M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 3 VOLUM E 12, NUM BER 2

INSI DE

Shanghai and Taipei Biennials Whose Asia? Whose Art?

Yin Xiuzhen: a Material World WOMEN Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture

Poetry and Praxis in Southwest China

Artist Features: Miao Xiaochun, Ming Fay

US$12.00 NT$350.00 P RINTED IN TA I WAN

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VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2, March/April 2013

CONTENTS  Editor’s Note 22  Contributors

6 Changing Faces of the Monster: Taipei Biennial 2012 Sylvie Lin

14 Reactivation—The 9th Shanghai Biennale Barbara Pollack

22 Shanghai/Taipei Afterthoughts 50 Makiko Hara and Helga Pakasaar

35 What Asia? Whose Art? A Reflection on Two Exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum Chang Tan

50 Yin Xiuxen: A Material World Stephanie Bailey

60 WOMEN Alpesh Kantilal Patel

68 68 Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture Inga Walton

76 Poetically Perfromance Art Dwells: Poetry and Praxis in Southwest China Sophia Kidd

86 Miao Xiaochun: Digitally Re-figured—The Animated Self Alice Schmatzberger

86 96 Ming Fay: From Money Trees to Monkey Pots Jonathan Goodman

106 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Yin Xiuzhen, Thought, 2009, clothes and steel, 96 340 x 510 x 370 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Chen Ping, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

Vol. 12 No. 2 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien   Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu   Ken Lum The majority of the texts in Yishu 55 focus on exhibitions and exhibition-making strategies, -- Keith Wallace   Zheng Shengtian opening with reviews and observations on the  Julie Grundvig Shanghai Biennale and Taipei Biennial—two Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li important Asian events that demonstrated very different curatorial approaches. The other  ⁽ ⁾ Carol Yinghua Lu Chunyee Li exhibitions (and one performance festival) Chen Ping reviewed were presented in Australia, China, Debra Zhou Germany, Singapore, and the US, and among   Larisa Broyde the topics they addressed are the question of   Michelle Hsieh Maryon Adelaar what makes Asian art Asian, the possibility    Chunyee Li of what might constitute a portrait, new   perspectives on representations of gender and Judy Andrews, Ohio State University sexuality, the gap between the poetic and the Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney pragmatic in performance art in Chengdu, and Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia how increased exposure to the global arena Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator has left its mark on the work of Beijing-based Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China artist Yin Xiuzhen. Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, Critic and Curator Aside from the specific exhibition thematics Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster or artists that are the subject of these texts, Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive what repeatedly becomes apparent are Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator references to tensions embedded within the Lu Jie, Long March Space complex relationships between regionalism, Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University nationalism, and internationalism as well as Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand our capacity to understand—or not—the initial Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator intentions behind an artwork’s conception Wu Hung, University of Chicago either in its place of creation or when exhibited Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District in other contexts around the world. This can  Art & Collection Group Ltd. happen within a variety of conditions—from 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, one Asian country to another Asian country, Taipei, Taiwan 104 from China to Europe and Australia, from Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 Canada to China, from the artist to his or her E-mail: [email protected] viewer. The conundrum that arises is whether    Jenny Liu the misinterpretation that might result from Alex Kao what Chang Tan refers to as “transcultural   Joyce Lin   Perry Hsu illiteracy” does the artwork a disservice or Betty Hsieh becomes richer through the addition of new  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. layers of meaning.   http://yishu-online.com   Design Format Intrinsically rooted in the discussion of  1683 - 3082 nationalism is the issue of identity, even as Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited globalization gradually erodes the idea of in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, fixed identities as artists travel and exhibit in advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: other parts of the world, as the possibilities for Yishu Editorial Office the expression of gender become ever more 200–1311 Howe Street fluid, and, especially, as the independence Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 and specificity of place and culture become Phone: 1.604.649.8187 increasingly tenuous. We conclude Yishu 55 Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: offi[email protected] with features on artists Miao Xiaochun and Ming Fay, and, as it turns out, the irresolution   1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) of nationalisms and identity are alluded to here 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) as well. 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com)    Leap Creative Group   Raymond Mah   Gavin Chow Keith Wallace  Philip Wong No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 200251

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22 (Philip Tinari) (Judy Andrews) (Britta Erickson) (Melissa Chiu) 35 (Sebastian Lopez) (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) (Pauline J. Yao) 50 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 60 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 68 76 856 : (886) 2.2560.2220 (886) 2.2542.0631 [email protected]

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Contributors

Stephanie Bailey has an M.A. in contemporary Sophia Kidd is currently a doctoral candidate art theory from Goldsmiths College, University at Sichuan University researching aesthetics of London, and a B.A. in classical civilization in classical Chinese literature. She has lived in with English literature from King’s College, China for most of the past fourteen years and London. Between 2006 and 2012, she lived in has published arts writing, poetry, fiction, and Athens, Greece, where she played a formative translations. She presently co-curates Frequency, role in designing and managing the BTEC- a semi-annual experimental live art exhibition, accredited Foundation Diploma in Art and in China. Design at Doukas Education while writing on contemporary art production and its Sylvie Lin worked at the Museum of discourses from around the world as Art and Contemporary Art of Taipei as assistant to Culture Editor of Insider Publications and Director Mr. Leon Paroissien and assisted with as a freelance critic and essayist. Currently the installation of the 2004 Taipei Biennial. Managing Editor of Ibraaz, her writing has She has also worked as an editor for major appeared in publications including ART magazines and publishers in the cultural PAPERS, Aesthetica, ARTnews, Artforum, field in Taiwan. She holds a master’s degree Frieze, LEAP, Modern Painters, Notes on in contemporary art and new media of the Metamodernism, and Yishu Journal of Université Paris VIII. During her periods abroad Contemporary Chinese Art. and in Taiwan, she has interviewed curators, artists, filmmakers, and film critics extensively Jonathan Goodman studied literature at and has written and translated texts on art and Columbia University and the University of cinema for press and institutions in Taiwan, Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer France and China. specializing in contemporary Chinese art. He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School Helga Pakasaar is a contemporary art curator of Design, both in New York, focusing on art and writer based in Vancouver. She has an criticism and contemporary culture. independent practice and has been curator at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, Makiko Hara has been curator at Centre since 2003. She was previously a curator at A: Vancouver International Centre for the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, and Contemporary Asian Art since 2007. For the the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff. She has past twenty years, she has curated numerous produced many exhibitions, commissions, contemporary art exhibitions by Japanese, and publications of contemporary art, with Canadian, and international artists. She has a focus on photography and media art. She served as project coordinator for several also produces exhibitions of historical and international exhibitions, including the vernacular photography. Yokohama Triennale (2001/2005) and the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2003). Hara was Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an art historian, curator, one of the three curators for the Scotiabank and critic. A visiting scholar at the Center for Nuit Blanche (2009) in Toronto, and has the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), contributed essays to catalogues and magazines. New York University, from 2010 to 2011, he Her most recent essays were published in received his B.A. in art history with honors Mutation: Perspectives on Photography (2011) from Yale University, New Haven, in 1997, and and Institutions by Artists (2012). his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester,

4 Vol. 12 No. 2 England, in 2009. His forthcoming book on visual culture. Her recent article examines queer South Asian visual cultures was shaped by the Communist legacy in modern Chinese his organization of the 2007 exhibition Mixing art, with a focus on the Long March Project It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying (Third Text, 2012), and she has studied the Canal Street, a series of public art projects and interactions between Chinese, Japanese performances that were situated in over seven and Indian artists in the early 20th century museums and public spaces throughout the city for the online project MIT Visualizing of Manchester. He is a frequent contributor to Cultures. She is currently working on a book Artforum and Artforum.com and has delivered manuscript on the practices of imitation and talks on his research in Europe and the US. From appropriation in modern Chinese art, which 1997 to 2005, he was based in New York City, is based on her Ph.D. dissertation. where he worked in the curatorial and director’s offices of the Whitney Museum of American Inga Walton is a Melbourne-based writer and Art and the New Museum of Contemporary arts consultant. She completed a B.A. (Hons.) Art. Currently based in Miami, Florida, he is the at the University of Melbourne. Her work has director of the M.F.A. program in visual arts and appeared in numerous Australian publications, an assistant professor of contemporary art and including Artist Profile, Australian Art Review, theory at Florida International University. Poster, Etchings, Artichoke, Eyeline, Melbourne Living, Art Monthly, and, regularly, in Trouble, Barbara Pollack is the author of The Wild, Textile, and The Journal of Australian Ceramics. Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures Internationally, she has contributed to in China (Timezone 8, 2010). She has written Ceramics: Art and Perception (US), Ceramics: on Chinese contemporary art since 1997 for Technical (US), Sculpture (US), art4d publications such as the New York Times, (Thailand), Ceramic Review (UK), Fiberarts Vanity Fair, Artnews, Village Voice, Timeout (US), Surface Design (US), Neue Keramik New York, and Art & Auction. She was awarded (Germany), and Washington Report On Middle grants from the Asian Cultural Council in 2006 East Affairs (US), among other publications. and from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation in 2008.

Alice Schmatzberger is a natural scientist, art historian, independent writer, researcher, and lecturer, and is author of the blog www. chinaculturedesk.com. She is currently working on an academic project on artists’ selves in contemporary Chinese photography, video, and digital art.

Chang Tan is an assistant professor in Chinese art and culture at the Claremont Colleges, California; she has also taught Chinese art at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests touch on a range of topics in modern Asian art and

Vol. 12 No. 2 5 Sylvie Lin Changing Faces of the Monster: Taipei Biennial 2012

rganized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), the first Taipei Biennial was held in 1996 and organized by six local Ocurators with a focus on local artists. Attempting to reach a more international profile, the second version was curated by Japan’s Fumio Nanjo and featured works from Asian countries that included Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. As the Biennial gradually gained its reputation among biennials and triennials held in Asian regions, TFAM began to combine one local curator and one foreign curator for each Biennial. Between 2000 and 2010, internationally renowned curators such as Jérôme Sans, Bartomeu Marí, Barbara Vanderlinden, Dan Cameron, Vasif Kortun, and Tirdad Zolghadr were paired with Taiwanese counterparts including Manray Hsu, Chia-Chi Jason Wang, Amy Cheng, Jun-Jieh Wang and Hongjohn Lin.

In its curatorial concepts and selection of artists, the Taipei Biennial in the past decade had reached a level equal to that of other grand-scaled international shows. However, as is the case with all shows in places where the distinction and integration of the local and the global remain an essential issue, the curating processes of the Taipei Biennials inevitably involved negotiations over the inclusion of representation from the local scene while maintaining a balance between local and foreign curators.

For the 2012 Taipei Biennial (September 29, 2012–January 13, 2013), TFAM changed the paring one local curator and one foreign curator by calling for proposals from a single curator or a curatorial team. Whereas the number of curators was not restricted, the criteria of selection lay in the proposed project. Three proposals from overseas and two from Taiwan were received, and Berlin-based Anselm Franke was selected by a jury composed mainly of curators from past Taipei Biennials. As the sole curator of the show, Franke was able to concentrate on his own themes and working methods that potentially wove a more coherent curatorial thread throughout the project. Besides this, he drew upon some central references from Chinese literature and theoretical works and collaborated with players of local social and cultural scenes, as well as curators from Taiwan and other countries to produce what were referred to as Mini-Museums that were interspersed throughout the Biennial venue. This contributed to a better integration of local histories and cultural practices that were then merged into the global situation of modernity that was at the core of Franke’s investigations.

In line with Franke’s consistent interest in “borders”—political borders, social borders, or borders of the imagination—themes that were also treated

6 Vol. 12 No. 2 in his recent project Animism,1 this Taipei Biennial adopted the theme “Modern Monsters/Death and Life of Fiction”2 and explored questions around modernity through the monstrous figure of Taowu from Chinese mythology. The textual reference here is from David Der-Wei Wang’s book The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (2004). Throughout the centuries, the atrocious creature Taowu has taken on various incarnations in Chinese literary works and has been appropriated, at different historical moments, to designate the demoniacal. In examining the recurrent and continuous violence and brutality that has plagued modern China, Wang’s book tackles issues of history and the monster, modernity and monstrosity, historiography and the imagination.

The Museum of the Monster The central themes of the 2012 Taipei Biennial were represented in The That Is History, curated by James T. Hong and Anselm Museum of Monster That Is History produced by Franke with James T. Franke, installation view of Taiwan Weapons of Mass Hong. Here one found documents, including Wang’s books and certain Destruction. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum. modern Chinese novels like A Madman’s Diary (1918) by Lu Xun (1881– 1936), a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. The book contains imagery associated with bodily violence and epitomizes the heavy presence of the savage side of modern China as it has been elaborated in Chinese literature. While The Museum of Monster That Is History could have served as a strong opening statement for the Biennial by showing connections to atrocities inherent in the processes of modernization and to possible transformations through fiction and imagination, it was hidden behind the vast The Waiting Hall: Scenes of Modernity by Hannah Hurtzig. Situated just inside the main entrance and in the form of an auditorium, The Waiting Hall contained several cells with recordings of conversations that took place at the opening of the show by individuals representing various backgrounds (social

Vol. 12 No. 2 7 movements, psychology, music, art, etc.). If The Waiting Hall placed in the Hannah Hurtzig, The Waiting Hall: Scenes of Modernity, Museum’s grand entrance area appeared to be all-encompassing regarding 2012, installation at the entrance of the Taipei Biennial the social issues brought up in the conversations and foregrounding a certain 2012. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. aspect of collective participation, the aftermath which was manifested in audio recordings and a billboard showing the names of participants created an atomizing, distracting effect for many viewers.

In total, this Biennial featured The Museum of Gourd, curated by Chihiro Minato, entrance around forty-three artists, a third of view of Shiro Takahashi's Big Gourd. Courtesy of the Taipei whose contributions were produced Fine Arts Museum. specifically for the Biennial. The Mini-Museums were conceived in relation to the overarching theme of the Biennial while maintaining a certain autonomy. They carried their own themes—The Museum of Gourd, The Museum of the Infrastructural Unconscious, etc.—artists, or archival materials. In the investigation of the vicious Harun Farocki, Parallel, and savage side of modernity, war 2012, two-channel HD video installation, colour, sound, 17 was one of the highlighted issues, mins. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. and was foregrounded in the aforementioned The Museum of the Monster That Is History. Objects, documents, and films were arranged in a museum-like display under the title A Recent History of Weapons of Mass Destruction. In addition to this survey exposing the most destructive forces throughout human history (bombing, war, genocide, etc.), the war theme was approached from other angles as well, such as in Harun Farocki’s two-channel video installation Parallel (2011-2012), which explores the influences of computer-generated imagery on our perception of the real world and in the field of military action.

8 Vol. 12 No. 2 The Museum of Ante- Another substantial interrogation about war was Paris-based artist and Memorials, curated by Eric Baudelaire, installation view curator Eric Baudelaire’s The Museum of Ante-Memorials which was of Robert Filliou, Commemor, 1970/2003, 12 black-and-white conceived following his visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and created photographs mounted on plates, each 70 x 100 cm. for this Biennial. With reccuring acts of war in mind, Baudelaire proposed Courtesy of Stiftung Museum, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf and a memorial that would be created before rather than after the catastrophes. the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Exploring the idea that Japan is both perpetrator of war crimes and victim of nuclear attacks, Baudelaire juxtaposes documents found in the Peace Memorial with fictional material in ways that would allow what he calls “a glimpse of alternative histories.” Part of the project includes a documentary film shot from one of the planes that would bomb Hiroshima in 1945, revealing that this plane was originally about to bomb Kokura instead of Hiroshima. Next to the film is a memorandum composed by scientists of the Manhattan Project. The text illustrated the horrible effects of nuclear power and called for putting nuclear development under control to avoid drastic consequences.

Angela Melitopoulos and The Biennial also featured films Maurizio Lazzarato, The Life of Particles, 2011–12, 3-channel by Yervant Gianikian and Angela video installation. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Ricci Lucchi. Based on found footage showing the destruction brought on by wars and colonialism, their cinematic images became a viewing lens through which one could examine upheavals in human history. From a perspective of

Kao Chung-Li, The Taste of personal history, Kao Chung-Li’s Human Flesh, 2010–12, slide projection installation with The Taste of Human Flesh (2010–12) audio cassette. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. takes his father as the protagonist who fought battles between the Communists and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) around 1948. Composed of a slide installation with audio-cassette,

Vol. 12 No. 2 9 Chen Chieh-Jen, Happiness Building, 2012, video. Photo: Chen You-wei. Courtesy of Chen Chieh-Jen Studio and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

the piece narrates the tale from the first person point of view of the bullet that has remained inside the father’s body after battle. The work proposes a critical retrospection on social, political, and economic upheavals over an extended period and on a worldwide scale; globalization is here seen as an inheritor of colonization of the past.3 The contemporary consequences of globalization are treated in Chen Chieh-Jen’s latest video work Happiness Building I (2012), composed of a series of portraits of individuals who have suffered social, economic, or familial difficulties under Taiwan’s neoliberal policies, first implemented in 1984.4

The Otolith Group, Daughter Products (1952–62), 2011, installation with silver gelatin prints. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Modern political history was also represented through a number of photographic series in the show. Maryam Jafri and the Otolith Group both presented photographic archives that reflected upon the political utopia of specific times and events: Jafri’s Independence Day 1936–1967 (2000, ongoing) shows the first Independence Day ceremonies of certain Asian and African nations mainly during the 1960s; the Otolith Group’s Daughter Products series (2011) shows a delegation of communist Indian women visiting China, Russia, and Japan. As Franke put it, “We found it interesting to see how meaning changes when the images are being shown today—when we have a slightly different view on the expectations that ‘independence’ carried back then, before the historical experience of neo-colonialism and ‘globalization’.”5 These works became all the more significant in the context of Taiwan which is not officially recognized as a

10 Vol. 12 No. 2 country in the international diplomatic world but as part of the People’s Republic of China; thus the questions of “independence” and of “national identity” remain problematic. Another photo series was Chang Chao-Tang’s Time of No Shadows which was compiled especially for the Biennial. With their indirect, relatively poetic approach, his pictures about Taiwan’s past five decades imply a certain exitentialist quest and often capture strange conditions wavering between motion and the static, life and death.

Chia-En Jao, ARMS, 2012, Apart from photography and works pencil on paper, series of 30 drawings, each 40 x 40 cm. of moving images, some artists Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. took an iconic approach to treat the theme of history: Chia-En Jao’s series of pencil drawings, ARMS (2012), represents coats of arms that reflect symbolic meanings drawn from Taiwan’s political, economic, and industrial past under the monstrous regimes of Japan, the U.S., and the Kuomintang. Joven Mansit’s Tabloid News series (2012) are paintings directly executed on the Philippine newspaper Daily Pacifican ; the newspaprs are from the 1940s with headlines indicating the time of World War II. On top of these pages, Mansit paints figures with Filipino baskets (bayong) covering their heads, figures that have immediate associations to “traitors” in the local historical context. Precisely, such figures represent members of the Makapili or Alliance of Philippine Patriots who gave military aid to the Imperial Japan during the World War II.

Fernando Bryce, ASIA, 2006, ink on paper, 50 drawings, each 30.21 x 42.3 cm. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

In the context of the 2012 Taipei Biennial, the theme of fiction in the exhibition’s title was partially associated with how the West imagines the East. For example, Fernando Bryce’s ASIA (2006) is composed of copies of Asia magazine covers that were published in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s and that served as an important resource for information about Central and

Vol. 12 No. 2 11 The Museum of Crossing, curated by Anselm Franke and Hongjohn Lin. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

East Asia. Revisiting the pictures and article titles on these covers reminded the viewer of the stereotypes and assumptions that Westerners once had about Asian people, societies, and cultures especially in the decades leading up to World War II; such stereotypical projections remain in our present time. The fiction of exoticism found its most radical representation in The Museum of Crossings organized by Hongjohn Lin. It was conceived as a (pseudo) museum dedicated to George Psalmanazar (1679–1763), who claimed to be the first Formosan to visit Europe and who wrote An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa but was later revealed to be an impostor. Psalmanazar even spread to his Western peers his ideas about the remote island, which amounted only to a fantasy about him carrying out “savage” practices (“hyper-exotic performance” as described by Hongjohn Lin) such as eating raw meat or sleeping with his eyes open in order to claim authenticity to his bond to Formosa.

Another work that was related to historiography and fiction, but not from a Western perspective, was Jompet Kuswidananto’s video War of Java, Do You Remember #2 (2008). In its treatment of the subject of Indonesian colonial history, Kuswidananto’s video restages cembengan, a ritual created by plantation workers and sugar farmers in the sugar factories that were built in the mid-nineteenth century by the Dutch in the north coastal region of Java. Restaging such a ritual in the factories today not only invites the spirits of the ancestors to return, but also acknowledges the experience of colonialism.

Whereas some works in the 2012 Taipei Biennial proved to be pertinent in their treatment of the dark sides of modernity, there were also those that appeared weak or misplaced. For example, Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung Chuen placed texts on the vast glass windows on the first floor of TFAM that were borrowed from his notes during various visits to Taipei. These almost invisible texts conveyed nothing more than a collection of personal impressions that had little connection to the themes of the show. For example, “Once I arrived in Taiwan, I shifted to use Chinese language in my mind” or “Artists using Screen Saver as medium can stray everywhere with his/her laptop” (translation by Sylvie Lin). Other works that lacked substantial links to the content of the Biennial were otherwise strong

12 Vol. 12 No. 2 Left: Ashish Avikunthak, Vakratunda Swaha, 2010, video. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Right: The Museum of Rhythm, curated by Natasha Ginwala with still from Ken Jacob's film Ontic Antics, 2005, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Bye, Molly. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

contributions, such as Rosemarie Trockel’s collage Copyright Is a Myth (2012) and Ashish Avikunthak’s video Vakratunda Swaha (2010), and while the latter may have appeared relevant with its ties to local rituals where monstrous masks play an important role, it was more a personal gesture towards the artist’s dear friend who was the subject of the film, and less about larger issues of society and culture. However, one also found original ideas that treat the issue of modernity such as Natasha Ginwala’s The Museum of Rhythm based on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “rhythmanalysis.” The choice of time as the subject of investigation broadens our thinking about modernity, a notion that can indeed be extended to all kinds of constructions including time-keeping. This Mini-Museum featured an anthropological display of time-keeping devices and documents showing how different people conceive of time, along with Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion photo series and Ken Jacob’s films, with the latter tackling the issue of cinematic time as well as perception.

A Symptomatic Mirror In his curatorial statement Franke writes, “The systemic aspect of modernity is willfully ignorant of culture and human relations, and this is its strength, and its anonymous monstrosity.” The Taipei Biennial 2012 represented an attempt to disclose the multiple incarnations of the monster of modernity that lie under the masks of rationality, progress, culture, or, in their more advanced and elaborated forms, as colonialism, internationalism, neoliberalism, and globalization. Each of the works and the Mini-Museums in the show tackled a certain aspect of the monstrosity, as if holding up a symptomatic mirror that revealed the processes, causes, and possible fictions around the great myth called modernity.

Notes 1 Anselm Franke is a curator and writer. He was Director of Exhibitions of KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2001–2006) and Director of Extra City (Kunsthal Antwerp, 2006–10); he also co-curated Manifesta 7 and the 1st Brussels Biennial. For Animism, see http://www.extracity. org/en/projects/view/52/. See also Sylvie Lin, “Monster, History, Fiction: Interview with Anselm Franke, Curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012,” first published in Voices of Photography, August 2012. Re-published on Sylvielin’s Blog, http://sylvielin.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/interview-with-anselm- franke-curator-of-the-taipei-biennial-2012/#more-424/. 2 The official Web site of the Taipei Biennial 2012 is at http://www.taipeibiennial2012.org/tb2012/. Interviews with artists and Mini-Museum curators can be found at http://www.tfam.museum/TFAM_ Media/Default.aspx/. 3 Sylvie Lin, “Dissect the Image—Gaze upon the History‘Cinema Otherness of Cinema’: A Film and Art Exhibition of Kao Chung-Li,” first published in Art Taipei Forum Media, November 2011, http://www. atfm.asia/en/article.php?id=103/. 4 The work was shown at the Paper Mill, near the Biennial venue. On Chen’s artistic practice, see Sylvie Lin, “History of the Photographed: The Age of Provocation—Interview with Chen Chieh-Jen,” Online version on Sylvielin’s Blog, http://sylvielin.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/interview-with-chen- chieh-jen-part-i/ and http://sylvielin.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/history-of-the-photographed-the-age- of-provocation-interview-with-chen-chieh-jen-part-ii/. 5 Sylvie Lin, “Monster, History, Fiction.”

Vol. 12 No. 2 13 Barbara Pollack Reactivation—The 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012 October 1, 2012–March 31, 2013

The Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Courtesy of the Shanghai Biennale.

igger than ever before and definitely more chaotic, the ninth edition of the Shanghai Biennale is simultaneously a great leap Bforward for China’s cultural scene and an incoherent curatorial jumble. The Biennale inaugurated a new location, the Power Station of Art, formerly the Nanshi power plant that served as the Pavilion of the Future at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. With nine thousand square meters of exhibition space within a thirty-one-thousand-square-meter facility—requiring a much bigger budget than provided by the Shanghai government—the new museum was still being renovated just two days before the opening, making it almost impossible to install on time the massive number of works by ninety artists and artists’ collectives from twenty-seven countries.

