Zheng Shengtian Contemporary Chinese Art in Vancouver Introduction to Yellow Signal: New Media in China Jiangnan In 1996, Vancouver-based artist Hank Bull came back from his first trip to Top: Jiangnan exhibition opening, 1998. Left to right: China and was extremely excited about what he saw there. At that time I was Hu Jieming, Zhang Peili, Gu Wenda, Liang Shaoji, Hank working for the newly established Annie Wong Art Foundation that had a Bull, Scott Watson, Cate Rimmer, Greg Bellerby, Xia mandate to promote contemporary Chinese art internationally. Joined by Wei, and Zheng Shengtian. Xia Wei, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, and an Photo: Yishu archive. Middle: Gu Wenda, Confucius advocate of Chinese art, the three of us had several discussions and came Diary, 1998, performance at Jiangnan exhibition up with an idea to launch a citywide project that would bring emerging (with Daina Augaitis at the Vancouver Art Gallery). Photo: contemporary Chinese art to North America. Yishu archive. Bottom: Xu Bing, Introduction to New English Calligraphy, Our initiative received an overwhelming response from the local art 1998, installation view as part of Jiangnan exhibition, Art community. In the spring of 1998, Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art Beatus, Vancouver. from South of Yangzi River took place in Vancouver with the participation of twelve major public and commercial galleries, artist-run centres, universities, and cultural organizations. In the catalogue essay, Hank wrote that the purpose of the Jiangnan project was “to draw the shifting parameters of an ‘organic space’ wherein the meaning of place no longer holds any fixed truth. Works by artists included in the project exhibit different tensions within this 1 constantly evolving, multi-dimensional space.” The thirteen exhibitions introduced works by Chinese artists who were beginning to gain recognition in the international arena during the 1990s, among them Huang Yongping, Xu Bing, Chen Zhen, Gu Wenda, Zhang Peili, Zhou Tiehai, Geng Jianyi, and Ding Yi, as well as twentieth-century masters of Chinese modern art Pan Tianshou and Qiu Ti. Artists of Chinese descent in Vancouver—Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Gu Xiong— also exhibited in the participating venues. The event wrapped up with an international symposium that brought leading critics and professionals to Vancouver, among them Li Xianting, Gao Minglu, Fan Di’an, Zhang Qing, and Liao Wen, from China, along with renowned international scholars such as Michael Sullivan, James Caswell, Chu-tsing Li, Julia Andrews, Kuiyi Shen, Ellen Johnston-Laing, Richard Vinograd, Hou Hanru, and others. The success of the Jiangnan project was of great encouragement to us. One day, Hank and I were sitting in a coffee shop on the corner of Davie and Granville. We both felt that this city, with more than one third of its population originating from Asia, needed a permanent platform to represent art and culture from the other side of the Pacific. In our neighbouring cities on the West Coast—Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Victoria—there are Asian art museums or at least a collection of Asian art. But our city had none, a fact that professor Jan Walls described 6 7 as “a humiliation.” Our idea to set up a not-for-profit institution was enthusiastically supported by art patrons Stephanie Holmquist, Milton Wong, and many others. In 1999 the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) was established and soon after opened its first gallery space on Homer Street in downtown Vancouver. Curators’ Trip to China In 2000 Ken Lum was invited to teach a workshop at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He asked Okwui Enwezor, then the curator of Documenta XI, to give a talk to his class. They were to take a trip together to other cities after the lecture in Hangzhou, and Enwezor suggested that he could come with his colleagues, philosopher Sarat Maharaj, Renaissance Society executive director Susanne Ghez, and Dia Foundation director Lynne Cooke. I liked the idea and got permission from Annie Wong for our Foundation to sponsor and organize the trip. Later, other curators also joined us, including Gate Foundation director Sebastian Lopez, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen director Chris Dercon, and Art Gallery of Ontario curator Jessica Bradley. In a recent text on this historical tour by Philip Tinari, we were described as Virgil guiding the collective Dante on their pilgrimage through China.2 During the three weeks and six cities in China, we visited many artists’ Centre A on Homer Street, Vancouver, 2004. Photo: Alice studios, in most cases, in their humble walkup apartments, where we often Ming Wai Jim. had to climb staircases to the fifth or sixth floors. In some cities we were directed to alternative, and, at