A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics [Paperback ed.] 3837616657, 9783837616651

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Jörg Huber, Zhao Chuan (eds.) A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China

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Institute for Critical Theory (ith) The Institute for Critical Theory (Head of Institute: Prof. Dr. Jörg Huber) is part of the Department of Cultural Analysis (Head of Department: Prof. Dr. Christoph Weckerle) of the Zurich University of the Arts (President: Prof. Dr. Thomas D. Meier); Zurich Universities of Applied Sciences and Arts

Jörg Huber, Zhao Chuan (eds.)

A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de © 2011 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Lu Dadong, »To unfold is hard«, April 2004 (Exhibition »Diushi-ing« (or »Lose-ing«) in Hangzhou, Loft 49), Calligraphy, ca 6 m x 1.5 m, Foto: Lis Jung Lu. Typeset by Justine Haida, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1665-1 Distributed in North America by:

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Content Preface Jörg Huber | 7

Ink Painting in the Age of New Wave Chang Tsong-zung | 17

The Sound of One Hand: Between Meaning and No-Meaning Lu Dadong | 29

The Essential Meaning of Chinese Calligraphy and Its Loss Kong Guoqiao | 45

Literati Painting: Reflections Across Discontinuities Chen Anying | 59

Realism is a Kind of Ideology in China Wang Chunchen | 71

The Emperors Have Rotted Long Ago, Only the Fragrance of Nanmu Wood Remains Qiu Zhijie | 79

People’s ‘Writing’. bitan (‘pen talk’ or interview) Chen Chieh-jen/Zhao Chuan | 87

The Dismantling and Re-Construction of Bentu (‘This Land’ or ‘Native Land’): Contemporary Chinese Art in the Post-colonial Context Gao Shiming | 103

Gu Dexin: A Double Take Chan David Ho Yeung | 121

Art in Its Regional Political Context: Exhibition and Criticism Wang Nanming | 131

Two Histories of Art: What Arts Represent China? Zhu Qi | 143

Pingyao and Lianzhou: Changes in the Situation of Contemporary Chinese Photography Jiang Wei | 153

Evolution of Conceptual Photography and Its Position in the History of New Art Dao Zi | 163

How Much Space of Exchange is there on the Internet in Relation to Contemporary Art? Jin Feng | 179

The Paradox of the Individual and the Collective: An Angle of Observation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre Tao Qingmei | 189

Can That Be? Why Can’t It Be? Zhang Xian | 199

Art That Has Encountered Changes Zhao Chuan | 211

Authors | 223

Preface

“In recent years the cultural tide has gradually been changing. Increasingly, non-Western new wave artists have tended to return to indigenous experience and local history for inspiration.” Chang Tsong-zung’s observations accurately explain the motives behind this collection of essays. Ever since the 1990s, large areas of China’s culture—and the visual arts in particular—have generally evolved with an eye on the West and on the international art market, and thus correspond to projections of ‘Chinese art’ coming from outside China. This context of ‘opening up’, of cultural colonialist constructs and ideological reflexes, together with the production and dissemination of the corresponding clichés, has also influenced art journalism and theory construction. The choice of themes, the style of criticism and the orientation of fields of discourse clearly conform to international guidelines. At the same time, however, on the fringes and in fragments, there have been trends which have resisted or explicitly opposed this euphorization—or estrangement from reality—and in which artists, although inspired by the ‘opening up’, have concentrated on their own everyday lives, on the critical survey of their own traditions, and on individual sensibilities. These self-referential insights are not the expression of a reactionary, ‘protectionist’, nationalist mindset; rather, they bear witness to a heightened awareness of the complex changes taking place in the economy and in society, in everyday culture and in urban life. They are the expressions of personal experience and empirical knowledge and are not ideologically formatted projections of a collective imaginary. It is clear that these trends are presently gaining in importance. While the international art market has proved to be crisis-prone and subject to fashions and trends (‘Indian art’ is in vogue at the moment), the celebration of the West is in decline in China; the topics that are now coming more and more to the fore concern self-positioning, the critical borrowing from tradition and, as a consequence, new structural analyses of presentday positions. This involves questioning our own time, asking how individuality and community can be conceptualized and practised within the global context of neoliberalism and the consumer society; it also involves

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the critical working out of definitions and the question of who may and can speak out and manifest themselves and where this can be done. The contributors are Chinese colleagues who experience and reflect these changes in practice and in theory. The main emphasis is on examples of artistic work in the field of visual culture, and on reflections concerning aesthetic theory. Both mark out an open terrain of interchange between artistic practice, cultural positionings, political intervention and social subjectivations. The choice of authors, the examples and the questions reflect positions and insights that are individual yet can at the same time be considered exemplary. This publication runs the risks of all translations/transmissions. Obviously, misunderstandings have occurred: during discussions with colleagues, in the compilation of the texts, and in our attempts to understand what was being presented. It is to be hoped that the gaps in our understanding will have not only counterproductive effects, i.e. that the experiences of our Chinese friends might act as a productive irritant when we endeavour to think in similar ways or undertake similar things. This kind of transculturality of experiences and discourses can only succeed in a spirit of mutual cooperation: my very special thanks go to all the authors, to my friend and co-editor Zhao Chuan, as well as to Helen Wallimann, Ouyang Yu, Sujing Xu, Hsin-Mei Chuang, Eva Lüdi Kong, Lis Jung Lu and Benjamin Marius Schmidt. *** Traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy—which were, or still are, highly significant for Chinese culture and society—supply a central field and subject of this new reflection. The question is raised of their potential significance in our day, the question also of the possibility and the need to borrow from tradition, to create tradition. Chang Tson-zung directs our attention to the so-called literati1 culture and puts forward the thesis that a new positioning of painting/calligraphy should follow the ‘spirit’ of this culture although—or perhaps precisely because—the conditions of life have radically changed in the course of the intervening centuries. In his contribution, he sketches the main characteristics of this ‘spirit’ and at the same time stresses an interesting difference: whereas intellectuals or artists of today often develop their critical attitudes through confrontation, dissidence, opposition and subversion, literati put into practice a critical culture based on the paradoxical combination of participation and non-involvement in which critical participation was not conceived as interventionist action. This attitude, which forms the basis of an actual culture theory of shu-hua (calligraphy-painting), could be seminal for the 1 | According to the principle of literati art (wenrenhua), which originated during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), the completely literate, cultured artist who revealed the privacy of his vision in his art was preferred over the ‘professional’, whose art was more immediately attractive.

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potential present-day relevance of painting/calligraphy. It also raises the question of the artist’s self-conception, of the relationship between intellectuals and artists and, in general, between art and politics. As against the self-conception of the artistic avant-garde and their oppositional gestures, the author draws up an artistic strategy which consists of combining engagement with the present on the one hand with the productive power of desistance, of absence, on the other hand, in the shape of ‘conservatism’, i.e. explicitly as a continuation of (literati) tradition. This paradoxical conception of contemporaneity could mean that a calligrapher, while using new computer technology and exposing himself in the new media, could at the same time adhere closely to the tradition of the literati and try to carry on their ‘spirit’. What many conservative traditionalists regard as a betrayal is also interpreted by the artist Lu Dadong as a possibility for renewal and innovative recontextualization. However, unlike Chang Tsong-zung, Lu Dadong does not go back to the literati but to Zen Buddhism. As a calligraphic artist, he stresses the importance of writing with its complex traditions concerning, for example, techniques, instruments and materials. At the same time, he stresses that writing as an event, that the artistic act as a happening, that spontaneity and intuition are just as important as acquired skills and know-how with regard to craft traditions. The calligraphic act as an artistic action is never determined purely by intent, it can never be fully understood. Lu Dadong refers to various cultural contexts, to Shamanism, Taoism etc. Calligraphy is performance. In his actions he continually redefines the limits and transition points within the aesthetic happening and with regard to the public; at the same time there are no limits as to the means, media etc. employed. He aims at a spiritual encounter with the people who are present, in the belief that the interaction between tradition and the present will take place within the hearts and minds of the participants. Tradition does not have to be ‘restored’, its presence manifests itself in the artistic (inter)action. Kong Guoqiao follows a similar path by underlining the connection between calligraphy and dao (also known as tao). Dao, the path, is a broad concept and more complex than, for example, the Western concept of idea or knowledge. Calligraphy, as the principal art form in Chinese cultural history, is at the same time a form of personal development, a philosophy and a way of life. It is, according to Kong Guoqiao, world-opening in the Heideggerian sense—but what happens when the world is not the same any more, when everyday worlds in which traditions emerge and take effect and which are also dao, the path, undergo radical change? In such a case—and this is Kong’s pessimistic answer—one should ask oneself whether calligraphy today is perhaps nothing more than abstract common sense, no longer a cultural element in our Lebenswelt: part of our ‘inheritance’, not art. Chen Anying treats this question more optimistically, although within a wider perspective. Whereas for thousands of years the development of

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Chinese society and civilization was characterized by continuity, the past hundred years are marked by breaks, discontinuity and revolution. The result is a fragmented society that can no longer find itself and thus struggles to find its own identity. This fragmentation is the cause for radical change, dissidence, pressure to innovate, and the ‘progressive’ rejection of all tradition. Against this background, Chen Anying suggests that one should not simply cancel out the tradition of literati painting, which is so central to Chinese culture—an art history which, as he stresses, differs radically from that of the West and stands out as something culturally specific and unique. However, the vistas he opens up remain very general: according to him, the cultivation of this tradition must not be seen too narrowly; it could take place in the new, open contexts and thus counterbalance the modernization euphoria, which is no more than an attempt to cover up the damage caused by the galloping changes of the last hundred years. A critical appraisal of tradition demands a critical working out of definitions, as Wang Chunchen demonstrates, using the term realism as an example. It is important that the term and the practice which he describes are analyzed in their historical context: in relation to their functional attributions in official cultural politics (‘social realism’ ), as an instrument of normative party politics (Cultural Revolution), as an aesthetics of opposition (in the battle against Japan, Korea, imperialism), as a trendy branding (politpop) or as a medium for the subtle observation and reproduction of everyday experiences (grassroots tendencies). In order to talk about and evaluate the possible meanings of ‘realistic’ art, precise knowledge is required: an understanding of the ‘internal’ coherence of Chinese history. To this end, additional efforts are also required within China (cf. Wang Nanming’s article). The lack of such knowledge can be seen, for example, in the superficial labellings in the international discourse on Chinese art (Chinese art is realistic, political, etc.) The question if and how traditions are effective and can be dis-covered and ‘updated’, is raised in an inspiring way by the artist Qiu Zhijie. Following the example of archaeological artefacts, he has created eight pillars made up of cement cylinders. There are texts engraved in the cut surfaces (i.e. the texts are not visible), each pillar containing texts on one particular theme: revolutionary slogans from Chinese history; statements concerning perceptions of foreignness in China; texts from the history of calligraphy; a list of songs from a karaoke bar; e-mails written or received by the artist, etc. This aesthetic concept addresses and exposes the complexity of the question of remembrance and memory. The focus is on aspects of the reciprocity of presence and absence, on the tension between individual and collective memory, the mediality of remembrance and memory, and, crucially, the importance of writing, including handwriting, or rather the calligraphic composition of the ideogram, not least for the ideological formatting of a society. Remembrance/memory always takes place in the imagination and is never physical. Qiu Zhijie composes an impressive picture of this dilemma in his eighth pillar, luanma (mess): the column

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contains a jumble of random characters which a virus produced in the artist’s computer. The unreadable texts that result represent the black hole of not-knowing, which, in remembrance and the construction of tradition, always foils the desire for knowledge. “They [the ideograms] have not lost their meaning: they only deviate from the rules governing our reading. However, we are powerless in dealing with such deviations.” These are the deviations that occur in everyday life and that cannot be grasped through grand narrative formattings or the polarizing of world-cultures. So we have to shake off rigid worldviews, and thus empire ideologies, says Chen Chieh-jen in his discussion with Zhao Chuan. The two theatre makers deconstruct these worldviews and geopolitical block ideologies by building on people’s everyday experiences: Grass Stage. Writing is action, intervention, bottom-up; it is not a question of creating politics through theatre—on the contrary, as a joint performance of individual actions, theatre is politics: theatre seen as the voice of those who are normally silent, uninvolved and marginalized. The communion of the many as a ‘sharing’, on the internet for example, gives rise to an—always provisional—sense of ‘people’, of belonging to and forming a collective, a community. Aesthetics as the construction of visibility, as a strategy for ‘de-empiring’. Chen Chieh-jen bases his ideas on what he sees in his home country, Taiwan: Americanization and the dominance of international capital, the failure of the politics of reform. It is not the difference between East and West that is decisive, says the author, but the worldwide dominance of neoliberalism. Gao Shiming develops this idea further with his observation that the post-colonial debate has lost its bite. ‘Localization’, ‘heterogeneity’, ‘difference’ etc. are concepts which, according to him, have degenerated into slogans of international capitalism. Against this horizon, how can a critical culture and politics that seek to build on tradition without at the same time losing sight of the global context find their bearings? Bentu (homeland, literally: soil of one’s origins, native soil) is the key word in Gao Shiming’s subtly argued attempt to define the dialectics of re-signification in the global bentu (global ‘home’) conflict: return as rediscovery, as a process of dissolution and reconstruction, contemporaneity through remembrance that does not seek identity in the fundamentalist sense of going back to national roots. Bentu, then, as the historical site of cultural and artistic production, not of Chinese contemporary art but of contemporary Chinese art, a notion that, rather than fixating, opens up. Gao Shiming reveals a new range of possibilities with this shift in terminology: “Today we are no longer satisfied with [...] struggling for space and a position in the globalized edifice: we want to create a new homeland, a historical site of cultural creation and renewed subjects. This is the site of ‘contemporary Chinese art’—although we lack a profound understanding of ‘contemporary Chinese art’; we even lack the basic discourse and a cognitive framework. [...] ‘Contemporary Chinese art’ is an unfinished plan, a possible world. It is precisely because it is a ‘possible world’ that

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‘contemporary Chinese art’ has nothing to do with any form of nationalism or fundamentalism.” With regard to the problem of self-positioning and the search for new meaning within our rapidly changing daily lives, art—more precisely, the artistic process and the associated aesthetics of curating, the creation of a public sphere—plays an important role. David Chen discusses this aspect by taking as examples two exhibitions which he organized with the artist Gu Dexin at the celebrated gallery Three on the Bund in Shanghai. Gu’s installations thematize the exhibition area and the urban context and thus the conditions and economics of the art system. Chen points out possible references to Robert Smithson’s ‘non-site’ and Rem Koolhaas’ ‘generic city’ concepts and procedures. Gu stresses the self-referential dimension of his interventions: by directing attention to the production and performance of art, he allows the viewer to observe his own reception of the art works and to position himself accordingly. This aesthetics, with its intermingling of art and exhibition, creates a variety of small, locally specific narratives which escape the domination of the abstract grand narratives of politics, the art market, institutions, or social formatting. For Wang Nanming and Zhu Qi, too, the grand narratives which the West uses to create a picture of China and the Chinese are the principal problem to be dealt with by art and aesthetic theory. Whereas Zhu Qi describes in detail the production and functioning of clichés and, with his demand for a distinct Chinese aesthetics founded on tradition, draws attention to the significance of transcendence and abstraction in the history of Chinese art, Wang Nanming calls for more exhibitions arising out of a criticism of the projections of the foreign eye and explicitly directed at a domestic public. Whereas the big international events celebrating ‘Chinese art’ use superficial clichés, the exhibitions which reflect individual, specific contexts show that, in order to understand the exhibits and to formulate criticism, a full understanding of all the relevant conditions and circumstances is essential. Without this understanding there is nothing to be done. Using two memorable and impressive examples of art by Jin Feng and He Chengyao, Wang Nanming proves that, and shows how, highly differentiated contextualization is the sine qua non of the aesthetic and political power of independent art production and art reception. For Jiang Wei, too, exhibitions are important showcases for the interplay of art practice, aesthetic strategies, the creation of a public sphere, culture-management, and politics. Two important photo-festivals with very different concepts provide examples. One of them concentrates on international prestige and ‘big names’, the other on meeting intellectual demands, on the analysis of visual culture and the discussion of highbrow topics. This difference shows that in China, as elsewhere, there is an expanding field of art festivals, biennials and other big events which are often sponsored by local party bureaucrats and the tourism authorities. The feverish activity of the art market and the art industry produces ever more events which are praised in the loftiest of terms although they

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are weak in content and conception and serve primarily as a vehicle for the global circulation of ‘art people’, works of art, notions and attitudes, and as prestige enhancement for the venues. Against the background of these observations the author considers the development and trends of contemporary photography in China: the purpose and practice of the photographic image, in relation to the record of co-option by Western art or political propaganda on the one hand, and in relation to the present in which photography increasingly engages with the everyday lives of ordinary people on the other hand. (There are connections here to Wang Chunchen’s discussion of realism.) The attempt to describe a specific aesthetics of photography—also in the context of an aesthetics of visual culture—is intimately related to the attempt to think the present and to ask what ‘contemporaneity’ might mean: “Since the 1990s, the Western ideological discourse has been intervening in China at all levels, exerting a comprehensive influence on social and cultural life. Because of our anxious and continuous desire to join the ‘contemporary’ countries, we regarded ‘contemporary’ as a once-and-for-all solution. However, for lack of systematic research into Western histories and cultures, we ignored the inherent defects and self-contradictions of this contemporaneity. The picture of contemporary Chinese art was established on this superficial and surface understanding, paying no attention to Chinese matters, the reality of a weak cultural foundation and the lack of contemporary ‘software’.” Dao Zi regards concept photography (whose beginnings he connects with the political events of 4 June 19892) as an exemplary and innovative aesthetics of committed, self-reflexive, photographic art. In this context, by the way, we can also find explicitly feminist works—still an exception in contemporary China. (See also the work of He Chengyao in the article by Wang Nanming.) As a continuation of concept photography Dao Zi names postmodern post-photography, which uses the staging of pictures, the play of construction and deconstruction, the re-editing of historical material, the combination of text and picture, and also experiments with the aesthetic dimensions of documentary pictorial work. This enlargement of the spectrum of artistic photographic practice and aesthetic strategies corresponds with the contingency and fragmentation of present-day concepts of individuality and identity—a correspondence which should be understood as a critique of traditional ideologies and world views and also of the aesthetics that serve them. As Jiang Wei and other authors stress, artistic practice and aesthetic reflection must be pursued in the context of a new consumer and communications culture. In spite of restrictions through controls and censorship, the internet is omnipresent, and this, according to the artist Jin Feng, 2 | The Tiananmen Square massacre: On 3 and 4 June 1989 the Chinese military put a violent end to the occupation of Tiananmen Square (‘Square of Heavenly Peace’) and thus to the public uprising catalyzed by a democratic student movement. Many artists and cultural creatives went into exile or inner emigration.

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opens up new productive possibilities, for art is, above all, social exchange. (See his work which is mentioned in the article by Wang Nanming.) This aspiration is, however, continually being thwarted in the established art world by the self-referentiality of ivory tower art as well as by the galleries and exhibitions that cater to the needs of the upper classes. Art is exclusive, communication formalizes. But in the open, flowing world of the internet, different forms of publicness, of direct communication as well as grassroots awareness can be developed, while at the same time, however, the negative side of this ‘freedom’—the power and violence of structures and systems—is equally evident. The internet presents the artist with the challenge of exposing himself through his actions and positioning himself self-critically with regards to his approach to the public. Questions of participation and self-management are central aspects of any internet practice which sees itself as an element of the art system while at the same time subverting it from the inside. There is another venue which could fulfil a similar intermediary role. The theatre is on the one hand the stage and locus of official traditionbuilding, of traditional pictures, of propaganda. On the other hand it is increasingly the experimental scene of critical artistic practice and aesthetic discourse. Citing various dramas as examples, Tao Qingmei shows how directors and groups deal with individual and collective problems in contemporary China. Whereas in the official theatre the collective continues to be celebrated in the emotive terminology of ‘community of the people’, alternative and contemporary projects experiment with social realities and the experience of the vulnerable, alienated, helpless, vexed, fragmented individual torn between post-1989 depression and the consumer culture. The challenge is how, based on that situation of the individual, one can arrive at a new conception of the collective without falling into the trap of creating just another variant of the official theatre which celebrates the ‘new collective’ of ‘liberated subjects’ in the style of the old collective pathos. References to tendencies in popular theatre and the Grass Stage initiatives connect with the article by Chen Chieh-jen and the practice of Zhao Chuan. Another branch of contemporary theatre addresses individuals who see themselves within a new collective context resulting from their existence as workers, from production conditions and related everyday experiences: the actors here are individuals who constitute themselves as such and as subjects by speaking out as workers, by expressing themselves and becoming visible. What can the collective, the community, the people ‘be’? How is it, how are they, to be conceived? These questions, which are particularly urgent today and which run through several of the articles in this collection, lead Zhang Xian to his impressive description of how, in China, through political formatting, myth creation and rituals—such as the People’s Congress, the Party, and the recruiting of members and representatives—the state and the body politic are construed as empire and become cemented in the people’s imaginary. In this way, official (cultural) politics pursue the

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expropriation of the people’s symbolic capital. Political organs act as “corrupt vested interests groups. [...] They transformed the social and cultural capital as well as every kind of symbolic capital—all of which they had already monopolized—into financial capital. ‘State’, ‘government’, ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘philanthropy’, everything was mixed together and recycled for use in private investments and reproduction. The result of all this was to act as a catalyst for artists’ righteous moral indignation at the political rationale.” Zhang Xian closes his critical contribution with the metaphorical picture of a herd of sheep which is held together by an electric fence. Again and again the sheep experience electric shocks as they come into contact with the fence, so they continually move back. Finally the electric current is switched off without the sheep noticing. They remain herded close together: “There is no electricity any more, but not one of us touches the fence.” To get rid of this mental barrier it is necessary, in times of radical change, to look behind the new imprints of living styles for traces of surviving traditions, traces which are to be found not least thanks to artists. We close the cycle of these investigations with the article by Zhao Chuan in which he presents works of art which reflect the impact of tradition on the mind, as memory work and ethics. Painting with dust or water on paper, or piling up stones into small objects in a lonely desert—Zen meditations; thousands of photos of the faces of peasants sitting at a table in a tea-house—the physiognomy of naked life; the ashes of an executed criminal that no one cares about buried in the cement floor of an art place in Shanghai—art as moral action in a society whose ethical foundations are at risk. It is art which records, adjusts something, shifts something slightly, insistingly; quiet gestures of personal concern against the dazzling grimace of the consumer culture. Jörg Huber Translated by Helen Wallimann

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Ink Painting in the Age of New Wave Chang Tsong-zung

As an independent tradition of art, there is nothing wrong with the practice of Chinese ink painting, contrary to the impression one gets from the lively scholarly debates over its survival. It is true that the sense of national cultural crisis over the past century has prompted numerous attempts to ‘reform’ and ‘revolutionize’ Chinese painting, yet the practice of this traditional style of art has continued to flourish in spite of all its detractors and reformers. The challenge facing the study of Chinese painting from within its own tradition would seem to be one of positioning, of tuning into the changing context of contemporary times, rather than defensive retreat and constant self-denial. Creative self-appraisal and renewal is the way forward and the way to preserve its essential spirit while responding to the diversity of the multi-cultural world. A principal task for guardians of the art of Chinese painting should be that of defining and defending the tastes and artistic aims that have been achieved over its long history. If one looks at the social and cultural position of Chinese painting today with an eye towards its historically prominent position, one cannot but be disheartened by its constant decline in cultural leadership and social influence. A revealing comparison with traditional painting today would be the art of China’s ‘New Wave’, the darling of the contemporary cultural world. (Throughout this essay the term ‘New Wave’ is used loosely to refer to the entire field of art employing ‘contemporary’ practices, art which positions itself as being more progressive than conventional). No traditional art form has managed to remain at par with the New Wave in setting trends, whether in China or in the West, and the Chinese art world should therefore realize that what is at stake here is not a historical cultural problem but the rising order of a different time. The principal issues that need to be addressed are: Which specific social and cultural roles and functions have been replaced by the New Wave? What are the differences between these roles and functions in the context of their respective histories? And finally, what strategies should traditional painters adopt to redress, or simply to address, the difference?

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There are both internal and external reasons for the decline of the role played by traditional art. The main internal reason is the overall decline of the great tradition of ‘literati art’. Modern society and its educational system have ceased to educate and promote this type of art, which had hitherto always expressed itself in the context of a literati society whose members wrote poetry and created paintings as aspects of civilised social intercourse. It has everything to do with a society bred to write with a brush and communicate through literature. Modern Chinese political systems generally discourage these cultural forms, so the issue for those who continue to write and paint today with a brush is that of continuity, or how not to continue. Having lost the social framework that produced such a literary class, other problems of cultural role and artistic identity immediately follow. The external reasons for the decline consist, of course, in everything related to the changing times. The more inflexible traditional painting remains in the face of change, the more uncertain it is of its own virtues, the more it will be ignored by the community at large. By contrast, art of the New Wave is constantly moving and adapting to shifting currents; it is highly malleable and creative, and therefore has been able to engage with the cultural system of the dominant West and become a player within the international cultural and economic discourse. By contrast, the system of traditional painting is largely nationally based. It is not equipped to engage the international artistic community on an international platform and is in danger of losing touch. (The notion of ‘system’ here refers to the full machinery of validation that includes critical appraisal, the intellectual discourse developing out of the visual arts, private and public collecting institutions, and the art market network). Today the market in China still favours traditional art, but it is already feeling the pressure of contemporary art. If traditional painting remains outside the sphere of international influence where the New Wave seems to be able to establish itself, both academic and market interest in traditional painting will slowly shift with the trend. This is the danger lurking around the corner. The above points are by no means original as these issues have been debated by numerous specialists in China and abroad. The reason for bringing them up here is to speculate upon strategies and to suggest courses of action. Given that these are the problems, it seems the heart of the matter for traditional Chinese painting is a question of positioning, beginning with a re-definition of terms. By re-defining the term used to refer to traditional painting, we can define its special role in art, so as to find ways to strengthen its roots. The final goal is to venture onto an international contemporary platform. One should not shy away from reviving the grand ambitions of traditional literati art, and one should strive to find strategies for bringing its visions into the contemporary art world. To achieve these goals it is necessary to learn from the New Wave, to allow the possibility of new blood, to raise the level of scholarship and artistic discourse of traditional painting, and, finally, to seek a role in the mainstream multi-cultural world of art.

I NK P AINTING IN THE A GE OF N EW W AVE

A S UITABLE N AME Zheng ming (to find a suitable name) has always been a central concern in Chinese culture. A ‘suitable’ name defines the role and shows the way forward. Until the dawn of the modern period, calligraphy and painting never needed to refer to themselves as anything other than just ‘calligraphy’ and ‘painting’. Since then, a century ago, new terms like guo hua (‘national painting’) and shui mo (‘water-ink painting’) have been coined; but they all bear the mark of their time. Over the past century, a looming concern for Chinese culture has been that of jiu wang (‘fighting for survival’), a concept touted by all political parties before the mid-twentieth century, and still being promoted today. Unfortunately, it has been the view that in the name of jiu wang, all subtle cultural concerns and longterm visions can be brushed aside. ‘Fighting for survival’ may be useful as a short-term political measure, but its political expediency has cast a long shadow over China’s cultural development, carrying its short-sightedness forward into the present day. The cultural programme for jiu wang presupposes traditional culture to be outmoded and optimistically accepts the ready solution of the classical Western model of ‘progress.’ While the overriding concern has been political and national survival, reforming culture is always promoted as a critical strategy. Ironically, in the concept of jiu wang there is no provision for rescuing the threatened Chinese traditional cultural system, a unique treasure of human civilization. The Chinese world view, together with all its scientific and cultural establishments, has in fact been considered by ‘reformers’ to be an impediment to ‘progress’, which should rightly be destroyed (or ‘reformed’). As the representative soul of literati fine art, traditional painting has continually found itself in an awkward position. The way in which terms such as guo hua (‘national painting’), shui mo (‘water-ink’ painting) or ‘new literati art’ (xin wenren hua) have been used affects how artists position their creative angle. Guo hua was coined at the beginning of the Republic (established in 1911), and the term is laden with implications of the modern national state and geographical cultural identity. Guo hua is an especially narrow concept when one remembers the cosmic vision of the literati, the nucleus of which is to seek ‘order under heaven’ (wang tian xia). Shui mo, a term first used by the Japanese, defines the art by its medium, giving an impression of ‘objectivity’, when in fact its purpose is simply finding a position alongside that of ‘oil painting’. With the aim of elevating the theoretical and intellectual level of shui mo, artists and theorists have been preoccupied with explicating the ‘spirit of shui mo’ from the medium of ‘water-ink’ for more than a generation. To look at the cultural-political implications of the ‘spirit of shui mo’, it is instructive to compare the case of American abstract art of the 1950s and 1960s. American theorists and artists joined hands in explicating the issue of ‘abstraction’, and the resulting ‘universal’ norms such as ‘abstract expression’, ‘flatness’ and ‘the grid’, to name just a few, were promoted as

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marks of a new American artistic identity. This identity was also used in the years of optimistic American ‘internationalism’ to make the case for a type of universal, international art. The term shui mo caught the fancy of Chinese artists in the 1950s, and it may be seen in retrospect to fall into the ‘international’ spirit of the times, when a ‘national’ art as enshrined in the term guo hua began to look dated and self-restricting. Shui mo is therefore also a marker of cultural identity. It uses the structural features of an artistic medium to create a new supra-national identity. Like ‘abstraction’, the ‘spirit of shui mo’ has now run its course. It has served its time under the limelight; today the strategy of avoiding concrete content is not seen to be as highly intellectual as it once was. Furthermore, by refusing to define its substance, shui mo painting becomes increasingly marginalized by the rise of new media and new modes of expression. The other favourite term, ‘literati art’, or its more recent variant, ‘new literati art’, naturally has problems of its own in that the ‘literati scholar’ class has been pushed to the brink of extinction by modernization—the few surviving tottering ‘literati scholars’ are hardly going to make a difference. However, if we need to find a suitable term for traditional painting, there is no escaping the cultural sphere of the literati. In the search for a term that refers to a ‘fine art’ tradition that can stand up to the great traditions of Western and Middle Eastern fine art, it is essential to remember that the literati scholar tradition is China’s greatest asset. (One caveat: it is probably not a good idea to resurrect the term ‘new literati art’, as it conjures up images of the Nanjing-based ‘New Literati’ painters of the 1980s, a decadent and sheltered movement that has now faded away). A suitable name can only come from understanding the mission of literati culture. A comparable term to literati art, or wen ren hua, is shi ren hua or shi hua (literally, ‘scholar’s art’, the term shi being another word for a scholar with political aspirations). Perhaps an even better solution is to revive the old traditional term shu hua (‘calligraphy-painting’), which refers to the parallel practice of calligraphy and painting. Shu hua also hints at the calligraphic nature of painting if the word shu (calligraphy, writing) is subordinated as an adjective of hua (painting), taking the term to mean ‘calligraphed painting’.

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Without the aspirations of the traditional literati scholar Chinese traditional painting would not have developed as far as it did. For the same reason, if shu hua is simply defined as an artistic skill without commitment to literati aspirations, then the field of Chinese painting would lose its broad vision and simply would not deserve the deep attention it still receives in certain quarters. The most honourable aspect of the traditional Confucian scholar is his commitment to a world order (wang tian xia or ‘kingdom under heaven’), which is attended by a global vision (tian xia xing or ‘under

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heaven vision’). The aspiration of the Confucian scholar is to become a shi of the world (tian xia shi or ‘under heaven scholar’), with moral strength that transcends nation and emperor, time and country. The fact that we find in China today academic symposia with the theme of ‘ink painting in the global context’ may be said to reflect the contemporary expression of such a tian xia (‘under heaven’) vision. Of course, from a negative angle it may be interpreted as the mentality of a marginalized culture seeking a niche in the international context. Whatever the mentality, the traditional literati vision has provided an ambitious scope to the field of shu hua. A tian xia shi is comparable to a modern-day ‘intellectual’ in his profession of learning, but the two are ultimately different concepts. The shi was steeped in the traditional version of a liberal education, but was often impractical in ‘pragmatic’ matters; his strengths were in moral rectitude and political leadership, historical perspective and cosmic vision. The shi also had a unique relationship to political power in traditional Chinese society, which the modern intellectual generally lacks. The modern intellectual is defined by his intellectual assets; he is a member of the ‘working class’ of learning. Where the shi and the intellectual may fairly compare is in their common sense of responsibility to society. If the highest values of the tian xia shi are held up as the ideals for this literati art of shu hua, then values for moral historical decisions and strategies for political coexistence as delineated by Confucius and his followers in the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’ (Chun Qiu) should also apply. Some of the principles that may be useful when adapted as cultural strategies include: the provisions made for preserving an old political order while a new order takes over; the strategy for co-existence (or merging) of diverse non-Chinese cultures into the central scheme; and the embracing magna-nimity of the ‘Way of the King’ (wang dao). In the Gong Yang School of the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’ one finds the stipulation for the preserva-tion of the ‘three lineages’, which not only provides for the preservation of the rites of a previous dynasty, but also recommends proper measures for absorbing foreign cultural practices. The unity of a great order may only be achieved when different cultures, and political and cultural orders old and new, can all communicate in a manner fitting for each one’s position.