Conceptual artist Qiu Zhijie, nominated this year for the Guggenheim’s prestigious Hugo Boss award, served as chief curator, and he directed a team that included Hong Kong gallerist/curator Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, media theorist Boris Groys, and former Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art director Jens Hoffmann. In addition to the exhibition at the Power Station of Art, the curators invited thirty cities, from Detroit to Auckland,

14 Vol. 12 No. 2 to host pavilions located in empty buildings along Nanjing Road, bringing over one hundred more artists to the event.

Huang Yongping, Thousand Under the theme of Reactivation, Hands Kuanyin, 1997–2012, cast iron, steel, various items, a nod to its new home in a former 800 x 800 x 1800 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai power station, the Biennale Biennale. was divided into four sections: Resources, Revisit, Reform, and Republic. But it seemed that the curators ignored these categories when installing the works on view. For example, Resources included Shanghai Biennale veteran Huang Yongping’s jaw-dropping sculpture Thousand Hands Kuanyin (1997–2012), in the main lobby, a magnification of Marcel Duchamp’s bottle rack reaching three stories high with steel hands covering its one thousand prongs, each holding an object of significance in Chinese culture, from chopsticks to Buddha statuettes. But this section also includes works on the first and second floors, including Light, Falling Like A Feather (2012), by Wang Yuyang, a string of white neon lights suspended through the center of the museum as if falling gently through the air. These two works were spectacles that distracted visitors from the more thoughtful aspects of Resources, where several works were linked by the theme of education, including drawings by reformer Rudolf Steiner, notes for lectures by Joseph Beuys, a neon wall installation by Joseph Kosuth, and a miniature version of Night School, an education lab at New York’s New Museum, recreated here by Anton Vidokle, Eungie Joo, and Nikolaus Hirsch.

Wang Yuyang, Light, The overall layout of Reactivation, Falling Like a Feather, 2012, fluorescent light tubes. however, was so disorganized that Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai Biennale. it took the tenacity of a Sherlock Holmes to find such connections. It was far more rewarding to abandon the Biennial’s categories entirely and find themes running through the exhibition in a more serendipitous manner. While wandering through the first floor galleries, for example, I discovered hidden away in a darkened room a work by young Shanghai artist Lu Yang, a 4-channel, 3-D animation, The Anatomy of Rage (2011), depicting the Buddhist deity Yamantaka from a neuroscientist’s perspective which looks at aspects such as brain chemistry and chemical imbalances. Following a string of arrows into the one-hundred-and-fifty-metre-

Vol. 12 No. 2 15 tall chimney of the power station, I found Swiss artist Roman Signier’s Roman Signer, Chimney Project, 2012, wood barrel, explosion of blue pigment, created by dropping a two-hundred-kilogram paint, performance. Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai steel ball into a pool of paint. While almost overwhelmed by the breadth Biennale. of the exhibition, there were spaces in which subtle connections could be found, such as the gallery that features Israeli artist Nira Pereg’s meditative videos about religious factions in her home country, Sophie Calle’s subtle interrogation of blind observers at the edge of the sea, and Pakistani artist Naiza H. Khan’s Observatory Archives from Manora Island (2010), which conveys a redolent nostalgia for a place few have visited. These three artists, placed in close proximity to each other under the thematic of Republic, share acute insights into the human condition, which they communicated through the most understated means.

Nira Pereg, Sabbath 2008, 2007–08, video, 7 mins., 12 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghai Biennale.

16 Vol. 12 No. 2 Left and right: Sophie Calle, Voir la mer, 2011, video, photographs. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Perrotin, Paris, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Naiza H. Khan, The Observatory: Archives From Manora Island, 2010–12, photographs, drawing, video, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai Biennale.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Spinoza Car, 2007, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai Biennale.

Given the ambition of the curators in terms of the scale of the exhibition, it was not surprising that there were many international art stars included in the Biennale, a boon for a Shanghai public that might not be familiar with some of these names, but there was a lack of contextualization to underscore their significance. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Spinoza Car (2009), a full-sized automobile packed with ephemera related to this great philosopher, seemed to be included mostly because of its emphasis on accumulation, linking it superficially to Ouyang Chun’s Infinity Column (2012), shown nearby, which consisted of a stack of everyday objects including a birdcage with live pigeons atop Louis Vuitton luggage, but neither of them fit into the Biennale’s themes. Gillian Wearing’s well- known videos of British drunks and vagrants and police officers are set off to the side, segregated, in wooden-walled rooms, like packing containers, an indication of how little they fit in with the overarching themes of the Biennale. There is little need to include again the overly exposed Peter Fischli and David Weiss classic video The Way Things Go (1989), and Anthony McCall’s light show You and I, Horizontal (2012), a thoughtful work that demands unbroken attention, is pretty much lost in the confusing arrangement of surrounding galleries.

Vol. 12 No. 2 17 Ouyang Chun, Infinity Column, Hannah Hurtzig, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai Biennale.

Left: Anthony McCall, You and I, Horizontal, 2012, light installation. Photo: Blaise Adilon. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Right: Lucy + Jorge Orta, Antartica World Passport Delivery Village, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artists and the Shanghai Biennale.

But the Biennale did demonstrate profound progress over previous ones by its inclusion of performance art. But I have no idea what visitors thought about Tino Seghal’s work, in which three female security guards surround anyone who enters their gallery and sing, “This is the contemporary, contemporary, contemporary” (perhaps it should have been translated into Chinese). On the other hand, a long line stood in wait to have their faux passports stamped at Lucy + Jorge Orta’s Antartica World Passport Delivery Village (2012), a makeshift collection of huts to be set up in the

18 Vol. 12 No. 2 South Pole as a place that welcomes all. Grass Stage Theater, a troupe from Shanghai, revived their experimental plays presented in a short-lived space, the Nail Theater, that previously operated in Shanghai and then closed, by juxtaposing scripted text with slides and videos projected above them. Even without understanding a word, the actors were so passionate that I found the experience fascinating and moving.

While not one of the stated themes, one pronounced element of the Biennale was the interrogation of the archive. This was manifest in the work of artists who collect and catalogue information, creating miniature libraries and reports that may or may not be based on fact. Shanghai photography duo Birdhead presented several large-scale grids of images that juxtaposed close-ups of gardens with snapshots of youth culture. American political artist Martha Rosler showed photographs from Cuba that she shot in 1981 and that consisted mostly of views that demonstrated the importance of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in daily life through their constant, though often subtle, presence on wall murals or television screens. Hong Kong artist Ho Sin Tung conjured up an entirely fabricated archive from his fictional Hong Kong Inter-Vivos Film Festival complete with hand drawn posters, seating charts, and film stills. On the other hand, the team of Zhuang Hui + Dan’er documented a very real social issue, the decline of the city of Yumen due to the depletion of its oil resources caused by over- drilling, here presented as an installation of photographs and artifacts set in a faux photo studio.

Irrelative Group, Family Letter, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Shanghai Biennale.

I must admit that I spent a considerable amount of time trying to decipher the connections among the artworks in this Biennale, often coming up empty handed since, despite the designated themes, there seemed to be little reason for their placement or relationship to each other. For this reason, one of my favorite works was by the Beijing collective Irrelevant Commission,

Vol. 12 No. 2 19 whose Family Letter (2012) documents a performance where each artist blindfolded his parents and brought them to a spot they remembered from their childhood. In the resulting videos, the parents rested their hands on the shoulders of their child as they were led through the streets of the city, an unintended metaphor for the experience of most visitors to this exhibition who wandered galleries and hallways not knowing what they were about to encounter.

Far more curatorial strength could be found at the city pavilions, some Kane Sy, Boulevard du Centenaire Made in China: installed on the fifth floor of the Power Station of Art, but with the majority Untitled 2009–10, photograph. Courtesy of the artist and the located in derelict spaces and even a former department store on Nanjing Shanghai Biennale. Road. The setting was so decrepit and unmanageable that when many of the foreign envoys showed up to install their exhibition, there were complaints about the insatisfactory circumstances they encountered—no lighting, no doors, no walls. Nevertheless, many seemed to tackle the shortcomings and turn them to their advantage. Detroit presented a neo-vaudeville team, The Hinterlands, with dancer Haleem (Stringz) Rasul, and created an impromptu stage in a dilapidated room with screens showing video footage of silent films along with hometown settings. Pittsburg contributed a fully operational estate sale, with goods all brought from a single family home, and Shanghai buyers were allowed to purchase pictures of priests and Santa Claus or embroidered tablecloths and baseball pennants, many that were specific to that city. On a more “exotic” note, Dakar’s contemporary art space Raw Material showed photographs of that city’s African Chinatown by artist Kan Sy, depicting a community full of shopkeepers selling knock- off bags and DVDs, not so different from those found on Nanjing Road. Vancouver bravely overcame the severe limitations of their dark vault of a space by installing First Nations artist Brian Jungen’s ceremonial masks made from Nike sneakers and placed in museum vitrines as well as a full- scale skeleton of a whale made from plastic chairs hanging from the ceiling and dramatically lit by a spotlight.

As stated in numerous interviews, Qiu Zhijie considered the introduction of city pavilions to be his most profound innovation within the concept of the biennale. This was a kind of revision of the richly funded national pavilions found at the Venice Biennale, but, in a time when nationalism in art has been roundly criticized, Qiu Zhijie’s choice of cities was savvy and not only included cultural capitals (Berlin, Amsterdam, Los Angeles), but also unexpected and overlooked places (Lima, Tehran, Ulan Bator) or new

20 Vol. 12 No. 2 art magnets (Moscow, Mumbai, Istanbul). It was brave for this chief curator to stack up the artistic output of Shanghai with the accomplishments of these other diverse communities demonstrating that places outside of China often have a more sophisticated and experimental approach to art making and a more solid grasp of curating.

Vancouver Pavilion, Brian China can be a tough place for international contemporary art, so I Jungen, Cetology, 2002, plastic chairs. Courtesy of the artist, hesitate to criticize any biennial as ambitious as Reactivation. Certainly, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Shanghai Biennale. the installation was free of many of the problems that plagued its former location, the Shanghai Art Museum, which is housed in an old jockey club from the colonialist era. At the Power Station of Art, at least, unlike previous Biennials at the Shanghai Art Museum, the works were for the most part dust and fingerprint free, which may not seem like much but was a miracle given the problems with installation and the fact that construction was still taking place on opening day. But this Biennale, like most of the exhibitions I have seen in China, lacks what can only be called curatorial vision, a sure- handed insightfulness that justifies the selection and placement of each and every artwork. Under the supervision of the right curator, art exhibitions can vibrate with meaning without becoming didactic. Too often, in China, the selection of over-scaled work—like those found here—becomes a substitute for the skilled orchestration of varied points of view, something the next Shanghai Biennale, or, for that matter, any other major exhibition undertaken in China could benefit from. But that, of course, would require a longer time frame to allow for appropriate planning and fundraising, something this biennial struggled without. What was accomplished, even given this lack of support, is far better than any Shanghai Biennale in recent history, but that accomplishment alone sets the bar too low to inspire a more thought provoking show for the future.

Vol. 12 No. 2 21 Makiko Hara and Helga Pakasaar Shanghai/Taipei Afterthoughts

akiko Hara, curator of Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) and Helga Pakasaar, Mcurator of Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, attended the Taipei Biennial (Taiwan), Kuandu Biennale (Taiwan), and Shanghai Biennale (China) through a new Asia Pacific Delegation program of the Canada Council of the Arts. This initiative sends Canadian arts professionals to research, network, and develop dialogues with Asia. The itinerary for this year’s focus, which was Shanghai and Taipei, was carefully designed by the Canada Council's Pao Quang Yeh and Koba Johnson in consultation with Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, and Debra Zhou, Editor of the Chinese edition of Yishu, as a travel guide for the six- person delegation.

Makiko Hara: We saw three major biennials in Shanghai and Taipei on our recent delegation trip. There were different formats and biennial concepts to consider with this experience. Let’s start with looking at the differences between the types of biennials we encountered.

Helga Pakasaar: Each biennial certainly seemed very different in its scope and degree of resources. Clearly, the Shanghai Biennale had to grapple with a brand new monumental space. It was more like what I’ve come to think of as a biennial—a giant spectacle—and Taipei seemed more like a museum show, a carefully considered concept that was well installed. How each city thinks about what it is hosting becomes evident before you walk through the doors—the type of promotion, the official opening ceremony, and such.

Makiko Hara: When I was talking with Lobby of the Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Courtesy of the people at each biennial site, local artists Shanghai Biennale. and curators gave me insights into their respective structures. For example, the Shanghai Biennale’s move from the old Shanghai Art Museum site to a new and expanded one, The Power Station of Art, was a huge space to fill compared to the last one. Locals analyzed this change as a phenomenon of post- Shanghai Expo (2010), so the general public expected something equally large in scale. The additional City Pavilions

22 Vol. 12 No. 2 component of the Biennale, which invited thirty cities from all over the world to participate and took place at eight different locations spread across the city, was very similar in concept to Expo 2010. The pavilions had a diverse range and level of presentation that I enjoyed, actually more so than the main site. They provided a new form for experiencing art in that particular city.

Helga Pakasaar: Yes, I’m sure there were big expectations with Shanghai. It’s interesting how the Expo experience has been used as a springboard for new things, the opposite of what we did in Vancouver after Expo 86. The fact that the first two weeks of tickets sold out in Shanghai within half an hour is evidence of wide civic support. The general public seemed excited— imagine that! And the City Pavilions were an interesting way to bring in other perspectives, and perhaps avoid official constraints. Cities register creative activities very differently than nations, which have other agendas. Clearly each city understood the opportunity in different ways, and, presumably, had varying financial resources. I appreciated what Mexico City did, just postcards by artists in response to their local Chinatown placed in boxes and to be freely taken away by visitors.

Makiko Hara: That’s an interesting point about the different reactions to Expo from Shanghai and Vancouver. Of course that difference is a reflection of the times between the 1980s and now, but also of the state of each city’s current development and economy.

Helga Pakasaar: It is also a reflection on a Canadian attitude toward culture that doesn’t always recognize its positive impact on economic growth.

Line up for the opening of Makiko Hara: What most impressed 2012 Shanghai Biennale.Photo: Makiko Hara. me in Shanghai, compared to my last visit, in 2004, was the popularity of contemporary art in general. It was shocking to see major fashion magazines like Harper’s and Vogue highlight contemporary art. The special contemporary art issue of Harper’s featuring the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama that had just been published when we were in Shanghai was two inches thick and quickly sold out. Also, free tickets for the preview of the Shanghai Biennale were given out to three thousand people, making it pretty difficult for us to get in and view the exhibition as professionals, as much of the audience did not appear to be people who necessarily attend exhibitions on a regular basis.

Helga Pakasaar: But that’s great, too—that the idea of art having relevance for and being of interest to the masses does still exist. What were your favourite pieces at the Shanghai Biennale?

Makiko Hara: I liked the diverse presentations of the City Pavilions at the main site that featured sixteen of the thirty cities. Each city made a

Vol. 12 No. 2 23 unique presentation; I like Detroit Detroit Pavilion, performance by Hinterlands. Photo: Makiko with its durational street theatre Hara. performance by four actors and a musician, and the a very intellectual Dakar presentation addressing that city’s relationship to China through several art publications and photos, and Bogota, which had work that also remarked on the history of its Chinatown. These were conceptually inspiring. I also loved the video of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Reactivating the Republic (2012), which revealed government censorship but didn’t indicate what exactly was censored. They produced a new animated, text-based video for this Biennale in response to the theme. Two weeks before the opening, the curators informed them that they couldn’t show the work because the censor board rejected the title, so they made a second version with a new title in which they crossed out all the key words in their text. I found this to be one of their most conceptual pieces.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry, Reactivating the Republic, 2012, video. Photo: Helga Pakasaar.

Helga Pakasaar: I agree, and there was the functioning The Lovasik Estate Sale—where everything really was for sale—at the Pittsburgh Pavilion by Jon Rubin which gave an interesting sense of lives lived in a particular place in America. I liked how this piece worked in that context—it was very popular, and I am sure there was hardly anything left over at the end of it all.

Pittsburgh Pavillion, John Rubin, The Lovasik Estate Sale, 2012. Photo: Makiko Hara.

Makiko Hara: Yes, I too loved that garage sale, although I didn’t have enough time to buy anything there. But I found the new Biennale site to be too monumental—it over-determined the installation of the artworks and our encounter with them.

24 Vol. 12 No. 2 Helga Pakasaar: Yes, it was a mess in many ways, which is not surprising given the time and financial constraints for installing the works. The Biennale was difficult to negotiate, even, let’s say, for skilled viewers. We bring a lot of knowledge to these situations and are sensitive to the conditions of display, noticing when works are cramped and others lost in big empty rooms. Many of the subtler works seemed orphaned. It was visually apparent that members of “the curatorial team” did not have the same roles or perhaps even power within the team—something that might often be the case in other such large exhibitions but is not always so evident.

Makiko Hara: My expectations of the chief curator, Qiu Zhijie, a very interesting conceptual artist who incorporates mapping into his practice, was that he provided the conceptual framework for the Biennale, but it was really hard to see any visual coherence in the actual exhibition. Some works, such as those in the room of Rudolph Steiner, Joseph Beuys, and Joseph Kosuth, and the room with the museum-display-type artworks on the ground floor, where Thomas Hirschhorn’s Spinoza Car (2007) was, gave a philosophical context to one of the main themes of the Biennale, Re-utilize Creative Energy. But, unfortunately, after seeing Chico MacMurtrie’s Totemobile (2007), a gigantic car-robot at the entrance to the exhibition, which I felt was quite a distraction, our mind was consumed by large spectacle entertainment, and it was difficult to shift back and pay attention to the more detailed and complex art.

Joseph Kosuth, Any Knowledge (for Shanghai), 2012, neon. Photo: Helga Pakasaar.

Helga Pakasaar: That’s right. We have to take into account our physical and mental experience of trying to make sense of things when encountering such monumental works. The unruliness of Shanghai’s extravaganza nevertheless had interesting surprises; I saw work that I was completely unfamiliar with, especially by Chinese artists. These types of exhibition experiences are often about relationships. What you think of one work is heavily affected by what you have just seen. Here, there were lots of large-scale sculptures

Vol. 12 No. 2 25 incorporating everyday objects that were installed in close proximity to each other, so it all started to seem similar, but, at the same time, these artists come from different contexts around the globe and have very different reasons for making such assemblage works. I suppose it’s not fruitful to think about the artists’ particular contexts in biennials such as this because really all one can hope for is to make links among a diversity of works. Delving into where it all comes from isn’t really possible—that can come only in follow- up research. I find, too, that I “read” works in a particular way depending on the context (in this case at times unfamiliar for me) that filters the process of trying to make sense of why particular works were chosen.

Makiko Hara: I am more familiar with Asian biennials as I’m from Japan and have worked in a similar context in the organization of the Yokohama Triennales in 2001 and 2006 and have been to the Shanghai Biennales twice before (2000 and 2004). There is always a complex local expectation with these exhibitions. City officials and organizers want to promote the “event” to more popular audiences, and often biennials are programmed as “cultural tourism,” whereas the curators and directors are under pressure to show new and challenging art that is relevant today. There is always this kind of dilemma between populism and more experimental artistic practices, and so Shanghai delivered as expected—some new works were interesting, but overall it wasn’t a revelation for me. The really new and interesting works were in the City Pavilions, regardless of their success, and it was a new concept for this Biennale.

Helga Pakasaar: The impact of China’s rapid growth on such cultural extravaganzas was palpable. Our conversations with the commercial galleries as well as museums confirmed that there was a lot of at stake financially, with or without official government support. How each city, whether it be Shanghai or Taipei, sees the impact of cultural tourism would certainly create expectations for biennial curators. The local significance of the Taipei Biennale, for example, would be quite different than that of Shanghai. I would guess that one key motivation, for Taiwan, would be to assert its cultural identity.

Makiko Hara: I saw the first international Shanghai Biennale in 2000 (where Canadians Lani Maestro and Ken Lum were participants), curated by Hou Hanru and Toshio Shimizu. At that time, there were not many commercial galleries in China, indeed there only a few, run by Europeans, and in 2000 there were quite good “counter” biennial exhibitions organized by local artists and curators, including Ai Weiwei’s legendary Fuck Off exhibition.

Helga Pakasaar: Do you think that such exhibitions could or should happen again? My sense is that such counter gestures might not have the impact that they did only a few years ago.

Makiko Hara: Recently biennials held in Asia have become integrated into larger critical contexts, so I wouldn’t expect a counter or so-called fringe;

26 Vol. 12 No. 2 instead, most galleries and artists seem to organize their own exhibitions in association with the Biennale, which is a convenience for visitors like us.

Helga Pakasaar: So how did this Biennale have a criticality that wasn’t present in the one in 2000?

Makiko Hara: I don’t see such obvious critical content in this Shanghai Biennale, but, in general, over the last twelve years, critical discourse about such large festival types of art events has become more common. However, it is ironic that the 2000 Biennale was more cutting-edge, critical, and challenging than the one we saw this year. For example, censorship then was more obvious, but the curators showed attitude that challenged the government. Perhaps being critical is old fashioned.

Helga Pakasaar: The 2000 Biennale reflected an entirely different art context; criticality was an inherent part of being an artist at that time in China. Today, with such a developed market and increased opportunities for artists, the issues and references and impulses to be an artist are quite different.

Makiko Hara: That’s interesting. It's funny, though, that for us, coming from outside, where, for example, contemporary Chinese art is so often associated with Ai Weiwei’s political gestures, no one talked about it in China, so far as I remember. Perhaps this is the difference between Beijing and Shanghai?

Helga Pakasaar: I suppose that changes in the Chinese art education system would have significant impact, especially with a new generation thinking about the history of contemporary art quite differently than what Zhang Peili described to us when in the 1980s access to Western literature and movies became available for the first time. I don’t want to suggest that having knowledge about the West is so critical; artists today are responding to a wide range of visual and textual references from everywhere.

Makiko Hara: Is the self-censorship by artists a tendency to not address or deal with obvious political subjects due to restrictions by the censor board in China, or are there hidden or indiscernable political messages in their work that we were unable to read—the cultural codes that speak in different languages to Chinese audiences? I always feel sensitive about the different layers of codes that we as foreigners cannot understand.

Helga Pakasaar: Sure, the references don’t necessarily translate, or we don’t know the language. This is part of the misconception of taking such a trip and realizing that you don’t necessarily have the tools for understanding what artists are thinking and why they chose to do one thing or another. These issues apply to any exhibition with a global scope—for example, if you think of the idea of “global conceptualism,” which has brought works together from all over the world that share a similar aesthetic although the reasons for making conceptual art have been vastly different. In many places, ephemeral art (remember Geng Jianyi’s amazing conceptualist works

Vol. 12 No. 2 27 of the 1980s) was the only art possible with no resources and audience, whereas in North America it was an artistic choice to make such works. And the political motivations were different, too. All I can do is make comparisons with what I already know, which the biennial phenomenon perpetuates. Perhaps this is why I found it very informative to see retrospectives that gave a sense of the changes from the 1980s to now within one artist’s sensibility, like Geng Jianyi’s show at the Minsheng Art Museum. I really got the sense that regions and cities are very different— separate worlds even. What does Asian art, as a term, actually mean, and what is its geopolitical scope? The definition must be changing all the time.

Geng Jianyi, Useless (detail), 2004, installation at Minsheng Art Museum. Photo: Helga Pakasaar.

Makiko Hara: That’s a complicated question, and, indeed, for me, as a curator whose organization, Centre A in Vancouver, presents Asian contemporary art, the term “Asian” is always a struggle. In this kind of biennial context in which “Asia” is within a global art context, even though there are different art histories—like with South America or Africa, for example—it’s always examined in relation to “Western” notions of biennials. This is complicated by the fact that quite often Asian biennials invite non- Asian curators to reflect on the differences between art practices in Asia and the Western art world, and to examine their art from outsider points of view, as with this Shanghai Biennale, which had two Western curators as part of the team. In Taipei this year, Anselm Franke, who is based in Berlin, was the only curator, which was very unusual compared to previous Taipei Biennials.

Helga Pakasaar: We often heard how thorough Franke was in his research. By thorough I understood that people meant he talked to a lot of Taiwanese artists and really wanted to understand the place and its histories. His interests of course extended beyond Taiwan, but that seemed like the anchor. By referencing directly the literary historian, David Der-Wei Wang’s book, The Monster That Is History, he signaled an acknowledgement of the place and its related intellectual histories. You had a public conversation with him; how did that go?

28 Vol. 12 No. 2 Top: Façade of Taipei Fine Makiko Hara: Yes, I did the radio performance with Franke at the opening, Arts Museum for 2012 Taipei Biennial. which was a very interesting experience. There were five radio booths Bottom: Hannah Hurtzig: in the main entrance hall, and in each booth three programs took place The Waiting Hall: Scenes of Modernity, 2012, installation during the opening with invited hosts (artists, curators, theorists, etc.) and and performance, September 28, 2012. Courtesy of the guests (general audience) discussing for thirty minutes about one image artist and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. out of three that was hidden from the listener. The audience could get audio headphones to listen to the conversation. The image we discussed was a famous “duck and rabbit” drawing in which one can visually register either a duck or a rabbit. Franke said that he started to conceptualize this Taipei Biennial as a result of the ambiguity of that duck/rabbit drawing. There were two other images discussed by participants; a reproduction of a historical painting and an archival photo from a colonial period.

Helga Pakasaar: That is quite a unique strategy—for the curator to put himself into that kind of discursive situation, equal to other discussants, on opening night. Maybe the drawing was a version of the fiction/nonfiction dynamic . . . everything being intertwined.

