of his solo exhibition at Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, and he also created a newspaper contribution about the event for Ming Pao.

When he ﬁrst told me about Mr. Bus, Pak Sheung Chuen showed me the book Pokfulam Village: The Historical Settlement Below Victoria Peak. It presents oral histories and rare historic photographs of Pokfulam, one of few remaining indigenous villages of Hong Kong with a history stretching back almost four hundred years. Surprisingly, Mr. Bus is also depicted in one of the photographs, which Pak Sheung Chuen noticed only after he got to know him personally. There is a photograph of him as a child, standing in the doorway of his home. Pak Sheung Chuen ﬁnds it intriguing that the person he called by chance comes from a small community that is said to be very open-minded and does not think ill of strangers. For Pak Sheung

78 Vol. 17 No. 1 Chuen this explains why Mr. Bus listened to him initially and was open to meeting him, and why now they actually have become friends. It is fascinating to see how the artist managed to bring out an exceptional story through his faith in the “hidden meaning” of a strange number. Here, Pak Sheung Chuen’s belief that “something beautiful can happen through his art”33 has become a reality.

Notes

1. See Hu Fung, “From Studying to Bible to Studying Everyday Life: Hu Fung in Conversation with Pak Sheung Chuen,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 3 (May/June 2009), 71. 2. Blog entry by Pak Sheung Chuen made under the category of “HK Life Series 06,” about his work Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone, 2005, at http://pakpark.blogspot.de/2007/03/work-on-hk- life-06.html/. 3. Telephone conversation between Pak Sheung Chuen and Mr. Bus in 2005, documented at http:// www.vitamincreativespace.art/en/?work=pak-sheung-chuen-that-light/. 4. Tobias Berger, “Conversation with Curator Tobias Berger,” in Pak Sheung Chuen: Odd One In II— Invisible Travel (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations; Para Site, 2009), 222. 5. Christie Lee, “Connecting the Dots,” Baccarat (April 2012), 149. 6. Pauline J. Yao, “Hong Kong Protests,” Artforum 53, no. 4 (December 2014), 272. 7. Press release, Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions, Para Site, Hong Kong, September 23 to December 3, 2017, http://www.para-site.org.hk/en/exhibitions/chris-evans-pak- sheung-chuen-two-exhibitions/. 8. Text by Pak Sheung Chuen about the court case of a Mr. Tsang, displayed as part of the artwork Nightmare Wallpaper (No. STC2360-15/a), shown in the group exhibition The Mulberry Forest Becoming Ocean, Esther Schipper, Berlin, January 20 to February 25, 2017. 9. Ibid. 10. Text by Pak Sheung Chuen on display table at the exhibition Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions, Para Site, Hong Kong, September 23 to December 3, 2017. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Press release, Chris Evans and Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions. 15. Pak Sheung Chuen in conversation with author, Honk Kong, March 2017. 16. Jaspar Lau, “X+Y+Z (Abstract),” in Pak Sheung Chuen: Odd One In—Hong Kong Diary (Hong Kong: Artopia, 2005), 237. 17. Pak Sheung Chuen text on display table at Para Site. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Mr. Lam said: “It can happen to you, too,” in Alan Wong, Michael Forsythe, and Andrew Jacobs, “Defying China, Hong Kong Bookseller Describes Detention,” New York Times, June 16, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/hong-kong-bookseller-lam-wing-kee.html/. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Carolyn Cartier, “Power Plays: Alternative Performance Art and Urban Space in the Political Life of the City,” in Kam Louie, ed., Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 32. 25. Pak Sheung Chuen text and display table, Para Site, Hong Kong. 26. Ibid. 27. Tobias Berger, “Conversation with Curator Tobias Berger,” in Pak Sheung Chuen: Odd One In II— Invisible Travel (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations; Para Site, 2009), 221. 28. Pak Sheung Cheun, “Conversation with Curator Tobias Berger,” in Pak Sheung Chuen: Odd One In II—Invisible Travel (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations; Para Site, 2009), 221. 29. See Pak Sheung Chuen, “From Studying the Bible to Studying Everyday Life: Hu Fang in Conversation with Pak Sheung Chuen,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 3 (May/ June 2009), 76. 30. Pak Sheung Chuen, “From Studying the Bible to Studying Everyday Life: Hu Fang in Conversation with Pak Sheung Chuen,” 75. 31. Pak Sheung Chuen in conversation with author, Honk Kong, September 2017. 32. Pak Sheung Chuen in conversation with author, Honk Kong, March 2017. 33. Pak Sheung Chuen in conversation with author, Honk Kong, September 2017.

Vol. 17 No. 1 79 Helen Wong Entangled Histories: Unraveling the Work of Tsang Kin-Wah

ong Kong-based artist Tsang Kin-Wah evokes the notion of Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-specific installation, the “other” in his work EITHER/OR, part of the Vancouver Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 4 to October 15, 2017. Art Gallery’s public art program. Covering the space of two Photo: Rachel Topham, H Vancouver Art Gallery. locations—the Gallery’s Offsite location outside of the Shangri-La Hotel on Courtesy of the artist and West Georgia Street and on the Onsite Howe street facade of the Gallery— Vancouver Art Gallery. are beautiful floral patterns that gently unravel and spiral up along the walls.1 For visitors who walk past the site, Tsang Kin-Wah’s installations are reminiscent of decorative patterns that reflect a soft and welcoming tone; however, one soon realizes that phrases that reflect a spirit of intolerance such as “where is the money coming from, where are these people coming from” and “those rich newcomers” comprise the floral patterns on display.

Tsang Kin-Wah’s work addresses a longstanding debate surrounding immigration, particularly involving the Chinese-Canadian community in British Columbia. Culled from discriminatory language that appeared in newspapers and political campaigns during the 1887 anti-Chinese riots, the mid-1980s immigration inﬂux from Hong Kong, and, most recently,

80 Vol. 17 No. 1 Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-speciﬁc installation, Onsite, Vancouver Art Gallery Howe Street facade, September 22, 2017 to January 2, 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Vancouver Art Gallery.

the heated debates around foreign buyers and the local housing market,2 Tsang Kin-Wah’s installation not only draws attention to the discriminatory rhetoric that has been used in the past, but exempliﬁes how it continues to manifest itself today. EITHER/OR is part of a larger series of exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery that were scheduled to open around the time of the twentieth anniversary of the return of Hong Kong sovereignty from the United Kingdom to mainland China. “Anniversaries often give rise to unresolved tensions and provide an opportunity to look at voices that have been silenced or those of opposition to the larger narrative,” stated Diana Freundl, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She goes on to say “The handover brings up many different responses in both Hong Kong’s residents and its diasporic communities . . . to consider peripheral themes that reveal complex narratives and histories surrounding Hong Kong emigration.”3

Immigrants who arrived in British Columbia—as early as the 1850s—are the Chinese-Canadians who have withstood the longest period of legalized discrimination in the province.4 Canadians of Chinese ancestry could not vote municipally, provincially, or federally until 1947; in addition, they were barred from certain professions such as law and ﬁnance.5 In 1878, the provincial legislature passed an act that levied a $10 head tax for the right to reside in British Columbia for three months, and by 1903 this tax was increased to $500. It was not until 1947 that these discriminatory laws were gradually repealed and full political and civil rights were granted. Historian Julie Gilmour states that “in a society in which Asian immigrants had been disenfranchised, politicians had been able to defame Chinese, Japanese, and Indian communities with impunity.”6 Through Tsang Kin-Wah’s installation, these conﬂicts are brought to the fore and demonstrate how the tensions of Asian immigration have remained unresolved.

The 1997 return of Hong Kong to mainland Chinese rule marked the second period of mass migration of Hong Kong immigrants to Vancouver. Historian and writer Paul Yee explains: “Hong Kong immigrants represented a different breed because their cultural roots had been taken from China and planted

Vol. 17 No. 1 81 in the British colonial soil.”7 That is, the Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-specific installation, individuals immigrating to Vancouver Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 4 to October 15, 2017. were familiar with British colonialism, Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. and the concept of capitalism in this Courtesy of the artist and group played a strong role in the Vancouver Art Gallery. economic development of Chinese businesses in Vancouver, evident in the establishment of Concord Pacific in 1987 and the increased demographics of Chinese-Canadians in Richmond, British Columbia. Thus, Vancouver became a desirable place to live and work as the city’s increasing prosperity mirrored the growing capital of the Hong Kong immigrants it attracted. Conflict around foreign buyers in the real estate market, most of them now arriving from mainland China, are the most recent manifestation of tensions around immigration. In an interview, Tsang Kin-Wah explained that his piece begins by addressing “the social issue caused by the flooding of money from Asia and the Chinese that raised property prices in Vancouver. And expands to [address the] topic of racism which can be traced back to the nineteenth century, and, more currently, the racism intensified by Trump.”8 It is ironic, then, that the site of Tsang Kin-Wah’s Georgia Street EITHER/OR stands opposite to the new Trump Tower that opened in February 2017, a direct representation of this conflict.

