oɴe pe ʀ s o ɴ’s cʟassɪcs of mouɴtaɪɴ aɴd sea: oɴ qɪɴ ʏufeɴ aɴd ʜeʀ ɪɴsta ʟ ʟ atɪoɴ aʀt ʙɪɴɢʏɪ ʜua ɴ ɢ Qin Yu f e n , Floating Boat, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 2004. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. The gallery is wide open, but few feel the urge to walk in. In this vast and sunny space, Floating Boat, Qin Yufen’s installation, feels oddly suffocating. Strangely, the Lightwell Gallery at the University of Buffalo becomes all at once empty and occupied, isolated and accessible, specific and abstract. Numerous threads hang from the ceiling, with each anchoring a transparent “boat” about 3 by 4 inches in size. The transcendental materiality of the work draws me into a closer view. Here, I realize that the boats are made of the disposable masks we usually find at a dental clinic. I also hear a mysterious sound composed of many voices. They are not exactly musical, but revealing, whining, sighing, as if someone is telling a story not expected to be understood. This work resonates not only with me, but also in the work of others, such as in the writing of Wallace Stevens, who penned a rather humorous piece in 1922 entitled “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”: Proud of such novelties of the sublime, Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves. A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.1 If S tevens is asserting that rel i g ious rh etoric has no high er meaning than on e’s priva te imagi n a ti on , Qin, on the other hand, notes that no conceptual, philosophical, or political discourse can replace one’s fictional or emotional attachment to, and elaboration of, life as oneness. Simply put, the most powerful interpretation of Qin Yufen’s art is one’s physical encounter with her work. Neither gender nor Asian philosophy can fully represent Qin’s essential curiosity. She is a keen observer of the broader human condition, but she also declines to present a superficial dramatization of social 44 issues such as identity and globalism. In her art, Qin Yufen raises a fundamental question for all critics; namely, how can we read materialized artistic expression in critical terms that are not limited by aesthetic beauty or simplistic cultural symbolism? This inquiry will serve as the backdrop of this essay. It traces the development of Qin as an artist through an analysis of various visual and artistic strategies the artist has formulated over the years. It also discusses Qin’s contribution to the early development of installation art in China and Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s. Through reading her provocative shifts between reminiscence and myth and her staging of a superfluous simplicity, we gradually approach a broader understanding of the evolution of contemporary art practice in both Chinese and Western societies. pɪctuʀe fʀame: eaʀʟʏ wo ʀ k Qin became involved with the early Chinese avant-garde movement through participating in the activities of the influential No Name School (Wuminghuapai). Founded by Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu in the early 1970s, No Name School developed the earliest significant discourse in China to concentrate on the notion of abstract painting. Qin was one of the few women members of the group. Her senior colleague Ma Kelu noted that Qin’s precise control of composition and colour resonates with the style of Robert Motherwell.2 Qin’s early paintings can certainly be addressed in such formalist terms. However, her most significant concern was not simply to compose beautiful pictures or to achieve subtle colour modulations. She was inspired more by the potential for a two-dimensional space to develop into a three-dimensional one. In his critique of Minimalism, Michael Fried argues that its theatricality finds expression in an anthropomorphism that constitutes a breaking point between formalist painting and the later movement into installa- tion.3 In comparison, Qin Yufen placed emphasis on the notion of experience, even more so than performance. To Qin, the singularity of the picture frame itself became anthropomorphic, which is both culturally alive and personally telling. In 1986, Qin Yufen left Beijing for Germany with her husband Zhu Jinshi. Prior to her departure, she had developed a number of ideas for installation projects, but it was only in Berlin that she began to create the physical reality of these proposals. Qin Yufen and her early abstract paintings. Courtesy of the artist. 