Vol. 12 No. 2 29 Makiko Hara: Yes, and he was reflectively questioning his culturally constructed views of the world. I think that this Biennial challenged how to imagine “Others” and other ways of seeing the world.

Helga Pakasaar: So that was a type of critique of Eurocentrism, or maybe a confession of relativism.

Makiko Hara: I think so. The exhibition was designed very carefully and in sensitive ways. I felt the power of art to be rooted in ways of telling stories. I really enjoyed experiencing and pausing and thinking while at the exhibition and wished I could have spent more time seeing all the videos. For me, having grown up in an Asian city (Tokyo), I carry this issue of the “other” in different ways, and this was at the core of my conversation with Franke. It was about individualism, and I told him that for me, putting oneself into collective thoughts or different cultural contexts was not a question until I moved to Canada in my twenties, because such a clear sense of individualism doesn’t exist in my culture.

Helga Pakasaar: It was very effective how the back projection entry screen to the museum and the row of radio booths immediately announced interaction and set a mood (all the work of Hannah Hurtzig, The Waiting Hall: Scenes of Modernity, 2012). I agree that it was very sensitively installed, but when I think about it, the exhibition wasn’t as interactive as the entry hall suggests. It seemed like quite a formal, elegantly installed museum display, an effect that was accentuated by all the museum vitrines. You are right, storytelling of all sorts was really the main thrust of the exhibition, which I liked because then it didn’t become about issues as such, or politics. The works were read through the impulse of storytelling that foregrounds the teller rather than the tale and thus avoids the polemics of documentary. So given your Japanese sense of individuality, did you make your way through the exhibition with a distinct sense of how the relationship between history and the individual can be understood?

Makiko Hara: Certainly. It was really eye-opening for me how, for example, events such as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disasters were addressed in different works in different ways. There were lots of discoveries for me. The video installation by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, for example, was inspiring. It is based on Felix Guattari’s interview on animism from 1992, combined with interviews with other cultural producers from Asia and Europe. The interviews in this installation were mind-blowing.

I was also quite shocked to see Eric Baudelaire’s film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenoby, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images (2011). I myself have been thinking a lot about Japan’s Post 311 (nuclear disaster) and researching artworks that speak about the failure of modern science and the concept of modernization in the twentieth century. Coincidentally, I had been searching for Fusako Shigenobu, the leader of the Japanese Red Army of the 1970s, so it was great to see that work in the biennial.

30 Vol. 12 No. 2 Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011, Super 8 film transferred to HD video, 66 mins., 9 silkscreen posters, printed libretto. Courtesy of the artist and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Pratchaya Phinthong, One of Helga Pakasaar: Baudelaire’s them (01), 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the research is certainly in-depth. Such Taipei Fine Arts Museum. unique and relevant information is what makes such a biennial not just about looking at art—the artists also seem like important contributors and players in a bigger field beyond culture as such. Given that you’ve already thought about Baudelaire’s subject matter just makes it all the more important, and not just at a personal level. Such connections open up possibilities for thinking about curatorial practices, too. Those works rose to the surface as rich explorations of a very tangible fear that we have all thought about recently. Those pieces had an immediacy combined with rich philosophical discussions, as you point out. These ideas were expanded through works about nuclear issues, like Peter Watkin’s 1965 mockumentary film, The War Game, and an archival display about the atomic history of Taiwan in Anslem Franke and James T. Hong’s The Museum of the Monster That is History. And in my mind (I am not sure that it’s scientifically correct) there were links to the rare earth sphere in One of Them (01) (2012), by Partchaya Phinthong; I loved that ball just sitting in a corner, it was easy to miss, especially in relation to some of the quite extravagant installations. So there were threads of ideas that fed into the overriding theme of trauma. The exhibition didn’t propose polemical narratives, but, rather, was like an imaginative constellation where art and non-art displays supported one another.

Makiko Hara: Yes, there were a lot of “undefined” spaces in between the works that were also very interesting. As curators, we have a desire to make sense of works in the space, and tend to design our exhibitions without leaving ambiguous spaces. I don’t know if that was the curator’s intention, but regardless of so many works, I felt that the spaces between each work created openings for us to interpret them through our own experience. That way, I didn’t feel the stress that I often have in big exhibitions like this—the

Vol. 12 No. 2 31 need to see everything and understand it all. I felt so free to experience works again and again; to go back and forth.

Helga Pakasaar: Yes, I think that process of making sense, of going back, was a special experience that forged complex relationships among the works. Such stress-free looking is a rare thing.

Makiko Hara: Yes, maybe it’s my professional disease that I tend more to register the context of how works are presented than to just enjoy them. And in that sense, Franke’s curation and the entire installation was almost perfectly designed, with intentional imperfection also part of it.

Helga Pakasaar: Sure, noticing bad labels, bad connections, or whatever is a professional disease, but we also look at exhibitions as a creation, a work itself with its own aesthetic, so we appreciate when there appears to be consideration for optimizing our physical and visual experience. It seems that this pleasure factor is too often overlooked. The incoherence of the Shanghai Biennale was certainly not an issue at the Taipei Biennial—quite the opposite. I suppose that having one curator would affect that. Do you think it might have been too coherent with all that archival material organized in the vitrines?

Makiko Hara: Taipei was so professionally organized, and I can recognize the accumulation of knowledge and expertise of the teamwork. That might be the advantage of holding biennials in a museum context as opposed to a big spectacle.

Left and bottom: Wei-Li Yeh, Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate in 206, 2010–present, indoor vitrine and outdoor balcony installation. Photo: Helga Pakasaar.

Under the expertise of the director of the Taipei Biennial, Fang Wei Chang, it seems that everything fit in the right place, and even though some pieces were not working properly (which she kept apologizing for). The other large installation by Taiwanese artist Wei-Li Yeh, Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate in 206 (2010–present), challenged the conventions of museum practices and I think it was the focal piece of this Biennial; it brought a critical discourse to the examination of ethnological museum display and its value systems.

32 Vol. 12 No. 2 Jimmie Durham, The Museum Helga Pakasaar: That was an extravagant installation, a crazy of Stones, 2012, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the transformational museum that wasn’t just about gathering junk, but about artist and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. the process of recreating meaning from devalued materials. The way they worked with the conventions of ethnographic display and the inclusion of permanent wall vitrines was so effective. It was expansive, not just in scale, but conceptually, too, in relation to all the critiques of museum displays and history writing throughout the show, like the Mini-Museums and Jimmie Durham’s hilarious The Museum of Stones (2012). The ongoing collective labour that produced this work was important, too, and was made visible in a way that took on political meanings.

Makiko Hara: What I liked most about the Wei-Li Yeh’s installation was the exterior part on the second floor of the museum terrace that was used for storage of materials such as old doors and windows collected over the years for this project. Staff and visitors were allowed access to this space and even allowed to smoke a cigarette. So it ended up being a kind of social gathering space. We could see low flying airplanes over our heads every ten minutes which made the experience of the museum strange and surreal.

Helga Pakasaar: As a previously closed off secret zone for smoking and potential parties that everyone seemed very excited about, it had real impact, like a hot spot within the highly designed installation. Your point about professional organization takes us back to what biennials mean to a particular place and how that resonates in the results. Overall, it seemed that there was an institutional and civic pride in pulling off such an event in a place that might not normally have such resources and energies to expend. The fact that there were two other biennials—the really interesting one at Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, which focused on local media artists, and the Kuandu Biennale, at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (located in Taipei National University of Arts), is indicative of how Taipei places importance on interpreting its cultural identity within a wider field. I’ve been wondering if this more considered approach perhaps has to do with a certain isolation.

Vol. 12 No. 2 33 Makiko Hara: The Kuandu Biennale was very specific to the Asian region and seems to be trying to build a network and structure among Asian curators and artists, as well as using the biennial as an art education tool.

Helga Pakasaar: The experimental format of the Kuandu, with each artist choosing a curator, certainly makes sense in a university. In a focused way, this project was making interpretive links between art practices from across the diverse Asia Pacific regioin, which was also a constructive aspect of the other two biennials.

Makiko Hara: I actually liked the scale of it—only ten artists and ten curators—and it is interesting that as soon as we hear the word biennial, we automatically expect a bigger exhibition, but really there can be all types of biennials.

Helga Pakasaar: Yes, technically, a Nipan Orraniwesna, Ghost Skin: Taiwan, 2012, Installation at biennial is simply a group exhibition that Kuandu Biennale, Taipei. Photo: Helga Pakasaar. takes place every two years and that feeds into local and wider cultural landscapes. Like a tradition—if you do something twice, it can become tradition, if you want. The ever-shifting impact of large- scale biennials happens in complex ways, from putting a remote location on the map to asserting cultural muscle, and these differences can occur within one city. We also saw that what these events provide for local citizens is often quite different than for visitors. This trip left me wondering if the imperatives to interpret global culture and deliver a social message, with all the calibrated formulas for insider/outsider representation, perhaps has become a burden for established “international” biennials. Moreover, with art tourists like ourselves who, judging from our discussion, gravitate towards a “cohesive” exhibition, I’m left wondering why we hesitate to embrace the potential of totally unruly spectacles. After all, what we remember are particular works that continue to resonate in our minds, and that’s what’s meaningful in the end.

Makiko Hara: There was an international conference on biennials held in Gwangju, organized by the Gwangju Biennale foundation a month after our visit to China. I am very curious about the outcome of the conference. I believe that there are a lot of points we made in this conversation that would overlap with their topics, such as censorship, finance, scale of the event, and so forth. As a curator who used to be involved in biennial organizations, I know enough about how hard and intense it is to organize such an event, and whether it is evaluated as excellent, mediocre, or bad, the organizers put much effort into delivering the “best” art of the time. It is our job, and also pleasure, to experience and read the messages and subtexts, and witness the zeitgeist of each culture and society. We encountered a lot of great artworks and people who carried passion and love for art, and that was the most encouraging experience for me.

34 Vol. 12 No. 2 Chang Tan What Asia? Whose Art? A Reflection on Two Exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum

hat is “Asian art”? Wasn’t this a concept conjured up by the first generation of modern connoisseurs and collectors who were Winvariably Orientalists looking for an antithesis to the West?1 Why, then, do we cling to such a troubled discourse and keep on renewing it? In each display of “Asian Art,” who is chosen, and who is left behind? Aren’t these selections always based more on sociopolitical rather than aesthetic criteria? To what extent, then, should curators lay bare their criteria and agenda—or must they remain hidden and unspoken? Finally, what kind of “Asia” is being presented, when a museum—and the state apparatus behind it—is committed to collect, display, and interpret “Asian art”?

The above questions haunted me during my visits to the two exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM)—Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011 (March 12–June 26, 2011) and Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Asia (April 20, 2012–April 14, 2013), the latter presented in two segments, and installed, respectively, in the main building of SAM and at its 8Q branch across the street. Both exhibitions were excellent, yet the art they choose to display leads to radically different impressions that, in combination, may help us understand the agenda and vision of the museum, the first institution of modern art in Singapore and, in its own words, “the first international standard art museum in Southeast Asia.”2 The earlier exhibition, which featured fifty-four artists from Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, is scrupulously scoped to achieve a dynamic balance between diversity and coherence. As “the first such large-scale Asian-made institutional presentation of contemporary Southeast Asian art,”3 it also firmly places Singapore at the centre of modern Southeastern Asian art, despite its own limited representation in the show.4 What matters, the exhibition seems to argue, is the museum’s capacity to rescue those artworks from politically tumultuous societies, to display them in a state-of-the-art facility, and to interpret them in a vocabulary that stays at the frontline of the global art world today. Beneath it all—or, perhaps, above it all—is the new initiative of the Singaporean government, which has decided that its manicured city-state will harbour creative industries and become the cultural hub of Southeast Asia—or even entire Asia—in the twenty-first century.5

The curatorial conceit behind Negotiating Home, History and Nation is well articulated, if not unproblematic. The six nations, the guest curator Iola Lenzi explains (Lenzi worked with two co-curators, Tan Boon Hui

Vol. 12 No. 2 35 and Khairuddin Hori), share a regional network of maritime migration Sutee Kunavichayanont, History Class, 2001, mixed and trade, a dynamic “syncretism” of religions and spirituality, and a media. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. more recent history of colonization, independence, and nation building.6 Individual nations within this ensemble, of course, had different historical trajectories, demographics, and societal structures, but such details get lost to those unfamiliar with the historical and geographic diversities of the region, since the exhibition galleries provide little context for each work. Even the works that aim to investigate specific historical facts can be read as abstract and “contentless.” Sutee Kunavichayanont’s History Class (2000), for example, features fourteen school desks with texts and images carved on each desktop in low relief. As the title suggests, these carved images outline the history of Thailand from 1884 to 1992 through quotes from a range of documents as well as photos of historical figures and illustrations of events. Pencils, crayons, and paper were provided so that the visitors could make their own rubbings of the desktop renderings. The narrative of History Class is one of bitter irony and somber reflection: The country fought to turn absolute monarchy into constitutional monarchy and democracy but acquired a “modern” government of military dictators in the process. The texts, however, were written in Thai, and no translation was provided in the exhibition venue.7 Such a lack of explanation posed few problems when the work was first installed in 2000—in the open air, at the foot of Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, again with pencils and papers provided. Since much of the carving is too shallow to be directly legible, the lack of explanatory texts compels viewers to replicate and “make seen” the artist’s compositions, therefore creating a much stronger sense of involvement. But in its current setting, the vast majority of visitors, the present author included, understood next to nothing when sitting down at the desks to dutifully duplicate the artist’s vision. The “class,” in other words, can no longer be taught due to transcultural illiteracy. The work evolved into a clever yet inconsequential specimen of relational art.

On the other hand, a powerful yet carefully mediated sense of communal trauma—and, to a degree, communal resilience and revival—pervades much of the work in this exhibition. One of the most eye-catching works, encountered immediately upon entry, is the Filipino artists Alfredo and

36 Vol. 12 No. 2 Alfredo and Isobel Aquilizan, Isabel Aquilizan’s Wings (2009), Wings, 2009, used rubber thongs, fibreglass armature a large installation consisting of with metal internal structure, metal plate base and tubing, four thousand pairs of rubber stainless steel bolts. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. flip-flops assembled into three pairs of gigantic, angelic wings. The shoes are semi-transparent in varying shades of ivory and yellow, and when lit properly—as they were in the SAM gallery—they glow and sparkle beautifully. This Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Lang congregation of the mundane Kacang, 1991, metal and cement, 141 x 104 x 120 cm. acquires an aura of the ethereal, but Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. when one learns that all the shoes are collected from a “correctional facility” in Singapore—as I found out during the curatorial tour I took of the exhibition—the piece becomes at once ironic and moving: for those who cannot even walk freely, the fantasy of flying with slippers must have brought a sense of bitterness as well as comfort. Ascending to the third floor, the visitor was greeted by Bayu Utomo Radjikin’s Lang Kacang (1991), a human-sized sculpture of an armless warrior, squatting, head thrown back, howling into the void. Rustic scrap metal constitutes his armour— underneath which no body exists—and the elaborate headgear and the jeweled breastplates hint at his Javanese origin. While only 1.41 metres in height, the statue nevertheless appears monumental: desperate yet ferocious, defeated yet proud, the warrior is the epitome of tragic heroism. Many other pieces, such as Vasan Sitthiket’s Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt (1995), F. X. Harsono’s Burned Victims (1998), Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Horror in Pink (2001), and Din Q Lê’s The Farmers & The Helicopters (2006) also point at traumatic events in recent history, with varying degree of explicitness. As the curator points out, social problems that ravaged Southeast Asia in the past decades—“ inequality, corruption, environmental rape, authoritarianism”—are common themes for the artists of this generation,8 yet the very fact that they can now address those problems freely speaks to optimism and hope.

Left: Vasan Sitthiket, Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt, 1995, mixed media, 250 x 400 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Right: F. X. Harsono, Burned Victims, 1998, installation and performance video. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Vol. 12 No. 2 37 Din Q Le, The Farmers and The Helicopters, 2006, 3-channel video installation, 15 mins. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Again, while the audience can become mesmerized by the visually captivating presentations, one continues to desire historical specificities that may throw more light on and contexualize these conceptually intriguing pieces. The viewer would have had a broader understanding, for example, of the pink-suited man who pushes a shopping cart through the black- and-white scenes of torture in the photographic series Horror in Pink by Manit Sriwanichpoom, if she knew that the work was provoked by the artist’s shock at hearing that Samak Sundaravej, who publicly urged the use of brutal force on Thai democratic protesters in 1976, won more than a million votes in his campaign for mayor of Bangkok in 2000. The economic boom and the pleasure of consumerism, the artist concludes, erases memory of injustice and trauma among the Thai populace, and the “pink man” stands for present day Thailand—“a soulless man without a conscience to trouble him.”9 The de-contextualized images of violence, suffering, and resistance, on the other hand, convey a larger sense of an inexplicable yet inescapable victimhood that reminds one of what Paul Kagawa described twenty years ago—all “Third World Artists” (T.W.A.) are, “by our (e.g. American) definition, a voice of the oppressed.”10

Many works also feature troubled representations of individual as well as national identities—another theme that is routinely associated with “T.W.A.” The Singaporean artist Lee Wen’s Strange Fruit (2004), in which he douses himself in bright yellow paint and walks through the streets of London with his upper half covered in a balloon of red lantern, is a blatant and confrontational appropriation of racial stereotypes. Thailand’s Navin Rawanchaikul, in Where’s Navin? (2007), on the other hand, is at once more light-spirited and

38 Vol. 12 No. 2 Manit Sriwanichpoom, Horror high-strung: a human-sized statue in Pink, 2001, colour print, 120 x 165 cm. Courtesy of the of the artist holds up a plaque with Singapore Art Museum. “Navin” printed on it, and a plethora of plaques are scattered around his feet, each with his name printed in a different Asian language. As an ethnic Hindu-Punjabi-Thai artist with permanent resident status in Japan, Rawanchaikul’s anxiety as well as playfulness with his “Asian” identity is well justified, yet the work’s power comes primarily from its materiality: The painted fiberglass simulates the tone and texture of human skin to perfection; one can see every pore, every crease, and every droplet of sweat on his face. The work is also placed strategically—at a corner next to the stairs—so that it appears abruptly to the visitor, and from a few steps away the hyperrealism of the work, therefore, is doubly striking. Before grasping the ideas about the fluidity of identity and its confused expressions that underlie this work, the viewer immediately feels the emotional stress and comical awkwardness of “Navin.” The uncanny realism also induces the visitor to suspect, no matter how briefly, that a real human being is performing on the spot, thus making its title doubly ironic: where, indeed, is the real “Navin”? For an artist immersed in the ethnic and linguistic jungle of “Asia,” does any name, label, or even visual representation, do him justice?

Is it wrong to create an exhibition with themes that are routinely associated with “third world artists?” As both the curator and the critics have convincingly argued, those two themes—“the challenge to national power structures and their offshoots . . . as well as investigation of cultural identities”11—indeed have been central to Southeast Asian art during the past two decades. However, the majority of the works in Negotiating Home, History and Nation had little to do with either political trauma or cultural identity. In fact, many are impossible to classify within any of the themes the curators propose—national memories, religion and spirituality, or women serving as “victor” of storytelling.12

Vol. 12 No. 2 39 Left: Lee Wen, Strange Fruit, 2003, C–prints, 42 x 59.4 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Right: Navin Rawanchaikul, Where’s Navin?, 2007, painted fibreglass, cloth, and wood, 176 x 67 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Pinaree Sanpitak, Noon Nom, 2001–02, silk, cotton stuffing, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Most works from Singaporean Jose Legaspi, Untitled 4, 2009, pastel on paper, 100 x 70 cm. artists, for instance, seem to deal Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. with a set of issues that are different from the main themes—such as censorship (Suzann Victor), commercialism (Vincent Leow) and emotionally estranged yet physically close relations across generations (Amanda Heng)—issues that are more relevant in that particular city state than in the other Southeast Asian countries represented. Filipino artist Jose Legaspi’s clinically accurate yet eerily nightmarish portrayal of violence, perversion, and mental anguish in his series of paintings Untitled (2009), is frankly private and confessional, yet this work also creatively engages with both psychological and pictorial realism, mixing familiar visual icons of Philippine folklore with those of horror films and the more graphic depiction of pain and sacrifice in Catholicism.13 The Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak’s Noon Nom (2010–11), which consists of sixty large pieces of vaguely breast-shaped cloth balls (filled with synthetic fiber, with organza covers) among which the

40 Vol. 12 No. 2 visitor could sit or lie down, has feminist implications, yet it is primarily a piece of relational art—inviting, playful, and deliberately inconsequential. While those individualist works are no less “Asian” than those bearing more familiar themes, they appear marginalized and out of place within the overall installation of the exhibition.

The liberal inclusiveness within Negotiating Home, History and Nation, however, is not without exceptions. Despite all its political critique, the exhibition sidesteps any portrayal or reflection on the conflicts among the various countries represented. Ethnic tensions, both within and across national borders, also seem absent despite their persistent prominence in the region: nothing is present to remind the viewer of uneasy relations Singapore has with its neighbours, nor can anyone tell, from the rich display of religions and ethnicities in the exhibition, that the Chinese, the Muslims, and the Buddhists clashed, often violently, in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. The tension between the “indigenous” Asians and various stages of Western colonialism, on the other hand, receives considerable attention. The exhibition leaves the impression that, while individual nations might have experienced repression and devastation, the bond between them, facilitated by the networks of artists and curators, remains strong and untroubled. While such a perception, especially regarding the close ties among art communities, might be accurate to a degree, one must be wary of turning art into a kind of “visual massage”—a vehicle through which the ethnic, political, and economic tensions between the Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) nations is smoothed over to create a sense of brotherhood and harmony, a regional “imagined community” that is even more false and misleading than the nation.14

National and ethnic conflicts are not the only theme that was excluded (albeit subtly) from Negotiating Home, History and Nation; the curators also make clear that they selected only “contemporary art”—that is to say, artworks that consciously respond to the visual lexicons that have prevailed in the “global art world” during the past century, including modernism and its later, postmodern ramifications.15 The curators tread water carefully: They declare that they do not attempt to define “the contemporary in Southeast Asia” in any conclusive way, yet they also argue that new critical approaches and formal styles emerged in Southeast Asia only in the past two decades—the timeframe chosen for this exhibition— and that the “contemporary turn” was preceded by the encounter between “socio-political art practices and postmodern theory.”16 What they did end up selecting, as a result, would not be out of place in a “world class museum,” international biennial, or art fair anywhere on the globe. In other words, “contemporaneity,” though constantly in flux and hotly contested, is a prerequisite for practically every living artist who wants to be taken seriously. Other types of art are created in abundance, yet they invariably end up in either the low-end commercial market or historical- anthropological oriented museums. Nowadays, “non-contemporary” yet living art may encompass anything from academic realism to “traditional” ink-wash paintings, from totemic statues made for worship to the

Vol. 12 No. 2 41 decorative abstracts hanging in the corporate offices. While one may debate whether the properly “contemporary” sensibilities should dominate the field of fine art, there is little chance that the vast numbers that represent “the other” will ever attract much attention of critics and curators.

If we cannot step out of the “contemporary,” Top: ZERO, CMYK Soft Sculptures, 2010, cotton we might as well acknowledge it and embrace cushion cover and printed iron-on, 150 x 100 x 120 cm it fully. The next major exhibition at SAM, each, (5 sculptures in total). Courtesy of the Singapore Art Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Museum. Asia, displayed a range of artworks that are as Left: Justin Lee, Eat Fast Food Fast, 2011, video, 4 mins. diverse as the title suggests. Walking into the Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. first gallery, one encountered the works of two Singaporean artists: Justin Lee’s Eat Fast Food Fast (2011), in which he mixes a McDonald’s value meal—hamburger, fries, Coke, etc.—together in a blender and gulps down the brown slush, and Zero’s installation of two paintings and four cushion- style soft dolls, Agent Provocateur, Monogram, and CMYK Soft Sculptures, all of which feature his design of brightly coloured, graffiti-inspired humanoids. I have sat through many grueling pieces of performance and video art, but I found Lee’s work hard to endure—one cannot help imagining how the mixture of those familiar ingredients must have tasted as he raises the jar to his lips. Yet I wouldn’t say that the work is powerful. The concept seems at once familiar and redundant; after all, to blend any foods of different textures and flavours would produce equally unappetizing results. Also, I found myself asking “why McDonald’s?” It is, of course, a universally recognized symbol, but in a multicultural, densely populated Asian city with numerous choices of small, family-owned “fast food” vendors at every street corner, Lee could have made a stronger, more complex statement. Zero’s dolls, on the other hand, seem merely coy at the first glance. A close look reveals, as the artist points out in an interview conducted by the museum, that the faces of the humanoids are “morbid” and “sad:”17 the eyes are pupil-less, heavily creased, and drooping, the nose literally “thumbed”

42 Vol. 12 No. 2 by an intrusive finger. The short, tapered limbs also add to the sense of helplessness. Yet, like Lee’s work, the installation speaks little of its locality: to imply a sense of morbidity and perversion through seemingly harmless images of pop culture was a trademark of Tokyo Pop, if not the earlier generation of Pop Artists in the US.