The Vancouver Art Gallery, located Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-specific installation, two blocks away from Offsite, serves Onsite, Vancouver Art Gallery Howe Street facade, as a second site of contention; it has September 22, 2017 to January 2, 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham, over the years functioned as a site of Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and protest. Gatherings and demonstrations Vancouver Art Gallery. have taken place outside the gallery steps both on the Georgia Street and Robson Street sides. “The work and texts at the Vancouver Art Gallery are rather bold and aggressive in terms of visual appearance and content. This is more like a work and ‘space’ for all those different voices and views to be seen and ‘heard’, which I think fits with the nature of the site as a protest and gathering area,” Tsang Kin-Wah states.9 Thus, the site-specificity of these works strengthen EITHER/OR’s ability to critique the sociopolitical landscape of the city. The work draws upon Vancouver’s history and interaction with the increasing population of Chinese-Canadians by highlighting how discriminatory language and the political systems it represents have carried through to the present. EITHER/ OR “is the reality of Vancouver’s history. [Tsang Kin-Wah] uses archival material, real quotes, commentary from public online platforms and newspaper editorials to compose his pictorial designs. It is up to the reader to interpret the work and to contemplate it over time, but the material is certainly not fictional, this is our history, and, alarmingly, it is resurfacing in the present,” Freundl elaborates.10

82 Vol. 17 No. 1 Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-speciﬁc installation, Onsite, Vancouver Art Gallery Howe Street facade, September 22, 2017 to January 2, 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Vancouver Art Gallery.

In this way, Tsang Kin-Wah forces a mode of looking that is at once internal and external. “It is about the ways we see and perceive. Appearance can easily mislead us and make us think that we already understand or know something, however, once we spend time to get to know the inside, things could look very different. This is why we often enjoy our time in a city as tourists, but once we start to live in that city we form a rather different view. This also applies to the people we meet or are around us,” Tsang Kin-Wah explains.11 Through his astute aesthetic choices, the work subtly implicates the viewer, who becomes enveloped and linked to Vancouver’s history. Avoiding any direct confrontation through his use of juxtaposition between image and text, Tsang Kin-Wah is able to draw viewers in and engage them with a reality they otherwise might not have thought about.

Tsang Kin-Wah powerfully gives voice to communities that often go unheard. The spiralled vines of text with EITHER/OR reappropriate the discriminatory language used by the media to vilify the individuals it was attacking. Incorporating phrases such as “it’s not anti-Chinese, it’s anti-people who don’t try to fit in” or “our whole city will appear to be Asian,” it is evident that these tensions stem from a lack of acceptance of the “other,” or, perhaps instead, a lack of mutual understanding. In the texts, a fear of the unknown manifests itself as the theme of assimilation becomes a common thread throughout the work. Assimilation is embodied figuratively, with the text being assimilated into the larger seemingly decorative patterns on display. Viewers are invited to shift from admiring the formal composition from a distance to walking closer to examine the content of the texts, and, thus, at the same time, to both admire the aesthetics and reflect upon the work’s implications, creating an experience that is self-reflexive yet contentious.

These tensions do not exist solely within the Vancouver community, but are shared experiences internationally. Not a native to Vancouver, Tsang Kin- Wah related to these struggles from his life in Hong Kong: “I’ve never lived in Vancouver or other places in Canada before. I only got the ideas from articles and photos but it feels like things were more or less similar. [This didn’t relate just to] the Chinese or Asians but to other groups of people in various periods of time.”12 During the time of the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, there was an apprehension towards the future of Hong Kong causing

Vol. 17 No. 1 83 Left: Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-specific installation, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 4 to October 15, 2017. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Vancouver Art Gallery. Right: Tsang Kin-Wah, EITHER / OR, 2017, site-specific installation, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 4 to October 15, 2017. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Vancouver Art Gallery. a flux of emigration from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom. Thus, it is important to present this type of work within the context of the public sphere. Through its widened accessibility, public art has the capability to provide a platform for meaningful reflection and discussion. Historian Rosa Ho stated, “We use art and aesthetics to make our lives whole, to explain ourselves to each other, and to explore our place in the world.”13 Located across from the Trump Tower and installed on the facade of the Vancouver Art Gallery, both EITHER/OR and EITHER/OR demonstrate just that. Tsang Kin-Wah’s work stands as a constant reminder of how these tensions will persist, albeit in different forms, if we do not continue to address them. In order to understand the bigger picture, in this case the floral patterns on display, one must take the time to understand the constructs, the texts used to create the patterns. Perhaps then a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand will arise.

Notes

1. The title for the Offsite Georgia Street work is EITHER/OR and the title for the Onsite Howe Street work is EITHER/OR. 2. Vancouver Art Gallery press release for ONSITE/OFFSITE reads: “Tsang Kin-Wah critically addresses some of the , complexities surrounding immigration, cultural identity, and racism . . . using English texts to form ﬂoral and animal patterns,” https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exhibitions/ exhibit_kinwah.html/. 3. Diana Freundl in conversation with the author, August 20, 2017. 4. Kevin Grifﬁn, Vancouver’s Many Faces: Passport to the Cultures of a City (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1993), 34. 5. Ibid., 45. 6. Julie F. Gilmour, Trouble on Main Street: Mackenzie King, Reason, Race, and the 1907 Vancouver Riots (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 17. 7. Paul Yee, "Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), as quoted in Henry Tsang, Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and Chinese- Canadian Artists in Vancouver (Vancouver: The Chinese Cultural Centre, 1992), 19. 8. Tsang Kin-Wah in conversation with the author, June 24, 2017. 9. Ibid. 10. Diana Freundl in conversation with the author, August 20, 2017. 11. Interview with Tsang Kin-Wah in conversation with the author, June 24, 2017. 12. Ibid. 13. Rosa Ho, “Saltwater City Then, Wan Koh Wa Now: Another Chinese View in Vancouver,” in Henry Tsang ed., Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and Chinese-Canadian Artists in Vancouver (Vancouver: The Chinese Cultural Centre, 1992), 19.

84 Vol. 17 No. 1 Denisa Tomkova Zhu Fadong: Why Art Is Powerless to Make Social Change

Zhu Fadong, Identity Cards, Art appears rather powerless against realities.1 1998–2015, documentation of identity cards. Courtesy of —Zhu Fadong the artist.

his text explores problems of inequality and rural-urban class disparity generated by the hukou system, which was introduced in Tmainland China in the 1950s with the aim of preventing migration from rural to urban areas. The ideas presented here are based on an interview with contemporary Chinese artist Zhu Fadong about his project Identity Cards (1998–2015). In the name of progress and modernization in the 1990s, the state introduced a massive program of reconstruction of cities, as well as a pedagogical program—the wenming reform—focused on Westernization as a means of entry into the global market. To fulﬁl the goal of modernization, a disciplinary power of the state—biopower— emerged. The following questions will be addressed: What was the modernization of Chinese cities like? How was a new globalized Chinese citizen constructed? How did biopower affect the modernization process? And how is Zhu Fadong’s art project Identity Cards positioned within these issues?

Vol. 17 No. 1 85 Zhu Fadong’s authentic Identity Card, front and back. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhu Fadong’s Identity Cards was inspired by the fact that every adult in mainland China must hold an identity card (ID card), which reveals important household information. The artist produced his own identity cards to raise awareness about the fact that government-issued identity cards oblige citizens to remain in the area where they were born. Zhu Fadong has been producing these Identity Cards, which look different from the ofﬁcial cards on which they are based, and sold them for ﬁfty yuan.

The price of Zhu Fadong’s Identity Zhu Fadong, Identity Cards, 1998–2015, 13 x 9 cm, Zhu Cards is notable when compared Fadong’s personal identity card. Courtesy of the artist. to the actual price for the second generation of the ID cards introduced in 2004. The ofﬁcial ID card costs twenty yuan for a new card, ten yuan for a temporary one, and forty yuan if the previous card gets lost.2 Some citizens who are living on minimum social security allowances are not charged the fee.3 The different formal characteristics as well as the price asked by the artist for his Identity Cards suggest that Zhu Fadong treats his ID cards as art objects created to raise awareness and encourage a discourse on the issue of these cards, rather than as fake documents.

