Yishu 26 Final.Pdf

Home , He Chengyao, Ni Kuang, Performance art in China, Qin Ming, Sui Jianguo, Yang Zhichao

:      may 8 May 2008 | Volume 7, Number 3

Inside

Artist Features: Sui Jianguo, Zhan Wang, Ye Yongqing

Guggenheim Museum’s Asia Art Council Symposium: Part 1 A Home Conversation at the Beijing Pavilion Some Perspectives on Performance Art

Review of Cai Guo-Qiang’s I Want to Believe

US$12.00 NT$350.00

VOLUME 7, NUMBER 3, MAY 2008

CONTENTS

6 Editor’s Note 29 8 Contributors

Artist Features

10 A Secret Anti-modernist: Sui Jianguo and His Retirement Project Chang Tsong-zung

22 World-making and Mirror Reflection: Zhan Wang’s Art in Time and Space, Between Worry and Wandering Kao Chienhui

29 Nonexistent Reality: A Discussion between Li Xianting and Ye Yongqing

56 Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council Symposium

41 Part 1: What is the Mission of Asian Art Curators in the Age of Globalization?

Some Perspectives on China Now

56 The Gelatin Age: Contemporary Chinese Art’s New Power Zhang Qing

70 The Return of the Individual: A Home Conversation at the Beijing Pavilion 86 Some Perspectives on Performance Art

78 Male Body Fatigue Lesley Sanderson

86 Majong 2007 at PERFORMA07: Interview with He Yunchang Rachel Lois Clapham

90 Neatly Arranged Freedom, Present Absences, Dislocated Contexts, and Signs of Our Times: Some Readings of Dai Guangyu’s Art Maya Kóvskaya 90 Reviews

99 Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe Jonathan Goodman

106 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Ye Yongqing, Bird, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/Beijing. Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien   Ken Lum One third of the content in Yishu 26 is generated from the spoken word rather than the written  Keith Wallace word. Few publications offer readers the   Zheng Shengtian opportunity to enter the worlds of symposia,   Julie Grundvig communal conversations, or personal interviews, Kate Steinmann an important component of Yishu’s mandate since editorial assistant Chunyee Li its inception in 2002. Within this context, one is  manager Larisa Broyde reading, but one is also listening.   Joyce Lin web site  Chunyee Li Among the spoken words, we are pleased to advisory  publish three of the panel discussions from the Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Guggenheim Museum Asian Art Council’s inaugural Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum meeting in New York, which brought together many John Clark, University of Sydney celebrated writers, curators, and theorists. Part 1, Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation “What is the Mission of Asian Art Curators in the Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Age of Globalization?” appears in this issue. In the Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China July and September issues we will publish part 2, Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation “Asian Art in Context: A Nation-based, Inter-Asia, Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh or International Paradigm?” and part 3, “Exhibiting Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Katie Hill, University of Westminster Asian Art—Alternative Models and Non-Western Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Paradigms.” These discussions represent a move Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian by the Guggenheim Museum to more aggressively Sebastian Lopez, Institute of International Visual Arts include modern and contemporary Asian art in its Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Cultural District, Saadiyat Island program and to delve into issues concerning Asian Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University art that are of prime importance now. Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Other conversations in this issue take place in Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar quite different circumstances. Vitamin Creative Space, based in Guangzhou, is also occupying an  Art & Collection Group Ltd. apartment in Beijing where its carries out various    Leap Creative Group activities including informal conversations among artists, curators, writers, and publishers.   Raymond Mah Art Director Jeremy Lee In addition to the one published here, we will be following up on their future conversations. From webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei another segment of the Chinese art community,  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei artists Li Xianting and Ye Yongqing talk about the  - evolution of Ye’s painting from the early 1980s to Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in the present. In our feature on performance art Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are first day of January, in China, Rachel Lois Clapham and He Yunchang March, May, July, September, and November. discuss his recent performance in New York City. To subscribe please go to www.yishujournal.com or call And on the subject of performance, we also have 1.604.649.8187. a text by Lesley Sanderson exploring the issue of Subscription rates: one year: US $60; two years: US $110. men, the body, and endurance, as well as one by For airmail delivery please add US $18 per year for Asia; Maya Kovskaya on Dai Guangyu. US $24 for all other regions.

Yishu 26 also has extensive texts on well-known All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: artists Sui Jianguo and Zhan Wang, as well as Yishu Office essays about two important exhibitions—one 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC featuring artists born in the 1980s and one Canada V6B 4N8 reviewing the survey of Cai Guo-Qiang’s work at Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Distributors: Yishu will again have a booth at Art Basel, so if U.S.A. you are attending, please stop by and say hello. Journals Department, University of Hawai’i Press [email protected] Canada Keith Wallace Disticor Magazine Distribution Services www.disticor.com Australia Selectair Distribution Services www.selectair.com.au YISHU EDITIONS Advertising inquiries may be also sent to: Now available. A limited edition print of Art & Collection Ltd. a project by Xu Bing from his MoMA/NYC 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 exhibition Automatic Update, June 27- Phone: (886)2.2560.2220; Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 September 10, 2007. E-mail: [email protected]

Book from the Ground, 2007, digital print, www.yishujournal.com 29.7 X 35.6 cm, produced by Xu Bing Studio, New York. Edition Size: 199. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. For more information please see www.yishujournal.com We thank Mr. Milton Wong, and Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone Technologies Corp., for their generous support.

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版‧第7卷第3期‧2008年5月1日出版

6 編者手記典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日 8 作者小傳社長：簡秀枝總策劃：鄭勝天創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）人物聚焦主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 10 一位秘密的反現代主義者：隋建國和副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 他的「退休計劃」史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 張頌仁編輯助理：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 22 造境與鏡照：在時空憂與游的展望行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 高千惠廣告：林素珍

29 明鏡亦非臺 — 葉帥與老栗對話錄顧問：王嘉驥栗憲庭、葉永青安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 學術研究范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 41 纽约古根漢美術館亞洲藝術委員會洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 研討會第一部分：全球化時代亞洲侯瀚如藝術策展人的任務徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 今日話题倪再沁高名潞 56 果凍時代：當代藝術的新生力量費大爲張晴楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 70 返身個人性∕北京亭‧家裏談 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 曹斐、储雲、Doryun Chong、胡昉、劉鼎、 Katie Hill 劉韡、阚萱、華睿士（Keith Wallace）， Charles Merewether 姚嘉善（Pauline J. Yao）、張巍 Apinan Poshyananda

出版：典藏雜誌社行為藝術台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 78 男體疲憊傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 Lesley Sanderson 電子信箱：[email protected]

86 何雲昌訪談編輯部： Yishu Office Rachel Lois Clapham 410-650 West Georgia St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 4N8 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 90 巧設的自由、現時的缺位、語境的錯置及傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 當代的符號：對戴光郁藝術的一點解讀電子信箱: [email protected] Maya Kovskaya 訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。

展評設計： Leap Creative Group 印刷：中原造像股份有限公司 99 蔡國强：我想要相信 Jonathan Goodman 網址： www.yishujournal.com 管理：典藏雜誌社

106 中英人名對照國際刊號: 1683-3082

本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月一日出版。售價每本12美元。自2008年起訂閲一年60美元，兩年110美元。航空郵資亞洲一年加18美元。其他地區一年加 24美元。

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Contributors

Arjun Appadurai serves as Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences. He was formerly William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University. He is also the founder and now President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai, India.

Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature, Harvard University, is a leading intellectual of postcolonial studies whose influential publications on the subject have helped shape postcolonial discourse. Bhabha received his B.A. from Bombay University and his M.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford University. He is the editor Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990) and The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994). Forthcoming publications include A Measure of Dwelling, a theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism from Harvard University Press, and The Right to Narrate, from Columbia University Press. He is also Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London.

Chang Tsong-zung has played an important role in promoting contemporary Chinese art since the late 1980s. He has curated numerous exhibitions including China New Art, Post-89 (1993), and Magic at Street Level for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2001). He is currently Director of Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong.

Rachel Lois Clapham has an M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, London. She is a curator, editor, and writer with Writing From Live Art (www. writingfromliveart. co.uk), a Live Art UK initiative. She has worked in several artists’ collectives, private galleries, and public museums, and her writing has been published online as well as in Dance Theatre Journal, AN Magazine, Realtime and Total Theatre Magazine. Her curatorial interest is in visual art that embodies performative, time-based, or participatory elements.

Fan Di’an, a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, is a professor of art history who has held the posts of President Assistant and Vice-President of the Academy. In December 2005, he was appointed Director of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC). He is also the Deputy Chair of the Theoretical Research Committee at the China Artists Association. A specialist in twentieth century Chinese art and a leading expert on contemporary art criticism and curatorial practice, Fan received the Louise T. Blouin Foundation Award in 2005. His recent exhibitions, Italian Art in the twentieth Century and Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation, have reached a broad audience and generated great interest and discussion within China.

Jonathan Goodman studied literature at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer specializing in contemporary Chinese art. He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design, focusing on art criticism and contemporary culture.

Doug Hall was director of the Queensland Art Gallery from 1987 to 2007. He has served on a range of state and federal cultural organizations as Chairman of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, member of the Australia Council, and, until recently, member of the Australia International Cultural Council (Department of Foreign Affairs). Under his directorship, the Queensland Art Gallery expanded its international focus and developed a strong engagement with Asia, especially through his initiative the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. In June 2001 he was made a member of the Order of Australia, and in 2006 he was made a Chevalier dans l‘Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Republic of France.

Hou Hanru, director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, San Francisco Art Institute, was curator of the 10th Istanbul Biennial, 2007, and the Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007. He has curated many exhibitions and important events such as the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, 2004–06, the Venice Biennale, 2003, the Gwangju Biennial, 2002, the Shanghai Biennial, 2000, and Cities on the Move, 1997–2000.

Kao Chienhui, a Chicago-based art critic, received her M.A. in Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. She is a visiting scholar at Montclair State University, New Jersey, a guest associate professor in the graduate school at Tunghai University, and was guest curator for the Taipei Fine Art Museum’s Taiwan Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale.

Maya Kóvskaya, a Beijing-based art critic and curator, has curated numerous exhibitions, including China Under Construction II, for the Fotofest Photography Biennial, and China On The Road (Brussels, 2008). Her writing has appeared in languages including English, Chinese, and Japanese in numerous art catalogues, academic volumes, and magazines, including Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Flash Art, Art Post, Art iT, and Eyemazing: International Contemporary Photography Magazine.

Li Xianting is a renowned art critic, curator, and one of the earliest advocates of Chinese avant- garde art. He organized the pivotal Stars exhibition in 1979 and coined the terms “Cynical Realism” and “Political Pop,” which later became the dominant schools of Chinese avant-garde art. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1978 and was the editor of Fine Art Magazine until 1983. From 1985 to 1989, he was the editor of China Fine Art Newspaper, and he has remained active as an independent critic and curator.

Victoria Lu moved to the United States in the early 1970s and received her B.A. and M.A. from California State University. She began writing art criticism in the mid-1970s and later became the Director/Curator of Stage One Gallery in southern California in 1978. She returned to Taiwan, helping the government to establish policies regarding public art and the promotion of art education to the general public. She is currently a professor at the Fashion and Media Design Graduate School of Shih-Chien University in Taipei and newly appointed Director of the Moon River Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., is an influential scholar and the first senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum. Fluent in Japanese, she publishes widely and lectures frequently on Asian art in Europe, North America, and East Asia. Her exhibition Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky was the first survey of postwar Japanese art ever presented in Japan or the U.S., and its contribution toward establishing modern Asian art as an urgent area of academic, curatorial, and collecting activity is widely acknowledged and respected. Other ground breaking exhibitions that she has conceived and curated include the large-scale retrospective Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, which opened in February at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Pan Gongkai is a highly respected theorist in Chinese art history and an influential ink painter. Before assuming the presidency of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) in 2001, he was President of the China Academy of Fine Arts (Hangzhou) from 1996. Pan Gongkai has been awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. As an innovator of Chinese traditional painting, Pan has had many solo exhibitions in galleries and museums, internationally and nationally. His major publications include History of Chinese Painting and An Analytical Study of Pan Tianshou’s Painting Techniques. His most recent undertaking is redefining modernity and modernization within Chinese art. He has organized four symposiums concerning this topic in four different cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Ningbo.

Lesley Sanderson, a Sheffield-based artist, is also Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, England. Together with Neil Conroy, she has exhibited in Cruel/Loving Bodies (Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong), Strangers to Ourselves (London and Maidstone, U.K.), EAST International, (Norwich, UK), Out of Nowhere (Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, U.K.), and Here We Are (PM Gallery & House, London). In November 2007, she was invited to present a paper concerning issues within current art practices and strategies at the Vital Bodies International Conference, which was organized in conjunction with the Vital 07 festival (Manchester, England).

Andrew Solomon, a writer and cultural critic, studied at Yale University and then at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he is currently completing a Ph.D. in psychology. Mr. He is an internationally acclaimed author and regular contributor to The New Yorker, Artforum, and the New York Times Magazine, where he has written on contemporary art in China, Russia, South Africa, and Central Asia. His most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001), won eleven national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is currently writing a book, to be published in 2008, titled A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Traumatic Children. In addition to his writing, Mr. Solomon serves on the boards of various national committees and funds. He is a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Zhang Qing serves as Deputy Director of the Shanghai Art Museum, Director of the Shanghai Biennale Office, and Artistic Director of the 7th Shanghai Biennale 2008. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the China Academy of Art. Since 1989 he has been a regular contributor to numerous leading Chinese journals including Jiangsu Pictorial, Art Monthly, Dushu, Avant-Garde Today and Shanghai Culture.

A Secret Anti-modernist: Sui Jianguo and His Retirement Project

Chang Tsong-zung

Sui Jianguo, Speeding Up—140 kph, 2007, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

culptor Sui Jianguo’s latest exhibition, held in March 2007 in Beijing, presents a video installation titled Speeding Up. A large set of spinning mechanical arms charging around San axis at breakneck speed—140 km an hour, to be exact—forces the audience towards the walls of the exhibition hall where twelve equally spaced videos show synchronized documentary films of a train passing by at regular intervals. The exhilaration of speed as the arms spin around in a circle, essentially going nowhere, shocks the visitor and injects a feeling of adrenalin in the hall. The film was shot at a village near Beijing where test runs for Chinese trains are made in a very large circular loop, which completely encircles the village. When a test run is on, twelve gates crossing the tracks to the village are synchronized to shut and open at regular intervals to allow traffic through. Speed driven by mechanical power, an iconic symbol of the industrial age, is represented in this installation as a blind power lost in its own might. As a laboratory experiment, the only purpose speed serves is to measure time. But Sui Jianguo reminds us that speed is more than a measuring rod; it actively enforces a regularity of time by delivering the train at appointed intervals at the evenly distributed gates.

Currently, the artist is also continuing work on two long-term projects—projects unto death, to put it in macabre terms. For the project Shape of Time, which commenced on December 25, 2006, Sui Jianguo has been dipping a wire, twice daily, into a tin of enamel paint. As the paint dries the new coatings from the next day add a thin new skin to the original drop, adding two and a half millimetres each week to its diameter. Slowly the drop grows, from drop to pellet, from pellet to

10 Sui Jianguo, Speeding Up—140 kph, 2007, twelve-screen video installation. Courtesy of the artist. ball. Eventually, in twenty years’ time, Sui Jianguo explains, it will grow to such a size that he will need to perform the dip with a crane—assuming, of course, he lives that long. The enamel ball, or cannon, will represent the artist’s cumulative labour from 2007 until his last day on earth and will become a testament to his industry.

The other long-term project, Untitled, was first conceived in 1992, but Sui has only recently been given the opportunity to realize it. The project has its roots in 1989, when Sui began work on a series of stone sculptures involving breakage and mending. One of these works is a standing plinth broken into many sections and mended with metal pins that work along the same principle as the stapler—a technique traditionally used in China to mend broken ceramic bowls. The artist proposes to erect one such column each year until his death, with the stipulation that the collection be kept together indefinitely. The collection will then become a testament and monument to his life. Unlike other monumental sculptures of the Communist era, this large closed-ended work is not a vision of the future being given a physical shape by the monument, but rather a work that starts with the painful consciousness of mortality, marking the passage of time, and is rooted in the metaphor of mending a broken wholeness.

To appreciate these unusual projects, especially coming from a representative of official art education (Sui Jianguo is currently the head of the Central Art Academy’s sculpture department), we have to go back to the artist’s beginnings. In 1972, at the age of sixteen, Sui Jianguo was assigned to work in a factory in his native Shandong province. Coming from a family of intellectuals, Sui’s status during the Cultural Revolution was a lowly one, and getting assigned to a factory was the best he could hope for. In 1973 he sustained an arm injury in a workers’ sports’ match and had several weeks off to recover. Idling in the neighbourhood, he spent time at a local park where retired people passed the day; some came with birds, some played chess, others played music or told stories, and the better educated among them had very interesting stories to offer. Passing the days, Sui Jianguo came to realise that he was having a glimpse of his own future. And it also occurred to him that being able to bring interesting experiences to his neighbours in retirement would be his ultimate achievement. Returning to work at the factory, he began a personal search for a cultural mission and eventually sought out the traditional ink painter Liu Donglun and asked to be his student. Master Liu advised Sui that the factory’s propaganda department offered good prospects for a factory worker and aspiring artist, but working there

11 Sui Jianguo, Shape of Time, 2006 until the artist’s death, paint. Courtesy of the artist. would involve training in Social Realist technique; training in classical landscape technique would do nothing for his career. But Sui Jianguo was not seeking to advance himself in the socialist factory hierarchy. He wanted to learn something that would sustain him personally throughout his life. Master Liu accepted this and Sui Jianguo started to copy old master paintings from poorly printed black-and-white illustrations. Beginning with the works of the Song dynasty masters, he slowly worked his way through Chinese painting history by copying pictures in sequence, executing hundreds of ink paintings over several years. In 1977 Sui Jianguo joined an evening art course for factory workers at the local Workers’ Cultural Palace and began training in the Western academic style: charcoal drawings, life studies, plaster cast sculptures, etc. During this time he discovered a passion for sculpture that has informed everything he has done since.

Achieving official success as an artist must seem an ironic twist of fate to one such as Sui Jianguo, who had difficulty finding a comfortable position within the structure of state ideology. Having awakened early to the precariousness of happiness and the insignificance of worldly success in the face of life’s brevity, Sui Jianguo does not take to the grand visions that have continued to mesmerise China even after the brutal lesson of Mao’s revolution. The future, hijacked by ideology and held for ransom by the myth of modernity, becomes an ever unattainable moving target of happiness. The promise of the revolution has changed over the years, turning into other visions of the future that remain committed to rejecting China’s past. Sui Jianguo’s recent projects address directly the issue of the passage of time, using the artist’s own mortality as a fulcrum to rein in the hollowness of ideological promises. With the enforced regularity of time, as in Speediing Up, even the absurdity of speed is made graspable. The train, champion of the Industrial Revolution, is condemned to impotent acceleration, just as the failed Communist revolution has turned into a senseless emblem of prowess, recalling not its original ideals but only its singularity as a blind force in history. Sui Jianguo tries to reclaim a sense of purpose in life by taking a personal position on the future. His art projects are not symbols pointing towards a hallowed vision, but markers checking off time past. Neither Shape of Time nor the Untitled column project has a predetermined

12 final form, yet, without loss of meaning, each is prepared to terminate as fate will have it. By planning projects unto the ultimate end, Sui Jianguo puts a damper upon the hubris of a glorified future.

Over a course of three decades, Sui Jianguo’s career has covered the complete terrain of Chinese modern sculptural art, and his works constitute a continuous enquiry into how this art may be used to respond to current issues and still remain significant as personal statements. Like other academic sculptors, Sui has participated in numerous projects such as public monuments, facades, and commemorative statues. The tension between public ideological statement and private expression, the language of sculpture and its uses in both artistic and mundane spheres, are issues that constantly have challenged the artist and informed his art. He works within the official tradition of monumentality and historical vision to dispute the tradition’s own premises, turning sculpture into an artistic practice for reflecting on China’s modernity as a whole. Themes about permanence and idealism, icons of power and their complicit role in cultural conversion, and radical modernity versus the finite body as the site of experience all gradually grew out of the artist’s long engagement with the art of sculpture.

Going back to Sui’s early career, after several years of dedicated study at the Workers’ Cultural Palace in Shandong, in 1980 the artist was accepted to the Shandong Art Academy, where he remained for four years. This period of his training coincided with the formative years of the so-called ’85 New Wave Movement, in which the liberation of the individual and formalist explorations were the main concerns of artists. Sui Jianguo had already developed into a talented sculptor sensitive to the human form; at the same time he was also interested in diverse materials including ceramics, which led to stylised studies of historic and mythical forms such as the Three- Legged Bird, a symbolic creature of the sun. In 1986 he entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing as a graduate student and became increasingly interested in formalist issues. One of his earliest works that reflected an interest in the element of time and the sculptural process is a

13 square cube of plaster with one corner eroded by a constant stream of flowing water Untitled( , 1986). He also began to look below the surface of the sculptured form to seek the inner core of the figure, by literally opening up the “shell” of sculpted busts (Unborn Bust Portraits, 1988–89) or making broad cuts into raw blocks (Bust Portraits, 1989). In the face of the student movement and the siege of Tian’anmen Square in the summer of 1989, Sui began to infuse his Sui Jianguo, Three-Legged Bird, 1985, ceramic, 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist. figurative works with a tragic heroic strength, and the Untitled bust with plastered bandages (1989) was made before he went on one protest march not knowing if he would return safely. These works are powerful not just because of their expressiveness; they are powerful perhaps also because they bring forth an underlying concern with destiny that has always haunted the artist. Through a radical act of rebellion the artist both acknowledges the power of the status quo and claims his own position within the structure of its evolving ideology.

After the military crackdown at Tian’anmen in 1989, Sui Jianguo’s art changed, as did the art of many of his generation. What went quietly missing was his work in figurative portraiture.

Sui Jianguo, Untitled, 1987, plaster of Paris, 40 x 30 x 30 cm. Instead, the artist turned to seemingly formalist Courtesy of the artist. studies under the Structure series (1990–92). In one of the series’ first pieces, he opens up the interior of the sculptural mass and links the split halves with chains. This work can be seen as the prelude to Sui’s powerful series of broken stones mended with metal staples or nets. The artist clearly is creating a metaphor of healing and restoration, while images of bondage and manipulation also are called forth from the mending process. A stone in an iron cage was the first attempt to show a repressed psyche (Untitled, 1990). In another work, the iron bars contracted and actually became implanted into the “flesh” of the stone (Earthly Form, 1991). The descriptiveness of Sui’s earlier works in portraiture is here replaced by a more general metaphorical depiction of the psychological state. Manipulation and control are enacted upon the sculptural substance directly, turning the viewer into an accomplice of the artist. In 1996 Sui Jianguo created Execution (1996), in which hundreds of nails were hammered into a thick rubber skin, bringing to visceral sensation the silent terror of punishment and its presence in mundane circumstances. In turning away from the figurative in his depictions of repression and manipulation, the artist brings to light the general condition of existence: it is no longer a matter of identifying the oppressor and the oppressed, but rather of recognition of a predicament common to both that we must come to terms with. The anonymous collectivist power of the Earthly Form boulders is less of an indictment than a statement, a reminder of what it is that gives us “form” in the first place. Issues about “form” reflect on the question of “identity,” which Sui Jianguo directly addresses when he deals with the physique of the modern Chinese body in relation to cultural politics. Cultural politics is also an issue that is highlighted by non-figurative

14 art: does not every recognizable sculpted form carry a certain ideological disposition? Is not the question of identity, whether national or cultural, embedded in culturally endorsed forms?

In 1997, Sui Jianguo again returned to working with figurative forms. In April of that year he modelled the first work in his Legacy Mantle series out of foam rubber (a sculpture in the shape of a stiff jacket without the person, cast in aluminium, 1997). The artist has said that he wanted to find an icon to symbolize Chinese modern history, and the jacket (mistakenly nicknamed “Mao jacket”) designed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) seemed to him most suitable. The surface corrosion of this piece suggests excavated damage and the passage of time. Later, he modified all Sui Jianguo, Bust Portrait, 1989, wood, 40 cm. subsequent pieces of this series to show the icon Courtesy of the artist. in pristine condition, perhaps to suggest the untarnished currency of the icon. Following this work came the Study of Clothes’ Veins series in 1998, which puts the “Zhongshan jacket” on famous classical Western nude statues. Chinese modernity may without equivocation be claimed to have exerted the most brutal and thorough destruction of cultural and political heritage in Chinese history, and the radical shift in values and paradigms are primarily based on an interpretation and imitation of the modern West. As an icon of power the Zhongshan jacket represents both the faceless parental figure who asserts modern values as well as the apparel that physically conditions the modern Chinese. In the context of the artist’s previous bandaged bust, Untitled (1989), and the Earthly Force boulders (1992), the Legacy Mantle (first piece made in 1997) can be read as a later development of the image of restriction, although here the implication is more cultural and political than psychological.

The Zhongshan jacket as designed by Sun Yat- Sui Jianguo, Untitled Bust With Plastered Bandages, plaster of Paris, 40 x 25 x 25 cm. Courtesy of the artist. sen, the “Father of China’s Republic,” was based on a modern (nineteenth-century) Japanese outfit copied from Prussia. Inspired by the West twice removed, the design still contains symbolic values intended by Dr. Sun: the five buttons symbolise the five civil powers, the four pockets the four cardinal virtues and so on. The traditional Chinese jacket, on the other hand, values a comfortable fit, emphasising a relaxed drop of the shoulders and

15 Sui Jianguo, Structure Series, 1991, granite and steel, Sui Jianguo, Untitled, 1990, stone and iron, 40 x 40 x 40 cm. 83 x 60 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Courtesy of the artist.

Sui Jianguo, Earthly Force, 1992–94, stone and welded steel, Sui Jianguo, Execution, 1996, rubber and iron nails, 60 x 70 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 150 x 500 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist. subtle withdrawal of the chest. This new jacket, essentially Western, is made with lifted shoulders and a thrusting stance expected of the soldier: it is designed for standing to attention rather than for carefree movement of the limbs. After Mao’s revolution it is impossible not to associate this jacket with the Communist leader, or with the form of Communism and ideological institution that carry forward the legacy of reform. Sui Jianguo’s sculptural icon monumentalises the symbolic jacket, showing its staying power even as it is left without a carnal human occupant. The “Father of the Nation’s” legacy has been passed on to the “Great Leader,” finally to become the outfit of the absent father who is yet ubiquitous and cannot be removed.

What exactly is the “modern Chinese body” introduced by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries? Social realism and the Chinese art academies give us clear and vivid illustrations: the ideal Chinese modern body is a European Renaissance body with a Chinese face. As a teacher in an official art academy, Sui Jianguo constantly has to refer his students to examples of famous Western sculpture, which implicitly constitute ideal models of human physical beauty. As a foundation course in art, students are taught to analyse and draw the human body in the style of Western classical academic art, which inevitably refers back to the Greco-Roman tradition and the Renaissance. In Study of Clothes’ Veins (1998), Sui Jianguo reproduces the plaster cast models used in class, intentionally retaining the effects of the study pieces but adding to the nude bodies the Zhongshan jacket of modern China. The work becomes a statement about the modern Chinese body as a colonised body two levels removed from its origin, first through the adoption of the European jacket and second through its re-colonization as the ideal Western body.

16 Sui Jianguo, Legacy Mantle, 1997, painted fibreglass, 320 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

By going to the root of the premise of Social Realism via the human body, Sui Jianguo exposes the myth of Chinese modernity. As a reference for the imagination, the artistic monument gives shape to ideology and becomes the object of desire, the physical shape of a perfect future and the symbol of authority. While the revolutionary monument gives substance to a concept, Sui Jianguo finds that even as the monument is dismantled it continues to haunt us and continues to constitute the source of meaning for China. In 2003 and 2004 he made several works that refer directly to monuments of Mao Zedong. Study of Base Plinth is simply a six-metre-tall plinth with an iron-runged ladder on the side; it is the kind of plinth large public statues stand on, but there is no statue here. As the viewer climbs to the top there lay the remains of a pair of shoes, made to look as though a previous marble statue has been rudely removed. Another work, titled Study of Clothes’ Veins: Right Arm, is simply the stretched arm broken off from a very large statue (of a size suitable for the Study of Base Plinth), an arm from the statue of a leader waving to the crowds that is familiar to every Chinese. This is of course a satire of the material contingency of the monument, but it also points to the absence that continues to operate and support the ethos of modern China: the hollow that sucks everyone forward to seek fulfilment in order to fill the void left by the fallen monument.

The magic of the monument rests upon ideology’s claim on history, which establishes a closure on the future to secure its meaning; the fate of China’s modern monuments therefore coincides with the changing vision of the state. Since 1992, after Deng Xiaoping demonstrated his determination to make the market economy a new guiding principle for the government, a new fever for public sculpture flared up across the nation, and countless “modern” and so-called “abstract” sculptures emerged to replace the demolished Socialist statues. From the mid 1990s onwards, commissions for public statues accelerated, and every town and municipal district seemed to find the budget for a monument, making public art the most rewarding occupation for anyone with a title in

17 Sui Jianguo, Study of Clothes’ Veins, 1998, painted fibreglass. Courtesy of the artist.

Sui Jianguo, Study of Base Plinth, wood and fibreglass, 600 x 450 x 450 cm. Courtesy of the artist. art. Today many of these ugly edifices are already starting to be removed, but replacements continue to pour in. It is amazing how new public monuments can be so hideous; when Socialist statues suddenly appeared en masse in the 1950s, it must have also been a shock to the prevailing sensibility. But social realism at least had a coherent aesthetic, a consistent rhetoric. The new type of state-initiated capitalism has no ideological premise. It is “experimental,” for lack of a better description; Deng called the change in government’s economic policy “crossing the river stone by stone,” and the unprincipled “experimental” spirit is reflected in the artistic chaos erected in its glory. But the enthusiasm for monuments points to the spirit of a master narrative at work— exactly the continuation of the previous heroic project of modernity, and similarly uncritical of its debts to past history. In 1999 Sui Jianguo returned to the theme of the monument and cited mass commercial objects in his art. He chose the toy dinosaur with the embossed legend “Made In China” as the icon of the era (Made in China, 1999) and reproduced faithfully the once-ubiquitous fibreglass panda bear trash bin.