THE S OCIAL I DENTIT Y OF SHU HUA The social identity of a practitioner of shu hua today is simply that of an ‘artist’ or ‘intellectual artist’, (rather than of a ‘literati artist’), and more specifically of an artist representing a conservative position paying homage to a historical lineage. As such, it compares unfavourably with the New Wave as champion of the ‘critical spirit’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘mirror of the times’, and other urgent causes. To put shu hua in perspective in light of such lively qualities it is necessary to review its social identity in Chinese history.

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The New Wave and the contemporary intellectuals see themselves as members of the same class in society. Comparing the ‘intellectual’ with the traditional ‘literati’ in whom the shu hua artist finds kinship, there emerges a critical difference, even though both groups represent the educated elites of their respective societies. The difference lies in being zai wei (‘in position, in power’) or not. The literati scholar has traditionally been the most socially concerned class in Chinese society, and this is because he is part of the same class that constitutes the governing administrative officials. The sweeping vision of the Confucian literatus as a tian xia shi (‘under heaven scholar’) and his sense of responsibility are shaped by his aspirations, which presume the eventuality that someone of his constitution may bring such vision to reality as a government official in power. A shu hua artist, whether he has political ambitions or not, is cultivated in the same milieu of ‘official in reserve’, and therefore shares similar aspirations. Because shu hua artists and literati scholars consider themselves ‘officials in reserve’, they share similar concerns as those in position and consider themselves on the same side as the government. Because of their common outlook, the communication between scholars ‘in position’ and ‘not in position’ does not need to take the form of confrontational critique as is the case with the contemporary ‘intellectual’. Instead their social intercourse develops into a style of amicable social exchange typified by the exchange of poetry and the sharing of artistic, poetic and cultural insights which have left the great legacy of what we now call ‘literati art’. Critique and political comments are presented in a polite and oblique manner, as one would admonish friends and colleagues. This roundabout manner of political criticism has been refined to a high art in China, but unfortunately in later dynasties, especially the Qing dynasty when the Manchu minorities instituted for the first time in Chinese history a class system based on race, political criticism was also vigorously purged, seriously damaging the tradition of political dynamics through intellectual exchange. This does not diminish the value of traditional artistic and cultural discourse between literati scholars both in position and otherwise. The fact that they represent the same class, sharing a similar sense of responsibility for governmental action, means that social-political comments need not descend to the level of antagonistic public drama before results may be achieved. The contemporary intellectual, on the other hand, is not of the same interest group as those in political power. Even in democratic societies, the collusion between political and economic interest has largely kept ‘intellectuals’ out of the arena of power. The class that is zai wei (‘in position’, ‘in power’) is the financially affluent class. Intellectuals are not zai wei: their principal political function is to be the conscience of society. Thus they critique the system from outside the protected circle of power, and their manner of critique is confrontational, and often antagonistic, by necessity.

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L INE AGE OF THE W AY AND A FFIRMING THE R OOTS Realistically, the immediate crisis facing shu hua is the lack of paradigmatic masters. The present generation of shu hua practitioners is already quite a long distance away from the literati scholar tradition, and even among them they represent a variety of socio-cultural positions. Under the circumstances, the task of maintaining the lineage with the past and preserving a continuity of new paradigmatic models becomes the most urgent mission for the survival of shu hua. Since lineage is the primary concern, the canonization of new paradigms would better fail by being conservative than by being too radical. Radically original masters will appear at their own time, and of their own accord. The call for conservatism here is based on the concern for preserving the historical link of shu hua in order to keep its cultural identity distinct. Without paradigmatic models there will be no point of reference, whether to extend support or to rally against. The champions of shu hua should be sought from among ‘intellectual’ artists with aspirations congruent to those of the tian xia shi. Only then do considerations of style, subject matter, brush-and-ink quality, temperament and other artistic issues come into play. The task for critical study should be the continuous re-defining of the spirit and ethos of shu hua, so as to keep the literati scholar’s spirit alive in this age of constant change. One feature of the shu hua tradition which this author would like to emphasize is the special sensitivity to ‘alive-ness’ and ‘chance’ (or, more literally, ‘chance to live’, sheng ji). The positive concern with life and possibilities for life is a lesson shu hua may impart to contemporary art practices. Vocabulary with phrases concerning life and liveliness abound in the practice of painting and calligraphy: criteria such as ‘lively brushwork’ and ‘moving qi’ remain foremost in the mind of the artist. This emphasis on being alert to the quickness of life, and being constantly made aware of the living communion between man and nature, artist and audience, is also behind Dong Qichang’s distinction between painters of the Southern and Northern Schools based on the spirit of Southern Zen, which teaches one to grasp the living moment. It is also the same spirit of respect for life that one finds in Confucius and the Taoists; life-before-death and life-afterdeath are less important issues than strategies for giving full worth to the present. Implied in this attitude is respect for the living world, learning to provide for the world to revitalize itself and to grasp the moments of quickness that invigorate heaven and earth.

TO L E ARN FROM THE N E W W AVE For worldly success and influence, shu hua should measure itself against the model of the New Wave. Identifying features that make the New Wave attractive to the intellectual world, shu hua should find parallel precedents in its own history, with the aim of either reviving them in its own manner,

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or at least positioning itself more favourably in the eyes of current ideologies. A prominent feature of the New Wave is its rebelliousness. Unlike shu hua, the New Wave is subversive to tradition and consciously seeks a voice that stands apart from the norm. It is instructive to consider shu hua tradition in this light. The literati scholar is known for the ideal of moral rectitude (jie chi) which, although not intentionally subversive, preserves him against the vagaries of opportunism. He is neither ‘rebellious’ nor ‘subversive’, yet he is respected for his devotion to a set of higher principles that are grounded in ideals of the ‘ancient sage kings’ (fa sheng wang). The literati scholar has a long tradition of bringing critical stances to current politics, and the traditional strategy is ‘criticizing the present through examples of the ancients’ (yi gu fei jing). With this tradition in mind, an academic appraisal of historical literati art’s critical tradition and methodology should be an instructive exercise for current shu hua practitioners. Again, bringing modern sensibility to the ancients, one could look at ‘seeking hermitage’ (ying yi), a common pretext of literati scholar-artists for expressing dismay at the current state of affairs, as a response to social ills comparable to the dissent of the New Wave (allowing, of course, for the different cultural context). Nevertheless, how far one may push passive escapism to represent the critical stance, and how far one can claim that the ‘indulgence’ (ji qing, ‘depositing one’s sentiments’) in a rarefied land of landscape and flower-and-bird art in fact comments on the turbulence of current affairs, are issues that probably deserve to be properly studied if we wish to bring traditional literati art back to the ‘floating world.’ To reiterate a point made in the above section, the special relation which literati scholars had with the power circle in dynastic days made for a different manner of articulating disapproval and criticism. The contemporary social identity of a shu hua artist, as both an ‘intellectual artist’ and a bearer of the lineage, puts parameters around its creative range, and so it is through appreciating its historical relation to circles of influence that shu hua artists may address its present possibilities. One may fairly claim that a contemporary artist of ‘fine art’ tends to be more engaged with society and current affairs, but in a historical context the literati scholar-artist was already part of the reserve base for officialdom, and his ‘indulgence’ or ‘retreat’ takes on a socio-political significance that cannot be found in the action of a contemporary artist. The cultural milieu and ideological framework of the New Wave are essentially based on intellectual discourses that originated in the West, and its current influence is dependent on a continued intellectual vigour that centres around the Western intellectual world. In mainland China, the most powerful experience of ‘modernity’ has been brought about by the programme of Communism, which has shaped the world view of artists of the 1980s and 1990s. This experience of modernity is of course also an experience based on Western ideological thought. In recent years

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the cultural tide has been gradually changing; increasingly, non-Western New Wave artists have tended to return to indigenous experience and local history for inspiration. Here is an excellent opportunity for confluence between New Wave and shu hua since the historical identity of shu hua may be turned into an important asset for new art. Given the present situation, shu hua should creatively re-interpret its position to broaden its reach within current artistic discourse. It should do this, moreover, with an eye to providing a base camp for the New Wave to retreat to, so that shu hua may be seen as a pool of resources for future New Wave creativity. The historical experience of literati art shows that it is an elegant cultural tool, which can engage with affairs of the state when the opportunity presents itself, and can equally be content when obliged to retreat. In retreat the literati artist excels through the pursuit of selfcultivation. This is also a lesson that is particularly valuable for the New Wave, namely to provide for those who either fail to make the stage or are in the process of retreat.

TO R ESPOND TO THE TIME AND TO R ECRUIT F RESH TALENTS Contemporary art faces a range of challenges today. Not only does it need to deal with the rich diversity of multiple cultural traditions, it must also respond to a social reality rapidly altered by new technologies and new economic frameworks. In response to such a complex situation, the marginal stance of the New Wave and its guerrilla strategies of criticism afford great flexibility and scope for originality. Generally speaking, today all traditional arts using visual images are facing the challenge of technology; the power of new image-making technology overtakes any traditional technique. The rise of new technologies of image-making has also changed the habits of image consumption, so that the new generation today increasingly understands reality through their grasp of images manipulated by digital and keyboard control. The manipulation of images, and the engagement with virtual reality, is replacing actual experience. This is the challenge presented to all professions that handle images as their career; everything pales in comparison with digital technology when it comes to the power of virtual image making. And yet it is precisely here that an art such as shu hua may show its advantage. Compared with most other artistic traditions, Chinese painting and calligraphy have set rather less store by iconographic content or imagery. Instead, shu hua excels by emphasizing personality, taste, and the direct expression of the heart. The traditional emphasis on ‘brushwork’ and ‘ink-play’ serves to break the barrier between objective description and personal expression. This form of art, operates on the boundary between form and icon, may well be an important resource for the development of painting in the future.

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Apart from hermeneutic revitalization of its own heritage and deep structural analysis of its artistic constitution (both undertaken for the purpose of preserving its uniqueness and identity), shu hua should venture further afield to keep its creative instincts alert. The shu hua circle must strategically open up to new blood. The most effective way to achieve this is by recruiting from the ranks of the New Wave. For example, one obvious quarter to look at is contemporary art that uses the Chinese written word: through proper explication these artworks may be structured as part of the naturally extended realm of shu hua. In order to open up the field to new talents, given suitable opportunities one should even be prepared to abandon the brush, or even ink and paper. Here I am looking ahead at the world of electronic message communication systems, such as computer emails and mobile short-messages (SMS). In the world of such new technological communication one occasionally finds the poetic spark and quick wit reminiscent of traditional poetic parlance; perhaps here is room for the future generation of literati scholars. If the tool of trade of the literati may be extended electronically in this direction, perhaps the literati’s visual arts should follow. After all, the historical significance of calligraphy, and by extension the traditional taste for a calligraphic touch in painting technique, is partly a result of the writing brush’s prestige as the working tool of the literati. One leaves such speculations to the talents of theorists and curators. Recruiting from local ranks of the New Wave is perhaps not enough. It is not enough if the world of shu hua truly believes in its mission as successor of the tian xia shi (‘scholars under heaven’) and therefore its worth to humanity as a whole. Here one should remember the example of European art. In the 19th century, as Western culture convinced the world of its superiority through the exploits of industrialization, oil painting (of the classical academic tradition) also came to be identified as the paradigm of ‘progressive’ art for all countries aspiring to modernize. Oil painting was seen to be representative of international high art by riding on the crest of Western political and economic strength. Now that the interest in cultures East and West have finally begun to cross-pollinate, and Western interest in Chinese art has genuinely begun to spread, the Chinese shu hua circle should seriously try to take advantage of this turn in national fortune. As the historical representative of Chinese fine art, the shu hua circle ought to re-invent itself as an international forum that accommodates non-Chinese practitioners. To achieve this, academic criteria and critical studies must aim for even greater rigour and creativity; critical appraisal should be structured around more organized frameworks; rewards of exhibition and recognition must be instituted with an open mind to accommodate all interested parties. Only by turning itself into such an international host may shu hua truly claim to have succeeded in fulfilling its historical mission. While shu hua is preparing itself as host it should also think of ways to get accepted onto the current international platform of contemporary art. The machinery of validation that operates on such public platforms as the

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biennials and the Western contemporary museum circuit has so far left out arts with strong ‘national’ colour or ‘traditional cultural’ references. However, the tendency is changing. Art that champions regional cultural character is increasingly getting its due respect, and shu hua can certainly find more and more sympathetic support under this trend. What strategies to adopt, how best to present itself on such platforms, are issues the shu hua circle should seriously investigate. Coming back to the vision of tian xia shi, the purpose of seeking an international platform is strategic. The West today still leads the mainstream, and through its platforms shu hua may gain the audience and the right to validation within art circles worldwide. This may also be the most expedient path to arrive at a world stage that is truly capable of accommodating a vision as broad as that of the traditional literati scholar.

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The Sound of One Hand: Between Meaning and No-Meaning Lu Dadong

Why do your works represent a transition between traditional art and contemporary art, without rupture but instead with integration, absorption and extension? How do you do that? What has been extended? (In what ways?) Did this transition encounter any coincidences or problems? The word ‘transition’ is full of meaning. In Chinese, it usually implies three things: the gradual development of things from one stage to another, the intermediate state of things, and the crossing of a river by a ferry. Buddhist scriptures talk about Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom’), the reaching of the other shore through Prajñā (‘wisdom’ or ‘intuitive apprehension’), but is the other shore a status of a higher level? Is tradition this shore and modernity the other? Is this shore not just the other shore of the other shore? These days, Mainland China discusses the ‘scientific outlook on development.’ Although no one propagates the slogan ‘get rid of the old, set up the new’ any more, the influence of this idea will not change easily. When Mao Zedong published his work On New Democracy in 1940, he wrote: “Unless [the culture of imperialism and semi-feudalism] is swept away, no new culture of any kind can be built up. There is no construction without destruction, no flowing without damming, and no motion without rest; the two are locked in a life-and-death struggle.” In the later part of the last century, in mainland China the core part of this essay was required reading; it had to be read with enthusiasm or even learned by heart. As a result, ‘no construction without destruction’ became a widely known phrase. I am not sure if this is the main reason why to this day ideological formations of social Darwinism and communism co-exist in every corner of mainland China. ‘No construction without destruction’ was originally a Buddhist concept, Mao Zedong borrowed it successfully for his own purpose, so that he was even thought of to be the inventor of this term. In the context of class

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struggle, ‘no construction without destruction’ expresses a conditional relationship: if the old is not destroyed, it is not possible to construct the new. Understood by Buddhist terms, however, it can be interpreted totally different as a parallel relationship: neither destruction nor construction. Monk Zhili (960~1028) of Northern Song Dynasty explained in his Record of the Commentary on Amitāyurbuddha-dhyāna-sūtra: “Either destruction or construction, the two can be called doing, this are the two meditations on the absolute and the phenomenal. Nor destruction nor construction,the two can be called being, this is the meditation on Madhyma-pratipada (the Middle Way).”1 The double negation structure ‘not… not…’ is commonly used in Buddhist scriptures, it can be interpreted in the sense of ‘neither…nor…’ Madhyma-pratipada is ‘no destruction, no construction’, ‘like destruction or construction’, or ‘neither destruction nor construction.’ This is what Nagarjuna (Longshu, ca.  150-250  CE) in his Madhyamaka described: “neither arising nor vanishing, neither impermanence nor permanence, neither unity nor difference, neither coming nor ceasing.” Neither pursuing destruction nor pursuing construction, neither pursuing meaningful nor pursuing meaningless, I pursue deliberately a balance between meaning and no-meaning. In regard to works of art, does meaning come first or the work itself? For me, before you want to have a work with meaning or no-meaning, you must create a work first. I couldn’t become a pure conceptual artist, I could never accept such a fact: a theorist says, after he had listened to your concept for a work: “I already totally understand your work which is of great significance and value.” Under certain conditions, transition can also be interpreted as extension. In my opinion, there are so many elements in the calligraphy of the past that could be extended. The aspects who concerned me in recent years mainly include those following, I may call them ‘having sound and colours’: calligraphy with sound—not only the physical sound but also the inaudible ‘sound of one hand’; calligraphy with colours, such as the ‘miscellaneous script type’ (zatishu) popular in the 6th to the 10th centuries; the performativity of the body-movement while writing calligraphy; word plays; spiritual interaction. Does calligraphy has borders (boundaries)? In the exhibitions held by graduating students from China Academy of Art today, it is often hard to tell whether a work is made by students from the Department of New Media Art, the Department of Experimental Art, the Department of Print-making, or the Department of Sculpture. This is because their supervising teachers had defined too few limits for the work in advance. 1 | Taisho Tripitaka, Volume 37, No. 1751.

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A graduating student in design at the Chinesisch-Deutsche Kunstakademie2 of the China Academy of Art made a design for a dynamic display of posters. A presentation of posters assisted animations is form of presentation many young Chinese poster designers would be willing to try, but her supervising teacher from the Universität der Künste Berlin said: “This belongs to fine arts, but I need a poster, for this reason, I can’t mark your work.” When this graduating student described this incident to me she expressed a great amazement as she had thought that Western arts teachers might have had broader standards to define the borders of art. The above two cases seem to indicate that the definition of artistic boundaries always changes as people will always define things according to their own experience and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Things without boundaries do not exist in this world. Classic art precisely exists because of its boundaries. Calligraphy becomes interesting because it has borders. The major boundary I define for myself is the act of writing itself: As long as there is the act of writing, it can be called calligraphy. Smaller boundaries are techniques. In traditional Chinese art they are called ‘threshold’. Doors in the past had a wooden frame, which had a horizontal piece of wood or stone near the floor. Everyone who entered the door had to step across this threshold. The higher a person’s position was, the higher the threshold was made. According to Chinese geomancy (fengshui) the threshold of a house is a barrier at the door which prevents the ‘energy of the earth’ (diqi) from going out of the house. When one visits a temple, one has to step across a very high threshold, first with one’s left foot for a man and one’s right foot for a woman, no wrong footsteps allowed. When a man steps over with his left foot first augurs that he’ll enter the Western Pure Land after death, but if he steps over with his right foot he then may go to the eighteen levels of hell. The reversal is true for a woman, no carelessness is permitted. In addition, one is not allowed to tread on the threshold as this may cause one to float between the two worlds of yin and yang, unable to become a deity or gain rebirth. The threshold in traditional calligraphy is whether or not an artist, after quite a long time of training in the study of the classical model copies and steles, skillfully masters the basic artistic techniques. Traditional calligraphers may set smaller boundaries whereas modern artists intend to re-define boundaries themselves or influence the way of defining boundaries of the people around them.

2 | A collaborative education project of the China Academy of Art (CAA) and Universität der Künste (UdK), Berlin, Germany for training master students in art and design.

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Creation is based on what? A. The artist’s own experience and inertia. B. Rules summarized from artistic creation. I’d like to abstain from voting, but if I would be forced to choose I would choose A. An influential kōan of Hakuin Zenshi, (1686-1769), a Japanese Zen master of the Rinzai school, is ‘the sound of one hand’: “Two hands clapping make an ordinary sound, the clapping of one hand only the heart can hear it.” He makes people ponder about the sound of one hand. Ikeno Taiga, 1723-1767), the founder of the Southern painting school in Japan, studied ‘the sound of one hand’ by learning from Hakui Zenshi. One day he gained a sudden insight and wrote down this Buddhist hymn: “How can the ears hear it? The sound of one hand, if the ear is no more, the sound is preserved in the heart; if the heart is no more, it will be difficult to hear it. I didn’t know that my master’s grace was so deep.” When I am involved in writing, what I hope is that my audience experiences whether movement nor sound, neither a concept that can be clearly explained nor even art, what I can feel is only some sort of response. I must reiterate, one can always only approaching perfection, there is always a possibility for improvement. The impact and influence of ‘the sound of one hand’ kōan on my artistic and creative mind is as indescribable as the realm of Zen Master Hakuin Zenshi’s artistic creation. The kind of ‘skill-less’ art created by him and the Zen artists influenced by him went beyond definition set up by classical and modern times, the absolute creative mind is always pointed towards the infinite. (Fig. 1) My acceptance of Zen Buddhist art was a gradual process: It was in the mid-1990s that I first came into contact with Zen Buddhist art when I discovered that in Chinese art history Zen Buddhist art fills no great space nor it is highly valued, but in contrary that it is one of the cores of Japanese art and also a key subject in the field East Asian art history in Europe. Because at the China Academy of Art the studies in calligraphy focus on technique, I was not able to express my opinion on Zen ink art as it didn’t Figure 1: Hakuin seem to have much technical contents. It was only Ekaku, Tetubeo, Sumi with my deepened and more global understanding

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that I began to free myself from the shackles of the centrism on Han Chinese culture. The formal resources of modern Japanese calligraphy derives from modern Western art, but quite a substantial part of its spiritual resource originates in the special features of its national culture such as Zen Buddhism, a way of thinking that breaks through sublimity and returns to emptiness. Chinese ‘modern calligraphy’ was born of the converging impact created by modern Western art and the ‘few-character’ calligraphy style of Japan. The story may have had another version but actually, what is the spiritual resource of modern Chinese calligraphic creation? Zen Buddhism itself is nor aesthetics nor an art theory. From the 7th century on, however, it has created an important impact on the artistic creation and theory of poetry, calligraphy and painting. In the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Zen Buddhist art gradually faded out of the mainstream of Chinese art, which may have been because the Manchu rulers were much more interested in Tibetan Buddhism than in Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhism advocates ‘to attain Buddhahood by enlightenment’, showing no ‘phenomena’ on the outside and no ‘noumenon’ on the inside. The condition in which one is saved by Buddha and able to enter the ideal heavenly kingdom of the other shore is called wang xiang and the condition in which one returns again to the world of this shore in order to save all living creatures is called huan xiang, both are circumvented issues in Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhist thought is ‘neither close nor distant’, ‘both close and distant’ to the human realm, sees the myriad phenomena ‘neither beautiful nor ugly’, ‘both beautiful and ugly’. Moreover, Zen Buddhism opened before the Buddhist doctrine the gate of intercommunication between monks and laymen, the gate of equality between the literate and the uncultivated, Zen Buddhist thinking goes beyond the one-sided aesthetic and artistic taste of Chinese literati who regard ‘clean and quiet, deep and peaceful, light and simple, distant and lofty’ as their core values. I am not critiquing the so-called literati taste currently popular in China with its slogan revitalization of ‘Chinese national studies’ (guoxue); but I’m thinking that the taste of Han-Chinese culture has not only the literati as its representative. The chaotic educational background of my generation and the social structure of contemporary China also decided that a return to a literati culture would only be silly nonsense. Even though it was possible for Zen Buddhist art to become an important formal and conceptual source of modern calligraphy in Japan, this would hardly be possible in contemporary China. Looked at from the level of religion, the contemporary Chinese artists I know are basically like me all atheists, neither believing in a religion nor being without any belief. Personally, the search for a strong reliance on spirituality in artistic creation resembles someone with a loss of memory who has to remember step by step the indistinct past.

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What is the spirit that you seek to express (such as regarding your new media works)? As stated above, what I seek to express is not a spirit; you can also say that spirit is nothing. When I discovered for the first time that calligraphy gave me an incredible and indescribable pleasure, I felt gratitude that enabled me to despise selfishness and self-love. Later on, I came to know that Abraham H. Maslow described that as the ‘peak experiences’.3 For my part, I prefer using the Confucian concept of ‘benevolence’ (ren), like in the phrase “relying on benevolence to drift in art”, to express one’s state of mind after being baptized. Can the contemporary audience understand your live performances? What pleases me until now is that many kids like my performances. It must be stated that I have different expectations for my audience in a rock-music concert as when I make a calligraphy performance: As a singer, I try to make my voice as clear as possible that everyone in the audience will understand my lyrics; as a performer of calligraphy, though, if the audience would know too clearly what I intend to do, would make me feel uneasy, because there are many things in my performance that I cannot predict in advance. The initial work—the interpretation by critics and audience—adding new meaning—the influence of the superimposed meaning on new works—a mixture—the artist creates new works, mutually he is also created by the work, during this process, ‘meaning’ is continuously overlaid and transformed. Please allow me to tell a story first. On Christmas Eve in 2006 when I took part in the ‘live calligraphy event’, for the first time I did a calligraphy performance that was related with drums. At that time the idea was simple enough: how to make calligraphy generate sound that everyone could hear? Interestingly, on several occasions when I asked this question to new-media artists or students, their initial response was exactly the same as my initial thought: fixing a sound amplifier or sensor to the brush or on the paper. Of course, at the end I chose not using any electronic media, but using only my hands to dip ink, beating on the drum in a variety of ways in order to let the drum reveal characters. Subsequently, in different exhibitions, I did the same calligraphy performance, which I still referred to as calligraphy because it contained the essential element of calligraphy: even though there was no brush, the hand was the brush (in fact the brush is the extension of the hand), there was ink and the body movement of writing, and the final result was that on a plane surface (the drum skin) characters of aesthetic brushwork were emerging. I must ad3 | Ma Sike (Abraham H. Maslow). Ziwo shixian de ren (Toward a Psychology of Being). Beijing Sanlian shudian, 1986:257-260.

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mit that prior to that rock concert in Beijing in 2008, my thinking about this act was limited just to the range of calligraphy, music and modern art, the construction of atmosphere, including the selection of costumes, ways of singing and content of the lyrics, was basically technical. I call all these acts or performances as ‘fate’ (suming). In 2008, on the eve of the Beijing Olympic Games, my band gave a rock concert in Beijing, in which I used a hand-drum with the characters ‘Wenchuan’ written on it. Impromptu, I decided to define this performance as an attempt evocate the dead of the Sichuan earthquake. At the end of the performance, someone in the audience came up to me and said: “I am an Estonian. At university I study and research Shaman culture with my teacher. Before, you performed just like a Shaman.” When I returned to Hangzhou, after I had begun searching for information on Shamanism again, I discovered that a number of my choices were really similar to Shamanism, such as the dress I wore, the drum in my hand and the incantations I chanted. At the same time, I discovered further that, in regard to this culture, I was in a state of amnesia for a long time. But at once the Estonian’s remark called up a lot of memory. For example: I remembered a book I had read before I went to university, titled “Among Deities and Demons: A Self-account by a Priest of Yi Nationality.”4 Over a long time in the early 1990s, this book let me be fascinated with gathering information on all kinds of spiritism and I learned to sing various songs of shamans or sorcerers. For a period of time, I wrote shamanistic symbols and characters in Shang and Zhou dynasty bronze script on clean dustmen overalls, which I wore while walking in the streets of Hangzhou, watching the reaction of the people in the street and watching the reaction an audience in site-specific performances, it is really very different. In the mid-1990s, I read “The Origin and Development of Written language” by B. A. Nctpnh,5 which etymologically did not inspire me much, but I discovered that the symbols created by Shamans, besides being anthropological samples of word creation can also used as a resource of creation in calligraphy and seal carving. In the early 1900s, Deng Erya (1884-1954), calligrapher and seal carver from Guangdong, and a pioneer of using characters and symbols of different ethnics for own creation, began experimenting with characters in the traditional field of seal carving. After the 1950s, Ding Yanyong or Ting Yin Yung (1902-1978), a Hong Kong oil painter who loved Henri Matisse

4 | Jike Erda Zehuo. Wo zai shen gui zhi jian—yi ge Yizu jisi de zishu (Among Deities and Demons: A Self-account by a Priest of Yi Nationality).Narrated by Jike Erda Zehuo, recorded by Jike Zehuo Shihuo, collated by Liu Shaohan. Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1990. 5 | Yisitelin (B.A. Nctpnh). Wenzi de chansheng he fazhan (The Origin and Development of Written Language). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1987.

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(1869-1954) and Bada Shanren (1626-1705), began creating ‘calligraphic oil paintings’ with Chinese pictograms, which looked hardly different from the symbols on shamanic drums.6

Figure 2: Ding Yanyong, 1966 (left), Shaman’s Drum (right) Another memory about spiritual response and performance is also concerning calligraphy: In the 1990s I read Lothar Ledderose’s “Some Taoist Elements in the Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties”7 for the first time, the article quotes a self-account of Wang Xianzhi (344-386). When Wang was 24 years old, he stood in the woods one day, a flying bird held a piece of paper in its left hand (claw?) and a brush in its right hand, and wrote for him 579 characters. In less than a week’s time of copying, Wang mastered the secrets in it.8 When I began learning calligraphy as a young child, I had heard many stories of Wang Xianzhi, one of the greatest calligraphers in history, except this account that no one had mentioned and that had never appeared in any teaching material on calligraphy. In the 1980s China, such stories were certainly part of the forbidden ground of feudalistic superstition. This story was critiqued by the Tang Dynasty calligrapher and theorist Sun Guoting (648?-703?), who thought that Wang Xianzhi had made a mystery on purpose, pretended to rely on divine immortals, he went even 6 | At the symposium of Modern Calligraphy Art Festival “Calligraphy·Not-calligraphy” (shu·feishu), held in Hangzhou in 2005, I presented a paper in which I call this experiments with characters and calligraphy in the early and mid 1900s “pre-modern calligraphy.” 7 | Lothar Ledderose. “Some Taoist Elements in the Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties.” T’oung Pao, vol.70 (1984): 246-278. 8 | Wang Xianzhi’s autobiography on calligraphy Flying Bird tie (Feiniao tie), now collected in Taiwan, attributed to be a Tang Dynasty copy by Zhu Zhuiliang (596659). The earliest record of this autobiography is found in Zhu Changwen’s (10411100) Ink Pond Compilation (Mochi bian) of the Song Dynasty.

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so far as not to mention the influence of his father Wang Xizhi (330-361), the greatest calligrapher ever lived. Lothar Ledderose thinks that this account was in fact related to ‘planchette writing’ ( fuji jiangbi). In his article, he described how close Wang Xianzhi and his father, the first so-called family of calligraphers, were related to Taoism. Fuji is a divining activity, equivalent to the English word ‘coscino-mancy’, that appeared mainly in Taoist rituals and activities, where characters or symbols written by descended deities are used to make predictions about the future. In the West normally a planchette, in China, however, a plate or box of sand and a brush to write characters in the sand are used—the so-called ji. All pointed objects can be used, but they should have a crossbar as handle for two people to hold. After a ritual of incenseburning and kowtowing, when the invited ghosts, deities or immortals ‘descend to the altar’, the ji carried by two people will then start to move and write things like poems, sentences or symbols in the sand. If people on the spot want to consult the deities or ask after good and evil or disaster and fortune, they will also get answers. Records of fuji are mostly extant in Taoist literature. For example, Declarations of the Perfected (Zhengao) by Tao Hongjing (456-536) of the Liang Dynasty is a collection of poetry and prose related to fuji, which Lothar Ledderose also studied as documents on calligraphy. In mainland China, fuji activities basically disappeared in the years from 1949 to 1978,9 till in the early 1980s when they suddenly became popular. The first celestial being attended the divination in the name of Yang Kaihui (Mao Zedong’s first wife), before it did it in the name of Mao Zedong himself. At that time, for being successfully, it was required to hang Chairman Mao’s portrait and to place the five volumes of The Complete Works of Chairman Mao, cigarettes and a bowl of water, moreover only children were said to be able to use the fuji for writing. In fact, without children, without even placing the five volumes and the cigarettes success could equally be achieved. When I studied at the university, ‘brush-deity’ and ‘dish-deity’, simplified version of fuji, were popular on the campus. I‘ve tried the ‘dish-deity’, it is very easy: you have to place a small white porcelain dish upside down on a piece of paper on the table and to draw in the size of the dish a circle in the middle of the paper, sometimes I drew a skeleton in the middle of the circle, and you have to choose a quiet place preferably in the middle of the night. Four to six people have to sit around 9 | In Tips for Traditional Chinese Medicine Qigong, published in 1993, there is a record of a fuji activity conducted by a teacher and his students in a medical school in Baoji, Shanxi, which they referred to as an “experiment in the positioning of moving objects”, the whole experiment resembling a group art performance. Yan Zhangrong, Xiao Weisheng and Feng Xin eds. Zhongyi qigong miji (Tips for Traditional Chinese Medicine Qigong). Guilin: Guangxi minzu chubanshe, 1993: 213.