Zhu Fadong’s inspiration was frustration: “Whether you are now in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, as long as you show your ID card, you will have your registered permanent residence exposed immediately. You don’t belong to this city where you live. It’s nearly impossible to change this situation for ordinary people.”4 He adds, “My work is a response to this system of unfairness and prejudice. This is a response from me as a citizen as well as an artist. I hope the Chinese can also enjoy the freedom of migration, for it is merely a basic human right!”5

Identity issues have provided inspiration for artists worldwide—art has responded to, challenged, and contemplated artists’ personal identity, including feminist identity, gender identity, postcolonial, diasporic, and even cyborg identities. Many artists have also directly incorporated and questioned ID cards in their work. For instance, the Slovenian art group NSK responded to the political and social situation in their home country (the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s) by creating their own state without a territory—State in Time (1992)—which involved the creation of an administrative branch that would issue NSK passports. Serbian artist

86 Vol. 17 No. 1 NSK, Passports, 1992– ongoing. Courtesy of the State of NSK.

Santiago Sierra, Wall Enclosing a Space, 2003, bricks and cement, Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Studio Santiago Sierra, Madrid.

Deep European Visa Tanja Ostojić’s project Looking for a Department, component of Hybrid Workspace, 1997, Husband with EU Passport, 2000–05, documenta X, Kassel, curated by Geert Lovink. Photo: documented her personal struggle Luchezar Boyadjiev. Courtesy of Geert Lovink. to gain a passport that would allow her to live in the European Union. Czech art group Ztohoven’s Citizen K, 2009–10, involved twelve members of the group applying for, and living with, ofﬁcially issued ID cards that had digitally morphed photographs. They intended to expose the control and surveillance components of national ID cards as they exist in contemporary Europe. At documenta X in Kassel, on August 2, 1997, several media and art practitioners met for a project curated by Geert Lovink titled Hybrid Workspace, which included Deep Europe Visa Department as one of ten workshops. Every visitor who wanted to enter had to apply for a visa; the application process replicated the administrative apparatus of a real institutional application process. Similarly, in 2003, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, in his work for the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Wall Enclosing a Space (2003), allowed entry only to Spanish passport holders. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s work One Million Finnish

Vol. 17 No. 1 87 Left: Alfredo Jaar, One Million Finnish Passports, 2014, one million replicated Finnish passports, glass, installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki Finland. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.

Passports (1995/2014), commented on the then strict Finish immigration policy by printing up a million Finnish passports and displaying them behind bulletproof glass as a representation of the barriers to Finnish citizenship. In 2000, German artist Christoph Schlingensief held a week-long event in Vienna entitled Bitte Liebst Österreich in which he questioned Austrian attitudes toward immigration by putting twelve participants, introduced as asylum-seekers, in a cordoned-off shipping container complex surveilled by closed-circuit television cameras and placed next to the Vienna Opera House. Austrian audience participation was required; visitors were asked to phone in and vote out inhabitants, the two least popular of whom were ejected each day. Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña reﬂected on issues surrounding the Mexican/American border in his performance Border Brujo (1989). Sitting at an altar decorated with a kitsch collection of cultural fetish items, the artist illustrated the double edge of forced cultural occupation and mutual misunderstandings. Livia Ungur of Unger & Huang, originally from Romania, in her performance Green Card, wore her green card, which allowed her to live and work in the USA legally through the year 2011, as a necklace. Chinese artist Hung Liu also looked at cards and exclusion in her work Resident Alien (1988), in which she painted her self-portrait on an enlarged “green card” and changed her real name to Fortune Cookie.

Personal identity has become Right: Unger & Huang, Green Card, 2011, performance another important issue explored at New York Philharmonic. Courtesy of the artists. by artists in mainland China during the vast shifts in the period of modernization. In the 1990s, two performance artists, Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan, were among those whose work in general explored the body and nudity under what were challenging circumstances. As Sheldon H. Lu notes, “Today, no public platform for the artistic performance of the naked body in post-socialist China exists. Perceived as subversive and perverse, such exhibitions are held in private and nonofﬁcial spaces.”67 He argues that by using their own bodies, these two artists “question the modern procedures of the subjectiﬁcation of the individual, and contest the laws and taboos of the socialist sovereign state.”8 Here he refers to Giorgio Agamben, who states that: “It can be even said that the production of a biopolitical body is the

88 Vol. 17 No. 1 original activity of sovereign power.”9 I would argue that, in a similar way, Zhu Fadong, in his performance This Person Is for Sale (1994), employed his own body by wandering in public places, using his own body as a medium of his art to challenge the new reality of modern Chinese subjects. This performance consequently led Zhu Fadong to explore identity cards in 1998.

Right: Zhu Fadong, This Zhu Fadong—Art of Dialogue Person Is For Sale, 1994. Photo: Zhang Xeijun. Courtesy I have always considered the artist a of the artist. medium.10

To position Zhu Fadong’s work within a contemporary Chinese art discourse, one can recall the words of Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie, who questions “whether art should express some kind of intrinsic ‘meaning’ (yiyi), or whether it should focus on constructing direct ‘effects’ (jieguo).”11 By “effects” he means “a real situation created through a formal experiment, not an author’s inward intentions and situation created through a formal experiment.”12 Qiu Zhijie argues that instead of “conceptual art,” the term “experimental art” (shiyan yishu) should be applied, “where this would provoke thinking through direct encounters with art.” Thomas Berghuis sees in this idea as a parallel with Li Xianting’s essay “Art is Not Important.”13 “In this essay,” Berghuis writes, “Li Xianting seeks to reposition the ’85 New Wave Movement (which stands at the basis of discourses on the post-1989 Chinese avant-garde) ‘not as a modern art movement; but, at best, as a stage of ideological consciousness’.”14 This idea of art functioning as a relationship and dialogue instigator closely links Zhu Fadong’s work with a global, socially engaged phenomenon because of his direct interest in social problems and his aim to provoke public awareness and dialogue. To understand how Identity Cards functions aesthetically and ethically within art historical discourse, it is helpful to engage with Grant H. Kester’s Dialogical Aesthetics theory. Kester criticizes the very conservative perception of aesthetics as a form and proposes the assessment of the aesthetics of socially engaged art projects based on dialogue, where the consciousness of participants and collaborators is being transformed in some meaningful way. He believes that aesthetic experience emerges from the subject’s participation in intersubjective exchange, and is, therefore, understood as moral consciousness or new knowledge, and something that happens as an individual mental experience.15

Similarly, the aesthetics of Zhu Fadong’s Identity Cards project are meant to be constructed through public dialogue; the artist’s intention with this work was to provoke awareness of identity cards laws, which, as a citizen, he did not agree with. The core of this art project is not the art objects themselves—the identity cards produced by the artist could not be used to migrate from rural to urban areas, for example, as they are not

Vol. 17 No. 1 89 legal documents. Once again, one can make a link with Qiu Zhijie, who “concludes his critique of conceptual art by considering his own ‘care for society.’ . . . This includes making artists consider doing their work ‘in situ’ and by involving ‘cultural research’ next to ‘social investigations’ that allow them to consider social change in China.”16

The Influence of Chinese Subculture on Performance Art In 1998 Zhu Fadong moved to Hainan Island, where he stayed alone for more than a year; this had a profound influence not only on his personal life at that time, but also on his art practice. He stayed in Haikou City and slept in basement hotels that cost just two yuan per night. These hotel rooms consist of a row of beds against the wall of a large room, with only a narrow aisle separating them. If he returned to the hotel too late, he would find all of the beds taken. Sometimes he would return so late that the hotel would be locked, and he then had to spend the night wandering the streets, sleeping outdoors with others until daybreak on a large nearby concrete slab. Finding himself without a residence, some days he would wander the streets aimlessly, selling newspapers to make money, while also searching for other work.