Agnes Arellano, Haliya Bathing, 1983, cold cast marble sculpture (polymer resin with marble dust as filler), and crushed marble stones, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Reading To start an important exhibition (After Henri Fantin-Latour’s La Lecture, 1877), from Days of with these two pieces—Panorama is Our Lives, 2009, digital print on archival coated canvas, the museum’s first installment of its 112 x 83 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. permanent collection—is to make a statement, although I cannot determine whether it is a bold or a reconciliatory one. It is radically irreverent, yet it is also consistent with the museum’s proclivity to entertain—a characteristic shared by many cultural institutions in Singapore. But above all, I am struck by how “non-Asian” the two works appear: Asia happens to be the land where the two artists were born and raised, but no more. This impression persists throughout the exhibition. Not that the artists are avoiding the iconography, themes, or issues of their origins; on the contrary, many appropriate or confront “indigenous” objects, legends, and controversies—the disappearance of bajaj as a mode of transportation in Indonesia in Bajaj Gold, Silver and Bronze (2009–10) by Naisun; the Philippine myth of the Goddess Haliya giving birth in water in Haliya Bathing (1983) by Agnes Arellano; and the awkward condition of Malaysian Muslim women today in Days of Our Lives Series (2009), by Wong Hoy Cheong. What is absent here is a sense of shared identity, a subtle implication that there is something fundamentally “Asian” behind all the works. While I find the curious “locus-less-ness” of some works puzzling, this absence of “Asianness” also feels refreshing and liberating.

The works in Panorama remain primarily from Southeast Asia, with Singapore playing a more prominent role than in Negotiating Home.18

Vol. 12 No. 2 43 But the exhibition also includes two artists from China, one from India, and one from Australia—to justify the “Asia” in the title, of course, but also in keeping with the museum’s acquisition policy, which “devotes 80% of its funds to Southeast Asian art and the remaining 20% to the wider Asian region.”19 The curators wisely refrained from putting such diverse regional experiences and sensibilities under one (or several) thematic umbrella; instead, they choose to structure the exhibition around the all-encompassing idea of “contemporary art.” Remarkably, they have also managed to turn this notoriously slippery and diverse entity into eight “key points,” illustrated by ten of the exhibited works but “can be applied to viewing all kinds of contemporary art.” 20 The two works by Justin Lee and Zero, for example, demonstrate the “irreverent and humorous” aspects of contemporary art, as well as its tendency to mix “high and low culture.” Other important characteristics of contemporary practices, such as the emphasis on the art-making process, site-specificity, and the appropriation of existing pictorial paradigms, are also well exemplified by selected works. Some points seem generic, however, such as contemporary artists “are often influenced by their context or background.”21 Also, one could conceivably criticize the entire undertaking as reductive or superficial—contemporary art, after all, can hardly be summarized in a bulletin list.

But one may also argue that, instead of navigating a labyrinth of theories and concepts, the curators are dealing with the biggest challenge contemporary artists in Asia face: how to make themselves accessible to the majority of its population. The recent market boom does not necessarily translate into popularity among the general public, and although artists have—at least in principle—struggled to bring art out of its institutional confines during the past decades, most of their works remain incomprehensible and irrelevant to all but a small group of urban sophisticates. The accessibility of Panorama, on the other hand, is immediately apparent. Unlike Negotiating Home, History and Nation, all the works are accompanied by large, subtly illuminated, easy-to- read plaques that provide background information as well as clues for interpretation. Visitors can also download The Director’s Guide, which contains the aforementioned eight “key points” and detailed explanations of selected works, and The Educator’s Guide, which includes multiple “activity sheets” from the museum’s Web site.22 In addition, one may also visit “The Learning Gallery,” a separate exhibition hall that has been an integral part of the museum since its founding, but has never before been used so effectively: Here, diverse, thought-provoking works of contemporary Asian art are selected, each supplied with lengthy yet engaging explanations of its sociopolitical and art historical context as well as questions for further contemplation, and available at the door of the gallery. Again, such guidance may appear redundant or even restrictive for more seasoned viewers, yet for an audience with little prior exposure to modern or contemporary art, it provides helpful opportunities. I wish more museums in China—or even in the US—could develop such a practical and thoughtful educational program about contemporary art.

44 Vol. 12 No. 2 Phunk, Electricity (Neon), 2010, carbon ink transfer on wood panels, animated projection, 300 x 830 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Sherman Ong, Hanoi Haiku, 2005, print on archival semi- gloss paper, 75 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Ang Song Ming, Be True to The desire to reach across and beyond Your School, 2010, 5-channel video. Courtesy of the Asia may well qualify as the strongest Singapore Art Museum. rationale of Panorama. The aesthetic contemporaneity of these works also represents the face of the “new Asia” they come from, where identities are being crafted anew and articulated in a more or less “universal” language. In other words, the strategy of identity politics that since the 1980s has marked artists who live in the “periphery” is now being resolutely rejected; thus the absence of a fixation on ethnicity- based identity has become a sign of avant-garde pride. The Singaporean artists seem to lead the way in this triumphant cosmopolitanism: With the sole exception of the art and design collective Phunk, whose glittering Neon (2010) mirrors the over-electrified city of Singapore (although, as the curator points out, such “neonized” landscapes are far from unique in Asian metropolises), all the works in Panorama by Singaporean artists appear curiously rootless. Sherman Ong’s Hanoi Haiku (2005) series, made during his residency in Vietnam under the Goethe Institut Art ConneXions project, is perhaps the best example: featuring the street scenes of Hanoi, the beautifully assembled triptychs are inspired by the aesthetics of haiku—poetry created through the juxtaposition of seemingly banal imagery. To push the rejection of fixed identities even further, Ong admits that he learned about the idea of “visual haikus” from Sculpting in Time, a book by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, the English translation of which was published in 1987.23 Ang Song-Ming’s video Be True to Your School (2010) records scenes of high school reunions he observed during his years of residency in Japan, and six of the Singaporean artists in the exhibition work with abstraction, in both two-dimensional and three-

Vol. 12 No. 2 45 dimensional forms. The only work with clear local relevance is Tang Mun Kit’s White Elephant Expostulation (2007), which makes reference to public outrage in Singapore regarding a redundant subway station in 2005, yet the explanatory plaque still stresses the arte povera influence in its aesthetics. In other words, the works of these Singaporean artists are mostly either “pan- Asian” or not “Asian” at all.

Tang Mun Kit, The Hidden White Elephant Expostulation, 2006–07, canvas, stitching, acrylic sheets, cotton netting, wooden found objects, wood dye, preservatives, acrylic paint, LED strips, red bulbs, sockets/wiring, 366 x 396 x 28 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

One might attribute such a lack of local Zhou Xiaohu, Crowd of Bystanders, 2003-2005, clay content to censorship or self-censorship in statues, video animation, 800 x 800 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore, which raised much controversy Singapore Art Museum. in the 1990s and still exerts its influence today;24 works from other countries refer to their respective origins more liberally,

yet they are also anything but provincial. Wiyoga Muhardanto, Conversation Pieces, 2010, The Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu’s Crowd installation. Courtesy of the of Bystanders (2003–05), for example, Singapore Art Museum. clearly draws from the century-old intellectual critique of the “bystanders’ mentality” (pangguanzhe xintai) within the Chinese population—the morbid Nalini Milani, Hamletmachine, curiosity and prevailing indifference 2000, 4-channel video installation. Courtesy of the observable in crowds faced with spectacles Singapore Art Museum. of injustice, suffering, or violence. The ten groups of “bystanders” in his installation, however, feature several scenarios from the global theatre: The 9/11 terrorist attack and the trial of Saddam Hussein, as well as more generic references to idol worship in a temple or the electrocution of a criminal. Each scene is staged as both a group sculpture of clay figures and a black-and-white animated narrative played on a monitor placed next to the sculptures, and the crude, homogeneous appearance of these clay figures further enhances their lack of ethnic specificity. The exhibition hall of Indonesian art, located at the 8Q branch of SAM, features two heavily conceptual works that poke fun at institution of art: Wiyoga Muhardanto’s Conversation Piece (2010) and Syagini Ratna Wulan’s Biblio Tea (2011). The former is an installation of several

46 Vol. 12 No. 2 Syagini Ratna Wulan, Biblio pairs of hyper-real and fashionably dressed legs that are visible beneath lifted Tea, 2011, installation. Courtesy of the Singapore Art curtains, which, according to the placard on the wall, depict typical members Museum. of the “art circle” in Indonesia today—rich wives, professional dealers, and hip artists who form an exclusive society “behind the curtains.” The latter features a “teashop” that parodies a museum shop or an art collective, with titles of works listed as menus, boards covered with slogans or photographs of artists, and books that bear titles such as Blood and Beauty and World’s Greatest Conceptual Impostors yet carry nothing but blank pages inside. Both works are delightful, and their irony, although originating within an Indonesian context, can easily apply to art communities everywhere in the world. The Indian artist Nalini Malani’s Hamletmachine (2000), an ambitious work that takes up an entire room with a triptych of gigantic video projections on the wall, one projection on a bed of salt on the floor, and surrounding sound effects, is supposed to address a distinctly local and personal issue: the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India, which resulted in Partition in 1947 and rendered the Karachi-born Nalini and her family refugees. Yet the artist chose to make explicit references to Hamlet, the prototype of human fickleness and the inability to act, and to the German playwright Heiner Müller’s 1977 work Hamletmachine, which depicts the violent split of a nation and the consequent trauma. It also employs a Japanese Butoh dancer, on whose body a montage of images is projected—the scenes of riots in India and Pakistan are interspersed with abstract patterns as well as an array of faces and objects. The audience has to rely on the artist’s monologue, which is cryptic and often indecipherable among the accompanying drumbeats, in order to penetrate the layered intertextuality and comprehend how this work is relevant to the ethnic conflicts in India; all the same, the sophisticated, multicultural intentions of the artist come across with conviction.

What does all this imply for the Singapore Art Museum and for the idea of “Asian art”? First of all, in this age of globalization and migration, one’s identity, as Homi Bhabha has famously argued, has become an issue of itinerary instead of fixated, essentialist topography.25 All the artists presented have “traveled” across and beyond Asia—physically,

Vol. 12 No. 2 47 intellectually and emotionally—and their works are shaped more by such experiences than the locality of their birth. But as important, while such dislocation used to be a source of nostalgia, anxiety, alienation, or deliberate awkwardness for the “T.W.A.” artists, Asian artists today seem to be increasingly comfortable with hybridity. One may speculate that the rising prominence of Asia, enhanced by its relative immunity to the recent global recession, is manifesting itself in the sphere of culture. Only those who are secure about their own identity can accommodate the “other” with ease, and Panorama seems to suggest that Asia is in the process of acquiring such confidence. The exhibition Outside In: Chinese X American X Contemporary Art (March 5–June 7, 2009, Princeton University Art Museum), which displayed works created by Chinese-American as well as ethnically non-Chinese artists, may count as an example of such expansiveness;26 maybe it is time to forgo “Asian” as an adjective when contemporary art is the subject.

However, such exuberance cannot stand up to close scrutiny. The cosmopolitanism of some artworks seems contrived—the multicultural references in Hamletmachine, for example, are rich to the point of obscurity and pedantry. More importantly, the erasure as well as expansion of what can be perceived to be “art of Asia” continues to be selective within Asia, and the standard of selection—the elusive yet authoritative “contemporaneity”—in fact becomes more elitist than ever, especially if one considers that the vast majority of people in the parts of Asia represented in Panorama still have little or no access to the advantages offered by cosmopolitanism. To travel, to acquire the taste for other cultures, to become familiar with an artistic lexicon that is current, and to engage with “international” institutions and agents is a privilege that only a handful can enjoy—with the apparent exception of Singapore, a city-state with a relatively small population and land mass, where cosmopolitanism, at least at a mundane and materialist level, is more easily available. In a manner that is subtle yet persuasive, the Singapore Art Museum extols the exceptionalism of its city-state. This ease of switching among cultures, together with a business-friendly environment and an English-speaking population, is precisely what Singapore uses to compete against its neighbouring giants in the race to become the “art centre of Asia.”27

Whether one chooses to retain a uniquely Asian identity or to reject it, the political agenda behind such choices should not be overlooked. In other words, the concept of Asian art remains ideologically fraught. When we encounter a display of Asian art, we are obliged to ask, “whose Asia? What art?” The answers can be illuminating. Negotiating Home and Panorama offer seemingly paradoxical answers to those questions: The Asia they represent is both a tight-knit community and a “global village” without borders, and the art on display is at once bound up with the history, religion, and culture of its origin and accessible to all, bespeaking visual sensibilities and conceptual sophistication that are decisively “contemporary.” In combination, the two exhibitions showcase how art can articulate the status and ambitions of a culture—within Southeast Asia, in Asia at large, and in a world of shifting paradigms.

48 Vol. 12 No. 2 Notes 1 The most obvious examples would be Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Teshin, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the “three luminaries of Asian art” in the early twentieth century. Their perceptions of “Oriental art” were also perpetuated by many institutions, collectors, and artists at the time, in Europe, America, and Asia. 2 Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum: A Perspective (Roseville, N.S.: Fine Arts Pty. Ltd., 1996), 3. 3 "Exhibition Synopsis," Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Educator’s Guide, Singapore Art Museum, available at http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/downloads/nhhn_educator_guide.pdf. 4 Seven Singaporean artists were selected in the exhibition, already an outsized representation. All but Malaysia, however, had more artists represented. 5 Eugene Tan’s “Institution of the Future: Singapore,” published in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 5 (September–October 2012), is a resounding statement of the Singapore government’s intentions on this front. 6 Iola Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011 (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011), 9–10. 7 There was no translation available in the gallery, and the texts were not explained during the curatorial tour offered on May 24, 2011, which was admittedly constrained by time (one hour). One has to look to the end of the exhibition catalogue for translation; see Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 241–2. 8 Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 20. 9 See the artist’s statements at Rama IX Art Museum, the Web site of Thai Modern and Contemporary Art (http://www.rama9art.org/manit_s/). The Pink Man series started 1997 as a parody of the rampant consumerism the artist observed in Bangkok. 10 Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessing: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 15. 11 Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Southeast Asia Artists Look to the Present,” New York Times, April 27, 2011. 12 Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 20–7. 13 For more detailed commentary on Lepaspi’s handling of the imagery of horror, see an introduction of the artist from the exhibition Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, August 13–November 6, 2011). Available at http://www.portrait.gov.au/ site/exhibition_subsite_beyondtheself_artist.php?artistID=10&languageID=1 - start/. 14 Apinan Poshyananda, “The Future: Post–Cold War, Postmodernism, Postmarginalia (Playing with Slippery Lubricants),” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993). 15 There is no consensus on what constitutes “contemporary art,” yet it is evident that “contemporary art practice is saturated with deep, detailed—but not always (or even often) systematic—knowledge of art history.” See Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 244. 16 See Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 10–11, 85. 17 The interview is available on YouTube and accessible through the official site of the exhibition. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEv54Ed3Qw&feature=plcp/. 18 Thirteen of the forty-one artists are Singaporean; two of them are originally from Yugoslavia (Milenko Privacki) and Korea (Om Mee Ai). 19 See the “Collection” section on the SAM Web site, at http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/the_ collection/. 20 Tan Boon Hui, Panorama, Director’s Guide (2012), downloadable at http://www.singaporeartmuseum. sg/exhibitions/details.php?id=112. 21 Ibid. 22 Educator’s Guide, together with “Primary Activity Worksheet” and “Secondary Activity Worksheet,” is downloadable at the same Web site. 23 The interview is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEv54Ed3Qw&feature=plcp/. 24 Notable examples include Josef Ng, who was banned from performing in public after his provocative performance in 1994, and Simon Fujiwara, whose work was “altered” without the artist’s permission at the 2011 Singapore Biennale. But more often, the state’s control of the arts is achieved through the granting as well as withdrawal of funds, and its power has grown as the funding increased in recent years. 25 For Homi Bhabha’s theories on hybridity and dislocated identity, see his monograph The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) and article “Cultures in Between,” in David Bennett, ed., Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 29–36. Bhabha also brings up this argument in the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council Symposium, Part 3, “Exhibiting Asian Art—Alternative Models and Non-Western Paradigms,” published in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 5 (September/October 2008), 67–98. 26 As Sohl Lee points out, the exhibition sits “awkwardly” between Chinese and American art as well as contemporary and “traditional” art, and challenges the very construction of both polarity. See Lee, “Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 4 (July/August 2009), 88–97. 27 In Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Singapore Nurtures Art with Bureaucratic Touch,” New York Times, November 12, 2012), various gallery owners discuss the advantages of opening galleries in Singapore, as compared with other Asian countries—and with China in particular. Interestingly, the article carries a more sensational title in the Times’ Chinese version: “ ”[Singapore surpasses China in becoming the center of art in Asia].

Vol. 12 No. 2 49 Stephanie Bailey Yin Xiuzhen: A Material World

in Xiuzhen is an artist concerned with the story of people.1 It’s a story she constructs from society itself using items—from Ybananas, shoes, and clothes set in concrete, to sculptures made of secondhand clothes—that recall personal and collective narratives. These narratives are rooted in the artist’s upbringing in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and move into her experiences entering art school with little formal training, in 1985. That year, an exhibition at the Beijing National Gallery featuring work by Robert Rauschenberg confirmed for the artist— and many others—that there was more to art than Socialist Realist painting, a timely moment that coincided with the emergence of the avant-garde in China, later commemorated in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition staged in February 1989. Yin Xiuzhen describes that exhibition as a summary of the ’85 New Wave Movement which emerged in mainland China as a response to the rapid changes taking place in Chinese society in the early eighties and its opening up to the West.

The Tian’anmen Square crackdown also took place in 1989, before Yin Xiuzhen graduated with a painting project that used the idea of crossroads as a central idea. She remembers the period as one when students were spending more time outside of their studios, reluctant to return given everything that was happening on Beijing’s streets. After graduating, she broke from painting altogether to explore alternative ways of making and engaging with art. Along with her contemporaries, during the 1980s and 90s she began to search for places to stage art projects in the suburbs and rural areas surrounding Beijing, a time when, unlike today, there was no support structure for contemporary art in China. Her work has since evolved with the social fluctuations of China’s economic boom, and today, she is a global artist whose work balances an innocent curiosity with a critical sophistication that has emerged from the experience of living through and witnessing an extraordinary historical transition.

The artist’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (December 15, 2012–March 10, 2013), a collaboration between the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Groniger Museum in the Netherlands, was Yin Xiuzhen’s first major exposure to a European audience. In this exhibition, the artist’s later sculptures were the focus, ones constructed for the most part from secondhand clothes as membranes for intricately constructed shapes sourced from urban life—bookshelves, airplanes, vans, and a series of miniature cities made from fabric that are presented in suitcases: works that consist of references that are at once familiar and accessible.

50 Vol. 12 No. 2 Left and right: Yin Xiuzhen, Bookshelf No. 1, 2009, clothes, wood, bookshelf, 226 cm x 126 cm x 43 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

Left: Yin Xiuzhen, Nowhere to Land, 2012, used clothes, steel, stainless steel, mirror, vehicle light, 330 x 240 x 210 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

Right: Yin Xiuzhen, Clothes Plane, 2001, steel frame, used clothes, photograph. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

But there is also a sense of tension in the combination of something soft and personal—one’s clothes—and the easily recognizable, often industrial, forms with which they are combined. For example, in the large sculpture representing an airplane’s inverted landing gear, Nowhere to Land (2012), positioned at the Kunsthalles’s entrance, the tires of the airplane are made with large pieces of fabric that would never support the weight of any aircraft. Moreover, the subliminal sensation of the plane having been overturned makes the piece look as though it is a scattered remnant from a crash. Then there is Clothes Plane, installed in another gallery, commissioned by Siemens and developed as a three-month project in which company employees donated their work shirts to the artist. Coincidentally completed in August 2001, it was installed in a Siemens work office just one month before the 9/11 attack in New York, and when viewing the work today the association with 9/11 is difficult to ignore.

The tension between the specific references of an artwork and how its initial ideas assume new meanings in accordance with the passing of time and the changes in history creates a paradox of universals; things represented as forms that are at once particular, replicable, and, by nature, a challenge to describe. The reference to an airplane, for example, in the sculptures Nowhere to Land and Clothes Plane, refers to a universally recognizable icon that represents a vast web of complex and interrelated historical associations. This situates Yin Xiuzhen's works not only within both national and international contexts, but in more subjective contexts, too, in that the use of something as familiar as a T-shirt could be read in an

Vol. 12 No. 2 51 infinite number of ways when placed within a global context. This raises a plethora of meanings upon which multiple interpretations arising from the specificity of cultural and geographical circumstances might be inscribed— with some of them potentially diverging from the artist’s original intent. Nevertheless, in the immediate moment of communicative exchange when a viewer encounters an artwork, the immediacy and the impact of the work is inescapable. Whatever connotations a plane or a T-shirt may have for one person, they are also related to a much larger constellation of meanings.

When viewed from a Western perspective and in the context of this Düsseldorf show, the use of clothing in Yin Xiuzhen’s sculptures has been read, from the responses of those attending the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, as a comment on China’s manufacturing industry that has been so central to the country’s economic boom. But on this point, she is quick to respond:

Actually I never thought about making a comment on China’s manufacturing or textiles industry. It was not my intention at all, but a lot of people have mentioned this when discussing my work.

The presumption that a Chinese artist using clothes that essentially look the same as those worn by people around the world is a comment on manufacturing might be an easy one to make, and aside from Yin Xiuzhen’s denial of that, it raises questions within a Western context about whether or not this work is positing a critique of China. In this respect, the tensions that arise in the Düsseldorf exhibition from these questions are highlighted by the presentation of these particular sculptures to a foreign audience, which, for the most part, is as unfamiliar with Yin Xiuzhen’s work as the circumstances from which her practice evolved.

As such, this cultural displacement of Yin Xiuzhen’s was addressed on the day of the exhibition opening, when Artistic Director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf Gregor Jansen noted that many of the journalists who came to view Yin Xiuzhen’s show expected the artist to be critical of China, an expectation Jansen aspires to overcome, explaining:

You cannot ignore China anymore and I think we have to learn to recognize and deal with this. For me, Yin Xiuzhen is an ideal artist to show because she is not dealing with clichés: She is not producing work on Tian’anmen or Mao Zedong, like the art we saw in the late 90s and the early noughties.2

In other words, the exhibition does not only shed light on a major artistic practice within the Chinese avant-garde, but also dislodges Yin Xiuzhen’s work from the particularities of its roots within Chinese culture, while edging into a larger, more rapidly evolving critique by an artist who now operates within the art industry’s global networks.

In the Portable Cities series (2000–12), fabric replicas of cities the artist has visited rise from within open suitcases and have been made of clothing

52 Vol. 12 No. 2 Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City: sourced from people who live in New York, 2003, suitcases, used clothes, light, map, those cities. The Portable Cities sound, 148 x 88 x 30 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of series was produced, according to Pace Beijing. Yin Xiuzhen, in response to the fact that in the past decade she has been able to travel more, an experience that parallels China’s tentative and gradual opening up to the world during the past thirty years. Constructed from fabric and stuffing, Yin Xiuzhen’s “cities” reflects a kind of curiosity; an exploration in which the artist attempts to understand, interact, or engage with a place on material and personal levels, with the suitcase a signifier of her mobility. In producing towers built from people’s garments such as characteristic Brooklynite plaid shirts in Portable City: New York (2003), for example, Yin Xiuzhen’s toy-like “portraits” render the world’s cities—places that can be tough, alienating and impenetrable—into soft, more approachable spaces.

Something Yin Xiuzhen’s seeks in her work is a kind of personal balance within the collective flows and forces of society as it undergoes the transformations brought on by technological progress and globalization. On globalization, Yin Xiuzhen notes:

It brings a lot of negative aspects because no matter where you are, in New York or Beijing, everything is more or less the same. You have the same shops around you, so you sort of throw away your own identity. You gain something but you also lose something.

In this reflection on progress, modernization, and development, the idea that we gain as much as we lose reinforces the idea of exchange that has been another underlying component of much of Yin Xiuzhen’s work. Here, the audience becomes as integral to the work as the artist, an approach rooted in earlier projects the artist produced in the late 1990s and presented in this exhibition by photographic documentation. Projects like Shoes With Butter evolved during a 1996 trip to Tibet, when the artist collected shoes from locals and filled them with yak butter in recognition of the butter’s role in Tibetan life both for physical and spiritual sustenance. In conceiving this piece, Yin Xiuzhen recalls expecting to find traditional shoes from the locals who donated their footwear for the project, and was surprised to find that the shoes looked much like those she would find in China.

In these earlier projects, there is a sense of reciprocity in how the artist explores the way in which people partake in social events and spaces through interaction with each other. Shoes With Butter was left behind in situ, like many of Yin Xiuzhen’s other early works, not just because of a lack of space for storage, but also because, perhaps, these on-site installations were in

Vol. 12 No. 2 53 essence offerings to the various cultures and landscapes that that served as Top: 5. Yin Xiuzhen, Shoes with Butter, 1996, photograph, the inspiration for the artist’s creative intentions. Such intentions are perhaps 120 x 180 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Kunsthalle clearest in the seminal 1995 project Washing the River, staged in Chengdu. In Düsseldorf. this work, the artist transported water from the heavily polluted Funan river, Bottom: Yin Xiuzhen, Washing River, 1995, photograph of had it frozen into blocks, and then returned these blocks to the riverbanks, performance, 120 x 180 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of the water’s original source, in order to “wash” them clean with drinking Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. water, with passersby welcome to join in the cleansing process. It is the one project Yin Xiuzhen personally recognizes as a performance, recalling the most rewarding part of the work being the communicative exchange that took place with those of the public who became involved.