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a table, the lights must be turned off and the doors closed, with only one window open. Everybody have to tip lightly with their fingers on the dish while concentrating on “dish-deity, come quick”. If one sees the dish on the paper starts to turn around gently means that the dish-deity has arrived. Then, you can start to ask questions and the dish will answer them by shifting its positions. It is not the task of an artist or art historian to decipher such a peculiar phenomenon as fuji. I am more concerned with Shamanism and the mental experience of the medium because, for them, the spiritual sensation was as unshakably genuine as that of eating and sleeping. There is a very well-known term in calligraphy called ‘awl drawing sand’ (zhui hua sha) that describes a feeling of writing with a brush. Explanations by theorists over the dynasties has focused on the various individual experiences of using an awl drawing in the sand, but no one explains why it is an awl used for writing in the sand. In my recent research, I hold the view that this term is related to fuji jiangbi as well. According to Andreas Lommel, “the earliest type of an artist is a Shaman”.10 It’s not mystery for mystery’s sake, as the spiritual interaction has always been the core content of classical art forms such as calligraphy. Whether it is Shamanism or fuji, their basic elements such as spiritual interaction, performance involving body movement and the use of expressive and creative symbols are all closely related to calligraphy. What on earth is your purpose? Do you want to renew or modernize calligraphy? Does your work embody criticism and subversion towards calligraphy? Going beyond these concrete questions, did you ever think your artistic practice has a meaning for modern society? Does tradition need protection or salvation? The meaning of art to the modern society cannot be prejudged by the artist himself. No individual alone could protect or save the whole tradition, only by circulating in the blood of every individual the tradition will able to survive. Without a profound and independent recognition of tradition, blindly talk about protecting is equally dangerous. My current goal is to save myself first, save myself out of low techniques. I have no intention so ever to hide my aims in traditional calligraphy and to become someone like Vladimir Ashkenazy in the field of music. For me, measure oneself in a serious battle against the ancients in better brushwork techniques is as much a challenge as finding selfrealization in modern art. One thing about traditional calligraphy is quite thrilling: in the field of modern art, critics are unwilling to compare the good and bad, high and low of artists, but this is precisely the thing traditional artists have to face almost daily. The competition between tradition10 | Lommel, Andreas. Shamanism, the Beginning of Art, New York: 1967.

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al calligraphers is less through concrete works then via ‘brush meetings’ (bihui), a traditional calligrapher even has to see another calligrapher writing one stroke only to estimate his level. Traditional calligraphy does not need modernization, criticism or subversion. Yet, you can criticize calligraphers because the brains of Chinese calligraphers do need modernization. Contemporary art in China is beginning to acquire a strong position in foreign exchange and mainstream exhibitions. Twenty years ago, the engagement in artistic experiments by artists was like treading on thin ice. Today, however, this has become a common sight in art schools. At the same time, a group of anti-modernists that deviated from reformists of those days merged with the new generation of conservatives to build a strong force to fight for the ‘revival of tradition’ and to confront contemporary art, although the two parties are not in a open conflict like during the 1980s and 1990s. While taking part in activities both of calligraphy and of contemporary art, I discovered that the main difference between these two groups is that most calligraphers who claim to engage in traditional art lack interest in contemporary art and even in art in general, but indulge in and enjoy the pleasure of calligraphic creation. In contrast, contemporary artists always try not to fall behind the times, but are not primarily concerned with the continuity and details of a work. Simultaneously, in terms of calligraphy, in Chinese art schools o fall levels, there is no calligraphy education that is really associated to modern art. Every student begins with the techniques and concepts of traditional calligraphy, only a minority of art schools would add some contents regarding modern art in their education plan, which is not enough to change the brains of future calligraphers, a fact that won’t change in the short term. For my part, I only try my best while teaching to show more possibilities of calligraphy to my students.

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Figure 3 to 6: Lu Dadong, performances and installations, 2004 to 2008

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Figure 7: Lu Dadong, performances and installations, 2004 to 2008 How does the transition between material and media functions? As being a traditional artist, what an approach do you have towards paper, drums, tables, space, movements, body, live performances, music, singing, new media, and photography? Do you do a form of multi-media painting? Total art work? The art of assemblage? I prefer to call it calligraphy. No, not calligraphy but shufa. While conceiving material and media, I am used to focus on ‘writing’, even though I do not always do this deliberately, but the works most valued by others are still those related to the discipline I’m best in, I don’t know if this is the case with other artists. Chinese calligraphy in exhibitions and pictures is actually a static result of a blend of writing activity and other elements. The reason why the art of ‘cursive script’ (caoshu) by Zhang Xu (658?-747?) and Huai Su (725-785) was esteemed so highly in the history of Chinese

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calligraphy, is because of the performativity of their ‘wild cursive script’ (kuangcao). When Zhang Xu got drunk he wrote his cursive script, shedding his hat in front of the royal princes and nobilities, showing the crown of his head. This wild incident without any etiquette later turned into the rumor that Zhang Xu soaked his hair in ink and was writing with it. Huai Su, a young monk, ate fish and pork and also drank alcohol. His way to gain recognition from the elite was to perform before them wild cursive script at an extremely fast speed on mounted screens or walls. As the story goes, when Tang Dynasty Emperor Shunzong (761-806) saw that a wall calligraphy by Wang Xizhi had peeled off, he summon the foreign student-monk Kūkai (Konghai, 774-835) from Japan to do an inscription in its place. Like doing magic, Kūkai held brushes both with his hands and feet, and a fifth one between his teeth. Moving five brushes together and completing five rows of characters was an instant sensation and he was subsequently known as the ‘Five Brush Monk’. After Kūkai had returned to Japan, in the first year of the hongren era (810), Emperor Saga (Saga-tennō, 786-842), who was fond of calligraphy, after having finished restoring the royal palace ordered Kūkai to inscribe the South Gate and Yingtian Gate. When Kong Hai had finished the three characters ying, tian, men, he discovered that the character ying was lacking a dot. He dipped the brush fully into the ink and threw it towards the top of the gate, completing the character in a perfect stroke and winning admiration from everybody around.

Figure 8: Komatsu Sigemi. Zoku Niqponn no emaki 11, Koubou Daisi gyoujou ekotoba (simo). Kyuuou kouronnsha

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Such stories of calligraphy performance in the eighth and ninth centuries always lets one in speculation, these contents found in records that were deliberately or not forgotten by the mainstream consciousness though, add a new definition to tradition. Translated by Ouyang Yu/Lis Jung Lu

The Essential Meaning of Chinese Calligraphy and Its Loss Kong Guoqiao

I remain skeptical about Chinese calligraphy, a skepticism that people tend to be contemptuous of but that wonders why calligraphy exists as art and how writing has turned into an art? The birth of Chinese characters was meant for the purpose of recording things and exchange. The impetus to its continual evolution roughly lies in expressing meanings in a complete and appropriate manner and writing in a convenient and fast way. All this, presumably, is commonly recognized. However, in this sense, the so-called ‘beginning’ of ‘writing’ that objectified Chinese characters should naturally rest with a pure technical skill. If, during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period (770-221 B.C.), the term shu (к) in the word for “writing” (к‫ ݭ‬shuxie ) that led the ‘six arts’ of rites, music, arrow-shooting, riding, writing and mathematics had the qualities of a certain technique, why then from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.C.) onwards, the shu (writing) as a skill of writing had gained the status of something that ‘only a person of ideals and integrity’ could attain? The history of calligraphy records the hardness of countless gifted scholars who turned ‘the waters of ponds inky’ and ‘gathered brushes in mounds’, and the depth of their brush-techniques that made it possible for Zhong Yao (151-230) who ‘didn’t venture outdoors for sixteen years’, to ‘beat his chest and vomit blood’ as a result of not being able to learn the skills of the famous calligrapher Cai Yi (133-192) until he was finally able to secure the ‘high standards of writing’ by ‘robbing the tomb of Wei Dan’ who possessed an important scripture of Cai Yi. After all, words of various civilizations were close to each other in origins as they were all pictographic in the Age of Painted Pottery. But afterwards, Chinese characters and their writing took to a unique road that was strikingly different from other cultures with the so-called six categories of Chinese characters (liu shu), such as ‘pictographic characters, reference, associative compounds, phonetic loan characters, pictophonetic characters and mutually explanatory or synonymous words’—writ-

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ing (shuxie) finally turned into calligraphy (shufa), a pure technical skill ascending to ‘art’.1 With such concerns, let us return to the Chinese characters. In modern Chinese language, the word for art (㡎ᴃ yishu) is composed of the two characters 㡎 (yi, art) and ᴃ (shu, technique). Yi (art) originally carried more than one meaning: The yi in “I went for art because I wasn’t employed” in Analects of Confucius or in “Delight in sacredness? That’s relevant to art” as Zhuangzi said, yi refers to certain practical skills and abilities in life, e.g. technical skills.2 In The Classic of Rites (chapter Study of Yi), the ‘art’ (yi) in “when you do not like the art, you take no delight in studying it”, as contrasted with ‘studying’ (xue), refers more to taught subjects as rites, music, arrow-shooting, riding, writing and mathematics, the so-called ‘six arts’. In the sentence, “the world meet with a thing of good quality, plucked by a beautiful hand, that gives a sound topping all the 1 | The term of liu shu (six categories of Chinese characters) was first found in The Rites of Zhou (chapter Earth Officials): “The official responsible for advising the king and educating his children taught six arts, […] the fifth are the six categories of calligraphic writing; the sixth are the nine numbers.” In Seven Summaries by Liu Xin in the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-24 A.C.), it is said that “in ancient times children go to school at eight. For this reason, the official responsible for the education of the king’s children taught them six categories of Chinese characters, based on ‘pictographic characters, reference, associative compounds, phonetic loan characters, pictophonetic characters and mutually explanatory or synonymous words”; this is the earliest explanation about the liu shu. Inspired by Liu Xin, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 A.C.) compiled a book, titled Explaning and Dissecting Characters (Shuowen jiezi) by comprehensively incorporating the ancient character styles of zhuan and zhou and he made a detailed explanation about liu shu in his Preface: “According to the rites of Zhou, children go to primary school at eight. When Baoshi taught the king’s children he started with the six categories of Chinese characters. The first refers to things that are visible and identifiable whose meanings can be discerned in relation to up and down. The second refers to shapes, drawn in curves, like the moon or the sun. The third refers to sound based the name of things and their similes like rivers and streams. The fourth refers to meanings based on combining two or more characters, such as the characters ℺ (wu) and ֵ (xin). The fifth refers to transference by coping with the same meaning of words expressed differently in different places, such as 㗗 (kao) and 㗕 (lao) denoting the elderly. The sixth refers to the use of substitutes for spoken words that have no equivalents in the written language.” 2 | ‘Having no official employment, I acquired many arts.’ The remark is found in The Analects of Confucius: What the Master Seldom Speaks of, and Xing Bing explained, ‘to have an official employement means obtain a function, meaning that Confucius confessed himself that “because I didn’t obtain any function I was able to engage in arts.” and ‘delight in sacredness? That’s relevant to art.’ See Zhuangzi: Outer Chapters, quoted in A Collection of Notes on Zhuangzi by Guo Qingpan [Qing Dynasty]. Zhonghua Book Bureau, 1961, p. 367.

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arts”, in Qinfu, by Ji Kang, in the Three States (220-280 A.C), the word yi seems to take on the meaning of art and literature as we understand them today. By the late Western Han (206 B.C.-24 A.C.) , though, the six canonical scriptures (liu jing) were called the six arts (liu yi), which is why, in The Book of Han (chapter Treatise on Art and Literature), it is said that Liu Xin ‘did the Seven Summaries and Six Arts Summaries (liuyi lüe)’. In addition, the nature of “clever arts” (qiao yi) as listed in A New Account of the Tales of the World (Vol. 2) is similar to what we speak of as “arts” (yishu) today. Likewise, the character ᴃ (shu, technique), in Chinese language, also has multiple meanings. Roughly speaking, it means methods and measures, such as the remark, “one can judge a government by whether the methods (shu) it uses are good or not”, describes in The Classic of Rites (chapter Summary Account of Sacrifices). Secondly, it refers to techniques and professional skills, as described in “those in ancient times who learnt the ways and skills (shu) did so for the purpose of establishing themselves, which is why even saints would do it as well”, in The Classic of Rites (chapter Meaning of the Drinking Festivity in the Districts).3 There were others as well, such as Liu Xue who derived the thought and theory of this meaning in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (chapter Summary on Talents), with his remark, “with ways and skills (shu) the exponents of various schools of thought obtained their capital while Qu Yuan and Song Yu shone in Chu Ci”, and the learning and imitation as in The Classic of Rites (chapter Account of Studies), where it is said: “According to the Account: little insects achieve their purposes by constantly practicing their skills (shu). Isn’t this what one should aim at?” In relation to the joint use of the two characters of yi and shu as yishu (arts), there were such instances as “in the first year of Yonghe, an edict was issued that Wuji and court consultant Huang Jing had to check the classical texts, the writings of all philosophers as well as the arts (yishu) in the royal library”. In The Book of Later Han (chapter Biography of Fu Kan), and “the territory of arts (yishu) has always been in a high ground. Emperors of previous ages used them to make decisions when hesitant, to tell good from evil, to assess survival and to examine good fortunes and bad” in The Book of Jin (chapter Preface to a Biography of Arts); they basically refer to such techniques and skills as the ‘six arts’ as well as the arts of alchemy and astrology.4 In The Book of Wei by Wei Shou (5073 | Noted separately by Zheng Xuan as both “skill as a law” and “skill as an art”. 4 | See The Book of Later Han (chapter Biography of Fu Kan) and The Book of Jin (chapter Preface to the Biographyof Arts). Li Xian’s note on the first book is that ‘arts mean writing, mathematics, archery, riding, and skills mean medicine, lifeenhancing techniques, divination and witchery’. On the other hands, words in The Book of Jin (chapter Preface to the Biography of Arts) to the effect that ‘a detailed look at a mass of arts shows them really as a small path that would be regretted if abandoned and be thought as unworthy if kept… Now a record is made of the best of them that could be carried on as a biography of the arts’, mean that ‘arts’ in

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572), weather foretellers, doctors and diviners, and fengshui masters are all categorized in The Biography of Arts. Subsequently, various kinds of histories as amended in the early Tang Dynasty (618-907) mostly inherited such categories, although there was also a subject of ‘seal scripture and music tonality’, but their nature was quite similar to that in The Biographies of Geomancers and Alchemists in The History of Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou.5 Based on this, we can roughly find that in ancient Chinese language the word yishú (arts) covers a much wider area than the same word in modern Chinese, basically referring to a big variety of skills and techniques. In other words, in the cultural and linguistic system of ancient China, there was no such a ‘world of arts’ independent of other areas as we understand it today.6 At the same time, however, the list above, far this sense were really in an embarrassing situation in which they were considered as something ‘that would be regretted if abandoned and be thought as unworthy if kept’. 5 | Others, such as A Miscellany of Arts in The Book of New Tang (chapter Record of Art and Literature, A Summary of Art and Literature in A Comprehensive History), as well as The Category of Arts in A Comprehensive Examination of the Literature, can roughly be regarded as an extension of the contents in A New Account of the Tales of the World: Clever Arts. In addition, in An Edition for Lü Zhai’s Offspring: Talk about Literature: Evolution in the Historical Style by Sun Yi in the Song Dynasty, there are words to this effect, ‘in late Han, it was called fangshu; in Wei, it’s fangji; and in Jin, it’s yishu (art)’. In A Collection of Picture Books compiled in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, fangji and yishu were put in the same category as that of books and paintings. Even in Essays at Suiyuan Garden: An Account of Things in the Liang and Chen Dynasties: the Story of Guangyi, by Yuan Mei, yishu as proposed refers to jingshu. Meanwhile, in Fang Bao’s A Response to Shen Qianju, where he says, ‘there is nothing harder in yishu than ancient literature. Since the Zhou Dynasty, various well-known ones in each field number only in a dozen. One can see from this how hard it is’, the two characters of yi and shu refuse to be contained in just jingshu. 6 | The word yishu, as used in contemporary China, came in modern times from the Japanese, as a matched translation of the English and French word ‘art’. It is generally thought that it was not till the beginning of the late 18 th century that the concept of ‘art’ in the modern Western sense was introduced to the sphere of Han-Chinese character and culture and became gradually fixed. In 1870, Nishi Amane, a Japanese, used the word yishu in his book, Hyakugaku renwa. In 1872, the word meishu was used in The Beautiful Theory. The so-called meimiao xue (studies of beauty) was the early Japanese translation of the western word aesthetics. Based on Zheng Gong’s study, in the meantime, the earliest introduction to China from Japan was meishu, not yishu. The earliest example of meishu in Chinese literature that can be found at present is found in an article, titled, ‘A Plan for the Education of Elites in Fine Arts’, in Tokyo Daily (16 th September 1897) in Japan, translated and published in the eighth volume of the 10-daily

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from being complete, gives us a vague impression what the ancient Chinese characters yi and shu as well as yishu refer to, containing a tendency to merge technical issues with grand narratives, and that point is really something that requires us to look into in depth. In fact, because of this unique line of thinking that combines the subjective and the objective, our tradition is able to present a path of development that is different from the West in its understanding of the relationship between the arts (yishu) and the skills of arts. Let’s read a story in The Records of the Historian (chapter Biography of Confucius): Confucius was learning how to play a drum and a zither from Shixiang Zi but did not make any progress in ten days. Shixiang Zi said: We can practice a bit more. Confucius said: I am familiar with the music (qu) but I haven’t mastered the skills (shu). After a while, he was told that he had acquired the skills and that he could move ahead more. Confucius said: I haven’t yet grasped its spirit. After a while, he was told that he had grasped the spirit and that he could go further. Confucius said: But I still haven’t got the person (ren) yet. After a while, when he sat in quiet meditation, Confucius became delighted and looked afar as he was filled with spirit (zhi), saying: I got the person now. He looks sad and gloomy. He is tall, with eyes of a sheep and heart of a king who reigns all around. Who could that be if not King Wen Wang?

Here, if music (qu) and skills (shu) are understood as technical issues in some sense, and if spirit (zhi) is understood as the spirit that is formed of the musical movement, then, Confucius is hoping through his musical practice to grasp the person (ren) that owns the spirit by practicing some certain technical skills and deeply entering these skills. This practice process of a ‘technique that already approaches the way (dao)’, like Confucius who developed his skills to a consummate degree trying to merge them with the ‘music’, became the unique understanding Chinese magazine Shi Xue Bao of 5 th november 1897. However, it is a translated article, and the meaning of the word is equivalent to gongyi (craft technology), not ‘the art of beauty’ in the sense of ‘art’. See Zheng Gong, Evolution and Movement: the Modernisation of Fine Arts in China (1875-1976). Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2002, p. 76. At the end of the 19 th century and in the beginning of the 20 th century, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao used the word meishu, a transplanted word from Japan, on many occasions. In addition, with the concept of meishu that Wang Guowei frequently used in a series of treatises on aesthetics and pedagogy given in 1904, the word meishu was definitely used as that of ‘art’ in the modern sense. Probably prior to the May Fourth Movement in 1919, ‘art’ had been used as the concept of art in the modern sense and meishu specifically referred to figurative art. The definition of the term came to be generally recognized in the Chinese intellectual world. And it was also beginning from then that the concept of ‘art’ acquired a clearer modern sense.

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tradition had of the relationship between technical skills and arts, or, to be more appropriate, between technical skills and the way (dao). The reason why ‘the hunchback caught the cicadas’ is he ‘had undivided attention’. This is because the heart can merge into one with matter in the sense of ‘a quiet heart contemplating the things’. ‘Seeing the way (dao) inside of technical skills’ essentially requires and accentuates the meaning of the person itself who owns the technical skills.7 In Zhuangzi’s stories of ‘Zhi Qing whittling the wood to make a musical instrument’ and ‘Nanbo Zikui asking the Female Hunchback’, only the whole process from not having any “thoughts of criticism, praise, cleverness or stupidity” nor “thoughts of celebration, gifts, official positions or official salaries” to the forgetting of “my own limbs and shape” and even to “merge the sky with the sky” made the production of this musical instrument that “amazed everyone was as if it was God’s handiwork” possible. The formation of an object lies upon the cultivation of the person. And the cultivation process of the person, like the female crookback who moves from “outside earth”, “outside matter”, “outside life” to a “thorough insight” and the “seeing of oneness” in a “timeless state without past nor present”, untill she becomes a “sacred person” by the mental state of being “neither in live nor in death” in which she is aware of the Way (dao).8 For this reason, the so called ‘technique 7 | Zhuangzi: the Full Understanding of Life: Once, when Confucius went to the State of Chu, he went out of the woods and saw an old hunchbacked man trying to glue cicadas with a bamboo stick, so easily that he looked as if he were just picking them up from the ground. Confucius said, ‘You are so clever. How did you do it?’ The old hunchbacked man said, ‘I have my own ways. After practicing for five to six months, when I can put two balls at the end of the stick without them falling, it is rare that I will fail. If there are three balls without falling, I will not fail more than once out of ten. When I pile five balls without falling, it will be as easy to pick them up as from the ground. I stand still, like a broken piece of wood close to the ground, my arm holding up the stick like the branch of a withered wood. Although heavens are huge with so many things, I focus only on the cicada wings, never looking around or getting distracted, my attention to the cicada wings never divided for things. How could I have not possibly succeeded?’ Confucius turned around and said to his disciples, ‘When you have undivided attention, you can achieve a high level of concentration. It’s probably because of this that this old hunchback managed to do that.’ Quoted in the above book, pp. 639-641. 8 | Zhuangzi: the Full Understanding of Life: Ziqing was able to shape a piece of wood into a ju (musical instrument). When the ju was ready, everyone was amazed at it as if it were God’s handiwork. When he saw him, Marquis of Lu said, ‘How did you manage it?’ Ziqing said, ‘I am a worker and do not have a high level of techniques. Still, I have my own way. When I get ready to make a ju, I do not waste my energies. Instead, I fast for three days, without entertaining any thoughts of celebration, gifts, official positions or official salaries. If I fast for five days, I will rid myself of any thoughts of criticism, praise, cleverness or stupidity. If I fast for seven days, I will not be moved by anything external as if I had forgotten my own

T HE E SSENTIAL M EANING OF C HINESE C ALLIGRAPHY AND I TS L OSS

that already approaches the Way (dao)’ relies upon an entity that still follows the idea of “making the heart quiet” as a premise to attain a state of “merging the heart and the matter” or “merging the subjective and the objective” Interestingly, in line with the research by Martin Heidegger, the word ‘techne’ used by ancient Greeks referring both craftsmanship and art did not just mean craftsmanship nor art or even technology in a modern sense—‘it never refered to practical activities’. With Heidegger, what ‘techne’ refers to should be knowledge and this knowledge in the broad sense refers to a removing of a cover, e.g. bringing the existor out from the things covering over him so that he can be seen. And it is “only in the sense that the external views of the existor are brought into the uncovered sense of ‘production’ that techne can gradually generate the meaning of a ‘production technology’”.9 For this reason, there is something in common between China and the ancient West’s understandings of ‘skills’ or ‘art’ at this level. Probably, in the West, from Plato to early Ludwig Wittgenstein, mainstream thought based on the ‘subjective-objective dimension’ values conlimbs and shape. At that particular moment, office and the royal court no longer exist in my eyes; I am so intellectually focused that all external interferences have disappeared. I then go into the woods and examine the texture of various kinds of timber. I select a piece of wood that best fits the shape and figure of ju. By then, the formed image of ju will have appeared in front of my eyes. I then will begin making it by hand. Otherwise, I would have stopped. The way I do it is combine the pure personality of me as a carpenter with the natural composition of the wood, thus making an instrument that appears like God’s handiwork. That’s why.’ And Zhuangzi: the Great and Most Honoured Master: Nanbo Zikui said to Woman Crookback, ‘You are quite old now but you look like a child. Why is it so?’ Woman Crookback said, ‘I’ve gained the way.’ Nanbo Zikui said, ‘Can the way be learnt?’ Woman Crookback said, ‘No. It cannot be. It’s not for someone like you. Buliang Yi is as intelligent as a saint but he does not have a saint’s state of mind that remains far from fame and wealth. Even though I have the saint’s state of mind that remains far from fame and wealth I am not as intelligent. If I teach him how to attain that state of mind, he may possibly become a real saint. On the other hand, it is also easy to tell the one with the intelligence of a saint in a saintly way. I insisted on teaching him for three days with the way. Only in so doing can one leave the under-heaven behind one. When that happens, I persist for another seven days till I can leave things behind me. When that happens, I persist for another nine days till I can leave life and death behind me. Only when this happens can one gain throughness. Once throughness is gained, one can recognize the great, absolute way and when one can recognize the great, absolute way, one can understand that time is limitless. It is only when time is limitless that one can gain an insight into the state of being neither death nor life. See the book above, pp. 658-659, and pp. 251-253. 9 | See Chen Jiaying, An Outline of Heidegger’s Philosophy. Sanlian Bookshop, 1995, p. 263.

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cealed certain things whereas, by contrast, traditional China based on ‘the quotidian’ and not ‘the ideal’ values of a ‘dimension of intersubjectivity’, made it possible for the quotidian and skill-based activity of writing of characters to appear metaphysical. This difference between the traditional Chinese and Western lines of thinking is, in its traditional Chinese representation, the so-called “oneness of a matter and its principle” (shi li bu er), so much that Bao Ding, the chef, in Zhuangzi’s writing, prompted by his interest in Dao (the way), could butcher a cow in such a way that ‘he could meet it in spirit without making eye contact and his spirit moved even while his senses stopped’, till ‘he stood holding his knife and looking around, feeling proud.’10 Thus, starting with the so-called trend in which ‘technical issues are combined with grand narratives’, we seem to also understand that Chinese calligraphy, an ordinary, practical behaviour, is led by the traditional Chinese epistemology with the way (dao) as its core and that is distinguished from the traditional West’s pursuit of ‘ideal representation’. It reflects a ‘quality life of knowledge’ in the form of a ‘behaviorism’ that is centered on life. Because the initial meaning of Dao is still the “way”, i.e. something that people walk on, thus it is different from the idea in the traditional western epistemology, idea meaning ‘watching’, ‘looking at things’. From here, the Western tradition has always been expecting the ‘transcendence beyond rationality’ and ‘keeping the doubts for further assessment’ in the regular thinking mode. In fact, when Zhuangzi said in 10 | Zhuangzi: Nourishing the Lord of Life: There was a chief by the name of Ding who killed cows for King Hui of Liang. Wherever his hands touched, or his shoulders leaned, or his feet trode or his knees held against, there was the noise of the skin becoming detached from the flesh. The sound of the knife was even greater as it was thrust in. Nothing of that sound did not fit with the rhythm, matching the temperament of the dancing music Mulberry Forest, as well as the cadence of the melody Jingshou. King Hui of Liang said, ‘Well, that’s great! How is it that you are so skilled?’ Chef Ding put down his knife and said, ‘What I have been exploring is the natural rules, which has gone beyond mere pursuit of butchering techniques. In the beginning when I started killing a cow, all I could see was a whole cow. Three years subsequently, I didn’t see the cow any more. Now, when I kill a cow, I come into contact with the cow at will, without having to use my own eyes. It feels as if my mind were at work while all my other organs had ceased functioning. Along the muscular texture […] and with a gentle twist of the knife, the bones and the flesh come apart, falling to the floor like a heap of mud. I stood holding the knife, looking around me, drunken with success, with an air of pleasure and satisfaction. Then I wiped the knife clean and hid it away’, quoted in A Collection of Notes on Zhuangzi by Guo Qingpan [Qing Dynasty]. 1961, pp. 117-119. 11 | The Confucian ‘meaning’ is the grasping achieved through tihui (body felt or understood) in the practical process of ‘experiencing morality’. However, neither in German or English, is there any equivalent word to the Chinese tihui (body felt).

T HE E SSENTIAL M EANING OF C HINESE C ALLIGRAPHY AND I TS L OSS

his Making All Things Equal, ‘only the knowing one knows thoroughness as oneness, not having to use intelligence but having to obey the ordinary reason, the yong. Yong means usefulness; usefulness means thoroughness; thoroughness means gains. When he gains it he nears it, going with this but not knowing it, which is the way’, he took the lead in revealing the unique theme of traditional China in which ‘the ordinary is the way’ even as early as the early-Qin period. Subsequently, in The Doctrine of the Mean, there is such ordinary morality (yong de) and ordinary language (yong yan) as the remark that goes, ‘the way is something one can never go without’. In the metaphysics of the Wei and Jin dynasties, there was the saying of ‘understanding the meaning while forgetting the words’. And in the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties, there was the oneness of substance and function (ti yong bu er) thought in which ‘in terms of the substance, use can be for the substance, and, in terms of function, the substance exists for the function, combining oneness of knowledge and action (zhi xing he yi). Following this route, from when calligraphy was first included in the six arts (liu yi) during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States, to the Tang Dynasty when it had been defined as one of the subjects in the imperial examination and also as one of the ‘four (required) talents’ for assessing the officials, to such a degree that the quality of the written characters was the primary standard based on which scholars got their promotion. In the end, with the fundamental guidelines that ‘he who excels in study can follow an official career’ or that ‘when you are prosperous you govern but when you are poor you perfect yourself’, the daily classes of soft-brush calligraphy formed a way of existence attached to the state of living for men of letters and scholars. If the attitude as emphasized by Heidegger is that the essential task in philosophy is for the exploration of the meaning of ‘sein’ of all the ‘existors’ and the nature of art is to include the truth of the ‘existors’ in his work, thus writing in traditional China, in some sense, clarifies that the writer as the ‘sein’ of the ‘existor’ does ‘exist’ and is shown through writing. In ancient times, our ancestors successfully achieved a unified explanation about the universe and, in the big context in which they were able to keep in line with that explanation in actual life, calligraphy seems a ‘real art’ in which ‘philosophical studies’ may become possible in the opinion of Karl Jaspers. The concept of art changes over time in meaning. Calligraphy, as a way of life for men of letters and scholars in ancient China, has a tight and harmonious relationship to the ‘quotidian’ and to the ‘language’, giving us the impression that calligraphy represents the highest achievements in traditional Chinese art and has become the perfect epitome of traditional Chinese culture and philosophy.12 Even so, skepticism about calligraphy 12 | What is art? This remains an entangled issue. Heidegger discussed this in his ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ but remained ambiguous to the end of the article, near which he claims that ‘Art is the generation and genesis of truth….as a revealer and concealer of existence, truth is generated through poetic creation….

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still exists. On one hand, a work of art can be removed from its environment to become the representation of an ‘existence’. For this reason, the contents of Duck-head Ball Calligraphy by Wang Xianzhi (344-386 A.C.) or Belly-ache Calligraphy by Zhang Xu (8th century) are no longer important, and even the incomplete copying of Mid-autumn Calligraphy by Mi Fu (1051-1107), in which sentences hardly make sense, became one of the three rarities collected by Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). With the removal and loss of the irreversible world, a work of art is no longer the one before and the existence of the object for the work does not form the existence of the work as work. A work of art can open up a world and, as Heidegger emphasizes, it is not the world that establishes the work but the ‘world that is established through the work of art’. On the other hand, ‘being in relationship’ remains the essentiality of a work of art—‘the fact that a work is a work is that it belongs to the territory that the work itself opens up because the fact that the work takes existence in this opening-up becomes its nature and can only become its nature in this opening-up (Wesen).’13 Only in this way were the questions asked, ‘What is art?’ and ‘How can art possibly happen?’ In our age pen writing, when even the pens are being replaced by keyboards, is the cultural foundation on which calligraphy, the model of Chinese art, was rested, or is the ‘relationship’ in which calligraphy was situated, undergoing an essential change? Or has an essential change already happened to it? If the answer is yes, when the relationship

all art is essentially poetry Dichtung’. Quoted in Heidegger (German)’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. See Sun Zhouxing (ed), A Collection of Writings by Martin Heidegger. Shanghai: Sanlian Bookshop, 1996, p. 292. To be sure, Heidegger boasted that, after two thousand years when everything was forgotten, it was he who re-introduced and broadened the ‘issue of questioning the meaning of existence’, thus focusing his thoughts of everything on the pursuit of the word ‘existence’. The claim that ‘all art is poetry by nature’ seems extraordinary but it actually refers to the process in which every work of art posits truth in an individual existor and takes action through the existor. Because the kind of poetry that Heidegger refers to is, more often than not, described as Dichtung in German, not poesie, Dichtung with the meaning of ‘formation’ in dichten, this ‘poetry’ carries a range of meanings from ‘scheming, planning, tearing into lines to become a rough chart or Riss, or forming shapes’. See Chen Jiaying, An Introduction to Heidegger’s Philosophy, p. 285. On the other hand, language is as ‘the region of existence–temple of existence (templum), which is to say that language is the home of existence (Haus des Seins)’. Quoted in ‘What Are Poets For?’, A Collection of Writings by Martin Heidegger, Heidegger (German), p. 451. Language underlines all art whereas poetry is a way of art directly employing the language. For this reason, there seems to be an ambiguous but also clear relationship being formed between calligraphy, poetry, language, art and even existence. 13 | [German] Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, A Collection of Writings by Martin Heidegger, p. 261.