During the 1980s and 90s Zhu Fadong, Looking for A Missing Person, 1993, hooligan (liumang) culture photograph. Courtesy of the artist. emerged as a response to modernization. Many theorists discuss hooligan culture as an influential aspect of the emergence of alternative culture, including performance art. Liumang culture manifested itself in literature,17 music, and even politics.18 In 1986, John Minford used the metaphor of a spectrum to describe China’s hooligans: “Rapist, whore, black- marketeer, unemployed youth, alienated intellectual, frustrated artist or poet—the spectrum has its dark, satanic end, its long middle band of relentless grey, and, shining at the other end, a patch of visionary light. It is an embryonic alternative culture. . . .19” Tanner M. Harold believes the non-criminal pizi variety of hooligans represented an alternative, non-official culture.20 As a part of non-official culture, pizi (mostly young men) were violating social norms. Harold explains that modernization involved “the questioning of old ways of life and, ultimately, their destruction.”21 He compares them with English youth subcultures: “While the dangerous, criminal liumang was labelled, dehumanized, and punished by the criminal justice system, the liumang style was appropriated and commercialized by authors, artists, and performers.”22 A link to studies of subculture with performance art can be

90 Vol. 17 No. 1 found here, as performance art, or xingwei yishu, “describes the deliberate provocation of a ‘behavioural’ action (xingwei) or ‘conduct’ (pinxing) realized through the practice and conditioning of art (yishu).”23 This 1990s alternative hooligan culture that was characterized by breaking up societal taboos was an influential time for Zhu Fadong. There were many people who, similarly, like Zhu Fadong, left their homes to move to Hainan Island without telling anyone. Hence, there where notices for missing persons everywhere in the streets. It was the first thing Zhu Fadong noticed when he arrived to the island. These notices appeared on telegraph poles or inside hotels, residential buildings, and office buildings, which resulted in his work Looking for a Missing Person (1993). He explains:

These notices were everywhere. In fact, I myself came to Hainan Island without notifying others and could be counted as a person to be looked for. . . . Suddenly, I thought that I should do something. It was obvious that this time no ﬂat drawing or sculpture could express my feelings. I thought of posting notices for missing persons or little ads. At that time, I didn’t mind whether this piece of work was a drawing, a sculpture or anything else. It was enough that it could express my feelings. Then I began to consider the contents of notices for missing persons. I suddenly felt that those being looked for at Hainan Island or in the rest of the world by their relatives and friends were, in fact, not lost to themselves. They were only looking for themselves everywhere in a conscious or subconscious way, just as what I was doing. Therefore, I decided to look for myself. What I didn’t expect was that I could not stop this process of seeking. 24

The Biopolitics of Chinese Modern Life The social order strategies introduced by the government in the modernization of Beijing during the 1990s and the new pedagogical program presented by the Chinese state was shaped around the discourse on civilization—the previously mentioned wenming. The signiﬁcance of the wenming concept can be understood, as Ann Anagonst proposes, by the terms “modernity,” “Westernization,” or “civilization.” Its aim was to “refashion the Chinese masses into a modern citizenry.”25

I would like to draw a parallel here to Judith Butler’s argument that the term “civilization” works against the conception of the human, as there is no single deﬁning feature of the human. Butler’s analysis can help us to understand what effects modernization had in China on some groups of citizens. She claims that: “The term and the practice of ‘civilization’ work to produce the human differentially by offering a culturally limited norm for what the human is supposed to be.” Based on this differentiation, then one is to be decided to be treated humanely or not.26

One of such groups affected by wenming reform was made up of the illegal residents who had in preceding years travelled to the capital in the hope of ﬁnding work. Ann Anagost wrote that “The wenming discourse and the diverse campaigns it engendered also played a part in constructing the

Vol. 17 No. 1 91 Chinese peasant as the inappropriate ‘other’ of modernity, unﬁt for the project of modernization, and from whom urban elites wish to distinguish themselves.”27

Hence, we can argue that the state employed disciplinary procedures to create efﬁcient, well behaved, and productive individuals, which recalls Michel Foucualt’s biopolitics—regulatory controls and interventions focused on the species body imbued with the mechanics of life.28 Biopower, the way in which biopolitics is put to work in society, emerged as a part of capitalist development and resulted in the state gaining control over its citizens within economic processes. Hence, in China, various techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations were introduced. These also led to segregation and social hierarchization of the population, which affected, for example, the movement of people, as Zhu Fadong’s work demonstrates. The objectives of the “civilization” or “Westernization” program, were in ensuring the “social control and ideological domination through production of docile political subjects.”29

One of the examples where the subjugation of bodies was performed was in restricting the right of movement, as Zhu Fadong explains:

To me, [the] ID card means that you have no choice. It’s a fact that no one can choose, where to be born or [to] whom to be born. It is a passive thing. But when one becomes an adult, one should have the right to move. What inﬂuences or dominates such a choice can only be one’s personal will and adaptability to the resettled area, not other factors such as ID, registered permanent residence, etc. That is, the citizens in China should have the most fundamental human right endowed by the United Nations Human Rights Conventions—everyone should enjoy the freedom to migrate.30

Why was the hukou system introduced and how does it inﬂuence the everyday lives of people in China? During the Mao era, class hierarchy was recreated and imposed by the state in socialist economy and ideology. To maintain social stability, internal passports called hukou booklets listed one’s household name and type, issuing agency and date, handling person’s signature, seal, registration date, and data on each family member: name, name of householder or relationship to householder, former name, gender, birth location, ethnic group, origin location, birth date, other address in the city, identity card number, height, blood type, educational level, marital status, employment location, position, when and from where moved into the city, and when and from where moved to the address. Historically, during the Mao era, it was almost impossible for rural people to migrate into urban areas; this changed after 1984, when the state encouraged migration into urban areas with the aim of supplying labour for the growing demand of (trans)national capital. Paradoxically, it also strengthened other discriminative policies against rural migrants achieved through the hukou system. For instance, access to state-sponsored medical care and pensions is not given to rural migrants in cities; similarly, they have experienced unfair treatment by the police.

92 Vol. 17 No. 1 This control of migration in China led Peter Alexander and Anita Chan to explore the existence of an apartheid pass system in China and to compare it with South Africa’s apartheid. They propose that: “the essence of both systems lies in the use of passes to control he inﬂux of rural migrants into urban areas, thereby buttressing cheap labour economies.31” However, in 2013 Jason Young argued that: “Where once it blocked migration outright, hukou can no longer prevent Chinese mobility, but it does still control and limit access to social services delivered at the local government level. Local hukou rights grant the holder eligibility to education, healthcare, and some forms of employment in urban China, and, to land contracts and housing in rural China.” 32

NSK, Become a Citizen, poster. Major currents in identity Courtesy of the State of NSK. discourse are concerned not just with people holding a particular identity, but also with those who are denied that right. There are individuals who have an absence of identity that is the result of “the effacement or denial of individuality, of ‘face’—that object of ethical duty or moral care.”33 This is aligned with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of homo sacer, someone excluded, outside the law.34 This problem has become even more apparent during the current migration crisis, when over millions of people found themselves crossing borders without appropriate papers. This is exemplified in the previously mentioned 1992 State in Time project by the Slovenian group NSK, which was meant as a conceptual challenge to the idea of the nationalism and state border restrictions. However, paradoxically, the group in their over-identification with the nation-state formation they had aimed to critique ended up creating an administrative branch of NSK State in Time and the issuing of passports resembling the official state apparatus. By 2012, there had been a notable demand for the NSK passports from outside of Europe. These applicants, particularly from Nigeria, originally mistakenly saw NSK passports as a way into the European Union. Regardless of the motivation of the applications from Nigeria, using NSK passports for crossing borders might be considered a criminal act, which led NSK to put up the following statement on their website: “The NSK State is not an officially recognized country internationally, and the NSK State passport is not a legally valid document. Holding an NSK Passport does not grant citizenship to the Republic of Slovenia or of any other country of the world. You cannot legally cross any international border using an NSK passport!”35 However, this attempted use of NSK passports to cross borders is not entirely new. Inke Arns claims that a group of Bosnians managed to cross international borders in the late 1990s with NSK passports.36 This was at a time when Bosnia was not internationally recognized, and therefore its citizens had no papers to allow them to travel abroad. NSK’s artistic

Vol. 17 No. 1 93 challenge to state structures, therefore, took on a new life by subverting ID Cards in a new way.

The NSK project demonstrates one’s dependence on the identity given by the state. Except in exceptional circumstances where the nation state is absent or in crisis, one cannot decide or choose to live without national identity because the system simply does not allow it. Similarly, Chinese migrant workers from rural areas ﬁnd themselves without appropriate documents and have been illegally migrating with hope for a better life in the city. Hence, like refugees, they are basically excluded from the territory they inhabit, even within their own home country.

Since 1998, hundreds of people have applied for the Identity Cards made by Zhu Fadong, including those who are involved in the art world such as artists, collectors, gallerists, critics, and curators, as well as those who encountered his art by accident.