There is nothing stylistically or conceptually original about these new works: Pop artists have worked the idea of using mass commercial objects to death. By turning away from personal

18 Sui Jianguo, Study of Clothes’ Veins—Right Arm, 2003, fibreglass and resin, 700 x 230 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist. expression and original forms, Sui Jianguo makes it clear that he has lost faith in the idea of the original genius of art, and he positions himself as artist as the provider of context and as interpreter through citation. The monument is no longer the visualisation of an ideal, nor does it glorify the hero beyond this mortal life. Sui Jianguo has made these sculptures in the context of China’s public monuments to draw our attention to the mundane and to confront the absurdity of the present cultural demise of China. Without people taking notice of the change, Sui Jianguo shows that the national Chinese dragon has quietly undergone a transformation into the dinosaur- dragon, prompted by exports to the Western toy market. Likewise the panda bear, happily exploited as the mascot of good will, is unthinkingly used to contain rubbish in public places (Wasted Beauty, 2003). He shows us how the great vision of modernity is actually realised in the daily context of China here and now.

In the same spirit, when Sui was invited to participate in an exhibition in Guilin in 2000, he simply borrowed a bronze sculpture of a man speaking into his cell phone from another artist and placed it in the Guilin River (Man Crossing River, 2000). It is the context that gives the work special meaning. The urban man absorbed in an urban style of communication, oblivious to the beautiful

19 Sui Jianguo, Wasted Beauty, 2003, painted fibreglass, 150 cm each. Courtesy of the artist. landscape of Guilin, represents the new relationship to timeless nature. Bringing together the image of the Zhongshan jacket and classical Western art in a new work, in 2004 the artist made a series of six life-sized portraits in parody of the famous classical Greek statue Discobulus by Myron. The six portraits are of five renowned Beijing property developers plus the artist himself, and they are destined for display in a new urban development project. This is the new public monument of the modern Chinese, idealized in a colonized physical beauty, half a century after the Revolution.

“Where does one stand today in the context of China’s ideological ethos?” the artist seems to ask, and “How do the workers and the masses fit in?” In November 2006, Sui Jianguo was asked to contribute to the inaugural exhibition of a new art space, and he proposed the performance project Horizontal Movement—50 Metres. He hired a group of labourers to move a sedan car manually across fifty metres, from the parking lot into the art gallery. Here the artist revisits the idea of art as collective labour and celebrates the ingenuity of solving a technical problem that serves no end but symbolic performance. In China countless monuments have been made in the past half century to celebrate anonymous workers and soldiers furthering certain glorious causes; few remain standing, and fewer have been made in recent years. Sui Jianguo revives this memory, yet he cannot name a visionary cause that motivates such labour. Instead the artist brings Sui Jianguo, Made in China, 1999, painted fibreglass, 320 cm. Courtesy of the artist. alive the contingency of the moment, putting back

20 Sui Jianguo, Man Crossing River, 2000, bronze. Courtesy of the artist. into artwork an essential mystery that escapes the monument, which is attention to the finite and the living moment.

Sui Jianguo now says he is increasingly drawn to themes dealing with time. Having spent all these decades with sculptural monuments, he appears thoroughly disillusioned by the hollowness of the grand gesture. His own projects clearly repudiate claims to historical destiny; in reverting to the uncertainty of the working process, the artist gives priority to the contingency of the moment. It is the meaning of “living,” not the meaning of “life,” that confronts a person every day; it is by the continuous effort of taking stock of time past, reordering and rediscovering memory, that life is Sui Jianguo, Horizontal Movement—50 Metres, 2006, made meaningful. As a sculptor who has arrived performance. Courtesy of the artist. at the pinnacle of the official art establishment, Sui Jianguo has certainly taken constant stock of his role, questioning himself along the way, and has contemplated the ethos of modernity with both seriousness and with an open mind. Perhaps a suspicion of sculptural form of every kind is at play in the artist’s movement toward temporal processes; he probably realizes that the proliferation of meaning generated by any form of signification will always extend beyond his own access to it. By focusing on process rather than outcome, he maintains a personal relationship with the work. What is most impressive about Sui Jianguo’s career is that he has set his own goals, while considering the public uses of history. He thus casts aside anxiety about the purpose of life to focus on the journey itself. He is free from the grip of modernity’s false freedom as he devotes himself to his own projects, and he remains open to life’s vicissitudes.

21 World-making and Mirror Reflection: Zhan Wang’s Art in Time and Space, Between Worry and Wandering

Kao Chienhui

or an art writer, the artist’s link to art history is as important as the uniqueness of the artwork. Together these present an angle from which to search for a possible position in the art world. Among contemporary Chinese artists, Zhan Wang focuses on the link between F 1 Chineseness and contemporariness. Given his actions of historical nomadism and his critical attitude towards his subjects, Zhan Wang could be considered to be affiliated with a version of the trans-avant-garde, which already exists in China but has yet to formulate a clear definition of itself.

Ranging from objects bearing signifiers of Chinese culture to renderings of modern metropolises in light metal alloys, Zhan Wang’s works have always been characterized by a mix of feelings that include alienation, contravention, and compromise. His dissolution of old myths and the construction of new ones involve an artistic strategy of double intentions. For contemporary conceptual artists, the adoption of this strategy is characterized by two conflicting methods. One is the modification of familiar objects to create new ones. The second is to instill a distance between the work and reality through the introduction of incompatible contexts. Writing in the mid-1980s, the Italian theorist of the trans-avant-garde Achille Bonito Oliva called this strategy “imitation of the Mannerists.”2 Oliva pointed out that artists originally implanted a historical nostalgia in the spectator by re-presenting the familiarity of the past, but in the use of rhetorical actions such as appropriation, dislocation, and duplication, the objective was transformed and a new discourse about nebulous and mystical states evolved. While the Italian “trans-avant-gardia” artists of the 1980s focused on two-dimensional pictorial arts, their concept flourished even further in the artistic milieu of overseas Chinese artists in the 1990s, in which installation art became prevalent.

Mannerism refers to a style manifest in European painting, sculpture, and architecture between approximately 1520 and 1600. Its characteristics include an exaggerated, ingenious, intentional complexity. Artists working in this style were no longer bound by linear perspective or by so-called reasonable or objective formats. Instead, they were free in their use of light, colour, proportion, and borrowed motifs from different periods and different artists. As well, weird and satirical works gradually became appreciated during the Renaissance, indicating that alternative perspectives on tradition were liberated under humanistic thought. If we do not confine Mannerism to a painting style and understand it more broadly as a creative attitude, then we can begin to perceive considerable potential for dialogue between this sixteenth-century phenomenon and the Italian trans-avant-garde of the late twentieth century, and then, by extension, certain innovative currents in Chinese installation art of the 1990s.

In the 1990s, overseas Chinese contemporary artists preferred to remake images of historical objects and reinterpret them in a post-industrial cultural space. By so doing, they stimulated reflection on the ambivalent use of Chinese cultural signifiers—between affirmation and negation—in the West at the turn of the century. This expression also responded to the notion of imitation of the Mannerists, which is characterized by historical nomadism. On the other hand, performance art became prevalent in mainland China around 1994. If the overseas Chinese artists who arose in the 1990s had deconstructed the historical myths of Chinese cultural objects, then their counterparts

22 within China from the same period orchestrated the emergence of the myths that represented modern Chinese life. In the meantime, the work of Zhan Wang, who began his activities in the mid-90s, mediated between the two. His early work utilized strategies such as excavation, hanging, burying, cleaning, and even mending the sky (as in his New Plan to Fill the Sky) in his approach to cultural objects, and later he began to refabricate everyday objects Zhan Wang, Mao Suit, 1994, fibreglass. Courtesy of the artist and with modern materials. His principle and Long March Space, Beijing. vision were not entirely concerned with criticality, but, rather, were closer to a kind of exaggerated and unruly imagination. His dreamy articulations turned him into a contemporary Chinese artist with the absurd and transformational style of the late Ming3 and the double attitudes of self-negating “worry” and self-liberating “wandering” typical of the traditional Chinese literati.4

Standing amid the conflict of the old and new, Zhan Wang approaches culture and civilization with mild skepticism. Although his works mostly involve objects laden with cultural codes, and although he often emphasizes the potential overlap between Zhan Wang, Cleaning Ruins, 1994, performance. Courtesy of the craft and technique on the one hand and artist and Long March Space, Beijing. concept and performance on the other, within the process his imagination precedes criticality and turns negative thinking into positive. In his work Temptation, from 1994, he created a surrealist human-shaped shell made of fiberglass, evoking the contrast between the social nature and shallow humanity characteristic of socialized or proletarian uniforms, as well as the paradoxical and dialectical relationships between subject and object. This work was representative of Zhan Wang’s entry into the contemporary art world. Emerging from social-realist techniques and thinking, he created a mystical aura through the tenebrism of “national trauma.” The Mao suit (Zhongshan suits in Chinese) is a modified uniform laden with political and cultural signifiers and was introduced during China’s modernization in the twentieth century. Its meanings included the elimination of individuality and the emphasis on group identities; it gradually became a “national costume.” Zhan Wang’s Mao suit, from which the body is emptied, is endowed with the spirit of vacated humanism, and we are left with the beauty of a constructed object from which humanity has departed. At the same time, this shell had to be propped up with a body-like frame.

In the autumn of 1994, Zhan Wang performed Demolition Project in the neighbourhood awaiting demolition east of the main street of Wangfujing, Beijing. He spent a day cleaning and dusting old buildings before they were torn down, as if in mourning. This work, once completed, was almost immediately destroyed by bulldozers. Zhan Wang clearly saw that the social nature of an artist’s work cannot have an appreciable effect in the real world. In the mid 1990s, at the start of

23 the construction boom in Chinese cities, steel frames and ruins stood side by side. Between the old and new, Zhan Wang searched for possible new legends. His proposal prefigured a latent attitude of cultural recognition. The artist’s use of stainless steel to preserve cultural objects, his rewriting of Chinese legends, his hunt for curiosities in Chinese literature, and his attempt to construct delusional

Zhan Wang, Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles: Floating Rock Drifts spaces with the flavour of Chinese gardens all on the Open Sea, 2000, stainless steel sculpture set afloat in international waters. Courtesy of the artist and Long March demonstrated his attitude towards culture and Space, Beijing. civilization. They expressed Zhan Wang’s non- radical eclecticism.

After 1995, Zhan Wang moved his interests from the human to the natural world. In the mutual reflection between the “thing” and the “person,” he chose as his targets objects of an “artificial nature.” Within traditional Chinese culture, Zhan Wang selected taihu boulders— those peculiarly shaped rocks that straddle Zhan Wang, Floating Island of Immortals, 2006, stainless steel, the boundary between the natural and 480 x 860 x 400 cm, installation at Beaufort Triennale by the Sea. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing. man-made—as his artistic code, on the one hand valorizing them, and on the other creating futuristic replicas of them in stainless steel. In order for this series of stainless steel jiashanshi (scholars’ rocks) and floating rocks to find a place in human society, Zhan Wang endowed them with unprecedented significance through the ideas of exile, drifting, and compensation. Two examples are Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles: Floating Rock Drifts on the Open Sea (2000) and New Plan to Fill the Sky (2002). Placing rocks in the sea or transporting them up mountains, Zhan Wang created new myths for these stubborn, static objects. Absurd and reckless, these journeys were nonetheless full of activism in their drive towards reaching their realization. As well, by using stainless steel, he adds a permanent, non-corrosive layer of clothing to normally corruptible material. Empty within but reflective and shiny on the outside, the stainless steel rocks are at once light and heavy. They are cultural objects from the future, and the artist attempts to endow them with man-made legends.

Coming after the earlier Demolition Project, works in polished stainless steel such as New Map of Beijing: Today and Tomorrow’s Capital—Rockery Remolding Plan (1997) and Flower Garden Mirror (1997) involved the reflection of city life and civilization in its various forms. Through reality transformed and refracted by the irregularity of stainless-steel surfaces, Zhan Wang made manifest the vacant illusions of civilization. This is a conflict faced by the ancient capital of Beijing after it stepped into a postindustrial era. Zhan Wang endowed his use of stainless steel with the ultimate hope of it never being eroded by time, and he also expressed the duality of capturing uncertainty on the one hand and relishing the permanence of his works on the other. Later, Zhan Wang’s stainless steel jiashanshi gardens and cityscapes of stainless steel utensils acquired a more comprehensive conceptual direction. He returned to the starting point of non-criticality, noting that his stainless steel rocks harmonized with their environments. Using techniques for replication and polishing, he “modernized” the spirit of Chinese garden landscapes, contrasting old and new cultures. By “faking” the process more extremely than with traditional scholars’ rocks, Zhan Wang

24 articulated a viewpoint and explanation about the changes in the garden space, much like late-Ming literati did in Odes to Yushan. In the proposal for The Public Project for Greening the Great Wall—Gold Bricks to Repair the Great Wall (2001) in particular, Zhan Wang highlighted an absurdity between different eras. Repairing its damage from time with a metal that symbolizes materialistic greed and worldliness, Zhan Wang vulgarized the sacred status of the Great Wall, a world-class historical wonder, and demonstrated that incongruity, materialization, and hybridity were gradually becoming naturalized characteristics within Zhan Wang, Garden in the Mirror, 2005–06, photographs. Chinese civilization. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

Responding to the modernization of city and country, Zhan Wang used “hybrid” methods such as inserting his work into the environment to articulate his critical-yet-participatory viewpoint. As he wrote in a manifesto-like account, “Clear, direct, and thorough fusion of Chinese and Western cultures is our only future. . . . We do not need so-called creation; we need only manufacturing.”5 These statements can serve as the bedrock of Zhan Wang’s artistic and cultural vision, and stainless steel jiashanshi can be said to be the best product to express it. The grand vistas pieced together with stainless-steel utensils are a metaphor for a post-industrial civilization’s future. In a cold and uniform life, a miraculous stainless steel city stands as a kind of utopia, and the supervising Big Brother is none other than materialist desire.

The Italian Socialist Antonio Gramsci once said, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” Between reality and illusion, between dream and waking life, between unrealism and idealism—this is where utopia begins. The progression of art is intimately connected with utopianism and the imagining of better futures, and Chinese utopianism is founded upon wandering in nature. Tao Yuanming of ancient times wrote an essay on “Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” using strange books and wandering deities to allegorize about the present world: “I surveyed the Biographies of the Kings of Zhou and the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Within the moment of lifting and lowering my head, I exhausted the breadth and depth of the universe. Is there anything more pleasurable than this?”6 His pleasure, of course, is not all about wandering in a leisurely manner, but is rather a mixture of worry and wandering. Zhan Wang’s ideas about the beautiful new world arising from stainless steel and about where his aimlessly drifting rock will end up can serve as both starting and end points.

In both the East and the West, the development of art is intimately connected with utopian consciousness—it is an imperfect pursuit of a perfect realm. This is why avant-garde art can be viewed as a brief history of utopia, and reflections upon utopia in classical literature can be seen as historical texts for avant-garde art. Utopianism is a grand social dream, transcending the boundary between reality and fantasy and existing in both. Utopia and its derivatives, moreover, can be said to have world-changing significance. The issues that it raises towards contemporaneity and historicity, physical infrastructure and social infrastructure, individuality and socialism, reality and imaginings about the future—all these have stimulated many initiatives applied in scientific research, politics, philosophy, social systems, artistic spaces, and even everyday life.

25 Zhan Wang, Chinese Scholar Garden, 2000, photomural. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

Zhan Wang, Urban Landscape—Chicago, 2003, Zhan Wang, The Public Project for Greening the Great Wall— stainless steel installation. Courtesy of the artist and Gold Bricks to Repair the Great Wall, 2001, performance. Long March Space, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

For Zhan Wang’s 2008 retrospective exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the title of Garden Utopia was proposed. His model utopias conflate the spectacles and wild imaginings of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Peach-Blossom Springs, and Flowers in the Mirror (2005–06). Although the social structure of modern garden utopias has not been recreated and imagined scenes are used as blueprints, the rendering of modern cultural objects merely reflects dissatisfaction with reality, and thus has fable-like artistic functions. Zhan Wang’s garden utopias, much like those fugitive mountain paradises in Chinese tradition, drift in open seas and reflect the movement of tides. Flowers in the mirror, moon in the water, things and images interacting to generate fantasies—these are all elements of Chinese thinking about world-making and mirror- reflection. As well, the almost indestructible material of stainless steel, turning the insubstantial into the substantial, is a response to the objectification and object-fetish milieu in which the contemporary Chinese artist lives.

In Garden Utopia, Zhan Wang tries to construct his whole concept within the physical exhibition space itself. He divides the exhibition site into four divisions, explaining: “First, the stainless steel garden presents my concept or idea. Second, the works about space will be presented by the project in the open sea with the other flowing rocks. These pieces subsist in a condition of between-ness, which neither belongs to the fantasy nor belongs to the reality, a place difficult for humans to reach. They need to break through many boundaries to get there. Third, spiritual life is reflected in the Deity Search Engines. The other parts are outdoor scenes made up of mountain paradises and traditional rockeries of Chinese tradition.” Rather than limiting ourselves to specific works within the exhibition site, it is possible to bring up some conceptual issues here.

The utopian concept employed here belongs to the art and literary world, its foundation having been built on the world of dreams, imagination, un-executed project proposals, or blueprints.

26 Zhan Wang, Deity Medicine, 2008, proposal for a stainless steel installation at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

In modern times, many states have tried to develop or practice the concept of utopia in real society. The executors have believed it could build a better life for their societies. Zhan Wang divides the four philosophical sections for his art utopia: “concept, space, material, spirit.” However, this should only be a very general way to classify the content of the exhibition. The four sections do not represent a well-established philosophical theory, but an interesting proposition that has them overlapping each other. For example, conceptual art is often “formless” or reduces the function of form and material. Yet Zhan Wang’s works are filled with significant meaning inherent to plastic form and material qualities. Unlike Arte Povera in Italy, which tried to overthrow the meaning attached to form and material, Zhan Wang did not really remove linguistic meaning from his objects. “The open sea” is a metaphorical expression; “the metropolitan mountain” is a sarcastic gesture. Though the ATM format of his Deity Search Engine is trying to bring out the issue of current spiritual life, it has nothing to do with faith. As a matter of fact, the machine-like object shows the artist’s agnostic attitude towards religion. These artworks reveal that the artist has been bothered by modernity. He is not proposing utopia as a place for a better life, however, but offering different angles from which to consider modern life. His “spiritual” issue is about both meditation and medication. Instead of finding salvation for people, the artist presents the prescriptions or prophecies in an anthropological manner.

Indeed, utopia is a concept, a time, and a space, as well as a form. Therefore, utopia could be a visible space or it could be an abstract thought. But as a part of an indeterminate state or something sought out for the future, utopian consciousness is also present in some aspects of modernization. Generally speaking, the relationship between modernization and utopia occurs at the junction between old and new societies, even occurring in its contradictions. Let us consider utopian and counter-utopian literature and art, where Plato’s Republic or Thomas Moore’s Utopia are the representations of utopian consciousness, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are the counter-utopian models. If we look again at the underlying structure of Zhan Wang’s Garden Utopia and compare it to these models, its boundaries are not clear enough to identify it as utopian or counter-utopian. It is difficult to use the logic of Western discourse to define something Chinese; thus Garden Utopia borders more on Chinese thought and expression. The Chinese word for utopia (wutuobang) is taken phonetically from English and has many connotations; in China, the search for a simple life is called utopia. But today, the love-hate relationship toward unstoppable modernization and the constant dispute with modernity have become the spiritual polluters of utopia.

27 Zhan Wang, Deity Medicine, 2008, proposal for a stainless steel installation at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

For as long as ten years, contemporary Chinese art developed separately within “official” and “grassroots” registers. The National Art Museum of China has been somewhat resistant to installation art, but, in 2008, Zhan Wang’s Garden Utopia managed to bring about a compromise. Moving from a modernized world to a Chinese cultural realm, the artist shaped a time-capsule-like Chinese garden in a new medium and demonstrated both the necessary conflicts and potential for harmony between the natural world and the material world. Finally, Garden Utopia also returned to the life-world of the Chinese literati, cloaking an archaic tradition with an unyielding scene from the future. In the past century, Chinese art has been saddled by prolonged debates about Chinese learning in Western forms and Western learning in Chinese forms. At first glance, Zhan Wang’s artistic production looks very different from Chinese art from the early twentieth century, but the goal that he has been striving toward is the same as the one set a hundred years ago and still unattained. In the discourse of the modernization and modernity, of Chinese art’s continuity with and departure from tradition, Zhan Wang’s work indubitably provides a typical example and is the fruit of a prolonged commitment. Understood in the larger context of his artistic production since the mid-1990s, it is exactly ripe and ready for its showcase at the National Art Museum of China.

Notes 1 Since the 1980s, nomadism has been understood in different contexts as a new concept in philosophy and as a real and metaphorical concept for new artistic praxis. Adopted from the Italian trans-avant-garde, historical nomadism is an artistic style that appropriates the cultural symbols of different times and spaces. The movement is characterized by its return to traditional genres, to visual delectation, and to the marketing of national groupings of artists. 2 Chen, Chuan Sheng, Melancholia Documentary (Taipei: Lion Publishing, 1992), 28–33. 3 This absurd and transformational style of the Late Ming dynasty is represented by the works of Ding Yunpeng, Chen Hongshou, Cui Zizhong, Wu Bin, and Lan Ying. 4 Worry and wandering (you yu you) was an attitude or lifestyle of the traditional Chinese literati. Since they were not able to change their societies, bitterly, they would escape from reality by wandering or traveling. Typical was Chu Yuan, the poet who anxiously wandered in southern China writing poetry and mythological stories. Unable to adjust himself to society, he jumped into the river and ended his anxiety about political and social problems. 5 This quote comes from a text by the artist about jiashanshi. He writes: ”Clear, direct and thorough fusion of Chinese and Western cultures is our only future. Reproducing scholars’ rocks in stainless steel is the only pathway between tradition and modernity. We do not need to look to any other historical standard. We need not research and discuss how to create natural forms; we can simply and naturally select. We do not need so-called creation; we need only manufacturing. The natural forms represent the essence of the world; each unique form functions as proof of the uniqueness of all matter in this world.” 6 Tao Yuanming, from Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas, 1 of 13 lines 13–16. The poet Tao Yuanming (365–427 A.D.) is remembered as unique voice as a poet of transition and reclusion. Starting his career as a “scholar-gentleman” or government official, he grew weary with the demands of “worldly things” and began living as a recluse in a rural area with his family.

28 Nonexistent Reality A Discussion between Li Xianting and Ye Yongqing

Ye Yongqing, Spring Awakening, 1985, oil on masonite, 71 x 97 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/Beijing.

Ye Yongqing: I don’t like to organize documents. My past documents and objects are just piled up in boxes in my Chongqing and Kunming homes. When I was still a student, maybe in 1979 or 1980, you, He Rong, and Xia Hang came to the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts and published some current things on art, then later there was the edited chronicle of Luo Zhongli’s Father, and all of it was linked to my work at the time.

I stayed on as faculty in 1982, and later, in 1985, with the ’85 New Wave Movement, everyone had to locate their previous works and annotate them with poems and make slides for catalogues and presentations because the conditions didn’t exist for exhibiting them earlier.

Li Xianting: During this period did you have the same motivations as Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui?

Ye Yongqing: Right. We were all painting Mt. Guishan, a village not far from Kunming.

Li Xianting: You all began from rural painting, but you had already started to stray from the rural painting style of Luo Zhongli. All of you shared this difference, although you differed from each other as well.

Ye Yongqing: Our biggest sources of reference were the works that criticized realism and rural painting.

Li Xianting: I remember feeling that although you were all classmates and all painted in the rural style, the works had a feeling of skepticism to them.

29 Ye Yongqing, Horse and Woman, 1985, acrylic on paper, 60 x 50 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/Beijing.

Ye Yongqing: Sichuan rural painting was critical on the one hand and also had an aspect of suffering, something that never really interested us.

Li Xianting: Or you could say that the theme was the same, but the starting point was different. As for the countryside experience and the vast difference between the Cultural Revolution and the reform period, you guys did not experience this transition as strongly as people like Luo Zhongli and myself, who are ten years your senior. You guys didn’t have that strong feeling of intervening in society.

Ye Yongqing: Right, there weren’t the social concerns. Even early on, the stuff we wanted to do and the influences we received were different. This may have had something to do with the books

30 Ye Yongqing, Two Men on the Last Green Lawn, 1985, acrylic on paper, 58 x 48 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/ Beijing. we were reading or the artists we liked. I liked post-Gauguin modernist artists. So we had to leave rural, ethnically Chinese Sichuan and find a place that was different—to go off to the other regions, like Yunnan. I had two places I liked to go. One was Xishuangbanna, and the other was Mt. Guishan.

Li Xianting: For you guys the stark contrasts between the Cultural Revolution and the period that followed weren’t such a heavy blow to your consciousness. When you started making art it was with rural painting, but in your hearts it didn’t inspire you. I want to know about this difference, including the artists you liked and your influences, because we older ones, such as Luo Zhongli, He Duoling, and Cheng Zonglin, were all influenced by Russian art and literature.

31 Ye Yongqing: At the time we really wanted to escape from mainstream themes and forms of expression. I was surrounded by some of the hottest artists, and it was their works, concepts, and styles that pushed me, and it made me feel that I’d never catch up. So I enjoyed going to Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan. I remember there was one year when I went eight times. I had some unrealistic ideas at the time.

Ye Yongqing, A Falling Fairy, 1986, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. I wanted to be an artist in the Courtesy of the artist. spirit of Gauguin. My graduate work was along those lines. Those works are now being bought and sold, back and forth, at auction, and it’s like a joke that history has played on the ideas of that time.

Li Xianting: Even Zhang Xiaogang’s graduate work is in this state.

Ye Yongqing: The Mt. Guishan paintings were basically influenced by Cezanne and post- Impressionist work. It’s also like you were just saying . . . we would all go to the same place but have a different reaction. I always liked light, almost transparent, brushstrokes. In my third year of school I didn’t even buy paint. I’d show up to class every day with a bottle of turpentine, then dip my brush here and there in my classmates’ paint. It didn’t matter how large the painting was, I could always finish it with a minimal amount of colour. I made a habit of making a painting like it was a watercolour, it was like a skill.

Xiaogang and Big Mao (Mao Xuhui) would go paint at Mt. Guishan, as would Yang Qian. I was perplexed, because my work was light and expressive, but theirs would always be different: Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings were sensitive and spasmodic, Big Mao’s were clumsy and inhibited, and when Zhou Chunya painted the Tibetan areas, his expression was deep and bright. This had to do with each person’s personality and each person’s interests. It served as a sort of mirror.

Li Xianting: This was very important. When mainstream art and thinking were still at that return to a “collective aesthetic,” you guys started paying attention to the relationship between painting and individual experience. Not to say that the collective aesthetic of painters—like rural and scar painters—lacked individuality. What I mean to say is that during the rural period, the expressive methods of art, or the link between what was being expressed and the actual state of painting, had a lot more elements to them, like political concerns, subject matter, detail, and the completeness of the narrative. The endless rearrangement of the literate and social elements is a mark of modern art. The literate aspect of traditional Chinese painting is something that Western modern art has always sought out. I think that your technique of using thin layers of painting suits your character, including your easygoing quality. These are all personal traits of yours. I once described you as a talented literary painter, expressive and cathartic.

Ye Yongqing: Right. There was a painting of a mountain village from 1983 that looked like a hill. That village was a source for the paintings, life-studies, by a previous generation of Yunnan artists, people like Yao Zhonghua, Jiang Tiefeng, and Sun Jingbo. But later we turned it into an

32 opportunity to experiment and applied the tenets of the Barbizon painters from France as well as other movements we had read about.

Li Xianting: The tenor of the work and methods were all different. That generation was still painting landscapes, and their differences were stylistic. The difference between you and them was not stylistic, but conceptual. The paintings you guys were making then were the first paintings in China to have a conceptual tendency to them. Is it the portraits that follow the post-rural conceptualization?

Ye Yongqing: Right. This series follows a chronology. One early self-portrait was like Georges Rouault’s work. The other was a portrait of Fu Liya. I had a completely different personality back then. I was shy and I didn’t get along with the people around me. When I was painting in Xishuangbanna, I just painted freely. Walking Poet was actually a self-portrait. That was in 1983, which was when rural painting was at its height. There wasn’t much to use as a reference in the Chinese art world back then: Courbet, Millet, and Andrew Wyeth. But I was different. If you look you can see some of Chagall’s influence. My work had a lamenting and dejected feeling, and I could almost be considered a literary youth at the time.

Man Under the Trees, painted in Xishuangbanna, was a play on Gauguin, but with a totally different style. Doesn’t Gauguin have a painting called Good Morning, Mr. Gauguin? It depicts him knocking on a wooden door on a crisp morning. Well, I felt that I had just arrived at the door of modern art. It was a self-portrait; I stood under the shade of a tree. It was an allegory about civilization and nature, about reality and escape. I did a lot of sketches for this painting. I was also highly influenced by Picasso and Australian aboriginal art. I loved the expressive power of lines. And I ended up influencing a lot of people in Sichuan. Then I went to Beijing where I painted urban jungles and factories in acrylic. That was 1984, and I was reading some Western books at the time. All of my classmates from the institute had left Chongqing. Xiaogang had gone to Kunming, and Cheng Conglin, Qin Ming, and Gao Xiaohua had gone to Beijing, while Yang Qian and Luo Zhongli left China to go abroad. I had virtually no one around me. I was just drinking all alone at school.