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on which the nature of art relies is no longer there, what is calligraphy? And what can calligraphy do? Tradition—such as the Chinese calligraphy, as historical sediment, keeps our relationship alive with the past that is getting further away from us, and it is also in this sense that our existence is a ‘historical existence’. In fact, real tradition is reflected in quotidian behavior and thinking, unlike the beliefs we create at random and at will. Such ‘quotidian tradition’ is invisible but is the part of things that Northrop Frye refers to as not easily changeable in our ‘cultural gene code’. This reminds me of scenes I once witnessed in some ancient towns in Europe: delicate, smart cars ran along streets of uneven surfaces laid with pebbles hundreds of years ago; young girls in wedding dresses worn by their mothers in the old days were walking to the same church that their mothers had been to for the wedding ceremony; and the stone slabs in the city square on which kids were roller-skating may have also witnessed the rolling of iron hoops by their fathers or even grandfathers. Aren’t such similar quotidian or even ‘ordinary’ live scenes becoming daily further away or have become so in the hearts of modern Chinese who claim to bear the ‘sediment of tradition over thousands of years’? I am not proposing that we should ‘follow the Western suit’ because ‘the removal and the loss of the world’ itself is an issue all mankind needs to face—just as ‘Roman thought accepted Greek words without inheriting the equally primitive experience described in these words, e.g., not inheriting the Greeks’, the rootlessness of Western thought is age-old.14 The so-called irreversible process of ‘modernization’ that took place only in the last century and that is still continuing made it possible for the Chinese civilization, one ‘that seemed to be born old, and at the same time to prefigure future cycles of thousands of years’, to experience a cultural breakage that refused to be concealed: we were beginning to question the values that we have grown used to as we were also beginning to abandon ways of living that we had long been absorbed in. There happened such essential changes in our ways of thinking and of living with the ‘retreat’ of tradition. Meanwhile, such a breakage has caused our traditional mainstream ideology and frame of concepts to be greatly detached from the present realities, forcing the tradition we mention to become one of a certain ‘grand narrative’ in nature. It is an unrefutable act that calligraphy is a vehicle of our tradition but an equally unavoidable fact is that as calligraphy is daily removed from our quotidian life and also because the values system is increasingly weakened in which ‘the quotidian is the way’, something that Chinese calligraphy rests on, our calligraphy-tradition has finally become a dangerous set of systems like ‘emblematic virtuality’.15 The idea remains 14 | [German] Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. See A Collection of Writings by Martin Heidegger, selected and compiled by Sun Zhouxing, pp. 243 244. 15 | If the source of thought for all the West came from Greece, then, our tradition already contains much of the Greek tradition except that we express it in Chinese

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one of the mainstream traditions. But the reality used for its defense is far from the reality ‘of the past’. Without an examination, we absorbed and accepted such a ‘tradition’ from our intellectual environment: the ‘discourse of power’, that is not critiqued and taken for granted, that appears in the form of ‘common sense’ but that is fatally severed from our ‘quotidian’, has in fact become an ideology, hidden but with great effect, which has formed the history in our mind and is swaying our judgment. Meanwhile, in relation to history, what we in fact own is only imagination, one that is founded on knowledge. In the West, subsequent to Theaetetus, a collection of dialogues, by Plato in his later years, in which he, based on a discussion between Socrates and Theaitetos, gives three conditions that must be satisfied if ‘knowledge is knowledge’: ‘truth’, ‘belief’ and ‘proof’, this universal standard about knowledge has been the basic clue to our understanding of knowledge to this day. As a result, in the history of Western thinking, the statement that ‘knowledge is justified true belief’ is a rare opinion that reaches consensus.16 The Problem, though, is how we can secure a faith in the historical ‘truth’ and the ‘proven’? After all, there is an issue hidden in the historical description that cannot be transcended: Owing to the transformation of events in the description, history has in fact become the product of a certain language, a collection of various kinds of texts comprising files and historical material—the texts can never reach the site again. For this reason, various kinds of discourse about the tradition rested on history have in essence become a signifier that cannot find the signified because they have lost the correspondence words have to matters possibly existing between the quotidian description and the world. Because we cannot go back to the depths of history with our own feet—history, with the tradition on which it is rested as an illusion, can only cause us to stop in the arena of signs! Even in the area of calligraphy, in opposition to the theory of “studies on stele calligraphy” (bei xue) that rose in the Qing Dynasty during the era of Qianlong and language, which is thus no longer ‘pure’ and an impure language enables us to be no longer clear about our own tradition. In this sense, we may hope to keep our ‘own’ tradition but what we end up keping is really a ‘Greek’ tradition! 16 | Such as the book Language, Truth and Logic, written by A. J. Ayer, an English analyst, in the 1930s, whose concept of knowledge was exactly the same as the ancient definition as made by Plato. It is not till 1963 when Edmund L. Gettier published his article, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ in Analysis, a magazine, that traditional epistemological theory was fatally challenged. From Gettier with his two little examples of reversal to Alvin I. Goldman with his theory of cause and effect or Robert Nozick with his ‘theory of knowledge based on virtual conditions’, their varied questioning on the classic definitions of knowledge propsed by either Plato or Ayer have helped us realize the impossibility to gain ‘total knowledge’. See Wang Qing jie, ‘Knowledge and Skeptism: A discussion of and exploration of the nature of knowledge in contemporary English and American philosophies’, Chinese Social Sciences, No., 4, 2002.

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Jiaqing (1736-1821) , the so-called “studies on calligraphic notes” (tie xue) emphasized that calligraphy as an ideal standard and artistic norm had its origin in the Wei and Jin Dynasties (3th to 5th century). Kang Youwei (18581927), in his Thoughts on Chinese Calligraphy, also limited stele studies to the steles in the Northern Dynasties (386-581) and explicitly excluded the process in which Emperor Kangxi (1644-1662) promoted the steles of Tang Dynasty (618-907) as a result of his attempt to restore the classical stile.17 Our historical vision, however, determined that our interpretation of the standards for “model calligraphy” (fashu) in the Wei and Jin Dynasties inevitably carried our ‘pre-conception’. Just as we cannot go back to the depths of history with our own feet we cannot reach the world of famous calligraphers like Lu Ji (261-303 A.C.), Wang Xun (349-400 A.C.) or Wang Xizhi (303-361 A.C.) Originally, calligraphy belonged to the world calligraphy itself opened up and formed its own essence in this opening up. Then, with the loss of the relationship in which calligraphy as the essence of art rests, and along with the loss of the traditional thought and paradigm that ‘the quotidian is the way’ and ‘things and reason are not two’, in what is known as “oneness of heaven and men” (tian ren he yi), i.e. the harmony of man with nature, in addition to the removal of it from our quotidian, is calligraphy becoming a ‘retain pattern’ like a ‘heritage’ while gradually losing its possibility as an art? Translated by Ouyang Yu/Eva Lüdi Kong 17 | The earliest tie (note) referred to the title of a text; it subsequently also referred to small scraps of paper such as invitations and horoscope engagement cards. For this reason, Ruan Yuan, in his On the Northern Steles and Southern Notes, holds the view that calligraphic notes (tie) began with the texts written on silk. In the subsequent centuries, when people kept pieces of paper with treasured traces of ink, they were all categorized as notes (tie). This is to say that the so-called model calligraphy in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, was only single characters or broken sentences on small pieces of paper. Later, with the completion of calligraphy, The Book of Jin became the model calligraphy for calligraphers in the subsequent dynasties. For this reason, the tie subsequent to the Tang Dynasty had the significance of ‘samples’ for people to imitate or follow. By the Song Dynasty, the fad for ketie (rubbings of calligraphic notes carved on steles) grew strong with the flourishing of wood block printing industries. In this, calligraphies by both Wang Youjun senior and junior, published in the third year of Chunhua, Emperor Taizong of Song Dynasty, took more than half of the space in The Model Notes of Chunhua Pagoda, becoming a quintessential model note (fatie) example for all subsequent centuries. At the same time, though, with the ‘re-emergence’ of The Pagoda Tie, fashu gradually lost its original features, inevitably. In order to find out about the true model calligraphy, people of the time had to turn to the stele inscriptions prior to the Wei and Jin Dynasties. Hence the genesis of the socalled ‘studies on stele calligraphy’.

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Literati Painting: Reflections Across Discontinuities Chen Anying

C ONTINUIT Y AND D ISCONTINUIT Y Continuity is generally held to be a distinguishing feature of Chinese culture. However, throughout the modernization process of the last hundred years the Chinese people have experienced repeated discontinuity: not only was there the complete break with a three thousand-year-old cultural entity, but there were also repeated fractures and rejections within the different periods in recent history. The Cultural Revolution, which lasted ten years, is usually considered to be the main factor responsible for the annihilation of traditional culture. Not only was it responsible for the destruction of innumerable cultural relics, for the degradation of a whole intellectual class and the disappearance of all refined culture, it even challenged the moral ideas and customs stubbornly held on to by ordinary people—with the result that later generations unanimously qualified this period as catastrophic or unparalleled in history. What was most incredible about the Cultural Revolution is that not only did it create discontinuity within Chinese cultural tradition in general, it also created discontinuity within the short tradition of the Chinese Communist Party. For example, the system which was set up at the founding of party and state, the Yan’an literary and artistic traditions from 1942 onwards1 and the ensuing Soviettype art education system from the fifties onwards, were all completely repudiated during the Cultural Revolution. So when talking about the ‘art of the Mao era’, art historians usually classify the ‘art of the Cultural Revolution’ as a separate unit. And this is not only because the art of the Cultural Revolution arose out of a different social context, but also because it created forms which differed from the Yan’an woodcut movement or the art style of the seventeen years following the founding of the state in 1 | Cp. Mao Zedong’s Talks on Literature and Art, delivered in Yan’an in 1942 (translator’s note).

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1949. Of course, the policy of reform and opening up which followed the Cultural Revolution gave rise to social structures and trends which were totally different from those of the previous thirty years. But the thirty years of ‘reform and opening up’ were also cut in two—by the 1989 students’ movement and Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern tour—so that we have two clearly distinguishable periods: the 1980s, and the period extending from the nineties to the present. According to art historians, we have to differentiate between the two periods: some call the first period the modern period, and the second the post-modern period. This may not be completely accurate, but there are many pragmatic reasons which justify these distinctions as a basis for discussion. The sociologist Sun Liping, referring to the description of the West as a “pluralist society”, calls Chinese society since the nineties a “fragmented society”. In this so-called fragmented society “the different parts seem to be living in wholly different eras as far as development is concerned, and so it is impossible for them to form a coherent society. The result is that society as a whole is fragmented.” In comparison to this, “in (present-day Western) pluralist society, even though society is deeply split and all kinds of social forces co-exist and different value systems clash, as the different parts of society all co-exist at the same level of social development, together they still form an entity.”2 The ‘fragmented society’ described by Sun Liping is chiefly the result of the series of social changes that have occurred since the ‘opening up’ policy. But we can just as well regard it as a final result of the modernization process which China has undergone in the last hundred years. As described above, it is exactly this history of continual social and cultural discontinuity that has made it impossible for China to create a ‘pluralist society’ since it came out of its centralized, isolationist socialist period: Although on the surface Chinese society appears to be pluralist, the societies of even relatively conservative European countries have more diversity and enjoy a greater degree of social freedom. After entering the twenty-first century, China’s contemporary art has become ever more difficult to describe in terms of ‘schools’ or ‘movements’; the enormous choice in art trends does not favour the creation of schools, and at the same time popular culture, on the net and on television, creates one short-lived fashion or hot topic after the other. Although from the sociological point of view the danger of social upheaval lurks beneath the ‘fragmented society’, the ‘freedom’ (or perhaps ‘disorder’) and the diversity of social landscapes to be found in this society apparently provide a fertile soil for the continuing freshness and vigour of contemporary Chinese art. However, quite a number of people suspect that Chinese avant-garde art from the eighties to the present day is nothing but a superficial imitation of Western modernism and post-modernism, and that it is only thanks to its reliance on ‘Chinese branding’ that internationally fashionable Chi2 | Sun Liping, Duanlie—20 shiji 90 niandai yilai de zhongguo shehui. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2003, p. 11.

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nese contemporary art has attracted the attention of Western mainstream art circles, that its continually rising prices are nothing but the result of speculation and are made up mainly of bubbles. Contemporary artists interested in documenting the times tend to cast a sharp eye on the transient nature of present-day Chinese society. For example in his series of photos taken in March and April 2008 entitled ‘Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan scene’, the new media artist Jin Jiangbo, using deserted buildings and abandoned, rubbish-filled production workshops as his subjects, showed up the effect of foreign enterprises absconding with all their capital—something that frequently happened after the promulgation of the new labour laws. Jin Jiangbo’s ‘Great Economic Retreat’ unwittingly presaged the devastating effect which that year’s international financial crisis would have on the processing industries on China’s eastern coast. The accuracy of his presage might have been a coincidence, but the artist’s concern with China’s unbalanced economic structure was of long standing. In Jin Jiangbo’s solo exhibition ‘Booming?’ (October 2008) the present author grouped this set of photos together with the artist’s previous photographic series ‘Chinese Market Scene’ which pictured ‘booming scenes’ in the biggest small-commodity market in the world, in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province. With these two contrasting series the artist set a question mark against China’s exploding economy. In an interview he said that prosperity and crisis were inevitably the two future scenarios which simultaneously presented themselves to China, “which can be regarded as a ‘cross the river by feeling the stones’ kind of developing country“.

R ADICAL AND C ONSERVATIVE The tendency of Chinese intellectuals to revert to tradition can be traced back to the nineties. In the decade since the policy of reform and opening up (i.e. the 80s), the self-named heirs of the May Fourth New Culture Movement with its democracy-inspired ‘emancipatory language’ had completely dominated the art world. At that time, people’s attitudes towards tradition and towards government were much the same: as far as most people were concerned, the rule of the Communist Party was nothing but a revival of the old feudal autocracy; only by making a clean break with past traditions could China perhaps leave its isolated yellow earth and head towards the vast blue oceans. Then, at the beginning of the nineties, the conflict between cultural radicalism and cultural conservatism surfaced. In September 1988, a professor of history at a US university, Yu Yingshi (b. 1930), gave a lecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong entitled ‘Radical and Conservative in the History of Modern Chinese Thought’. The lecture notes reached the Mainland and gave rise to widespread discussion. In his lecture Yu Yingshi sharply criticized the dominance of radicalism amongst Chinese intellectual circles during the previous hun-

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dred years. He said: “In the West, for example in England with its Conservative Party, ‘conservative’ certainly is not seen as something shameful. But in China I have never met anyone who would call himself politically conservative. If a Chinese person happens to be attached to old things, there will always be something apologetic about the way he talks about them”. He also said, “Western society is a modern open system; basically it is self-regulating. Thus, whether it is conservative, libertarian or radical, it has transcended the conflict between tradition and modernity. China, however, is not like that: the focus of ideological conflict is still between tradition and modernity, whereby Chinese culture stands for tradition, and Western culture stands for modernity”. In the main Yu Yingshi’s analysis is not wrong. One of the implications of his comparison between Eastern and Western attitudes toward conservatism is that, in the course of gradual modernization, it is beneficial to preserve extant indigenous traditions. For example, in his essay he says: “Over the last hundred years Taiwan has certainly endured the repeated onslaughts of modernization and has become very different from mainland China. However, Taiwan’s multifaceted socio-economic, political and cultural changes followed a natural, gradual historical development, and a relatively large number of Chinese traditions have been preserved, certainly many more than on the Mainland.” As stated above, during the past hundred years the people who stayed on the Mainland again and again encountered disruptions of the modernization process. These continual disruptions were the cause and at the same time the consequence of cultural radicalism. The prevailing radical ideological trend which took the West as a model for modernization and completely repudiated home-grown traditions was much like Yu Yingshi’s huge rock which had rolled down a steep slope for nearly a hundred years and thus stowed up an astonishing amount of energy. Thus even though the Mainland opened up after the Cultural Revolution, radical ideology had not come to an end. At the same time as Yu Yingshi was holding his lecture in Hong Kong, in mainland China this radical ideological trend was moving towards what was to be yet another climax after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution: the 4th June 1989 Tian’anmen incident. With regards to art, ’85 New Wave art (a radical imitation of Western avantgarde art) had reached its peak that same year with the opening on 5th February of ‘The China Avant-Garde Exhibition’ at a place considered to be a symbol of national authority, the Beijing Chinese Art Gallery. At this exhibition, radical performance art with gunshots, scattered condoms etc. declared the victory of new art over the old system. With the beginning of the nineties there came the so-called swing away from ideology to learning (cong sixiang dao xueshu de zhuanxiang). People generally considered the thinking of the eighties to have been rather careless, for although they used the word ‘Western’, people’s understanding of the West was still no better than it had been during the ‘New Culture Movement’ period—or even very much inferior, for many of the

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intellectuals who had initiated the New Culture Movement period (19151920) had been in Europe as foreign students, so their understanding of the West was based on their own experience and not on second-rate Chinese translations. Besides this, although they commonly maintained a radically critical attitude towards tradition, the standard bearers of the New Culture Movement generally all had a sound grounding in ancient Chinese civilization as well as the basic knowledge that is handed down from generation to generation, so they were much better equipped to compare Chinese and Western culture than the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution. At the beginning of the nineties, when New Confucianism and the study of Ancient Chinese Civilization swept across China from overseas, there were still quite a few people who had their doubts, suspecting that these trends represented some kind of narrow nationalism, autocracy in another guise, or a retreat into the past etc. However, with time, the cry for a return to tradition gradually prevailed over these suspicions. These days traditional Chinese painting or literati painting no longer suffers the embarrassment of having to justify its existence. But this does not mean that the discontinued tradition can be revived simply by picking up the threads. There is a prevalent argument which says that tradition is in our blood, that all we need to do is create art and it will inevitably have Chinese features. Such statements constitute a kind of mild deconstruction of the idea that we need to form some notions about tradition. Certainly, people who spend all their time propagating tradition may not necessarily truly understand tradition. Copying a scholar-official’s lifestyle is most probably just an affectation, and the resulting art most certainly lacks the casual natural style of traditional literati paintings. In his most recent article ‘Traditional Chinese painting’s problem: What exactly is the basis for the continued existence of painting with writing brush, ink stick, paper and inkstone’, Lü Peng implies that most new literati painters are not conversant enough with traditional culture. Indeed, in private conversations there is a more direct and provocative rumour which says that new literati painters are simply uneducated. True, a distinctive feature of literati painting comes from skills other than painting, and it is often the artist’s superior cultural backpack which directly determines the quality of his painting. By comparison, the art of those using ink wash painting as a medium to create abstract or conceptual ‘experimental ink wash painting’ is very far from the standard bimo-paintings that we are familiar with, yet among these artists there are several who are exceptional and who surpass the majority of the new literati painters as far as their mastery in integrating traditional culture is concerned. But the idea that ‘tradition is in our blood’ is no wiser than the ‘stick to traditional culture’ idea which it seeks to deconstruct. Of course, new literati painting may be suspected of being a cultural pose, but at least it represents an effort to return to mainstream cultural traditions. Compared to all the different ideas about reforming traditional Chinese painting

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advocated within the last century, choosing to return directly to the main trend of traditional Chinese art—literati painting—seems to be the best choice.

THE ‘A RT R E VOLUTION ’ AND THE R EFORM OF TR ADITIONAL C HINESE P AINTING In 1985 the magazine Jiangsu Pictorial (Jiangsu Huakan) published an article by Li Xiaoshan entitled ‘My Opinion on Contemporary Chinese Painting’, which contained the sentence: “Traditional Chinese painting has come to a dead end.” This sentence paved the way for a public discussion about Chinese traditional art’s advance on the road to modernization: experimental ink and wash painting. This sketchy superficial article evidently reflected views on tradition which were widespread among the generation that had grown up during the Cultural Revolution: Traditional Chinese painting can be regarded as one facet of a feudal ideology, it is rooted in a closed-off autocratic society […]. For two thousand years, from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen, Chinese feudal society showed astonishing stability and severely restricted the development of art, which was an expression of its values. With regard to both form and content, traditional Chinese painting is in decline […]. There is scarcely a sign of any breakthrough or renewal. As a matter of fact, throughout its history Chinese traditional art has been steadily perfected as far as techniques are concerned, but as far as concepts of painting are concerned its history just shrivels up.

In this article Li Xiaoshan suggests that “changes in concepts of painting mark the beginning of the revolution in painting”. This sentence is reminiscent of the discussion about ‘art revolution’ in the New Culture Movement period. The term ‘art revolution’ was first used in New Youth (Xin Qingnian), the core magazine of the New Culture Movement. The first number of volume 6 of New Youth, issued on 15th January 1918, published a correspondence between Chen Duxiu and Lü Cheng about the ‘art revolution’. According to Chen Duxiu the target of the art revolution was literati art—from the Song Dynasty ‘scholar group’ (for example Su Shi, Mi Fu, etc.) to Duan Ni and Huang Gongwang of the Yuan dynasty, then Wen Zhiming and Shen Zhou of the Ming Dynasty and the four Wangs of the beginning of the Qing Dynasty (Wang Shimin, Wang Jian, Wang Yuanqi and Wang Hui). Chen Duxiu said: “It seems that if you want to improve Chinese painting you first have to get rid of Wang pictures.” In his article he wrote: “In my family’s collection I saw at least two hundred Wang pictures, not more than one tenth of which had a ‘subject’; generally speaking, all of them used lin, mo, fang, fu3; they duplicated old paintings; 3 | The four methods for copying ancient paintings (translator’s note)

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as for their own creations, there were simply none—that was the worst influence Wang paintings had on Chinese art.” If that is the case, how can traditional Chinese painting be reformed and what can be used to replace Wang art? Chen Duxiu’s answer is clear: it is the realistic spirit of Western art, or simply ‘realism’. The realism Chen Duxiu meant was not that of artists like Gustave Courbet, who revolted against traditional academic realism. Rather it referred to the representational painting tradition which had taken shape since the Renaissance. However, in this article, Chen Duxiu does not understand the Western realist painting tradition as chiefly a ‘method for reproducing the world’s particularities’. Rather for him it had the much wider meaning of ‘keeping in touch with real life’: he saw it as a way of approaching art, a way of approaching life. Then why must one use realism or rather a ‘realistic spirit’ to save moribund Chinese painting? Chen Duxiu actually says it very clearly: “Painters must use realism, only thus can they give reign to their own talents and paint their own pictures, get away from the stereotypes of their forefathers.” The implication is that it is not necessary to revert to the Western concept of realism. Jin Cheng (1878-1926, also known as Jin Gongbo), who had studied in England and was the founder of the Society for Research in Chinese Painting, quoted the ancients to express a similar idea: “Painters of the olden days had Mother Nature as their teacher, later generations used pictures as teachers […]. The decline of art was assured.”4 Painters should use nature as their teacher. The same logical conclusion was to be found within the literary revolution of the time. Thus it can be seen that ‘realism’ as advocated by Chen Duxiu and his circle did not refer to the reproduction of some technique or particular style but rather to a certain spirit and a certain attitude. Later generations who took this ‘realism’ in its narrow sense caused many misunderstandings. Particularly in those years Chinese artists who had themselves lived in Europe could not but have been aware that the canons and norms that had taken shape after the Italian Renaissance had been destroyed by the concepts of new art. Many of the Chinese artists who had studied in Europe during the first thirty years of the twentieth century were influenced by Western modern art movements like Late Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, abstract painting etc. Some of them stayed on in Europe but most of them returned to China and either formed associations for the propagation of modern art concepts or themselves undertook research on how to combine Western art movements with Chinese painting. This resulted in the creation of many fine oil or ink and wash paintings. Western classical painting and Western modern painting are the two references used when examining Chinese painting. Defenders of traditional Chinese painting emphasize the differences between traditional Chinese painting and Western classical painting; but no matter how hard they try, 4 | ‘Jin Gongbo’s Lectures’ (Jin Gongbo Jiangyanlu, 1919)

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they cannot find any difference between modern painting from China and modern painting from the West. In the last hundred years the comparison between Chinese and Western painting has provided inexhaustible material for discussion, and yet this topic has never really been the subject of thorough academic research and awaits a convincing conclusion to this day.

THE F ORMATION OF L ITER ATI AND L ITER ATI P AINTING The terms ‘Chinese painting’ (zhongguo hua) and ‘traditional Chinese painting’ (guohua) normally do not include all the art genres produced in Chinese history but refer particularly to the essence (some might say the dross) of Chinese traditional painting. Or else they refer to the kind of painting that is most representative of China. For most people the terms zhongguo hua and guohua refer to literati painting and the style of painting created by the intellectual stratum in imperial times. Historically, we can roughly divide Chinese painting into two categories according to the identity of its creators. One category concerns artworks created by anonymous craftsmen, for example engravings in stone, tomb murals, frescoes in cave temples, lacquer paintings etc. The other category concerns the art created by the intellectual stratum which generally goes under the name of literati painting or scholarly painting. In its broader sense, this category also includes painting by educated people of noble birth. The notions of scholar (shi), scholar-official (shidafu) and literati (wenren) are very important concepts in Chinese history. Roughly speaking, each of these terms can be translated as ‘intellectual’ or, as Professor Yu Yingshi suggests, ‘intellectual stratum’, in order to distinguish them from modern intellectuals.5 As individuals, all these scholars, officials and literati certainly had one or the other shortcoming as well as all kinds of selfish motives and wild ambitions. But judging by the ideals they pursued, whether they tended more towards to Confucianism or rather towards Taoism or Buddhism, they all sought to transcend our mundane existence. Generally speaking, the Confucian school advocated exercising restraint over one’s personal desires, treating the world as one whole community, and recognizing one’s duty to the state. On the other hand, what Buddhism and Taoism sought was to transcend the profane world and to live a carefree individual life untrammelled by everyday matters. As a matter of fact, the conflict between the two ideals—detachment from the world or worldly engagement—also existed within Confucianism, being mentioned as far back as the Analects. The scholars, officials and literati moved freely between detachment and worldly engagement. This created a very special kind of personality that allowed them to transcend the profane world; as far as se5 | Yu Yingshi, Shi yu zhongwen hua. Shanghai: Shanghai Press, 2003, p. 3.

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cular power was concerned they kept their independence, since they were unwilling to form cliques to pursue selfish interests, and also unwilling to bow and scrape in the service of influential personages. That these scholars, officials and literati cultivated elegance and refinement as criteria for their artistic activities—poems, calligraphy, paintings, engravings, or playing the qin, or chess, or cultivating gardens—surely had something to do with their superior, independent characters. It was in the Wei-Jin period (220-240) that large numbers of scholarofficials began to take up painting and the idea of ‘fine art’ took shape. Calligraphy and literature had already ceased to be purely functional in the Han Dynasty and had become art forms for the deliberate expression of individual thoughts and feelings. Whether it was literature or calligraphy that first became a fine art is difficult to ascertain, but one thing we can be sure of is that they were both established as independent fine arts before painting. Writing articles was the scholar’s business. Non-scholars could not lay down standards for characters and penmanship, and the only thing a craftsman without classical schooling could do was write and copy characters. Before the appearance of the independent man of letters and the calligrapher, writing characters and texts was originally the main occupation of scholars. The writings and characters they carelessly left behind would become a fertile soil for later writers and calligraphers. The situation with painting was not the same. From the beginnings it had been considered to be a craft, and it was only after having been influenced for a long time by the participation of scholars and by their way of thinking that it gradually left the sphere of craftsmanship to become a fine art in its own right, what we now call literati painting. What is now called literati painting is a style which gradually developed due to the participation of scholar-officials. This style is characterized by, for example, the use of the traditional tools: writing brush, ink stick, paper and inkstone; the preponderance of black ink; the taste for exquisite writing; the combination of poetry, painting and calligraphy in one print; the use of landscape, flowers and birds as principal subjects etc. The history of scholars’ involvement in painting reaches far back into Ancient China. However, although it is true that the literati of those times painted, it was not yet literati painting. It was not until the tastes of scholar-officials had become the standard for painting, and the special instruments, techniques and styles had been developed in conformity with these tastes that literati painting was finally established.

I NK PAINTING AS A L EISURE P URSUIT IN OUR D AY AND A GE The rise of literati painting in China can be compared with the formation and establishment of fine arts in Europe from the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries. The modern concept of art has its foundations in the Italian Renaissance when a difference began to be made between ar-

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tists and artisans, and art gradually came to be valued for purely aesthetic reasons. Western scholars have pursued wide-ranging studies on the links between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, on the shaping of modern art concepts, on the establishment of fine arts, and on the changes in institutions and concepts which developed against this background. Most Chinese people know little of these studies, yet their ideas on art, and all the familiar art institutions like art museums, art academies, art galleries and the art market come from the West. Most people still do not realize that China has its own fine art with a history much older than that of European art, and also with a history which is very different. It has never entered their minds that art might take another path. The main purpose of this article is to try to describe this extraordinary path. The reason why Chinese art developed along a different path is because China once had a class of people which existed nowhere else—the scholar-official class. It is the existence of this class which assured the unity of China, which was responsible for China’s cultural and social structure and which for two thousand years maintained a high degree of continuity and stability. And it was also due to the existence of this class that the main trend of art cut itself off from the inspiration to be found in folk art or the crafts. In fact, the opposite was the case: folk art and crafts were always influenced by literati art, and great efforts were made to imitate and reproduce literati artworks. On the other hand, if we consider mainstream art in medieval Europe—i.e. religious art—we can see that there the official art of the period was a kind of folk art, just as many of the official festivals of the period were no more than popular festivals which had been converted into official festivals. Again, if we compare Chinese literati painting with European fine art since the Renaissance, we discover that European fine art continued to have close links to artisanry. In the eyes of Chinese scholar-officials, although this way of creating deceptively life-like perspectives and shading might not quite have been a vulgar taste that was unworthy of mention, yet the product was too ‘artisanal’, too clumsy, its style too lifeless. This was the view of Western art actually held by scholar-officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties. In an earlier era, for example, when the famous painter of the Southern Dynasties (420-589) Zhang Sengyou used the light and shade techniques which had spread to China from India to paint flowers-in-relief (tu’ao hua) on a temple wall, this elicited the comment: “Looking at them from a distance, one has the illusion that they are (carved) in relief, but close at hand they are seen to be flat. The visitors of these times found them peculiar and renamed the temple Relief Temple.” This technique of relief painting, although it was in favour among the common people of the time, could never become the dominant practice for Chinese painting. To come back to the problem of fine arts mentioned above: After literati art had left the realm of artisanry and had become fine art, it did not follow the road of Western modern painting. It did not move towards pure abstraction but developed into a mainstream means of expression

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embedded within traditional society, a medium of communication. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the art concepts and art institutions (for example, art academies and art galleries) which had come into existence after the Renaissance had been widely challenged by artists. In the first half of the twentieth century, fine arts and their accompanying aesthetics also felt the effect of the anti-aesthetics stance taken in philosophy circles, and during the same period there were also various anti-art movements in artistic circles. From the sixties on, these anti-art trends gradually merged into post-modernism, which demanded the breakdown of the boundaries between elite art and popular art, between high culture and popular culture, thus giving rise to a contemporary art which no longer bears any resemblance to the fine art of the past. This also to some extent changed and restructured institutions like art academies and art galleries. The idea of art as high culture was also often the target of deconstruction in contemporary Western visual arts research. These tendencies and trends immediately had an influence on China. The situation compelled Chinese people to wonder: Does the tradition of Chinese-style fine art already have to be given up again so soon after its revival? In the series of fragmenting social transformations which took place in China, the links between the people and literati painting were severed bit by bit. In the course of modernization in the West, however, the traditions formed by different eras did not completely negate each other, and the traditions formed by later eras did not supersede the traditions of the previous phase. In fact, dissimilar traditions converged and created a pluralistic state of affairs. Within this pluralistic set-up, modern Western society has not—as Walter Benjamin and similar thinkers worried— brought about the destruction of civilization or become the graveyard of civilization. The Chinese have only recently realized that modernization cannot be equated with civilization, and yet Western thinkers and artists like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or William Morris realized a long time ago that unbridled modernization has a very destructive effect on culture and civilization. Literati art was produced by the scholar-official class. After the abolition of the imperial civil-service examination system in 1905 this class progressively faded away to be replaced by modern intellectuals with their tendency to ever narrower specialized learning. Literati painting had its roots in a traditional society, but this traditional social order has long since been shattered by Maoist political movements and the last thirty years of economic development. In fact, one may rightly say that nothing of the old social order is left. So is it possible or not for literati painting to live on today? For the last one hundred years, from the ‘art revolution’ of the early twentieth century to contemporary ‘experimental ink-wash painting’ (shiyan shuimo), Chinese cultural elites have worried their heads with such questions as the creative power of art and its capacity for innovation. In their view, literati art cannot provide an impetus for artistic innovation. Certainly, literati art’s trail-blazing golden era is already gone never to re-

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turn, and in contemporary society literati art is doomed to reproduce the painting styles of old. However, this does not prevent literati art from being a very good option for ordinary people’s approach to art. And as this article has shown, the specific characteristics of literati art qualify it to become an optimal choice, at least as far as Chinese art-lovers are concerned. As far as modern housebound and office-bound people are concerned, the way of life of the ancient literati class and their art form could provide them with a model for recreation. Literati art and calligraphy can be exercised in a small space. As a kind of almost motionless dance they can provide modern people—so far removed from song and dance traditions—with a chance to return to naturalness. The subtle movements of hand, eye and body are the natural world of literati painting. The instruments of literati painting—the four treasures—are all natural products, too. Collecting inkstones can take you to remote mountains. Investigating the manufacture of your brushes, ink and paper will take you into the vast human world. Naturalness is preserved beneath literati painting’s sophisticated cultural form. Leaving aside the question how landscape painting (shanshuihua), which came into being thanks to literati art, managed to achieve the merger of culture and nature, if you consider literati art’s basic materials and the basic physical movements which it requires, you can see that it could supply modern man—who is increasingly estranged from the natural world—with a chance to get closer to nature again. Literati art is like Chinese gardens: it combines culture and nature within a restricted space. It is to be hoped that the modern study of literati art will not only enable us to reconnect with nature but that it will also enable us to reconciliate modernity and tradition, modernism and culture. It is only by achieving this reconciliation that China can become a country that is pleasant, reliable, and an attractive place to visit and live in. Translated by Helen Wallimann

Realism is a Kind of Ideology in China Wang Chunchen

Realism has a significant influence on contemporary Chinese art theory. Even artists and works that are internationally recognized to be avant-garde are influenced by Chinese realist ideology, which has persisted spontaneously as part of avant-garde or ‘contemporary’ art. Since the early twentieth century there have been contrasting ideas in China about the function and significance of art. These ideas have appeared in different forms as part of China’s development over the past one hundred years or so. During wartime in the zone led by the Communist Party the idea was promoted that art should support the war effort and that it should also serve the ‘Workers, Farmers and Soldiers’. China then carried forward the socialist political system after the founding of New China in 1949. The National Fine Art Association was founded at this time to implement art-related policies made by the Central Government and the Party and to coordinate, conduct and lead artists across the country in the creation of art works. To carry out research on the history of Chinese fine art during the twentieth-century, it is necessary to address how realist theory has changed and developed within a Chinese context. It is especially important to pay attention to the significance of the background to realist theory in China and its ideological discourses. It will thus become possible to conduct clear research into the significance and reasons for the existence of other types of artistic forms. Consequently, the key aims of this essay are to analyse how realist discourses in China have been expressed and why they still conform to the correctness of official political discourses. Also, by way of criticism there will be a discussion of what new kind of Chinese realism might be upheld. Only then can the whole artistic structure and the diversification of art theory in China be clearly judged.