Washing the River is a subtly political work, reflecting wider artistic movements that were evolving in Chengdu at the time, and is predicated on

54 Vol. 12 No. 2 practice rather than theory—a response to the immediacy of the present and the issues affecting specific communities. In the case of Chengdu, a response was activated on Yin Xiuzhen’s part by the detrimental effects of progress and industry and the artist did what she thought was right. In this reaction, Yin Xiuzhen’s works enter into a space of global concerns. She explains:

I was born in China, raised and educated there, and I live there, so of course everything I do has to do with China. But on the other hand, in the past years, I have travelled and communicated with people outside. So in that way, I’ve become globalized and I can see that many of the world’s problems are the same. Environmental problems, climate change, these things are not only specific to China.

Yin Xiuzhen, Collective Subconscious, 2007, minibus, stainless steel, used clothes, stools, audio,1420 x 140 x 190 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Beijing Commune, Beijing.

Collective Subconscious (2007), a reference to the first widely available (and affordable) vehicle produced in China, the mianbao che (little loaf of bread van), is one work that strongly illustrates how Yin Xiuzhen mediates references between the particular and the global in her work. The sculpture references a symbol in China—the minivan—that, for a period of time, represented a sense of growing promise and prosperity in China through its opening up to the West that inevitably ended for many in certain individual and collective disappointments. In the sculpture, an actual vehicle has been cut in half, its framework extended and covered with over four hundred pieces of clothing arranged into strips that lengthen the central portion of the vehicle’s body accordion-like. A variety of stools have been placed inside the van’s enlarged interior, and a song is played on repeat: “Beijing, Beijing” by Wang Feng, a song with the following lyrics in its opening verse:

When I walk on each of these streets, My heart never seems to be at peace Apart from roaring of the engines and sounds of the electric . . .

Vol. 12 No. 2 55 On the work, Yin Xiuzhen explains:

Chinese people understand the lyrics and know what it is about: struggles and disappointments. When they see the car they will remember that certain period of time in the nineties and think about where they see themselves now.

In other words, the sculpture operates as a social space in which people can come together to collectively reflect upon their experience of society. The artist elaborates:

This sort of social space; it’s like a little boat, and a lot of people are sitting inside, and they are all tender and warm together, but around them is this vast, stormy ocean. It’s a dangerous situation, and maybe the people want to go in one direction, but around them, things are up and down, up and down. . . .

In this once modest but potent Yin Xiuzhen, Engine, 2008, stainless steel, steel, used cultural symbol from the recent clothes, 200 x 230 x 410 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace past, Yin Xiuzhen explains how the Beijing. exhaust pipe coming from the van’s motor is significant as a reference. It is an idea further expanded in Engine (2008), with its bright red clothing stitched like a membrane over an intricate heart-shaped structure presented on the floor. A valve ringed with metal protrudes from the sculptural organ like an exhaust pipe, alluding to the machinist qualities of the heart; the engine as both a mechanical and human form. The same sort of protrusion occurs in Thought (2009), a bright blue sculpture in the shape of a brain. The two sculptures suggest the idea of the heart and the brain as universal motors for thinking and feeling—the drivers of humanity’s needs and desires within the mechanics of society. The heart and mind: things that form such associations as those made by the little bread van: a collective subconscious.

When speaking about the engine as a motif, Yin Xiuzhen explains:

It’s also about questioning all of these things. Of course, a person can dream, but human beings can never have enough; they always want more and more. So the thing that drives these desires—the engine—can it actually endure this burden, or do we want too much?

In this statement, the human Yin Xiuzhen, Highway, 2009, clothes, stainless steel, drive to progress, accumulate, and aluminum panel and lamp, 329 x 654 x 200 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. evolve is explored through the Courtesy of Pace Beijing. individual, represented in the use of secondhand clothing, against the common motifs Yin Xiuzhen chooses to represent—an airplane, a minivan, or, in the case of Highway

56 Vol. 12 No. 2 Yin Xiuzhen,Thought, 2009, clothes and steel, 340 cm x 510 cm x 370 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

Yin Xiuzhen,Thought (detail), 2009, clothes and steel, 340 cm x 510 cm x 370 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

(2009), a segment of highway complete with street lamps and road dividers. Constructed essentially like a “road bed” in that it looks and feels like a soft mattress covered over with black clothing, the work is a comment on the pace of progress and how the human soul cannot maintain the speed with which the engine of society moves. As Yin Xiuzhen explains, the work invites “the viewer to lie down and to wait for their soul to catch up.”6

Vol. 12 No. 2 57 58 Vol. 12 No. 2 Yin Xiuzhen, Dress Box, 1995, In Highway’s material references, the cement road is used as a symbol like clothes, cement, an old home- made dress box, copper plate, the secondhand clothing, but in its opposite form. For the artist, cement television. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing. is the material that constructs our collective physical landscape—roads, buildings, houses—and the clothes serve as a representation of the individual person. This reprise of the juxtaposition of something hard— concrete—with something soft—clothes—provides a visual language with which to think about the individual in society. But this time, as Yin Xiuzhen notes as she discusses the idea of social space from a global standpoint, it is like the whole world is still in that little boat navigating the vast stormy sea, struggling to survive against all odds.

Highway recalls a key work not included in the exhibition: Dress Box, made in 1995 and the first piece the artist created using her own childhood clothing, which she placed in a wooden chest that was then set in concrete. For Yin Xiuzhen, the work is both a reflection on her own life and on China, a time when “everyone shared, more or less.” Dress Box is an individual biography embodied in society’s stories and histories. Yet, as tender or sentimental as this work as a memorial may be, it also touches on the entombment of memory—of childhood and nostalgia—in a material that essentially confines such memories in a hard casing, just as cities—and social systems—can confine the people who live in them, no matter which culture. In presenting common objects to an audience as an invitation to position oneself in relation to globalization’s symbols, viewers might also mediate the fact that while one has read an artwork in a certain way, the other might have read it entirely differently.

Given the context of China’s transformation in the past half century and how it has influenced the artist’s work, the reception of it today expands on the function of Yin Xiuzhen’s practice, one that continues to invite a restorative sense a sense of “being together” or of repairing a collective consciousness that may have been fractured. Considering the pace with which globalization is progressing, their familiarity as objects raises the issue of what it means to experience the world today and the processes within which it operates, which is a global experience in and of itself. By employing objects and ideas that are both familiar and foreign, Yin Xiuzhen constructs an image of a material world made by material people: a narrative based on collective experiences built from individual lives.

Notes 1 Yin Xiuzhen, in conversation with the author at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, December 14, 2012. All subsequent quotes are taken from this interview. 2 Gregor Jansen in conversation with the author at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, December 14, 2012. All subsequent quotes are taken from this interview.

Vol. 12 No. 2 59 Alpesh Kantilal Patel WOMEN September 15–December 15, 2012 Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco December 2011 EMG Gallery, Shanghai

n her 2011 op-ed piece for Le Monde, feminist scholar Julia Kristeva briefly sketches out the history of women’s rights in China. She notes Ithat the country’s early-nineteenth-century bourgeois revolution was feminist as much as it was nationalist and socialist—Chinese suffragettes invaded parliament in 1912—and that the women’s rights movement inspired the 1919 May Fourth Movement, which called for equal rights for men and women, an end to polygamy and arranged marriages, and access to higher education for women. By 1950, the People’s Republic abolished a marriage law that would not allow women to keep their maiden name, bequeath property to their children, or earn property rights.1

In contemporary China, women routinely outperform men on entrance exams to college and have become integral to the country’s strong economy—they make up 46% of the workforce.2 In contradistinction to this evidence, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report indicates that the disparity between men and women in China—not only in categories such as economic participation and education attainment, but also political empowerment, economic opportunity, health, and survival—is still significant: in 2012, China ranked 69 out of 130 countries assessed.3

Kristeva surmises that the international community’s interest in the economy of post-millennial China has eclipsed concerns for woman’s rights.4 Her op-ed piece—later translated into English and published in the Guardian Weekly5— focused on the problems faced by two co-winners of the 2010 Simone de Beauvoir prize for women’s liberty—which Kristeva founded—in upholding woman’s rights in China. One recipient, professor of comparative literature and filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, was not allowed to leave China to accept her award; the other, lawyer Guo Jianmei, was allowed to leave the country, but two months after her return, Beijing University severed its relationship with the non-governmental organization (NGO) she founded in 1995, Women’s Legal Research and Services Center, one of the most well known legal aid NGOs in China and abroad. No definitive reason for the closure of the center was given, but it was suspect since the other three NGOS with which the university cut ties at the same time were largely “empty shells.” 6

Curator Abby Chen was invited in 2009 by the aforementioned Ai Xiaoming and her colleague Ke Qianting to serve on a panel discussing documentary film in China, and while there she was introduced to a number of scholars, feminists, and artists in Guangdong. Through this experience Abby Chen began to develop the exhibition titled WOMEN , which took shape

60 Vol. 12 No. 2 initially as an exploration of feminism through contemporary Chinese art and visual culture, a woefully unexamined topic in the art world.7 Mobilizing the metaphor of a contagion to speculate about the dearth of exhibitions on gender identity, curator Hou Hanru in an interview with Abby Chen on January 28, 2013 provocatively said that the contemporary Chinese art world is “contaminated and driven by commercial success” and that its “disengagement of political and social issues” is tantamount to a “generalized disease.” The latter echoes Kristeva’s observation that an emphasis on commerce has led to a general occlusion of women’s rights in China.

Man Yee Lam, Silk Cocoon, The Historical and Contemporary Roles of Women in China 2011, installation and video, 5 mins. Courtesy of the artist. Two works in WOMEN , both performative, by mid-career artists are exemplary in linking the historical and contemporary contradictions embedded within women’s rights.8 California-based, Hong Kong-born Man Yee Lam’s Cocooning—Self-Combing Woman (2011) concerns her ancestral hometown of Shunde, the workforce of which has been dominated by women for hundreds of years. Silk production is the chief industry of Shunde, and women who tended the silkworms not only wielded significant economic power but also reshaped the prevailing feudal social structure. Instead of marriage, the women of Shunde could choose “spinsterhood” by performing the “self-combing” ceremony. Traditionally, families hired married women with many children to recomb a bride’s hair into a matronly bun—to signify her transition from girl to woman and daughter to wife; on the other hand, the self-combing ceremony involved women combing their own hair to signify their commitment to lives of self-reliance. Man Yee Lam’s performance involves her literally weaving herself into a cocoon with white pigtail yarn; by doing so she foregrounds the sobering truth that although the women of Shunde could choose a role outside of that of a housewife,

Vol. 12 No. 2 61 it was in exchange for a life-long vow of chastity taken in front of family members and other women as part of the self-combing ceremony.

The installation is accompanied by two video monitors, one of which includes interviews with the few surviving self-combing woman (the society of self-combing women faded away after the China’s republic era); the other depicts Man Yee Lam, herself, in high-heel shoes, a business suit, and her hair pulled up, which seems to imply her own ability to be self-reliant. Of course, today, Chinese women certainly do not have to take a vow of chastity to be self-sufficient. At the same time, in an artist’s statement on the wall of the exhibition, Man Yee Lam notes that although she has a greater range of choices than her ancestors did, she considers herself as emblematic of a contemporary variant of the predicament of the self-combing woman. She is able to support her artistic practice through work in the financial sector, but this has necessarily meant a delay in marriage, which is still largely looked down upon from a dominant hegemonic point of view. CNN Hong Kong recently referred to unmarried wealthy women as “golden spinsters.”9

Beijing-based performance artist He

Chengyao’s photographs allude to past and He Chengyao, 99 Needles, 2002, C print. Photo: Li present roles of women but through a more Yongsheng. Courtesy of the specific personal relationship—one between artist. herself and her mother. He Chengyao was born out of wedlock, and her mother, unable to bear the societal scorn, became mentally ill when He Changyao was quite young.10 To begin to understand what her mother might have gone through, the artist staged a series of performances re-enacting various scenes such as one involving the forcible insertion of acupuncture needles, 99 Needles (2002). According to He Chengyao, her re-performance of the procedure—originally performed as a potential cure for her mother’s increasingly fragile psyche—functions as a kind of atonement given that she had witnessed the event yet was unable to intervene.11 Particularly poignant is the photographic series Mama and Me (2001–02), in which He Chengyao takes a photo with her mother for the first time. She explains that when she visited her mother in Rongchang, the rural hometown in which she grew up, she found her in the courtyard sitting by herself “on a stool at one side of the courtyard, half naked and playing with a rotten apple.”12 Eventually, her mother took off her top, so He Chengyao, too took off her shirt in solidarity for this mother–daughter photograph; and thereby satisfied “a yearning of more than thirty years to support, touch, and embrace her.13 He Chengyao’s works are metaphors for the deeply embodied and generational wounds connected to the failure of women’s rights to change the lives of a great many of the women in China, especially those outside of urban areas.

He Chengyao, Mama and Me, 2001–02, C prints. Photo: Yan Yan. Courtesy of the artist.

62 Vol. 12 No. 2 Shanghai Nvai/Gao Ling, Occupy Shanghai Subway: “It’s a Dress, Not a Yes”, 2012, performance. Courtesy of the artists and the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco.

Slipping Signifiers Kristeva’s aforementioned article appeared a little over two months after France banned the wearing of full-face veils in public.14 Subway Performance (2012)—a collaboration between emerging Shanghai-based artist Gao Ling and the NGO Shanghai Nvai, a lesbian advocacy group—productively connects feminism in China with the politics of the veil; and is exemplary of the manner in which Abby Chen’s exhibition incorporates transnational feminist discourses. Subway Performance is in large part a comment on the response of Shanghai’s Metro to the sharp rise in sexual harassment of woman on its trains. The Metro asked women to “please be self-dignified to avoid perverts.”15 That is, one might say that instead of seeking redress through asking male perpetrators to change their ways, women were asked to literally re-dress. In a protest against the response that effectively shifted blame from men to women, Gao Ling and other women rode the subway wearing clothing that resembled reworked burkas and full-face veils—ones like those that France has banned—while holding tablets that read “It’s a dress, not a yes” and “Want to flaunt, not a taunt.” The work moves beyond the confines of the national and signals complex, transnational connections between the politics of the dress of women and tradition across vastly different cultures: China, France, and implicitly even other Islamic countries.

Gao Ling, Hey! TTTTouch Me!, This is, of course, not to minimize the importance 2010, performance. Courtesy of the artist and the Chinese of the work Subway Performance within Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco. national discourse. For instance, when Sina Weibo—China’s version of Twitter—asked some 45,000 people what they thought of Shanghai Metro’s call for modest dressing, 70% of the respondents wrote that women should be careful to dress in such a way so as to avoid sexual harassment.16 This is the sort of reaction Gao Ling hopes to curb, and it points again to the complexity of feminism in the current moment in China. Rather than replacing the national with the transnational, I argue that Subway Performance indelibly links them together. The women in Subway Performance also wore tea strainers as bras. In the exhibition, the installation Hey! TTTTouch Me! (2010) by Gao Ling includes tea strainers hung up as if on a kitchen rack; the sexualization of a domestic item conflates—and thereby disrupts—the construction of women as either housewives or whores.

Vol. 12 No. 2 63 Installation view of Occupy Shanghai Subway and Hey! TTTTouch Me! at the Chinese Cultural Center Gallery, 2012. Courtesy of the artists and Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco.

The title of the exhibition, WOMEN Mu Xi, Moth, 2011, video installation. Courtesy of the , is a play on the English–Mandarin artist and the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco. homophone meaning “women” and “we.” It succinctly reveals the crux of the exhibition’s curatorial conceit: to examine issues relating to women in China while shifting and stretching the very terms of what the categories of woman and China signify as Gao Ling’s Er Gao + Li Zhe, My Little One, collaborative work does. The exhibition 2010, film, 56 mins. Courtesy of the artists and Chinese keeps the category of woman under Culture Foundation of San Francisco. question through its inclusion of artists who are not biologically female and works concerned with gender ambiguity or gay male sexuality. For instance, Shanghai-based emerging artist Mu Xi’s video installation Moth (2011) depicts a graceful, semi-naked, and androgynous dancer onto whose back digital drawings of a caterpillar becoming the titular lepidopteron are superimposed. While caterpillars do not have morphological characteristics that distinguish males from females, moths do: usually female moths are larger than their male counterparts, even though the genetic blueprints dictating development and growth are the same for both.17 However, by juxtaposing the equally ambiguously gendered caterpillar and dancer with the supposedly mature and gendered moth—whether male or female is beside the point—the work suggests that sexual dimorphism is as “natural” as the fluidity rather than fixity of gender. My Little One (2009) by Er Gao and Li Zhe—collectively, Er Gao Production—is less metaphorical than Mu’s Moth. It is an hour-long documentary, which includes reflections of various members of the LGBTQ community in Guangzhou on their lifestyles. While homosexuality is not illegal in China, there is a lack of official recognition of its existence. Underscoring the danger in making non-normative subjectivities visible, some of the participants wear masks of various kinds; yet these often carnivalesque and exaggerated masks ultimately serve more as bold avatars rather than something to hide behind.

64 Vol. 12 No. 2 Activism as Art and Art as Activism As I previously noted, Abby Chen originally conceived of this project to explore feminism in Chinese art and visual culture, but eventually expanded her focus to include intersecting concerns such as gay male sexuality. By including authors of works who are not always of Chinese descent in the exhibition, Chen further pushed beyond nationalist and ethnic boundaries. Indeed, the San Francisco version of the exhibition included the video Ice Queen (2011), by the Mexico-born, US-based artist Ana Teresa Fernandez. In preparation for the work, the artist constructed a mold of a stiletto, which would fit her feet, filled it with water, and then put it in the freezer. Fernandez’s work is a looped, five-minute video of her standing on a grate wearing her form-fitting stilettos of ice—only her legs from the knees down are visible—on International Boulevard, a seven-and-a-half-mile-long strip in West Oakland, California which is notorious for being “an open-air sex market for young children,” especially Asian-American girls who are in high demand.18 The pain involved in wearing high heels made out of ice is evident; the artist’s legs shiver and from time to time she pours water down her legs to speed the process of the melting of the ice. Fernandez’s icy shoes look perversely like fairy tale glass slippers; as they become pools of water, any economic value they signified literally goes down the drain and the subject wearing them is metaphorically and literally freed from a seemingly interminable labour of waiting—one with no necessarily inherent economic value in and of itself—for a morally dubious “prince.”

Ana Teresa Fernandez, Ice Queen, 2011, video, 5 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

The strategic placement of a poster produced by the China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum next to Fernandez’s work allows for a consideration of sex work through a transnational frame. Established in 2009, the Forum connects sex worker advocacy groups from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and fifteen other sex worker organizations in mainland China. The text on the organization’s 2011 poster, “Chinese Sex Workers Say No To Violence and Crackdown,” sits above a drawing by an unknown artist of a chain link fence, the center of which is broken by a ruby red stiletto; flourishes of red behind the shoe look as much like lipstick as they do blood. Whereas Fernandez’s artwork itself is not necessarily activist and the forum poster is not necessarily art, installing them together seems to blur these distinctions.

Vol. 12 No. 2 65 Even as I write, the exhibition tries to break free from fixed geographies and subjectivities, the specific inclusion of materials from activist groups in China keeps the exhibition from drowning out the embodied politics and sited-ness of the project. That is, the posters connect to specific locales and ensure that the artworks and the queer and feminist bodies to which they are attached do not become too abstracted. Installed in a section separate from the China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum poster and Fernandez video are posters from other NGOs such as Aishang LGBT, a Shanghai-based group that promotes the advocacy and visibility of gay men; the aforementioned Shanghai Nvai, which promotes rights for lesbians, bisexual women, and transgender subjects; and PFLAG Guangzhou, an organization founded in 2008 that works in eight regions across China and connects parents, friends, and supporters of lesbians and gays. All of these NGOs operate under the radar to avoid scrutiny and are creative about getting their messages across—often through what Abby Chen refers to as “guerrilla tactics” that are more synonymous with performance art such as the aforementioned Subway Performance.19 Indeed, perhaps some of the most provocative art interrogating identity is happening outside of the supposedly official contemporary art world in China.

To conclude, it is worth considering the reception of this exhibition. To do so is not to gauge WOMEN ’s success or failure but to reposition the discussion in the context of the art world. In an email to the author on January 9, 2013, curator Abby Chen notes that the feminist conference, which the exhibition in Shanghai was part of, was under the scrutiny of the National Security Bureau; however, the exhibition itself seemed not to generate any specific negativity from the government or the art world. Chen ironically surmises that WOMEN went largely “unnoticed due to the highly commercialized art scene.” It is interesting to note that at least one review of the exhibition suggested that the exhibition had upset the supposedly “official” Chinese art community or the state.20 This suggests the default position continues to be a belief that the state and the Chinese art world are oppressive towards liberal culture in China which might have led to a paucity of exhibitions exploring gender and sexuality in Chinese art and visual culture; yet the fact that there has been no backlash, makes the omission seem even more curious and problematic. Have the discourses of post-identity—effectively considering identity as a historical formation— in Euro-America moved to China? At the same time, the antidote to this cannot be the sort of clunky identity-themed exhibitions that essentialize and fall back on fixed or known subjectivities. It is in this regard that the curator of this exhibition has marvelously succeeded: Not only does Abby Chen suggest that there is an extraordinary amount of visual material being produced by emerging and mid-career artists in both China and abroad that is providing fresh perspectives on gender and sexuality, but, also, she does so in a way in which identity categories elude fixity—without sacrificing embodied politics. That is, eluding fixed identity categories can sometimes also abstract the bodies connected to them; and, here, this is avoided through the inclusion of activist content.

66 Vol. 12 No. 2 Notes 1 Julie Kristeva, “La féminisme chinois en danger: Des militantes menacés à Pékin,” Le Monde, June 15, 2011. 2 Economist Online/Shanghai, “New-fangled feminism: Self-dignified indeed,” June 29, 2012, http:// www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2012/06/new-fangled-feminism/. 3 Ricardo Hausmann, Laura D. Tyson, and Saadia Zahidi, “The Global Gender Gap Report 2012,” World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf/. 4 Julie Kristeva, “Feminism under pressure in China: Repression greets those brave women who are fighting against scandal and abuse,” Guardian Weekly, June 21, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ global/2011/jun/21/comment/. 5 Ibid. 6 The three other NGOs were the Finance and Economic News Research Center, University Public Law Research Center, and Constitutionalism Research Center. However, these were “empty shells” and hardly had the stature of Gou’s NGO, as Shawn Shieh writes on his blog “NGOs in China: A blog about developments in the nongovernmental, nonprofit, charitable sector in China.” A statement by Gou Jianmei on April 2, 2010 regarding the incident can be found on Shieh’s blog: http://ngochina. blogspot.com/2010/04/peking-university-womens-legal-aid.html/. 7 An exception is Sasha Su-ling Welland, “Cruel/Loving Bodies” an exhibition of work by Chinese, Hong Kong, and Chinese British feminist artists which travelled to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing. See her article “On Curating ‘Cruel/Loving Bodies,’” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 3, no. 2: 17–36. 8 Economist Online: Beijing, “The place of young women: Girl power up,” June 27, 2012, http://www. economist.com/blogs/analects/2012/06/place-young-women/. 9 Zoe Li and Hiufu Wong, CNN Hong Kong, “Everything but the man: Chinese ‘golden spinsters’ just can’t get hitched,” June 24, 2011, http://travel.cnn.com/hong-kong/life/everything-boy-hong-kongs- golden-spinsters-just-cant-get-hitched-241756. The article is light—the sub-title is "Look at all these gorgeous, successful Chinese women: Somebody marry them already"—but the use of the word spinster to refer to women as young as in their mid-thirties suggests that Lam’s connection of historical “spinsters” with her own life is not far-fetched. 10 See interview with He Chengyao in Sasha Su-Ling Welland’s Experimental Beijing: Chinese Contemporary Art Worlds in China’s Capital (unpublished Ph.D diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006), 20–21. 11 Feminist Art Base, Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, “Chengyao He,” n.d. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/chengyao_he.php?i=607/. He notes in this link that at the behest of her grandmother “several People’s Liberation Army uncles from a nearby military factory . . . held my mother down on a wooden door used as a table, while one of them stuck acupuncture needles into her. My mother lay on the door screaming and struggling.” 12 Ibid. 13 Feminist Art Base. 14 It is worth noting that Kristeva has been criticized for unwittingly re-inscribing East/West dualisms, especially in connection to her book About Chinese Women, translated by Anita Barrows (New York: Marion Boyars, 1986). See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s criticism of the book in her article “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981), 154–84; and Rey Chow’s criticism in Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). However, Kristeva’s op-ed piece is about feminism in China in connection to the winners of the prize of which she chairs the jury; making transnational connections would therefore be secondary. Moreover, Kristeva does mention the rise of awareness of gender- related violence in French public opinion—though it is unclear whether she means public opinion in connection to violence in France, China, or both. Regarding the controversy over veils, see Steven Erlanger, “France Enforces Ban on Full-Face Veils in Public,” New York Times, April 11, 2011, http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/world/europe/12france.html/. 15 Economist Online/Shanghai, “New-fangled feminism.” 16 Ibid. 17 University of Arizona, “Why female moths are big and beautiful,” Science Daily, March 12, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2010/03/100311141218.htm/. 18 This is a quote from Sharmin Bock, assistant in charge of special operations for the district attorney’s office in Alameda County, where Oakland is. See Patricia Leigh Brown, “In Oakland, Redefining Sex Trade Workers as Abuse Victims,” New York Times, May 23, 2011, http://www.nytimes. com/2011/05/24/us/24oakland.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. See also Barbara Grady, “A Night on the Track: On Oakland’s International Boulevard young girls abound after nightfall,” Oakland Local, May 25, 2010, http://oaklandlocal.com/article/night-track-oaklands-international-boulevard-young-girls- abound-after-nightfall/. 19 Nancy Ewart, “‘WOMEN’ at the Chinese Cultural Center explores gender and sexual identity,” Examiner.com, September 25, 2012, http://www.examiner.com/article/women-at-the-chinese- cultural-center-explores-gender-and-sexual-identity/. 20 Ibid.