4 5 Qin Yu f e n , Negative Print, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1988. Courtesy of the artist. In 1988, the year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Qin installed Negative Print (Yinwen). At that historical moment, Qin lived near the Berlin Wall, and in her daily strolls around the city as a newcomer, she found Berlin surreal. She experienced an alienation that was generated by various ruptures in her life relating to history, time, language, and personal destiny. The local newspaper was the only way for her to acquire information from the outside, but somehow, it also disconnected her from it. Therefore, in Negative Print she decided to use a combination of newspapers from Berlin and rice paper from China. In the Western pictorial tradition, the picture frame is defined by stretcher bars and wall spaces, hence setting up physical parameters for the composition, subject matter, and, more importantly, the autonomous space of art and art history. The Chinese classical practice fashions the picture frame through a different approach. The idea of mounting a work of art is a tangible and elastic process. The rice paper is usually mounted onto another layer of rice paper; then later a layer of silk brocade envelops the mounted picture. As a result, the mounted painting is never finalized by one form, size, or presentation. Each rolling out of the scroll varies, and thus each viewing varies. In Negative Print, Qin brushes liquid glue behind the blank ri ce paper so that her stro kes and ge s tu res su rf ace on the mounted “ i m a ge .” She mounted numerous layers of rice paper and newspaper onto the wall. In the end, her painting was only a negative expression and ultimately existed as null. The installation disappeared during the process of its making. More than a remark on the sharp contrast between two cultural traditions, Negative Print exposes an innate tension between the two-dimensional picture plane and the execution of a three-dimen- sional work. While a picture is framed and “contained” by its mounting, here the very act of the mounting of the picture becomes the picture itself. Is the notion of “frame” ever a genuine embodiment of the stability of art’s autonomy? Or is it the ultimate expression of objecthood? The idea of Yinwen came from the stone carving and rubbing tradition. Historically, the Chinese used rubbings from stone carvings to “frame” the original writing. However, there is a paradox embedded in this practice. The original writing is presumably preserved in the carving, as stone is considered permanent. The rubbing in fact reverses this process. The question becomes whether the negative print (a two-dimensional image) can contain the stone carving (a three-dimensional execution) and still maintain an intimate connection to the two-dimensional writing. In Negative 4 6 Qin Yu f e n , Marriage Chamber, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1992. Courtesy of the artist. Print, if the rice paper indicates a displacement of history, the local newspaper in the German language seems to complicate the matter by hinting at an additional element of displacement. Around the time Qin made this work, a number of important artists in Beijing were working with the idea of mounting and traditional pictorial forms. Among their work are striking examples such as Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (1988) and Wu Shanzhuan’s Big Character Banners (1989). While both artists were working with these historical forms and social formats, Qin seems at that time to have departed from that specific content or subject matter and to have begun to devise a more detached method of contemplation. In her 1992 installation Marriage Chamber (Guifang), Qin employed a more resolved visual language. The idea of picture frame was replaced by a mythology of things and a sensuality that was both mundane and provocative. The installation was conceived with three kinds of objects: two wash stands, two sets of diaphanous mosquito nets, and a Chinese ceramic vase. What defines the physical reality of the work, or the “frame,” are the wash stands—evidence of modernity and industrialization—while the mosquito nets structure an abstract interior that is both gendered and cultured. Although today Kunst-Werke has become one of the most important galleries in Berlin featuring contemporary art, Qin recalls that fourteen years ago when she exhibited the work, the space was semi-abandoned and still contaminated by the smell of dead fish from its original function as a storehouse for seafood. The laboured process of mounting exemplified in Negative Print was now translated into the simple touch of hanging. Nevertheless, the power of the “frame” remains: a soft and simple structure manages to transform a vulnerable and tangible material into a sculpturalized fantasy. The artist no longer dwells on the relationship between the “image” and the “thing,” or between “art” and “history.” Now she has begun to navigate an allegory that is entirely her own. Critics have elaborated on the fantastic and utopian quality evident in Qin’s art and have argued that much of her “paradise” was derived from her experience in China as a young woman struggling to come to terms with turmoil and various difficulties.4 Nonetheless, Marriage Chamber seems to be detached from the specificity of Qin’s biography.