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‘R E ALISM ’ IN THE C HINESE C ONTE X T The text of the talk given by Mao Zedong at the ‘Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ of 1942 had a considerable influence on realist discourses in China. It became official policy in China after 1949. Mao’s talk, which set out an authoritative political definition of literature and art, stated that ‘Literature and Art should serve the common people’1 and advocated ‘socialist realism’.2 Another theory of realism in China originated from socialist realism in the Soviet Union. These two views mingled and correlated with each other to become the guiding systems and principles for creating artistic and literary works. These systems and principles were implemented through the teaching activities of various kinds of fine art academies and fine art work units (yishu danwei). Artists and art workers in these organizations created, published and exhibited their art works according to the principles and policies which defined artistic form and thematic content after 1949. Although there were disputes and different interpretations of these principles and policies when they were implemented, they still had great influence on thinking related to fine art education, concepts of art creation and habits of artistic judgement. All of this forms the background to the transformation of fine art after the adoption of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Opening up’ policy in 1978. These concepts of realism are important frames of reference for research on the subsequent development of Chinese Modernist Art (xiandai yishu) and Contemporary Art (dangdai yishu). Looking at representations of art works made at the time, it can be concluded that realism was used to reflect the Anti-Japanese War and the Civil War before 1949, the war to resist U.S. aggression and to aid Korea during the 1950s, ‘the detailed activities and aspects of the common people of New China’ and ‘Productions and Constructions’. The understanding of realism was clearly directed toward life under Socialism, its praise and the reflection of its construction, which required responses from various fine art media. For instance, Chinese painting was supposed to reflect the reality of contemporaneous social events. Traditional Chinese landscape painting (shanshui hua) was supposed to include scenes such as war, construction sites, big chimneys etc. When it did so, it could be considered as a form of realism. If not, it would be open to criticism3 . Traditional Chinese ink and wash painting (shuimo hua), which did not conventionally involve representations of the human figure, was required to ‘enforce figure painting by copying from life’ as a means of reflecting reality. This 1 | Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong Thoughts on Art and Literature, Central Literature Press, p. 67 2 | Ditto, p. 71 3 | Wang Qi, Fight for the Founding of Neo-Realism in Painting, firstly published in Discussion on New Fine Art (1951, New Art and Literature Press, Shanghai), collected in Wang Qi’s Thoughts on Fine Art, Volume I, China Art and Literature Federation Press, Beijing, 2008, pp. 220-211.

R EALISM IS A K IND OF I DEOLOGY IN C HINA

was the starting point of the reformation movement of Chinese painting, which was intended to bring about an objective representation of real life. As a result, ‘ink, wash and figure painting’ (shuimo renwu hua) became an important new genre of Chinese fine art. The theoretical background to this new genre was undoubtedly derived from an interpretation of realist discourse. Representation of the new scenes of socialist China which the common people would love to see and know was the requirement of realism. As a result, the realistic style of painting was stressed, which was equally considered as a form of realism. A number of painters from the Soviet Union came to China to provide training and tutorials. Moreover, many Chinese students went to the Soviet Union to study. Gradually, the mainstream of artistic creation began to lean in one direction. Technically, sketching, especially the style influenced by the Soviet Union, was “considered to be the basis for the realist model of art”.4 Although it appears that “realism is a creative formula”, different from the concept of “realist expression method”, the “attitude toward real life and the masses is the basis for the realist approach to creation”.5 Therefore, realism is not just an approach within the Chinese context. Thematically, socialist realism before 1978 strove for plots or stories to represent life scenes, working scenes and ‘great leap forward’ scenes of workers, farmers and soldiers; to praise the history of wars led by the Communist Party according to the policies made by the Party and the government; to reflect and extol political movements such as the war to resist U.S. aggression and to aid Korea, the Anti-Right Movement, the Cultural Revolution, Anti-Capitalism; to object to American imperialism; and to support the independent movements in Asia, Africa and South America in international relations. Therefore, it would not be appropriate to understand Chinese realism purely from the definition given by Western fine art history, or to interpret it according to the literal meaning of the word. Understanding Chinese realism means to analyze and chart the historical and political situations within a particular historical period. When the official ideology dominated realism, it was inevitable that abstract art would become marginalized and politicized. For instance, the discussion on impressionism in the 1950s was regarded as a kind of political criticism of a non-factual approach.6 Within the Chinese context, being political and ideological implied ‘rising 4 | Zhang Shaoxia, Li Xiaoshan, The History of China’s Modern Painting, Jiangsu Fine Art Press, 1986, p. 243. 5 | Shao Dazhen, The Spirit of Realism and Modern Art, firstly published in the 11th edition of Fine Art, 1980, then collected in Traditional Fine Art and Modernist School, Sichuan Fine Art Press, 1983, p. 210. 6 | Wang Qi, Fight for the Founding of Neo-Realism in Painting, firstly published in Discussion on New Fine Art (1951, New Art and Literature Press, Shanghai), collected in Wang Qi’s Thoughts on Fine Art, Volume I, China Art and Literature Federation Press, Beijing, 2008, p. 289.

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to a higher plane of principle and dialectical struggle’, which requires writers or artists to withhold wrong political positions or political attitudes which indirectly indicate ideological issues. Artists or writers who did so would be criticized or discriminated against if the issues were slight, or they would be repudiated or imprisoned as ‘Rightists’ or ‘anti-Revolutionaries’ if the issues were serious. Quite often writers or artists were accused because of what they said, given the two typical historical periods: the anti-Right movement and the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, government officials could not be criticized and individuals could not freely express their views on society or current situations. Truly revealing real life meant to eulogize official policies and politicized life. Realism within such a background, which was closely related to “the political struggles during the modernising process of Chinese society”,7 became the main understanding of realism before the Cultural Revolution. After 1978, following Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘Reforming and Opening up’ (gaige kaifang), people started questioning art theory and art creation related to revolutionary realism or socialist realism,8 which consequently diversified the features of art creation in China. Contemporary Chinese avant-garde art was considered as a way to break away from socialist realism and create art works based on personal life experience or the experience of studying art. That is why Western realist art that had been popular in previous decades had a big visual impact in China during the 1980s. Although the ‘New Generation’ of the 1990s adopted a factualist approach, the thematic content was about their personal lives rather than political events. This kind of art work aroused interest from the public because it was seen as a reaction against politicized realism. Moreover, ‘Cynical Realism’ also adopted a factualist approach, but these young artists’ works were concerned with their state of life and their observation of surrounding stories, which were meant to pass on sentimental feelings toward life. These kinds of art were nothing special from the perspective of the language they used and the way in which their concepts related to the avant-garde. They did, however, attract attention from the public and were regarded as avant-garde art by officials as they kept a distance from official realist ideology. It should not be ignored that in the past thirty years, no matter how diversified approaches toward the creation of art have been, and no matter how challenging the avant-garde art has been, there has always been an official socialist realist line—for instance, the socialist spiritual civilization during the 1980s and the policy-guided ‘main theme’ advocated since the 1990s, which actually were just names for socialist 7 | Yi Ying, Realism and Modernism in the book The Dusk of Academy, Hunan Fine Art Press, Shangsha, 2001, p. 317. 8 | Li Xianting, Realism is not the Only Right Approach (1980), Re-discussion on Realism is not the Only Right Approach (1981), The Art Model of Mao Zedong (1 st draft in 1989, 2nd draft in 1995), in the book The Important Part is not Art, Jiangsu Fine Art Press, Nanjing, 2000.

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realism and which still emphasized praising and extolling. The main tones and themes are still set and decided by officials, rather than artists’ personal observations and personal life experiences. The only difference is that there are many more styles of expression and more diversified techniques now, which has resulted from the diversification of art over the past thirty years.

W HAT K IND OF R E ALISM ? During the past decade or so, the term ‘realism’ was not used that often in relation to contemporary Chinese art. Instead, social, interventionist and political sides of contemporary Chinese art were emphasized, which actually was a kind of artistic conceptual transformation of the notion of ‘realism’, transforming it into a ‘realist spirit’, which “faces laborious life directly, faces the spirit of a violent struggle directly (Lu Xun). It does not cover up ugliness with beauty. Perceptually, it can either be aesthetic, which is harmonious, refined, unified and coherent, or unaesthetic, which is incomplete, contradictory, absurd and mysterious. It faces both the society and the individual.”9 Its target is socialist realism. Contemporary art would lose its dependent relations and avant-garde side if there was no such target. It should therefore be considered a new kind of realism that is not false, a rural realism that has been affected unconventionally. It is not the kind of realism that copies existing patterns. It is a kind of realism that truly faces the inner side, observes the world independently and reveals true feelings about the world. If there is such a kind of realism, it will embody new meanings and concepts related to realism. The new realism in China today is not the realism of painting, it is a comprehensive realism that embraces the art world in an integrated way and crosses different kinds of artistic boundaries. It should be emphasized that the factualist painting style should now be smashed, and it should be realized that realism is not just a kind of reality seen through our eyes. The difficulty of today’s art is how to create a kind of reality that is not based on everyday visual life and that will make people experience a new kind of art and its values, rather than thinking of conventional painting whenever art is mentioned. Now is the turning point for contemporary Chinese art. The turning point is that China has now been exposed to modern realism and represents itself as an open society, mixing with the world. If the new realism cannot be shown comprehensively, the tremendous changes in China—material, cultural and artistic—will not be conveyed. Chinese art today requires individual characteristics, individual visual opinions, strong creative desires in the sense of a comprehensive

9 | Wang Lin, Introduction part in The State of Contemporary Chinese Fine Art, Jiangsu Fine Art Press, Nanjing, 1995, p. 22 and p. 23.

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creation from personal experience, and a self-display of national cultural mentality in a new era.

R E ALISM O BJECTS TO O PPORTUNISM When we look at art works from other countries, we expect to see something different from Chinese art works. People from other countries, too, expect to see something different from their own cultures in Chinese art works. In a global context, the ability to strike a balance between locality and the overall global situation is more important than ever. This does not involve neo-colonialism or Western view points. China should now be open-minded enough to engage in self-criticism, to be independent rather than to rely on influences from the outside. For instance, among those artists who live abroad, apart from a few artists who inherit Chinese elements and receive international recognition, it is obvious that some art works created by some Chinese artists who live abroad lack Chinese characteristics and the historical values of contemporary Chinese art. We often say that being separated from a culture for too long will ultimately lead to a lack of cultural connection in one’s work, a lack of direct perceptual knowledge of the original culture, and a lack of artistic power. This can only be counteracted if these artists create art that can be considered as ‘the other’ within their living environments, and if they do so with a special artistic power that overcomes traditional visual habits. That is the history of contemporary Chinese art, which cannot be inverted. It becomes apparent that as contemporary Chinese art develops it is very important to add personal blood and fresh feelings into the art works. Otherwise, it is a kind of spiritual abandonment. If we understand realism as a way to reflect real life both specifically and factually, for example, painting scenes from real life, sketching farmers in the countryside, etc., then this understanding will be too limited. It actually deviates from the critical spirit and value of realism, and it lacks the personal attitude of artists. Realism should not become partial and one sided, in which case it will not be healthy for the development of contemporary art. Nowadays an artist should be a lonely walker in contemplation, rather than drifting with the tide.

E NTERING THE F IELD OF E NQUIRY OF R E ALISM The purpose of raising the question of the field of realism is to refute the false conception of art that China has at the moment. For the topics that need to be included in the field of inquiry, why can they not become artistic expressions and thinking? When philosophy, history and sociology criticize psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, deconstructionism, gender, post-colonialism and pop-culture etc., what should contemporary Chinese

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art do? Should we just paint casually in the studio? Do it as a kind of technique? If there is no constant creation, it will mark the end of an artists’ life. There are many studios in Beijing, and they should not exist just for the market. Instead, they should become the striving force of Chinese culture and the basis for artistic concepts. While there are many artists in China, there are not many art works that have a personality and spirit that matches the era. Given the special circumstances of China, it will be difficult to judge art only by itself, and doing so will not lead to something that has a unique insight or angle. Only when artists look at issues from a realist perspective, or look at contemporary Chinese issues with realism as a sense of enquiry, will we be able to show art that has artistic personality and is embued with the character of the artists. This is not an excessive demand; it is a requirement that any true art in the Chinese context should have. Therefore, contemporary Chinese art should be judged under the following aspects: whether it changes the conventional understanding of art; whether it admits an attention to life to interfere and impose itself; whether it recognizes the importance of paying attention to related issues. Contemporary artists should not be infatuated with the formality of art. The more diversified art becomes, the wider and more difficult people’s art concepts become. The pluralistic situation of China today is not just a cause for gossiping or for considering meaningless forms or techniques as the purpose of art. What is meant by a realist attitude is to allow the understanding of artists that reforms society to permeate their art. This attitude is really important in making art works that respond to the demands of the era and directly face the issues that China is facing. The realist attitude in China also means the consciousness that each artist and intellectual should have. Pragmatic speculation is not realism. When an artist or intellectual shows the courage to reveal the truth or question false appearances in the face of a politicized environment and history, then this is also a real and specific question. When people are eager to enter history, then there should be a realistic response. People should have an independent spirit and the skills to debate the history that has been hidden, politicized and authorized, and to rewrite history with a responsible realist spirit. The realist field of enquiry means to break away from authority, to break away from market-led opportunism, and to be an artist who can express personal feelings and ideas. As for serious critics, they should hold a serious realist vision that will face real art, that will face and seek serious art. The realist field of enquiry also means truly facing one’s ego, giving full play to art functions that have been enlarged. As some artists have indicated, when painting is not enough to express internal feelings or emotions, performance art or installation is adopted. When painting is too distant, video is used to transform visual power. When picture plane is too weak, stereoscopic presentation is adopted to place the viewer personally

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on the scene. With respect to those works that for more than a decade have involved the painting of big figures, small figures or political symbols, no matter how vivid they are: they are not realism within the field of enquiry, because there is no true realist spirit in these paintings, and these painters have no capability for self-reflection or criticism. The reason why we mention the realist spirit in China is to encourage artists to give free play to their artistic wisdom, to make art that will touch people and inspire people to think more deeply about philosophical issues. To conclude, because of the political system, realism in China is not an academic issue, it is still an ideological issue. The only difference lies in the forms of expression and the degree of politicization. Translated by Sujing Xu

The Emperors Have Rotted Long Ago, Only the Fragrance of Nanmu Wood Remains Qiu Zhijie

At present, the Monument series has eight cement columnar blocks and I cannot guarantee that I shall do a ninth.

Figure 9, 10: In the studio of Qiu Zhijie

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The idea took shape in 2000. It originated with my interest in archaeology; I have always liked to look at the vertical dimensions of the archaeological pits, and I have also liked to look at the sections of the structure of different strata in geography books. In those days when the Xiamen Special Economic Development Zone went through a great development, a lot of machinery came to make roads. Overnight, half a mountain had dramatically disappeared, forming a vertical naked mountainous body of dozens of meters in height. On the cliff, one could often see many half-broken ceramic vases embedded in the earthen wall. Those were the tombs holding the clothing and belongings of the deceased. When cremation was promoted, families that placed an emphasis on tradition would put the ashes in the ceramic vases and re-bury them. Relentless modernity would dig up these things, deeply buried, and show them to people without giving it a second thought, and often carelessly. In a place of history like China, layers of secrets are hidden everywhere. It would be the arrogance of archaeology to remember and sort everything. And it would be a helpless, angry dismissal to forget everything. What we have possessed all along or what I need today is a middle-ofthe-road attitude. In the archaeological pit at the Ban Po remains, I saw that people had put the children who had died young into ceramic vases and set them in the thick wall of rammed mud in their homes. This is invisible existence, completely forgotten, which has become a memory of darkness inside the body, and this is the middle-of-the-road attitude. On New Year’s Day of 1998, I was involved with the excavation of an archeological pit at Yaojiayuan in the eastern suburb of Beijing. At the time, I was also creating video art about missionaries. The idea was to bury small television screens in the strata at different heights which showed videos featuring the same crows flying. In the northern winter the earth was frozen so hard that one could only dig one foot in a few days. As a result, this plan did not entirely work out. My wishes of digging downwards, today as in the past, turned into a heaping of earth upwards. The eight cement blocks are square shaped. The traces on the sides look like the printing marks from the frames in which the cement walls were cast. People might think that I loved Louis Kahn or that I wanted to pay respect to Donald Judd. Each layer of the first cement block consists of revolutionary slogans from various dynasties, mainly involving economic ideologies. The core element is land distribution in agricultural societies, in the rise and fall of dynasties, and in the separations and mergers under heaven. With the rise of the revolution, the followers of the new leaders were mostly attracted by exciting revolutionary slogans, and their attraction always lay in advocating egalitarianism. As the proponents of these slogans had huge followings at their beck and call, the slogans lead to the creation of new emperors as if by the will of heaven. Once a new dynasty was established, prosperity would ensue for several decades if there was a relatively effec-

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tive land system. With the passage of a couple of centuries, land would slowly fall into the hands of the wealthy, again leaving people to go hungry and without land to harvest. Someone else would then ascend the heights and call out with slogans that led to another mass gathering and another revolution. Such cycles became periodic turbulences in Chinese history, a trick for manoeuvring the people through the use of ideals. In the ideal cycle of egalitarianism, the only exception seemed to be Deng Xiaoping when he said: “Let a number of people get rich first”. But, of course, behind that remark stood the remoteness of the comforting thought that we would be ‘getting rich together’. I had learnt these slogans by heart ever since I started middle school. This game occurred at a place where the history of calligraphy converged with that of ideological formation. Sometimes when I wrote out the slogans of the rebels in calligraphy, I would so so in the style of the rulers at the time. Every layer of the second cement block is about texts on how Chinese people have looked at foreign nations or cultures. Cycles and repetitions occur here, too, from contempt for the savage foreigners to the need to learn from and protect ourselves against them, and from a willingness to open up to a return to self-confidence. It is also public knowledge that from modern times the implicit object in that discourse was the European and American world of Christianity. What escapes notice, however, is the nationalism induced by these crises in modern times, in which ‘nation’ furtively replaced the ancient term of ‘under heaven’ and ‘power’ furtively replaced the concept of ‘nation’. The third cement block is by far the easiest to work with if one traces back the history of calligraphy. I selected the mastheads of all the important magazines since the end of the 19th century, when the reformists first created modern newspapers. I copied them directly without gathering characters or designing concepts. On the one hand, the contents of these mastheads are the keywords to the history of Chinese modernization and, on the other hand, despite the rise of mass media, the tradition of calligraphic sociology is to this day still powerful as one in which an individual’s handwriting can support the power of discourse. From Liang Qichao to Yu Youren, and from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, generations of spiritual leaders have left their calligraphy called “ink treasure” on the mastheads of newspapers or magazines in different times. The last layer consists in the two characters yu le (entertainment), from The Entertainment Pictorial, but, of course, entertainment is far from entertainment itself. On the fourth cement block there appears a list of songs appears as can be found in the Karaoke rooms. Even in a public place like Karaoke, each generation enforces its own identification with the ideological formation. Rubbings of public history can be found in the repertoire of their programmes. Their adventures and their unique combination of chosen songs depict a space of personal tastes. The other thread points back to keywords in our collective unconscious such as ‘the age’, ‘tomorrow’,

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‘moon’ and ‘dreams’, but of course there is never lack of the word ‘love’. In a Karaoke atmosphere of self-love, the collective unconscious rules behind a hanging curtain, and what struts on the stage is an individual who thinks he or she can have a total abandon of his or her desires. The fifth cement block serves as evidence that certain individualized discourses can also become a public memory in specific historic chance encounters. These discourses may be able to give rise to certain completely individualized emotions and situations, and they may further become the collective memory of a history because of the energies of the individuals and also because they respond to the collective unconscious of a certain kind. Different from the orthodox histories of the previous three cement blocks, this one is about the way in which the history of our hearts and souls is formed. Sometimes, such a public individual discourse is only a temporary oral language, but it spreads through time, becoming fomented in secret like a curse. Many years later, when facts disperse and details gradually blur, what remains is probably only a remark such as one may blurt out late one night without thinking. Everyone organizes their own version of such a history of heart and soul. One can consider the sixth cement block a pure personal memory. By following the old adage that ‘one treasures paper with written characters’, I have always kept every piece of paper over the years as long as it carries traces of characters, whether written by myself or written to me by others or written to others by others; not even my cats will ever scratch paper with written characters. With the advent of the email age, it becomes rarer for one to receive hand-written letters. What one sees are mostly pieces of paper with insignificant messages or post cards, of which I have chosen a few to be inscribed on these cement steles. They include academic exchanges as well as daily trivia, fragments of personal life as they are. The seventh cement block contains emails written to me by others, but when they arrived they became luanma (characters changed to be irrecognizable because different coder or other reasons). The eighth cement block consists of a diary which I keep on my personal computer. On one occasion when my computer was hit with a vicious virus, it became a mass of luanma. I hold a mysterious respect for these luanma: for me, the luanma has nothing to do with the chance nature of dadaism but is related to the Black Hole, that is, to our ignorance. They have not lost their meaning; they have only deviated from the rules that govern our reading. However, we are powerless in dealing with such deviations. If we had the ability, we should be able to read the voice from the luanma, just as some people are able to decipher information from the lines on the palm and the face as well as from the tree leaves and the star chart, and in that voice I am sure there must be more than just me speaking. As a teen, I deliberately manufactured secret codes, a symptom of my youth. Suspecting that my parents had read my diary in secret, I invented a pinyin-based language by using characters from the oracle bone script

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and bronze script as phonic elements. In such secret codes, I kept a diary for more than six months. In addition, I edited a General Notes for myself on the rules of usage and character formation. Later on, perhaps because of the end of my adolescence, I no longer felt that there was any need to create secrets and did not object to others reading my stuff. This is probably because it was rather troublesome to use it and there were conflicts with the standard Chinese characters one had to write on normal occasions in daily life. Gradually, I gave it up and even forgot that this had ever happened. When I graduated from university and went back to my hometown, I suddenly found a diary that I had kept in my childhood among a stack of old things but was not able to understand it. The secret codes had turned into luanma, a sealed book. With public knowledge as a starting point, the eight cement blocks revealed individual presences by degrees, but the complete individual is in fact an unreadable luanma. What one has on one’s mind is always restrained by discourse in a specific time and space, and it turns into a discourse, thus further turning into a public force through the discourse. Is not the so-called public discourse, the historical common sense, a luanma for certain people as well? I have noticed that the force of characters in their ideological formation comes from the ‘New Wei Style’, a fine-art character style commonly seen and used during the Cultural Revolution. I do not know if it is because of Kang Youwei (1858-1927), leader of the reformist school in the late Qing dynasty and an important theorist and practitioner of the stelebased epigraphic movement that the harshness of the calligraphic style on the steles of Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 A.C.) was much loved by the revolutionaries of modern times and that the ‘modelbook school’ (tiexue), its imaginary enemy, continued to appear to be conservative until the difference between them and the counter-revolutionaries had become paper thin. Among the mastheads in the third cement block of newspapers and magazines throughout the dynasties, the earliest editions of Shiwu Bao (Current Affairs) and Qingyi Bao (China Discussion) employed the style of the Wei steles. By the time of the Republic of China, Mr Yu Youren, a master newspaperman, was also a famous calligrapher of the epigraphic school. Towards the end of the 1940s, Chen Luyuan, of Yixing, created a unified and standardized ‘New Wei Style’, based on the structure of the strict and sharp Zhang Menglong Stele, with the round turns around the inner corners of the boundary formed with strokes in the ink-swelling style of Zhang Yuzhao, a Hubei calligrapher in the late Qing dynasty, as he was able to form a sense of strong and tense rhythm by using his pen in a rhythmic manner, inspired by the crescendos and cadences of Peking opera. In the 1950s, the freshness of China required a bold and healthy character. In the 1960s and 1970s, prior and subsequent to the Cultural Revolution, when the atmosphere was tense as if with drawn bows and unsheathed swords, the same bow and sword character style was called

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for. As a result, even as the creator of the style sank into oblivion, the style was well in its prime, becoming one of the ‘fine-art characters’, squeezing into the rank and file of print, and now entering the Chinese computer font. When I grew up in the 1980s, the new Wei style was a common sight in the newspapers and magazines. Now it has been replaced by a variety of fonts that are more sophisticated and soft and more lovely and cute, so much so that the new Wei style is rarely seen any more. For me, this is a sign of a transformed collective unconscious. With the rise and fall of the new Wei style, the keywords of our society have also turned from ‘revolution’ into ‘success’ and ‘pleasure’. Another font that has become a popular computer font is the style of calligrapher Shu Tong (1905-1998). However, back in the days of the Republic of China, the popular character style was that of Tan Yankai, a calligrapher in the Yan Zhenqing style. Incidentally, Shu Tong was a calligrapher in the Red Army during the Long March. Character style always comes from the hands of an individual. A political life always requires the individual to take care of public affairs. It is for this reason that the character styles of individuals become collective memory. After the founding of the new China, Mao Zedong’s character style gradually became the sole choice for all the big newspapers and magazines. When they were unable to secure Mao’s own hand-written inscription, less important organizations and work units would adopt the method of ‘character gathering’ we also see in Chinese calligraphy history. For example, of the Fujian Youth, which I would often read when I was young, the first two characters were taken from Fujian Daily in Chairman Mao’s personal handwriting, the second two from China Youth, and then put together. If you look around today, any university that does not have Chairman Mao’s inscription can hardly count as first rate. The cigarette Zhongnanhai which I am holding is no exception either. During the Cultural Revolution, there were people everywhere in the country imitating Mao’s calligraphy, from Jiang Qing and Lin Biao at the top down to the amateur connoisseurs in the small country towns. After the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s style began to appear in places. When I worked on this set of cement blocks, I adopted the method of character gathering as particular styles were naturally required because of particular discourses. In combing through my memory that year I also reviewed the genealogy of stylized ideological formation. Discourse linked the times gone by in the same way that traces of characters also store anxieties of influence and excessive vigilance, which could reduce us all to nothing. When Yang Jiechang and Yang Tianna came to my studio to see the cement blocks, Jiecang said: “Is there any way you can convince people that you have carved characters inside and then covered them up? Can one insert a membrane of some sort between layers and make it possible to see the characters inside with an X ray?” I said: “That is the way I do it, whether others believe it or not.” Yang Tianna said: “Right. It has got to be cool.”

T HE E MPERORS H AVE R OTTED L ONG A GO , O NLY THE F RAGRANCE OF N ANMU W OOD R EMAINS

The method of carving characters on stone, wood or metal is age old in China. Even if we begin with Chunhua Pagoda Rubbing, a large-scale collection of rubbings from carved characters, it is one thousand years alredy. In ancient China, there was no such a thing as the ‘General Administration of Press and Publications’. Publications did not require an application for a book number. Everyone could be a writer, editor and spreader of knowledge. In ancient times copying hand written characters onto plates of stone, wood or metal was for the purpose of perpetuity and propagation. But of course perpetuity and propagation was always managed since printed versions could be banned and inscriptions in stone could be erased with rough sands and big rocks. I carved characters in each layer of cement, and after making a number of rubbings the surface was quickly covered up with a new layer of cement. This was as much selfrestriction against propagation as it was self-destruction. Like history and other events in life, inscribing on the stone and rubbing was not possible to recur. Things have no lasting value and it was as real as unreal for the writing and the printed traces had in fact taken place. Like the changing shapes of the clouds that leave no traces behind, those writings and printed traces did just happen. That’s all. There are things that do not match up between public memory and individual memory. That is unavoidable. And it is difficult to say that memories of many people, when combined, can become collective memory. Each individual can only remember his own part. These memories belong to certain individuals because of certain causes and conditions, and these individuals become the so-called collective, again because of certain causes and conditions. In the final analysis, memory is not possible; memory, after all, is imagination. If memory always relies on a medium, where is a medium that is permanent? If a certain medium can be used to seal up memory, it must also be used to forget. For that reason, content that has not been rubbed has not disappeared because it misses out on the medium. After all, memory is not possible, even though the concerns inside our bodies and in our hearts and souls are genuine. What is remembered may not be what should be remembered. What is remembered may not be what needs to be remembered. Part of the memory is only the incident that has walked to the front of the stage. Behind the stage, and among the audience, the play is ceaselessly staged, never repeated. Now, the eight cement blocks are like eight stages in the afternoon sun on this winter day in my studio in Feijia Village; they are more like eight luanma. The top layers of the cement blocks have by now been sealed. Although there are frank rubbing copies, more secrets have revealed themselves as secrets. The singing has died down while the light is still moving. The emperors have long since rotten, just the fragrance of the Nanmu wood coffins remains. Translated by Ouyang Yu

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People’s ‘Writing’ bitan (‘pen talk’ or interview) Chen Chieh-jen/Zhao Chuan

Zhao Chuan: The issue of ‘modernity’ became a definite political issue during the time of Mao since the Chinese people not only had to liberate themselves from feudalism but also had to take part in the historical process of liberating mankind. China’s imagination of modernity had originated with the forceful entry of the West. Under Mao, however, modernity was certainly not equated with a move towards the West, not only because capitalist hegemony, which had been associated with modernity since the industrial age, suppressed the Chinese people but also because according to Marxist theory capitalist society contained its own irresolvable contradictions. As a result, the expectation for a successful socialism was to transcend Western modernity. For a time, the Soviet Union was a successful example. In his Talks at Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, Mao Zedong seemed to have naturally moved on to a cultural nationalism based on his world view regarding the task of national liberation. After the founding of the republic in 1949, however, the line of thought that had been inclined to reform the folk culture during the war did not seem to be able to cope with the situation of the New China when Soviet experience was systematically brought in. Under Deng Xiaoping, literary and cultural practices that had been led by the politics of the previous thirty years were gradually abandoned or turned into hollow shells with the slogan of ‘ideological liberation’. It was not until the end of the 1970s that we caught up with the pace of ‘May Fourth’ once again. Modernity came to be regarded as identical with Westernization. My question is this: If we accept the reality of the thirty years after the Cultural Revolution, it seems that there has been insufficient reflection of the literary and artistic ideology of the Mao age, that it has not been inherited in the way suggested by Lu Xun when he talked about nalai (taking it) so that it becomes a dialectical nutrient. We have been in such a rush to avoid it that we constantly deny our own experience, which is perhaps why the contemporary art of China today is unable to remove itself from the troubled Western context.

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Chen Chieh-jen: With regards to how we should think about the issue of ‘modernity’, we believe that scholars on either side of the Taiwan Strait need to engage in a comprehensive discussion. All I can do is propose my own fragmentary observations and thoughts as a contemporary Taiwanese artist in a discursive position that is different from mainland China in terms of the modernized experience after the Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists prior to 1949. After the May Fourth Movement, among a variety of solutions as to how to help China move from a fallen state to modernity, Chiang Kai-shek obviously chose the Fascist model of development. In 1966, when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, Chiang Kaishek, who had been beaten and retreated to Taiwan in 1949, also launched the so-called ‘Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement’ in the same year under the structure of the Kuomintang, his own Fascist organization, in an attempt to compete with mainland China’s Cultural Revolution. However, as a movement that combined feudal ideologies in the Chinese tradition with those of Fascism, it did no more than try to clamp down on reformist thinking in the Chinese tradition as well as on a variety of Western ideologies introduced to China subsequent to May Fourth rather than further developing traditional Chinese culture. In 1950, the Kuomintang, with the backing of America, secured its rule in Taiwan. As the system of martial law was established during the Cold War, and around the time when the ‘Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement’ was launched, Taiwan was successfully shaped into an anti-Communist and pro-American society, with the help of ruthless White Terror initiated in Taiwan. It became a society closed to all ideological reflection and criticism, which effectively cut short the possibility of any discussion about China’s development after the May Fourth Movement. Simply put, Taiwanese society developed into an anti-Communist base for America, performing the ‘instrumental’ role of serving capitalism by giving up on zhuti siwei (ideology of subjectivity). As a result, Taiwan has now become a society totally centered around consumption, and it keeps removing social veins from its own body. On the eve of the abolition of Martial Law in 1986, various minjian forces (i.e. non-governmental or composed of ordinary people) in Taiwanese society came forth following their suppression during the period of Martial Law, and a large number of Western ideologies were also quickly introduced. This should have been a period to look forward to. However, the Cold War mentality that had been internalized in Taiwanese society as well as the American-led ideology of globalization that followed (i.e. the new liberalism) made it possible to subsume the minjian forces, the social movement and the so-called process of ‘democratization’ of Taiwan under the issue of the political divide between unification and independence, and under the question of how to participate in globalization. Once again, reflection on Taiwan’s own modernity was delayed.