Vol. 12 No. 2 67 Inga Walton Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture September 13, 2012–February 17, 2013 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia September 15–December 1, 2012 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington, New South Wales, Australia

wiss-born lawyer Uli Sigg first travelled to China in 1979, soon after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the announcement Sof the Open-Door Policy that encouraged greater engagement with the West. As Asia Pacific Area Manager (1977–90) of the Schindler Group, a manufacturer of escalators and elevators, Sigg played a key role in establishing the first joint venture company between China and foreign interests, the China-Schindler Elevator Company in 1980. Sigg’s relationship with China has been extensive since his initial foray. He has lived there for long periods, and he founded the China-Switzerland Chamber of Commerce in 1980, established the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) in 1997, and held the position of Swiss Ambassador to China, North Korea, and Mongolia (1995–98).

Sigg’s passionate interest in contemporary Chinese art has resulted in a collection of singular breadth and significance, consisting of more than 2,200 works by some 350 artists. It was announced in June 2012 that Sigg would donate 1,463 works from his collection to M+, a private museum for visual culture scheduled to open in 2017 in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong. The idea for staging an exhibition in Australia using selections from the Sigg Collection was conceived by Gene Sherman of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation before the permanent relocation of many of the works was finalized. The resulting exhibition, Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture, is the first devoted to this theme to be held in Australia, and was curated by Claire Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Australia’s University of Adelaide.

Roberts chose works that fit within a broad and occasionally rather strained definition of “portraiture.” This definition is one that included examples from the last thirty years of contemporary Chinese art practice while maintaining at least a loose reference to the body. This was possibly a difficult premise since, as she has noted, “portraiture has not been a conscious focus of Sigg’s collecting.”1 Conversely, working within the confines of this directive presumably helped narrow down the number of works that could be considered. This may also account for some of the more debatable or tenuous inclusions. In attempting perhaps to widen the parameters of what can be considered “portraiture,” in a number of instances there is no “body” or figurative element present in the work, which in several cases stretches the limits of credibility.

In the context of the exhibition, it seems to have been intended by the curator that these works be viewed as an embodiment, an implied presence, or

68 Vol. 12 No. 2 one suggested by its very absence. Works of this nature included Founding Ceremony (1997), by Yue Minjun, in which the bank of microphones at Tian’anmen Square remain, but all the Communist party officials at the rostrum have been removed. Similarly, He Xiangyu’s Dedicated to Her: Loudspeaker (2011) uses a solitary anthropomorphized microphone, similar to those used in the founding ceremony for the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, from which a loop of Mao’s disembodied voice emanates. Qiu Shaofei presents an empty room with retro furniture in the installation It’s Almost 7 O’clock (2005). The redundant objects forming a sly reference to the China Central Television news program Xinwen Lianbo, which has served as the Communist Party’s mouthpiece since it was first broadcast, January 1, 1978, on every channel at seven o’clock in the evening. Wu Gaozhong’s Roving P-1 & P-2 (2010) looks somewhat like a topographical drawing, or undulating mass, until, on closer inspection, boar hairs protrude from the surface of the cardboard, suggesting numerous nostrils or sleeves with hairy forearms. Zhang Peili’s X? (1986), where the only reference to the body is a pair of flaccid rubber gloves rendered in monochrome, is like a still life of the most visually inert kind.

The works were selected with the aim of illustrating four broad thematic groupings identified by Roberts. “About Face” focuses on the face, both revealed and concealed, the idea of surface, and the space between the private and public sphere. The Chinese cultural perspective of “face,” or mianzi, referring to a person’s sense of dignity in relation to actions or performance, is considered in this grouping, as is the ongoing significance of social protocols and appearances. “Skin Deep” brings together works, particularly those derived from performance art, that explore the figure and the idea of skin or surface, nudity, and sensory experience, and probes into the relationship between individuals, society, and the natural world. “Body politic” is concerned with the ways Chinese artists, predominantly those on the mainland, have responded to experimenting with form and content to create new visual languages that express the Chinese experience since the program for reform and opening was announced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. It traces more recent developments, especially since the 1990s, in which artists have used their own bodies as experiential entities by placing themselves or their proxies within political, civic, and other spaces to reflect on the place of the individual within Chinese society. “Self Reflex” looks at the fascination artists have with aspects of everyday life, urban and social transformation, identity and youth culture, the impact of the one child policy on the individual and society, the lives of women, global consumer culture, the quality of the environment, and the escape from real life into virtual worlds.

The exhibition’s content was split between two venues, the smaller Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF),2 in the inner-city suburb of Paddington, in New South Wales, and Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), some 280 kilometres southwest of Sydney. It’s hard to tell whether the availability of this particular public institution was the deciding factor in the prospective exhibition’s eventual theme of portraiture. The partnering decision between these two institutions seems to have been made as much for pragmatic reasons of space constraints and the difficulty of accommodating the larger sculptural installations at the NPG as it was

Vol. 12 No. 2 69 to reflect the input both institutions had in bringing the project to fruition. That considered, the distance between the venues still would have presented a fairly significant logistical challenge to all but the most determined gallery-goer aspiring to see the “complete” exhibition. As the SCAF closes for an extended hiatus over the summer months, the works presented there—Ai Weiwei’s Newspaper Reader (2004), Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old People’s Home (2007), and Shen Shaomin’s Standard Portrait (2009)— were returned to Switzerland, thus excising that venue from the overall exhibition. Three of the new media works, Wang Jianwei’s From the masses, to the masses (Part A & Part B) (2000) and Zhou Tao’s 1, 2, 3, 4 (2008) were intended to serve as the “connective” bridge between the sites, and were therefore on display at both galleries.

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Old People's Home, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of M+ Sigg Collection.

The feature work at SCAF, and certainly the most entertaining in the entire exhibition, was the husband and wife team Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old People’s Home which consisted of thirteen moving, motorized wheelchairs bearing life-sized sculptures of elderly, predominantly Caucasian male figures. Proximity sensors were attached to each of the chairs, whose sedate pace helped prevent major collisions, although watching them perambulate within the space produced an irresistible “dodgem car” randomness. The work ponders what a retirement village for unspecified former military dictators, autocrats, and church leaders might resemble as its inhabitants succumb to the ravages of age and senility, apparently abandoned to a gaga twilight by

70 Vol. 12 No. 2 their once devoted adherents. Some are slumped in their chairs, apparently asleep or drugged, and others stare blankly into space. They wear the clothes of their offices and the insignia of their former rank but are otherwise enfeebled and stripped of status. Comparisons seem inevitable to the often- aged leadership elite of totalitarian states, including China, as well as to the reaffirmation of the transitory nature of power and the ability to wield it.

Ai Weiwei, Newspaper Reader, Ai Weiwei’s Newspaper Reader, the first 2004, fibreglass, mixed media, 108.8 x 58 x 72 cm. Courtesy of work encountered upon entering SCAF, is M+ Sigg Collection. a hyper-real portrait of a seated Uli Sigg, given to him by the artist as a token of appreciation for the support of his work.3 It formed a dramatic counterpoint of youth and vigour to the preserved-in- aspic decrepitude wheeling around in the next space. The only Chinese artist

Shen Shaomin, Standard with an Australian background in the Portrait, 2009, oil on canvas, silicone frame, 173 x 137 x Sigg collection is Shen Shaomin, who 6 cm. Courtesy of M+ Sigg moved to Sydney in 1989 where he Collection lived and worked for a decade before returning to Beijing.4 Given SCAF’s long- standing interest in exhibiting the work of Chinese-Australian artists, a work by Shen Shaomin was placed there.5 His Standard Portrait shows the familiar image of Mao Zedong seemingly warped out of shape and slumping down the wall like a crumpled poster. Shen Shaomin’s canvas sits in a flexible silicone frame that gives it a three-dimensional, distorted quality, one of a series of e’gao, or parodies, that includes the Mona Lisa, Osama Bin Laden, and US President Barack Obama.

Of the remaining works in Canberra, those that attempt to articulate the lot of women in China under rapid socio-economic reforms, coupled with continued under-representation within the ruling party—an entrenched inequality—seem particularly topical. Yu Hong’s works are invariably preoccupied with a narrative of female experience and existence, that of both the artist and those she observes. She—Unemployed Girl (2003) is a peculiar triptych in which two flanking photographs show a girl posing delightedly in a gaudy pink “Disney princess” type dress with rows of exaggerated ruffles and a matching hat with veil. She presents herself standing in her finery and then lying down on a drop sheet. This photo shoot is set not in a studio or home, but outside, in the street, in front of ramshackle shop fronts, a parked motorbike, an abandoned chair, and a bemused-looking child.

The painted centre panel takes on a level of domestic “ordinariness” that still manages to strike a discordant note. Two women sit in a room; an older woman on the left gazes at a younger woman on the right. Are they mother and daughter? They sit on different sets of furniture, against different backdrops; one is simply dressed, but the younger woman has her

Vol. 12 No. 2 71 Yu Hong, She—Unemployed Girl (detail), 2003, acrylic on canvas, chromogenic prints mounted on board, 150 x 300 cm (painting), 100 x 70 cm (photographs). Courtesy of M+ Sigg Collection.

hair done up, wears a flashy yellow jacket over what appears to be a lacey transparent net top, and clutches a large toy dog. Perhaps this is how she spends her time, going out and amusing herself. There is a mop and bucket leaning against the wall, pointing to household chores performed by the older woman. Their relationship, if there is one, to the girl in the pink dress remains unexplained. Possibly she is the older woman in her youth, but we don’t know; there is a strangeness to the juxtaposition.

Yang Na’s Pimple (2007), a painting Yang Na, Pimple, 2007, oil on canvas, 160 x 150 cm. Courtesy of a cartoon-like young girl of M+ Sigg Collection. contemplating her appearance in a hand mirror, has a lurid, almost trashy quality to it that is oddly compelling. Apparently dressed to go out, she has discovered with evident dismay an angry-looking eruption on her forehead, and she punctures it with a needle. Thus, we are exposed to her private world of grooming, beauty, and fashion, with its emphasis on outer perfection, conformity, and an element of narcissism. In some ways this echoes the type of before-and-after “confessional” endorsements for skin care and cosmetic products seen on so many infomercials and home shopping channels. These are often tailored to a specific country and/or demographic, and seek to emphasize how the individual can achieve the same results as various celebrity spokesmodels by using the sponsored product.6 Such advertisements work on the premise that we the viewers are being given some sort of personal access to the celebrity, made privy to their personal beauty régime, and otherwise encouraged to identify with them as being “just like us.”

Yang Na suggests that the Chinese market is just as clamorous as any other nation to be seduced by Western beauty products, advertising campaign fantasies, and consumerist preoccupations. As Yang Na has observed, “These women are a symbol of our era of consumption. Enveloped in a lifestyle of greed and excessive materialism, these girls look alike. But their interest in the latest fashion masks inner confusion and obsession, a kind of emotion only youth has. Being young means being both perfect and imperfect, gorgeous and sick, happy and despondent.”7 Yang Na’s work fits within

72 Vol. 12 No. 2 the “Animamix” style, a trend in aesthetics so-called because it combines animation and comics with elements derived from computer game graphics, and the avatars from virtual world environments such as Second Life, which promote a self-absorbed, interiorized world.8 The “unreality” of the character portrayed fits in well with the Animamix genre; her huge eyes, bee-stung lips, rabbit-like teeth, surgery-enhanced button nose, and ghostly pallor conform to no recognizable ethnicity. Just as we see only the parts of her face contained within the mirror’s reflection, she inhabits a made-up fantasy world—albeit one still replete with troublesome breakouts.

Han Yajuan, Perfect Ending, The escapist consumer experience of the rising affluent middle class in large 2010, oil on canvas, 180 x 360 cm. Courtesy of M+ Sigg Chinese cities is the subject of the painting Perfect Ending (2010) by Han Collection. Yajuan, a series of departments in a store or shopping emporium shown from above and populated by excited female customers and a frequently appearing cow. The women browse for clothes and accessories, try on lingerie, gossip in cafes, check the Internet, have their hair, make-up, and nails done, and sport sought-after luxury labels—Chanel, Fendi, Dior—that confer apparent status on the insecure and brand-conscious. This blizzard of sensory gratification is accented by sequins and crystals applied directly to the canvas where they accentuate the “blingness” of this experience, one replicated in countless shopping precincts worldwide.

Yin Xiuzhen, My Clothes, In contrast to this zing of spending 1995, wooden box, clothes, cement, video monitor, 38 x 67 and acquisitiveness, Yin Xiuzhen’s x 44 cm. Courtesy of M+ Sigg Collection. performance piece My Clothes (1995), documented through film, involves her “disembodied” self— her face and most of her body is not visible—opening a trunk made by her father into which she has placed the clothes from her childhood, which are now literally entombed in cement as if to ensure some sort of permanent vessel for her memories. A contemplative, slightly melancholy tone is conveyed by Weng Fen’s On the Wall—Guangzhou (II) (2002), in which a lone girl sits atop a high wall overlooking large skyscrapers and other signs of rapid urban development.

Vol. 12 No. 2 73 Ji Wenyu & Zhu Weibing, The Environment Here Is Great, 2006, mixed media, 45 x 32 x 32 cm. Courtesy of M+ Sigg Collection.

The dislocation felt by ordinary Weng Fen, On the Wall– Guangzhou (II), 2002, citizens living in the midst of an chromogenic print, 126 x 171 cm. Courtesy of M+ Sigg aggressive real estate boom, with Collection. forced internal relocations and the demolishing of long-standing communities, is hinted at as this figure contemplates a cityscape governed by the inexorable proliferation of glass and steel monoliths. Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing’s The Environment Here Is Great (2006) expresses similar concerns; the textile and mixed media work contained within a glass dome is attached to a tiny air conditioning unit. Surrounded by “hothouse” flowers, the parents and their small child gaze up in wonder at a bird in a wicker cage above their heads. China’s levels of pollution and the choking smoke stacks of industry increasingly affect the quality of life of its citizens.

The exhibition seems to hinge on differing expectations between the viewer and the organizers about what “portraiture” might constitute, and certainly many of the works included do not conform to the more traditional

74 Vol. 12 No. 2 representation/formal rendering of a person. Still, a more reportage-like style is evident in a number of the other pieces: paintings, photographs, and footage of groups of people, or venues with people in them. This points toward an intention or approach to producing work on the part of the artists that sometimes sits uneasily within the themes of the exhibition. Many works include imagined scenarios and characters, particularly the more cartoonish imagery; these bear little relationship to reality and serve to complicate the exhibition content as a whole.

Roberts likens the artworks selected “to a skin, a sensitive surface upon which artists record ideas and questions, probing and complicating our understanding of the changing ‘face’ of China.”9 Perhaps the exhibition is more concerned with presenting “portraits” as more generalized readings, or “snapshots” of moments in time, of country and culture, through these works, than with ruminating on the real or perceived experiences of the individuals depicted therein. Like modern China itself, the tension and competition between the individual and the collective, the specific and the general, the macro view and the micro view, the reality and the aspiration, are being played out within the works in this show.

Notes 1 Claire Roberts, ed., Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture (Canberra, Australia: National Portrait Gallery/Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2012), 16. 2 Originally established as Irving Sculpture Gallery in 1981, Sherman Galleries was a respected commercial venture run by Gene Sherman, AM, until December 2007. After closing the gallery, the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) was established in April 2008 as a not-for-profit Sherman family philanthropic enterprise focusing on research, education, and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, and the Middle East. Sherman is Executive Director of the SCAF and current Deputy Chair of the National Portrait Gallery, Australia. 3 The plan was for both venues to include a portrait of Sigg, but owing to space constraints the work destined for the NPG was not included in the final selection; Claire Roberts, e-mail to the author, November 16, 2012. 4 Shen Shaomin maintains his connection to Australia. In partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, he launched a residency program in October 2012 for Australian artists to use his Beijing studio; see www.4a.com.au. 5 The exhibition was not without a minor controversy. Shen Shaomin’s The Great Corpse (2006), which has never been exhibited, was supposed to make its public debut in Go Figure! The work is a silicone replica of the nude corpse of Mao resting on a stainless steel mortuary gurney while a facsimile of the sarcophagus, containing replicas of Mao’s clothes cleaned and pressed, sits beside. The artist has released an image of the empty sarcophagus component of the work, but not the corpse part. Shen Shaomin based the concept on the annual process undertaken at the mausoleum in Tian’anmen Square, whereby the embalmed and mummified body of Mao is undressed, washed, and subjected to processes the authorities believe will prolong the corpse’s longevity. Although the work is one that Sigg is donating to the M+ Museum, Sigg would not allow it to be displayed in Australia, citing the sensitive high-level negotiations surrounding the donation, a decision that caused Shen Shaomin considerable frustration. Shen Shaomin returned to this theme for his later installation satirizing the G8 meeting, Summit (2010), which was exhibited at the 17th Biennale of Sydney (May 12–August 1, 2010). See Michael Young, “The Morbid Humour of Shen Shaomin,” ArtAsiaPacific (blog), November 2, 2012, http://www.artasiapacific.com/Blog/TheMorbidHumorOfShenShaomin and Adam Fulton, “Age shall not weary them, but they are tyred,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 12, 2012, http:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/age-shall-not-weary-them-but-they-are-tyred- 20120911-25qj6.html/. 6 In Australia, the most insistent of these are propagated by Guthy-Renker, who seem to have the infamous Rodan & Fields “Proactiv Solution” series of adverts on constant rotation. Others include Cindy Crawford’s “Meaningful Beauty” range and Victoria Principal’s “Principal Secret” line, which are repeated countless times on various commercial channels. 7 Quoted in Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “All Eyes Inward,” Newsweek/The Daily Beast, May 15, 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/05/15/all-eyes-inward.html. 8 The term was coined by Victoria Lu while curating the exhibition Fiction. Love (2004) at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Lu, Creative Director of the Shanghai eARTS Festival, went on to curate the first Animamix Biennial (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. 9 Roberts, Go Figure!, 10.

Vol. 12 No. 2 75 Sophia Kidd Poetically Performance Art Dwells: Poetry and Praxis in Southwest China

Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling.”1

he curatorial premise for Chengdu’s 2nd Up-On International Live Art Festival (October 12–16, 2012) was “Strength of the TPoetic Idea.” This theme, as well as the festival’s roster of artists, was chosen by Chengdu performance artist and curator Zhou Bin, and this was also the second time he has curated Up-On in conjunction with performance artist Liu Chengying and sculptor/critic Yan Cheng. Of twenty-five participating artists, seventeen were from mainland China, one each from Taiwan and Macao, while additional artists came from Germany (Boris Nieslony and Marcel Sparmann), Northern Ireland (Allistair Maclennan), Singapore (Jeremy Hiah), Thailand (Nopawan Sirivejkul), Israel (Tamar Raban), and Japan (Megumi Shimizu). Of the mainland Chinese artists, one sound artist and six performance artists were from Chengdu, while the other performance artists and one contemporary dancer came from Xining, Xi’an, Changsha, Beijing, and nearby Chongqing. Zhou Bin’s exploration of “the poetic idea” and its strength was far-reaching in scope; he invited artists to perform in contrasting styles which showed how well the power of the poetic idea held up against its more concrete other—the pragmatic.

China’s art history has shifted back and forth many times between the pragmatic and the abstract. Because of China’s past and present tendency to unite ethics (politics) and aesthetics (art), each shift in art history receives a new interpretation. A recent example followed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, in which official art theory and history shifted dramatically away from the poetic towards the realistic in art. Chinese academics and art institutions had to appraise the beauty and value of an artwork based on its social significance. Famous Chinese art theorist Li Zehou, in his Path of Beauty (1981), found in the mythical taotie beast inscriptions found on pre-Qin bronze ritual vessels a method of psychic intimidation, a means for the ruling class to keep common peasants in perpetual fear. On the other hand, later period inscriptions of phoenixes and dragons, according to the book’s author, were derived from everyday creatures, respectively the bird and snake, symbols originating with the common people. Today, twenty-five years after the publication of Path of Beauty, Chinese contemporary art theory has shifted back from reducing aesthetic interpretation to solely economic and political interpretation.2 It is as if art is allowed once again to dwell in a poetic space.

76 Vol. 12 No. 2 A new problem, however, has arisen in the field of performance art—a medium that originated in the West—especially within its discourse in Chengdu. Some Chinese artists are concerned about the tendency to mimic Western performance art and thus look to localize (bentuhua) their practice and appropriate the medium of performance art in an authentically Chinese way. Art Praxis Workshop (here after referred to as Art Praxis), a Chengdu collective of performance, sound, and video artists, is adamant about this. As fervent as Zhou Bin is about the power and strength of the poetic idea, Art Praxis is equally set against it. They maintain that abstraction is an escape from local political issues and social concerns. Young and idealistic, this collective of artists wants to use art to influence political, economic, and land reforms. This is most apparent in its recent and ongoing project Under Construction—Village Politics Being Watched (2010–12). This debate continues between those, like Zhou Bin, who enjoy a relatively new freedom to abstract and dematerialize their art practice, and others, like Art Praxis, who insist that art be used in the struggle to improve society.

He Liping, Like the King's Chengdu’s 2nd Up-On Speech, 2012, performance, 180 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. International Art Festival Courtesy of the artist. Although Chengdu’s performance art scene enjoyed a favourable reception from the press, the public, and even the government in the 1990s, it was driven underground in 2001 by a government edict forbidding the presentation of, and writing about, performance art. The medium has been slowly Family Art 4 Poster. Courtesy of Art Praxis Workshop. recuperating from this setback, although nudity, violence, and overt political comment are still avoided by artists. The controversial or “sensitive” status of performance art in China today forces many artists, if they want to address political matters, to do so indirectly, often encoding them in an abstract visual language. He Liping’s Up-On artwork, Like the King’s Speech (180 mins.), involved the artist staying up for twenty-four hours prior to his performance, taking sleeping pills, and then sitting down at a school desk covered in a red tablecloth where he proceeded to shell a small mound of tiny rice pods. Does this artwork protest labour conditions? Political absurdity? K-12 educational pressures put on Chinese kids? It’s not really clear. But being unclear, coded, or abstract can serve as a political statement in China, a country in which artworks, up until the mid-1980s were required by the government to be primarily social realist. Artists who advocate a return to

Vol. 12 No. 2 77 socialist realism in performance art might accuse He Liping of escaping from the important matters at hand and find fault with the artist’s choice to be unclear, or poetic. Recently in Chengdu, at Family Art No. 4, a screening of works by Taiwanese artist Wang Molin that included a lecture given by Chen Jianjun, performance artist and member of Art Praxis, He Liping was visibly perplexed by Chen Jianjun’s insistence on promoting “native ground”(bentu) and “purification and restructuring”(qingli) in performance art. Lance Pursey, oral interpreter for the recent Up-On Festival, who was present at the Family Art No. 4 discussion, noted that He Liping was clearly not in agreement with Chen Jianjun throughout the lecture and discussion.3

Chengdu performance and video Zhang Yu, Declaration, 2012, performance, 30 mins. Photo: artist Zhang Yu often addresses Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the censorship in his artwork. A work artist. from 2011, Site Creation (30 mins.), performed at Chengdu’s Re-C Art Space, involved the artist holding a piece of paper that stated he was not a political aggravator. Later, in 2012, when a survey of his works was published in a catalogue accompanying the 2012 Chengdu Biennale, these words were Photoshopped out. Zhang Yu was furious when he saw this, believing it was done to satisfy government censors. The artist’s recent Up-On festival piece Declaration (30 mins.) presented gestures of official declaration such as those recently “performed” by politicians at China’s 18th National Congress. Zhang Yu stood unnaturally straight, with a microphone raised to his mouth, but only a harsh, high pitched whisper emitted from his mouth, becoming raspier and harsher the longer we sat in our dark theatre seats. After fifteen minutes, Cai Qing, a German/Chinese performance artist whose work Reading Your Symptom (20 mins.) opened the next day of performances, angrily hurled a near-full bottle of water from mid-auditorium. The projectile barely missed Zhang Yu, who, in reaction, with torso pitched forward, legs straight at the knee, and stance widened, continued to read from the pages in his hand, now in the loud, full-throated intonation of polit-speak. A few minutes later, the tension in the theatre became unbearable. Another bottle was thrown. Then a young man jumped on stage and ripped the pages out of Zhang Yu’s hands, but the artist kept on speaking aloud. At last an intern leapt up and grabbed the microphone out of Zhang Yu’s hand. The artist politely bowed to signal the close of his piece. Zhang Yu’s practice is not strictly political, often being complex and obscure but for the few political elements that are expressed in the piece. For example, his usual costume of a white one-piece painting suit, shaved head, and dark sunglasses gives him an aura of spectacle and showmanship, both elements discouraged by artists who work in the socialist realist camp. Zhang Yu seems to be more interested in satire and alienation than he is in proposing reform.