Li Xianting: A sense of those ‘85 New Wave Movement works started to appear in 1983 and 1984. What I knew of it definitely wasn’t from official exhibitions like the Youth Fine Arts Exhibition, but from a gradual wellspring emerging among the artists, like with your self-portraits and Zhang Xiaogang’s early sketches for his ghost series. Word of your New Image exhibition was sent to me by Hou Wenyi, a classmate of Huang Yongping. I was at home with nothing to do, and I had been meeting lots of artists who had sought me out. The surrealism and metaphysics of ‘85 New Wave Movement appeared in artists’ works much earlier, even in Feng Guodong’s works. Chen Yufei, over in Anhui, sent me some works at the time, some as early as 1983, and they had a similar feel to what you guys were doing. They really had something to them, unlike the overly stylized works in the official exhibitions. Your works at the time had a different mood to them, as though people were in a trance.

Ye Yongqing: I painted those in Beijing. I remember looking you up, and I remember you saying that it was strange that the Sichuan Institute had produced such an artist, as you hadn’t seen this kind of work before. At the time I started wanting to paint the reality around me, but when I did, it was influenced by my past work. I painted the pipes like plants, like the trees of Xishuangbanna. It was like a hybrid of Xishuangbanna and the industrial environment. When I first painted the factories and the city, like the smokestacks of the Hengjiaoping Power Plant, it was all a bit surreal. The title Two People Men on the Last Green Lawn represented my thinking at the time. I really

33 enjoyed works by de Chirico and Picasso who both liked spatial relationships. I really wanted to use a horse to represent the West. I was reading a lot of books and foreign magazines every day. The many thoughts and conflicts arising from those books caused me to do a lot of pondering.

Li Xianting: A lot of painting titles at the time seemed like titles for philosophical essays, like Self Portrait with a Window (Gu Wenda), Mankind and Their Clock (Zhang Jianjun), and Mysticism on the Staircase (Chai Xiaogang). It came from all those books. Art was to a certain extent following a spirit that can be found in Western modern philosophy. I remember you had a painting called. . . .

Ye Yongqing: Horse and Woman. The horse was looking at the woman and the woman Ye Yongqing, The Big Poster (detail), 1992, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 180 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New was looking at us. It was like there was a York/Beijing. titmouse in the back. This spatial-temporal relationship was a kind of metaphor for external culture and the situation of the self at the time. It was a contradiction between viewing and being viewed, and it possessed some observations about the current culture, though we couldn’t imagine cultural issues in the same way as Shu Qun and Wang Guangyi, in the north. But I still felt that there were external things influencing me, so I wanted to use imitation and metaphor to sketch out my internal understanding and situation. I imitated Picasso’s horse; I used it to make a sort of symbol, along with the cistern from the power plant next to the institute. It was all an autobiographical sketch. At the Sichuan Institute I was the only holdout for modern art. No one else was doing modern work. It wasn’t until Xiaogang was reassigned there in 1986 that our circle slowly started to form. There was also a painting about the love-hate relationship between two places, like a lonely, helpless, and grieved poem, expressing love. They were all painted in Beijing.

Li Xianting: I’ve seen all those paintings.

Ye Yongqing: My work was coming back to a previous theme all over again. It was the late eighties by then. I was adding a lot of borders around the edges, which was linked to changes going on in my life; I was endlessly moving back and forth between Yunnan and Chongqing, sometimes coming to Beijing. It was then that I started rushing about, so the image has some montage-like qualities to it.

Li Xianting: Paintings with borders. I think that was during your third transition, from Guishan— a lonely and inhibited self-portrait—to Scenery with Grey Border. But ever since the borders began appearing in the paintings, you took on distinctive language traits. On the one hand, you were handling all kinds of conceptual imagery in a formal manner, and on the other you were using a lot of scattered compositions that were disruptive in terms of time and space, they had an air of philosophical prose poetry. This had a lot to do with your situation of moving back and forth between Chongqing, Kunming, and Beijing, and of course it had a lot to do with your personality and character—you were at once inhibited, poetically or literarily, and you liked pondering—

34 Ye Yongqing, Bird, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/Beijing. pondering about art history and trying to understand a lot about international post-modern art trends. You wanted to bring your various qualities and contradictions together as one. It’s very contemporary, very conceptual, but it retained an approach that was still decidedly about painting. And after that it was the big character poster series, right?

Ye Yongqing: That was in 1989, after June 4. I was depressed and full of dread. I used paper and oil. I was living at your house at the time and we were always together, the two of us, you sitting there in the daytime smoking cigarettes, waiting in the evening for Fang Lijun and Liu Wei to come over for a drink. That was at 28 North Palace Alley, with me sleeping on one couch and old Fang Lijun on another. No one knew what to do back then. Later on I went back to Chongqing and started painting with brush and ink. In 1991, I remember I was painting on a calendar, and I started playing with water-ink and calligraphy stuff, which grew into the Big Poster project.

Li Xianting: That was when Pop started to appear in China. I remember it was 1991. You painted Big Poster, bringing all kinds of current and popular Chinese symbols together in the same space through the methods of big character posters and announcement boards, but all of the symbols still retained your normal painting style.

Ye Yongqing: Then I started making installations for a few years, later incorporating silk, hanging it up, and then making some installations in the style of the Ma Wang Dui artefacts at the China Experience Exhibition. Those works had just come back from France, and when they were shown in China some of the cultural officials were angry because theMa Wang Dui and Big Poster work touched on some of Mao’s writings. They requested that the works be covered up during the exhibition so that no one would see them. The installation was made of Plexiglas, silk, and lights, expressing two sides of my interests, one of which was work from the West. At the same time I also did some work along ancient scholarly lines like Jin Nong. I think that these aspects of my work started to gain subconscious links that have continued to this day. Five thousand years in

35 China have nurtured and formed a tradition of “calligraphy and painting,” including poetry and literature, and this tradition is unparalleled in its refinement. But it’s not totally an artistic tradition, and calligraphy and painting are impossible to bring into dialogue with the world, so it’s just a misunderstanding. But I’m the type who’s always doing futile things, straddling borders, and putting myself in one tight spot after another.

Li Xianting: You’ve always wanted to find a link between them. I remember writing, “Ye Yongqing’s works on silk are in his typical philosophical-poetic style; he has put fragments of his different spatio-temporal life experiences together on a single surface, evoking that state between dreaming and waking. The symbols are like forms that come together in a dream; the strokes are emotive, and even the aging methods of the silk evoke sadness. It is like his life.” You wrote a letter to me then, saying, “My life is often rendered fractured and aimless by my migratory flights from city to city. My paintings and writings also move around with each shot. My painting style, working habits, and even my painting tools and materials are quite ‘amateur,’ and in this profession as a ‘painter,’ my choices are growing increasingly marginalized. In the past few years my interests have become increasingly fragmented. Sometimes I have this vision that I am gathering and piling up all these fragments of images upon silk, and when I raise my hand, it all flies up like so many chicken feathers, like none of it ever existed. Such things, Chinese or not, foreign or not, current or not, ancient or not, are the unbearable and helpless aspects of life.” You’ve always been trying to bring together the ancient and modern, like the literary aspects of Chinese scholarly painting, the feel of oil paint strokes, the printed feel of woodblocks, and the serendipity of scribbling together on one surface. With this, you want to transcend the limitations of cultural ethnicity, identity, and regionalism in your choice of symbols, techniques, and materials, to try to find a world of harmonious coexistence within the various historical, spatial, and temporal elements.

Ye Yongqing: I always wanted to find a link, I was always looking for something like that, maybe because of my character. I felt that using the images of Beuys and Jin Nong was like erecting a memorial, a new Ma Wang Dui. As I said, I did installations for a while, including nine birdcages at the Shanghai Biennial. Everything was on silk. My paintings changed in the 1990s to more of a graffiti style, a jotting-down of my feelings, kind of like blogs these days. I had wanted to distance myself from the current Chinese ideological styles and trends and search for a free form of expression that was transcendent of regionalism. I was spending most of my time drifting around places like Germany and New York at the time.

Li Xianting: The feeling in your work was a bit like Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Ye Yongqing:. Yes. I was living in Dali in the late nineties. In 1999 I started some works that I’ve been continuing on to this day. Before that I was living in England, and I was still painting the graffiti stuff, but the longer I was in that environment, the more I felt that my earlier work lacked power. I felt that it was too close to what Basquiat was doing or what some other people were doing. I started calling that kind of painting monkey painting, because I only had that creative motivation when I was hurting or happy. But that kind of work is everywhere, and it’s all the same. Like I just said, I’ve always had a scheming heart, because I really love work from the Song dynasty. But that stuff can’t touch contemporary culture and life. So I tried to find a way to bring them together, but I didn’t know how to do it at the time. In London, my landlord was a woman artist and a vegetarian. I hadn’t had this experience before, living with a woman for such a long time for whom I had no affections. We lived together for six months, one of us eating vegetarian and the other eating meat every day. There were conflicts on a daily basis. Not just the kind of cultural conflicts people write about. My piss stank more than hers. The people around me were

36 Ye Yongqing, Fly, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. Courtesy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/Beijing. all designers and furniture artists. I started to understand a bit about British art. I feel that British art has an obsession with cleanliness, and is at once the most conservative and the craziest, the most elegant and the coolest all in one. What comes out in the end is artwork that is bipolar: one side is minimalist, exquisite, and clean, and the other is dirty and violent, like someone who is both obsessed with sensory cleanliness and has an anal fetish. I went to see a Chuck Close exhibition— the American realist master—that showed the contrast between his early and late periods. His early periods were meticulous photo-like reproductions. In the late period, maybe his eyes and hands were giving out, and he started making each part of the magnification abstract, but the whole would still look like a photograph. This gave me a lot of inspiration. I figured that the logic of an artist is truly different from that of a mathematician or philosopher. An artist can start from his own point and go on to the flipside of logic. He uses his hands, not his mind, to guide his thinking.

Li Xianting: Your “birds,” which you are continuing on today, look like graffiti, but are actually a model of countless details from graffiti, and they are also a search for a link between painting and concepts. I saw Glenn Brown’s paintings in England in 1998. They had very expressive strokes and were modelled in a similar fashion, using paint strokes to construct an objective thing. Where do the two of you differ?

37 Ye Yongqing: There are lots of people like this in England, using handiwork instead of computers, using their hands to make very difficult, even impossible, things that are a breeze to do with computers. This hand-crafted aspect, in its contrast to new technology and media, has created a feeling for the absurdity of the day. At the time I felt that this unreasonableness was interesting, although I had my doubts. I got tired of it and came to oppose it. Maybe this had something to do with my time making installations, but it was mostly linked to my personality; whenever something gains attention in someone else’s eyes, I drop it right away. I usually walk away when everyone else starts doing it. This is an old habit of mine, and it’s been like this with every phase of my life, especially with art. I’d rather do something challenging. At the time I was following my own disposition to paint something clean.

Li Xianting: What’s the specific method?

Ye Yongqing: First I put a picture together in pencil and scan it into my computer. Then I project it onto a canvas and copy it. That’s a very subjective method that I’ve worked out over time. Of course anyone can trace, even an elderly woman with her embroidery, but she’ll trace around it and I’ll purposefully exaggerate it, making it all chopped up. This is actually totally different from the way other people trace. It’s also very complex. I want this effect where normal people see a child’s drawing, but the more they look at it the more it seems wrong. Then they realize that it is they who were wrong in the first place. It’s like a joke.

Li Xianting: What looks to be cobbled together is actually meticulously crafted.

Ye Yongqing: I feel it contains that poetic element that I like, like the elegance of ancient painting. Elegance has been discarded by contemporary culture. But I want to make use of this absurdity. People are always asking me why I paint so many birds. What is that all about? There’s really nothing to the idea of painting birds. Bird is a difficult word to translate in Chinese. It has two meanings: to paint a bird is a very elegant statement, but, on the other hand, it’s also rather filthy because it equally says to “to paint a turd.” In Chinese, to say “paint a bird” is cursing or mocking someone.

I’m not really painting anything at all. I think that this working method suits my life. My life is the same, all fragmented in different cities and getting into all sorts of odd situations. With the painting method I use now, I can start and stop whenever I want. I can paint when I only have twenty minutes. I have one easel set up in Beijing, one in Chongqing, one in Kunming, and one in Dali. I don’t need to have any drive to paint. My art has reached a state of consistency and lack of enthusiasm.

In a way, my methodology has dispelled ideas and concepts. I don’t have any ideas behind painting birds; I’m just scribbling them out. But a lot of people have a lot of ideas when they look at them, and that’s their business. As for me, it’s just the same as painting anything else. Liu Zuhui can say, “The Bodhi tree is not a tree; a mirror is not a platform.” Things appear real and are not at the same time. For me, working is a bit like reading sutras and meditation. It is a basic thing, and I can basically paint. This is linked to a very long experience. After I had done a lot of things, I started to feel that I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to be a painter.

Li Xianting: I’ve been meaning to ask you about this. Your later role is a lot like my own now. I do almost no critiques anymore. I’m developing another area of art, and I’m a lot like the

38 country gentleman of the past, meeting with local officials and architects to develop this liberal experimental field, a cultural, artistic, architectural, and way-of-life proposition. Traditional Chinese scholarly types didn’t paint as professionals. They were officials and soldiers. Chinese scholars chased after success all their lives. In failure, in the shady depths of officialdom and the travails of the heart, they used their free time to find rectitude through music, chess, calligraphy, and painting. What they expressed was the emotion of life.

Ye Yongqing: This kind of identity allows you the time and the distance to provide some ideas or other possibilities for reality. It was just this kind of experimentation, multi-disciplined experience, and wandering around the world that allowed me to relax. Time is broad and the world is vast. No one is mandating that we can only be artists, but what does art imply? Right now, art is like a bottom line. If I have twenty minutes or a few hours in a day to think about something and do it, I’ll do it, regardless of whether or not it will be a success. It becomes meditative, and you attain peace and calm right away, although it becomes less and less connected to what others are doing. If one day even art doesn’t bring you this, then you might as well go and play chess like Marcel Duchamp did or do something else.

Li Xianting: I’m neither a craftsman nor an artist. I am a person first, and art is but a means of expression. I once said that it wasn’t the art that is important. Many years later I suddenly realized it’s just like the ancients saying the power is outside of the poem. Art cannot express the feeling of life.

Ye Yongqing: I thought of leaving Chongqing in 1997. I had undergone surgery, and you came to see me. Sitting on that sickbed, I felt so weak. It took me two months to heal from a one- hour operation. I had lived in Chongqing for twenty years, and still I had no connection to it whatsoever. I felt so defeated. So I went back to Yunnan. Yunnan is heaven for the defeated. All kinds of failures go there to find a new way of life.

Li Xianting: Just like the plants that thrive in that moist, sunny environment.

Ye Yongqing: I returned to Yunnan, my old home. But my life had changed, and I was frightened by the tranquility of Yunnan. I started doing all kinds of random things and accumulating multiple identities. In the early days I was just expressing myself, and my works seemed autobiographical. You asked about how I differ from Xiaogang and Big Mao. I think that we’re alike in that to some degree we’re all autobiographical artists. But I have a sort of bystander mentality towards things. I don’t get involved, though I’m curious about everything. Xiaogang is full of vigour. He starts out lukewarm, but he goes deeper and deeper in search of the essence of things. Big Mao is a natural revolutionary, very sensitive to the times. He’s great at expressing his enthusiasm in words, and painting is just another outlet. I’ve gone from being one who expresses to being a hawker. What am I selling? A way of life? I’ve been very enthusiastic about opening a club, the Loft, eating with people and talking. I’m trying to influence reality and change life, so I play the roles of hawker and promoter. I’ve done quite well in this. I’ve been elected spokesman of Yunnan by the masses—not by the government or the art crowd, but by the old folks in the street!

Li Xianting: How big are your recent paintings?

Ye Yongqing: They’re all pretty big—three metres, the largest one is six. Sometimes it takes over a month to paint one. I paint slowly. There is one called called Joy. It’s just five or six metres of

39 Ye Yongqing, Scar, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. Couresy of ChinaSquare Gallery, New York/Beijing. random scribbles. This work isn’t taxing on the brain, but it’s a lot of work. It’s a peaceful painting process. You can do it in any state of mind.

Li Xianting: And you can stop any time.

Ye Yongqing: I can stop any time. I wrote to you before, saying that I was becoming more and more of an amateur, even my tools are those of a child. I have a tube of ink and a small “eyebrow brush.” I use this little brush for even the biggest paintings. I dip it in water and I can carry it on the plane. I think that it suits me.

Li Xianting: And you work in acrylic?

Ye Yongqing: Acrylic and water. This is a little bird with a rock. After over thirty years, I am a survivor and witness to the changes of the art trends. I’ve travelled so many roads and seen so many sights. As students early on we accepted and studied foreign cultural influences, and later we came to recognize our own traditions. Accepting and recognizing weren’t our goals. What was important was a return to life. Today, I no longer want to go and be a mood-swinging modernist expressive monkey, nor will I ever go back to being a kaleidoscope chasing after trends and conceptual shifts. Art is just an attitude, and a person’s character and personality are revealed within it. I envy artists like Huang Binhong and Lin Fengmian to whom forty years is as a day. Through a long and repetitive social and artistic history, I’ve come to understand that I can only strive to be a single point in time. My highest motivation is the Buddhist “permanence, personality, pleasure, and purity.” We’re talking about self-cultivation, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be any different from artistic attitude.

40 Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council Symposium Part 1: What is the Mission of Asian Art Curators in the Age of Globalization? September 20, 2007

Introduction by Alexandra Munroe Moderated by Arjun Appadurai Presentations: Homi K. Bhabha, Fan Di’An, Doug Hall, Andrew Solomon Transcribed by Chunyee Li

Asian Art Council members, from left to right: David Elliott, Wang Hui, Pan Gongkai, Layla S. Diba, Doug Hall, Yuko Hasegawa, Jack S. Wadsworth, Alexandra Munroe, Susy Wadsworth, Hou Hanru, David Joselit, Homi K. Bhabha, Fan Di’An, Geeta Kapur, Apinan Poshyananda, Shahzia Sikander, Sandhini Poddar, Vishakha N. Desai. Not in photo: Arjun Appadurai, Victoria Lu, Andrew Solomon, Xu Bing. Absentee members: RaYoung Hong, Hongnam Kim, Uli Sigg.

Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Guggenheim Museum: We are delighted to welcome so many distinguished friends, colleagues, scholars, curators, museum directors, artists, and writers—many who have travelled exceptionally long distances to join us for this historic inaugural Asian Art Council meeting. It’s an exceedingly ambitious forum and your support and participation in this enterprise is highly significant for the Guggenheim Museum, and for the various fields and different international constituencies that we each serve.

As you know, in 2006 the Guggenheim Museum established a new curatorial program devoted to modern and contemporary Asian art. I was hired to lead this initiative, which is the first of its kind in a contemporary art museum in the West. The purpose of this council is to function as

41 our curatorial think tank—to debate the key issues pertinent to the curatorial practice of modern and contemporary Asian art and, specifically, to explore how such issues apply to the practice and curatorial culture of the Guggenheim Museum. Our questions and challenges would be different were we conducting this forum within a contemporary art museum in Asia, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), or within an Asia-centric institution such as the Asia Society, or within an encyclopedic museum such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We are holding this at the Guggenheim, a global institution with annual attendance of some 2.5 million visitors, whose historic focus on modern and contemporary art has been shaped around a Eurocentric axis. So what we are trying to get at with our questions and debates over the next three days of meetings is how the Guggenheim can most effectively integrate an Asian dimension—as David Joselit said, how we can productively expand the Western paradigm to include half of the world—into the core strategic vision and collection, exhibition, and education programmes of the Guggenheim.

As Geeta Kapur commented to me, the council’s purpose is “to make things good and difficult for ourselves.” Yes, it’s about thinking through the complexities that this emergent field poses. We need to begin by deconstructing the premise of Asia; for example, how should we define the geography of Asia? Who does it include? Who does it not include? How do we periodize modernism within Asia? What styles, movements or media should we focus on? Which ones do we exclude? And then of course we must question the whole meaning and construction of Asia in this era of globalization. Perhaps regional expertise is totally irrelevant in today’s trans-national art world and global art market, maybe it’s already a redundant formulation. The purpose of this council is to help establish an intellectual framework for our Asian art initiative. Your input and critique should help guide our direction, or at least, help us to shape the right questions for the enormous work ahead in our exhibitions, collecting, and education.

For curators dealing with the notion of “Asia,” of how one ascertains the adequate vocabulary needed to represent these artists, interpret their exhibitions, and contextualize their work, how should we reappraise the language of culture with its dialects and vernaculars, within a system of multiple locations and uses? Is Asian art being ghettoized or decontextualized in the West? Is this even a relevant discussion anymore? Artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Anish Kapoor, Shahzia Sikander, Xu Bing, and Lee Ufan have been cited as examples of those who present a transnational perspective, where art can remain culturally distinct and yet be integrated into collections, exhibitions, and education programs in museums of contemporary art, within an ever-expanding global paradigm.

Homi K. Bhabha: There are many sins committed under the aegis of global discourse. Amongst them is that somebody like me who has never curated in his life is here today speaking to this group of distinguished curators and museum directors. I really had to scramble around to put together something that I thought might interest you. And then I remembered that one of the things I did this summer, and throughout last year, was to participate in the Aga Khan Architectural Award. When we sat down to finally decide on our award winners, I was asked to write the jury statement as well as an introduction to the book that went along with it.1 And I could think of no better way of describing what we did as a jury than to say we worked as curators; we had certain themes and we had a range of works to look at—apples and oranges, mostly—and we had to make comparative decisions in a fair and equitable manner while focusing deeply on the singular achievement and excellence of each contribution to the built environment—be it an apartment block, the restoration of an ancient mosque, or a beautiful urban water garden in war-torn Beirut.

42 Another aspect of being on the architectural award jury was to be confronted with the huge diversity that is Asia. Although it is an award for work done in Muslim or Islamic societies, the definition of Muslim society includes globally distributed diasporic and migrant communities. Participating in the jury meant confronting the whole range of Asian architectural dialects and vernaculars while giving due attention to the more traditional cultures of construction and design. In fact, I learned something that most curators already know: that the problem of scale is much more than a question of measure, volume, or size; scale is a measure of complexity. And I bring this to you because I think that the complexity of the contemporary global perspective, whether you limit it in some way to Asia or you take the Asian diaspora and then stretch it out across the world, is really quite baffling. Definitions and designations that are national or continental do not begin to do justice to the scale of social interactions and intersections—historical differences and cultural disjunctions—that signify “Asia” in our time. The question of scale, as it comes to be applied to regions like Asia, has to deal with the persistence of partially de-sovereignized national societies as they enter into global relations and urban contexts as they bleed into the rural world. Much of what has been written about multiculturalism assumes that the rural world does not exist—as if multiculturalism happens only on city streets or in suburbs. In fact, the whole idea of a life-world that exists within a rural scenario and an agricultural economy is crucial to global survival. Alexandra’s demonstration of cultural dynamics within Asia reminded me of the range of materials and materiality that comprise contemporary Islamic architecture—we awarded prizes to a hand-made school in Bangladesh as well as to Lord Norman Foster’s new Petronas University of Technology in Malaysia, which is completely high-tech in its conception and more contemporary than most other universities. The other lesson I learned about globalization from this curatorial experience was that these life-worlds, these forms of habitat—whether they are individual homes, or pavement-dwellings, or software campuses in suburbia—made us aware of a whole range of civil societies, of global publics, and how we are to actually think about them in relation to each other, and indeed, decipher their relations internally within themselves. These are not simply geopolitical or ethnographic sites of the global experience. They are also locations of cultural, social, and aesthetic knowledge production that emerge from these singular life-worlds and force us to meditate on the ethics of the global as a problem of scale. It seems to me that a lot of time is spent thinking about global expansion in terms of “global transfers”—financial transfers, knowledge transfers, or technological transfers—and global transformations. But between them, in an interstitial position, is an area of experience and critical concern that I will call “global transition.” It is in this area of transitionality that we need to conceive of theories and create artworks that rise to the challenge of global integration and global interpretation. This space of global transition is where many urgent current questions emerge as aesthetic, critical, or political problems. The transitional perspective unveils the ambivalent dynamic that structures global experience and the discourse of globalization. In this regard Michel Foucault was rather prophetic in a 1978 essay called “On the Ethics of Discomfort” when he said, “We’re witnessing a globalization of the economy, for certain a globalization of political calculation, but the universalization of political consciousness? Certainly not.” And I think thirty years later, we are still involved in a partial and disjunctive reality of transitions, whether or not we call it an age of terror, which is replete with such ambivalences and disjunctions.

And I want to draw attention early on in our discussion to this area of transition that is visible in many of the slides that have been projected. It is always perilous moving from ideas to art, placing one in the service of the other—I don’t want to do that. However, something of what I have been saying is certainly visible in Anish Kapoor’s upcoming Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin

43 piece that I was discussing with him just last week in London. He has this great, outsized figure in the middle of a room that resists any single or unified position from which it can be viewed or approached. You have to enter the gallery in three different ways. You can’t at any one time be in its presence either without being displaced or diverted—you enter from one room, and then you walk out the door, walk around into another, and then finally you enter into the third. It creates a maze-like amazement! And it is this restless sense of being caught in the “aspectival” perspective of an itinerant or mobile experience that is linked but never “whole,” a narrative that reveals itself asynchronously in lagged temporal sequences, that gives you some impression of the restlessness of the transitional and the contingent in the global era—be it art, life, or history.

Now, it seems to me that we come to one of the more general questions about the global: we don’t simply think about the global as a known space or a knowable geography; we also think about its transitional temporality as opening onto an ethical horizon. Globalization is often a claim to aspiration. With work on global citizenship, for instance, legal scholars would suggest that only so much has been done or only so much can be done, but it is still a great aspiration. In many ways, we all raise our eyes to the global horizon to pray for a world in which, as Auden said, we must learn to love each other or die—and we desperately want that—but it is of course also very problematic in another way. When you have a relational, holistic concept like globalization, however much you introduce asymmetries, disjunctions, and ambivalences within it, you have to assume a responsibility for its ethical duality. Hannah Arendt put it well when she said that the assumption of the global makes you responsible for the barbarism that emerges from within the global—there is no way of saying that the barbarism comes from beyond the global because there is nothing “beyond” it. The barbaric is as much a product of the global process as are the more positive aspects of global culture. You produce your own icons of civilization, and yet from within you also produce barbarism—both barbarism and civilization come from within. This is the larger frame of ambivalent identification which global ethics demands that we contemplate and for which we must make ourselves responsible. Now, this all might sound very theoretical, but something like it is borne out in a speech given by Manmohan Singh to the Asia Society in Bombay on the 18th of March 2006. I was actually heartened because he got the idea of how to make affiliations and how to deal with antagonism in the contemporary world. He placed his discourse on the ambivalent axis of the global world. First of all, I think he was salutary in suggesting what some of us forget when we see the stock market climbing in Asia, or the Asian art market rising, that there are significant parts of these societies that missed out on the leavening agent—they have not risen in their search for rights, education, health, or employment. He said something like this—and forgive me for my summarising ventriloquism!—“You know this whole wave of global success will just wash over us if we are not vigilant about national issues of infrastructure, of older problems like health, literacy, and education. We can turn Bombay into a Special Economic Zone, but that will not deal with the sewage problem or the traffic problem.” I think I was very heartened by this notion, this assumption of a kind of nationally rooted aspiration for global linkage. I was also taken with what I consider to be a kind of postcolonial perspective when he suggested that when we actually think of our own gritty obligations, or forms of global governance, we have to think of what we share with our Asian neighbours who have also suffered histories of subjugation. This is of course the Indian Government’s “Look East” policy. Now, one could be sKeptical about these things, but I feel that these two points were very well made by Manmohan Singh, and it did not create a kind of Luddite resistance to globalization, but, instead, a very realistic notion of global doubt. And global doubt—Amartya Sen talks about this—is very important, particularly from a cultural point of view, because it allows those of us who are working in the cultural field—curators, artists, and academics—to become aware of what I started

44 with: the effective moral ambivalence generated in locations of transition, despite the instinct to celebrate our success, our wealth, our competence, our modernity, and our postmodernity. When we think about social integration, we must accompany it with a form of intercultural and intertextual interpretation—whether it’s on the screen, on a canvas, in an installation, or in an essay—that takes doubt and deliberation seriously, and allows for public representation of social conflicts and political contradictions that are part of the process and practice of global transition. Ambivalence describes both the dialectic of global change and our identification with it as artists, critics, curators.

My ultimate reflection is to point out that in an essay I wrote for a MoMA catalogue on a show called Without Boundary—Seventeen Ways of Looking, the main theme that I explored was the way in which Islamic provenance, not necessarily origin, affected a whole range of artists. That’s why I didn’t necessarily call it Islamic inheritance, but just Islamic provenance—how it influences artists who have spent most of their lives outside of Islamic countries. I suggested that this kind of spatial and temporal transition has had some really rich effects on the artwork of, for example, Shahzia Sikander, whom I was very privileged and happy to write about, particularly in light of the way in which the global world picture is so often accelerated, digitally driven. In that show, I found there were artists who, for instance, used digital media and embroidery in the same work. And I think these kinds of temporal variants expressed through materials are a profound way of thinking and experiencing both what I call ambivalence and indeed what I think of as transition. Leaving the seams open for questioning, leaving the passages from one form to the other open for elaboration, and working on that edge.