P EOPLE ’ S ‘W RITING ’: BITAN (‘ PEN TALK ’ OR INTERVIEW )

Roughly put, because of its geographical isolation and the Cold War mentality within the country as well as its political and economic attachment to America, Taiwan is more like a ‘besieged society’. With the Taiwanese experience of the ‘besieged society’ as a starting point, I would like to respond to your question and the statement that “we constantly deny our own experience, which is perhaps why the contemporary art of China as it is today is unable to remove itself from the troubled Western context.” To my mind, this question has a number of aspects. First, the issue of the ‘Western context’. In the 1990s, in response to the ‘Western context’, artists in China would normally adopt a strategy of re-developing Chinese traditional symbols, which, in the period of multiculturalism in the international world of arts, achieved personal success to some extent. But the question of how Chinese society could develop its own modernity kept being delayed in the discussion. This phenomenon, I think, mainly stemmed from the intention of the artists to present yangmao (features) that were different from Western art forms by differentiating between the East and the West. It can be said that the strategy of ‘difference’ may have arisen from the limitations of the time. However, a repeated effort to return to the situation of pre-modern tradition would inevitably fall into the traps of ‘Orientalism’. Moreover, it would avoid the reality in which China has become the largest processing base and consumer market in the context of globalization, starting with the invasion of colonialism more than 100 years ago and the development of Chinese-style socialism since 1949. It is for this reason that Chinese society and Western societies have become integral parts of a mixture in the system of global capitalism. As the past ‘Western-centrism’ is impacted by deconstruction and postcolonialism in an international political and economic situation in which the global economy has evolved into one of cooperation and confrontation, does a ‘pure Western centre’ still exist? Or has the ‘Western context’ of the past been replaced by the consumerism which has developed under global capitalism? It is more likely that the aesthetics which keep taking contemporary Chinese art back to the traditional situation conform to this capitalist consumerist tendency: an aesthetic taste that keeps avoiding its own reality, and one which also falls into the traps of ‘Orientalism’. So, to my mind, the question you posed here about ‘the Western context’ does not refer to the geographical West but is meant to point out that we may be able to propose a social model that is different from the one which at present is controlled by ‘New Liberalism’. With regards to the question of how to establish such a model, my feeling is that we must first give up the attempt to presuppose a comprehensive and omniscient blueprint for the world since we know that no such blueprint or the knowledge of any region today would be able to include all the differences in the world, and any attempt to describe such an omniscient blueprint for the world may very well lead to another empire mentality.

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For this reason, I think that the important first step is to engage in the movement of ‘writing’ about one’s own social veins in the movement of a ‘de-Westernized context’ in non-Western regions, in the Taiwanese version of ‘de-empiring’. The writing I talk about here refers not to locking oneself up in the studio to concern oneself exclusively with issues such as the correct historical chronology or the graphic presentation of social phenomena. The writing I talk about means that we must adopt an ‘action of giving rights to oneself’, different from the Cultural Revolution, a top-down movement initiated by the state apparatus to describe a Utopian blueprint. In my imagination, new ways of ‘action’, individual or group-based, must first of all regard themselves as an open platform that is functional and multilinked by involving itself in various kinds of contemporary social situation. Various kinds of mini-models, such as self-organization, development of new democratic forms, experiments with different economic formats, and the necessary development of a new aesthetics corresponding to one’s own social veins, can then be written about and described in a process of dialogue, cooperation and experimentation. I do believe that, with continuous development in this way and a process of experimentation with ‘re-modernization’ initiated in the minjian, a number of periodic concepts could be summarized. And I also think that only by engaging in practice at this stage will it be possible to avoid retreating to traditional aesthetic tastes and falling into the predicament of the ‘Western context’ again. Let me come back to the issue of the ‘Western context’. Perhaps we should also ask ourselves how the ‘Western context’ constructed its own power? And how non-Western regions handed over this power? Is it not because non-Western regions handed over the description of their own societies and their ‘imagination’ of the human condition to the ‘Western context’? The issue is not whether there is an ‘Oriental context’ or a ‘Chinese context’ that is exclusively owned by the East or by China. If a context was actually prescribed, its first danger would be that of ‘closing itself up’. I think that the solution should be primarily a return to a variety of social intervention actions initiated by people before real change is possible. Zhao: That is right. My work over the last few years involving Grass Stage has also moved in this direction. Your mention of “a variety of social intervention actions initiated by people” provides an interesting topic for deeper exploration with regards to the issue of ‘New Liberalism’. Through the format of the theatre, we help ordinary people re-think their own times as they are manipulated through the monopolizing of capital and people under the alluring neon lights. We cannot possibly engage in idle talk about refusal or resistance by going back to the ‘pre-historic’ without a sense of the physical site. Instead, we must directly confront the enmeshed realities as they are at the moment, and by involving ourselves in the pull and push of these realities we can become aware of our creative responsibilities through observation and criticism that connect new experiences.

P EOPLE ’ S ‘W RITING ’: BITAN (‘ PEN TALK ’ OR INTERVIEW )

I would like to talk a bit more about the ‘Western context’. This is not a subject that I can skip with ease. The ‘Western context’ is already something of an empire, constructed as it is of the knowledge production promoted during colonial times and the operation of capital in ‘New Liberalism’. It can be seen from my own investigation in recent years as well as the veins of radical art in the 1980s and 1990s China that a number of mainland artists used regional and historical symbols in response to their own historical situation, which, stirred up by the ‘Western context’, won the pleasure of the empire, eventually becoming the euphoric pattern in which mainstream Western ideology walked towards victory in the 1990s. For quite some time, European and American museums have been vying with each other to exhibit those patterns, and they are equally keen on any related topics. The arts have become material evidence testifying to the identity of the losers through powerful purchases. They do, of course, require repeated production and reproduction just for the purposes of promotion, and at the same time this process plunges the artistic exploration into a predicament: the kind of exploration that encountered a variety of responses in those days, whether formalistic or not limited to any form, or whether it had once more become meaningful, gave one the impression that it had been frustrated or disappeared into thin air. It was in those moments that the empire once again revealed its own needs and showed off its powerful muscles. Modernistic exploration in China must take its starting point in the writing of its own veins. However, there is another issue that I can see. Because of its fall into the interweaving of capitalism, global consumption and markets, modern and contemporary art in China has been quite confused about ‘itself’ in the thirty years since its initial development, particularly in the latter half of those years. Or, as you see it, the artistic forces issuing from the European and American systems have an absolute control in mainland China as many ‘self-based’ debates come from overseas, thus concealing the real veins of development in Chinese society. For a long time they have no longer been the exotic sentiments of ‘Oriental aesthetics’ or ‘the pattern of the Cultural Revolution’; they look ‘universal’. Theory and creative interest undergo a gradual shift, encoding our ‘selves’ in the empire. Any interest or confrontation outside these systems will easily meet with exclusion or extermination. Vigilance against the ‘Western context’ must begin here. The powerful right of explication with the West is being gradually deconstructed. Our exploration and discussion may have become a deconstructing force even though it is weak. In the previous letter, there was a brief mention of Mao’s thoughts on literature and art, also with the hope that this may help one think differently about ‘New Liberalism’. However, what I did not mention is another aspect of the powerful troubled reality in which China’s criticism of the progress of the state machine towards Fascism over the last few decades is still being suppressed by authority, and the re-thinking and criticism by the people in this respect have not been launched to any extent. For this reason, the way in which the ‘self-

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independence of the people’ is proposed is an extremely difficult and profound subject.

*** Chen: Or perhaps I should talk about my plan for shuxie (writing). And when I talk about that, I must talk about the political shift in the Taiwanese society in which I found myself. Taiwan moved from the Cold War, the Martial Law, the White Terror, until it finally became a world factory that processed goods but never produced anything, before it then entered a consumerized society in which the Martial Law was abolished and a system of bourgeois representative democracy implemented, followed by the debate about unification or independence between the Blue and the Green parties, the country’s membership in the WTO and its recent entry into the anti-terrorist coalition. Although all this appears to be an independent evolution within the Taiwanese society, it is in fact a ‘passive shift’ in the strategy of American and capitalist global expansion. The period of the Martial Law/White Terror is the core of this series of ‘passive shifts’. The Martial Law/White Terror was the result of relentless suppression by the Kuomintang of the political dissidents within itself as well as the comprehensive purging of opponents by the political agents (political parties) in all regions of America/capitalism. Military Court and Prison in my 2007 work with the same title represents the ‘law-enforcing institution’ under this policy, which suppressed the dissidents. However, the greater purpose of the Martial Law/White Terror was to subdue ordinary people outside the jail and to prevent them from having dissident thoughts. In other words, the Military Court and Prison intends to put a ‘minority’ of political dissidents in jail for a long time in order to create a greater jail which closes down the possibility of independent thinking. In this big jail, people become ‘reformed’. With the development of capitalism at various stages and the invention of various kinds of governance, people are systematically ‘reformed’ to become collaborators with the system of the Martial Law, ‘anti-Communist fighters’ under the antiCommunist system, or submissive and low-paid workers, consumers pursuing consumers’ desires, loyal followers of a bourgeois political party and gatekeepers of globalized capitalism. Back then I wondered how in the pursuit of independent individuality we could transform from a ‘reformed’ person into someone who is against the reform, someone who is able to act on his own initiative. Are we capable of re-thinking the world view imposed on us by the whole system of politics, society and economics in terms of our own concrete in-situ life experience? In addition, how can we describe or write another version that is different from the world described in the values of the state machine and capitalism? Despite the individual’s limited knowledge and experience, if he only writes on the basis of his own local experience, his criticism of

P EOPLE ’ S ‘W RITING ’: BITAN (‘ PEN TALK ’ OR INTERVIEW )

capitalism may appear localized. I do believe, however, that one could start from oneself as a point of departure, being connected to other people and other regions. and then, through mutual dialogue, recognition, supplementation and accumulation, people may be able to become united in a more comprehensive opposition. After 1996, following this line of thinking, I re-thought my own local experience by conducting a number of creative plans involving shuxie (writing). For me, the meaning of shuxie includes the proposal of a different view outside the mainstream discourse of the system so that that the invisible reality may ‘be seen’, so that sites may be created to produce sound in incidents in which no sound was possible before, and so that another possible model can be provided. Those are the things that my creation has always been about. It means that I must be thinking ‘politically’ how to create. In relation to my films, it is not just about the presentation of the ‘inside’ of the images but also about the whole process of filming. For this reason, every filming for me is at the same time an ‘action’. Take The Processing Factory and Bade Area, in which I illegally entered a space that had been sealed up by the court for the purpose of filming it. To a certain extent, by ‘occupying’ the site and producing the film, I turned the space of law and capital into a site of critique. I returned the workers to the site, who had become unemployed as a result of the vicious shut-down, and thus made the cruel reality of globalization ‘visible’. In the Map of Routes, I invited members of the Kaohsiung Stevedores Union to engage in a symbolic strike in response to the privatization of the port that they had not taken note of before.

Figure 11: From “Map of Routes”

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Figure 12, 13: From “Military Court and Prison”

Figure 14, 15: From “The Processing Factory”

Figure 16, 17: From “Bade Area”

Figure 18, 19: From “The Empire Boundery”

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In Military Court and Prison I dealt with the issue of how to avoid falling into the traps of binary opposition set up by the two opposing political parties in the name of history when facing the issue of ‘transformed justice’ within the Taiwanese society, particularly the traps that were used to conceal the continuous suppression of human rights under global capitalism. In 1987, after the abolition of Martial Law, Taiwan, like other third-wave democracies, faced the issue of dealing with its history of persecution by the authoritarian system and the violation of human rights in the period of the Martial Law/White Terror. A study of the files in the period of White Terror, a recognition of our responsibilities and an in-depth re-thinking of the authoritarian system can appropriately help bridge the gaps and heal the wounds that have been created within the Taiwanese society by the authoritarian system in the throes of ‘transformed justice’. If one looks at the issue of ‘transformed justice’ from a pluralistic and democratic point of view, one will see that the difference between Kuomintang or Democratic Progressive Party matters little: they are both right-wing political parties representing capitalist interests, even though they are worlds apart in the ideological divide between unification and independence in terms of the nation’s sovereignty. Not only did they ‘conceal’ and ‘obscure’ the differences and the multi-faceted historical facts around the ideologies and identities of the many political sufferers in the history of White Terror, but at the same time they deliberately ignored the real reason for the formation of the White Terror—the fact that in the formation of the ideology of the Cold War and anti-Communism by America, the authoritarian system in Taiwan was supported in order to remove left-wing ideologies and political dissidents in Taiwan. This was used as one of the steps in pushing towards global capitalism. And that is why in the film I am concerned with relating the contemporary human rights issue to the historical veins so that the debate about the issue of ‘transformed justice’ is not limited to past history. It should also be told in the present progressive tense. Zhao: Most of the time the labour of an artist is that of an individual. It deals with social change but does not necessarily rely on the push of social circumstances. We are expecting a leader whose call has a ready response, but art happens concretely and quietly. For me, when I did what I did with Grass Stage in the theatre I had no intention to be a producer or provider of the beautiful aspect of theatre in the traditional sense. We began with collective creation and moved on to individual creation, from dramatic reportages in the tents to temporary creation of theatres on various occasions. For years, we kept running weekly workshops, inviting ordinary people to walk onto the stage, or we engaged in unpaid theatre work that did not charge admission. What I used the theatre to manufacture is a politicized gesture about social intervention. We gather the masses with theatre activities, displaying values and judgments that are different from those of developmentalism. We train individuals and directly re-think and discuss social issues in the public sphere. In our collisions with

P EOPLE ’ S ‘W RITING ’: BITAN (‘ PEN TALK ’ OR INTERVIEW )

the real situation, we exercise our gestures or postures and become part of political confrontation with practical meanings. Just like the creative process you talked about, I am not hoping that theatre will become a political tool but rather politics itself. I am hoping that it may become a site where people can engage in rethinking, questioning and confronting realities. This concerns us as individuals or artists as much as the question of how to become ‘people’. How can individuals use this collective noun? In post-performance discussions over the years, we frequently encountered responses such as ‘Who are the people?’ or ‘People and us’. In my opinion, individuals can only have the politicalness that is embedded in the notion of ‘people’ in a process in which one is fighting for the ‘qualities of people’ that are external to us. It is only in our lifelong search for ‘people’ that we can become members. For that reason, the ‘writing’ of people must be continuously accumulated to become a cultural landscape and to sediment in an influential aesthetics.

Figure: 20: Grass Stage-Performance in a building under construction; based on texts by Lu Shun; Shanghai 2008

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Figure 21, 22: Grass Stage-Performance in a building under construction; based on texts by Lu Shun; Shanghai 2008

P EOPLE ’ S ‘W RITING ’: BITAN (‘ PEN TALK ’ OR INTERVIEW )

Chen: That’s right. This must be work that continues. Let me take another film of mine, The Empire Boundary I, as an example. This film is an extension of my previous blog writing action ‘I suspect that you are trying to steal across the border’. Prior to this blog writing action, there had never been any protest in Taiwan against the unequal visa system in the USA. In the film, I used typical cases in which Taiwanese had their visa applications knocked back for no reason at all, compared with their mainland Chinese spouses. I conducted interviews at the Taiwanese airports, in which they were treated on even more inhumane grounds, in an attempt to show that in today’s global ‘empire’ in the shape of a pyramid formed by various sovereign countries, America is a main controller of the ‘empire’, including countries like Taiwan, but it treats other weaker Others also in the control mode of the ‘empire mentality’. In response to the concerns you raised before, for me, the removal of the ‘empire consciousness’ is not only a criticism of America but also a re-thinking and a critique of myself. In my opinion, to oppose the global empire as it is today, one could criticize and do away with the ‘empire consciousness’ as one of the methods to help the global map of the empire disintegrate. For this reason, putting these two together helps us recognize the global nature of this dominant relationship and engage in the work of ‘de-empiring’ wherever we are. In The Empire Boundary I, apart from initiating the collective blog writing, the very reason I wanted to develop it into a film is that I was hoping that the movement of removing the ‘empire consciousness’ could be repeated in the film and that more sites of dialogue could be created in different times and spots. Each screening also meant a temporary gathering with the audience about how to remove the ‘empire consciousness’. As to your ‘continual accumulation’, for me, it means one has to keep creating the sites of dialogue in the artistic ‘action’. Obviously, our present dialogue is a continuation and accumulation of such work. Translated by Ouyang Yu

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The Dismantling and Re-Construction of Bentu (‘This Land’ or ‘Native Land’): Contemporary Chinese Art in the Post-colonial Context Gao Shiming

In April 2000, a delegation from Documenta 11 Kassel visited Hangzhou. Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of the show, was a Nigerian, the first black person to conceive and curate an important exhibition in the history of documentary shows, even in the history of major Western exhibitions, whose selection (for the job) itself is an important sign of multi-cultural trends in the international world of arts. Okwui was convinced that the history of post-colonialism was a key to the analysis and examination of issues of globalized politics, economics, culture and social debates as “all discussions that have been held up to now centre around such oppositional dichotomies as East/West, Communism/Capitalism and democratic socialism/ new liberalism without ever facing the impact produced in the process of decolonization”. Documenta 11 proposed the idea of ‘postcolonial constellation’, to explain the complexity of cross-influences between pre-colonies and colonized countries as well as those between various colonies. The Documenta delegation emphasized that “the postcolonial process is not situated elsewhere outside the West but is equally deeply embedded in the veins of historical and modern development in the West”. During their visit to Hangzhou, the Documenta delegation engaged in an in-depth exchange and debate with artists and scholars from the institutes of fine arts in China, which can be said to be the first direct confrontation between the Chinese world of art and the Western academic world concerning the issues of globalization and post-colonialism. The border-crossing debate helped bring to the fore the thoughts of the Chinese world of art on the globalized situation, bentu (‘this land’ or ‘native land’) resources and post-colonialism. For Okwui, what we must look for in the cultural context of post-colonialism and globalism is not just a new kind of existence in the world but a new method capable of construction in this world. In the construction of

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reality, the most important task is that of excavating the self of post-colonialism, which is gradually being accepted by a cultural group (which also plays a major role in the process of globalization) that has gone beyond nation and race. With the growing strength of the new generation of postcolonialism as the main subjects, the dialogue between national identities and modernized international trends has also entered into a new era of self-conscious re-Westernization and modernization, which entails taking the initiative to re-introduce these developments after shedding the role of the colonized. The increasingly complex ways in which modern groups of people engage in activities have created artistic uncertainties. Transnational activities and the quotidianization of migration involving modern men and women have produced the image of a moving group and a ‘space of displacement’ that goes beyond national groups, the growth of which has led to two cultural trends: one being a confrontation between nomadic culture and mainstream culture, and the other an effort to excavate historical origins in order to rebuild the bentu nature of one’s culture. It has now become quite urgent to create a global space of public culture to cope with all that, a super-cultural space that will form a postcolonial and transnational cultural force, providing development opportunities for postcolonial individuals and leading to ideas of post-nation and post-state. This has gone beyond the pattern of confrontation between the early nomadic culture and mainstream culture where reality reminds us that seeking pluralism in the realm of unbalanced power is tolerance, and it is precisely this pluralist tolerance that will eventually lead us to a transcendence beyond the isolation and struggles between cultures. However, what Okwui said about the kind of non-regionality of world citizens produced by the new generation of post-colonialism as its main subjects in my view represents only a brief revelry among the waves of globalization.1 As the famous thinker Jacques Derrida put it: “Globaliza1 | The process of globalization is a long process of world history that accompanied the development of capitalism as well as a process of continued production of margins and Others. Just as Amin, an important writer on the related theories, pointed out, in the Commercial Age (1500-1800), prior to the Industrial Revolution, the commercial capital, with the Atlantic as its centre, had formed its own dominant position, and had created its own marginal regions (Americas). In the so-called classical period (1800-1945) of capitalism, produced in the Industrial Revolution, and with the development of Western capitalism, Asia (except for Japan), Africa and Latin America became the marginal regions around Western capitalism. Through agricultural and mining production, they joined the global division of labour. At the same time, with the formation of an industrial system based on the capitalist nation-state system as its form, nationalist liberation movements also developed in these regions, whose ideological patterns were characterized by their treatment of industrialization as synonymous with liberation and progress and as a measure of ‘trying to overtake’ others. And, enlightened by the centre of capitalism, the aim was to establish powerful nation-states. From the

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tion is the universalization of a certain kind of narrow prejudice about human beings, an excessive assertion of a certain human quality, while at the same time it is a repression of one’s own infinitely rich otherness that one must contain and respect narcissistically in oneself.” Today, in the so-called ‘postcolonial space’, in this world that is drifting away from its original position, the potential reader is no longer a stable community since the relationship between the reader and the writer, the reader and the reader, and the writer and the writer, is no longer cross-referential but one of mutual dismantling and repetitive reconstruction. Unlike the mass world of classical time and the alien countries, the globalized world as it is today is situated in a process of integration which, like an engine, kick-starts all the similarities and differences in the world. Conversely, it generates many kinds of ‘folklore landscapes’, which is a new imaging of this plural world, a superficialism of culture and a combination of crosscultural tourism and exhibition economics. In the world of thought, the landscape contains such diverse thoughts as multi-culturalism, cultural nationalism and bentuism, and, in the world of art, all these have increasingly ‘international’ exhibitions as the basis of their system. On the meaningful platform of international exhibitions, the postcolonial discourse remains a concern to certain cultural groups, such as mis-readings of Chinese culture. It is worthwhile to engage in a serious enquiry and to be concerned with the vigilance of the postcolonial discourse against the gift from the forceful Western culture presented in the manner of a ‘Trojan Horse’ alongside its cultural and historical ‘massacre’. However, the political ‘anxiety of root-seeking’ which it produces will not replace a deep understanding of and experience with different cultural patterns of a pluralist culture. A return to ‘re-Westernization’ will only lead to the deracination of non-Western cultures in order to adapt to an industry that keeps producing fashionable globalized discourses. Ideas such as ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ have lost their former analytical and critical edges; instead, they have turned into an expression of politicized ideology. For this reason, such a ‘new global platform’ cannot radically support a pluralist culture since at the same time it takes the possible epistemological foundation into a zone of errors that is superficialized, politicized and pan-artistic. The politicized tendency towards a postcolonial and globalized discourse has concealed the primary issue of multi-cultural survival as its cultural-political way of seeing things causes us to move further away from the inner core of a culture of our own.

end of the Second World War to the present, marginal regions have been going through a period of industrialization under unfair conditions, during which many Asian and Latin American countries, including China, re-gained political sovereignty of their states. With the globalization of capitalism, self-sufficient national industrial systems have gradually disintegrated and eventually re-grouped as formative elements of the integrated global production and trading systems.

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The essential nature of the global situation is the global production and flow of signs, images and meanings. For artists, globalization is first of all an expanded vision of issues, a horizon that keeps extending. Second, it signifies a cultural reality of multi-meanings and a system of significance, an opening out to difference and otherness. However, influenced and pushed by the current system of international exhibitions, globalization is first shown as a political posture, a sprawling multi-culturalism and a new domination. In addition, the bentu experience of contemporary art was turned into an easily available resource, even a convenient sign-based tool to produce cultural labels with which non-Western artists manufactured their cultural otherness. The questions we are facing are: What has the globalized situation brought us? What has it concealed? How can artists in the globalized situation re-consider the meaning of confronted realities and activated history originally associated with the bentu experience?2 In real life, the kind of pluralism based on individuals is in fact also a rootlessness. Even when experiencing a globalized existence, the plural intersubjectivity can also form a special subjectivity and will still be realized in every individual. As pointed out by Michel Foucault, ‘to be subject to’ is not just to ‘become the subject of’ but also to ‘be subordinate to’ since subjectivity itself means a subordinate relationship, and plural subjectivity means the complexity of that subordinate relationship. However, such complexity, and the dislocation and hybridity of such a culture may not necessarily produce greater freedom and richer creativity. Without the sustenance of the earth it would be difficult for a tree to reach a skytouching height., The Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul can be said to be a quintessential example of the new generation of post-colonialism, the history of whose life has gone from the age of colonialism to that of postcolonialism, representing the individual experience of survival with the duality of cultural hegemony. It is for this reason that the Swedish Academy described him as ‘a global literary navigator’. A complex background to his birth and a roaming life around the world have made it possible for 2 | The modernity of Chinese culture expresses itself as a historical practice in an interactive cultural context. The development of the history of modern Chinese culture is characterized by the ‘distinction between China and the West’ as the core, a confused imagination of the West as a reference and a hybridized difference-merging against the background in which Western studies gradually moved eastward. In the one more than one hundred years referred to as ‘modern’, the ‘modern historical condition’ as encountered in Chinese culture can be summarized as intercontexual historical threads, an enlarged cultural vision, created tradition (such as the concepts of Chinese painting), the transference of identities, a new experience of the system, modern education and consciousness of disciplines, and ideological experience. The modernity of China is rooted in the history of cultural merging over a period of more than one hundred years, in which the context involving the interaction of China and the West has so deeply affected and regulated our thoughts on our self-history and fate.

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him to become a déraciné, no longer clinging to bentu but willing to drift away from it, in spite of occasional attempts to seek a ‘homeland in his own imagination’. An important theme of post-colonialism is dispersal and return. As Edward Said said, for postcolonial subjects to return means to return to oneself, e.g. to return to history, thus enabling us to understand what really has happened, why, and who we are. The return of the postcolonial subject is to the source; it is the impulse of the drifting rootless to search for roots, the way Ulysses did in his lengthy return. In Homer’s epic poem Odyssey, this originator of The Account of the Wooden Horse was not able to return to his native land after the ‘Other’ was destroyed; instead, he was lost, drifting about homeless. It was not until ten years later that his real journey of return began, but it was a journey of return as much as one of loss since what awaited him was yet another decade of return journey. However, the story of Ulysses is not a tragedy as there are constant encounters and explorations between the return and the homeland, and there are countless arrivals and departures as well. For this reason, a return journey is also a journey of discovery. In the ancient Greek experience, history originally meant ‘enquiry’, an experience and xunmi or research. For the bards in those days, life was a long journey in which loss as well as return was part of one’s fate as much as it was part of one’s life. However, on his return to the island of Ithaca, Ulysses woke up but no-one could identify him nor could he recognize his own hometown. As a result, Athena had to reveal herself, assuring him that this was ‘his Ithaca’. After a long and tortuous journey, what Ulysses encountered was not just the kind of embarrassing ‘identity crisis’ as experienced by the postcolonial subject but a far more profound predicament.

*** At the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, the London city government presented a postcolonial multi-cultural show to the whole world, a harmonious picture of the co-existence of many races and many cultures. To be sure, postcolonial theory is being practiced not only in the non-Western world of ‘decolonization’ but also in the postcolonial Western world, whose most important achievement is a continuous questioning of Western society and its patterns as well as the creation of an open society that is different, tolerant and multifaceted. In the West, post-colonialism guarantees a civil society that is open and full of vitality, and the pursuit of tolerance and plurality has also created a newer version of the West, an emerging ‘post-Western society’. However, is this the moment in which we can celebrate the victory of post-colonialism? We have come to discover that today post-colonialism and multi-culturalism seem no longer equipped with the real challenging and dangerous ‘virus’ as they have been turned into a ‘vaccine’, with the strong body of the ‘West’ successfully producing an ‘antibody’—self-updated and up-

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graded, a newer version of the West run under the policy of multi-culturalism, a ‘post-West’. In this upgraded version of a post-Western society, post-colonialism and multi-culturalism are skilfully being turned into a management policy and publicity strategy as ideas of identity, hybridity and plurality gradually evolve into a pretty political statement. Under such circumstances, the issue is becoming even more complex. On the one hand, it is impossible to avoid the co-existence of difference or ‘the Other’ in contemporary daily life since plurality is a fact of daily life whether on the social level or on the level of survival theory. On the other hand, though, such a ‘multi-cultural politics and ideology’ has been enthusiastically embraced by globalized capitalism, which uses it to maintain and develop its transnational group interests. In this situation, as a publicity strategy and ideology, ‘multi-cultural management mechanisms’ have replaced the critical multi-culturalism, while the production of difference has deteriorated into a rule by difference. Now, calls for ‘plurality’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘letting the Other speak’ have become useless as they have long turned into slogans of political propaganda, a new ideological tool. Consequently, the work of an artist is even more important as it must present the complexity and contradiction of our political situation. For the last few decades, politics has been relegated to discourse politics, a mélange of varied identity politics, statement politics and translated politics. In the political arena, art has become an organ of expression for the political practice of these discourses. Correspondingly, in the realm of art, politics has also become a ‘prosthetic limb of meaning’. The prosthetic limb exists because of certain disabilities, but what does the contemporary art equipped with political prosthetic limbs lack? What space of meaning does politics complement? Can the critical views which artists have of society and history be included in the political arena? Or have such acts jumped out of the political category right from the beginning? Here, what we must pursue is the question whether we can keep talking about creation in a context in which ‘criticism’ turns into ‘politicization’. In an age of consulted values and consulted history, in a multi-meaninged modernity, and in a multi-cultural, sourced and non-linear historical vision, how can I talk about the future? Today, what is important is not ‘here’ and ‘now’ as defined in the dual mechanism of global and local. The pressing need is to have a longer vision in which we could touch our different pasts and common future as much as possible and from a historical angle. We must ask this question: What vision on earth will a this-worldly world view bring after getting rid of the ‘nation-state’, a framework of the modern world construction? Have we lost a ‘world that is being created’ in the struggle between colonialism and post-colonialism and between global capitalism and multi-culturalism? Has the ‘Other’ turned into the thousand faces that look exactly the same after continuous institutionalization and simplification despite the fact that it once carried the sign that it ‘had crossed the known boundary and gone beyond the living space as well as the realm of imagination’?

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How can we talk about the ‘order’ that is forthcoming without retreating back to the empire and to nationalist discourse? And how can we transcend the cultural mechanism of the nation-state, reconstruct our history and plan an open future as well as a plural agreement that has not yet been agreed?

*** In the last twenty years, there have been two influential expositions in the international academic world in which ‘multi-culturalism’ and ‘cultural clashes’ produced their own distinct images of the world. Multi-culturalism can be said to be a positive statement of a new liberalism in the present postcolonial-globalized global village, whereas the proponents of the ‘cultural clash’ theory as represented by Samuel P. Huntington have revealed a new relationship of tension triggered off globally by ideas, values and beliefs in the wake of the Cold War. At the forefront of the world of thought, we can find definite opposing views of these two expositions. In relation to the former, the well-known thinker Slavoj Zizek asked what it was that new liberalism had committed itself to: multi-culturalism or the cultural logic of multi-national capitalism? In relation to the latter, Trinh T. Minh-ha, American artist of Vietnamese origin, said: “Today, the First World and the Third World exist in a relationship in which one is within the other just as the other is within the one.” In the face of the financial crisis that is sweeping the world, the remarks by Zizek and Trinh Minh-ha are food for thought. Today, what framework should we use to talk about this world, which bears the collective fate as well as the mutual conflicts of mankind, this collective of ‘global-bentu’ that is both plural and multi-centred? East and West, North and South, developed countries and developing countries, the First World and the Third World, none of these traditional dualist models seem to provide a sufficiently convincing description of this world in which culture and politics, power and capital, and self and Other are all interwoven. We need to construct a new system of coded meanings and a new cultural production mechanism. To achieve all that, one must first of all establish a new cultural subjectivity that transcends the existing model of discourse. We must face the state of much more complex and dynamic cultural production in the ‘global-bentu’ context. Here, what we must consider is no longer ‘hybridity’ and creolization but a resignification in the interaction of ‘global-bentu’. In the process of this resignification and cultural recoding, the issue of homogenization-heterogeneity is becoming part of the reproductive process in globalized capitalism, no longer a reflexive postcolonial self-imagination.