times, odd places such as a communist card holder’s meeting hall, a trendy bar, a luxury garden-like tea house, and even a pole dancing night club where artists would show their slides or videos. All these visits were unforgettable, and some paved the road for later collaborations between curators and Chinese artists. Ding Yi lived in the west of Shanghai where many plain apartment buildings for the working class were built after the Cultural Revolution. Curator 8 Left to right: Ken Lum, Okwui Zhang Qing arranged about a Enwezor, Chris Dercon, 2000. Photo: Yishu archive. dozen artists to come with their portfolios. Just before leaving for lunch, we found Yang Fudong quietly sitting on a step of the staircase alone. I asked if he had anything to show the curators, and he hesitantly handed over a VHS tape to me. As soon as the black-and-white film started to play, everyone turned their heads to the monitor. During that evening Enwezor and two other curators asked me to arrange a meeting with Yang Fudong. In 2002, the artist’s video An Estranged Paradise was shown at the Documenta XI. In Hangzhou we were hardly able to squeeze into Zhang Peili’s tiny den in his dormitory suite to look at his video projects on a small desktop computer screen. Today, he is considered “the father of Chinese new media.” In 1988 he had borrowed a video camera for a day from a local TV station. He recorded his performance which consisted of a repeated action of breaking a piece of mirror and gluing the broken parts back together. This three-hour recording (he ran out of tape) became the first video work ever made by a Chinese artist. I remember we watched the video at the legendary Huangshan conference3 in 1988, and after ten minutes the audience lost patience and the organizer forced an end to the screening. Zhang Peili’s experimental spirit was not demonstrated only in his studio; he also took the curators to a food stall on a noisy, dark street where locals enjoyed fresh, inexpensive dishes. The hot pot and beer certainly added heat to the debate on the differences between Chinese and Western modern art. On the first evening in Beijing we were led to a theatre to watch artist Wang Jianwei’s new play Paravent (Ping Feng). This was a multi-media production that included stage performance, video projection, music, and installation, and was inspired by a famous painting, Han Xizai’s Night Banquet, made in the tenth century by Gu Hongzhong of the southern Tang dynasty. Wang used the paravent, a traditional partition in a living space, as a metaphor to convey the fear of being peeped at by others and the contradictory identities of human beings. The play lasted for more than two hours, and all the visitors became exhausted, especially with jet lag still in effect. But the surreal theoretical quality of the presentation left a strong impression on the curators, especially Wang’s intellectual, philosophical approach to his multidimensional art practice. A few months later, Paravent was chosen as the premiere piece at the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels and won high acclaim. The year 2000 marked a major shift in dialogues between Chinese artists and the outside art world. Co-organized by Annie Wong Art Foundation, the third edition of Shanghai Biennale opened its doors to international artists for the first time, a gesture in which co-curators Hou Hanru and Toshio Shimizu played a significant role. 9 Yishu In 2001, Mrs. Katy Chien, an Inaugural issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary important publisher from Taipei, Chinese Art, May 2002. was determined to support our idea of publishing an English- language periodical to meet the increasing need for information and critique on contemporary Chinese art. Ken Lum and I started to make a plan and recruited a team in Vancouver. We cudgeled our brains, trying to properly name the upcoming magazine, and eventually decided to call it Yishu, the phonetic transcription for a Chinese word that refers to art. What inspired us was Nka, a journal on African contemporary art founded in 1994 by Professor Salah Hassan of Cornell University and Okwui Enwezor. Nka is a word in Ibo from Western Africa. According to the late scholar of African culture Ben Enwonwu, art is defined in the English dictionary as “human skill as opposed to nature.” Nka does not share this definition, but bears a traditional significance as an art handed down from generation to generation.4 Similarly, “art” does not equate to yishu, and since what we discuss here is contemporary art within a Chinese context, we thought it would be meaningful to bring forth this new foreign term to the English vocabulary. In the editorial of the inaugural issue, published in May 2002, Ken Lum cited Regis Debray’s argument with other French intellectuals who suffered from the misrecognition of China.