These people are from mainland Zhu Fadong, Identity Cards, 1998–2015, identity card China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and application forms. Courtesy of all around the world. From the the artist very beginning, Zhu Fadong has documented his project, and he told me, “I have kept all the original documents related to the ‘identity card’, including the proposal, application forms, dates of receiving the applications and making the cards.”37 In 2015, in the interview for this article, Zhu Fadong explained how his project came to its end:

It is not because the situation now has changed or been improved. On the contrary. Art appears rather powerless against the realities. It is also hard for my artistic concept to be known by more audiences. Art is limited to a circle or a small range, just like the Internet in China. Is there an Internet in China? The answer is yes. But needless to say, everyone knows the real situation. But, of course, it’s better to have access to than be completely blocked from the Internet.38

He concluded that:

I have clearly realized that under the current system, Identity Cards can be only a small-range work, and, moreover, people seem to be less concerned about the messages my work reveals. They have become accustomed to it. A very serious issue for me has become a game to many people. When I realized that my work was starting to deviate from (or had already deviated from) my original purpose, it was time to end it. 39

94 Vol. 17 No. 1 Wu Hung explained that in the 2000s, Chinese art “changed and installation and other unorthodox forms lost their initial novelty and distinct political implications.”40 Maybe this is also an important aspect of the conclusion of Zhu Fadong’s Identity Cards project. It became commercialized and depoliticized, and its political message was lost. Art dealers and curators are interested in owning his Identity Cards, but why Zhu Fadong was making the cards is not conveyed. Could it perhaps be sadly concluded that this was another art project with “good intentions,”41 as Azimi Negar puts it, but unsuccessful in terms of social change? In an article on socially engaged art, she asks: “Are artists really able to levitate above the ugly stuff of politics and effect change?”42 Carol Yinghua Lu claims: “In China, the art community’s silence when it comes to political issues is one of the most distinctive features of artistic production and discourse today.”43 She argues that the political silence in Chinese art is the result of the government’s growing support of the domestic art market and its promotion of Chinese art exhibitions abroad. She concludes that “the Chinese art community has no vision for the future, but is only concerned with its own self-interest and self-preservation. As a result, the contemporary art world in China has not broken free from the government’s narrow political vision, and has instead fallen prey to self-isolation and arrogance.”44 To again use Zhu Fadong’s own words: “Art appears rather powerless against realities.”45 Nevertheless, the experimental nature and social engagement of Zhu Fadong’s work in political and social issues are undoubtedly important to consider. Despite the biopolitics that have arisen since the modernization period, there is also a counter power wielded by a youthful generation of artists, such as Zhu Fadong, who have questioned the state regulatory system. The dialogical aspect of Identity Cards is successful, and the way it puts the system of surveillance into question is important. It thus positions itself within contemporary socially and politically engaged art discourse.

I would like to acknowledge help of and thank to James D. Poborsa (Modern Chinese History at the University of Toronto) for his insightful comments and advice on this text. I would also like to thank Anran Tu (University of Alberta) and Zhou Tengjiao, the assistant of Zhu Fadong, for their translations of the interview from Chinese to English.

Notes

1. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 2. Cheryl L. Brown, “China’s Second-generation Identity Card: Merging Culture, Industry and Technology,” in J. Colin Bennett and David Lyon, Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identiﬁcation in Global Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 59. 3. Brown, “China’s Second-generation National Identity Card: Merging Culture, Industry and Technology,” 58. 4. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 5. Ibid. 6. Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 71. 7. Ibid., 71. 8. Ibid., 72.

Vol. 17 No. 1 95 9. Giorgio Agamben, in Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics, 72. 10. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 11. Quoted in Thomas L. Berghuis, “Experimental Art, Performance and ‘Publicness’: Repositioning the Critical Mass of Contemporary Chinese Art,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, nos. 2 and 3 (2012), 146. 12. Ibid., 147. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Grant H. Kester, The One and The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2011); Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Stanford: University of California Press, 2004). 16. Ibid. 17. Analyzing the literary works of Wang Shuo, Geremie Barmé describes how “Increasing numbers of liumang-type characters have appeared in Chinese literature since the late 1970s”; see Geremie Barmé, “Wang Shuo and Liumang (`Hooligan’) Culture,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs no. 28 (July 1992), 23–64, 40. 18. “In early 1989, the Economic Weekly, a Beijing paper run by Wang Juntao, Chen Ziming and others, published an article which commented on the liumang aspect of politics”; ibid., 30. 19. John Minford, “Picking up the Pieces,” Far Eastern Economic Review, August 8, 1985, quoted in Geremie Barmé, “Wang Shuo,” 28–9, quoted in Harold M. Tanner, “The Offense of Hooliganism and The Moral Dimension of China’s Pursuit of Modernity, 1979–1996,”Twentieth-Century China 26, no. 1 (November 2000), 1–40, 25. 20. Ibid. 21. Tanner, “The Offense of Hooliganism and The Moral Dimension of China’s Pursuit of Modernity, 1979–1996,” 1–40, 25. 22. Ibid., 1–40, 28. 23. Berghuis, “Experimental Art, Performance and ‘Publicness’: Repositioning the Critical Mass of Contemporary Chinese Art,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, nos. 2, 3 (2012), 138. 24. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 25. Ann Anagost, National Past-times: Narratives, Representations and Power in Modern China. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 75–80, cited in Anee-Marie Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (Routledge: New York, 1997), 176–77. 26. Judith Butler, “Indefinite Detention,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso: London. New York, 2004), 91. 27. Anagost, National Past-times, quoted in Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing, 178. 28. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, quoted in Paul Rainbow, ed., The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 262. 29. Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing, 176. 30. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 31. Peter Alexander and Anita Chan, “Does China Have an Apartheid Pass System?,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 4 (July 2004), 609. 32. Jason Young, China’s Hukou System: Markets, Migrants and Institutional Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1. 33. Zygmunt Bauman, Identity; Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. (Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2004), 39. 34. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998), 66. 35. NSK website, Passport “Important Message,” https://passport.nsk.si/en/important_message/. 36. Inke Arns, “The Nigerian Connection: On NSK Passports as Escape and Entry Vehicles,” e-flux journal 34, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-nigerian-connection-on-nsk-passports-as-escape- and-entry-vehicles/. 37. The whole project was exhibited several times; some cards and application forms were auctioned online through zhaoonline.com. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 38. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. The "real situation" refers to the fact that the Internet is censored in China. 39. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015. 40. Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History (1970s–2000s) (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 364. 41. Azimi Negar, “Good Intentions,” Frieze 13 (March 1, 2011), http://www.frieze.com/article/good- intentions/. 42. Ibid. 43. Carol Yinghua Lu,”From the Anxiety of Participation to the Process of De-Internationalization,” e-flux journal 70 (February 2016), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/from-the-anxiety-of-participation-to-the- process-of-de-internationalization/. 44. Ibid. 45. Zhu Fadong, e-mail conversation with the author, May 2015.

96 Vol. 17 No. 1 Chan Shing Kwan Public Displays of Afﬂiction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m 2

I had discovered that my body could become my language, it was the closest thing to who I was and it allowed me to become known to others…. It allowed me to express some very deep emotions coming from different places. — Zhang Huan1

Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, magine your repugnance performance, Beijing. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, upon witnessing myriad flies Shanghai. Ilanding on the skin of an artist’s unclothed body; imagine the persistent anguish of being confined in a public lavatory on a sweltering midsummer day, and attempt to enunciate the sounds of aversion as the stench of excrement permeates the air. Such combinations of gruesome physical affliction and extreme psychological endurance, which were all realized in a single action titled 12m2 (1994), epitomize the early abject art performances orchestrated by Chinese artist Zhang Huan. First in China and later in the global art arena, Zhang Huan daringly carried out intense art performances between 1993 and 2005 into which he unleashed personal, social, and political distress by pushing his body and psyche to the limits of tolerance. As Zhang Huan’s statement above highlights, the artist’s seemingly over-the-top performance works were in fact genuinely intended as a means to convey a thought or a feeling through a series of staged gestures and decisive actions. Although the number of viewers present at his early acts of fierce abjection was tiny, the artist quickly established his reputation through the photographs and video documentation of his performances that circulated in transnational exhibitions during the 1990s and 2000s.

Between 1993 and 1998, Zhang Huan presented the majority of his performance works in a now demolished bohemian community called Beijing East Village, which was located on the outskirts of the capital city of China. During that time span, Zhang Huan and other like-minded artists such as Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming staged a diverse range of controversial performances. These performers lived like the penniless artists of New

Vol. 17 No. 1 97 York’s East Village in the 1980s, such Zhang Huan, Seeds of Hamburg, 2002, performance, that their bodies became their major Hamburg Kunstverein. Courtesy of Zhang Huan medium of artistic expression. Studio, Shanghai. Whether in real time or through documentation, the unconventional displays of Zhang Huan’s own body provided the context of his artistic practices. His international career was launched when he immigrated to New York in 1998, and between then and 2005 his performances became increasingly choreographed and included more participants, with the artist performing acts at various locations around the world including Seattle (1999), Santiago (2001), Hamburg (2002), Sydney (2004), and Rome (2005).2 After Zhang Huan abandoned performance art in 2005, the artist founded an art studio in Shanghai, where his focus has been to embrace the creation of tangible artworks such as sculpture, installation, and painting. Although he ended his performance phase, Zhang Huan’s sensational acts have never left the limelight. Photographs, and at times documentary videos, of his performances continue to be disseminated through the Internet, art galleries, and auction houses. In 2014, Family Tree (2000), a series of nine photographs that document a gradual obscuring of Zhang Huan’s face with inked Chinese idioms until it is completely blackened, was sold at Christie’s for USD $642,591, nearly triple its estimate. Recently, his performance pieces like Family Tree and To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), together with works by other contemporary Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei and Zhang Xiaogang, were featured in Hong Kong’s M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art in 2016.