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*** James Cantalupo, ex-president of MacDonald International, made a deeply thought-provoking remark: “MacDonald has the purpose of trying to be part of the local culture as much as possible […]. Although we are described as ‘multi-national’ I would rather call us ‘multilocal’.” This remark is a definite reference to the ‘multilocality’ of global capital today, which is entirely different from the kind of ‘internationality’ that we usually talk about. In the real life of contemporary people, to be ‘international’ is to be no longer The Iinternational of the old days, and it is no longer associated with the revolutionary ideal of liberating mankind as a whole. In a country like China, it still appears as a concept and desire for development. From the ‘Window on the World’ in Shenzhen to the international small commodity market in Yiwu, and from the interestingly contrasted view on either side of the Huangpu River in Shanghai (the ‘international’ view in Puxi being of a colonial age, whereas Pudong is a statement of ‘internationalized’ urban development in contemporary China) to the theme of the Beijing Olympic Games featuring the words, ‘One World, One Dream’, the meaning of being ‘international’ is multi-layered with different versions. The ‘multi-locality’, as described by Cantalupo, not only refers to the ‘trans-nationality’—often a subtext for ‘inter-nationality’—heavily tinged with hegemony, which crossed the boundary in post-Cold War capitalism, but also envisages the bentu cultural strategy in the process of globalized capital. Such a cultural strategy is carried out in the interactive mechanism of being ‘post-international’ and being ‘global-bentu’. In a standard ‘international space’, such as an international airport, we can see passengers of passage whose identities are suspended; international brands that are similar everywhere; and local products that are different everywhere—with distinct differences between the ‘homogenous’ and the ‘heterogeneous’, and between the ‘international’ and the ‘national’. And in the ‘post-international’ context, nationalism will not only be the cultural policy of a country itself but it may also be the cultural marketing policy in multi-national capital. Transnational enterprises package themselves with the local cultural elements by re-defining the cultural properties of their products, a policy which has greatly strengthened the penetrating power into various bentu societies by way of capital and consumption. In the process of bentuing, global capital is creating itself to become a ‘multi-local’ or ‘multi-bentu’ image. It is here that ‘bentuing’ has become the ‘wooden horse of Troy’ in global capitalism, through which capitalism has made its way right through to the end of the world, by which global capitalism is building a new empire in which nothing is far away and nothing is external. Globalization not only produces sameness but it also creates rifts. In the last few decades, the core issue that the world of intelligentsia was preoccupied with has consistently been the notion of ‘production of differences’. Today, however, the most important difference is being produced by global capitalist production and consumption, a difference in time,

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space and society that is continuously manufactured as capital expands itself. Just as Daniel Miller said: “Capitalism and modernity will bring in a new homogeneity as it will correspondingly produce heterogeneity as well. However, the production of this heterogeneity and nationalism will be superficial and symbolic just like nostalgia that is obsessed with cultural difference.”

*** A few months ago, Kung Fu Panda, a Hollywood produced animation film, swept the world off its feet, particularly inducing a passionate response in China. John Stevenson, director of Kung Fu Panda, claimed that the film paid respect to Chinese culture, a ‘love letter to China’. To be sure, this is a film laced with Chinese elements, from panda to martial arts, from mountains and waters to architecture, from Chinese characters to firecrackers, from chopsticks to noodles, everything is ‘typically Chinese’, and from the music by Hans Zimmer and John Powell that is vividly Chinese to the ready-made Chinese usages such as ‘Shifu’ (master) that are retained in the film, we can see the sincerity of this ‘respect’. However, this ‘love letter to China’ is a mélange of Chinese vocabulary mixed with the Hollywood grammar. To be sure, from Mulan, which came under much fire a few years ago, to Kung Fu Panda, which everyone seemed to enjoy, Hollywood’s knowledge of Chinese culture has obviously gained depth, which is not only reflected in its more accurate deployment of cultural signs but also embodied in scenes filled with Chinese flavours and atmospheric exaggerations. More importantly, compared with Mulan, Kung Fu Panda not only makes use of Chinese stories and Chinese symbols but also borrows to a large extent camera techniques and forms from Chinese films, particularly Hong Kong action movies. However much impact Chinese people say China had on Kung Fu Panda, it is impossible to avoid the fact that, in this film, China is an object of expression, a typical ‘representation of the Other’. For Hollywood, your story is for me to tell—this not only involves the issue of who owns the discourse power but relates to a huge, devious and involved business. In its premiere in China, Kung Fu Panda fetched a sweeping amount of more than ten million Chinese yuan, becoming the highest box office earnings globally. The Chinese audience loved this film absolutely, not just because of its Chinese story but more so because of the fact that ‘the Hollywood imitation of Hong Kong films endeared itself to us more so than anything else’. Meanwhile, we must not forget that Cheng Long or Jacky Chan and Zhou Xingchi or Stephen Chow, or actors like them carry a heavy dosage of Hollywood in themselves. Hollywood imitated the Hong Kong films that had imitated them and in doing so re-sold the version of Chinese stories to China. Thus, the issue has become quite complex—my imitation of your imitation of me, and your consumption of our consumption of you.

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The cultural logic of global capitalism is meant for itself to assimilate to a variety of ‘bentu’ cultural environments. Even when such ‘bentuing’ can change the modes of its operation, it will definitely not give up on its own power as a subject. Despite the existence of many Chinese elements, the spiritual core of Kung Fu Panda remains American, with its Ah Bao or Po the Panda a mere American teenager who is dancing a street dance: fat, free and carefree, as well as hippy. The story of how the Panda practices martial arts is in fact a stereotypical one, featuring a Hollywood theme in which an ordinary teenager triumphs over demons and rescues the world as a testimony to self, which is completely different from the wuxia (martial arts knightly) spirit in China, in which one should “claim against injustice but put the arms down to aspire to real martiality that involves no arms”. The hot sales of Kung Fu Panda have generated much debate in China, in which some view it as a ‘propaganda of Chinese culture’ that is ‘more Chinese than Chinese’ and others consider it to be a ‘superficial representation’ of Chinese culture, another ‘invasion by culture and capital’. Today, however, we can no longer evaluate cultural production and consumption by simply taking the position of nationalism or traditionalism because identification or difference, identity politics or sign economy, ‘international rail-matching’ or nationalism, all have been consumed by global capitalism as part of the marketing stratagem in various bentu markets. Does the same logic apply to the Chinese elements in Kung Fu Panda as it does to MacDonald’s bentued stratagem and the cultural signage of Chinese contemporary art? What is the real difference between cultural and economic nationalism and the attempt to stamp the bentu traces on global products? It is so hard to distinguish between the re-codification of cultural significance and the meaning of product marketing. What is global and what is bentu has become so problematic now. It is equally hard to define the relationship between the bentu ‘cultural meaning reassignment’, nationalism and the bentued marketing by global capitalism.

*** In a 1983 article, Italo Calvino reminds us that the Odyssey—the story of Ulysses’ return—had been in existence before his return. That is to say the story had happened before the actual events it described. It is necessary to look for, think of and remember the return journey: because the real danger exists where the return journey may not even have occurred before it was already forgotten. As a result, the return journey was destined to be a journey of loss because the destination had already got lost. One cannot just rely on pure memory to claw back the return journey. Memory is of real importance only when it embodies traces of the past and plans for the future. The return journey must be in the planning, and it must be repeatedly told, not to review the one that was in existence but to envisage the

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one to come. Consequently, the return journey becomes the entrance to this maze, a road to set out and go back on. In the Odyssey, Ulysses’ faithful wife plays an equally important role, her name, Penelope, meaning ‘shuttle’ and ‘weaving’ in Greek. To cope with a large number of suitors, this faithful and wise woman devises the tactic of ‘making a shroud’ by weaving it by day and unravelling it by night in a constant cycle, not the decisive tactic of ‘destroying the city’ that Ulysses had proposed to end the wait but one that kept delaying for the purpose of waiting. In the story of the Odyssey, Penelope represents bentu and home, and she engages in a continuous process of dismantling and re-weaving. If the fate of Ulysses is that of return and of loss and discovery in that return, the significance of Penelope is waiting, with dismantling and reconstruction in that waiting. The secret about the shroud is eventually leaked, and the reason for waiting is thus also lost. Penelope has a sad dream in which twenty geese are shot dead. The explicator of the dream has come to the crossroads of meaning as he or she is not sure whether these twenty dead geese represent the twenty annoying suitors or whether it symbolizes the twenty years spent in waiting. Penelope decides to use her ‘bow to test her suitors’, a real moment of re-construction and re-selection, in which the strong bow serves as the standard for re-construction since Ulysses is the only one who could draw it. In that moment, Penelope becomes the executor of her own fate, and in that moment, too, Ulysses is able to turn from a drifter and alien into a returnee. It is not until then that Penelope’s bentu reconstruction and Ulysses’ self-reconstruction become one and the same. In the case of Kung Fu Panda we can see signs and forms travel between bentu, Hong Kong and Hollywood as capital. Creative ideas, production and consumption keep shifting their positions between what is global and what is bentu, jointly creating a culture that circulates globally. What the story of Ulysses and Penelope brings us, however, is not just a wait and a return home but also a dismantling and re-construction. In the spring of 1994, when Yang Fudong, a student from the Department of Oil Paintings, Zhejiang Institute of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), decided not to speak to anyone for three months, it was a work in which Yang Fudong produced 216 hours of silence in his own life, a life lived elsewhere. For Yang Fudong at the time, it was a posture of establishing oneself in his self-exile. In 2008, at the third Guangzhou Triennial, Yang Fudong created a large-scale image installation entitled Black-Kirin. In this work, he shifted his camera from the distant dream of self to a bentu reality. This is a northern town where the most exquisite Han Dynasty stone carvings are kept. Now, it is the stone carving base in northern China, where you can see thousands of Buddha images and tens of thousands of stone lions and where what is on display is not just a visual view of rural China. It is a grassroots base for image creation and visual production at the bottom of the world. Daily, there are thousands of stone carvings shipped to all parts of the country, and the mountains and rivers

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here are continuously being excavated and consumed, becoming prospering ruins. However, what concerns Yang Fudong is the people who work and live here. On that occasion, the camera was no longer focused on the inner world of those young drifters nor did it sing of the vast and hazy ‘roaming age’; instead, it put its focus on the labourers-creators at the bottom as they no longer ‘lived elsewhere’ but had their ‘presence’, those who possess no poetry and exist here and now. What concerned Yang Fudong here, was it the realization of a pause (another kind of silence) in the inertia of the history of art? Or was it hardship and pleasure in the face of the ordinary people? In this plan, he meant to present how those with ‘presence’ created and laboured—the artist’s description of reality like the landscape which the painter stared at right in front of his eyes. What he faced was a solid reality, a rubble of contemporary China filled with energy, a non-aesthetic living site and a this-worldly homeland of here and now.

*** In the forum on the Guangzhou Triennial, held in November 2007, curator Francesco Bonami pointed out: “Said’s Orientalism has reached the end of a life cycle. Today, the Orient has appeared once again as a changed Orient, a new invention by the Orientals themselves.”3 What on earth is this emerging new Orient as Bonami observed, this ‘new invention by the Orientals themselves’? Today, the ‘Orient’ is no longer what it used to be when it had to gain meaning and power via the European centre of discourse. And the ‘Orient’ is no longer the kind of Orient discovered in the West by the likes of Lin Fengmian and Feng Zikai—what remained of the modern Orientalism; it is no longer the ‘self-orientalization’ in the narrative on the edges of modernity or the bentued strategy of global capitalism but a new contemporary culture being established on the level of ordinary bentu life, a mixed creation between global capital and bentu memory as much as that between cultural consumption and cultural experimentation. To realize this creation, one must reconstruct a mechanism in which meaning is created as having been issued within China, which will be a re-construction of the system and of the historical site of cultural creation in the interactive mechanism of ‘global-bentu’. What is the past is also what is an alien place. In the face of modernity and cultural rifts in the so-called traditional society, memory also needs evocation, and history of contexts must be combed through as this reconstruction must be a historical one. At the same time, such a re-construction must also necessarily be one of dangxia contemporaneity, and contexts must extend to the contemporaneity, becoming part of the con-

3 | This is the second stop in the flowing forum at the third Guangzhou Triennial featuring the theme of ‘Limits to Multi-culturalism’, held at the Guangdong Fine Arts Gallery on 19th November 2007.

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temporary reality, of the site of historical occurrence that is bentu, of the ‘base’ for cultural creation, and of the shaping of the contemporaneity. In the name of history, modern cities everywhere in Europe are increasingly becoming old and turning into the ruins and memorial monuments of time. All this wonderfully matches the temporal logic of modernity, which is also what Benjamin felt in the rapidly ageing Passages Couverts de Paris: being modern means that the new will quickly become a symbol of the old, and progress expels progress. Modernity is continually being betrayed. The so-called ‘modern’ is a passenger of passage who keeps crossing the river from one side to the other on the river of time that runs without return. It is for this reason that Benjamin compared the 19th century to the ‘old people’s home of child progenies’. Continuing modernity is also one that keeps creating obsolescence and outdated modernity. There is no more pressing need for memory in any age as there is in modern times. Consequently, the uncanny, museums, historical writings, archival systems and nostalgic consciousness have all become important features of modernity. However, it is in its distinction from and its relationship to the past that contempraneity emerges, and the reality as felt in the contemporaneity is carved in memory every minute of the hour. What saves us from today’s cultural situation is the historicization and contexting of the contemporary situation, the key to which is what Foucault describes as ‘unidentified memory’. In Foucault’s view, the ‘identified memory’ of tradition is often for the purpose of seeking an existing answer to the question ‘Who am I’. In fact, the anxiety regarding this return and root-seeking often tends to become the source of cultural nationalism and fundamentalism. On the other hand, ‘unidentified memory’ suspends the identified ‘Who am I’, radically questioning the effort to seek Ursprung. Foucault points out: When listening to history, one may find that there are always entirely different things at the back of things, not eternally essential secrets but another secret—essence being historically constructed with numerous Others. In this sense, all constructs are dismantled re-constructions. However, the so-called ‘re-construction’ is not the so-called return to the past or the talk about something previous, as defined by the traditionalists. As shown above, naïve traditionalism or nationalism have today been reduced to the role of an uninformed collaborator in the bentued strategy of global capitalism. In addition, as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out, all ‘traditions’ are ‘modern inventions’.4 ‘Construction’ contains the double-meaning of de-

4 | In October 1884, at an astronomical conference held in Washington, the beginning and end of each day was determined to be at midnight. Hence the zero hour. This historical fact reminds us that many things that we have taken for granted are actually part of a not too old system. What we regard as tradition is often a modern invention.

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construction and construction, like Penelope’s tactic in which what is dismantled is reconstructed and what is erased is returned. In a paper written eight years ago, I argued that the predicament with Chinese intellectuals is that they ‘must fight a two-directional battle between the two spaces of meaning of what is global and what is bentu’, and that they ‘must simultaneously resist the two opposed and simplified discourse tendencies between nationalism and global integration’. For this reason, the core of contemporary cultural construction is ‘basing oneself on the bentu by reconstructing the self-expressing mechanism of Chinese culture’. Today, in the face of global capitalist bentuing strategy, what we have to do is to ‘reconstruct the bentu’, which is not a mere revival of tradition. In the contemporary China, tradition has become a pre-modern imagination in the modernizing process; it has even been reduced to a variety of folklorist scenes and tourist cultural products for consumption, relegated to a sub-culture. The bentu here is neither the marketing site of global capitalism nor the ‘cultural resource’ historicized and objectified in the modernizing process but a historical and happening site of cultural creation. What we obtain from the re-construction of the bentu is a continually changing, wearing and tearing as well as developing history, a transference and re-construction squashed in reality, a continuously extending horizon. The bentu can be reconstructed by using the creative practices of contempraneity to recast memory and the subject of values. To be sure, public values as a norm and standard are no longer impossible at the moment. However, values as a vision are still important.5 For this reason, ‘the bentu re-construction’ is also that of vision and that of meaning structure. The premises under which today’s China is reconstructed are a subversion of the existing bentuing strategy of global capitalism, whereby the bentu is established as the creative site of the cultural motherboard. The basis of reconstruction is renewal—renewal of a self-developing model, and renewal of the self-expressing mechanism.6 In the interactive context of ‘global5 | The public values system is important to all those who are alive in this world. But it does not even exist. This paradox is the nature of modernity. It is not only revealed in art but, more importantly, it is realized in our living world. For this reason, a re-thinking of modernity presents itself in a series of questions: In what ways can we regain values after the loss of common values if we want to avoid the fundamentalist position and the ideological position? Can humanity go beyond its difference to enter into a common vision? 6 | This refers to a series of important issues in the history of modern Chinese culture: How can one think and create in the confused modern world of culture? How can one reconstruct a sense of subjectivity in culture? A confused world of culture leads to a confused world of written history of art. Now, a common question we share with the West is: How can one write in a situation in which there is a lack of foundation for common knowledge in a confused world of written history of art? Words and concepts have such a multiplicity of contexts that

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bentu’ (glocal), and in the face of the capitalist bentuing marketing, bentu re-construction is a struggle, one in which the base area is subverting the agent and in which the consuming site is being converted into a chuangzao muti (created motherboard), the key to which is the re-organizing of contexts, and reassignment of meaning and the explanation of the system’s re-construction and the re-construction of codified meaning. And this requires an ‘in-situ reassignment of the subject’.

*** In October 2007, Chinese curators and Okwui had another argument about the theme ‘Migration’, to which the 7th Shanghai Biennale was directed. In Okwui’s view, ‘migration’ was obviously an old issue of postcolonialism since a migrant was not only a ‘displaced person’ in the postcolonial context but also a political refugee, a homeless person. What was induced with the theme of ‘migration’ was then the anxiety of root-seeking, a soul-searching for colonial history and its contemporary traces, the ‘unrealized democracy’ in the globalizing process. However, for Chinese curators, migration is first and foremost a Chinese bentu issue, a newer anxiety, an anthropological challenge in the radical process of urbanization in contemporary China, a change in the individual identity and fate of hundreds of millions of lives, a transformation of their life forms, a re-shaping of the world of meaning, and the dismantling as much as reconstruction of the social structure. Different interpretations of the same theme of ‘migration’ by Chinese and Western curators reflect the difference between the subject’s positions and visions. But in terms of the cultural issues of contemporary China, is the key to the ‘reassignment of the subject’ about China or from China? We are talking about a bentu that is not a readymade and inherent ‘base’, a bentu that is constantly situated between dismantling and reconstructing, and between departing and arriving. On the other hand, the ‘reassignment of the subject’ means the establishment of the soul-searching a total narrative is impossible. Is art only meant to construct a ‘discourse site of a chorus of languages’ and to reconstruct a ‘space of shared values’? The writing of the world’s art history is a global history: How could it have been flooded with ethnicism? In the multi-cultural global vision, and in the transnational operations involving the art market and art system, an increasingly frequent exchange makes it possible to share the same cultural resources. However, what faces this resource of knowledge is the subject of values with a variety of different identities. For this reason, the key part of the foundation for this common epistemology is not a shared contemporary art resource but an attempt to construct a shareable values vision and an identifiable space. For artists, will they really return to the state of ‘national poets’? Today when signs, discourses and meanings circulate globally, how do artists engage in their work? How can artists together construct a commonwealth of culture based on knowledge and sensibilities?

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space of the subject, in which the subject regards its body with its own body and examines itself with its own thoughts. Here, discourse finds its base area, and the questioning vision originates in the bentu and unfolds itself towards the bentu. Just as the issue of ‘migration’ can generate entirely different meanings and solutions in the meaning system of the bentu, so the issue’s codified meaning will change with the establishment of the bentu vision. As a result, the explanatory anxiety of ‘Chinese contemporary art’ could be turned into the creation and construction of ‘contemporary Chinese art’ in the contemporary bentu context. From this angle, we may find that ‘contemporary Chinese art’ is actually more meaningful than ‘Chinese contemporary art’ as well as more plural and complex.7 Indian scholar Ashis Nandy reminded us that we must not only consider ‘replaceable modernity’ but also substitutes for modernity. The key to the issue, however, lies not where we are the Other of the modernity, or in the question whether it is another modernity; our issue is that in the last twenty years ‘Chinese contemporary art’ has achieved huge success on the international stage and the capital market although, in the final analysis, this success is the success of an alternative modernity and contemporary art in its local version, a success of identity politics, a success of the ‘Chinese card’. Today, we are no longer satisfied with this success, not with struggling for space and position in the globalized edifice as we would like to create a new homeland, a historical site of cultural creation and renewed subjects. That is the site of ‘contemporary Chinese art’, even though we lack a profound understanding of ‘contemporary Chinese art’; we even lack the basic discourse and cognitive framework. ‘Contemporary Chinese art’ no longer refers to shipped cultural products or alternative modern cultural practices or the local versions and bentued models of cultural patterns originating from the ‘West’ that constitute contemporary art. For the same reason, it is not necessary for us to worry, if the Western culture should be only for practical application on a Chinese fundament (zhongti xiyong) or the Chinese culture should be only for practical application on a Western fundament (xiti zhongyong) and it is not necessary to rack one’s brains trying to define ‘nationality’ or ‘Chineseness’. ‘Contemporary Chinese art’ is an unfinished plan, a possible world. 7 | Contemporary Chinese art is ‘plural’, and this ‘plurality’ is not the rigid and hollow ‘hybridity’ nor is it the kind of ‘multi-culturalism’ that has become part of the publicity strategy. China’s plurality keeps its inner tension. Meanwhile, ‘contemporary Chinese art’ really is a ball of confused hemp bristling with meanings, in which Chinese paintings and contemporary art never have anything to do with each other until death do them part in the same way in which fine arts associations, institutes of painting and experimental artists forget about each other in their greenwood of rivers and lakes, the key to which depends on whether a relationship of dialogue in which ‘something can be done’ can be established between the different systems.

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It is precisely because it is a ‘possible world’ that ‘contemporary Chinese art’ has nothing to do with any form of nationalism or fundamentalism. Not east, not west Not south, not north I am right here.

What Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami expresses in the above poem is a realization about the state of the subject’s existence rather than a selfcentred will. The subject is not a readymade and natural self. On the contrary, it establishes the self in continuing liberation and free practice. What plays a role in this open self is not the enlightenment of the object but the ‘enlightenment of the subject’, an enlightenment of the self in the archaeology of the self. Consequently, the subject becomes a renewing subject of the self instead of being an agent in the currency of ideology. That is what Foucault describes as ‘the self’s techniques’ or ‘the subject’s engineering’. This is an ethics for the aesthetics of the subject’s existence as well as for a situation. It is not a standardized system formed of values and universal rules; rather, it is an open system formed of various possibilities connected to reality. This involves Foucault’s recognition of enlightenment. For Foucault, the ethics of enlightenment consists of two aspects: the critique of reality by the subject and the subject’s own self-construction, equally an action involving the dismantling and re-construction of the cultural subject. Foucault said: Man is not locked inside the historical frame. All I do is to tell people that history is made as it is full of man-made skills and motivated relationships. For this reason, it can be shaken up and changed on the premises that the people shouldering this mission must have the courage to change the politics.

In 2003, when the exhibition entitled ‘China: Crossroads of Culture’ was held at the Mori Art Museum, a large number of historical relics showed people how embracing and multi-cultural China was in the Tang Dynasty, a ‘global village’ in the 8th century. This exhibition reminded us that China was an imagined community as well as an open subject that, like an ocean, could take hundreds of rivers. In the early 20th century, when this cultural subject faced challenges from colonialism, people like Cai Yuanpei made a clear proposition about coexistence and unclusiveness. What is worth noticing here is that coexistence and inclusiveness is not the kind of ‘takism’ (nalai zhuyi) that is based on the ethics of utilitarianism. We can see that what was recovered at the end of the Cultural Revolution was the totally utilitarian ‘takism’, not an open gesture towards coexistence and inclusiveness. In the historical practice of the thirty years of reform and opening up, this gesture towards coexistence and inclusiveness must be re-established, which, in the current context, means interactive plurality and harmony with difference. This requires an open mind that is full of tolerance

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with a will that keeps accumulating while dismantling for re-construction. One also must have the wisdom to establish the self in its renewal and the courage to keep progressing towards the unknown. This requires us to imagine the future in the repeated dismantling and re-construction of the bentu and subject, in order to make a positive discovery of things ‘to come’ and things that ‘are coming’. Translated by Ouyang Yu

Gu Dexin: A Double Take Chan David Ho Yeung

Once employed as a worker in a plastic factory and later self trained as an artist, Gu Dexin holds an independent position in the Chinese contemporary art circle and is reputed for his contemplative and psychologically charged installation projects. Widely considered one of the front-runners of conceptual art in China, Gu Dexin, together with Chen Shaoping and Wang Luyan, formed the New Analysts group in 1988. The group’s subject matter and approach included the use of geometric and mathematical formulas as the modus operandi for their critical activities, and they incorporated different strategies to deconstruct textual passages in order to arrive at non-object based expressions. The group disbanded in 1995. Gu was one of a handful of Chinese artists who was invited to participate in the exhibition Magiciens de la terre, held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989 and widely considered one of the most controversial exhibitions of recent times in that it featured contemporary artwork by artists of non-Western origins. Critical of the very notion of the authorship of an artist, Gu believes that audiences are central in bringing meaning to an artwork. Gu states his intention explicitly: “I am concerned with the relationship between myself and others, the collective and the individual, and how people in society become who they are. I pay a lot of attention to issues such as social roles, power, artists, artwork, audiences and institutions. With these issues in mind, I find that the audiences use their own methods to read an artwork. I wish to provide a space without linguistic obstacles to the audiences.” Gu’s interest with site specificity is in line with the relational aesthetics so central to the critical art practices of the 1990s. Relational aesthetics bring into play the different relations between institutions and spectatorship as subject matter, in particular the ways in which contemporary art production can open up new kinds of relationships between the viewer and the work. As defined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud: “I like art that allows its audience to exist in the space opened up by it. For me, art is a space of images, objects, and human beings. Relational aesthetics is a way of considering the productive existence of the viewer of art, the space of

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participation that art can offer.”1 Gu’s exhibitions always convey an intense and timely experience. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Gu on two exhibition projects in 2005 and again in 2008 held at the Shanghai Gallery of Art. The exhibition site is not something given; as Gu claims there is always a way to push the reading of a site towards its complementary extremes. I wish to present these exhibitions as case studies in order to shed light on the ways in which Gu negotiates with a constant site and in turn polarizes our interpretations of the artwork on view.

TAKE ONE : 2005.03.05 For 2005.03.05, Gu created a single project that includes a series of different artworks. The use of the opening date as the exhibition’s title signifies the handover of the exhibition by the artist to the general public. Using a large number of apples, bananas and artificial materials for various site-specific installations, Gu encourages the audience to participate in the exhibition. The audience can consume the fruit at will and thus choose be included in the process of reshaping the artwork as the exhibition progresses. When looking at Gu Dexin’s exhibition, one thing to bear in mind is that you are not looking merely at bananas and apples. Gu first and foremost investigates our relationship with materiality. By witnessing the unfolding of a natural cycle, we are encouraged to re-think the contradiction between decay and beauty as a basic human condition; respect for a natural order is always interrupted by our imposition of control and reason. Hence, Gu’s aesthetic focuses on investigating the temporality of perishable materials that have their own time frame, their own life, and, ultimately, their own decay. Other questions also come to the fore. To what extent does art rely on an institution to legitimate its own existence? What is the function of an individual within such a process? Deliberately placed inside the gallery’s atrium is a large-scale plinth. If we examine it carefully, we soon realize that the plinth was conceived with the proportion of the whole atrium in mind. One would normally expect to see a classical sculpture on top of it, which would sanctify the architecture of that space. Gu subverts such a trope by painting the plinth with bright red paint, thereby making the object self-referential. Furthermore, Gu deflates the imposing spectacle of such an out-of-proportion plinth by placing a ‘sea’ of bananas on the marble floor, putting the object on view in crisis. After a week or so, the chemical reaction of the ripening, then rotting, bananas left permanent marks on the marble floor. If the very identity of the atrium relies so centrally on an art object to anchor the space, Gu’s strategy is to counter such an architectural conceit with something completely natural. We are confronted with our own powerless yet sensuous situation, witnessing thousands of bananas slowly rotting away. 1 | Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du Reel, 2002.

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Figure 23, 24: 2005.03.05 Following a similar strategy is another installation in the exhibition that utilizes tons of apples placed against windows looking onto Pudong as the backdrop. There is an unfailing tension between the facades of progress as signified by the supermodern facades of Pudong versus the process of natural decay. Observed from a distance within the gallery, the apples

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appear to be flowing out from the window into the rest of the exhibition space. On closer observation, the skyline across the Huangpu river, with the movement of ships in front of it, appears out of sync. By staging a clash of two different time frames, a natural cycle versus an accelerated modernization, Gu is opening up an opportunity for us to contemplate the brutality of senseless urban development.

Figure 25, 26: 2005.03.05 In direct dialogue with the apple installation are ten freezers filled with pig brains. These brains, similar in shape to the human brain, are preserved in the freezers to assure their longevity. Is this an experiment in the making? Are we caught in a paradox of deciding whether this matter is to be disposed of or to be preserved? The inclusion of nine photographs of a hand kneading meat, originally made in 1996, documents the very pro-

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cess of making the piece. Gu spent one and a half months kneading each piece of meat until it dried up. This work alludes to the journey from life to death, and kneading becomes a gesture to express our inability to hold onto our body and retain its existence. In juxtaposition to the kneaded meat photographs is a twenty-five metre long aluminium flag pole that divides the entire gallery space. The flagpole and its stand are the basic structures for flying a flag that serves to support the potent symbol of a nation. Placed prone on the floor inside a gallery facing a large red painting, the pole is turned into a minimalist sculpture. The provocative act of conceptually deconstructing the flagpole into its rudimentary components exposes the fallibility of its symbolic potency. Furthermore, when placed within a cultural institution, the audience is made more conscious of the flagpole as an art object and of the so-called master narrative of nationalism that glosses over the narratives of individuals. One must read this work in relation to a series of computer animations by Gu that express the tension between the individual and different social systems. Done in a playful manner, the computer animations, previously shown at the Venice Biennial during 2003, document the deprivation of individual rights relative to various institutional structures. Male and female figures are subjected to carrying out various involuntary actions. In one animation, a male figure is incessantly saluting the raising of a flag. The longing for individual freedom is perpetually contained by power structures that, for the sake of uniformity, still tend to exert control over our behaviour. Gu’s critique of individuality relies on what Homi Bhabha says “interrupts the self-generating time of national production and disrupts the signification of the people as homogenous.”2 In other words, Gu’s project attempts to intervene in an institutionalization of art that relies on consecrating the art object in order to make spectatorship meaningful. Like the piece of kneaded meat that one cannot entirely seize, the transient nature of our existence is something Gu is reminding us of time and again. While many contemporary Chinese artists are preoccupied with positioning themselves within a new global art infrastructure, an interest in the rights of an individual relative to institutions seems to be lacking. It is evident that showing work inside a museum or an exhibition space is merely a convention that many artists have accepted with little thought. Fewer artists are now interested in re-thinking how different forms of institutional power have legitimated the reading of an artwork for the audience. The time for proposing new interpretations for art and its ideological function may have passed, but we must not forego the idea that art can still initiate a positive social consciousness in light of China’s flight to become an economic and political superpower.

2 | Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994: 148.

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TAKE T WO : 2008.06.21 The exhibition 2008.6.21 makes reference to the computer game Sims, a 1990’s simulation programme which focuses on the creation of virtual life. To play this game, the users first designate a piece of land; they are then given funds to cultivate a viable urban setting. The objective of this game is to align infrastructure and materials strategically in order to achieve maximum prosperity and efficiency for a territory. It follows that the making of a city is not here merely a Utopian pursuit, since the model which possesses the strongest capitalist logic would ensure survival in the long term. Ever since Gu started to play this computer game ten years ago, he wanted to use it as a premise for an exhibition project. Gu’s own version of the Sims embodies hybrid domestic and sub-urban characters, a gated community with three large inhospitable houses that blur the boundaries of the private and the public. A number of toilets and bathtubs are put in a garden; a dining table is placed next to a sculpture by a stream that surrounds the property and also doubles as a swimming pool. Countering the overwhelming ambition to gentrify everything within sight, which is so common in many Chinese cities today, the artist exposes how artificial and standardized our lives have altogether become. As Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas observed, cities are becoming increasingly non-specific. He talks about […] the ‘generic city’, the general city, the city without qualities, the city without identity, which is simply an inventory of a new urban condition that is very pervasive in Asia but which is equally pervasive in America and in Europe […]. The virtues of this identity-less space could be, and obviously one of the enormous virtues is, that once there is no identity you are also liberated from a whole series of obligations, a whole series of assumptions and a whole series of models.

With existing architectural prototypes already installed in the computer game, what is inherently a Utopian vision of the city represented in the form of a ready-made appears even more generic in the digital realm. Even as we live in an era of simulation, and just as another tabular rasa is in the making in Chinese cities, contemporary art production must embody a sense of freedom, imagination and free will and propose a set of new ideals that reflect what is still possible at a time when contemporary art is everywhere but also nowhere at the same time. Everywhere in the sense of it being commodities for a burgeoning and now collapsed art market economy, in which contemporary art practices may have lost their own context. ‘Nowhere’ is directed at the inability to move the discussion beyond the artists as mere representatives of a more progressive ‘glocal’ subjectivity. What remains crucial is the validity of an idea first and foremost, the necessity to express it in a particular way within a specific context, and the extent in which an artwork can provoke the participation of the audi-

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ence and the public at large. To do away with established historical models is not just a blind faith for embracing something new at face value; rather this anomaly offers a fertile ground for timely experimentation that may speak more truly of the current state of humanity and for teasing out the psychological trauma in the name of modernization that many have accepted blindly. 2006.6.21 utilizes mirrors, three large-scale architectural models, videos and computer print-outs to register what is virtual as a concrete reality within the gallery. Gu’s critique is not directed simply at urbanization, but more centrally it is meant to question our infatuation with progress and power with a sense of irony and playfulness. To create meaning from an artificial and open digital source, Gu projects a dystopian vision which is subliminal and yet perverse in every aspect. His approach towards exhibition making is continuously based on using the project on hand to negotiate with the physical constraints of a given exhibition space and to seek ways to unify the site and the objects within as one. The gallery space does not function merely to enhance the readings of an artwork or vice versa, for Gu’s intention is to provoke a disjuncture between the two demanding audiences to contemplate their inherent contradictions. Denying expectations to deliver a singular meaning to the public, what we may say about an exhibition must then only be derived from our own perceptual experience.