Okay, so let me now proceed “digitally,” rather than in terms of slower art forms like embroidery. Let me just say that considering these few ideas that I have only been able to passingly present to you may help us to keep some perspective on a rapacious and largely homogenizing and hegemonic art market that I see as proceeding with very little discrimination. If I look at some of the catalogues—I’m not competent to talk about the prices, I’m only competent to talk about the descriptions—they are, in my view, so facile, so constructed, that all one has to say is that “X is really like a Balthus.” I think the vocabulary of the art market is a critical area—one that I take seriously—that really needs to be thought about. I also hope we will think about the kinds of endless biennales that seem to be creating a sense of Malraux’s musée imaginaire, which had a certain charm at one time, but I think we know too much about the texture, the wrinkles, and the crinkles of the world today to really want to have that kind of musée imaginaire idea. And I feel that very often they are produced as a kind of vapid cosmopolitanism, but there’s nobody in the polis at the centre of the term “cosmopolitanism.” The polis is empty, but the cosmopolitanism still continues.

Finally, I’d like to end by saying it would be interesting to consider two or three terms that I use so frequently now—the question of global identity, the notion of global memory, and the place of narrative. I believe that these three issues are important. Identity claims, in my view, are often used to legitimate a certain sense of indigenous belonging, and this leads to forms of ethnicity that I find regrettable, but I don’t think that the claim of identity is regrettable. I think what it’s really about is wanting to be authorized. It’s about authorization, not about authenticity. At least that’s the way I work it out in my own books, in my own writing.

Memory, I believe, is the great desire to visit the past, particularly in this postcolonial era, and to begin to understand one’s history in relation to that past which was either the subjugated or

45 suppressed. I don’t think it should be seen as atavistic; rather, I see it again as a way of actually creating a certain legitimacy of experience. And as far as narrative goes, I think most curators have to deal with narrative as indeed do most writers and critics. And it seems to me that what we need now are institutions that sponsor the right to narrate and provide spaces for the interlocution and the dialogue that follows the presentation of many views, many visions, and many voices. Thank you.

Arjun Appadurai: Thank you very much, Homi. I would now like to ask Fan Di’An to come to the podium.

Fan Di’An: First of all, I’m very grateful to the Guggenheim Museum, especially Alexandra, for inviting me here to participate in this forum with a distinguished group of art experts and colleagues. To discuss Asian art, and especially to use museums as a platform to express our cultural concerns for Asian art is certainly a very important mission, and it’s an opportune time to do so. In fact, many Asian art museums have already begun to initiate conversations around Asian art as a common topic. For instance, last September our National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) hosted a forum in Beijing for Asian art museum directors. Of course, we did not invite directors from all forty-plus countries and regions; however, we were honoured to have directors from ten different countries such as Japan and Korea in East Asia, and some South East Asian countries, as well as directors from India and Pakistan. So the forum was conducted through an Asian perspective, and we all tried to internally identify the common characteristics of the development of contemporary art. Talking about this makes me think of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art program, which can be considered as a strategic initiative on the part of the museum. As an external (Western) approach, it complements our efforts in Asia to discuss the common themes or traits in the development of Asian art, forming a convergence of internal and external perspectives. I hope that in the future this kind of mutual exchange can be carried out more in-depth.

When we consider issues of art from an Asian perspective, the most immediate issue, or cultural anxiety, we observe is the tension between globalization and localism. This conflict is manifested in every aspect of our lives, but most prominently in contemporary art. However, if we focus too much on this tension, we will never be able to walk away from it. Therefore, the issue of transcending this cultural anxiety remains a critical concern in our discussion of contemporary Asian art. Very often, when we talk about Asian art, we feel that it is closely connected to the economic and social development of Asia. In the development of Western modernity, this close relationship has been clearly acknowledged. Now it’s the turn for Asian countries. The dual dilemmas we are facing now are, on the one hand, problems arising from the immediate correlation between cultural development and social development in Asia, and on the other hand, issues emerging from our close relationship with the international world. So these are the current challenges faced by Asian art. I believe these two forms of tension—between the global and the local, and between local relevancy and global relevancy—constitute the fundamental framework for the analysis of Asian art. However, due to the time constraints I cannot discuss further this matter.

Many Asian art museums have started exchanging exhibitions to present our commonalities in art. Let me cite an example: currently, NAMOC is holding an exhibition titled Floating—New Generation of Art in China (in Chinese it’s pronounced as fu you) at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea. In exchange, the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Korea is now showing Contemporary Korean Art—Wonderland (xian jing in Chinese) at NAMOC. It is

46 a joint effort by the two museums to showcase China and Korea’s youngest generation of artists and their innovative artwork. These artists demonstrate a common interest in exploring their new relationship with reality and imagining a new utopia through the use of multi-media which has become a very popular art form in Asia. This new utopia, unlike the one mostly concerned with local politics and social issues, seems to reveal an approach shared by many of these young artists—to visually present the transcendental perceptions of oneself and humankind. Of course, this is just one of the examples. Another example I’d like to cite is the frequent exchange of exhibitions between NAMOC and the Singapore Art Museum that aim at studying the development of art by Chinese artists in a trans-regional process. In regards to Asian art, we have plenty of topics worth exploring internally among Asian countries. Or perhaps we should say that such investigations have already been underway for quite some time. So with the collaborative engagement of more Western museums, such as the Guggenheim Museum, in our discussions, we will be able to reach new depths of understanding.

Now, I’d like to focus on the development of Chinese art. We can all sense the current global popularity of contemporary Chinese art. In early September, we had a very large art fair in Shanghai, ShContemporary, and there will be another large-scale art fair, known as Art Beijing at the end of the month. These art fairs have garnered much attention for Chinese art in the art market. In view of this increasing number of art fairs in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, I think there are two points that merit our attention. The first one is the increasing interest of the international art market in contemporary Chinese art. The second point is that through the art fairs held in China, many international artworks are able to make their way into Chinese collections. This is a phenomenon worth studying because it reveals a duality.

This new attention on contemporary Chinese art has become an impetus for the development of Chinese art. Many people appreciate the new hype towards Chinese art collecting, but others are highly vigilant about this phenomenon, because from an intellectual’s perspective, a lot of problems are neglected, and contemporary Chinese art is becoming governed by the art market instead of evolving healthily through cultural development. Another problem posed here is that a group of new collectors who are fervent buyers is emerging in China, among them are owners of private enterprises. I have a friend who has been collecting Chinese art, but since last year he has changed his mind. He said, “Chinese art has become so expensive that I’m not going to buy any of it. I’m going to buy art from Western countries.” So this example suggests that to analyze the Chinese art market, one needs to consider the relevance of international or Western art in respect to China. This example also points to the complexity that exists in Asian art and Asian artistic life. Just like the Euro in Europe, it’s harder to envision the birth of a unified Asian currency. Despite this complexity, through cultural or academic research we will be able to identify characteristics of Asian art that would inspire our thinking on the future development of global art. I believe this is feasible and is what museums should focus on. That’s why I really appreciate the Guggenheim Museum’s efforts in promoting new Asian art by starting with an exhibition of Cai Guo-Qiang. I know that Alexandra has contributed greatly to this project. It makes me think about the relationship between the Guggenheim’s upcoming exhibition of Cai Guo-Qiang, and his Beijing exhibition to be held jointly by the NAMOC and the Guggenheim. Since Alexandra has already done a lot of research and invited many art scholars for this exhibition, I believe it is her intention to explore how artists like Cai Guo-Qiang, as well as Xu Bing, can employ Asian concepts and at the same time be able to tackle a globally shared theme consisting of contemporary social, political, and historical dimensions. This convergence of Asian art concepts and contemporary reality is evident in Cai’s work. And I congratulate the Guggenheim Museum for seizing this key characteristic of

47 Cai’s art. However, will this key characteristic be holding the same significance or as much meaning for his exhibition in Beijing? I believe this is something that merits further investigation.

Personally, I believe that for Cai Guo-Qiang’s Beijing exhibition, we need to look at how artists like Cai employ Asian wisdom in the trans-cultural progression. It’s a bit simplistic to say that Cai is using a Chinese gun to aim at Western targets. Due to the time constraints, I cannot explore further the cultural implication of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Beijing exhibition and how it impacts on the Chinese audience. In Chinese, we have an old saying, “the magic dragon is a creature that if you sees its head, you won’t be able to see its tail”; you can only see part of it at one time. It’s as elusive as artists like Cai Guo-Qiang. The biggest charm is that Cai, as well as many other Asian artists, are like magic dragons who have different manifestations in different cultural contexts. Thank you.

Arjun Appadurai: Thank you very much. So, please, Doug Hall.

Doug Hall: What I will do today, mainly using the notes that I’ve developed while listening to the speakers this morning, is to offer ideas and observations about contemporary curatorship in the age of globalization. I will make a number of points which, I think, will lead to an interesting conclusion. There is one point which is self-evident—that the traditional link between curatorship and modern museology is, as we understand it, now seriously in question.

The most obvious response to the mission of Asian curatorship in the age of globalization is to recognize from the outset that for most of the twentieth century the arts of Asia were ignored. A few years ago I was invited to speak to the Association of American Art Museum’s Directors in Hawai’i, and to talk about the context of the museum and its engagement with contemporary Pacific and Asian art, especially Asian. One director said to me, “We have wonderful, rich historical collections of Asian art, but there’s only one thing missing: we missed out on the twentieth century.” As we all know, there are American museums with fabulous collections of Asian art. But as a result of all sorts of changes throughout the twentieth century and the consequences of acquisition inertia or indifference to contemporary Asian cultures, it seems necessary to question the idea of how we define “encyclopedic collections.” While the concept of allowing Asia to emerge from the nomenclature art history is somewhat new, it is a refreshing change. Put simply, as the aforementioned director confirms, there are collections of Asian art in American museums (and other places, of course) that literally skipped the twentieth century. It seems as though we had typecast the cultures of Asia as having rich and lustrous histories that were fixed and unchanging. And the more they shifted from the romantic view of what we expected them to represent, there was a corresponding decrease of interest from the West.

This is an astonishing but self-evident and embarrassing observation. While perhaps surprising, it remains a fact that is easily substantiated. With the compression of history that has already taken place within the spectre of globalization, we can now contemplate upon the shifting responses to curatorship that has occurred within the past decade or two. I’m speaking from a Western perspective, but also from the museum’s viewpoint: a position that embraces an expansive engagement with the public, one where cultural literacy is regarded as central to all that we do. How do we re-contextualize meaning in a world of perpetual flux? Is this possible or even desirable? Should contemporary objects stand alone, uncluttered by curatorial intervention? And how, in the age of single-bytes, do we prevent the museum itself from turning into a coffee- table book of fast-paced and easy consumption. These are important questions to ask, but they are not easily resolved.

48 In my experience, the formative years of the relationship between modern and contemporary Asian art were being met with the Western museum’s own anxieties. “Identity” revealed itself in such a way that we developed exhibitions and responded to various cultures with a heavy-handed curatorship that operated under the weight of what became known as identity politics. It was, in many cases, more about Western self-doubt than an unfettered engagement with cultures with whom we sought to have a relationship, and to understand more fully. I can recall in Queensland at the time of the First Asian Pacific Triennial in 1993, that during the symposium there were many anxious Western voices consumed with identity. And then there was Geeta Kapur’s observation, and I hope I remember it correctly, “Will you stop worrying for us; we actually know who we are!” And I think that’s an incisive encapsulation of one of the formative tensions that took place.

Another anxiety in the early years was the curatorial paternalism and benevolence that consumed much of the art world; that of trying too hard to find parallels with expedient political issues. In some ways we’ve moved beyond that; or, perhaps, we would like to think that contemporary curatorship is, necessarily, more complicated—that it has matured and become more robust, independent, and less slavishly reliant upon contemporary issues for its raison d’etre. Perhaps the practice of “weighty” curatorship is shifting. I cite the example of the way Lee Ufan often talks about his art as an interesting parallel for curatorship when he says, “the highest level of expression is not to create something from nothing, but rather to nudge something which already exists so that the world shows up more vividly.” I think it’s a very beautiful and lyrical statement that can also be thought of as a particular approach to curatorship.

The Guggenheim’s exhibitions of Cai Guo-Qiang and Anish Kapoor (and I understand Lee Ufan is being thought of as well) will provide a timely counterbalance to the political and identity- prone anxiousness of much programming in contemporary museums; where great artists are not introduced as easy hand-maidens for identity-conscious curatorship, where they will bring transcendence and diffuse symbolism and a non-literal view of the modern world. This is timely and important. They teach us the value of not knowing: the importance of experience and the ways in which we might receive and understand elusive and conditional meaning. There are times when we must think of curatorship and the public presentation of objects as softly didactic— rather than a specific and singular interpretation. Sir Nicholas Serota said in his lecture Experience or Interpretation (1996), “We do not want to find our visitors standing on the conveyor belt of history.” That’s a bold and important claim, for it puts the public’s engagement with the artist, his/ her object, and contemporary experience at the forefront.

And now to touch briefly on an exhibition that was mentioned earlier, and to do so in the presence of its curator, David Elliot. Soviet Socialist Realist Painting, 1930s to the 1960s and China/Avant- Garde were groundbreaking exhibitions, and Elliot’s revealed culture and politics as they were: a coerced and legitimately expressed imagery as a proper function that represented the state. There was a peculiar banality, as well as an odd pathos, in many of the works in the Socialist Realist exhibition. This seems a relevant lead-in and opportunity to claim recognition for kitsch in modern Asian art. Kitsch is something that the West has resisted and walked away from—except when mediated through the narrow channels of high art. Kitsch, as we might generally understand it, remains critical to the visual cultures throughout Asia. But it is important to acknowledge that it’s often only we who tend to see it as kitsch.

The dynamic of contemporary curatorship remains a mutable undertaking. As professionals in the art world we can’t ignore the reality that our public no longer receives information and

49 experience through single-source cannons like the museum. Whether it’s the market phenomenon of contemporary Chinese art—all good media fodder—or the immediacy of media news and information, our audiences come to museums equipped (or loaded) with ideas, mindsets, and perhaps falsehoods. If we believe in the value of cultural literacy we must also be mindful that modern curatorship and the museum now operate in a vastly different environment than they did two decades ago. Thank you very much.

Arjun Appadurai: Thank you, Doug. Andrew Solomon.

Andrew Solomon: First, let me just say what a pleasure it is to be here, to be at the Guggenheim, and to be involved in Alexandra’s extraordinary convocation of so many remarkable people in this field, and to be at the site of the Guggenheim’s 1994 exhibition, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, which I think really was the exhibition that launched interest from the West, at least here in New York, in the idea of contemporary Asian art and the validity of that art as a coherent practice.

My background is not as a theoretician or as a curator, but I’ve done a certain amount of journalistic writing about art from Asia, especially about contemporary art from Asia. And so I’m going to speak anecdotally in relation to that. I’m going to begin, perhaps eccentrically, by talking about my first enterprise in this field, which was to write about Soviet artists and the way their lives were changed during Glasnost. The Soviet Union, of course, included large territories in Asia, but what was interesting about those experiences for me was simply that at the time, in 1988, it was almost impossible to persuade people in the West that there was any art being made outside of the U.S. and European context which actually had validity as contemporary art. And it was an enormous struggle to suggest that there was original meaning in this work. I was consistently confronted by one of two things: people either said, “this Russian art looks exactly like art that is being made in the West, and is therefore derivative,” or “it looks very different from art that is being made in the West, and is therefore provincial.” So there was no space for considering this art and reflecting upon any inherent validity it might have.

What I experienced in the Soviet Union in 1988, when I went there to write for a British art magazine about Sotheby’s sale of contemporary Soviet art, was a world in which artists were making art for different reasons and with a different sense of occasion than would have been characteristic of or appropriate for the Western context. I arrived thinking the art looked somewhat banal, but I was kind of curious to see what was going on over there. What I found was that a lot of the art was actually constructed to look not particularly interesting, especially at a time when there was enormous vulnerability to political repercussions for artists working unofficially. And the key to understanding its meaning was having personal knowledge of the artists, whose individual characters had become pivotal to interpretation, because they lived in a context in which they weren’t able to expose their work to a larger art market. They had a vision that art need not be explicitly dissident via some alternative set of policies or politics. Dissident was the word that I heard over and over again when I got back home; people said, “Oh, the dissident artists, tell me more about the dissident artists.” Rather, what I found was that there were artists who were interested in the idea that they lived in a society that was structurally opposed to the preservation of truth, and they felt that truth was a great thing which could be kept vital and alive by art, and so they were somehow preserving the notion of truth with the understanding that when the politics changed they would be able to shout that truth from the roof tops. And so there was an intensely moral sensibility behind the art that they were making. I was interested in that completely different

50 sense of art. So at that time Soviet art suddenly became very fashionable. There were gigantic exhibitions in one museum after the next, some of them like, David Elliot’s, were very masterful and some of them were less masterful, but the focus of the artists quickly shifted from the moral content of what they were doing to the quality of the material they were producing. This meant that the existing hierarchies were completely readjusted when the artists came to the West.

I also observed that Westerners who came in and who didn’t have any particular sense of the context and who would show up and say, “I’m a curator, I’ve decided to do a show of contemporary Soviet art, and I will be in the Soviet Union for two weeks.” They had twenty-six appointments a day to go around to the studios of artists, and then they might make choices about which paintings were interesting to them, and they frequently did it without any real sense of context. I watched all of that with considerable dismay, and a few years later the New York Times Magazine asked me whether I’d like to do a piece for them, and I said that I would really like to go to look at the contemporary art in China, which I thought might have some parallels to what I had seen in the Soviet Union. I think I proposed the idea at the end of 1991. I actually went in 1992, and the piece I wrote was published in 1993. At that point, there was no awareness in the U.S. of contemporary art in China. Once again I found that when I came back, everyone immediately said to me, “Tell me about these radical artists, tell me what their pro-democracy artwork looks like, tell me about them.” And again there was a tendency to look at illustrations of the work without any sense of context, and immediately say, “Oh jeez, I really like what this guy is doing; oh this guy doesn’t look so interesting.” And I thought, “You have no idea what these people are doing, and how it fits into the Chinese context.” This leads into a large question that I think is very critical and that I know is going to be addressed in the next panel discussion, which is, in my view, that it is a shame for contemporary Asian art to be ghettoized. I think for us to show these artworks only in museums of Asian art is a shame; there have been brilliant exhibitions at Asia Society, but there’s a large part of the population that doesn’t go to Asia Society unless they have an interest in Asia. On the other hand, it’s also terrible to see artists completely pulled out of context and shown as though what they are making is purely international. I think about the relationship among what I see as the three elements that are at play in the Asian art world: one is the vocabulary of traditional Asian art; one is the vocabulary of realism that became so interesting to people in Asia in the early part of the twentieth century; and the other is what I loosely call the international language of contemporary art as manifested in installation work, in conceptual work, in a certain kind of abstraction, and in all the other movements that are taking place in Western art. How do these things fit together ? What do they mean?

I remember coming back at one point and looking at the work of one artist from China that I showed to someone here, and the response was, “Argh, he’s effectively just copying Andy Warhol.” And I said, “It’s no more copying Andy Warhol than Andy Warhol is copying the labels of soup cans. It’s extremely, deliberately, and interestingly using a language which has been developed elsewhere and making reference to it in subtle, profound, and complex ways within the culture in which it exists.” So I think the struggle for curators of contemporary Asian art is to be able on the one hand to present context, and on the other hand to make the work accessible to the largest possible audience—neither to reduce it and attempt to universalize nor to ghettoize it, but, rather, to attempt to contextualize it. the challenge is to achieve both these goals at once. They are both challenging goals. I think the very existence of Alexandra’s position at the museum, the several exhibitions she is working on, and this convocation of people from all over the world, is testimony to the fact that this process is taking place and is moving successfully forward. We have Xu Bing with us here today. I think it’s important that people who are looking at Asian art have a sense

51 of where his sensibility lies in relation to language, that much of his work has used a character system as visual representation in actual studio art, that he expresses visual or iconic systems through calligraphy.

And I’m always kind of torn. I mean it was great to see some contemporary work in the China: 5000 Years exhibit, but again, it felt as though it was a kind of a dangling footnote that was somehow supposed to fit in with some dynasty ceramics and bronzes. It has been wonderful to see retrospectives of Asian artists; it has been wonderful to see work by, again, Xu Bing, at the Metropolitan Museum, but does his work belong in the department of Asian art to be exhibited by curators who are presenting calligraphy? Or does it belong in the twentieth or twenty-first century galleries? Does it belong in the American Wing? These are very complicated questions, and I think the answer is that it belongs in all of those areas, and that we impoverish ourselves if we say, “Okay, these artists we assign to this department, and these artists we assign to that department,” if we don’t allow for some fluidity and for some overlap, and if we don’t say, most fundamentally, if we show this work in the context of an exhibition of calligraphy over three thousand years we’ll understand the work more profoundly than we have previously. This is quite different from the way we might understand it if we show the exact same work in the context of an exhibition of art made in New York in the last twenty years. What do we achieve by showing it in these two different contexts, and how can curators manage to illuminate the vitality of those divergent contexts, and through these strategies, to illuminate the vitality of the work?

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in Central Asia, and I wrote for the New York Times about the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the war there after the fall of the Taliban. I was there in February of 2002, so just after the war had ended. It was an extremely interesting experience for me, and there was a great deal of art being made. A lot of that art didn’t look incredibly interesting to me, but people there were in a kind of ecstatic state because it was after the Taliban period in which music, including religious music, had been illegal, and when figurative representations had been extremely illegal. With all the things that were going on, there was a kind of heroics associated with the return to the creation and production of art. And many of you will have read the descriptions of the artist who worked with the National Museum in Kabul, who had taken paint and obscured the surfaces of figurative paintings so they appeared not to have figuration, and who, then, after the fall of the Taliban, rather dramatically just kind of sponged and sponged off the paint he had put over the actual paintings and revealed what was originally underneath. I went to see an artist who was considered one of the best at that time working in Kabul. He produced miniatures, and he was making what we call the Persian miniature, and there was a lot of national pride in Afghanistan around the fact that it is originally an Afghan art form from Herat. I looked at what he was making and I said, “It feels very conservative to me; they are very, very, very beautiful but it seems to me that they could have been painted four hundred years ago. Do you think of bringing them up-to-date in some way?” And he said to me, “You come from a country where the past is safe so you can contemplate the future. Here, the past has been hideously threatened by the events of the last thirty years. And so what I have to do right now is to articulate the past before we can begin to think of the future.” I think that was a complex and a subtle idea of history implicit in that response, and I think the issues of how time is understood are very important in contemporary Asian art, and very important to understanding its context and how it is tied into the history that precedes it, as well as into the history it creates. Thank you.

Arjun Appadurai: Let me first say I know the job of moderating, especially in an institution with which one is not deeply familiar, is tricky. It’s always difficult at the beginning, when we’re all

52 waiting to find out who we are and to hear each other’s voices. I think we have a wonderful feast of opening statements that already provides a very rich palette of possibilities, contexts, and issues; behind many of the comments made so far I’m going to speak for one minute to contextualize the discussion that follows and suggest where we can proceed. Obviously, these issues are going to come up not just in the next twenty minutes, but in the next session, over lunch, and the next several days. We don’t have to feel the panic of closure by any means. But I think it’s just worth noting, at least from where I stand, which is also somewhat angular to the worlds of collecting, exhibitions, and museums, that the things said today have already moved us well beyond a series of clichés that have dominated many of these discussions for decades. While everyone here spoke with great nuance and great subtlety, it was clear that they and the others in the room have already progressed in their thinking, and I imagine in their practices, to some new spaces and new locations. But maybe people have not yet been named, defined, and mapped, and that may indeed be a great opportunity. In the four commentaries today I sensed some interesting complexities. With the dragon, for example, I’m thinking about the head and the tail, the one we saw, and the one that Fan Di’An referred to very subtly in his comments. Because the question is if indeed there was some kind of a dragon, very motile, very mobile, moving around in the world we were describing, where might the head be and where might the tail be? I think he was suggesting that the tail, the root or the base is somehow local, national, and regional, and so the head must have run away forgetting about the tail. On the other hand, if one thinks of the head as the generative local and the tail as some kind of global market, then all that turns around; but it is a very rich way of opening the issue of the global art market. If anything is global it’s that whatever else is not; and then practices of art, including shipping and exhibiting, are always local because there’s always somebody, somewhere, by extension. But markets are really very mobile and abstract and non-territorial.

It was thought provoking to hear Homi’s mention of the key words “doubt,” “transition,” and “horizon”; rich words of Doug Hall talking of the value of not knowing. Andrew, in his very nuanced comments suggested a subtle way of not losing, not reducing, and not ghettoizing cultures. These are all the things that I deeply agree with, so the question is how to accomplish those things. Fan Di’An’s comments, hearing them in translation, struck me as having an interestingly different tone, a tone that came from a site of great productivity and great confidence in China and in its premier art institutions; something similar might meet the case in India as well as in other places. It was not a tone racked by doubt, I think, it was racked by some strong points of view about how the local and global ought to interact. I think we should pursue that question.

The last comment I’ll make is to introduce a thought, something that I myself am working on because the word “global” has come up. On the question of global, we have lots of debate and definitions. Some of them are quite tiresome and unproductive, while others are really original and important. Some are being alluded to today and I hope they will come up again.

As I think about our discussion this morning and how we might place the Guggenheim project, this project, in the wider context of processes that exceed the boundaries of art—those that pertain to politics, the economy, the market, finance, sub-prime mortgages, etc., all of which are driving the world furiously today—I propose a set of terms I have been toying with lately to make the whole debate about globalization slightly less tedious and slightly less predictable. That is to say, there is a tension, and I hope the Guggenheim project can tackle this tension. It is a tension between what people call an “ethic of possibility” as opposed to an “ethic of probability.” It seems to me that we live in a world in which all sorts of probabilities that Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, among many others, have brought to us: emergencies, disasters, ethnic violence, terror,

53 life chances, tsunamis. This is a world of probability, and a world of probability is a terrifying world, whether it’s 9-11 or it’s anything else. It’s an actual, real world, a world with the chance of getting sick, a world with the chance of dying, a world with the chance of being harmed— it’s a series of machineries that grind harshly for many people in many parts of the world, urban world or not.

An ethic of possibility is something else, and I think that the work of art—art practice, curation, collection, exhibition, museums—has two possibilities. On the face of it, of course, it belongs to the ethics of the possible, to the world of imagination, to the opening up of horizons, to the occupation of the space of doubt that Homi spoke of. But it also makes me equipped (this may be ambitious, but why not?) to conduct some negotiations between the ethics of the possible, which we would all like to occupy, and the ethics of the probable, which also are ethics but ethics that are hugely less controllable because they are much more abstract machineries—machineries of finance, of capital—that present the conditions under which the ethics of the possible make itself real. I know that’s a very abstract formulation, we might come back to it or not, but I won’t take up too much time and now I’d like to say please make comments. Alexandra, do you want to kick off?

Alexandra Munroe: I’d like to ask Pan Gongkai to respond to what we’ve heard today in the context of this globalization as we have all referred to it. Again coming back to the question: Where does the practice of tradition reside in this globalized arena?

Pan Gongkai: Thank you very much Alexandra. This morning, after listening to the presentations of several experts, I am greatly educated. I believe we have discussed a lot of general issues as well as focussed on the relationship between traditional Asian culture and globalization. As far as I’m concerned different regions and countries all have their own cultures that are of great value. Since traditional [Asian] culture has survived for thousands of years, and has sustained itself well, it has always been an integral part of the lives of people living in the area, which demonstrates that this kind of culture has its own strength, vitality, and unique characteristics. Therefore, I believe there are two aspects we should pay attention to: the first one is that globalization has brought common benefits to people living in different regions because its basic principles and structures have proven to be beneficial in promoting the quality of life and different cultures around the world. So this is the positive aspect that should be acknowledged and understood by people from different countries. However, we should also remain vigilant and take preventive measures as many distinct regional cultures and traditions have already been institutionalized, eliminated, or overwhelmed by globalization. And through the presentations given this morning, I sensed that the purpose of having this council meeting, initiated by the Guggenheim Museum, particularly Alexandra and other moderators, is to bring this concern and its implications to the forefront. While globalization has drawn our attention to the values of regional cultures and how their traditions can benefit human beings as a whole, there are questions we should consider. Perhaps it is beyond the realm of art to answer these questions, but art creation certainly is connected to the debate on globalization. Through the discussions we had this morning, I became increasingly aware of the importance and significance of this meeting as well as its innovative vision. Thank you very much.

Victoria Lu: I will follow-up with what Mr. Pan has just mentioned regarding the issue of Asian tradition. What I’d like to address now is that in modern Western culture we are really accustomed to seeing originality and creativity as the highest mission or standard of contemporary art. As a matter of fact, in Asian culture, including Chinese and Islamic art, historically speaking, we do

54 not view originality as so important—it’s not the supreme goal in Islamic and Chinese cultures. However, Western culture regards originality as the highest pursuit in any of their endeavours— the newer the better—for it represents progression and symbolizes the future. This does not mean that we do not understand the value of originality, it’s just that it does not hold a prominent place in our value system. I hope that this afternoon we can continue our discussion in this regard.

Arjun Appadurai: Hou Hanru, how are you?

Hou Hanru: How are you, everyone? I’m sorry that I’m late. The traffic from the airport was so bad. It was almost like a dragon as you could not see the head and the tail. I have a suggestion— when can we stop using dragons to talk about China? That’s my question. I actually missed the first part of this discussion. From what I’ve heard though, I guess there’s a little bit about doubt I’d like to address. Arjun said Homi had mentioned the space of doubt. I think this is very, very difficult to translate into Chinese because in the Chinese language I really don’t know how one can actually describe these very subtle differences of spaces—the spaces of movement, of change—in which questions and answers are all mingled together. I think this is very difficult for Chinese speakers to really express.