Following Zhang Yu’s Declaration, was another recontextualization—this time, of the art market. Beauty Auction, slated in the program at sixty minutes and bleeding into twice that, saw Jeremy Hiah of Singapore auction

78 Vol. 12 No. 2 Jeremy Hiah, Beauty Auction, performance objects discarded 2012, performance, 120 mins. Photo: Qiao Ye. Courtesy of during the festival by artists, such the artist. as a green military-issue blanket and a cleaver from Xi’an artist Xiang Xishi’s Untitled (40 mins.) and a mechanical wooden bird within a canister from Germany’s Marcel Sparmann’s Blind Spot (20 mins.). In doing so, Hiah incorporated and thus referred to most of the festival artworks that had transpired up to the moment of his piece. Hiah used the entire front area of the auditorium, walked among rows of seated people in the manner of a professional hustler, telling people, “I don’t want to make any money, people. I’ll give you a hundred kuai [spoken term for the Chinese official currency yuan] right now if you take this thing off my hands.” The auction commenced with each person offering a little less than the hundred yuan until it got down to jiao (tenth of a Chinese yuan), at which time the bidding reversed its trajectory, with each audience member outbidding the last until the highest bid took home the performance object.

During Beauty Auction, performance documentation of previous performance artworks at the festival was projected onto two screens, illustrating the role of the object in the piece, which rendered them into a sort of art history derived from the performances seen just hours earlier. Jeremy Hiah explained at the beginning of his presentation that “Beauty” meant “Bad, Evil, Awful, Terrible, Yucky,” and after nearly two hours, many of the festival’s participating artists felt pretty worse for wear. The ivory tower of fine art had been reduced to commodity fetish. The artist had effectively delivered his critique of the art market. This work was not very poetic, though it showed how poetic artworks were reduced to very concrete values on the auction chopping block.

Left and right: Xiang Xishi, Untitled, 2012, performance, 40 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

Elegiac in nature, Xiang Xishi’s Up-On piece, Untitled (40 mins.), was presented in a performance space at the Sichuan University Fine Art Academy Museum with the audience forming a semi-arc around him. Over the course of forty minutes the artist worked with stage props such as furniture, blankets, clothing, and a cleaver. He maneuvered onto and off chairs or a desk (he collapsed the desk, as if accidentally, by jumping on it) and interacted with the audience (using the knife as an implement of psychic tension but also of gift-giving/receiving). The artwork was abstract and non-linear, unlike Zhang Yu and Jeremy Hiah’s artworks, whose political/economic message was more direct. Equally lyrical, though less doleful, Marcel Sparmann performed Blind Spot (20 mins.) in the

Vol. 12 No. 2 79 same room later that afternoon. Top: Marcel Sparmann, Blind Spot, 2012, performance, 20 Starting by taking off his shirt and mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist. pants, Sparmann then stood in the Left: Gao Yuan, Metaphysics, centre of the space, arms extended 2012, performance, 30 mins. Photo: Qiao Ye. Courtesy of and whirring in circular forward the artist. motion with a strained expression on his face. Then he took a small wooden bird out of its canister (both later auctioned off by Jeremy Hiah) and helped it to fly for some time before putting it down on the floor before the audience. He then scooped out some red powder from its canister and lined his back lower calves in red. There were many, clearly premeditated actions within this performance, but there were others that seemed to meander more spontaneously, such as jumping off a wooden chair unevenly propped on a stone and then physically transitioning out of the fall. Later on, Sparmann overturned a container of black dust, and, using a brush, painted the word “empty” (kong) onto the wall. In later conversation with the artist, he revealed that this was a word taught to him the night before by Xining performance artist Gao Yuan. Although I didn’t get a chance to ask either Gao Yuan or Marcel Sparmann what significance the word empty held for them, this word most often occurs in Chinese Buddhist discourse as an antonym to “reality,” or material existence. Gao Yuan’s artwork (Metaphysics, 30 mins.) performed the next day, was an idiosyncratic endurance piece which saw the artist, body rigidly face down on the ground, wriggling along a twenty-metre-length and back again, blowing two Chinese jiao coins along the floor before him. He used a piece of white chalk in his left hand and a black one in his right, with arms spread wide in the wriggling forward motion, two respectively coloured lines developing along side the artist.

Later, in conversation, Xiang Xishi said he believed an important difference between Western and Chinese performance artwork is the will to narrative,

80 Vol. 12 No. 2 with Westerners telling a linear story and Chinese artists being more introspective.4 Xiang Xishi seemed to suggest that Chinese artists are more poetic in their approach to performance art than their Western counterparts. Marcel Sparmann, though, had noticed the historical element of tradition in many Chinese performance artworks. He said during a separate interview, “There is something overlying all the performances I saw and I would reckon it is partly because of the great and very long cultural history. It seems the Chinese somehow carry this traditional aspect with them in all kinds of daily life situations. It’s like an extra layer that surrounds the live artworks. It also might be a specific energy or concentration which I could spot.”5 Historicity foregrounds its narrative element which Xiang Xishi may want to aver, though narratives can be loose, as poetry can be epic or historical in nature.

Guo Qiang, Creation 8—Sesame Oil, 2012, performance, 8 hrs. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

Guo Qiang’ s obscure artwork, Creation 8—Sesame Oil (eight to nine hours), bordered on hysteria. The artist had set out from Chengdu’s central Tianfu Square at eight in the morning, walking most of the way to Sichuan University’s Art Academy. On the road for eight hours, by the time he arrived on-site, an apparent lumbar problem for which he wore a brace under his trench coat had acted up. Guo Qiang was in a state of frenetic frustration. He put down a basket he had carried on his back throughout the journey, took off his trench coat, poured honey over his body, and began to walk in circles, throwing handfuls of black sesame seeds into the air to land on his body. Then the artist, wearing only his boxers, took off his brace and dumped the rest of the sesame seeds onto the ground. While lying on the ground in pools of honey and black seeds, he stuffed fistfuls of sesame into his mouth. When he got up he charged the audience, and most of them were driven away, running as fast as they could to hide behind trees and planters. Those who didn’t run away had sesame seeds spit in their faces—I was still picking individual seeds from my neck hours later. Although Creation 8—Sesame Oil was pretty inaccessible, the energy of the piece exemplified in the artist’s volatility and aggression had certain pathos.

Vol. 12 No. 2 81 Zhou Bin, Celebration—1/6 Comment on Freedom, 2012, 150 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the Author.

Zhou Bin reserved a third of Up-On’s four-day performance schedule exclusively for his own personal project, Celebration—1/6 Comments on Freedom (hereafter referred to as Celebration). Zhou Bin has been curating and participating with Celebration over the past four years in Chengdu, nearby Chongqing, Changsha, and Macao. This project usually involves six artists in a spontaneous and sustained group action. This version of Celebration, however, done outdoors at Moonlight Lotus Pond, started with four chosen artists, including German performance artists Boris Nieslony and Marcel Sparmann as well as Chongqing contemporary dancer Rong Tao and Chengdu experimental sound artist, Li Kun. Twenty-five artists, as well as the odd child, mother, vendor, dog, student, and intern participated together in a series of spontaneous open-air actions. In all nearly one hundred and fifty people were at the performance, a third participating for as short or long a time as they wished. When, in the piece, audience members were no longer audience members, they became as much a part of the artwork as any of the Up-On artists. When an artist exited the piece, they returned to being an ordinary audience member.

Rong Tao went first. He concentrated mostly on his arms, reeling back half- extensions as he crossed axes of torso and limbs. Boris Nieslony entered the path behind Rong Tao and for some minutes their actions mirrored each other. Nieslony worked with a stone larger than his own head, bending at the waist to lift the stone; Rong Tao bent at the waist, too, to stroke his own ankles before throwing an arm upwards into space, flexing his hand at the wrist to emulate an angle at which a nearby lotus leaf folded a light brown and shrunken autumn phase around its own stalk. Nieslony picked up the stone, balanced it on his head, and took a few sullen steps. Rong Tao then stood up, balancing an invisible stone on his head, and collapsed into summersaults in the stink of the raised path’s muddy earth.

82 Vol. 12 No. 2 Then Marcel Sparrman made his way into the artwork. He moved, pants rolled up, bare feet, along the left edge of our visual pan making his way to an inlet which reached out towards but did not lead to the main center path where Nieslony and Rong Tao were still interacting. Sparmann reached his arms straight up into the air and held them there for a very long time, and then rolled up lotus leaves to put into his mouth, one after the other, until his mouth was painfully stretched. He stood in that predicament for a nearly an hour, as other artists and participating audience members entered in and out of the fields to spontaneously contribute to Celebration. Later, when Zheng Shijun from Taiwan began throwing large clods of mud into the audience, Sparmann then made his way into the centre, embracing Zheng Shijun which, aside from conveying compassion, engaged Zheng Shijun’s arms, preventing the latter from slinging any more mud at the mainlanders.

Many more actions by nearly all the festival artists ensued throughout the artwork’s two-and-a-half hours. It was a visual symphony, mostly silent, except for the sound of Li Kun’s digital voice recorder. Li Kun entered from the far edges of the lotus fields recording crickets, wind, cars, and farmers as he went. He reached the central path full of artists nearly one hour into Celebration, at which point he replayed and looped the sounds he had just recorded.

Zhou Bin had originally intended to join in as the fifth artist, but found himself preoccupied with administration of the artwork, that is, keeping photographers away from the piece. There were a large number of photographers and videographers who, in an effort to get the best views and framing of the action in Zhou Bin’s performance, stood in the way of audience members trying to watch, enter, or exit. While most people I spoke with about this phenomenon felt annoyed, others suggested that the actions of photographers and videographers were also part of the artwork, blurring the boundary between art, life, and documentation. Although Celebration implements Zhou Bin’s practice of indeterminacy as method, or no method, Zhou Bin chose to grant each photographer enough time to get a good shot, and then removed them from the site.

Art Praxis Workshop Art Praxis works exclusively in sociohistorical contexts, attributing little or no significance to an artwork’s poetry. Art Praxis’s most recent project, Under Construction—Village Politics Being Watched, is a long-term endeavour that began on August 8, 2010 when the artists started travelling to and conducting research and discussion forums in and around Kunshan, Sichuan, while doing what the project’s title suggests—watching village politics. Since the project’s inception, nearly all of Art Praxis Workshop’s exhibited artworks, throughout China, as well as in Korea, Taiwan, and Italy, have either figuratively or connotatively represented the struggles of Chinese villagers. In a recent interview with Art Praxis member and video artist Cao Minghao and member Chen Jianjun, they explained how they see their art as a way to point out the abuses of power in land politics in China today.6 Curator Ni Kun writes about Kunshan’s “new village” being considered a model example within Sichuan province through its process of transforming agricultural land into satellite cities surrounding major

Vol. 12 No. 2 83 urban centres. He describes the reconstruction project of Kunshan as a “demonstration village in socialist new rural construction” which is a “national top ten well-being village.”7

Cao Minghao’s most recent video work, Cao Minghao, An Individual’s Geographic Annals II, 2012, An Individual’s Geographic Annals II video, 8 mins. Photo: Maoqiu (2012) combined performance art with Ran. Courtesy of the artist. documentary filmmaking, when, on April 30, 2012, she sat in a van full of immigrant labourers who were invited to participate in this artwork. The labourers sat in the van with Cao Minghao telling stories of the places they’d lived in and travelled to before coming to Sichuan to pick mushrooms. Government programs had promised economic incentive for migrant labour, but, four years later, according to Ni Kin’s curatorial essay, the reformation of the village still saw them earning wages only half that of other regions. This video, An Individual’s Geographic Annals II (8 mins., 11 secs.), went to Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts in December of 2012 as part of the exhibition SEE/ SAW, Collective Practice in China Now.

On same the day that Cao Minghao Chen Zhou, Everlasting Pavilion, 2012, performance. interviewed and filmed the migrant Photo: Maoqiu Ran. Courtesy labourers, performance artist and Art of the artist. Praxis member Chen Zhou pushed Everlasting Pavilion (2012), a “permanent grave,” around Kunshan village in a makeshift wheelbarrow. The grave was of the traditional kind in Sichuan, looking like a miniature Daoist temple with a Chen Jianjun, 2.92 Square pagoda roof, the sturdy four-corner Kilometers, 2012, performance. Photo: Maoqiu Ran. Courtesy stone grave standing about three feet of the artist. high. Chen Zhou acted the part of a salesman trying, as he moved through the village, to sell the “permanent grave” to villagers. Rather than living in spread- out homesteads, the farmers of Kunshan village had recently been moved into the city centre to live in high-rise buildings. This new urban development had caused many graveyards throughout what had been farmlands to be dug up and/or paved over in order to build the city centre, and more were dug up to build roads and outlying infrastructure, such as light rail transit and highways connecting urban populations to the new satellite city. Chen Zhou’s new “permanent grave” could be moved easily from old to new gravesites along with an urn that contained ashes of the dead ancestor. Concurrent with Cao Minghao and Chen Zhou’s artworks, performance artist Chen Jianjun carried a sign that said, “Boundary of Kunshan New Village” and walked the 2.92 square kilometers, also the title of his performance, bordering the neighbouring villages of Yangong, Wenwu,

84 Vol. 12 No. 2 Tianlin, and Gonghu. A keen student of French film-maker and writer Guy Debord, Chen Jianjun walked along the physical borders of the village in an effort to demarcate its psycho-geographical frontiers. In a recent interview, Chen Jianjun and Cao Minghao described a live art hermeneutic that gave absolutely no credence to the poetic element in performance and live artwork, instead solely defining it as a locus of artistic intention and socio- historical context.

The poetry and praxis discussion is an active and interesting one here in Chengdu, for although it’s not all that’s being talked about, its two poles serve as orientations for most of the issues at hand. When it comes to poetry, there are tensions among image, meaning, technique, and medium. And once praxis is underway, it’s a question of what’s most important— economic, social, aesthetic, or political reform.

Since Art Praxis was formed, in 2009, Chen Jianjun has become one of its highest profile members and oftentimes spokesman. He has performed frequently at just about every Chengdu venue since coming to Chengdu in 2006, often iving lectures and facilitating discussion at Art Praxis and Family Art events. He also teaches video techniques at Chengdu’s Electronic Institute, where he is currently designing a performance art curriculum. Zhou Bin gives courses on performance art at Sichuan Fine Art Academy in Chongqing, disseminating ideas and performance techniques culled over a decade of prolific practice. Chen Jianjun and Zhou Bin each incorporate their own aesthetic and inscribe their own ethic into their curriculum, institutionalizing approaches to performance art that emphasize poetry and praxis, respectively.

At the moment, government agencies are relatively open to performance art, as the medium’s incorporation into educational institutions suggests. Political policy still, however, practices considerable control over performance artworks, for example, forbidding nudity, violence, or overt political comment at the Up-On festival. Is it possible that policy could extend one day, as it has in China’s relatively recent past, to dictate whether works can be poetic or concrete? Art Praxis flirts with politics, albeit in a role as artist, while for the most part Zhou Bin and other artists at Up-On maintain critical distance from politics. I myself would stick with the distance, although, admittedly, these local struggles are not my own.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001), 218. 2 See Li Zehou, Path of Beauty (Beijing, Cultural Relics Publishing House, 1981). 3 Lance Pursey, in conversation with the author, January 15, 2013. 4 Xiang Xishi, in conversation with the author, October 12, 2012. 5 Marcel Sparmann, in conversation with the author, November 5, 2012. 6 Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, in conversation with the author, November 14, 2012. 7 Ni Kun, “The ‘Reconstruction’ of ‘Under Construction’: Village Politics Being Watched,” in Village Politics Being Watched, exh. cat. (Chongqing: Organhaus, 2012), 7.

Vol. 12 No. 2 85 Alice Schmatzberger Miao Xiaochun: Digitally Refigured— The Animated Self

igital art touches upon some of the indispensable questions concerning contemporary art in the twenty-first century: How Dcan an artist create something new and develop an innovative visual language or aesthetic? Hasn´t everything be said and seen? What kind of art can be appropriate for these times, for commenting on or mirroring recent societal or global developments? Compared to other art media, digital media are still relatively young tools, opening little-explored possibilities for creating artworks and inventive aesthetics. Since technology is not an end in itself, artist Miao Xiaochun asks: “What makes a digital artwork worth viewing and noting after it has been surpassed by other artworks in terms of technology?”1

Over the last thirteen years, Miao Xiaochun has created one of the most widespread and many-faceted œuvres in contemporary Chinese art. He is also one of the first artists in China to thoroughly explore the possibilities provided by computer software and 3-D technology. He started making art in the 1990s with black-and-white digital photography, then switched to colour, and has continued to further develop this medium and its specific visual language.

His growing interest in digital technology resulted in The Last Judgement in Cyberspace (2005), a 3-D version of Michelangelo´s famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel consisting of C-prints and a seven-minute animated video work. More recently, he digitally created H2O Genesis (2007), Microcosm (2008), Restart (2008–2010), Disillusion (2009–2010), and Limitless and Out Of Nothing, finished in 2012. Each of these digitally animated works is accompanied by various 2-D artworks, such as C-prints, drawings, digital etchings, digital ink paintings, digital woodcuts, even embroideries on silk. This connection of new media artworks with traditional art and aesthetics is of interest to Miao Xiaochun: “Since Microcosm, I started to purposely ‘push’ new media back into traditional media. That´s why I tried ink (Chinese painting), drawing, and embroidery. In my new works, I tried oil painting, copperplate and wood engraving. I will gradually experiment with other traditional media as well. Of course, all these experiments are based on the characteristics of new media.”2 At last year´s Guangzhou Triennial, Miao Xiaochun exhibited Out of Nothing, an installation of a 3-D computer animation with five neo-cubist synchronized projections, and four absolute drawings,3 The Martyrdom, The Dissident, Fluoroscopy, and Security, all from 2012.

86 Vol. 12 No. 2 The starting point for Miao Xiaochun’s artistic process in digital art is something like an electronically blank sheet of paper—that is, the blank screen. Each work’s virtual space, images, personages, and actions—all objects, landscapes, the viewer´s perspective, the light, etc.—have to be defined and developed by the artist digitally. In addition, some of the most iconic and complex paintings from Western art history serve as the basis for certain of his digital works.4 His creative process is not about analyzing or reinterpreting these works; it is more about, for example, using their structure for addressing contemporary issues. He eliminates the typical figures, the narrative elements, and the temporal context, and transposes these art pieces into a new story about the present. Miao Xiaochun describes this as follows with the example of Hieronymus Bosch´s The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa. 1503), a painting that he used as a basis for Microcosm:

What Bosch created was based on the allegories of his time. . . . I may not understand them all. . . . But I have to create with my own language and to swap all the contents for modern things and make it a modern story. This can reflect my view and feeling in our times. . . . His works are my starting points where I used his structure, such as his structure of heaven, earth and hell and the basic form of his pictures. But I only use these forms and changed all the contents, including figures, backgrounds and all facilities. What I create belongs to our times. . . . are the dreams of modern people. They reflect the views of modern people on life and death, their desires, and their views on human´s weakness.5

In general, all Miao Xiaochun’s digital works are an examination of fundamental issues of human existence—of past, present, and the potential future, of becoming and passing away, beginning, paradise, and end. For example, in the context of his work Microcosm he muses: “To see death from birth, and birth from death; to see hell from heaven, and heaven from hell; to see the end from the beginning, and the beginning from the end.”6 Commenting on the work Disillusion Miao Xiaochun states, “Images made of soap bubbles are seen everywhere from the beginning to the end in my 3-D animation Disillusion; persons made of soap bubbles are fleeting and burst with a single touch, as short and fragile as our lives. However, even with such short and fragile lives, men are still creating earth-shaking or totally destructive events. On earth or in the universe, maybe there are no other kinds of beings worth such respect, such pity, or such hatred.”7

His aesthetic language is fascinating. Touching on the sub-conscious, it absorbs the viewer and drags him or her into a virtual space. One element of his signature style is that the same figure appears in almost all of his digital artworks; this figure is a three-dimensional model of himself, digitally created. For example, in The Last Judgement in Cyberspace, he replaced all the personages in Michelangelo´s Last Judgement with a digital image of himself: “In light of the imagined scenario above, I substituted all four hundred or so figures in The Last Judgement with a 3-D image of myself. I then reversed the original structure of the painting, as if we

Vol. 12 No. 2 87 could walk behind the fresco and look back at the mural through the wall. Substituting my own image for all the figures in the fresco effectively erased the identities of those judging and those being judged. The differences in their status no longer exists. The person who ascends to heaven is the same as [the person] who descends into hell.”8

Alice Schmatzberger: You have created a series of digital works in which a 3-D version of yourself—your body and face—appears as a digitally created figure; for example, you inserted this figure into The Last Judgement in Cyberspace, H2O, and Microcosm. Could you talk a bit about this, about your potential alter ego, and what this figure represents?

Miao Xiaochun, Mirage, 2004, photograph, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

Miao Xiaochun: Let me explain from the beginning. For the series Visitor from the Past (1999–2004), I made a sculpture bearing my own face, placed it in various contexts, and then photographed it. Mirage (2004) marked the end of this series and was the last photographic work using this particular alter ego. You can see him, that is, “me,” in this picture—the sculpture of me is going up the side of a mountain in a cable car, and at the same time I am going down, back to the city, Wuxi, my birthplace.

In 2005, I began the next series, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace, this time without the sculptural figure of me. I started to develop a model of myself by using 3-D software. You can touch this “sculpture/me” in the Visitor series; it is like a real figure and exists in reality. But if I create a figure with 3-D software, it is visible only on the computer screen; you cannot touch it, at least you could not do so then, in 2005. But in the meantime, technology has greatly advanced, and we now can print a digitally designed figure with a 3-D printer, and therefore we can create a digitally developed sculpture. But back in 2005, I could only develop this figure on the screen. I do think of it as another “me,” a digital me, a me within cyberspace—it has my face. I wanted to figure out what technical possibilities we have to work with. I really didn´t know what finally would happen once I started to work with this software, much less what would be the outcome in 2012. This was a challenge for me, because even I was not so good at that time with the technology, but I nevertheless began to work with the software. It is like opening a door to everything I don´t know; I had to begin at point zero.

Alice Schmatzberger: Do you consider this, then, a kind of a self-portrait?

Miao Xiaochun: I think of it as a new kind of self-portrait. We have always been able to make self-portraits with a camera or render them in a painting or in a sculpture. But now, with different technical tools, the self-portrait

88 Vol. 12 No. 2 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgment in Cyberspace— The Front View, 2005–06, Chromogenic print, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

is different from what it was before in the Chinese classical tradition. You must modify the self-portrait; for example, the figure in Visitor from the Past wears clothes from an ancient time; the figures I have created in cyberspace are mostly nude. This new digital figure can move, can act. I know it is not exactly me, it is more like a part of me. If you make a self-portrait from a real existing person, you cannot say this is only a fantasy or from the imagination, but when I develop this 3-D computer animation I actually can put all my fantasies into this animation.

Alice Schmatzberger: While in European art history the modern self- portrait has existed approximately since the fifteenth century, there seems to be almost no tradition of making self-portraits within Chinese classical painting. And, likewise, within Chinese ink painting there was no intention of modelling the body anatomically correctly or to achieve any similarity to a real person.

Miao Xiaochun: Yes, this is true. I remember a Chinese painting, a portrait of Ni Zan.9 The important fact is that next to him is painted bamboo, and this bamboo represents also some kind of character or virtue. For Chinese artists neither the face nor the body is important; other details such as precisely this bamboo—or nature, or a mountain—next to the depicted figure are what are important. For the painter of this portrait, the person is part of the bamboo, or of a mountain, or a river. For him, nature is bigger than anything else, and this is why in the depiction of Chinese traditional landscape the figures are always very small.

Vol. 12 No. 2 89 Miao Xiaochun, H2O-Genesis (still), 2006–07, 3-D computer animation, 4 mins.,14 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

Alice Schmatzberger: The Last Judgement in Cyberspace was your first 3-D work, and you modelled the 3-D figure exactly after your own features.

Miao Xiaochun: Yes, through 3-D software. I thought about how to accomplish this. We used a lot of photographs of my face to model it, and this was the most difficult task. Back in 2005, we had no 3-D scanners in China, so we had to develop my face step by step. As the Daoists say: After one comes two, after two comes three, after three come all things. So far, two 3-D models have been created: one was manually constructed using 3-D Max software. This first 3-D model was used in The Last Judgment in Cyberspace, H2O—Genesis, Microcosm, Restart, and Disillusion.

The second model was achieved by using 3-D scanning technology and used in Limitless and Neocubism—Out of Nothing. In the deformation that

Miao Xiaochun, Restart (stills), 2008–10, 3-D computer animation, 14 mins., 22 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

90 Vol. 12 No. 2 Miao Xiaochun, Limitless (stills), 2011–12, 3-D computer animation, 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

is particular to software, the two basic 3-D models generated many different models that could play different roles. For example, the 3-D figure was made into a figure with a marble texture, a glass texture, or one seeming to have a texture of bubbles, as in Disillusion, where persons made of soap bubbles represent a fragile and fleeting life. Moreover, these models underwent so many transformations that it looked as if I had created a lot of new different models; however, all of them came from those two basic models. According to different backgrounds and music, they looked as if they had different expressions—happy, tragic, or emotionally agitated. In an extreme case, the variation of colour revealed different ages, as in Fountain of Youth (2007).

Nowadays I make use of a 3-D scanner to scan my body. For me, this is just like another kind of photography. You create a 3-D body and you can view it from all different viewpoints. I think perhaps in the future we will take photographs only in 3-D.