Zhang Huan, Family Tree, 2000, nine chromogenic prints, 56.5 x 43.8 cm each. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai.

98 Vol. 17 No. 1 Zhang Huan, To Add One Writers and art critics have made Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 1995, performance, various attempts to interpret Zhang Beijing. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. Huan’s art performances. Notably, many of them analyze Zhang Huan’s acts based on the contexts of cultural identity or so-called “Chineseness.” For instance, art historian Paul Gladston remarks that Zhang Huan and other artists in Beijing East Village developed and recorded performance-based practices, which “focused on questions of identity.”3 In 2013, Agnes Hsu directed a four-part documentary series titled “Chineseness,” which was broadcast on Discovery Channel and aimed to examine the idea of “a renaissance in Chinese identity through the lives and work of four prominent contemporary Chinese artists,” Zhang Huan among them.4 Zhang Huan himself has seemed disappointed by this hyper- attention to the cultural identity or “Chineseness” of artists from China, which he ﬁnds symptomatic of the state of contemporary Chinese art within the larger art world: “When Westerners discuss contemporary art in China, they talk about ‘China’ ﬁrst and ‘art’ later.”5 Indeed, many critics and writers have been inclined to comment on his work primarily as the work of a Chinese artist; thus, only limited literature exists about Zhang Huan’s performances beyond the discussion of cultural identity. In order to better understand Zhang’s performances, this essay intends to explore these works from a theoretical and historical perspective.

At first glance, the title of this essay, “Public Displays of Affliction,” appears to be an innocuous pun, a tongue-in-cheek play on words. However, this title also references two phenomena of the artist’s performance-based practices. First, the term “public displays” refers to the ways Zhang Huan has displayed his body in his art performances. Second, the word “affliction” indicates the agony, affliction, and abjection he endured for his performance acts. Here I focus on Zhang Huan’s 1994 performance 12m2, and I examine the roles that affliction and abjection play in his performances as well as their secondary representations. By arguing that his performances are also legible particularly through the theoretical trope of abjection, I am suggesting that “cultural identity” and “Chineseness” are not adequate analytical tools through which to achieve a more comprehensive reflection of Zhang Huan’s art performances, as well as works by other contemporary Chinese artists.

Enacted inside a public toilet in Beijing East Village, 12m2 is likely Zhang Huan’s most famous (or infamous) work of art. It was documented both by video and photographs. In a widely reproduced monochrome photograph of 12m2, Zhang Huan juxtaposes his lean young figure and austere features with the unsanitary setting of a public lavatory. A slick substance that attracts swarming flies covers every inch of the artist’s upper-body, including his clean-shaven head, stoic face, and resolute mouth. The attractant is later revealed to be a sticky amalgam of honey and fish sauce. Writing on the wall reads “Please pay attention to the public hygiene” (请讲究公共卫生), in sharp contrast to the artist, who is engulfed by buzzing flies—common vectors of disease. The photo-shoot was arranged by Ai Weiwei, who was at times stopping by Beijing East Village, and the photographer Rong Rong.6

Vol. 17 No. 1 99 According to Rong Rong, Zhang Huan Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, performance, Beijing. Photo: remained unflinching through the entire Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. performance. Even when flies began to land on his nude body, he still sat as motionless as a sculpture.7 Approximately one hour later, Zhang Huan stood up and sauntered out of the stall.8 The artist walked toward a pond behind the toilet and went straight into the cold water. A rarely reproduced series of photographs demonstrate the culmination of his performance; as the water gets deeper and deeper, Zhang Huan’s naked body slowly disappears, leaving only ripples on the surface of the pond. 12m2 was no doubt an agonizing and abhorrent experience, one that suggests abjection. In a literal sense, the term abjection means the state of experiencing something unpleasant, debasing, or traumatic to the maximum degree. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva examines the visceral terror and allure of abjection. She views abjection as an ill-defined feeling of repulsion:

Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, performance, Beijing. Photo: Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai.

There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. . . . Unﬂaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. 9

In simpler terms, abjection is a bleak state of mind, a primal sense of detestation and aversion. In this regard, Zhang Huan’s exercise in 12m2 can be considered an abject art performance, as the artist underwent immense physical and psychological distress purely for the sake of his work.

In this performance, he also shared the abject experience of revulsion with his audience. While Zhang Huan was the only one to be covered in a liquid “ﬂy

100 Vol. 17 No. 1 attractant,” his viewers, including Rong Rong and Ai Weiwei, also endured the repugnant setting of the toilet as well as the swarming ﬂies. As Rong Rong recalled in a letter to his sister, he too suffered from this horrendous experience and went through an unsettling emotional state of repulsion:

11:30 am yesterday. . . . In a few minutes, swarms of ﬂies started covering his body. I had put on a mouth cover that I had prepared the day before. You know how stinky that public toilet is. On top of that, it was more than 38 degrees centigrade yesterday. I don’t know how I managed to take pictures in those conditions; all I can remember was the noise of the ﬂies and the sound of the shutter lens. . . . Holding my camera, I felt that I couldn’t breathe, it felt like the end of life.10

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), dedicating but a few sections of his renowned Critique of Judgment (1790) to the ugly in contrast to his extensive investigation of the beautiful, praised the critical function of art to transform real-life ugliness into something that is visually appealing: “Where fine art evidences its superiority is in the beautiful descriptions it gives of things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and the like, can be very beautifully described, may even be represented in pictures.”11 However, Kant emphasized that there was “one kind of ugliness alone that cannot be transformed into aesthetic delight and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust.” 12 Clearly, Kant did not oppose disgust on ethical grounds; instead, he argued that our interest in that which sickens us could never be aesthetically pleasing. 12m2, in which both the artist and the audience bore the disturbance of flies, the foul smell of the environment as well as the terrible heat of summer, operates in accordance with Kant’s claim about disgust as something that can never be beautiful. Similarly, one of Kant’s contemporaries, German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), argued that disgust as a repellent sensation breaks through the oppositional dichotomy of art and nature, real and imaginary, and, hence, unsettles the condition for the possibility of aestheticizing disgust.13 In 12m2, the abject is still abject and the repulsive is still repulsive, even though Zhang Huan’s performance of such abjection has been elevated to the level of fine art.

Because of the abject and at times repulsive nature of Zhang Huan’s performances, it is understandable that many people remain critical of his work. Attacks on these performances often include statements that call into question the mental state of the artist, derisively assigning him epithets such as “madman” or “sick-minded.”14 Some even questioned whether his works were sincere. Art critic Ellen Pearlman labeled 12m2 and his other performances “shock art.”15 The term “shock art” has a negative connotation, as it is generally adopted to categorize works of art that generate “shock for shock’s sake,” contrary to works that are genuine in intention. “Shock for shock’s sake” plays on the French credo “l’art pour l’art,” or “art for art’s sake” in English, which expresses a belief that the intrinsic value of art can and should be removed from having any particular meaning. However, as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) polemically argued, “art for art’s sake” does not exist:

Vol. 17 No. 1 101 L’art pour l’art—the struggle against purpose in art is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means, “the devil take morality!” But even this enmity betrays the overwhelming force of prejudice. Once you take away from art the purpose of preaching morality and improving humanity, the result is still a far cry from art as completely purposeless, aimless, senseless. 16

Far from being “shock art,” which produces no meaning and exists only to create shock, Zhang Huan was able to unleash personal, social, and political distress, which, in turn, also functioned as symbolic critiques by executing abject art performances. In fact, the art performances at Beijing East Village followed the growing attention by experimental artists who swapped “art for art’s sake” for a new type of embodied experience.