I cannot translate “the space of doubt” into Chinese. What I’m saying is that we actually have a linguistic difficulty here. Basically when we talk about China, “the Orient,” “the East,” or whatever, or “the West,” we use a lot of very generic terms without further definitions or explanations. And then we take it as a kind of ideological and commercial instrument, or even a kind of propaganda instrument, and this happens perhaps not on purpose but as a kind of habitude. And in discussions we always come back to this kind of very generic metaphor. I’m just having a doubt about this communication difficulty, and it actually brings up the question about the relevance of this discussion and how we should bring it to a much more precise ground so that we can redefine what we are doing here.

From what I’ve been listening to, it’s a bit like a repetition. Not with everyone, but I’m always—in French we say, l’avocat du diable (the devil’s advocate). When Doug mentioned the first Asia Pacific Triennial, I was reminded of that kind of discussion and that we are still making that kind of statement fifteen years later. I guess it’s really time for us to re-ground this discussion in a more precise language.

Arjun Appadurai: I’d like to conclude this session as we’re running behind. But I’m sure that many of your thoughts will come under consideration, including Hou Hanru’s gentle provocation which some may want to correct or debate in the next session, which is very good as this is the whole point. So I’ll simply thank the organizers, the panelists, and everyone else for presenting so many ideas so efficiently such that the rest of the discussion can pick up on them as well as carrying on with new ones.

The Asian Art Council inaugural meetings were made possible by The W. L. S. Spencer Foundation with additional support from the Asian Cultural Council.

Notes 1 Aga Khan Foundation (Author), Homi Bhabha (Introduction), Intervention Architecture: Building for Change, I. B. Tauris ( November 27, 2007), 6.

55 The Gelatin Age: Contemporary Chinese Art’s New Power

Zhang Qing

Bu Hua, Strange Youth Does Harm to Health, 2007, computer animation, 3 mins. 18 secs. Courtesy of the artist and MOCATaipei.

I. What is the Gelatin Age?

A snack consisting of set proportions of gelatin, water, sugar, and fruit juice: this is gelatin (guodong).

According to legend, gelatin was introduced to Europe by the returning crusaders. The word comes from the French gelée, meaning a gelatinous state.1 The earliest gelatin was made from deer hooves first left in water to soften, and then put in warm flavoured water until the gluey substance dissolved. The water was then poured into a vessel and chilled into its final form. Japan was the first country to engage in industrial production of this substance in the 1960s.2 The Great Wall Food Products Plant of Tianjin imported China’s first gelatin production line in 1985.3 The snack was extremely fashionable from the moment it hit the market, becoming a favourite of children and adolescents.4 In this century, China has become the world’s largest producer of gelatin, with an annual output of 500,000 tons valued at eight billion RMB.5 By 2007, gelatin had been in China for twenty-two years, coming of age alongside China’s 1980s generation; hence my coining of the term Gelatin Age to describe this generation and their influence upon the exhibition Infantilization

56 which was exhibited at the Shanghai Art Museum (May 28 to June 26, 2007) and MOCATaipei (February 23 to April 13, 2008).

Today, both the snack and the generation are entering adulthood. Amidst the swell of globalization, China’s economy, like its daily diversifying productive capacity, is increasingly connected to the economies of the rest of the world.6 Seemingly, the Installation view of Infantilization at MOCATaipei. Courtesy of political situation has been stable for MOCATaipei. some time now, as slogans and mottoes fade away, becoming history. An era has unfolded in which society transitions rapidly, a consumer era takes shape, and the market economy becomes omnipresent.7 As stories of China’s first overnight fortunes fade away, the Internet bubble emerged. Real life became ordinary and regulated, as if subservient to the basic necessities of food and clothing, but it was also bound up in customs as if frozen in a plastic shell.

Life in turn is just a packet of gelatin, frozen yet pliable, mixed with all sorts of liquids and materials, seemingly transparent but without a tangible core. As a snack, gelatin has no clear “Western” or “Chinese” associations, but appears rather as the defining element of an era, not a place. Coerced by the tides of global trade, the various brands of gelatin still retain an identical flavour. Yet at the same time, these gelatins carry subtle differences, and they touch upon the cultural estrangements effected by the uncertainties of change. Pacific, Atlantic . . . the onslaught of the West deposits its silt in the shoals of China and then mixes with the domestic currents and both lose their boundaries in this mutual collision. In an age where everything visible is a rich commodity, it is in those headlands of commercialism that international elements become raw material for the water and food of this era.

Water, sugar, fruit juice, additives: all have changed. People too have changed: freedom and loneliness, openness and reflexivity, purity and transparency—the hybrid, contradictory flowers of our time are in full bloom. Childhood is as fleeting as a dream, and youth disappears like the morning dew. Only adulthood is especially long, such that looking at every colour of jelly, one is left with no appetite. Although it claims to be rich in cellulose, gelatin actually lacks all structural support. It exists in a state between solid and liquid, its outline dependent on its container. In other words, its form is ambiguous. By coincidence, the youth of this gelatinous age praise the “self” while simultaneously staring out from empty eyes. The self has been held up high, but it lacks any actual substance.

Living in an agricultural civilization now suddenly infused with commercialism, we feel both stable and shaken, like a chunk of gelatin sitting in its wrapping. Of course, un-solidity can become a position in and of itself: a position of resistance to shape, to regulation. In life and in creation, Gelatin-Agers pursue style, but they resist the trend of their predecessors to turn any single style into a defining one. However, even as they resist becoming what others want them to be, they cannot avoid the influences shaping the cultural environment in which they live.8 Molded gelatin has a fluidly beautiful shape, but its shell is nonetheless weak. Even while Gelatin-Agers insist that they have cast off the expectations of their elders, they lack a model for self-cultivation. Thus, they are even more susceptible to losing themselves in the information overload of the

57 Li Yang, Han Guang and the Magpie Bridge Meeting, 2005, 7 components, 27.7 x 38.1 cm each. Courtesy of the artist. moment. These influences have all contributed to the tendency of members of this generation to resist being molded: often they are humble while appearing conceited, apprehensive even as their material conditions are good.

In the entire human life cycle, from embryo to death, the individual psyche develops from an elementary level to a higher, more complex one. All in all, individual human development and maturity is obtained at around the age of seventeen or eighteen. In developmental psychology, the period from birth to maturity is broadly labelled childhood. Individual development is a product of the child and his or her interaction with the environment. The process of development carries a transcultural universality, but it is also influenced by differences in family, social surroundings, and individual personalities. The gelatin generation has been faced since birth with an extraordinarily complex society and extraordinary isolation. They face new crises as their connections to family, school, friends, and society turn vulnerable in the face of the new environment.10 The U.K. has terms like “iPod era”11 and “Neets,”12 while Japan has otaku13 and 3P.14 China has what I call the “Gelatin Age.”

The Gelatin Age impacts only those of a certain generation. Older people, owing to their already established relationships to the external environment, thinking, and modes of behaviour, experience these changes with a degree of objectivity. Of course, birth dates do not define the fate of this generation. What marks us is the moment at which we enter society, like the date of production stamped on a packet of gelatin: In what year does one enter kindergarten? In what year does one begin middle school? When does one graduate from university? For the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic, these demarcations are sharp and meaningful as the education system operates uninterrupted, now a complete system working like an assembly line. This standardizing has replaced the disparate life experiences typical of the previous half-century in which historical tides and incidents affected all Chinese differently.

This is the first generation of children to undergo a complete compulsory education. The extension of this period of schooling provides new opportunities along with unprecedented pressures and a change in the course of growing up. In the relatively protected space of the school, a physically mature 18-year-old is no longer a true adult. A delayed direct encounter with society has led to the prolonging of adolescence, creating a widespread sentiment of “not wanting to grow up.”

58 In 1983—two years before the first gelatin production line went operational—the one-child policy took effect.15 Family structure has been altered radically in the wake of China’s Opening and Reform policies. Extended and direct families have become increasingly rare as nuclear families and broken families become more common.16 In 1950, China’s courts processed 1816 divorces; since the new marriage laws went into effect in 1981, the divorce rate has increased steadily. In 1985 there were 458,000 divorces, a rate of 0.44%.17 In Shanghai alone in 2006, there were 37,000 divorces, and one of every three divorcing couples was under the age of 25.18 These changes in the divorce rate vary widely between country and city. The increase has been higher in the cities than in the countryside: In the decade between 1979 and 1989, the divorce rates of Shanghai and Beijing multiplied by 512 and 319 times respectively, while the national divorce rate rose only by 211 times.19 The rapid rupture between the traditional and new family structures did not allow enough time for people to adjust, and accordingly discomfort in interpersonal communication also became a frequent scenario.20 A gelatinized urban culture began to lead society without explanation: people buried their heads in their individual lives, anxieties developed, perceptions grew sensitive, and suddenly everyone began to feel restless.

Catastrophe did not follow, but instead people settled into their narcissism, withdrawal, and self-torture, unable to shake them off. The Internet is their typical space of survival. Yet, at the same time, too many Gelatin-Agers hide away in their private spaces, neglecting or even refusing connection with society or other people. On the other hand, they often like to manipulate their own bodies—rows of ear piercings, lip rings, bellybutton rings, and tongue rings. Family differences are perhaps the reason for these alterations. Research shows that children from broken homes suffer skewed personalities, and that boys are more likely to be lonely, stubborn, emotionally unstable, unable to adjust to their environment, and prone to dangerous tendencies. Children of divorced parents are exposed to many negative emotions and few positive emotions, and therefore they view people and situations pessimistically and behave stubbornly. Moreover, children of divorced parents are on average less emotionally stable than children of married parents and more given to anxiety, depression, and strong emotional reactions. Perhaps this has to do with their uncertainty and impotence in the face of domestic strife or with their inability to change the situation. Long-term fear and repression develop into reticence, unsociability, or anger, sometimes even resulting in schizophrenia or borderline personalities. Too many of these individuals, on entering into early adulthood, retain the loneliness of being an only child.

59 Panda Temporary Workshop (Lin Zhele, Wang Yifei, Sheng Dongliang, Song Yuefeng, Huang Chen, Ma Haiping), Repanda, 2007, interactive animated installation, 8 mins. Courtesy of the artists.

This sort of loneliness takes many forms, and sometimes leading to the squalor of drugs or self-inflicted damage.21

Of course, the other side of loneliness is freedom. Like gelatin, this generation cannot be contained. The earlier era of greyness, then without the bright colours of gelatin, remains in spectral form like chalk erased from a blackboard. People born in the 1970s still nursed dreams of modernization, a love of the West, and a critical stance towards tradition—their feelings were strong and their sentiments mixed.22 Those born in the 1980s are completely different. For them, modernization was always already in progress. They were the first generation to enter the borderless world of information, coming to see themselves as residents of a global village, one that is without limits.

The gelatin generation of artists has naturally begun to use computer software in its creations and is making multimedia works. Logically, this has led to the emergence of new ways of working and thinking, although for them, new media is not really new because it is a technology contemporaneous with their coming of age. The Internet age almost seems to have come about in response to this generation’s unprecedented loneliness, cancelling out the hierarchy that once existed. Anthropologically speaking, as soon as collectivism and nationalism are allowed to determine individual and social questions, individual subjectivity is diluted.23 Today, innate individuality has come to form yet another kind of collectivity—a generation born as “me,” a personal subjectivity that fulfils itself over time. Yet in this process of gradually drawing closer to humanity itself, this generation has also been corrupted and distorted by the tides of market transition. In the Gelatin Age, commercial culture has established itself, and heroism falls away. The newly minted gelatin generation is bright and unrestrained, and also at times blindly daring.

In the last twenty years, cultural specificity has been transmuted as if seen through a kaleidoscope: Gelatin-Agers are on guard against narrow nationalist tendencies, and yet attentive to the latest speech by the Minister of Commerce and leadership transitions amongst other ministers and provincial governors, as well as the growth of China’s military, the pullout from Iraq, the French presidential election, and the Kenyan airplane crash—to say nothing of the massive inflation underway, for example, in the city of Shanghai.

60 Panda Temporary Workshop (Lin Zhele, Wang Yifei, Sheng Dongliang, Song Yuefeng, Huang Chen, Ma Haiping), Repanda, 2007, interactive animated installation, 8 mins. Courtesy of the artists.

Therefore, Gelatin Age artists chose no longer to simply depict the world and their lives, but to create new worlds and new lives. They no longer see the world and life in a set way, but develop a different manner of thinking and behaviour. The Platonic and anti-Platonic philosophies of the past were all linear, contained systems; those born in China in the Gelatin Age ascribe to a philosophy of anti-linearity and pastiche, like a chaotic, undefined, yet consolidated glob of gelatin. Looking outwardly, they in fact look back on themselves. The world is like Indra’s net all its own.24 A person is just a lump of gelatin, set at a given distance from a network, forming unlimited links to his or her surroundings in the context of this mutual refraction. Nothing is isolated, and no one can be entirely understood.

For this reason, the self is new. “New” is necessary. “New” is a given. “New” becomes a prejudice: hitherto untested ways of thinking, hitherto undiscovered possibilities of imagination, hitherto unexplored mythologies of the future. The price of such distinction is perhaps a surface-level eccentricity, sweet as gelatin, fragmenting so as to invite its own destruction—a simultaneous affirmation and denial of one’s entry into young adulthood.

For example, many of these Gelatin Age artists harbour a craving for the handcrafted. Handcrafted carries an aura of “uniqueness,” a private creative significance, the simple joy of fingers working. It is not unlike the games of paper stacking and folding played by children in their art classes, but it also carries the mark of individuality. These artists are also attracted to Polaroid cameras, which produce unique photographic images with distinct colouration and atmospherics, a perfect integration of personal existence and exceptional beauty.

“I” was born amidst the mixture of gelatin. “I” am pure. “I” leave the assembly line and enter into a rich but thin temporality.

There are basically no cities or villages left untouched by advertising. Product packaging is stamped not only with text but written in a language even more pure than one’s mother tongue: it mixes language from the Internet, new terminology, and words and syntax from around the world.25 But life remains pure: no matter how many new juices or ingredients are added, gelatin remains gelatin. In this way, life is as transparent as gelatin itself. True and transparent, likable, but

61 easy to crush and sometimes annoying. In the diverse context of contemporary culture, defining the self and establishing a pure position are all predicated on finding an entry point for expression tailored to one’s individual style. For this reason, some artists have developed unprecedented cultural insight and linguistic form.

Meng Jin, Anonymous Architecture Series, 2006, acrylic on canvas, In an economic era, Gelatin-Agers clamour 130 x 160 cm, and Corner Rooms Sterling Board, 2005, painted MDF, 180 x 50 x 43 cm. Courtesy of the artist. for the most basic sort of humanity. Waves of sentiment and realizations from the deepest reaches of the soul are brought forth. Peeled from its shell, gelatin flickers— and only because it flickers is it transparent. This pure light lacks the turbidity and power of the ages. In a short two decades, even though through introspection and reference they have been able to imitate accumulated experience, Gelatin-Agers still lack gravitas. Weightiness has disappeared, to be replaced by lightness. Books go unread, and are replaced by comics. Too lazy to consider life goals, Gelatin-Agers live arbitrarily. “Pretty but not nutritious” are the defining characteristics of gelatin and the creative style of Gelatin Age artists. A monolithic flavour and attitude render them children capable only of seeking the new. Others grow quiet, retreating into a daily routine, such that superficial creation achieves a Lei Benben, Dangerous Dance 2, 200, digital photograph, 100 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist and MOCATaipei. different kind of depth.

II. The Intergenerational Ecology of the Gelatin Generation

People born in the 1950s hold high the banner of heroism.26 Those born in the 1960s cherish idealism.27 Those born in the 1970s are practitioners of pragmatism,28 and those born in the 1980s are the Gelatin Age, a characterization that describes the core spirit of this new generation.

It is hard to imagine the number of changes Chinese art history has undergone in the twenty-nine short years since 1979.29 In cultural thinking, artistic form, artistic concept, and artistic language, a transition has taken place from imitation and borrowing to exploration and innovation. In a single decade, traditional artistic knowledge and concepts have continuously been subverted. It is difficult to say whether this marks a cultural renaissance or a cultural deviation, but the cultural focus in this period resembles a clock with a broken spring, drastically out of line. Artists in China have faced rapidly changing critical trends and a nascent art market. Previous research on intergenerational relations has tended to compare the artistic styles that mark particular periods. The trends in art we face today have been compressed from ten-year to five-year, and even to two- year cycles. In this context, it is impossible to use quick or slow to describe artistic progress.

62 Only by placing ourselves in the centre, and together facing the speed of artistic change, can we continue to connect the art of today with that of the future. For this reason, under such a special artistic background, as we look back on Chinese art since 1979, we discover that it moves explosively from a return to humanity, through reflection and exposure of cultural suffering, to a rapid processing of a century of Western art history contiguous with Chinese intellectuals’ interest in new knowledge. Art after 1989 entered a period of hiding and consolidation, gradually progressing to Cynical Realism, the New Students’ Generation, and Political Pop as its major presences.30 It is only today that the Gelatin Age is able to poke out above the interconnections of a global economy, using its distinct cultural sensibility and language to write the art history of the future.

Gelatin itself, the gelatin city, gelatinous emotions—these have created an era belonging entirely to the Gelatin-Agers. A metropolitan culture is the site of a visually transparent age. Even so, China is a vast land with profound regional cultural differences and an unevenly developed economy.31 Perhaps owing to such geographical and cultural differences, those born in the 1970s and 1980s are quite different in terms of aesthetic experience, expressive capability, and understanding the representation of social realities. Thus, youth living in the cities emerge with vastly complex and different understandings of artistic definition and style. For example, discovery and expression of the private psyche and its relationship to nature and the environment, exploration of the relationship between people and cities, depiction of and advocacy for grassroots cultural consciousness, eagerness for an international advanced culture, subversion of art’s internal logics and styles, artistic rewritings of life principles and styles, and dependence on the virtual world and the Internet—these have in effect become the basic cultural characteristics of the Gelatin Age.

Of course, the Gelatin Age only refers to those individuals who, growing up under such conditions, maintain the spirit of this period. Perhaps not everyone born in the 1980s possesses this spirit, or not even the majority—for example, the new generation of migrant labourers busy eking out a livelihood.32 Yet the spirit of the Gelatin Age represents all: those who have found an opportunity for expression and are now able to fully present themselves have this spirit, and so do those who lack this ability or feel confused. This latter group, for the most part, aspires to the Gelatin Age spirit.

The sensitive artists of the Gelatin Age are emblems of their generation. Young artists in the West have constantly faced the clichés of “art for the masses.” Asia’s young artists are similarly left to either follow existing trends or create new paths. Chinese artists born in the 1980s are going through a similar process, discovering their incorruptible individuality.

Many generations have championed art in response to cultural and intellectual transitions, among them the Beat Generation of 1950s America, the postmodern currents of 1960s France, the plastic culture of Japan in the 1970s, and the Punk and post-Punk tides of 1980s England. History tells us that in these subcultures we see the essence of a nation and the flames of revolution. But the cultural change represented by the Gelatin Age draws fragmentarily on the Internet. When we see the situation of the gelatin generation today, who is able to predict its flavour or shape in years to come?

Precisely for this reason, in comparing the youth cultures of Europe, Asia, and the U.S., it becomes clear that the artistic styles and languages of the Gelatin Age will be those of Chinese art in the future. At this moment, even though regional cultures and histories still differ, the styles and flavours of the gelatin generation have already been internationalized and standardized. It is difficult to say whether this marks the advancement or the limits of art—that is, the other side

63 Cheng Ran, Prelude, 2007, video projection. Courtesy of the artist and MOCATaipei. of Gelatin Age art. Through the artistic thoughts and practices of this generation, we can explore the connections between it and the contemporary world, the future, and human civilization. The development of Chinese art has reduced many cultural barriers and linguistic obstacles in international culture. If this is so, then the prospects of the gelatin generation are made evident.

In making comparisons about the Gelatin Age, be they across generations or among members of the same generation, across locales in China or internationally, we can already see that their artistic resources and thoughts are expressed like “Saint Seika” falling from the sky, invested with illusions of the special imaginings of this era and its virtual realities.33 They deconstruct themselves and explore each other daily, facing life directly, flying across the Matrix34 with the speed of Atomu.35 Thus, this Gelatin Age obscures all gaps—inter- and intra-generational and regional—placing all spiritual and life pursuits into the same folder.

III. Artistic Characteristics of the Gelatin Age

We urgently need research into the Chinese artists born around 1980, paying attention to their lifestyles, characteristics, and creative tendencies. We need to focus on how they face an ever- stronger trend toward commercialization and stylization, engage in creation and cultivate a serious artistic attitude, encourage the development of indigenous Chinese art, and contribute to the development of artistic images and languages uniquely suited to the artistic concepts characteristic of China in the twenty-first century. The exhibition Infantilization thus grows out of a long period of investigation and research into the practices and ecologies of young artists in China, showing how they manifest a young urban artistic consciousness in works spanning the media of painting, illustration, sculpture, video, photography, sound, architecture, computer games, design, music, dance, film, and literature. In doing so, they seek on every level and from every perspective to show the artistic face of the Gelatin Age, rooted in interdisciplinary explorations and developmental trends. In this way, they collectively form the artistic characteristics of the Gelatin Age, from conceptual transitions to imagistic transitions.

Infantilization is organized into three parts—“An Infantilized Youth,” “Portraiture of the Future,” and “A Disorderly Globalized Scene”—that seek separately to interpret the cultural, psychological, and linguistic specificities, as well as the lifestyles, of this generation.

64 Yu Honglei and Guan Xiao, The Reconstruction Plan of the Universe, 2006, video projection, 6 mins., digital prints, sculptural installation. Courtesy of the artists and MOCATaipei.

1. An Infantilized Youth

The sites of urban life are increasingly fashionable and new, bordering on the infantilized. Amidst this, urban life has given rise to three new groups of people.

The first group could be labelled “pseudo-tender,” a new term that is popular in China. Just as 50-year-olds pose as 40, 40-year-olds as 30, and 30-year-olds as 20, the desire to seem young has become a widespread pursuit of some urban classes. When people graduated from university in China, they often mouthed the words “forever young” to each other as a gesture of good wishes and the maintenance of youth and beauty—this was the earliest idealized slogan of the pseudo- tender. Today, cosmetics, plastic surgery, and even sex changes have become common words in everyday vocabulary. The pseudo-tender seeks to extend physical youth, and at the very least, allows us to redesign ourselves and our lives.

The second group might be called “prolonged youth,” referring to some people over thirty who still refuse to become true adults. Be it in terms of lifestyle, customs, dress, expression, or language, they float idly in the comfort of an imagined youth. Thus, the relationship between this group’s true age and their psychological age are out of synch. They continue to buy toys, watch cartoons, and indeed eat gelatin.

The third group is what I call the “infantilized youth.” This group is perhaps the most extreme. They are already over 20, and thus have already come of age. And yet, psychologically and emotionally unwilling to enter early adulthood, they maintain an equal sense of terror towards youth and adulthood alike. Be it a case of their thinking or habits, they all maintain the same infantile desires: toys, baby pacifiers, Garfield—these are their partners in life. Yet they also face confusion, anxiety, irritability, escapism, and vain hopes. In daily life they are often worried and nervous. Pursuing a simple, and supposedly happy life, they no longer imbue their art with profound meaning, but direct their emotions back to childhood. A common characteristic among all three groups is an unwillingness to grow up.

In this exhibition, most of the artists find themselves in a state of infantilized youth, with their life portraits and artistic tendencies floating in the mix. As for art history within China, their aesthetic

65 leanings and artistic forms are unprecedented. For this reason, their lifestyles and artistic strategies are distinct from those of the 1990s New Students’ Generation and Political Pop painters. That is to say, they offer a glimpse of a future decade of artistic development in China, and perhaps even determine the forms and languages of art for the coming twenty years.

2. Portrait of the Future

Art is a reflection of one’s own life and psyche and an investigation into artistic expression in and of itself, as well as into the formation of artistic forms and languages. Chinese art has specific styles and languages precisely because it has its own artistic forms. But in contemporary international art, what can be recognized as Chinese? Sun Wukong—the monkey from A Journey to the West—is easily recognizable as Chinese by people around the world. But this symbol was created long ago, not today. What symbols of our own time do we want to create? How will these form a Chinese portraiture of the future? These are questions that will determine the future vitality of Chinese art, as well as how the global art history of the twenty-first century will be written.

In investigating the art of the Gelatin Age, we can already sense these artists’ daringness in creating new forms and figures. These are drafts towards creating the image of contemporary Chinese art, taking form with each passing day. This is the core imperative in furthering the development of art in China: only by inventing forms different from those found abroad and in Chinese art history can a true contemporary artistic lexicon be established. The Gelatin Age artists work by creating their own unique Chinese forms, incorporating not only images refined from Chinese tradition, but layering within it various cultures and imaginations.

The realities and forms depicted by Gelatin Age artists are at once connected to and different from the realities and forms found worldwide. The previous generation was often bound by considerations of nation, state, and culture, whereas the Gelatin-Agers have transcended these linear distinctions, discussing questions from a wider, more universal perspective. Some of their scenarios are set in outer space. They create characters human and non-human alike. The ancients’ understanding of the universe was based on literati imaginings of nature and beauty, whereas the Gelatin Age artists begin from science and futuristic fantasy. The former takes place on the level of ideals and imagination, the latter on the level of science and the unknown. Standing in front of these images, one gets the sense of having arrived in a future world, and feels an unrestrained vitality of form. One can predict these artistic forms will be a portraiture of the future formed by new styles and languages.

3. A Disorderly Globalized Scene

Gelatin Age artists think and practice against the background of contemporary international society. This connection between contemporary Chinese art and the wider world distinguishes them from those who preceded them. For example, in the 1980s, Chinese artists generally got their understanding of artistic theory and trends from publications such as the China Fine Arts Newspaper and Jiangsu Pictorial. At a moment when a shocking amount of information is available, and when anything that happens anywhere in the world can be accessed almost immediately on the Internet, these artists work and develop their practice with an international understanding. Their intellectual leanings also distinguish them from their predecessors— these artists are often interested in new disciplines and advanced technologies such as celestial mechanics, biology, the universe, and other mysterious realms. They are also in love with international politics, economics, and military actions. Their chat rooms are full of disorderly

66 talk about sensitive social subjects like religion, energy, war, crime, democracy, power, humanity, desire, suicide, epidemic, migration, identity, marriage, stocks, wealth management, consumption, advertising, heroes, blogs, games, gossip, football, Super Girl, graffiti, fashion, gender, sexiness, stimulation, drugs, homosexuality, transvestitism, nude shows, and sex changes. They incorporate this knowledge into their Zhong Jialing, <{=000000, 2007, interactive installation. Courtesy of the artist work. The society and life that people and MOCATaipei. once knew exists as a phenomenon and a witness, wherein this generation’s life includes both the universe and the Internet. Their art reflects society and life of the Gelatin Age.

Aside from this, many Gelatin Age artists conduct themselves in the spirit of analysis and criticism undertaken by artists of the 1980s, as well as how life experience was depicted by artists in the 1990s. Gelatin-Agers, as always, are faced with a rapid social transition and its chaos and disorder. Through them, we can again see the conflicts and contradictions brought on by problems in Chinese life and society.

Generally speaking, the Gelatin Age seeks to lay a foundation for the next twenty years of artistic thought and style in China. In the serious and intelligent positions of the Gelatin Age artists, we can feel the beneficial future of art. The power of the Gelatin Age is built on its international insight and its various understandings and perspectives on the artistic past and future of China. They have already stepped onto the springboard and now ready themselves to jump. Thus, their artistic thought has grown to be more pure and individual, their artistic practice more complex and sharp, their artistic debates more wide-ranging and rational. We can imagine them as post-idealists or post-heroes who will propel China’s art to a period of advancing according to its own rhythms. Thus, the Gelatin Age will gradually emerge into both the domestic and international limelight.

The Gelatin Age is one of rich variety and differing dispositions. The loneliness that typifies the gelatin generation is also its freedom. This loneliness is mutually entangled within this era to the point of closure, and yet it is only for this reason that the self can proceed unrestrained. The Gelatin-Agers are incomparably open and self-aware, living against incomparably vast horizons. In this moment, everything is possible, nothing is intolerable, and the self is necessary—even if it is often submerged in commercial culture. Gelatin-Agers still seek out the pure and unaffected, free from historical burden.

The gelatin generation seeks to break free of the expectations of its elders, and yet it lacks a point of reference for self-cultivation. It is adrift in a tide of stimulating information from outside. And yet the Gelatin-Agers live purely. In the context of a diverse contemporary culture, a well-established self and a pure attitude all help in finding an expressive starting point that fits one’s individual style. Some people have in this way reaped unprecedented cultural insight and linguistic possibility.

The Gelatin Age is a necessary phase in humanity’s transcendence of its own spirit. Its impulsivity, like its creativity, is that of humanity itself. The Gelatin Age is precisely this era and has no limit.