Alice Schmatzberger: 3-D printers that print objects that have been designed on the computer are already available.

Miao Xiaochun: Yes, to make a print, for example, of a digitally created sculpture you need many layers of synthetic material until the 3-D object is complete. I think this is very challenging. With this new technique you cannot only produce a video, you can also create digital images, paintings, sculptures; this offers a lot of new possibilities for me and my artistic process. In such a case we could have another kind of me, in the form of a digitally created sculpture. Actually, we already are working on such a sculpture.

Alice Schmatzberger: What was the reason behind switching from digital photography to computer software?

Vol. 12 No. 2 91 Miao Xiaochun: During documenta in 1997, I saw an animation work by Miao Xiaochun, Disillusion (still), 2009–10, 3-D computer William Kentridge that affected me a lot. Then an idea came to my mind: I animation, 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist. will certainly make moving images in the future. In 2003, I started to learn 3-D software because first I needed to know how to use the software and then to think about possibilities for creating animation works in this way. During this time I tried also to fuse a 3-D figure into a photographic work, but I didn’t think it quite succeeded. So I thought of creating works purely with software. Thus, in 2005, I began the creation of The Last Judgment in Cyberspace using a totally different technique. When you take photographs, no matter whether you use an analogue or a digital camera, you always start with something that already exists; you only need to record it. But for creating The Last Judgment in Cyberspace you first have to virtually build everything. Nothing already exists—develop this figure, create the cyberspace, everything. Only then can you make photos or develop a video with a “virtual camera”; that is, the software, a specific computer program.

Alice Schmatzberger: You need to know how to deal with the software because otherwise you would not know what possibilities these tools could provide.

Miao Xiaochun: Yes, but I think for me courage is the more important point. Technique is not so important; you first need to have an idea and then you need to have enough courage to do it. I think many people in China are much better technically than I am, but they don’t want to do such complex artworks.

Alice Schmatzberger: What about the human figure in your earlier digital artworks? It is a very neutral figure; there are no individual signs of individuality, no specific cultural connotations, and, unlike the more recent

92 Vol. 12 No. 2 works, even the face is mostly without any expression or emotion. In what kind of situations do you use yourself within the animated work, and when do you decide to use another figure, sometimes a derivative of yourself, sometimes not? For example, in Microcosm there appears a robot, a statue of Venus, etc.

Miao Xiaochun: I think it is just a type of a human figure. The 3-D model of myself was created simply as a symbol of an abstract human being. The avatars are made out of this same model. In one sense they are the same, but in another they are not because of their different positions within the same space. This concept of “the same and not the same at the same time” was very important for me.10

Miao Xiaochun, Microcosm You need to use a figure and then immediately you have to ask one (still), 2007–08, 3-D computer animation, 15 mins., 56’ secs. question: With whose face? I think for the artist today perhaps the easiest Courtesy of the artist. choice is to use himself. The figure that is used most in Western art is Jesus; it is easy, there is a familiar story—for example, The Last Supper, and everybody knows what happened. Even if an Italian painter depicts the face of Jesus differently than a French artist, they all wanted to paint Jesus. But for the artist nowadays it is really difficult to choose which figure to use.

Alice Schmatzberger: Has there ever been such a prominent figure in Chinese art history?

Miao Xiaochun: During the times of the Cultural Revolution most artists painted Mao Zedong or the model worker, the peasant, the soldier. But this was for political reasons. There is an interesting detail; every artist painted a different Jesus, but every Chinese artist painted almost the same face of Mao when photography was used as the source material.

Alice Schmatzberger: This digital figure that resembles you appears in all of your digital artworks. At the opening of your solo exhibition Out of Body, at the Whitebox Museum of Art, Beijing in April 2011, you showed a work that was projected on a white cube that had been laid on the ground.

Miao Xiaochun: At the Whitebox we projected five different images, a different one for each visible side of the cube. We had to take pictures from five different viewpoints, and then this had to be rendered in five different modes on the computer. It was a totally new experiment, and at the time I had finished only about two minutes of the piece. Now it is fourteen minutes long, and we showed something like that at the Guangzhou Triennial. This idea originally came from working on the The Last Judgment

Vol. 12 No. 2 93 Miao Xiaochun, Neocubism— Out of Nothing, 2011–12, 3-D computer animation, 14 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

in Cyberspace, where I made the fresco visible from the front, left, right, back, top, and below. As a follow-up to this approach, I have now combined all these viewpoints in just one single 3-D video work.

Alice Schmatzberger: An exhibition of video works is a difficult task that is seldom resolved in a very satisfying way.

Miao Xiaochun: Video work is a time-related art, and in that respect it is totally different from painting or photography. It is very difficult for an artist to create a video and show it in a museum or a gallery. Generally people go to see paintings, and they can decide within five seconds if they like it or not. But with a video work you must really capture the visitor’s attention in every minute, even in every second. Therefore, you somehow have to condense your idea. Very often in such works there is no specific story, no dialogue, no fighting, no joke, no actors, nothing as interesting as in a movie at the cinema. You must explain your dream, your power of imagination, your thinking, your opinion; you are exposing your inner self. Sometimes this is very difficult and sometimes very easy. My approach is to regard video as a moving painting. I create a video work as if it was to be a series of paintings. It is like looking from one painting to another—I like this.

Alice Schmatzberger: Is it important for you if a viewer profoundly understands your work? A visitor from Austria, for example, may perceive something different from a visitor from Singapore—there are differences in the individual, the cultural background, etc.

Miao Xiaochun: When I travelled in Europe11 I was very happy because you can understand the works of an artist from another country—you can understand it even though they use another language. I think if I am able to transpose my ideas successfully, the spectator will understand. When Ludwig van Beethoven finished his Missa Solemnis (Miao Xiaochun used this piece in

94 Vol. 12 No. 2 his digital work Restart) he said, “This is from my heart; I hope it can reach another heart,” and he really reached my heart, even after two hundred years.

Alice Schmatzberger: Could you tell me a bit about your other digital works?

Miao Xiaochun: Perhaps it is better to view them. Sometimes it is difficult for me to explain a video work. How should I explain my work? For example, I gave the storybook I wrote after I finished the piece Microcosm to my assistant, and he then said, “Finally I understand!” But it is really difficult for me to explain my ideas at the beginning of a work or to explain the scenes in a few words.

Alice Schmatzberger: I imagine it being difficult because you create visual artworks out of your imagination, and maybe sometimes you can´t find the proper language. I think writing about such works is as difficult as exhibiting such works. Sometimes it is simply impossible to describe the vast number of scenes and details, the aesthetic, the colours, or music—to capture the spirit of these artworks through writing in a satisfying way.

Miao Xiaochun: If you use images to communicate, this is already enough; you do not need to explain every detail exactly. But if you use language, you really have to explain things very precisely—you have to use the right words—and sometimes this is difficult. If an artist writes an essay, sometimes it may be done incorrectly, sometimes it is simply boring, or you need a whole book to explain why you did what you did. But if you look at images you can apprehend them in the first second—even if you cannot say why.

Notes 1 This essay is based on an interview with Miao Xiaochun conducted in his studio in Beijing in September 2012, as well as on our subsequent e-mail exchanges between November 2012 and January 2013. Huang Du, “Miao Xiaochun, Microcosm—A Modern Allegory,” in Miao Xiaochun, Macromania, ed. Beate Reifenscheid (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010), 91. 2 Artist´s statement on Restart, March 2010, unpublished. 3 Absolute Drawings, one of two subseries of Metamorphosis, is a series of drawings on canvas with permanent Lumocolor pen. These drawings are painted by hand on canvas with a computerized structure related to his 3-D computer animation works. In this way, he would like to represent an aesthetic that combines art and science as kind of a new art form of our times. Until now (January 2013) eleven Absolute Drawings are finished. 4 In contrast, in his photographic works, the starting point for the artistic process has always been reality. 5 Huang Du, “Miao Xiaochun, Microcosm—A Modern Allegory,” 81. 6 Artist´s statement on Microcosm, March 2010, http://www.miaoxiaochun.com/zhongwenyemian/ yishujiazishu/yishujiazishu.htm/. 7 Artist´s statement on Disillusion, unpublished. 8 Artist’s statement on The Last Judgment in Cyberspace, artist´s Web site http://www.miaoxiaochun. com/zhongwenyemian/yishujiazishu/yishujiazishu.htm/. 9 Ni Zan was a famous painter and poet, one of the “four great masters” during the Yuan Dynasty. 10 Miao Xiaochun further describes this aspect in an interview with Huang Du: ”Especially the concepts concerning Adam and Eve are changed, which is the most difficult part: because this work only employed a single three-dimensional model and this model is a male who cannot represent both men and women. Therefore, finally I came up with the following idea: use a robot to represent Adam and Venus for Eve. My consideration is: we modern people are just like god in the way that we create a lot of robots according to our will and ask them to do as we direct. In this perspective, it is like god creating Adam and Eve and telling Adam that he should follow his rules. Next is Venus. Why do we always think the Venus with broken arms in the Louvre museum is the most beautiful one? I think one possibility is exactly the point that this Venus does not have arms, which means she cannot pick the forbidden fruit as Eve did. From this point of view, this image can be used to replace Eve and reflect the thoughts of modern people. There are many such cases in my work, and I have to do the same work with every detail.” In Huang Du, “Miao Xiaochun, Microcosm—A Modern Allegory,” 91. 11 Miao Xiaochun lived in Kassel, Germany, between 1995 and 1999.

Vol. 12 No. 2 95 Jonathan Goodman Ming Fay: From Money Trees to Monkey Pots

veteran of the New York art scene, sculptor Ming Fay remembers the city forty years ago, when its urban ways were raw and rough, A and even more financially troubled than today. Even so, the environment of the city at the time was favourable to sculptors who took over the big semi-industrial spaces of Soho and eked out lives entirely devoted to the production of art. Although his studio is now located in Jersey City, New Jersey, Ming Fay has been known to speak out in favour of those sculptors who persisted in staying in New York, saying that those who can survive its hardships end up being good artists by dint of tenacity and hard work.

Ming Fay, now in his late sixties, fits into that group himself. Born in Shanghai and educated in Hong Kong, he comes from a family of artists. Both his mother and father were active in the field; his father was an art director in the Hong Kong film industry and, later, in television, and his mother had an atelier where she taught art to young adults. Although he never really studied with either of his parents, he imbibed the atmosphere of art at home and spent a year (1959–60) making art in Hong Kong before moving to Columbus, Ohio to study design as a scholarship student from 1961 to 1964. After receiving his M.F.A. in 1970 from the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, he taught art at the University of Pittsburgh from 1971 to 1974. He then moved his studio to Canal Street in New York in February 1973, commuting back and forth from Pittsburgh into the following year. Today, he is a true New Yorker, having lived in the city for four decades. However, his work reflects the tensions that accompany an Asian-Western affiliation, that for him has resulted in increasingly strong sculptures and installations that reflect an international outlook arising from both his upbringing in the south of China and his long residency in the United States.

It has often been noted that in the 1990s several Chinese artists made use of New York’s internationalism and artistic freedoms to create works of astonishing variety and achievement (many of them have returned to China, often in quest of a more favourable market). But these artists were younger than Ming Fay, at times by a full generation. At that time Beijing and Shanghai art immigrants were greeted with the intense attention only a romantic reading of Chinese culture could bring; many in the New York art world made positive assumptions without basing them on in-depth knowledge, resulting in writing on these artists’ work that was often superficial and lacking in criticality. In contrast to these younger artists,

96 Vol. 12 No. 2 Ming Fay’s experience from the late 1970s through to the first years of the following millennium was one of a degree of isolation, and very little was written on his work; he had to go it alone. He took refuge from this by concentrating on his work and developing a sculptural practice that seriously explored the context of nature and culture as he understood it from a Chinese perspective. Early in his career, images remembered from childhood likely fed his artistic sensibility, but he later established a kind of sculptural crossroads that included Western work that also became central to his practice. In many ways, Ming Fay’s artwork was inspired by and developed from his extended contact with various international tendencies—abstract, conceptual, and performance art—that were representative of New York art during the 1970s.

When Ming Fay first arrived in New York from Pittsburgh, he did not find a large community of Chinese artists waiting for him. He met a couple of artists from Taiwan in New York City, but that was it; as the artist says, “There was no presence of Chinese artists as a group.” 1 When he and his few Chinese artist friends did get together at a party, they would exchange stories about their attempts “to decipher the secret codes of the New York art scene”

Ming Fay, Radiant Fruits, 1990, Understanding the art scene did not mean, however, that all Chinese artists Tirabia Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist. in New York had to acquiesce to Western culture. Some of these artists attempted to internalize the values of the New York art world of the time; others decided to remain independent from them. As Ming Fay comments, “We were all individuals who were determined to express ourselves, either with our ethnic background mixed into our work or with our background totally separate. During Ming Fay’s development as an artist in New York,

Vol. 12 No. 2 97 he increasingly made aspects of contemporary Western sculpture part of his work; for example, he created larger-than-life everyday objects, such as those in Radiant Fruits (1990), that evoke the exaggerated scale characteristic of American artist Claes Oldenburg.

But recognition of Western tradition did not necessarily mean that he downplayed his Chineseness—Ming Fay remained true to the heritage that was so much a part of him. In the mid-1980s, he founded the Epoxy Art Group, a small group of similarly minded artists from Hong Kong. Ming Fay says the following of their experience:

In artist parties, we talked, we ate, and we worked together as a group. We were looking for possibilities in finding the gap between the East and the West. We worked together and had shows as a group, taking part [in 1990] in the Decade Show at the New Museum. In the end, though, we started to unglue as a group as individual members found their own niche to work in.

Ming Fay acknowledges that today, the Chinese diaspora in New York is much more expansive than it was when he first arrived. He sees more complex connections in the sense that the affiliations between American and Chinese cultures are stronger and more intricate; this is evidenced by the increased two-way traffic between art centers like Beijing and Shanghai and New York. Even so, Chinese diasporic artists are struggling to find their individual place in the art world. Ming Fay comments, “I think we face the same issues of identity, but I think we have a longer history from which to proceed." In fact, the notion of identity remains in the thoughts and art of the Asian artists of Ming Fay’s generation in particular, as can be seen from their often personal and identity-oriented art.

Above and beyond disputes about cultural correctness—the place of the Chinese diaspora in New York City’s large but sometimes impenetrable art world, or the amount of coverage of Chinese art—is the business of making art and the public recognition that faces each artist who sets out to become known. One must collect one’s energies to produce the strongest art one is capable of. For Ming Fay, the goal was to make art that was accurate in regard to, but larger than, nature: “In the beginning my work was exacting in rendition, but with a twist—the sculpture was always bigger than the real thing.” Even so, his work continued to evolve into hybrid forms that only he could imagine—different kinds of nonexistent species of fruits and plants.

Later on in his career, in the early to mid-1990s, he started making “monkey pots” as allegorical warnings not to be seduced by one’s appetites. A monkey pot is the edible fruit of an Amazonian tree Ming Fay discovered in the Singapore Botanical Garden. Its name is based on the habit of monkeys who eat the seeds of the fruit by sticking their head inside the sphere-shaped gourd, hence making them vulnerable to attack—in their greed to devour the seeds they are slow to pull their heads out. He thus returned to a kind

98 Vol. 12 No. 2 Ming Fay, Ramapo Garden of Desire, 2005, Kresge Gallery, Ramapo College, New Jersey. Courtesy of the artist.

Ming Fay, The Garden of Qian, 1998, Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 12 No. 2 99 of a lyrical realism based on an outsized rendering of nature that he was known for. Making individual sculptures that refer to plants and fruits, Ming Fay constructs individual pieces that coalesce into an installation in which a forest or jungle emerges from the wealth of detail. Indeed, two of his strongest pieces, The Garden of Qian (1998) and Canutopia (2012), are installations composed of myriad individual works.

Ming Fay, The Garden of Qian, 1998, Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Most Chinese would know that The Garden of Qian also can be read as “the garden of money”; qian means money in Mandarin. Also, I expect that Ming Fay was aware of the proximity of the Whitney Museum of Art’s satellite gallery—where The Garden of Qian was exhibited and which was located at the time in the Phillip Morris building across the street from the Grand Central Station in midtown New York—close to the heart of the business community and financial services industry. So, we have a context of corporate money, in the form of funding from Phillip Morris, psychologically surrounding Ming Fay’s garden installation, which inhabited the entire space. While his money trees may not have consciously been meant as a metaphor describing the American economy, which was depressed at that time, to US viewers this interpretation was likely not far from mind.

The Garden of Qian consisted of a major installation of artificial trees with coin-like leaves that was augmented with other sculptures of plants and fruits, which resulted in an entire garden consisting of organic shapes built from materials as simple as paper and cloth. By demonstrating both cultural and natural differences, the artist slyly asserted the otherness of Chinese culture through its representation of flora from Asia, which are inevitably different from those of northeastern the United States. At the same time, the beautifully constructed garden was emblematic of the landscape architecture of China, likely from the Qing dynasty period. Unlike Western garden practice, the Chinese garden often is noted for its asymmetrical treatment of flower and plant installations—a design that is seemingly closer to the way nature works. This particular installation was key to Ming Fay’s career, being a formal construction of unusual accomplishment and exquisite effect as well as a charged memorial to an aesthetic that he brought with him from China.

100 Vol. 12 No. 2 Top: Ming Fay, Canutopia, In Canutopia, installed fourteen years later in a building belonging to the 2012, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey. Grounds for Sculpture, an art and education site located a few miles outside Courtesy of the artist. of Trenton, New Jersey, we see evidence of Ming Fay’s further understanding Bottom: Ming Fay, Canutopia, 2012, Grounds for Sculpture, of the form and effect of natural phenomena. Here, the artist had to deal Hamilton, New Jersey. Courtesy of the artist. with a difficult space complicated by ceiling by water pipes, air vents, and uneven walls, and part of Canutopia’s achievement lies in its considerable beauty achieved despite the architectural obstacles facing the artist. It is easy to remember upon seeing The Garden of Qian and Canutopia that, even today, in Ming Fay’s hands the Chinese aesthetic remains compelling in its presentation of nature. His work has moved more or less in the direction of the garden as the theme of his installations: He sees his gardens “as a metaphor, as a world within worlds.”

Vol. 12 No. 2 101 The garden theme is also central to Canutopia, albeit in a different direction—upward. The cavernous gallery space given to Ming Fay enabled him to draw a comparison to a canopy, the upper stratum of trees, where an entire ecology exists separate from the world beneath it. Ming Fay populated the ceiling and walls with all manner of fruits and other motifs representing nature: apples, gourds, and money-tree leaves achieved a density that evoked the uncanny sense of a forest canopy—this, despite the fact that the space’s rather austere structure remained visible.

Ming Fay has created his own versions of the Chinese garden—a form that traditionally is a beautiful, often sacred manmade space. In each of his installations, the overall effect is lyrical to the point where it feels as though poetic intuition guided the artist. His use of realism paired with lyric metaphor in Canutopia combine to create a manmade garden that reflects a ready-made one in the forest. Not all the forms hanging from the ceiling, however, were entirely accurate in a botanical sense, but that allowed Ming Fay a greater degree of artistic freedom. The general effect was cumulative, taking place over time as the viewer walked beneath the canopy. The eloquent presentation of this canopy piece, despite the large expanse of space and prominent beams, demonstrates just how structured his process is.

It might seem irrelevant for someone like Ming Fay to readdress the theme of Chinese versus Western aesthetics, or the nature versus culture debates. Given the vast travels and geographical locations of artists throughout the world, the theme of difference inevitably asserts itself. The globalization of art is now a reality, and it is hard to put a national label on many kinds of art shown today. Yet the specificity of Ming Fay’s work makes it clear to me that it originates from his Asian experience even as he deliberately turns his art toward a combination of realism and abstraction, thus seeming to carry to some degree a Western pedigree. The resilience of Chinese cultural origins in the face of sweeping historical change, especially in mainland China itself, demonstrates that early experiences, and the memories of them, die hard in the aesthetic of Ming Fay. Like many artists today, he belongs to New York's mixture of a desire for newness and a transparent wish for recognition; at the same time he is determined to solve the specific aesthetic problems he faces as an artist—the influences of two very different cultures.

The issue of “identity” art has been intensely debated for at least two generations, and it is showing signs of fatigue. There must be another, new way in which people struggle to align themselves with others beyond the restrictions of a specific identity. In much of Asian culture, there is an attempt to place community ahead of the individual, sometimes at the expense of the individual, but Ming Fay manages to achieve believable references to both the Chinese perception of nature as a living organism and to the Western emphasis on visual perception and individuality. Because of the international exchange of information, there may come a time when questions of cultural difference will no longer matter to the extent that they do today. Yet it is interesting to question whether the tension between cultural differences spurs the artist to accommodate both its psychological

102 Vol. 12 No. 2 and cultural anxieties and then transcend them. Such an accommodation, I believe, has been central to Ming Fay’s career.

Part of his obsession with nature results from the unrelenting experience of brick and concrete in New York—man made architectural materials that tend to crowd out the trees and parks in the city. As the artist says:

New York made me realize I am out of nature and living in a totally artificial place. It is a machine with everything man- made—down to the organized planting of trees in Central Park. This is how I was inspired to create an aggrandized man-made nature as a metaphor for utopian thoughts of the human ideals. But all human ideals change or the forces of nature change it.

Ming Fay, Shad Crossing/ Delancy Street Subway project, F train platform, 2005, tile mural, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

In place of idealism, Ming Fay offers the sense of a specific site and a fair amount of communal fervor. Chosen in 2000 to create public art for the Delancey Street subway station, on New York City’s Lower East Side, Ming Fay created a tile mural depicting a row of cherry trees on the wall of the uptown waiting area, a nod to the historical presence of the former Delancey Farms Cherry Orchard that was once located there, while in the downtown area of the station, the mural presents two giant shad fish, a scenario that refers to the East River that the subway trains must cross in order to arrive in Brooklyn. Both the shad fish and cherry trees are repeated on the outside of the stairs leading up to the street; the imagery, while quite literal, is gestures to the persistence of nature in an otherwise heavily urbanized site.

In one of his more recent projects, completed in 2005, for an outdoor site adjacent to the Seattle Federal Courthouse, Ming Fay took his inspiration from a sliver of a cedar tree seed pod. This cedar is native to America’s northwest, and Ming Fay’s proposal was a twenty-seven-foot version of the sliver standing upright and balanced as a symbol of justice. The

Vol. 12 No. 2 103 104 Vol. 12 No. 2 Ming Fay, Pillar Arc, Seattle sculpture rises dramatically into the air with a slight curve at its top; it is Federal Courthouse, 2005, wood. Courtesy of the artist. striking as an abstract sculpture that aligns beautifully with its site, one consisting of a mixture of grass, trees, streets, and public buildings. Here Ming Fay has reached a successful resolution in which his art merges with the surrounding landscape. At the same time, the sculpture constitutes a powerful humanist gesture about the necessity for the evenhanded treatment of people; the evocative simplicity of its aesthetic is something that can be enjoyed by all. The sculpture also evokes historical resonance in the sense that it subtly recalls the totemic structures that represent indigenous peoples in the region.

It becomes clear that in his public artworks, especially, Ming Fay is intent on revising history, challenging the mainstream, or whitestream—the white majority in North America. Perhaps he is aiming to restore a balance that is tipped in favour of the dominant culture. In many respects, Chinese art is the consequence of imperial culture, and it can provide an artist like Ming Fay a history that is an inherited, if not a living, context of cultural mores and references that enable him to make use of Chinese materials and imagery. While he is not one to bring up issues of identity, especially from a personal perspective, such concerns inevitably arise, and the complexity of his background and experience inspires his art.

Ming Fay, Needle at Sea In his Jersey City studio, Ming Bottom, 2012, mixed media, 20 x 6 x 6 cm. Courtesy of the Fay continues to work on his artist. “jungle,” as he refers to it. But, small human figures also have begun to populate his habitats. These figures, which suggest athletic poses, also have an origin in Chinese culture; they first appeared in this work about ten years ago when Ming Fay began to learn tai chi. According to the artist, “these figures live in the jungle as little people who are part of my bigger jungle.” It is interesting to speculate whether these human figures serve as a further humanization of the artist’s vision, which tends to see a shared responsibility in the ecology of both his art and the real world. Ming Fay may have come from China, but I believe his interests are broadly humanitarian, reflecting and encouraging broad-based appreciation of the exchange between culture and nature.

Notes 1 All quotes are from the author’s e-mail interview with the artist, which took place in the fall of 2012.

Vol. 12 No. 2 105 Chinese Name Index

106 Vol. 12 No. 2 Vol. 12 No. 2 107 108 Vol. 12 No. 2 Vol. 12 No. 2 109 110 Vol. 12 No. 2 Vol. 12 No. 2 111 W ANG GUANGYI (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Zhang Chaoxuan to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 134.6655.9126 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu; and is measured the same A RTWORK DESCRIPTION size as the Journal. ARTIST ------Wang Guangyi TITLE ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) MEDIA ------Serigraph DIMENSION ------210 x 295 mm EDITION SIZE ------200 PRICE ------US $400 plus shipping

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This edition is published quarterly—in March, June, September and December—and each issue features scholarly essays, interviews, conference proceedings, and critical commentary selected from Yishu’s English edition. With our English and Chinese editions, we endeavour to increase our efforts in promoting critical writing on, and contributing to the history of, contemporary Chinese art.

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