Zhang Huan has stated that many of his performances were carried out to directly reflect upon his personal experiences at Beijing East Village. The village, called Danshanzhuang, and populated mainly by migrant workers, was informally renamed by the group of artists who were residing in the community at that time, including Zhang Huan.17 In an interview with RoseLee Goldberg, Zhang Huan mentioned that he became aware of New York’s East Village scene by reading two books, New Wave of Modern Art (1987), compiled and edited by Yang Chihung, and Conversations with the Masters (1993), edited by Chen Tong and Yang Xiaoyan.18 After perusing these two art historical accounts, Zhang Huan decided to distance himself from traditional art practices such as painting and began to look for a new form of artistic expression; he eventually settled upon performance art. As Zhang Huan recalled, the name Beijing East Village was inspired by the East Village in Manhattan to express the artists’ respect and admiration for New York’s historical avant-garde.19 In Art in China, Craig Clunas considers Beijing East Village a “self-consciously bohemian and marginal artistic enclave.”20 From Paris’s Pigalle in the early twentieth century to New York’s Brooklyn in the early twenty-first century, bohemia has occurred over and over again in industrial cities across the world, holding within itself a radical spirit that engenders its own cycle of occurrence, innovation, and disappearance.21 The establishment of a bohemian community depends on the formation of a marginal artistic community that declares itself a replacement to a former avant-garde and is reborn as an urban arts district in which the spaces and lives of artists are displayed and consumed and where, eventually, its demise can be perpetually mourned. Just as New York’s East Village replaced the gentrified Greenwich Village, Beijing’s East Village was subsequently superseded by the now widely renowned (and also gentrified) 798 Art District.

Today, visitors to Beijing can no longer ﬁnd Beijing East Village, which has simply vanished from the cityscape due to rapid urban development.22 The once-thriving artistic community “village” now exists only in photographs, as well as in textual accounts in which the “villagers” have documented their experiences there. However, Beijing’s East Village used to have a strong inﬂuence on its artists-in-residence; at that time, Beijing East Village was

102 Vol. 17 No. 1 a village in the true sense of the word. A 1993 photograph by Rong Rong shows a slightly crooked, hand painted signboard that reads “北京東村 Beijing East Village” situated on a mound of trash against a background of unadorned village houses. According to Wu Hung, closer inspection of the photograph reveals posters on the wall advertising clandestine folk remedy for venereal diseases.23 Karen Smith, an art critic and writer based in Beijing, described the environment of Beijing East Village in the early 1990s as thus: “Waste accumulates by the side of the small ponds. This pollutes the water, generating noxious fumes in the summer. Raw sewage ﬂows directly into the water. Slothful, threadbare dogs roam the narrow lanes between houses.”24 In an interview, Zhang Huan recalled how he derived the idea of 12m2 from his quotidian life in Beijing East Village:

12m2 is the area of the public toilets that are used every day in China. One day after lunch, I went to the toilet as usual. The sun had just come out following a rainstorm, but there was no place to stand in the toilet for it was ﬂooded. I had to bike to another public toilet in the village. It was relatively cleaner. When I stepped in, thousands of ﬂies swarmed toward me and I still had to squat down. This was my life, and no one could experience it but me. I was determined to make artworks about my life and suddenly came up with the idea of 12m2.25

Beijing East Village itself was an abject environment. Kristeva refers to the abject subject as a “deject who places [oneself], separates [oneself], situates [oneself], and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.”26 Without a sense of orientation, the abject glides through what one might call “a space of anxiety” where the boundaries between the internal and external world are constantly intimidated by the invasion of the abject and where no true objects of desire can exist.27 The horrible living conditions experienced by Zhang Huan catalyzed his extreme endurance-based performances and formed the backdrop for these acts, as the visceral distress of thousands of ﬂies swarming around the artist motivated him to execute this work.

Zhang Huan, Original Sound, 1995, performance, Beijing. Photo: Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai.

Vol. 17 No. 1 103 The sickening elements of 12m2—flies, honey, fish sauce, sweat, filth—as manifestations of abject materiality bring to mind another performance orchestrated by Zhang Huan, Original Sound (1995). In this piece, he lay under a highway overpass and emptied a jar full of earthworms into his mouth and let them squirm inside his face. A critical purpose of abject art is its function as symbolic criticism of the human condition, and, as Theodor Adorno pointed out, in the “penchant of modern art for the nauseating and physically revolting . . . the critical material motif shows through: In its autonomous forms art decries domination.”28 In their microcosm of ongoing social conflict and struggle, both 12m2 and Original Sound can be viewed as art performances that were enacted to demonstrate the artist’s discontent with the poor living conditions of himself and others.

2 Just as in 12m , insects and worms, Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990, glass, steel, both of which in Chinese are referred silicone rubber, painted MDF, Insect-O-Cutor, cow’s head, to as chong 蟲, were once again blood, flies, maggots, metal dishes, cotton wool, sugar and adopted as part of his performance water, 2075 x 4000 x 2150 mm. in Original Sound, in which the artist had even more intimate contact with such creatures. The chong in both of these performances call to mind Damien Hirst’s controversial installation A Thousand Years (1990), which features a severed cow’s head and thousands of flies contained in a glass box. The box itself functions as a self-contained ecosystem: Maggots hatch inside the container, mature into flies, and feed on the cow’s head. In Hirst’s conception, flies symbolize people, and the closed system mirrors our world with its ecosystem fully exposed. The enclosed toilet in Zhang Huan’s 12m2, similar to Hirst’s self-contained life- cycle, harbours flies that feed on the honey and fish sauce, with Zhang Huan himself providing the nourishing and abject sustenance in this environment. Also similar to Hirst’s installation, Zhang Huan reflects upon the meaning of life; in an interview he describes his experience in 12m2:

I just felt that everything began to vanish from my sight. Life seemed to be leaving me far in the distance. I had no concrete thought except that my mind was completely empty. I could only feel my body, more and more flies landing and crawling over my nose, eyes, ears, forehead, every part of me. I could feel them eating the liquid on my body. Some were stuck but did not stop eating. I could even tell that they were more interested in the fish liquid than the honey because there were more flies on the left part of my body, where that liquid was. The very concept of life was then for me the simple experience of the body.29

According to Kristeva, the abject “is Zhang Huan, Original Sound, 30 1995, performance, Beijing. death infecting life,” and both the Courtesy of Zhang Huan fish sauce, a condiment made from Studio, Shanghai. dead fish, and the disturbing flies, which were hatched on decaying organic matter, are representations of death and decay. Unlike Hirst, who intended to mirror the larger

104 Vol. 17 No. 1 world with his glass-box installation, Zhang Huan offered a direct reflection on people’s lives in Beijing East Village. Like the flies, which were stuck in the honey and fish sauce, Zhang Huan, as well as other Beijing East Village residents, were trapped in this unpleasant environment, as this place was an abject but relatively safe haven for these artists to carry out their pieces.

Why did Zhang Huan choose to incorporate chong in his performances? The artist has never specifically pointed out the significance of using insects in his acts. Chong are, of course, paradigmatic of the abject. Traditionally, insects are feared organisms that are often unwelcomed. It is also important to note the meanings associated with chong in post-Cultural Revolution China. During the Cultural Revolution, the ruling party compared capitalists and members of the bourgeoisie to insects. In the first rally of the Cultural Revolution in Tian’anmen in 1966, Lin Biao, by then a political frontrunner, powerfully proclaimed that “we have to destroy old thoughts, old culture, old customs, old habits of the exploiting class . . . We have to destroy the worms that destroy our people and remove the millstone around our legs.”31 In Chinese female writer Zong Pu’s post-Cultural Revolution Kafkaesque novella Who Am I? (1979), the protagonist, a scientist, returns to China after studying abroad, only to be labeled a counter-revolutionary traitor during the Cultural Revolution; eventually, she is metamorphosed into an insect that is loathed by others. In this regard, Zhang Huan may also have used chong in his performances in order to reflect upon the preposterous era of the Cultural Revolution, where people could all of a sudden become as despicable as an insect due to their background or social class.

While abjection can be a feeling of repulsion, Kristeva states that it is not the lack of “cleanliness or health that invokes this feeling, but the disregard for social order.”32 Kristeva considers abjection as a process that interferes with the normal coordination and functioning of social order because it openly refuses to comply with social boundaries, conditions, or rules. She ascribes such a process to the social expectation that we rigorously police ourselves to prevent evidence of private bodily functions such as vomit, blood, or excrement from becoming socially acknowledgeable or visible.33 As Kristeva commented: “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”34 A lavatory is a designated space where people defecate, and human excretion, as with all things that are considered low, base, and unpleasant, should be carefully avoided and kept hidden from our vision. In the midst of performing 12m2, according to the artist, some villagers accidentally walked in during the course of the performance and looked surprised and embarrassed when they saw Zhang Huan carrying out his performance. They were shocked because they unexpectedly encountered him and were forced to confront abject manifestations that they normally might avoid; facing the abject is by nature a traumatic experience since it attacks the social order.35 In this sense, 12m2 maximized the power of performance art as a creative practice by obliterating the distance between artist and audience.