67 Notes 1 Legends hold that jelly and jam were introduced to Europe by the returning crusaders and became even more popular in the late Middle Ages. The French term gelée designates a translucent and brittle substance. The history of using cane sugar to make jam and jelly can be traced to the sixteenth-century West Indies, where the Spanish made preserved fruits. 2 See Li Hongying’s Gelatin: Sunshine After the Rain and the Storm. 3 It was said that this plant imported the first gelatin production line from a Japanese company in 1984 or 1987. 4 After gelatin was introduced to China, a wide variety of products appeared. For example, gelatin containers come in different sizes, ranging from 13 to 300 grams. The containers are made of various materials including plastic, PVC, PET, and paper. Gelatin products are made into eye-catching toys and gifts. 5 China is the largest gelatin-production region in the world. The second largest is Japan. The third largest is Taiwan, followed by Southeast Asia, Korea, the United States, the European Union, the Middle East, and Australia. 6 The 2006 trade volume between China and the United States is 26.268 billion U.S. dollars with a surplus of 14.426 billion U.S. dollars. The 2005 trade volume between China and Europe is 21.731 billion U.S. dollars, and that between China and Japan is 18.441 billion dollars. 7 Between 1999 and 2003, China’s GDP rose by 8% per year. According to statistical data, China’s average regional economic growth rate was 9.96%: 10.69% in the 11 provinces and cities in the East; 9.05% in the 8 provinces in central regions; and 8.93% in the 12 provinces, regions, and cities in the West. See Chen Jianxun, “An Analysis of the Mainland China’s Export and Economic Growth,” Special Economic Forum (jing ji zhuan lun) of the Taipei Chinese Economic Research Institute (1992), 141. 8 In 2004 Nike’s share of the Chinese market was about 30%, Adidas’s was about 10%, and Chinese and other foreign companies in total took about 10%. In 2005 the Super Women Singers Competition draw about 400 million viewers. The participants numbered 150,000. In the final, a fifteen-second commercial cost 112,500 RMB. A seven-digit sum was paid to the winner of the first place to appear in the advertisement, and a fee of 200,000 RMB was given to her for her performance in a concert. The TV rating for this show was more than 10%, the highest among all comparable programs. A Google search yields about 1,160,000 related Web sites. See Zhang Fu and Xue Hong, Zhong guo ping min de ling lei gao kao juan sheng (Beijing: Dang dai zhong guo chu ban she, 2006). 9 Sang Biao, ed., Contemporary Children’s Developmental Psychology (Shanghai: Shanghai jiao yu chu ban she, 2006), 352–74. 10 This has various manifestations, including addiction, drug abuse, gambling, and obsession with the Internet. See Cai Yuanyun, “The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the New Generation: A Hong Kong Experience,” Studies of Contemporary Youth 7 (2005), 7–13. 11 The term “iPod generation” does not refer only to the Apple Company’s iPod. It suggests the insecure, pressured, overtaxed, and debt-ridden state of the younger generation, which often results in their loss of interest in life. 12 The term NEET, coined in 1980s in the U.K., refers to the group of people who are not in education, employment, or training. The NEET groups exist not only in the U.K. but also in the U.S. and China. 13 Otaku is a buzz word in Japan that describes women like dried mushroom and mussels. The otaku life style is illustrated by the main character, Hotaru, in Hiura Satoru’s manga Glow of Fireflies (Hotaru no Hikari). The 27-year-old character is not interested in men. In fact, she is not interested in anything. In her sportswear, she spends most of her time lazing about in her apartment, watching baseball games and DVDs and drinking beer. Her motto is, “I’d rather lie around than fool around.” 14 3P refers to PC, Pager, and PlayStation. The life of the 3P generation revolves around high-tech gadgets and the Internet. As a result, they are no longer interested in direct contact with people. Japan has a large 3P population. 15 On February 11, 1980, China’s People’s Daily issued an editorial entitled “The Planned Control over Population Growth is Imperative.” It states, “The planned control over our nation’s population growth and the adjustment of population growth in proportion with economic development are crucial to China’s modernization drive and prosperity. . . . In order to realize this strategic plan, the most pressing task is to focus on the “one child per couple” policy in our family planning work. . . . This is the single best measure to lower the high population growth rate.” On September 25, 1980, the Central Committee of the Communist Party published “On the Control over Our Nation’s Population Growth: A Letter to All the Communist Party Members and Youth League Members.” The letter promoted the “one child per couple” policy and asked “all the Party and Youth League members, especially officials at all levels, to respond to this policy issued by the State Council. In the meantime, they should act as role models and take responsibility to promote this policy and to carefully educate the masses.” In 1982, the Twelfth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party included family planning as one of the nation’s fundamental strategies. In the same year, the revised Constitution stipulates, “The state enforces family planning policy in order to make the population grow in proportion with planned social and economic development. . . . Both the husband and the wife are responsible for family planning.” The Government’s Work Report, issued on June 6, 1983, in the First Session of the Sixth National People’s Congress, states, “In order to improve our production, construction, and living conditions, we need to continue controlling the population growth. This is our national policy and fundamental strategy. We should continuously encourage late marriage and advocate the ’one child per couple‘ policy. We should strictly control the cases of the second child and prevent people from having more than two children.” In the early 1980s, the one child policy was strictly enforced, and privileges were given to single children and their families in daycare, education, medicare, employment, urban housing, and the distribution of land for house construction in the rural areas. The Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China was put into effect at the end of 2001. Article 17 of the Population Law stipulates, “Citizens have the right to reproduction as well as the obligation to practice family planning according to the law.” The Population Law places certain restrictions on citizens’ reproductive rights in terms of the number of children and the interval between childbearings. The state encourages late marriage and late childbearing and advocates the one child per couple policy. Where the requirements specified by laws and regulations are met, plans for a second child, if requested, may be made. Citizens who give birth to babies not in compliance with the law shall pay a social maintenance fee prescribed by law. In sociological and demographical terms, there are five family forms. First is the extended family, which consists of two or more adults from different generations of a family who share a household. It may be a family that includes parents, children, and relatives including married siblings, etc. The extended family is the largest among all the family forms. Second is the nuclear family consisting of only parents and their children. There can be four generations in the same family. Third is the nuclear family consisting only of a mother, father, and their unmarried children. Fourth is the single-parent family in which only one parent in the household raises the children. Fifth is the family with only one person who either is single, divorced, or widowed. 17 Ye Wenzhen and Lin Qingguo, “An Analysis of the Factors and Tendencies in Divorces in Contemporary China,” Population and Economy, issue 3 (1998): 22–28. 18 The divorce rate and marriage rate often rise together in Shanghai.

68 19 Zhang Deqiang, Changing Marriages and Families (Lanzhou: Lanzhou University Press, 1993). 20 The changing patterns of communication and family structures have created many obstacles in interpersonal communication in society. 21 Li Youhui, Li Hua, Wu Ming, and Zhu Wei, “A Study of the Personalities of Children from Divorced Families,” China’s Mental Health Journal 13, no. 5 (1999), 302. 22 In the 1980s, there was a surge of interest in issues of culture. On the one hand, in line with the legacy of Lu Xun and the May 4th movement, Chinese traditional culture had been severely criticized. On the other, people who had lived through the 1960s and 1970s had a nostalgic attachment to China’s cultural traditions. See Ge Zhaoguang’s History and Methodologies of Chan Buddhism Studies. 23 Edgar Morin, The Complexity Theory and Problematics in Education, trans. Chen Yizhuang (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2004), 213–24. 24 The term yin tuo wang can be found in the Avatamsaka Sutra (Hua yan jing), which contains the line, “Like flames of the prairie fire, or like Indra’s net in the heaven.” Yin tuo wang or yin tuo luo wang is derived from the Sanskrit word meaning “Indra’s net.” It was also known as di wang (the emperor’s net) in Chinese. Indra’s net is a vast net that hangs in Indra’s palace. The strands of the net are joined together by shining jewels. When light reflects onto one of the jewels, the same light is reflected and re-reflected endlessly throughout the expanse of the net. 25 New words and phrases are being created at an amazing speed in China. Urbanites, especially young people, are embracing a whole new vocabulary. These phenomena have been viewed as “the third language revolution” in modern China. With the introduction of new things and concepts, thousands of new words and phrases have enriched Chinese vocabulary in the past hundred years, including steam engine, electric light, radio, train, boat, nuclear energy, and isotope, as well as terms from philosophy, social sciences, and natural sciences. Most new words created between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the inception of the reform are associated with politics. In contrast, most new words that are appearing today are related to socioeconomic issues and laws. For example, we have words such as ku (cool), xiu (show), and ke long (clone) from English, liang (pretty) and mai dan (to pay the restaurant bill) from Cantonese, and abbreviations such as WTO, GDP, and CEO, which are used directly in Chinese. There are new words created by the Internet, such as yi mei er (e-mail) and mei mei (pretty girl). There are also words such as an jie (mortgage) and zou xiu (fashion show), which are borrowed from commercial terms used by overseas Chinese or people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. Ma Yongli, “An Observation of the New Words in Modern Chinese,” Journal of the Liaoning School of Administration 1, no. 9 (2007), 171, 175. 26 In 1944 General Zhu De remarked, “our unprecedented achievement is due not only to the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army’s correct political guidelines, strategies, and tactics, but also to all the soldiers’ heroic spirit, which motivated them to fight bravely and endure the hardships.” 27 The generation born in the 1960s forms the backbone of China’s society today. They grew up in a very special environment, which cultivated in them a strong social and historical consciousness. They are group-oriented and have a sense of idealism and responsibility. 28 Pragmatism is an important and complex school of philosophy in the West. The term in this article refers to an attitude toward life in the 1970s that is illustrated by the motto “the useful is the truth.” 29 Currently, Chinese scholars generally agree that Chinese contemporary art began in 1979 when China’s reform and open-door policies were put into effect. 30 Contemporary art scholars in China call the period between the 1989 China/Avant-garde art exhibition and the mid-1990s “Post-89 art.” 31 The uneven economic development in China is reflected primarily by the difference between the Eastern coastal regions and the remote regions in the Midwest. To some extent, the Eastern coastal regions have played a major role in accelerating China’s pace in its entry into the global economy in recent years. The underdeveloped regions in the Midwest benefited very little from this new development. Some regions are facing the danger of being marginalized. Since 1999, when the policy of the development of the West was in effect, China’s economy has been growing rapidly. Against this background, the growth rate of the West was much lower not only than that of the Eastern coastal areas, but also than the national average growth rate. See note 7. Currently, the pattern of economic growth in China has been described as “high in the East, low in the middle, and medium in the West.” Affected by the global economy and China’s economic strategies, the central part of China is losing its vigor. Wei Houkai, “Globalization, National Strategy, and Regional Difference in China,” Journal of the Jiaxing School 17, no. 1 (2005), 91–95, 114. 32 The 210 million migrant workers are emerging as a “class of new workers” in China. Unlike their predecessors, the new generation of migrant workers do not work in the miserable factories. Instead, they focus on acquiring experience and knowledge to become skilled workers. Wu Xueyi, Social Mobility in Contemporary China: Research Report on China’s Social Classes II (Beijing: Beijing Social Science Literature Press, 2004). 33 The sentence comes from Saint Seiya, a Japanese manga series created by Masami Kurumada. It was first published in theWeekly Shonen Jump Magazine from December 1985 to November 1990. Due to its immense popularity, it was remade into an animated TV fiction series. 34 The Matrix (translated into The Hackers’ Empire in mainland China, The Hackers’ Task in Taiwan, and The Twentieth-Century Murderers’ Network in Hong Kong) is the 1999 Hollywood science fiction film directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski and starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. The Hong Kong martial arts expert Yuen Woo-ping served as its action director. In 2003 The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions were released. Recently, Euro-American scientists voted The Matrix their favorite science fiction film along withBlade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix. 35 Atomu, known as Astro Boy in the West (called Tetsu Wan Atomu in Japan, The Unrivalled Little Flying Knight in Hong Kong, and The Little Fighter in Taiwan) originated as a sci-fi comic series by Osamu Tezuka, who is known as “the god of manga.” From 1952 to 1968, it was published in a Japanese comic magazine. The story follows the adventures of a robot boy who fights in order to create a better life for humanity in the twenty-first century. Its Japanese nameア(Atomu) is derived from the English word “atom.” In mainland China and Hong Kong, it is called a tong mu, a translation based on the pronunciation of its Japanese name. It was first broadcast by the Fuji Television Network as a black-and-white 193-episode anime from 1963 to 1966 in Japan. It enjoyed immense popularity; the average audience ratings were 30% in Japan. Later, it was translated into English and broadcast all over the world. In 1980 it was remade into a colour 52-episode anime by the Nippon Television Network Corporation. In the mid-1980s, it was broadcast in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In December 1985, as one of the first imported Japanese amines, its black-and-white version was broadcast by the Central Television Station and gained wide popularity in China. In 2003 it was remade again by the Fuji TV. Fifty episodes of this new version under the name Astro Boy/Tetsu Wan Atomu were broadcast between 2003 and March 28, 2004. In early 2004 TVB jade channel began to broadcast this new version. Between December 28, 2004 and February 13, 2005, China’s Central Television Station broadcast 49 episodes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik/Astro_Boy#TV_series5.

69 The Return of the Individual: A Home Conversation at the Beijing Pavilion Participants: Cao Fei, artist; Chu Yun, artist; Doryun Chong, Assistant Curator, Walker Art Center; Hu Fang, Co-founder, Vitamin Creative Space/curator/writer; Liu Ding, artist; Liu Wei, artist; Kan Xuan, artist; Keith Wallace, editor/independent curator; Pauline J. Yao, independent curator/writer; Zhang Wei, Co-founder, Vitamin Creative Space

November 4, 2007 Vitamin Creative Space, SOHO Building, Beijing

Transcribed by Mo Xiaofei. Chinese text edited by Hu Fang. English translation by Chunyee Li.

Left to right: Pauline J. Yao, Kan Xuan, Chu Yun, Liu Wei. Photo: Hu Fang. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Zhang Wei: The Beijing Pavilion is a space for artists to exchange ideas about the creative process. It’s also an office space for Vitamin Creative. We are hoping to provide a venue for artists to communicate, or to conduct conceptual discourses concerning the artistic process. So “home conversation” will be our ongoing discussion format, and we will invite people to join it regularly.

I should begin by sharing my experience and thoughts with you, hopefully, this conversation will enable us to better understand how artists view the practice of criticism and curating. I’ve been thinking of this question constantly: while we are living here, what measures should we take to better understand our living conditions? If the purpose of art is to address issues of contemporary life, how can art help us approach life as fragmented pieces? Hu Fang’s recent book Pavilion of the Heart’s Insight has inspired me greatly. He shows us the artistic process through an artist’s or an individual’s perspective, not through a hypothetical social scenario. Therefore, we will begin our discussion by exploring the creative process through an artist’s perspective, rather than through established theories, in the hope that we can address some of the misconceptions pertaining to art creation.

Hu Fang: Art creation is not a process that can be over-theorized because it emerges from an individual’s intense experience. I’d like to cite Pavilion of the Heart as an example; this writing project is a collection of fiction written by artists such as Chu Yun, Cao Fei, and others. Since I’m a novelist, I find that novels can better reflect the reality of the world. Fiction approximates truth.

70 So when I read Chu Yun’s “Face People,” I was deeply moved by it. His story really chilled me to the bone. It is about a man who makes a living through selling a piece of his face as a form of food delicacy. The writing is stylistically very similar to the Hong Kong commercial horror movies, both of which focus on portraying life in southern China. The fiction offers us an opening to gain insights on situations surrounding the chaotic state of an individual.

Cao Fei: Is Chu Yun’s writing similar to Ni Kuang’s Wisely ?

Hu Fang: No, Wisely is more in line with the genre of science fiction. What Chu Yun reveals is the chaotic state of an individual. It makes one realize that while our cities have been developing very rapidly, the overall living standard still remains quite low. So Chu Yun’s story makes one immediately think of that kind of fierce survival instinct—anything, including the body, can be used as a means for survival. Cao Fei’s fiction is also really moving; there is one story titled “Woman” in which she describes the sensuality of a married woman. There’s one passage that is particularly fascinating. She is in her cheap sleeping gown. Her legs lay bare, tiny blood veins are vaguely visible on her skin; the chest line of her gown presses against her full breast, drawing one’s attention. But for many men this type of allure no longer seems to exist. Toward the end of the novel, the character suggests to this woman’s husband, “Return to where you belong, because home already encompasses all that you want.” The final line seems to read, “She ages for you, that’s why she is your lao po (wife), and you will also age together with her.”

Cao Fei: My intention was to re-examine familial structures and relations in order to bring a new interpretation to certain emotions.

Hu Fang: This fiction is not an analysis of certain phenomena, nor is it about knowledge transmission; it’s more about conveying an emotional experience, like the warmth of a body. This type of experience can only be conveyed through this type of storytelling, and I can hardly imagine there will be any other creative medium that can replace fiction, just as I find it equally difficult to narrate the story here. The Beijing Pavilion. Photo: Hu Fang. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Cao Fei: Interestingly, I posted the story on my blog, and someone re-posted it on a public forum under a women’s lives section, and the hit rate has been pretty high. The story portrays only something very basic, but for some women, they may be able to find a connection with it and think, “Yes, this is how we live.” It may remind them of the loss of some neglected emotions.

Hu Fang: Actually, Cao Fei has written a series of stories, and there is one titled “Old Man” in which she describes the loneliness of an old man; there’s another one about young, middle-class, professional women who talk about their loneliness and sexual yearning. She has a screenplay called Ears that I think has a special resonance with Chu Yun’s “Face People,” as both works critique the social oppression in China where people are deprived of rights and resources. And they are both a form of critique that no longer points directly at class struggles nor class consciousness. A lot of these critiques are based on the body’s primal responses to these social conditions by using the body as testimony to examine how much these societal problems have been infringing upon it.

71 Cao Fei: By using the body to reflect something really raw and cruel.

Hu Fang: Through the process of collecting these fiction and stories, I tried to understand how these artists convey their observation of the world through portraying instead of telling. On the one hand, I was really surprised by the striking difference displayed between Chu Yun’s writing and his artwork, and, on the other, by how Cao Fei’s writing and her artwork intimately resemble one another. Perhaps through these materials, as well as my own writing, I can achieve a more constructive understanding of art criticism. There’s also something else worth mentioning: Liu Wei does not write. I’ve tried to collect his writings, but he doesn’t have anything to show.

Liu Wei: I’m really not compelled to write.

Zhang Wei: Through creation an artist tries to reveal or make something unfold.

Hu Fang: I think a lot of times creative urges stem from bewilderment. Fiction is a form of revelation, of how life perplexes the subjective “I.” When you portray and construct this bewilderment through words, it takes time for the Taking a break. Left to right: Kan Xuan, Liu Wei, Chu Yun. Photo: Hu Fang. Courtesy of creative process to fully germinate. As experiences and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. perceptions are being recalled and reassembled, the intensity of it all is accumulated and retained over a period of time. Which is to say: it will not be exhausted nor dissipated by the writing process; instead, it will be transmuted into another form. I believe that this process of transmutation is more important than rational reasoning. Be it an exhibition or a piece of writing, it’s really about converting one thing into another.

Liu Wei: Hu Fang, Chu Yun, and I didn’t talk to one another much before. After being in contact more often we started to chat frequently. I’m often taken aback by some of our conversations, because you both use phrases and terms that I have never heard of. Actually, strangely, I’ve discovered that artists from southern China seem to speak from a different mechanism. You can feel the difference when you talk to artists from the North. Really, perhaps in your region people tend to focus on things that are more subtle and delicate, things that can be seen only when you have a sensitivity toward nuance.

Cao Fei: I’m more receptive to Hu Fang’s approach to art criticism and writing. On the one hand, I find his approach poetic, and on the other, it offers a broader spectrum for people to interpret and engage with an artwork. The language of art criticism is generally quite dry and generic— just change the name of the artist and the article can be used again for critiquing other artworks. Also, most of the writing is quite conceptually driven and often begins with broad generalities like “China’s art development is accelerating. . . .” These are really general and help me little in immersing myself in the works of artists whom I want to understand. Hu Fang has suggested an opposite approach, which is to reflect on our society through the viewpoint of an individual or an artist, instead of a particular social group. However, many critics approach an artwork by understanding the general backdrop of contemporary Chinese society, then they support their statement by citing the names of some artists as their entry point to understand China’s current development. Many China-related exhibitions adopt this approach when citing artworks of Chinese artists, but their concern may not necessarily be the artwork itself. This type of analysis and thinking seem to be a product of institutionalized training; perhaps many of these critics

72 were trained formally as professional coordinators or have a doctorate in some discipline. They may have read an extensive amount of theoretical work and learned the standard framework or phrasing for art criticism. I find that this form of writing doesn’t bring much meaning.

Liu Wei: You can say their writing is all nonsense.

Liu Ding: I think there are varied forms of art criticism; for instance, Hu Fang chose a form of writing that is parallel to artistic creation. Some other writing, as Cao Fei has just mentioned, seems to focus on playing with concepts, which I’d say is a more simplistic approach, or even an irresponsible one. Being an art critic or an artist both demand creativity. But the challenge we have in our current development is that creativity is not valued and is often overtaken by power struggles. All I can say is that the situation is really bad, and it’s beyond us to say or change anything.

Liu Wei: Basically there’s no need to read any criticism.

Liu Ding: Yes, that’s true. There’s nothing worth reading.

Hu Fang: Yang Fudong’s recent project Gold—Sarira is planned to be a compilation of twenty-five videos of various lengths that are a part of the Library Project. Each video will explore the existence of the soul. For Yang, this is not an abstract inquiry but an internal one. I could immediately sense this when I first heard about the project. It may take him ten years or even more to finish the whole project. Whether or not he will distill this whole process into something worthwhile—no one knows. But his use of the term Gold—Sarira is really interesting. On the one hand, it asks the question, “If the soul exists, where is the proof?” And on the other hand, through his exploration, the work itself has become a medium “proving” that the soul does exist. I believe this is the key concept where the critics should focus their attention. But then it seems there is a lot of distance between the critics and the artists—both seem to hold a different focus in their thinking.

Zhang Wei: I feel that Yang Fudong’s work is very similar to him as a person. It’s fascinating because his work represents his state of being. He can truly capture the tremors of his perplexity and joy because he searches for them everyday. Talking about his work is actually a form of creation, a form of critique.

Hu Fang: Art criticism and art creation are two different ways to engage with the creative consciousness. It is precisely the tension between the two that makes the whole process interesting.

Liu Wei: Which is to say, if [a certain work] unsettles you, if it challenges everything that you do, it’s a creative state worth pursuing. It’s a nice feeling being provoked.

Chu Yun: It is necessary for artists and art critics to challenge and provoke each other. But it has to happen under the condition that artists and critics should be treated as equals and that they should be capable of independent thinking.

Hu Fang: That artists and critics should be treated as equals is important.

Chu Yun: It’s important for an artist and a critic to hold their creative autonomy and maintain a certain distance; otherwise there won’t be enough room for independent thinking.

73 II.

Keith Wallace: As you have just mentioned, writing is a form of creativity, a way to engage a dialogue with the artists. In fact, we can form a dialogue with everything. Let’s suppose we have a non-theme-based exhibition that does not seek to educate. So people might come to this exhibition in anticipation of being provoked—provocation is intended as the aesthetics of the exhibition. Do you think artists will accept this type of exhibition?

Liu Ding: It takes an outstanding artist to make this type of exhibition work, because an exhibition can give only a partial representation of an artist, instead of showcasing his/her entire collection of works. Not every artist gets to present his/her whole creative process. So artists should be aware of this when they participate in this type of exhibition. Curating is a process where an artist and a curator arrive at mutual understanding.

Zhang Wei: This creative exchange is essential: when the curator introduces to the artist how he/she will contextualize the exhibition, the artist can offer his/her insight to generate a deeper understanding. So an exhibition is actually a result of the mutual understanding achieved between the artist and the curator.

Liu Ding: For me, this mutual understanding is not essential. Curating is about making judgment—it’s all that matters.

Cao Fei: Different exhibition themes can bring about the multi-faceted layers of an artist’s work—this is why I think it’s necessary for exhibitions to have a theme. It’s also the responsibility of an art museum to facilitate public exchanges and to serve the public. It’s part of the duty of a curator to convey to the public what the exhibition is about. Artists may think that it’s not their duty to communicate the message conveyed in an exhibition. It’s true that artists and curators, including the whole museological practice, may have different priorities and concerns. As for myself, I tend to bring my artwork to different exhibitions because they bring me fresh perspectives in viewing my work.

Liu Ding: Cao Fei is referring to an active participation on the part of the museums and the curators. There is also another level crucial to the process of curating: artists need to feel compelled by their curator’s vision, which allows them to view their work from a new perspective.

Cao Fei: But generally I feel that many curators and art critics have only limited knowledge on the subject they write about. They simply extract surface meaning from an artwork. Much of their writing seems to fail to touch, or it falls far behind, the reality an artist tries to present through his/her work—it’s a common phenomenon here. We’re not motivated to read the majority of art criticism produced in China. Why? Because it only scratches the surface of an artwork and tries to make it fit into the description of some existing phenomenon; it doesn’t have the capacity to uncover new territory in an artist’s work.

Liu Wei: Such a letdown. [laughter} A good curator will bring out the best in your work. A bad exhibition can ruin your artistic integrity.

Kan Xuan: An exhibition doesn’t need to be large-scale. A small curatorial team can already bring you new insights through creative exchanges, even though the process may unsettle or challenge you, but, just as Liu Wei said, this tension is going to help us in our artistic endeavour. So it’s more fulfilling to participate in an exhibition of this sort.

74 Doryun Chong: As a curator you don’t need to understand the artist’s entire portfolio, and a certain degree of distance is necessary. This distance is not a result of one’s inadequate understanding of the artist’s work. It simply serves to provide room to contemplate an artwork through different angles and to generate multiple dialogues if we can place it in different contexts. For many artists, this is a meaningful approach and an acceptable one.

Keith Wallace: Sometimes our understanding of an artwork does not need to be clear. But we have to allow an artwork to induce a certain feeling, as this is where a critic’s or a curator’s creativity can spring from.

Hu Fang: The curating instinct is a fascinating thing to follow. Exhibitions that captivate us can never be judged adequately by terms such as “good” or “bad.” Curating is about following an instinct that guides one to a definite point in time where different forces converge to give rise to a creative moment.

III.

Liu Wei: I’ve recently granted quite a few interviews, and everyone has asked about the social responsibility of an artist. It’s an absurd and ridiculous question. It’s not an artist’s duty to preach social ethics. It’s impossible—artists should not be held accountable for such a task. If the purpose of art is to give the public an explanation or an answer to certain social phenomena, then it’s no longer pure art that we are creating. So our motto is “Not responsible.”

Zhang Wei: But I do feel that your work carries a strong sense of social responsibility.

Liu Wei: Social responsibility is not something that can be articulated as a manifesto, nor is it a grand statement for you to recite repeatedly. Art emerges from an organic process. It embodies all your experiences and directly reflects your reality. But if you have to say you’re driven by a sense of social responsibility, or that there are other reasons and motives behind your work, then the whole essence of your art will be morphed into something else.

Chu Yun: I still think Liu Wei’s work embodies the strongest sense of social consciousness. [laughs] He is prone to create works embedded with social messages, like his concern over public architecture, fitness equipment, etc.

Liu Wei: I’m really perplexed by the discrepancy between what I set out to express and what gets expressed in the end. This explains why I don’t write anymore and why I’m reluctant to grant interviews. First of all, my writing reveals my lack of literary talent; what I want to express, what I write, and what I think are entirely out of alignment. So I prefer not to write. And then my speech barely resembles my thought, so I prefer not to speak.

Finally, what I set out to do doesn’t turn out as expected, Left to right: Liu Ding, Doryun Chong, Zhang Wei. Background: Huang Ji. Photo: Hu Fang. so I prefer not to act. [Laughter] Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Cao Fei: I want to add a few words: when an artist participates in an exhibition, it’s an act of partaking in the process of constructing social consciousness. An artist does not need to be aware of this so-called social mission when she/he creates, because once the artwork enters

75 into the public domain for mass viewing, then the work will inevitably become a social inquiry and make its impact. So it’s unnecessary to ask whether an artist should create with a sense of social responsibility.

Zhang Wei: So inevitably artists have to partake in the construction of social consciousness. But then such involvement can be a counter movement, which is to say, when an artist forms a dialogue with a certain social phenomena or realities, such dialogue can be considered an “alternative voice” that poses critical questions. This Sake for drinking (left) and Absolut, an artwork by “counter” movement is perhaps what propels artistic Chu Yun, for viewing. Photo: Hu Fang. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. creation, as it is another form of social involvement.

Liu Wei: I’ve seen a lot of things on the Internet. What scares me most is seeing a person’s CV listed with one’s involvement with, for instance, an animal rights organization, or other experiences that display oneself as the embodiment of a good citizen. This is too scary.

Kan Xuan: Are there many instances like this?

Liu Wei: Oh, yes—instances like: She is such a real lady, all knowing, all loving, and kind. You can find in her all the so-called good qualities. I find this really terrifying.

Chu Yun: Someone who has been indoctrinated to behave a certain way.

Cao Fei: Issues concerning the public intellectuals are heated topics in the Chinese media. The media seems to say that any artwork devoid of social concern will not be considered good art. In other words, if your work has little impact on the contemporary reality, then you’re not a good artist. So much of the mass media’s art criticism comes from an inadequate understanding of contemporary art, let alone speaking about it in depth.

Liu Ding: From ancient times to the present, we have always been instructed to toe the party line. But this is of no concern to us. As individuals, we need to think independently as we create—this is what we should focus on.

Zhang Wei: The sense of social involvement is not as strong in Chinese societies. Yet, it’s interesting that we cannot be exempt from this involvement because when we make art, we are already engaged in some form of a dialogue with society. Such dialogue does have an impact on us.

Liu Ding: . . . and takes root in our subconscious.

Zhang Wei: Liu Wei and Chu Yun both share the same aspiration in their works, which is to imagine life at its most ideal state. Then through this imagined state they form a dialogue with reality. They are not interested in finding solutions, but new possibilities to reveal the everyday existence of individuals.

Liu Ding: Artworks that are considered significant tend to focus on the individual’s state of being; they don’t offer a general outlook on society or a conclusion about certain phenomena. There are many creative mediums available now, so you can see the versatility in contemporary Chinese art and its tendency to promote lateral thinking. Since many of the artworks display a concern for

76 individual existence, one needs to be aware of this conceptual disposition in order to make a better judgment about contemporary Chinese art.

Zhang Wei: This reminds me of Chu Yun—his search for freedom and beauty through his art. If art parallels life, then we should turn to life to pursue our aspirations. When you create . . . or perhaps we should say the creative process is actually a searching process. As for myself, I’ve learned a lot from artists; their works allow me to look at the world and to understand life through different perspectives.

