Robin Peckham Hauntings: Rereading the Goddess of Democracy

t seems appropriate to begin a discussion of the Goddess of Democracy statue erected in Tian’anmen Square in the spring of 1989 with a meditation on discontinuity. The sculpture Iwas, above all, an event: a temporal image that both marked the unceasing passage of time and resisted its flow. The Goddess of Democracy stood as a marker delimiting a particular point in the chronology of contemporary Chinese art; arguably, it was the only work perched directly upon a turning point of the political and cultural avant-garde in China. The sculpture represents a rupture that it helped create. It was a confrontation, but also a plea; a spectacular performance, but also an expression of resignation. This paradoxically dual nature defines the historical moment at which it was positioned. But, if the Goddess of Democracy stood between the before and the after, it also stood between the inside and the outside. It was a public expression of private desire, a message from “the people” (or, more strictly, its creators, then temporarily resident in the centre of Beijing) to an outside audience. The construction, duration, and eventual destruction of the sculpture made up an extremely textual affair narrated in a voice aware of its own state of continual construction, a voice aware of its own impending failure, and a voice aware of the obviously cumbersome but ephemeral structure underlying it. We begin in the Beijing of 1985, not because contemporary art re-emerged from some imagined hiatus in that year, but because of what this iconic date has come to represent in terms of recent art history. In the fall of 2007, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) staged its first exhibition: a retrospective of the ’85 New Wave Movement. The exhibition raised several important themes concerning the spirit of this movement, among them its filmic aspect, emerging notions of archival memory and trauma, and the relationship between art and activism. UCCA hosted a series of screenings of the works of fifth-generation filmmakers, highlighting their role in the artistic movement that has become known as the filmic moment in China’s avant-garde discourse. The ’85 New Wave Movement brought to the fore of artistic circles the recent graduates of 1982, the first class to pass through the state arts institutions since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Not least among these young cultural producers were auteur filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, whose work enjoyed unprecedented influence over colleagues working in other media. Thematically and stylistically, the installation, video art, performance, photography, and painting of the mid 1980s drew heavily on the nostalgia, cultural nationalism, memory, and spiritual humanism that has come to signify Chinese films of the 1980s, allowing for a shared discourse that brought a fascinating degree of dialogue between artists of varying media and consuming publics. This element of the 1985 movements foreshadows the role of televisual media in the construction of Tian’anmen in 1989 as both political event and media spectacle in ways that cannot be ignored, especially with respect to the Goddess of Democracy as both icon and index of the memory and hope of the protesters.

Besides these screenings, the UCCA exhibition also coincided with the publication of a series of documents related to the ’85 New Wave Movement, a self-referential curatorial move that calls to mind the 1985 emphasis on public discourse and temporal communication via the example of the archive. One obvious instance of this trend is presented by the four serial publications that became the primary lines of communication within the arts community: The Trend of Art Thought

33 and Fine Arts in China, and, to a lesser extent, Fine Arts and Jiangsu Previous page: Goddess of Democracy recreated at the Pictorial. The first two began publication in 1985 and were shut down University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1989; the latter two co