What are the implications for bodies that are irrevocably abject, as suggested by Zhang Huan’s performances? Offering a rather cynical perspective, in his article “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” art historian Hal Foster proclaimed that tendencies of abjection were ubiquitous in postmodernist artistic

Vol. 17 No. 1 105 currents during the 1980s and 90s. According to Foster, artistic representation traditionally serves a pacifying function as an “image/screen” —a function meant to mediate or negotiate between viewers and their devastating experiences of real the world.36 But in much postmodernist art this traditional mission is replaced by a wish to shock, achieved by “puncturing” the protective representational “image/screen.” Therefore, the “abject” becomes a legitimate, self-reﬂexive, and self-contained “strategy of perversion.” As Foster polemically declared, “the shit movement contemporary art may intend a symbolic reversal of the ﬁrst step of civilization.”37

In a “project statement” for his performance, Zhang Huan connects this experience to a general “relationship between people and their environment” in China, where a large number of public lavatories in similar conditions continue to exist in cities and towns, concealed in dark alleys in the most densely populated areas and in the shadow of glamorous skyscrapers.38 His act thereby acknowledged a neglected subset of the population in China, including the artist himself, who were in a vulnerable position relative to the nation’s rapid growth, and who were yet to benefit from economic development and were still living in a substandard environment. The cathartic effects of tragedy can apply to the artist as well. As Zhang Huan explained in an interview: “[F]or me, after a performance, it is like a big stone is lifted from my heart. Every time it is like this and every time it is always different. . . . I need the feeling, this feeling close to my heart.”39 The concluding action in 12m2, in which the artist entered naked into the pond adjacent to the public toilet, cleaning the sticky liquid from his body and driving all the flies away, is by its very nature a purification. Here, he not only removed the physical contaminants, but also performed a mental purification. Abjection is only one of the many perspectives that can be employed to read Zhang Huan’s excruciating performances. By presenting the hitherto under-acknowledged relationship between the concept of abjection and the performance acts of Zhang Huan, this essay proposes contemporary Chinese performance art can be understood beyond the theoretical trope of cultural identity or “Chineseness.” Rather than discussing the artists’ creative efforts and the experimental aspects of the work, many writers on Chinese art devote their energies on revealing how contemporary Chinese artists are adept at evoking the specificities of “Chineseness,” as if the value of both artists and their work is simply a by-product of national/ cultural identity. To conclude, I will quote art critic Hon Hanru on the current state of scholarship on contemporary Chinese art:

For some Western writers, it is unacceptable to express the “Oriental mind” with the “Occidental” language of avant- garde art. The value and signiﬁcance of a Chinese artist can only be legitimized through their use of “ink-wash” or “calligraphy.” . . . Of course, its result is the discrimination of the “other.” 40

Studies on Euro-American performance artists like Chris Burden and Marina Abramović are not always about “Americaness” or European cultural identity. We must ask, then, why contemporary Chinese artists are so often limited to a discussion of “Chineseness.”

106 Vol. 17 No. 1 Notes

1. RoseLee Goldberg, “RoseLee Goldberg in Conversation with Zhang Huan,” in Zhang Huan, eds. Yilma Dziewior, RoseLee Goldberg, and Robert Storr (London and New York: Phaidon, 2009), 19. 2. Melissa Chiu, “Altered Art: Zhang Huan,” in Zhang Huan: Altered States, ed. Melissa Chiu (New York and Milan: Charta, 2007), 13. 3. Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 204. 4. “Zhang Huan,” episode 2, Chineseness, dir. Agnes Hsu (Discovery Channel, 2013). 5. Amélia Mariani, “Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha: Ten Years Later,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 4 (August, 2012), 56. 6. Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998 (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2003), 70. All of the images in this book were taken by Rong Rong, many of them of different artists’ performances. Rong Rong considers his photographs documenting these performances as works of art. 7. Ibid., 70. 8. Ibid. 9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 10. Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, 70. 11. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 173. 12. Ibid., 135. Emphasis added. 13. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137–38. 14. Mariani, “Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha,” 59. 15. Ellen Pearlman, “Zhang Huan Altered States,” Brooklyn Rail, October 3, 2007, https://brooklynrail. org/2007/10/artseen/zhang-huan-altered-states/. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer [1888], trans. Duncan Large (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20. 17. Zhang Huan, “A Piece of Nothing,” in Zhang Huan: Altered States, ed. Melissa Chiu (New York and Milan: Charta, 2007), 57. 18. Goldberg, “RoseLee Goldberg in Conversation with Zhang Huan,” 16. 19. Zhang, “A Piece of Nothing,” 57. 20. Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 231. 21. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 10–12. 22. Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, 160. 23. Ibid., 18. 24. Karen Smith, “Rong Rong: Records of the Observer,” unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, 18. 25. Zhang Huan, “A Piece of Nothing,” 46. 26. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 49. 29. Zhijian Qian, “Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in China,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1999), 65–66. 30. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 31. Julia Kwong, Cultural Revolution in China’s Schools: May 1966–April 1969 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), 35. Emphasis added. 32. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 33. Ibid., 98. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Ibid., 44. 36. Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (1996), 118. 37. In his article, Foster uses Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre to demonstrate that her pieces have moved across from early work of traditional “image/screen” to subsequent pieces that are “punctuated by close-ups of simulated damaged and/or dead body parts and sexual and/or excretory body parts respective.” To Foster, Sherman’s later work is an epitome of the “shit movement”—a term coined by Foster to describe the fascination with abjection. See Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” 110–118. 38. Ma Liuming, “Notes on Four Topics,” in Heipi Shu (Black Cover Book), eds. Ai Weiwei, Zeng Xiaojun, and Xu Bing (Beijing: self-published, 1994), 35. Quoted in Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993– 1998, 13. 39. Mary Jane Jacob, “In the Space of Art,” in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, eds. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 243. 40. Hon Hanru, “Entropy, Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism,” in Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, ed. Wu Hung (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 365.

Vol. 17 No. 1 107 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Lau, Jasper Qiu Xiaofei Yee, Paul 艾未未劉建華仇曉飛余兆昌 Cai Guo-Qiang Lee, Mark Qiu Zhijie Yu Youhan 蔡國強李國煌邱志傑余友涵 Chan Shing Kwan Leung Chun-ying Rong Rong Zhang Huan 陳承焜梁振英榮榮張洹 Chan, Anita Li Liang Shao Dazhen Zhang Jianling 陳佩華李梁邵大箴張健伶 Ding Yi Li Liao Song Dong Zhang Liang 丁乙李燎宋冬張梁 Fan Di'an Li Xianting Sun Xun Zhang Qing 范迪安栗憲庭孫遜張晴 Gao Mingyan Li Xu Sun Yuan Zhang Xiaogang 高銘研李旭孫原張曉剛 Guo Xi Li Zhenhua Tek, Budi Zhao Xing 郭熙李振華余德耀趙幸 Ho, Oscar Hing Kay Lin Fengmian Tsang Kin-Wah Zheng Guogu 何慶基林風眠曾建華鄭國谷 Ho, Rosa Liu Haisu Tu, Anran Zheng Shengtian 何偉卉劉海粟涂安然鄭勝天

Hou Hanru Liu Heung Shing Wang Jianwei Zhou Tengjiao 侯瀚如劉香成汪建偉周騰蛟 Hou Yimin Liu Yiqian Wang Wei Zhou Tiehai 侯一民劉益謙王薇周鐵海 Hsu, Agnes Lu Chunsheng Wong, Helen Zhu Fadong 徐心眉陸春生黃煜真朱發東 Hu Jiebao Lu Xun Wu Dayu Zhu Ming 胡介報魯迅吳大羽朱銘 Hu Yun Lu, Carol Yinghua Wu Hung Zhu Tong 胡昀盧迎華巫鴻朱彤 Huang Yongping Lu, Sheldon H. Wu Zuoren Zong Pu 黄永砯魯曉鵬吳作人宗璞 Huang Zhan Ma Liuming Xu Bing 黃專馬六明徐冰 Jia Aili Pak Sheung Chuen Xu Jiang 賈藹力白雙全許江 Jiang Zemin Peng Yu Xu Zhen 江澤民彭禹徐震

Jin Shangyi Qiao Zhibing Yang Fudong 靳尚誼喬志兵楊福東 Kung, Samuel Qiu Anxiong Yangjiang Group 龔明光邱黯雄陽江組

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