Liu Ding: Life is immense; so is reality. There’s not much that we can do. Artists are actually quite powerless, and many people have chosen this field just to try to make ends meet. What I want to say is that it’s quite pointless to have a discussion on a specific work of art or a specific artist. As art history has shown, anything that can be said has already been said. So can artists offer us new insights for re-examining contemporary life? While creativity and new insights are being valued in the art world, art can only offer us an opening or a small path that leads us to the mind of an individual at certain moments in an exhibition.

Cao Fei: I think art can still provide us new insights. Art history cannot foresee the implications of contemporary life. Each day brings us new changes—be it an issue, a question, or a phenomenon—so even though some works may explore issues or concepts that have already been explored in the past, the meaning generated by these works will be different, as they are set in a contemporary context.

Hu Fang: Art creation is not about answering an historical inquiry or inquiry of any other sort, but it is a response to our restlessness and captures how our mind changes between moments.

Liu Wei: So the question of whether all art should convey a social message is of no concern to us?

Liu Ding: It shouldn’t be an issue at all. In fact, people didn’t take art very seriously in the past.

Zhang Wei: I think a lot of our conceptions come from everyday life.

Kan Xuan: This mutual exchange between artists is one that is most real and direct, because they may share a similar approach in how they conceive their works and tackle conceptual challenges. Only they can understand what other fellow artists experience in their creative process. This explains why I can tell instantly when there’s an element of dishonesty in an artist’s work. Conversations between artists are important and difficult as well.

Zhang Wei: Are there frequent exchanges between artists in Beijing?

Liu Wei: Yes, quite a few. Chu Yun and I always have chats like this.

Hu Fang: Liu Wei’s cell phone is ringing—it must be his friends calling him from the karaoke bar. So let’s end our conversation here.

Notes 1 Hong Kong writer Ni Kuang’s masterpiece, Wai See-lei (Wisely), is a science fiction series.

77 Male Body Fatigue

Lesley Sanderson

Conroy/Sanderson. Meantime, video projection, 2004. Photo by Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Courtesy of the artists.

ome of the most iconic images in recent contemporary art have come from the documentary photographs of Chinese performance artists of mainland China. My Sresponse to the photographs of these performances comes from the particular position of a British-based artist practicing in the West. Like the majority of other viewers of seminal Chinese performances, I have access to most of these works only through documentary evidence. My interest arises out of shared themes that have concerned my own artistic practice for the past two decades, although my approach is very different. As a Chinese-British artist, I have spent the last twenty-three years engaged with making art that takes the Chinese female figure as its central concern. My particular engagement has been in how the Chinese female body might convey readings of power or vulnerability and the role that the gaze and spectatorship plays within the construction of these meanings.

Although I am not a performance artist, all my work involves myself working performatively in order to construct pieces where the subject (or subjects) perform scenarios of agency or its lack. My own art generally embodies some negotiation of power between the viewer and the viewed. For the past ten years I have worked collaboratively with the British artist, Neil Conroy, in order to question and confound readings of gender and race.

78 It is from this context that I reflect on the images of performances of an extreme nature that arose out of China in the 1990s, examining them through the filter of race and gender. My intention is to examine these performances generally rather than specifically, and to offer a critique of this significant and radical way of depicting the Chinese subject. It is striking that writing on performance art coming out of China seldom touches on the discourses of race, gender, class and sexuality, with the possible exception of Ma Liuming, whose naked, feminized male body in the Fen-Ma Liuming series has been written about in the West. I am interested in how the reading of these works changes when it travels across cultural boundaries and how its reception in the West points to a continued “Otherization” of the Chinese body. When such an Otherization is combined with a particular view of masculinity, dominated by cruelty and endurance, there is a continuation of traditional perceptions of the Chinese subject held by the West.

China in the 1990s saw an increase in artists who used their bodies as a way of commenting on their lives in a culture that was changing at an unprecedented pace; a culture where one’s position in society and all aspects of life were being challenged. Performance artists used their bodies as a way of exploring the personal in relation to the social, commenting on the extreme political climate and voicing a critical position within Chinese society. What was important was the link between the experience of the body in culture and the environment. It was in the late 1990s that performance art saw a particular emphasis on the body experiencing cruelty and endurance as a commentary on the repressive ideology experienced in China. Thomas Berghuis comments that, “Perhaps these cruel social and political situations can be traced back to what the Chinese critic Wang Nanming has called the ‘historical tradition of ruffianism’ in China: ‘that is to say, the tradition of continuing to violate human rights in a society that has no human rights in the first place.’”1

Peng Yu and Sun Yuan and others have spoken about cruelty being a way of conduct for the Chinese. In an interview with Ai Weiwei, Sun Yuan speaks about an attitude to violence in China, “Chinese people all share this tendency towards violence, so it’s easy to find common ground. . . . I think this kind of violence, especially in China, is quite common. It seems like these disgusting things don’t happen overseas. . . . This kind of violence is easily understood to Chinese people, but foreigners think it is hard to understand.” Peng Yu adds, “I think in foreign countries violence is hidden under humanism. Maybe their violence is buried deeper, and it’s worse. It won’t be as easy to read as that in China.”2

These comments demonstrate how different cultures relate differently to cruelty and the violation of the body. Sun Yuan’s comment foregrounds cruelty as a normal part of life in China, which also relates to Wang Nanming’s comment on the ruffian, a cruel and brutal figure that the Chinese are familiar with. Underlying Wang’s remark concerning the lack of human rights in China is the possibility of a Chinese philosophical attitude towards the body, which deviates from popular Western notions of personal freedom and morality based on a humanist tradition. By acknowledging that violence also occurs elsewhere, Peng Yu insinuates that it is not only a characteristic of Chinese people; rather, it is dealt with differently by other societies, who deny and conceal it.

According to Berghuis, for the Chinese performance artist the physical and mental aspects of the self are understood as being equal parts of the whole, both mind and body requiring the other; this whole is never seen as divorced from its social context. He calls this the “lived body,” or the entirety of a person as the social, cultural, and physical environment shapes him or her. It is based on the

79 Yang Zhichao, Planting Grass, 2000, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Chinese notion of the “body as process, one that brings our corporeal existence into contact with the entire universe.”3 This is different from the mind/body separation of Cartesian dualism more familiar in the West. In this light these performances can be seen as an exploration of the cycles of life and death, with pain and cruelty a part of the dynamic.

In speaking about extreme performance art, Yang Zhichao has said, “spiritual numbness is also a form of violence.”4 He goes on to talk about his performance Planting Grass, where an assistant planted pieces of grass onto his back without local anaesthetic: “I remember that at the live performance of Planting Grass a reporter asked, ‘are you personally really suffering so much?’ To tell you the truth, not only was I not suffering, on the contrary, I felt at peace with my life. What I originally expressed was the sense of responsibility and endurance that we in our lives should not try to avoid as we develop, and also as well as a sense of hope in life. What life has not gone through blood and the pain of labour? In a senseless atmosphere where everyone is temporarily laughing and joking, this method of seeking extremes definitely has the effect of sobering people up. You certainly can’t let a whole nation of people go around grinning like idiots.”5

Yang appears to be speaking about the nobleness of suffering and the way that, through enduring pain, one is better equipped to understand the human condition, as if pain were a window onto transcendency. His quote suggests that he privileges suffering over and above the transience and superficiality of pleasure. He understands that violence has the capacity to stir the audience and by implication to jolt a wider audience out of complacency. The point is that images of cruelty are by nature direct; they communicate an act at a primal level. Yang recognizes this when he speaks about the ability for the extreme to cut through the trivial and sober up, and therefore to reveal things as they are.

Many photographs of performances from China haunt and unsettle, and the written accounts of the work often provide uncomfortable reading. In the West, I think we are uncertain how to read them, which stems from our different philosophical traditions. It would seem obvious that the international art world might not be exposed adequately to the ideological motivations of performances that use cruelty or the philosophical underpinnings that are deeply embedded in the Chinese psyche. Without these tools, how are we to read photographs of the performances?

80 Zhang Huan, 25mm Threading Steel, 1995, performance, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

I’d suggest that a Western reading is affected by its legacy of Western humanism, Christian iconography, and colonial history.

Chinese performance artists are very aware of the general interest in images of violence. They understand the visuality of their enactments and are adept at presenting themselves in front of an audience (whether actual or secondary) in a meaningful if often contentious manner. They understand that what they are engaged in is spectacle, something being watched and consumed by the live audience as well as the viewer of the photograph. These artists have placed great importance on photographic documentation of their performances. The photograph acts as a witness to a historical moment, a re-presentation of the political and social changes happening in China articulated through the body of the performing artist. The photograph records what has previously occurred, which is viewed later by another audience that might have a different but as significant a relationship with the work as the viewer of the live event. The photographs are crystallized and made iconic through the photographer’s editing. What happens when these photographs travel, how are they interpreted elsewhere? Readings are culturally specific. The process of translating what is unknown results in a shift of meaning and the possibility that the photograph can be read in unintended ways.

Susan Sontag writes about how photographs objectify their subjects and turn people into representations that can be possessed. She writes about how the most graphic representations of bodies in distress are those that seem most foreign. “The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. . . . This journalistic custom inherits the centuries-old practice of exhibiting exotic—that is, colonized—human beings.” She continues, “for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.”6

Although the motivation for making these images of performance differs from that of a photojournalist taking photographs of war, the reception that these performance photographs receive in the West is similar. The photograph objectifies, and especially so if the subject is Other and regarded “only to be seen.” The West is used to being shown images of people from exotic lands engaged with acts that “offend” through displays of violence and savagery. There is a certain

81 amount of pleasure in seeing images of a barbarous nature, for it is an acknowledgement of the West’s supposed “civilized” and therefore superior status. The Chinese performance artists who privilege the photography of their work are unwittingly tapping into our habit of seeing. We might have some knowledge that these performances are concerned with the individual in relation to a particular social and political context, but largely they reiterate notions of the Other.

Unlike Chinese artists in the diaspora, for artists from China the exploration of being Other appears to have little relevance, as Lin Yilin articulates in an interview with Ai Weiwei. Lin says that “the majority of artists in China have not felt the crisis of existence in the position of the Other.”7

It is the West that postulates as Other anyone who is at odds from Western institutions. Whilst this might not occur within China, when the Chinese subject, or its He Yunchang, Eyesight Test, 2003, performance, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. representation, is viewed in the West, racially distinctive features clearly mark the body. Through classifying those that deviate from the master narrative as Other, the West constructs and maintains its power structures. The continued exoticization of the unknown is in keeping with a historical stereotyping of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril of imperialist nightmares, with the corresponding associations of violence and menace. Without the original context of how to view these performance works, the photographs become detached from their original cultural context and motivation, which means that the West becomes disconnected from a deeper understanding of the works. The Western audience views Chineseness simultaneously with the cruelty of the act depicted, and the embodiment of cruelty becomes a motif and another way of classifying, Othering, and exoticizing the body. This reception perpetuates the classification of images as Other within the Orientalist tradition. In this way the artists perform a racialized Chineseness in relation to Orientalist models of the savage.

The West’s fascination with these photographs and accounts of extreme performances might well be interpreted as an insidious way of restating superiority and power over those less “civilized.” Alternatively, it could be an attempt to delve into the interiority of the self to understand the stranger or Other within ourselves. Julia Kristeva writes about how the Other is a construction of that which we do not understand and fear within ourselves. We try to deny a part of ourselves that we do not understand or want to accept. We name someone Other when we find him or her threatening, but actually it is a part of ourselves that we have difficulty coming to terms with. For Kristeva, difference is an internal condition. With Kristeva in mind, looking at images of performances that use violence and extremes can be understood as a way of looking at a part of ourselves that we are troubled with because it signifies cruelty and the uncivilized—for example, behaviour that we associate with deviance, criminality, or immorality, or as symptomatic of systems and communities that have broken down. Perhaps we learn that these artists are willing to examine themselves, including their demons, in a manner that we in the West avoid.

82 He Yunchang, Casting, 2004, performance, Tokyo Art Projects, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

It is clear that the majority of Chinese performance artists (and artists generally) who receive national and international recognition are male. Gender as a critical tool to understand this work is noticeable for its absence. Borrowing from feminist theory dealing with the gaze, the Chinese body is here fetishized and objectified for the gaze to posses. Here, the male body is subjected to acts that he heroically endures. The male body, whether buried in earth, encased in concrete, suspended from the ceiling, branded, or beaten, is made vulnerable by these self-inflicted torments. The central point of the performance is the artist’s ability to withstand and endure such onslaughts to the body and to be able to walk away from them after the event. The performance is a symbolic enactment of pain and suffering. It is not a genuine situation of the actual violation of one body by another; rather, it is voluntary and self-inflicted. The value of the artistic gesture is in the fact that the artist chooses to put himself through the pain. This signals the authenticity of his intention and the artist’s need to comment on humanity, its suffering, and the lack of agency within real life situations. We interpret the willingness of the artist to take on the burden of suffering within the symbolic act of the performance as a heroic and significant act. It claims the potential of the individual’s agency to stand apart from the collective and demonstrate one’s accountability.

Applying Judith Butler’s theory that gender is a process and that we perform our gender rather than it being a biological given, we can see in these performances that masculinity is being played out and “performed.” The emphasis on physical strength is historically part of Chinese patriarchal culture, which is here resoundingly manifested. Depictions of cruelty and the figure suffering continue the trope of the masculine by exaggerating the attributes of masculinity through enactments of strength.

The performances privilege masculine extreme acts as a means of artistic articulation and fetishize the self-image to a point of the pornographic. The photographs are of fit, able, and lean naked or partially naked male bodies that we are able to view voyeuristically, to consume and enjoy.

83 He Chengyao, 99 Needles, 2002, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

The bodies are seen in acts of self-violation, potentially exaggerating the pornographic reading. Added to this, they are also Chinese male bodies that are engaged in cruel acts. It is the adding of the figure of the cruel Chinese to the male figure that allows the perpetuation of the stereotype of the unruly, uncivilized Other. Although the male figure might be presented as vulnerable and passively taking on acts bestowed onto his body, his endurance is an active resistance to the conditions being measured out to him. They differ from the passivity of the traditional female figure within Western representation, for he is in control of his body, the performance, and its parameters, and, to a large extent, the photographic document.

84 Performance artists see themselves as playing a central role in the formation of a modern China. Their works challenge moral codes of behaviour in society by making evident the line between civility and barbarism. Their works are an embodiment of the conflicts posed by the political and social situation that they find themselves in. But in the course of circulating to different audiences, particularly in the West, their works can encounter other readings. Whilst these international audiences acknowledge the political imperative to comment and the ideological content of these works, they can be differently interpreted because of Western readings of race and gender.

The problem facing any Chinese artist who uses him- or herself as subject or object is complex, because the work’s reception will often be racialized internationally. Those exhibiting abroad should consider this, even if they do not deal with it directly. I believe that “cruel” is too easily employed as a way of categorizing and exoticizing the Chinese male subject.

It seems to me that there are more female examples in contemporary Chinese literature than in the Chinese visual arts. We hear about the Chinese female protagonist through biographies and literary narratives, whereas there is a relative absence of female perspective within the visual arts. It is undoubted that female artists make a valuable contribution, and one thinks of He Chengyao, Kan Xuan, Cao Fei, Chen Lingyang and others, but they are relatively small in number and rarely reach the heights of critical acclaim and exposure awarded to their male counterparts. I think it is problematic that we are exposed to such a patriarchal view, especially when these and other female positions have not been given proper space and support. We are currently witnessing an increase of visibility of the Chinese body within the international art world, but this is not necessarily a good thing if those representations reflect a homogenous and one-dimensional view of Chinese subjectivity. Although I find much of this performance work genuinely engaging and challenging, I believe we are presented with a limited view of masculinity, which continues a patriarchal legacy rather than calling it into question. There seems to be a lack of nuance in relation to how gender is being addressed, even a lack of awareness that masculinity is always implicit within the work when the male artist employs his own body.

Is this the death of the vitality of these types of performance works in China? Shu Yang suggests this when he says, “the emergence of extreme tendencies in performance art was in some respects a sign that performance art’s creativity had reached a dead end.”8 If this is so, one hopes that from this ending will arise a multiplicity of Chinese subject positions that include varying models of masculinity and, crucially, equal space for female subjectivity.

Notes 1 Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2006), 115. I have found Thomas Berghuis’s research particularly useful in understanding the historical trajectory of performance as well as discovering a range of ways of interpreting the phenomena of cruelty within it. 2 Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, “Interview with Ai Weiwei,” Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA), 1998–2002 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2002), 23–24. 3 Berghuis, 37. 4 Yang Zhichao emailed the author the following details about the Planting Grass performance: “Time and Place of Performance: At 10:00 a.m. on 5 November 2000, second floor of No. 1133, Suzhou Road, Shanghai where Fuck off was on show. I made an operation platform, 2000 x 800 x 780 mm, where an operating scalpel was incised into my left scapula by a surgeon. Without any anesthesia, the scalpel made two cuts, 1 centimeter deep and 1 centimeter wide. Afterwards, grass picked at the banks of the Suzhou River was planted into the two cuts. The performance lasted for 45 minutes.” 5 Yang Zhichao, Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998–2002, 70–72. 6 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 63–65. 7 Lin Yilin, “Interview with Ai Weiwei,” Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998–2002, 121. 8 Shu Yang, “Performance Art and Live Art in China. Why do ‘Live Art’ in China?” in China Live: Reflections on Contemporary Performance Art (United Kingdom: Chinese Arts Centre, 2005), 18.

85 Mahjong 2007 at PERFORMA07 Interview with He Yunchang New York, November 14, 2008 Rachel Lois Clapham

He Yunchang, Mahjong 2007. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA and Chambers Fine Art.

eijing-based artist He Yunchang is arguably among the leading performance artists currently working in China. Over the last eleven years, he has created a series of unique Band discrete solo performances in which he has placed exceptional physical demands upon himself both in terms of his strength and endurance. For the performance festival PERFORMA07, in New York City, He Yunchang devised a unique version of mahjong, based on the ancient popular Chinese game, using over one hundred mahjong “tiles” made from large cement bricks. The artist played this game with various audience members for four hours in New York’s Washington Square Park.

Rachel Lois Clapham: How did Mahjong 2007 come about?

He Yunchang: I thought of the idea two to three years ago but my gallery, Chambers Fine Art, set it up with PERFORMA for 2007. People usually play mahjong recreationally, but I wanted to subvert it, turn it into something else and make it physically oppressive. My version of the game is quite cruel; that’s what the heavy bricks are about. I like the idea of playing it for a long time in the hot sun or in the middle of winter, like here in New York. But what’s important is playing the game with the audience rather than the game itself. My previous performances have been dangerous, solitary, or censored, whereas in Mahjong 2007 it was important that I was able to have the audience in the space with me and to interact with them. My relationship with the audience in Mahjong 2007 is also quite friendly—unlike the wrestling game I played in Wrestling: One and One Hundred, of 2001, where the relationship with the audience was definitely tense and antagonistic. People really wanted to hurt me and to win! In Mahjong 2007 the process of playing, the time we spend playing, is much more important than winning the game.

Rachel Lois Clapham: Why did you perform Mahjong 2007 in Washington Square?

He Yunchang: Because it’s a public space. Some people go ice skating, some people eat meals there, I chose to play my version of mahjong. It could have been anywhere public, really. I was ideally looking for somewhere a bit warmer!

Rachel Lois Clapham: You wanted to be warmer. You also ended the performance forty- five minutes early. Does this mean perseverance or physical endurance are less important to you in Mahjong 2007 than in other previous works?

He Yunchang: Physical endurance is still a factor, it’s just that there were logistical problems with Mahjong 2007. I ended the work early because it was cold and raining, but more so because several of the people could not play the game properly, which really affected the piece. The police also came part way through Mahjong 2007 and made me put my clothes He Yunchang, Mahjong 2007. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of on, which also interrupted the performance. PERFORMA and Chambers Fine Art. The nakedness was important. I have always performed naked so I was naked whilst playing Mahjong 2007—for continuity—but I also think nudity makes the performance more pure, with fewer distractions. Being exposed to the elements when naked was also a way of increasing the magnitude of what was happening in Mahjong 2007; it made the game a starker contrast to the wet and the cold.

Rachel Lois Clapham: Do you consider Mahjong 2007 a success even though you were interrupted by the police and stopped early because it was cold and raining?

He Yunchang: Yes. It is a success because I completed the performance. I carried it out. It is out of my control whether the police stop the work; they have guns and I don’t! Carrying out my work in the face of those elements does have a connected interaction with those chance elements. But they are also forces that are out of my control and so not central to the work’s success.

Rachel Lois Clapham: Is Mahjong 2007 a new side to your work, a softer side, in which testing your physical and mental limits is less important?

He Yunchang: It’s true that I often pitch my body and my individual will in contrast to external forces (harsh weather, fast moving water, poured concrete) or chance elements, like being

87 interrupted by the police—that is important in my work. But in some pieces I vary the concept and lessen those elements. Often, like in Mahjong 2007, the process itself is as important as fighting against those forces, whether they are outside (natural forces or instigated by others), or from within myself (my own endurance against my own body or will). In that way, the process and act of completion, following through with the act of performance, expressing it physically with the audience is key, in spite of any logistical, natural, or chance factors He Yunchang, Mahjong 2007. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA and Chambers Fine Art. that may stop or hinder the work in some way.

Rachel Lois Clapham: How would you feel if someone walked through the park, saw the game, and didn’t realize Mahjong 2007 was a performance or something original?

He Yunchang: I wouldn’t mind at all, that would be wonderful! My work is very ordinary looking. I always use the simplest materials in order to create the largest imaginary space. Even with simple, everyday gestures and materials you can make work of great magnitude and get the essence of something important. Also, it wouldn’t matter to me if some people thought what I was doing wasn’t art, or was pointless. In my nine-month tour of the U.K. in 2006, Touring Great Britain with Rock, I often had only two or three people watching me and sometimes in China I don’t have any audience at all, so I don’t necessarily think about who will witness or understand the work. My feeling is that if some people pass by Mahjong 2007 and don’t understand what they see, give them one hundred days and they can have a think about it.

Rachel Lois Clapham: Is it true that your work is interrupted more often here in the U.S. than in China?

He Yunchang: I have never actually been “caught” doing a performance in China, but have been arrested in the U.S. a few times. My work is under the radar of the authorities in China because of the locations and spaces I perform in—often in private enclosed gallery spaces or outside in the remote countryside. But there are big differences too: my performance work is not so easy to do in China because nudity is not permitted. That’s why I waited to do Mahjong 2007 here in New York. Chinese audiences don’t have the general level of understanding about art, or the same generosity or openness to understand or interact with different aspects of art. For instance, a lot of people in China still don’t consider what I do as art, and there is more financial support and artistic, institutional, frameworks outside China for artists doing performance. That doesn’t mean performance doesn’t happen in China. There are spaces in which you can perform, and perform nude, but for big projects like Touring Great Britain with Rock, it is much more conceivable outside China.

Rachel Lois Clapham: When pitching your individual will or mental limits against that of your own physical body, do you see that separation of those two elements as a separation of self, as something political in your work?

He Yunchang: For most people the intellect and body operate in tandem, but sometimes the intellect is superior. Under normal conditions we are used to what the body and intellect can do together, but under extreme situations sometimes the body takes over to do amazing things as well.

88 I feel that China is a very complex society, one in which it is important to use your body and your intellect so you can stop and face reality. Highlighting the body in this way, as separate, is also important because, historically, Chinese people have not endowed the physical body with value; rather, they have valued the spirit of the Chinese people as a collective. Contemporary China is much more individualistic in its thinking, so it’s a pull between the two. By putting pressure on an idea about myself, my intellect, and my own body, I can make it into something much larger.

Rachel Lois Clapham: Do you foresee a time when political, body-based, or nude performances will be shown alongside other contemporary visual art forms in China?

He Yunchang: Not in the short term, no.

Rachel Lois Clapham: What has been the most lasting effect of your performance work to date—mentally, He Yunchang, Mahjong 2007. Photo: Paula Court. physically, or emotionally? Courtesy of PERFORMA and Chambers Fine Art.

He Yunchang: It is my health that has suffered the most because my body has been in danger so many times. In Buffalo in 2005, as part of the exhibition The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, I did a performance where I stood in the Niagara river near Niagara Falls and the police came; they were worried and took me straight to hospital. The doctor told me my kidneys had failed because my body was so cold from being submerged in the freezing water. In general, I am also getting increasingly grumpy and short tempered. Despite all this I think the most valuable contribution I can make is to use my body to express ideas and give other people imagination. That is more important than my health. I have also derived much pleasure and enjoyment from my performances over the years.

Rachel Lois Clapham: What project are you planning next?

He Yunchang: I’m planning to do something for 2008 in China that involves my mother and it will be three months long. It’s going to be great. I can’t do it in the U.K. or the U.S. as the insurance costs will be too high. I can’t say anymore about it; all will be revealed in due course.

Rachel Lois Clapham: Is there anything you want to ask me?

He Yunchang: Can you please make PERFORMA happen earlier in the year next time, so it’s not so cold? October and November are too cold in New York.

Rachel Lois Clapham: I’ll do my best. [laughs]

Previously published at http://07.performa-arts.org/performa_live.php.

89 Neatly Arranged Freedom, Present Absences, Dislocated Contexts, and Signs of Our Times: Some Readings of Dai Guangyu’s Art

Maya Kóvskaya

hrough his critical writings, curatorial projects, and, most of all, through his socially engaged art, Dai Guangyu has been an active contributor to the Chinese contemporary Tart world for more than two decades. It is impossible in the short space of this essay to do justice to the breadth and depth of this artist’s rich career and body of work. Rather than attempting encyclopedic coverage of his artwork, I will offer an analytical approach to help reveal the powerful underlying connections among Dai Guangyu’s aesthetic, conceptual, and social preoccupations. Indeed, it is his staunch and passionate social conscience, which is linked to his conceptual and philosophical concerns, that undergirds and lends substance to his visual, linguistic, and aesthetic explorations.

From the perspective of materials, ink—the sort used in shuimo traditional ink wash painting— has an elemental presence in much of Dai Guangyu's work. Other objects that frequently appear in his pieces include Chinese vases or vats (often containing black ink), hills of flour (always white), attire stained with black or white ink, and white face make-up or masks, as well as ropes and other means of tying up and suspending the inverted human body in the air. In terms of expressive language and symbolic coding, we find his work is rife with apparent binaries and dichotomies that he ruptures, blurs, confuses, and calls into question; black/white, bad/good, up/ down, concealed/revealed, are among the most prominent. His work engages these binaries and dichotomies in ways that push us to think past this particular either-or mode of reasoning, and he calls into question simplistic conceptualizations of the world as seen through the filter of these dyadic tropes.

If we take these elements as the base from which to evaluate Dai Guangyu’s work, we would find his works interesting, even visually arresting. But it is not until we take his works and position them in their appropriate worldly contexts and explore an understanding of the artist’s engaged, socially conscious stance, that their genuine significance and power is fully evoked. Indeed, it is against larger cultural, political, historical, and ecological backdrops that the core issues in Dai Guangyu’s work truly come to the fore.

Rather than perpetuating the either/or binary logic of the dichotomy, the artist’s work offers what polymath philosopher, logician, and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce called a "dialogical" model of thinking, rooted in the synergy of a semiotic "trichotomy." If a dichotomy is the division of something into two mutually exclusive parts, a trichotomy liberates us from the rigidity of binaries, for it is a division into more than two parts that often overlap and are not mutually exclusive.

Using Peirce's semiotic trichotomy—the division of the sign into three modalities of signification: the symbolic, the iconic, and the indexical—we can tease apart different modes of meaning- making and bring the seemingly disparate elements of the visual, the conceptual, and the social into a dialogical relationship that gets us beyond simplistic analytical binaries and encompasses the relationship between language, the world, and the thinking mind. This relationship includes the processes of reception, interpretation, and investment of meaning into the connections

90 Dai Guangyu, Floating Object, 2006, performance, Germany. Courtesy of the artist. between the “signs” the artist produces, their “objects,” and their “interpretants,” always with respect to some specific “ground” or mode of meaning. In Peirce’s own words:

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea. This idea is the “ground of the representamen.” “Idea” is meant in the sense of a thought that has continuity, or like content, either in traveling between people or in the thinking of one person’s mind, or in memory.1

91 Dai Guangyu, Picturesque Landscape, 2006, performance, Germany. Courtesy of the artist.

The Peircian semiotic system, then, is inherently open, triadic, and dialogical, rather than dyadic and logically syllogistic, like other semiotic systems, such as Saussure’s, which treat the sign as a relationship between signifier and signified without reference to either an indexical ground/ referential context or the process of the intepretance of the thinking mind. Thus, the difference between the two is critical. In dyadic semiotic and logical systems, only one valid argument or conclusion can be inferred from two premises. As a richer mode of reasoning, the dialogical differs from logical syllogism in that each premise has at least two alternate conclusions, each of which can function as the premise for further argument, which then has at least two more alternate conclusions, and so on, ad infinitum.

In this way, every interpretant can function as a sign to subsequent interpretants because every interpretant is itself also a representation, thus forming a honeycomb-like chain of potentially infinite signification from the dialogical triad. Signs shift their modes of meaning-making depending on how we use them, and signifiers shift their significations when we use them against different indexical grounds or referential contexts within which they make particular sense.

92 So what are the main signs or “representamen” in Dai Guangyu’s art? What is the background against which Dai Guangyu situates these in his works? Where does the role of “interpretance” and the thinking mind come into play in his conceptual sign systems?

To answer these questions, we must move from the abstract to the concrete, and from the general to the particular, for meaning is made relationally. Because of the prevalence of indexical signs in Dai Guangyu’s work—such as the way, for example, smoke is an index of fire, or red litmus is of acid, as opposed to symbolic signs that signify via conventional associations, such as a heart symbolizing “love,” or iconic signs that signify via a Dai Guangyu, Landscape, lnk, lce, 2004, outdoor artwork, Germany. Courtesy of the artist. resemblance, such as a map signifying a territorial domain or network of roads)—we will pay extra attention to the changing indexical grounds against which various signs take on their particular, and varying, meanings.

To understand the role played by ink in Dai Guangyu’s work, for example, it is necessary to consider ink not merely as artistic medium but as a set of complex relations to various social, historical, and cultural grounds, against which a variety of possible significations becomes evident. How can we conceive of ink apart from the context of its history? And yet by sundering ink from the traditional historical contexts of its use and removing it from Dai Guangyu, Landscape, lnk, lce, 2004, outdoor its traditional indexical grounds to open up space artwork, Germany. Courtesy of the artist. for constituting its meaning by rendering it as pure materiality, Dai Guangyu implicitly foregrounds the present absence of ink’s historical function and meaning and in doing so pushes us to consider who and what we have become in our relationship to the past.

What can his dialogical rethinking of ink tell us about ourselves and our lives today? The meanings of ink in these works are as varied as their uses. Without the ink used in calligraphy, landscape painting, and even the basic writing of words by the literate classes, Chinese traditional culture would be unrecognizable. The connection between the level of a person’s cultivation and self- mastery and that person’s literacy and refinement in the various uses of ink is an ancient one that until held sway in Chinese society for thousands of years. In the modern era, the power of the written word has certainly persisted in the form of canonical texts, maxims, slogans, and blackboard “newspapers” where the latest official slogans or memoranda are written for the benefit of the neighborhood, as well as the mass print media. But the role that ink (both shui mo and mo shui) once played as a medium for the practice of self-cultivation and metaphorical litmus test of one’s refinement has gradually receded from the hegemonic public consciousness. As new forms of

93 Dai Guangyu, Absorbing—Being Absorbed, 1999, Dai Guangyu, Incontinence, 2005, performance at 798, Beijing. performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Courtesy of the artist. self-cultivation (such as shopping) and new standards of value (such as property ownership and self-definition through brands and possessions) emerge triumphant along with market reform in the new order of things, a whole new mentality accompanies them.

Dai Guangyu frequently uses ink in performances, installations, and landscape art to make a variety of conceptual and aesthetic points that emerge most clearly against the grounds of the works’ contexts. He uses ink that stains and spreads in unpredictable ways, ink that has the capacity to reveal both prowess and impotence, ink than can be concealed only so long as the vessel that contains it does not break (and break it will on the count of 64—a number that, when read as two individual digits, represents a month and a day of watershed significance for contemporary China). Ink is ingested, spat out, splattered on the body, splashed across the room, and even leaked from his dangling pant leg like the urine of an incontinent man. The artist seems to ask: What have we become? In other performances, such as Floating Object and Picturesque Landscape (both from 2006), the ink-splattered body has become a part of the landscape itself, as Dai Guangyu floats like a dead man in a lake fringed by bamboo or hovers in icy water, half-blinded by the ink dripping into his eyes.

In Dai Guangyu’s Landscape, Ink, Ice from 2004, the artist inscribes with black ink the calligraphic characters for “landscape”—literally “mountains and water”—onto the freezing surface of a lake. As the ink is absorbed within the frigid carapace of this icy mirror, this symbol of the essence of Chinese civilization is locked beneath the surface: beautiful, frozen, ossified, and just beyond reach. Over time, natural processes slowly erode and reclaim this symbol of civilization until all that is left is a blurry smudge where characters were once visible. This juxtapositon seems to ask: How much have we changed? Is the essence of our civilization now frozen and just out of reach, or has it already degraded into an illegible blob?

If the water in the work cited above is an indexical sign and metonym for “nature” taking its revenge on “civilization,” the polyvalence of indexical signs and the role of interpretance is illustrated once more in an earlier public art installation, Long Abandoned Water Quotas (1995).

94 In this project, water also reclaims human artifacts, in this case photographs of local Chengdu residents, but the indexical ground against which water functions as a sign or "representamen" is fundamentally different. Placing the photographs of local residents in pans filled with water from the nearby river, Dai Guangyu generated a dialogue about water pollution and the effects of environmental destruction. As days passed, people watched their own images grow murkier and eventually degrade until they became unrecognizable in the water. Far from signifying the power of nature, in this work water is an indexical sign of toxicity in the form of the pollution that humans create, demonstrating our potential erasure through the destruction of our ecosystem and natural resources.

A look at another of Dai Guangyu's most important works offers an additional example of how interpretance and indexical grounding (or shifts) create meaning. In the performance piece Missing (sometimes translated as Gone Astray), filmed in the early summer of 1999, on a date of critical historical significance familiar to anyone aware of the transformation and tragic events in China that took place in 1989, the artist uses the visual devices of the mask, the uniform, and the gesture, rather than ink, to make his point. He and a participant dress in black, don identical masks, and make their way from the center of the city toward the periphery. They walk, take public transportation, buy newspapers, and sit around reading the day’s news before going on to a movie theatre on the outskirts of town. Throughout the course of the day, they frequently repeat this familiar repertoire of gestures—a type of body language that is simultaneously familiar and bizarre because the gestures “make sense” only against the background of certain institutions, scenarios, and routinized social practices, and that background is missing because these gestures are performed out of context.

What are these gestures, and why do they matter? The two identically dressed and masked men raise their hands, applaud, and cringe at random intervals. On the bus, on the street, and in the movie theater, with porn and B-movies blaring in the background, these gestures, sundered from their usual contexts, seem hollow, absurd, and meaningless. Yet it is precisely this removal of context (much like the sundering of ink from its traditional contexts in order to bring our attention back to contexts and concomitant meanings that have now grown sterile and disconnected from contemporary life) that allows the full meaning of the gesture, replete with its unthinking automaticity, to manifest itself. When we think about the absent “ground” against which these gestures make sense, for example, we find school rooms, board meetings, committees, small group sessions—social settings in which a predefined authority structure has already dictated how one is to answer the question: “all in favor, raise your hand.” We assent, says the gesture; we know exactly what we are supposed do to in this sort of situation.

The absurdity that arises from these gestures of hand-raising, applauding, and cringing brings their deeper meanings starkly to the foreground. “We assent” is only the literal, semantic meaning of the raised hand; “we approve,” says the applause; “we won’t fight back,” say the cringing hands raised as if to ward off blows. The pragmatic meaning, however, is what really counts. That is to say, what this gesture does and not merely what it says determines how it functions as a shared social sign in its usual context, perpetuating conformity to the established structure of authority. And this is far more significant than mere assent to a motion or a measure in a meeting, more significant than approval of any given point made in a speech. The gesture is not so much a vote for whatever is specifically in question; rather, it is a clear indicator (an index, if you will) of the hand-raiser’s submission to the hierarchy of authority that draws them into such a charade in the first place. The raised hand says, “I will not rock the boat; I know my place; I know the rules, and I will play by them.”

95 Likewise, the pro forma applause of the two masked men watching a motley assortment of movies bears no relation to what is actually on the screen and denotes no inner state of approval. It performs its more important function as a social sign that pragmatically enacts conformity. And the cringing that comes as a reflex before the blow—in this case, an imaginary blow from an invisible assailant—shows how the internalization of mechanisms of discipline and punishment render the physical presence of the punisher unnecessary. As Michel Foucault puts it, the Panopticon—a circular prison designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in such a way that the unseen guard at the center could see all the prisoners at once without ever being seen by the prisoners, giving the prisoners the impression of being constantly watched and thus obviating the need for the guard to watch them at all—renders the prison guard superfluous. Discipline acts from within. People have internalized the rules so much that there is little need for active external enforcement. The internally disciplined have learned to enforce the discipline themselves. More frightening than the direct confrontation of force is the gradual mass amnesia that facilitates the conscious charade of forgetting (another present absence that the artist’s works bring to the fore). We do not notice what date it is, and we don’t want to notice—in spite of the repeated pans of the camera to the date on the newspaper—because we have already forgotten why one date, over any others, might function as a sign in and of itself or the ground against which other signs might take on meaning.

It is precisely the widespread conformity enacted through these simple gestures (and other similar socially conditioned repertoires of practice) and so elegantly captured in Dai Guangyu’s work— and the conditions those gestures perpetuate—that give the status quo its persistent power. In a sense one can say that such gestures, symbolically speaking and taken together, collectively and cumulatively across the time-space continuum of a nation, are what hold together—indeed what embody, enact, and realize—the order of things.

Against the ground of the absent yet familiar social contexts of these gestures, we are able to see clearly the outline of Dai Guangyu’s social and conceptual concerns visually reflected in his work. Missing, like so many of his other performances, bespeaks anxieties over the transformation of the order of things and its deeper implications for human autonomy, and by extension, the social function and independence (or lack thereof) of art.

As people internalize mechanisms of discipline, there is a concomitant and growing erosion of the logic of oppositional narratives that juxtapose ruler and ruled, because those binaries in fact do not always make much sense in the world in which we live. Likewise, there is growing loss of ability to think critically and independently within a conformist social framework. By internalizing the Panopticon we no longer need to fear punishment, for we have disciplined ourselves, and by disciplining ourselves, we have rendered prisons and prison guards obsolete, ushering in a new regime of self-regulated, self-censored, self-disciplined freedom—a “freedom” of absent presences (such as the absent guards in the Panopticon, or disciplinary contexts that lead to conformity so powerful that disciplinary measures rarely need to be invoked at all) and present absences (such as historical dates we are not allowed to remember or utter).

Nowadays, in this new era in which the power of the seemingly autonomous machine of global capitalism has swollen to an unprecedented degree, people enjoy a bounty of what Dai Guangyu calls a “neatly arranged” freedom—the bounded freedom a comprador enjoys from intrusion just so long as the implicit “rules” are not violated—and are far more tolerant (at least superficially) toward art than at any other time in recent history. He imagines a hypothetical day when the state will prepare metaphorical spittoons to catch any phlegm that artists might want to expectorate,

96 Dai Guangyu, Brain Dead #2, 2002, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the

97 Dai Guangyu, Missing, 1999, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. that will contain any messy emissions. He worries that this seemingly enlarged and yet neatly arranged “freedom,” which depends on mass conformity and internalized discipline, may ironically make us less free, and art less independent. While “art” enjoys mass popularity in this new era, it has also been transformed into cultural capital that testifies to the “intelligence and refinement” of its self-proclaimed new admirers and an index of the “tolerance” and “openness” of the times. Expressions of rebelliousness in art have been appropriated, domesticated, and neutralized into the endearing tantrums of a naughty yet beloved child. “Art has become cute,” he contends, assessing the sizable new wave of forms that are weak on substance and strong on the manipulation of images of naughtiness—just naughty enough to provide a “lite” provocation, without any actual risk of subversion, signaling the rise of a new ideological structure.

This new ideology is characterized by flexibility, a stance that is open toward the future and is increasingly pragmatic. One thinks of Deng Xiaoping’s famous invocation that black cats and white cats could both catch mice. An era of Manichean poles of good and evil gives way to a world in shades of gray. This has created an awkward and embarrassing situation for art, Dai Guangyu suggests, because while art can function as both sign vehicles and “interpretants,” offering us conceptual space and critical distance for rethinking ourselves and the human predicament, many “independent” culture producers have largely lost their capacity for analysis and critical judgment under the hegemony of this new ideological structure, becoming complicit in the emasculation of art. A new critical standard, rooted in the value structures of the market, by which to measure and evaluate art, becomes a co-opted weapon used to disarm the weapon’s original owner. What matters is not form, or technique, or even “artistic language.” What is at stake is nothing less than power itself.

Notes 1 Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 99.

98 Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, February 22, to May 28, 2008

Jonathan Goodman

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage Two, 2004, nine life-sized tiger replicas, arrows, and mountain stage prop; tigers: papier mâché, plaster, fibreglass, resin, and painted sheep hide. Installed at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

he protean land artist and visionary entrepreneur Cai Guo-Qiang has as the subhead of his show’s title the simple declarative sentence, “I Want To Believe.” It is found as well in This studio, having been printed over a poster of a UFO, bringing attention to his most extensive sequence of artworks, Projects for Extraterrestrials, in which Cai hopefully communicates with aliens through gunpowder displays and fireworks. The statement is ambiguous from an artist who trades in double dealing—it might well be a heartfelt statement underscoring Cai’s willingness to confront ethereal experiences resulting in a state of conviction; or, equally, it could be a cynical statement taking advantage of the gullibility of his audience who might view his desire for the acceptance of aliens as a kind of superior naiveté. Although the phrase is poetic and potentially moving, we don’t know whether or not he is being sincere. There is nothing wrong with the ambiguity—it lies at the heart of Cai’s work—but it calls for a credulous gullibility in the face of a statement that, on a certain level, renders our innocence absurd. Central to Cai’s brilliant literal and figurative smokescreens is an attitude that combines genuine ingenuity with a hucksterism born of disdain.

Part of the problem—indeed, to this viewer, the real difficulty of Cai’s art—has to do with his populist approach, which reinvents modernism for the sake of, as Mao put it, art for the people. In

99 a world culture increasingly determined to democratize art, Cai’s gunpowder drawings and grand explosions function as actions intended to take what many would characterize as entertainments and give them the resonance of the absolute. Surely he affects a sublime meant to be available to everyone. Thus, his accessibility is not a part of his ambiguity; he is a child of his age, a now- mature Chinese artist whose generation has been marked by Mao’s Cultural Revolution and its determination to savage class difference. Part of his appeal in the West—he has lived in New York City since 1995—has been based on his ability to seduce his audience with epic interventions; claiming a world citizenship, he flags his creativity as inherently global, even when much of the historical material he brings to his art is Chinese in nature. This is only one of the contradictions of his art, which praises the brilliant intuitions of the Chinese mind but affects an international position vis-à-vis the current crop of Chinese artists, many of whom are themselves global in outlook, having left China after the 1989 events of Tian’anmen Square.

Despite the brilliance of Cai’s experiments, as well as his success in bringing all kinds of people into contact with modernist culture and Chinese history, his ambiguous sincerity may be seen as a failed solution to a problem that has not been satisfactorily answered. Cai’s generation, like the rest of us, is composed of heirs to the model of modernity, whose intellectualizations of art left it with a true avant-garde—and a deeply limited audience. In a liberal capitalist society, the modernist position, if isolated, also made sense—art was meant to provoke and challenge the easy smugness of the middle class. The result was a kind of elitism, in which art for art’s sake took on an anti-democratic colouring. Marcel Duchamp, for example, hid his last work, an installation entitled Étant données, viewed between two peep holes, of a naked woman with her legs spread as a final mark of disrespect to his audience; this was a work that would not be shown, or even known, during his lifetime. Duchamp’s oeuvre pushed the envelope of what could be called art and at the same time troubled the bourgeois expectation that images should be understandable. Indeed, Étant données, with its erotic perspective and installational complexity, remains enigmatic to this day.

I give Duchamp as an example because he wanted to change the nature of art if not the audience; in contrast, Cai wants to change the nature of his audience if not the nature of art. Cai is a true son of Joseph Beuys, the great postmodernist, whose innovations included the action, or momentary performance, intended to change the view of his viewer. Cai’s large explosions can be seen either as inspired events paying homage to fireworks, a Chinese invention, or as calculated modulations of modernist art history, seemingly destroying in order to break through to a new insight, an art intent upon itself. In her review of Cai’s show for the New York Times, Roberta Smith singles out the fireworks as genuinely innovative, a position I agree with. But she also makes the point that he is an “impresario,” someone who stages events for the sake of spectacle. As happens so often with the artist, his viewers must choose not only to side with his work, they must also agree with his intentions, which in actuality are known only to Cai himself. A similar quandary happens with the conceptual artist Robert Irwin, whose installations are so ephemeral they have to be accepted with a modicum of trust. In both cases, it is hard to place the artist’s motive.

As a result, Cai, for all his easy confidence, has put himself between a rock and a hard place. He needs us to suspend our disbelief so that we can view his spectacular interventions as transparent actions. Unfortunately, doing so may in fact veil the events we see. Cai asks us to believe, for example, that his Project To Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 is an attempt to connect with larger cosmologies. Occurring at Jiayuguan, in Gansu province, where the westernmost part of the Great Wall is found, this undertaking was viewed by tens of thousands of spectators. For all Cai knew, they were mesmerized by the simple

100 Cai Guo-Qiang, Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10, 1993, realized at the Gobi desert, west of the Great Wall, Jiayuguan, Gansu province, February 27, 1993, 7:35 p.m., 15 mins., explosion length 10,000 metres, gunpowder (600 kg) and two fuse lines (10,000 metres each). Commissioned by p3 art and environment, Tokyo. Photo: Masanobu Moriyama. Courtesy of Cai Studio. fact of a 10,000-meter-long drawing lit during twilight in the Chinese desert, an event that lasted, remarkably, for fifteen minutes. But as grand as the occurrence may have been, and despite Cai’s claim that the lit fuse released energy into its surroundings, there is something disingenuous about his notion that the spectacle had been transformed into a metaphysical statement. Cai’s audience might easily say to themselves that the fiery line was no more than what it was—a succession of lit fuses. It would appear, then, that experiencing the moment is not a matter of wanting to believe; rather, it is a case of necessary belief—we must have faith in Cai’s intentions, which after all are not immediately transparent to us.

The conundrum of ambiguity persists in Cai’s art, both early and late. Devoted as the artist is to the randomness of chance, he cannot but be a manager of events he has little control over. By making use of scores if not hundreds of helping artisans, he must also wear the hat of an employer—a position not necessarily in synch with his populist leanings. He justifies his grandiose schemes by claiming a connection with the common man, but in doing so becomes controversial; his Maoist determination to bring art to a broad audience can look quaint because his explosions never move beyond simple theatricality. One hesitates to criticize his motives, but I find it difficult to square Cai’s mystical assertions with the amusements he constructs for a very broad cross section of people. It is not inherently a mistake to assume as an artist that you can reach almost everyone, but it seems impossible to maintain the tenets of modernism while introducing, to as many people as possible, what are essentially the simple pleasures of the spectacle. It may even be that, for example, Cai’s grand display of seven white sedans rising up into the centre of the Guggenheim’s open core supplies a needed distraction for people who are alienated from the processes of postmodern culture and its emphasis on theory and context.

Even so, the burden of proof—namely, that the social projects and installations transcend the realm of superficial enjoyment—remains essential to Cai’s success as an artist. The pop enjoyment of his projects seems natural, and also inevitable, given his canny ability to distract the crowd,

101 Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes. Collection of Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. Exhibition copy installed at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. but this capacity doesn’t necessarily transform itself into the subtleties of art. Cai’s position as modernist showman allows him to act on a grand scale, but it does not mean that the scale acts as evidence of his aesthetic credentials. The two achievements—in entertainment and in art—are separate entities, although the artist is sharp enough to nearly convince both his audience and his critics that they are intertwined. Inopportune: Stage One (2008), the installation of white cars with rods of colour blinking on and off in the Guggenheim’s central space, is a remarkable installation seemingly free of manipulative intent; however, at the same time it is an ode to the prevalence of a much darker event: the car bombs that are part of the arsenal used by terrorists in the past two decades. Cai is free to make his associations as he wishes, but there may well be something disturbing about the “fun” aspect of the cars and their deeper implications.

Given the current climate in Chinese art, with prices rising beyond astonishment and investors buying without any real involvement as bona fide collectors, Cai’s uncanny reading of capitalism as

102 an overwhelming force seems correct—but in the description of the situation alone. Incorporating art into the folds of a global market appears inescapable, in large part because the market itself looks as though it is destined, at least in the near future, to become the object of interest as well as the context surrounding it. No one is blameless in these circumstances; the curator and critic are as much a part of the market’s call as the artists taking advantage of its inflated prices. So it should be made clear that everyone involved in art bears a certain responsibility for the heavy hand of its finances, its ability to magnify the consequences of investing. Cai recognizes this set of circumstances, and he is in fact brilliant in his exploitation of its imagery, but he sets himself up within the already existing atmosphere of the market, refusing either to criticize or transform it. It may be said that it is his right to do so, but for the critic who approaches Cai’s art with the intention of seeing the big picture, the projects do not sufficiently distinguish themselves from the ambience they so effectively transmit. Rather than moving beyond the warp and weave of the market, Cai becomes part of it himself.

This would be fine if the artist did not have in mind to offer a critique of the way things are now. But one senses ambivalence in Cai’s art—the same kind of ambivalence that associates itself with his plaintive statement “I want to believe.” It seems to me that the purgatory of half-belief does not do justice to the real problems facing us today; a partial faith fails to cast light on the commercialization of culture, which is truly a global problem. Although it is fair to say that Cai is merely an artist making the best work he can, he himself raises questions about moral issues when he creates installations whose vivid display is partly based on car bombs. As an artist, Cai is free to do what he likes, but it is hard to imagine that he would be so naïve as to assume such an aesthetic would escape scrutiny, opposition, or even anger. When an artist who is as socially committed as Cai appears to play with destruction, it seems fair that he explain his motives rather than expecting a critic merely accept them as the results of an artist working today in international conditions.

One of the most striking and interactive pieces in the show is Cai’s restaging of his installation Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (1999). A huge display of 108 life-sized figures, this piece incorporates live artists working on the sculptures in the Guggenheim itself. This is a tribute to the work Rent Collection Courtyard, the original collection of statues created in 1965 by artists from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Praised by Chinese authorities in the 1960s, the original installation established the evil nature of the landlord in opposition to the long-suffering peasants responsible for his wealth. It has been said that when Cai rebuilt the installation at the Arsenale for the 1999 Venice Biennale (for which he received the Biennale’s highest award, the Golden Lion), he was interested in underscoring the nature of creativity as well as commenting on art whose ideological basis was patent and clear; however, it is hard to fully believe him because he himself becomes an employer of a project realized by assistants that he takes credit for. Is it too much to see a reiteration, in the re-creation of the figures, of the very principles the art takes its position against? Once again, it seems to me that the answer would have to be ambiguous, with Cai at once exploiting and drawing attention to the art and the suffering it describes.

Perhaps Cai is really at his best with his gunpowder drawings, which have become increasingly precise as the years have passed, and with his fireworks interventions, which are assuredly fun if not necessarily deep. His highbrow arguments lose their effectiveness in the pursuit of the moment—we remember that the public explosions last in the minutes and seconds, offering their susceptible audiences actions whose time is highly limited, although intense during the occurrence of their short duration. The long folding albums marking Cai’s effort to extend the Great Wall of

103 Cai Guo-Qiang, The Immensity of Heaven and Earth: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 11 (detail), 1991, gunpowder on paper, mounted on canvas, refrigerator containing soil and ice made out of seawater, gunpowder drawing 200 x 600 cm. Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Courtesy of Cai Studio.

China by 10,000 meters are beautiful but simple evocations of the spectacular display, although they too suffer from an over-reading of what is essentially a popular event. More recently Cai has become remarkably clear-cut in his imagery, which specifically represents people and nature:Pine Forest and Wolf: Drawing Experiment for Deutsche Guggenheim (2005) adapts traditional painting practices, portraying a wolf (in rough outline) against a small grove of trees. It is interesting to note a move in his drawings toward the recognizable, a decision that could suggest a retreat from abstract principles or a closer identification with Chinese cultural traditions. Even as he cultivates a world-citizen persona, Cai is inexorably Chinese, and it seems to me that he is at his best when he makes no bones about being so.

Also effective are the videos of explosion events. Two events done in Japan (Cai moved to Tokyo from China in December 1986, and spent ten years there) show Cai commemorating Japanese history in unusual ways. In Project for Heiankyo 1,200 Anniversary, Celebration from Chang’An (1994), the artist hopes to inspire a lucky future for Kyoto, originally known as Heiankyo. Cai had trenches dug in front of the Kyoto City Hall that spelled out the word “luck” in seal script and then filled them with 1,200 kilograms of Xifeng wine, produced in China’s Shanxi province. The event lasted sixty minutes, with the blue-flamed liquor cutting the mysterious signs into the earth itself. As the catalogue notes point out, the smell of the liquor and flame persisted for some time after the fires had gone out, continuing the artist’s wish to grant good luck to Kyoto. The video documents the auspicious public event in rich detail. Another project, also recorded by video, is entitled The Earth Has Its Black Hole Too: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 16 (1994); it consisted of helium balloons holding fuses and gunpowder aloft in the air, their general pattern forming a downward spiral. Once the airborne fuses were lit, they exploded swiftly in a descending circle. The final explosion took place in a hole dug in the center of the event, documenting the return of energy to earth, which in Hiroshima has its own black hole for tragically historic reasons. As it turns out, the occurrence took place in Hiroshima Central Park, which is situated nearby the A- Bomb Dome, serving as the major feature of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The explosion addressed history in a way that demanded a look backward to the atomic explosion at the end of the Second World War, and, given its horrific allusions, Cai’s calculated incident seemed august even if he was referring to a horrible moment in time.

104 Sometimes, though, the artist’s more obvious metaphorical designs have imperialism as their theme, in keeping with the general notion that China is becoming a permanent world power now that it has embraced capitalism, despite the confines of a single-party political system. Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (1998) is a not-so- subtle treatment of a narrative famous in Cai Guo-Qiang, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, 1998, wooden Chinese military history, in which a general boat, canvas sail, arrows, metal, rope, Chinese flag, and electric fan; boat approximately 152.4 x 720 x 230 cm; arrows approximately is ordered by a strategist to come up with 62 cm each. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in Honor of Glenn D. Lowry. Installed at 100,000 arrows within ten days or die. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Undaunted, the general sends out boats filled with straw figures before dawn, which attract attacks from the enemy, whose arrows are caught undamaged by the straw warriors. In this symbolic piece, a fishing boat from Quanzhou has been penetrated by roughly 3,000 arrows; to make certain that we get the point, Cai installed, on the stern of the wooden boat, a fan turned directly on a mainland Chinese flag, which flutters in its wind. The work is very strong, in keeping with the cultural imperialism of its story, in which Chinese cleverness conquers opponents by having them undermine themselves.

The message is clear: China—and Cai— are major players in world economics and culture, respectively. Cai is both an artist of the world and a true Chinese patriot; his ascendance is matched by the newfound strengths of a capitalist economy. But while the projects described above possess genuinely strong points, they also are made weaker by the lack of complexity that lies at the heart of Cai’s art. It looks like it is impossible to overextend the symbolic Cai Guo-Qiang, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Cityscape meaning of his strongest achievement, Fireworks, 2001, realized at The Bund, Huangpu River, and Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai, October 20, 2001, 9:00 p.m., the explosive events (also including the approximately 20 mins., fireworks (200,000 shots of explosive). Commissioned by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Photo: gunpowder drawings), but because the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, fireworks finale. Courtesy of Cai Studio. symbols have been simplified to reach as many people as possible, their meaning has been at least constrained if not nullified. One would like to offer a more sympathetic reading of Cai, whose interventions are not without their charm. Yet he forces the viewer—and himself—into a tight spot by relying on crowd techniques and historical anecdotes to reach a global audience that most likely doesn’t have the background to understand his references. True, his viewers don’t have to know the allusions to enjoy the spectacle, but then we are in the position of allowing the artist to claim a grand design we may well not comprehend. This is, I think, why Cai is spoken of as an impresario, someone responsible for visionary truths that are not really within his command. He regales us with a superficial reality that is actually simpler than it at first seems; our visual pleasure is consciously manipulated rather than freely taken. Despite the bells and whistles, the sparks and explosions, the results are disappointing.

105 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei He Rong Liu Wei Sun Yat-sen 艾未未何溶劉煒 (Sun Zhongshan) Bu Hua He Yunchang Liu Wei 孫中山卜樺何雲昌劉韡 Sun Yuan 孫原 Cai Guo-Qiang Hou Hanru Liuzu Huineng 蔡國強侯瀚如六祖慧能 Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 Cao Fei Hou Wenyi Lu, Victoria 曹斐侯文怡陸蓉之 Wang Guangyi 王廣義 Chang Tsong-zung Hu Fang Luo Zhongli 張頌仁胡昉羅中立 Wang Nanming 王南溟 Chen Lingyang Huang Binhong Ma Haiping 陳羚羊黃賓虹馬海平 Wang Yifei 王一飛 Cheng Ran Huang Chen Ma Liuming 程然黃晨馬六明 Xia Hang 夏航 Chen Yufei Huang Yongping Mao Xuhui 陳宇飛黃永砅毛旭輝 Yang Fudong 楊福東 Cheng Conglin Jiang Tiefeng Meng Jin 程叢林蔣鉄峰孟瑾 Yang Qian 楊千 Chu Yun Jin Nong Mo Xiaofei 儲雲金農莫小菲 Yang Zhichao 楊誌超 Dai Guangyu Kan Xuan Ni Kuang Yao Zhonghua 戴光郁闞萱倪匡姚鍾華 Deng Xiaoping Kao Chienhui Pan Gongkai Yao, Pauline J. 鄧小平高千惠潘公凱姚嘉善 Fan Di’An Lei Benben Peng Yu Ye Yongqing 范迪安雷本本彭禹葉永青 Fang Lijun Li , Chunyee Qin Ming Yu Honglei 方力鈞黎俊儀秦明尉洪磊 Feng Guodong Li Xianting Sheng Dongliang Zhan Wang 馮國東栗憲庭盛冬亮展望 Fu Liya Lin Fengmian Shu Qun Zhang Jianjun 甫立亞林風眠舒群張建君 Gao Xiaohua Lin Yilin Shu Yang Zhang Qing 高小華林一林舒陽張晴 Gu Wenda Li Yang Song Yuefeng Zhang Wei 谷文達李洋宋岳峰張巍 Guan Xiao Lin Zhele Sui Jianguo Zhang Xiaogang 關小林哲樂隨建國張曉剛 He Chengyao Liu Ding Sun Jingbo Zhong Jialing 何成瑤劉鼎孫景波鍾嘉玲 He Duoling Liu Donglun Sun Wukong Zhou Chunya 何多苓劉棟倫孫悟空周春芽

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