Figure 27: 2008.06.21

If we assume that the architectural models in the exhibition are there to illustrate a virtual city that exists digitally, we are missing the point altogether. The placement of three large scale architectural models alters the scale of the gallery space completely. What is already a gentrified cultural setting is now suspended, i.e. neither excessive nor reductive in nature. By installing mirrors on the ground of the architectural models, Gu incorporates the green marble and the wooden pillars from the atrium as added

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visual elements, displacing the audiences somewhere in between an artificial, imaginary and yet intensely physical setting. In coming to terms with the pillars that dictate the reading of the artworks in the gallery, Gu has decided to cover them with mirrors to diffuse these set structures and in order to create a self-conscious environment. Again, the mirrors function as a vehicle to expand the space visually, thereby drawing attention to the site and simultaneously denying its own characteristics. Such a visual disjuncture is further enhanced by the inclusion of over four hundred computer print-outs of fragments taken from Gu’s own sim-city. While selected images have a definite monetary value attached to them, the artist reveals an absurd interior which defies conventional domestic logic. In our pursuit for a better living standard, our material want is the dominant ideology—a new form of solitary and self- imposed confinement. In many ways, Gu’s exhibition strategy brings to mind the late American earthwork artist Robert Smithson’s notion of non-site: a middle ground for mediation and imagination exists in order to draw connections between an artwork that supposes to represent a site and the actual physical site that is situated outside of the gallery. As Smithson writes: The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in New Jersey (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—this is The Non-Site. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn’t look like a picture. […] A logical intuition can develop in an entirely ‘new sense of metaphor’ free of natural or realistic expressive content. Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that ‘travel’ in this space is a vast metaphor.

If the premise of making an exhibition is to use the objects on view to allow the audience to transcend the exhibition space towards another imaginative realm which lies beyond the given site, Smithson’s idea of ‘travel’ may be applied here. Indeed, there are many trajectories for travel, as the practice of exhibition operates as a testing ground for presenting artworks across a sea of diverse contextual interests – from evoking a contemplative state through our perception as a temporal and spatial experience, to the question of how best to bridge the gap between one’s judgment versus desire. It follows that a fuller understanding of the political, social, and institutional systems that inform the production of art will bring a fuller understanding of each step of the creative process. The very scope of travel is in fact without limits if we start to let go of our assumptions.

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Figure 28, 29, 30: 2008.06.21

In the case of Gu, one may ask what other possible connections exist between the non-site (as embodied by the exhibition’s content) and the actual/virtual site that exists in the digital world. To shed light on this aspect, Gu exhibits twentyone electronic photo albums which document by video his process of manipulating the computer console. The footage is edited at an accelerated pace. The pressure to achieve progress at a speed which complies with the logic of a virtual reality is schizophrenic and shocking to observe. Moreover, the demand for resources and time to comply with an established system of a virtual life further scrutinizes how artistic labour is valued—specifically regarding the way in which

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Gu’s strategy of making art is something that borders between work and play. To undermine the dominance of the external scenery of the bund which dictates the reading of the gallery space, Gu has decided to cover the entire wall at the fore, yet leaving a series of small openings to observe the scene of the river. Again mirrors are used to overlay fragmentary visions of the outside as a self-contained perceptual unit that is almost cinematic in nature. It is as if we were looking at a series of small television sets broadcasting live the madness of an ever changing metropolis which appears to be even more intense and surreal than what is shown in the photo albums. Living memories are recorded in our minds only through our perception as being something temporary and disparate, for the meaning of our existence is dictated by a much greater power, which reflects a characteristic that is innately human, yet the ability for one to transcend oneself to a more liberating place is a fallacy that we do not wish to abandon after all.

Art in Its Regional Political Context: Exhibition and Criticism Wang Nanming

As a former critic, I am often asked what criteria I use when planning exhibitions. As a matter of fact, the answer is to be found in the exhibitions that I have curated. In all of them I have shown art created by the artists whom I discussed in my ‘avant-avant-garde art’ theory, submitting it to the critical appraisal of academic circles. In times when there are more artists than ever before, solo exhibitions can confirm an artist and simultaneously serve to present new art forms. We may well have more and better artists. However, since we do not have powerful art criticism and convincing exhibitions in our own country, good artists have become inferior artists. ‘Hooligan art’, ‘Political bop’, and ‘New cartoon’ all bear witness to this kind of inferior art. I have always stressed that if Chinese modern art is to have its own public, it must have its own art critics and its own exhibitions. We have always relied slavishly on the Western response to modern Chinese art. As soon as something has received Western approbation it is acknowledged at home—with the result that Chinese works of art have become uniform, as could be seen at the 2007 Shanghai Art Fair International Contemporary Art Exhibition: Although there were different art galleries, they all showed the same artists and works of art, whose distinctive feature was that they contained Chinese cultural markers but nothing relating to contemporary China. In 2005 at the opening of the ‘Nouvelles Vagues’ exhibition of modern French art at the Shanghai Art Museum, the curator from the Centre Pompidou said that there were certain works in the exhibition which it would be difficult for the public to understand if they did not know the political background of the time. What the man from the Centre Pompidou said was true. If a work of art is a text, it can only be understood within the same linguistic environment, and international exchange is bound to be hampered by language barriers. Faced with a work of art, it is most important that the public have an understanding of its period and its region,

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especially now that contemporary art has left the epic narrative style to enter a field where specific social problems are a topic—which leads us to my theory of ‘avant-avant-garde art’. In my theory, a great number of factors have to be taken into consideration when appreciating art: vestiges of the past together with the present context, specific problem situations along with regional politics, avant-garde art’s persistent deconstruction of art and its critical nature. It is a new methodology for art appreciation, and without it we simply cannot analyze any worthwhile piece of art whatsoever. So what the curator of the Pompidou Centre said applies equally to foreigners. If they have no understanding of the political background from which the artwork comes, there is no way they can understand contemporary Chinese art. In other words, an understanding of the local context of art is necessary not only in relation to the ‘Nouvelles Vagues’ exhibition. Since every country has its own specific problems, the social problems which attract the attention of artists also vary. That is a consequence of the hiatus between political globalization and each country’s individual political development. In addition, a country’s politics are affected by the political participation of its people. Thus each country has its own political topics. Obviously any discussion of Chinese contemporary art will also involve the topic of regional politics, particularly as the distinctive features of such regional political problems have become more and more visible ever since present-day contemporary Chinese artists started creating works addressing specifically Chinese problems. When art was part of a religious philosophy, deciphering it was very simple as its themes contained allusions everyone understood. As far as the subject matter of this kind of art is concerned, there is no barrier to understanding. As long as art is not shown at international exhibitions, its public can be relatively parochial and there are unlikely to be serious regional misunderstandings. However, as soon as art is exhibited internationally and to an international public, it is necessary for the public to have some understanding of the foreign country. Westerners have difficulty understanding China so they also find it very difficult to interpret Chinese art. And yet perversely it is only Westerners who exhibit and analyze contemporary Chinese art. One way of reading contemporary Chinese art is through the identification and deciphering of any cultural markers it may contain. This method is a result of Westerners’ involvement in contemporary Chinese art. Because they do not understand the specific Chinese context, the easiest way for them to assess contemporary Chinese art is to base their criteria on its cultural markers. However, choosing contemporary Chinese art on this basis is problematic. Of course it is Chinese art, but the China it shows is not the intricately complicated China unfolding today. The reason I say that ‘token Chinese’ artworks do not form part of ‘Chinese context’ art is this: on the surface, ‘token Chinese’ art may be

A RT IN I TS R EGIONAL P OLITICAL C ONTEXT : E XHIBITION AND C RITICISM

Chinese, but it is created for Western eyes, or it is art created according to Western ideas of Chinese art. Now, as far as Westerners are concerned, it is not very easy for them to understand the context of Chinese art. On the other hand, if they have no understanding of the Chinese context it means they cannot understand genuine Chinese contemporary art. One day a Westerner came to talk to me for an article he wanted to write on Cai Guo-Qiang. I said that what Cai does is ‘token Chinese’ art, and told him I had already criticized it in an article, and that what I was interested in was Chinese art dealing with problems. I gave him examples of contemporary Chinese art, and of course before commending these artworks I gave him a bit of background information. For example, when showing him Jin Feng’s Standing Statues of Qin Hui and His Wife I first told him about an incident in Shenzhen where prostitutes and their clients were publicly paraded through the streets on the backs of lorries. The foreigner was puzzled and asked me what that had to do with art. My answer was: If you cannot even understand this kind of information, how can you possibly interpret art? My dispute with that Westerner was not only about art appreciation methods. It was also about Westerners’ oversimplified interpretation of contemporary Chinese art and my opposition to this kind of oversimplified interpretation. As far as Western critics are concerned, they can count on having exclusively Western readers who know nothing about China. So, although the writers themselves know next to nothing about China, their articles about contemporary Chinese art are not likely to be questioned. This would not be the case if their readers were Chinese. In fact, often a Western sinologist only needs to have written occasional reviews of Chinese art exhibitions to be immediately considered an expert in the field. It would certainly be a good thing if the qualifications of Western sinologists, including overseas Chinese sinologists, were put to the test in China! The basic idea behind my exhibitions is to have the exhibition of Chinese contemporary art come back home and contemporary Chinese art criticism return to its native soil. I want the richness of our own society to break up the uniformity of Chinese contemporary art. And also, through the excellence of my own criticism, I want to put paid to the sycophantic criticism still to be found in reviews of contemporary Chinese art. Thus, by showing the connection between regional politics and performance art and the links between pictures and society, my curating reflects my theory and is also making its mark on the gradually intensified work of art galleries to build up Chinese contemporary art. Choosing artists to be reviewed, organizing retrospectives of their work which can be followed by reappraisals—that, of course, is the science of art-curating. Only with that kind of science can we create the foundations for an international discussion of contemporary Chinese art. Whether we are talking about exhibitions or criticism, this will be Chinese contemporary art with roots in its own country—not just a Chinese flower stuck in a Western vase.

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Figure 31: Jin Feng, Standing Statues of Qin Hui and his Wife, Lady Wang, Fiberglass, 2005

E X AMPLE 1 J IN F ENG ’S S TANDING S TATUES OF Q IN H UI AND H IS W IFE AND ‘H UMAN R IGHTS A RT ’ When I saw in a news report that Jin Feng’s sculpture Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife had been withdrawn from the exhibition at the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art I could not help laughing out loud. Because after the Shanghai Morning Post reported that Jin Feng had created a sculpture based on the Portrait of Qin Hui and his wife kneeling (before Yue Fei’s tomb located by Hangzhou’s West Lake), there was an angry reaction from many readers, some of them saying Jin Feng was a traitor, or that he was a descendant of Qin Hui’s wife, Jin Wuzhu. This depressed Jin Feng who said that basically this piece of art was just a reconsideration of the historical figures’ position in the light of human rights and women’s rights. He had never expected such devastating protests, but as things stood he would just stop exhibiting it. As a matter of fact the viewers’ disapproval of this work of art is not only due to the fact that it conflicts with the picture they hold in their minds. It is also because it goes against what they were taught. From an early age we were all taught that people who had done something sha-

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meful should go down on their knees. Every time tourists go to Yue Fei’s tomb, they all show that they have been well trained by traditional teaching: quite spontaneously they will scowl angrily at the statues of Qin Hui and his wife, some people even wanting to spit at them or kick them. The revolutionary example set by Qin Hui and his wife being forced to go down on their knees in front of Yue Fei’s tomb imperceptibly influenced the common people; to such an extent that so-called revolutionary consciousness together with crowd behaviour inevitably gave rise to a kind of subconscious collective disposition to violate people’s rights. The humiliation of persons during the Cultural Revolution and this kind of revolutionary tradition are in the same line, and in fact such things still happen today. For example in Tahe in Henan Province criminal suspects are publicly displayed on cars driven slowly through the streets to the cheers and applause of the local people. Or, to take another example, when a number of men forced themselves on two female pornography workers and carved characters into their faces, some commentators on the net considered it served those two pornography workers right; what is even more absurd, there was a special discussion on the net as to whether or not this constituted a tort—it seems that women who work in pornography can be treated in any way and that they have absolutely no rights. No wonder that after a ‘pornography building’ in Nanning was destroyed in a fire causing a number of deaths, several female corpses went unclaimed. No one knew the names of these sex workers nor where they came from. In view of these things, and from the standpoint of today’s ‘human rights’ society, although it appears on the surface that the broad masses have a clear-cut moral stance, in fact our backward ideas about rights in the public domain lead to a total disregard for personal rights. Jin Feng selected the West Lake Portrait of Qin Hui and his wife kneeling and, reconstructing it in the light of the human rights ideal, changed it into Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife. One of his aims was thereby to initiate a process where the two of them would be set free, for people who have served their sentence must be released, and even criminals who have been condemned to death and stripped of their political rights should not be humiliated in such a way. The historian Lü Simian in his The vernacular history of our nation, published as early as 1923, established that Yue Fei’s military successes had always been exaggerated by the common people and that in actual fact the Southern Song had not defeated the troops from the State of Jin. It is precisely this academic research which caused Lü Simian to be accused of ‘defaming Yue Fei’. And now with his Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife Jin Feng goes one step further in correcting our dearly cherished error, even though this step lands him in criminal territory. The result is that Jin Feng is accused of being a traitor and a descendant of Qin Hui’s wife, Jin Wushu. I have always emphasized the use of art as a means of getting involved in genuine, home-made Chinese problems. Now, from the shower of abuse poured on Jin Feng, I can see the significance of this artwork here in

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China. In fact, one can say that Jin Feng’s artwork has brought into the public forum the question of what kind of art best exemplifies the direction in which advanced culture is developing. After I had seen this sculpture of Jin Feng’s I became aware of the direction in which Chinese artists are going. Following my opposition to contemporary ‘token-Chinese’ art with its dragons, pandas, bamboo branches, even things like cannibals eating babies, or small animals being maltreated, I maintain that not only should Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife continue to be exhibited but also that the community should place it on West Lake next to the original Portrait of Qin Hui and his wife kneeling as a contrast. Then, what has up to now been called municipal sculpture could be renamed public art. For Jin Feng’s Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife really is a sculptural form of public art. In fact, his concept, which depends on our combining the West Lake Portrait of Qin Hui and his wife kneeling with his own statues, shows that the subject of human rights is in the process of becoming a topic of public debate. There are people who say that the Portrait of Qin Hui and his wife kneeling shows a historical event and that we should respect history, and that by creating the Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife the artist ignored the real historical cultural background. However, the historical Portrait of Qin Hui and his wife kneeling had been reduced to a kind of value judgement which was furthermore carried over into the present and used to shape present-day reality. Now that we have entered a period in which many traditional ways of thinking inherited from the past are being reassessed and a system of universal values is being constructed, Jin Feng’s Standing statues of Qin Hui and his wife stands for ‘human rights’ and is a criticism of our subconscious culture. That is the reason why, to use the notion from my theory, Jin Feng’s art is ‘critical art’, which has, moreover, also joined forces with that ‘critical art’ which is critical of historicism.

E X AMPLE 2: PAIN IN S OUL : H E C HENGYAO’S P ERFORMANCE A RT AND V IDEO W ORKS The exhibition ‘Pain in Soul: He Chengyao’s Performance Art and Video Works’, which I had curated, opened at the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art on 2 July 2007. Originally the exhibition was divided into three parts: the first was a retrospective of six of He Chengyao’s older performance art and photographic works; the second part showed new work—a documentary film and documentary photographs. The purpose of the exhibition was to defend He Chengyao’s former performance art and support her new work. The third part—He Chengyao’s two-year plan to support rural education—was presented at the opening of the exhibition. He Chengyao’s work started out from her own personal experience and from there broadened out to engage with people from a similar social background, leading finally to her application to go out to a remote de-

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pressed area and return to her original job as a teacher. Following that, supporting education became the next step in her performance art.

1. ‘The body’s nightmare’: A retrospective of He Cheng yao’s performance art Paying my Respects to Mama is a piece of performance art created by He Chengyao in 2001. That year she created several pieces of performance art. In Paying my Respects to Mama He Chengyao is semi-nude, her eyes look straight forward, in her hands she holds up a photograph of her mother who is similarly bare-breasted. This performance makes no compromises; we can clearly read it as He Chengyao’s public confession and at the same time denunciation of her own life experience. Besides that, Paying my Respects to Mama is the key to understanding He Chengyao’s other related performance art. What she does is performance art, but what she uses is her own life experience. The woman in the photo He Chengyao is holding is not an ordinary mother. He Chengyao was born in Chongqing’s Rongchang County in 1964. Her parents had had long discussions about whether they wanted to have her, as her mother was unmarried when she became pregnant. Finally they decided to have the baby. This led to her parents’ dismissal from their state employment. Then her mother fell mentally ill under the pressure. Of course, for people who do not understand the social and political situation of that period it is very difficult to appreciate what political pressure He Chengyao’s parents were subjected to and in what an odious environment He Chengyao grew up—giving birth to a child out of wedlock was considered a sign of moral corruption. One must remember that He Chengyao and her parents were living in a period when discredited persons could be humiliated at will. Even today single mothers still suffer discrimination. To understand a work of art you have to know its background. Each artwork has its own specific background, and if we do not know it we have no way of recognizing all the different levels of meaning. A case in point is naked body performance art. He Chengyao’s performance art sets out from her mother’s semi-nude body. After her mother had become mentally deranged, she had a habit of running naked, with hair dishevelled and shouting, through the streets and alleys of the village, by day or by night. This is a childhood memory that has continuously accompanied He Chengyao, from her native Rongchang County to Chongqing, from Chongqing to Beijing and right up to the present day. And so, when He Chengyao first started doing performance art—in Opening the Great Wall—she used her naked body as a symbol. At the time there was a German artist’s installation of ‘trash people’ made out of industrial waste lined up on the Great Wall like Terracotta Army soldiers. He Chengyao took off her top and walked semi-nude behind the tourists to the beacon tower. As a matter of fact, from Opening the Great Wall on,

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all her art is connected with her mother. After Opening the Great Wall He Chengyao went back home to visit her mother. She found her, half-naked again, sitting alone and playing with a rotten apple. For He Chengyao this scene was as miserable as ever. Therefore she also took off her top, stood behind her mother and took a photo of them together. She named the photo Mother and Me. She said it was the first time she had been photographed together with her mother and that she wanted to use this photograph to make known to the public her family’s history of mental illness and her own story, things which she had up to then always been careful to conceal. By gently stroking her mentally sick mother she wanted to show that she was not ashamed of her blood relationship with her.

Figure 32: He Chengyao, Mother and me, Performance-Photo, 2001

Figure 33: He Chengyao, Testimony, Concept photograph, 2001/02 The misinterpretatation of He Chengyao’s art started with her Opening the Great Wall, and even though post-modern critics used the ‘body politics’ keyword to analyze her naked body performance art, a misreading was inevitable. Since, judging from contemporary critical articles, the term ‘body politics’ seems to have become the grand narrative, taking off one’s clothes must be part of ‘body politics’, at least that is what most critics maintain. So criticism of He Chengyao’s performance art stopped at that point, and the conclusion reached was that what defined He Chengyao’s art was her daring to take off her clothes. However, the fact is that this grand narrative criticism does not go deep enough for a profound critical understanding

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of the structure and meaning of a work of art. People still have many, many reasons for expressing themselves. All along He Chengyao has been faced with the same kind of suspicion—that she was taking off her clothes just for the sake of taking off her clothes. The general public and specialists alike all based their readings of He Chengyao’s art on body politics’ simplified and superficial narration and thus totally misread her. But it just happens that if you want to go beyond this kind of criticism you have to go further than ‘body politics’ to analyze He Chengyao and her naked body performance art. In fact this observation does not apply only to He Chengyao, but is also applicable to other body performance art. The photograph Mother and Me can be seen as a kind of extension of He Chengyao’s art and also as a kind of footnote to Opening the Great Wall. With her naked body performance in Opening the Great Wall, He Chengyao returned to her origins. The characteristic of this return to the original situation is that the artwork is not only the work of the artist He Chengyao but that of her mother, too, as it takes the two of them together to complete this set of artworks. In this series there are various photographs of her mother taken from different angles by He Chengyao, and also various joint photos. But even in He Chengyao’s performance art without photos of her mother, we still sense her mother’s presence. Mother and Me has supplied the context. In He Chengyao’s 99 Needles 2002 performance art she stuck ninety-nine needles into her body, to the point that she even fainted. He Chengyao herself said that this artwork was ‘dedicated to my mother who suffered extreme hardship and humiliation’—in her childhood family members tried every kind of folk medicine, including acupuncture and moxibustion, to cure her mother’s mental illness. He Chengyao heard her mother screaming, saw her struggling as she was held down by the arms and legs on a door plank while needles were stuck into her body. But her mother could not be cured. That is He Chengyao’s ‘body’s nightmare’. The above-mentioned pieces of performance art are all connected to this nightmare. In 2004 He Chengyao used Public Broadcast Exercises to concentrate her interest in the theme of the body and life experience into one piece. This controversial work of art could be said to represent a brief summary of He Chengyao’s early performance art. In it she wraps transparent adhesive tape around her naked body and limbs. Then she does a set of the public broadcast exercises she did while she was at school. Because the adhesive side of this transparent tape is on the outside, it means that whenever He Chengyao does one of the exercises, the tapes are pulled open as she forcibly stretches out her arms and legs. During He Chengyao’s performance the spectators can literally hear the sound her stretching makes, and it sounds as if her body was continually being rent apart. So in Public Broadcast Exercises He Chengyao’s revisiting of her early memories is linked to the suffering caused by an unjust society, and the collective delight in the repression of human feelings.

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He Chengyao’s performances are ‘body politics’, but that does not mean ‘the body is politics’, rather that the body comes to the fore, the political lies behind. We have to read her work from the back to the front, only then can we understand He Chengyao’s work.

2. Anxiety about the younger generation: He Cheng yao’s photographic message From among all her works it is Testimony (2001-2002) which marks the source of He Chengyao’s most recent creation. It is a set of photographs showing a third person—her son—next to her and her mother. The complete artwork is composed of three photos. The first shows He Chengyao standing behind her mother, with her mother turning her head to look at He Chengyao, semi-nude like herself. In the second picture He Chengyao is seated and her son is standing behind her. In the third photo He Chengyao’s son is seated in front of an empty background. What we have here is He Chengyao’s recollection of her own childhood, and also her anxiety about the next generation. Even though He Chengyao has used her own story to reflect on her son’s life, the general relevance of her art is already quite evident from this work. Just as in the performance artworks in The body’s nightmare, although He Chengyao starts out from her own personal experience her art touches on such political topics as social and personal freedoms. In these artworks she makes use of her own personal history, but what she criticizes is the injustice of former social forms and ideologies. Just as in Testimony, He Chengyao is trying to express her concern and respect for all underprivileged groups and marginalized people: like us, they all live in this world. Starting out from personal statements and moving on to an engagement with social questions—that is how He Chengyao’s art develops. So beginning with art within the context of her own life story, her interest expanded to include groups of people with similar experiences to her own, and this led to her interest in this society. And it is no longer the society of He Chengyao’s early years, it is the situation people are living in today. Rongchang is He Chengyao’s hometown. Recently she made a documentary film there about families afflicted by mental illness. As an artist who grew up in such a family, this is her sympathetic response to others in the same situation. It might be that having a common illness unites, but actually the subjective reason that led He Chengyao to make her documentary account was to support a cause. The social and personal problems of families with mental patients is a field sadly neglected by society, especially when it concerns families in remote areas, and even today there are mentally sick people roaming the streets of Rongchang. He Chengyao filmed in small towns and villages, and then compiled one documentary named Families Afflicted by Mental Illness which shows the situation of three families with mental patients; and another which shows the situation of the homeless mentally sick, entitled Home-

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less Mentally Sick People. Here the documentary is not an alternative to He Chengyao’s latest performance art but, according to the artist, it is simply a more efficient way of using the camera to give a realistic picture of the life conditions of the most vulnerable members of our society. Therefore if He Chengyao’s early performance art, based on her own experience, is made up of memories, her documentaries on the other hand are rooted in the immediate. She takes up her camera and decides to use documentary films and photographs to say: I suffered so much in the past, how can it be that they have to go on suffering in the same way? He Chengyao’s anxiety about the next generation has made her art more and more ‘socialized’, i.e. founded in real life. He Chengyao made her son a focus of her art, and that gave rise to discussion—that is exactly the kind of ‘socialization’ which is transforming art today. Art of this nature intervenes in social questions and is not satisfied with clinging to personal utopias. Thus ‘cultural politics’ is at the avant-garde of contemporary art. The kind of art created by individuals remote from society is not only nonsense, it is also kitsch. He Chengyao returned to her native township in the country several times. She filmed the children of underprivileged families. This film, named The Children of Poor Families, is made up of photographs and interviews He Chengyao made with about thirty children from underprivileged rural families. Each person is shown in a series of photographs; some of them are children from single-parent families, some are abandoned children, some are orphans, some are sick. Due to their living conditions and due to social attitudes, there is no way that they can live like normal people. Not only are they deprived of schooling, they also have no one who cares for them. By putting together these photographs and thus constituting a record of these children’s lives, He Chengyao made the lives of these underprivileged children known to the public just as she had done with her own life experience. In this way her art became an opinion maker. It also made people feel sad. Of course this was not He Chengyao’s sole aim. She also wanted her performance art projects to elicit public aid—after all, the children portrayed in her photographs really exist. There are people—especially trivial and kitsch artists—who may ask if this is art. My answer is: Yes, it is art. To those who ask if it is not just journalism I reply that journalism is also art. But do politicians not take care of political affairs? Why should artists get involved? Such questions are frequently raised. To all of them I reply: Art is the most political of fields. Translated by Helen Wallimann

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Two Histories of Art: What Arts Represent China? Zhu Qi

Interestingly, I find that there are more foreign than Chinese histories of contemporary Chinese art. In the past fifteen years, what has emerged in the international world of art is not only China’s contemporary art but also the research and publication of histories of contemporary Chinese art. These books were not written by the Chinese but by Westerners in English, French and German. They include histories of contemporary Chinese art written in the past thirty years and single items such as a history of Chinese performance art. The total number of such publications would be even more if combined with various albums published on contemporary Chinese art shows in the West. At present, there actually exist two histories of contemporary Chinese art, one written by the Chinese and the other by Westerners, including not only European and American scholars but also scholars from Australia, Japan and South Korea whose writing and pattern of discourse are basically of a European and American style. Despite their differences, the two histories of art have the same purpose. What artists can a history of art explore in order to represent the art of that nation? Many of my colleagues and I would like to write a ‘history of contemporary Chinese art’. However, we have not been able to do it. This does not mean that we do not have enough material in our hands but that we have been thinking of and making judgments about the standards that apply to contemporary Chinese art. The standards by which to judge contemporary art in the Chinese art world change every two to three years. For example, ten years ago, whatever art was most like the conceptual art in the West would be considered good art. At the end of the 1990s, whatever art employed Chinese symbols and images would be considered the native contemporary art. Western scholars of art history took a simpler approach for, in their eyes, contemporary Chinese art is one of rebellion.

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‘C ONTEMPOR ARY C HINESE A RT ’ IN A W ESTERN B OX The term ‘contemporary art’ does not yet have a defined meaning. Generally speaking, it refers in the narrow sense to the contemporary art that has been learning from and using modern Western art language since the mid-1980s, including the ‘scar arts’ of the early 1980s. The term ‘contemporary art’ appeared in China in the late 1990s. The use of the term ‘contemporary art’ to refer to the arts that include the ‘scar arts’ from the end of the 1970s until today is one applied in the past three to five years. As a generic term synchronous with the thirty years of reform, its generally agreed usage does not for the time being include the academic painting as described in the pre-Soviet Union realist language and the contemporary water ink paintings in the traditional format. On the other hand, ‘contemporary art’, as it occurred in a Western context, refers to the post-1960s capitalism in its higher stage, e.g. socialized consumption in its social formation, financial capital, monopolization by transnational companies, the globalization of economics, pop culture and news media, new technology-based internet culture and de-Westernization in terms of cultural values. In this sense, the real ‘contemporary art’ in China could count as something that started in the mid-1990s because, after 1995, as a background to contemporary art, urban life and patterns of consumer culture in main Chinese cities, with the synchronizing of contemporary art circles and international art systems as well as the languages and assessment indices used in art, have basically become synchronized with the ecology of international arts. From the 1993 Venice Biennale to the present, ‘contemporary Chinese art’ has become an internationally fixed term, generally referring to such language forms as the post-modern art, conceptual art and new media art after the two World Wars in the West, as a way to express Chinese contents. I describe this pattern as ‘contemporary Chinese art in a Western box’, i.e. the Western language equivalent to a biscuit box that contains Chinese material, the so-called ‘contemporary Chinese art’. This definition was basically accepted by the Western world of art since the 1990s. Recently, Chinese scholars have proposed the use of ‘contemporary Chinese art’ in order to distinguish it from the term ‘Chinese contemporary art’ that was popular in the West and the international world of art over the last fifteen years. The contemporary art that was popular in the West in the 1990s was an expression of cynicism towards politics and reality, which may have been an art that used traditional Chinese symbols. However, it does not represent Chinese contemporary art in its entirety as it also includes serious social concerns and experimentation with linguistic forms, such as new ink painting experimentation, abstract art, concerns for the lowest levels of society and a re-thinking of the modernity of China. All these arts, however, have not become well-known in the West

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as they do not directly express political rebellion or simplistically utilize Chinese symbols. A pattern was formed of exhibiting, collecting and explicating ‘Chinese contemporary art’ as seen by Westerners in the decade following the 1993 Venice Biennale, i.e. Chinese contemporary art was seen in three ways in that (1) it was seen as a result of the cynicism and rebellion of the younger generation after the Tian’anmen Incident of 1989; (2) it was seen as part of universalist art as influenced by modern and contemporary Western art; and (3) it had its basic concept determined as something that uses a Western language to express images or views on China. With regards to ‘Chinese contemporary art’, a newly agreed concept has emerged in recent years in which ‘Chinese contemporary art’ or ‘contemporary Chinese art’ are viewed as synonymous with ‘art in the thirty years of reform’, and in terms of values the participation of contemporary art in the process of social change and spiritual expression in China is an important standard for evaluation.

THE R ESPONSIBLE AND THE R EBELLIOUS Not long ago, in an international forum at the 798 Biennale, held in Beijing, Richard Vine from Art in America introduced Chinese contemporary art while a young scholar from the UK introduced the ex-Soviet Union Russian contemporary art. Interestingly, the Chinese art and the ex-Soviet Union art as chosen by these two scholars are of the same kind, i.e. an art that rebels against, scoffs at, and is angry with the respective country. Take performance art that portrays street movements, that appropriates Andy Warhol’s images as an irony against Mao Zedong and Stalin, and that imitates imprisonment and repressive social spaces as well as social marginalities. Chinese contemporary art also includes the use of Chinese symbols and the vulgar sights of Chinese capitalism. In the art historical vision of Western scholars, the writing of art histories about Chinese as well as Russian contemporary art is basically one of rebels’ and the linguistic measures and values in this rebellious art are part of the learning process from the West. China’s contemporary art is mainly a reflection of memories about scars created in the previous two generations by Chinese history and politics as well as the heart-felt pain produced in the primitive accumulation of capitalism in the past fifteen years. The pictorial elements and emotional characteristics of the ‘hurt’ have become the main contents of China’s contemporary art, represented as cynical, ironical and playful in terms of its aesthetics, which is both a genuine experience of growing up and part of an influence of post-modernism in the West. There must be voices of rebellion and anger in a nation, but that does not mean responsible groups do not have any worth. At least two groups

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are of equal importance and value in helping the nation progress. For many Western scholars, since they start off with their own art historical vision and democratic values, what they end up seeing is an avant-garde group that uses modern Western languages, rebels against political totalitarianism, and uses Western languages to transform traditional Chinese images. As a result, the rebellious art of this group has quickly become well-known in Europe and the United States since the 1990s. Art groups well-known in the West have never really been accepted in Chinese society, not because of their Westernized language but mainly because they did not reflect the spiritual orientation of a responsible group which helps China progress. There is an obvious example that shows Western critics, curators and scholars pay more attention to the rebellious values in Chinese contemporary art. For example, political pop by Wang Guangyi and Fang Lijun and paintings done in the cynical style were praised as the work of stars in the 1990s Western world of art despite the fact that the quality of their oil paintings is not high Western scholars and critics should have spotted this but did not mention it in the last fifteen years, not even famous European and American curators and critics. Everyone seems to be praising, one-sidedly, the rebellious images in these paintings. It is doubtful whether these rebellious groups and their art, enjoyed in the West, do really have a rebellious spirit. More than a decade ago, these rebellious groups became famous in the West, and they have now become the nouveau riche. In fact, the groups with a real rebellious spirit have not truly been recognized in the West because they have no superficial characteristics of cynicism.

‘THE C HINESE L ANDSCAPE ’ Over the last twenty years, Chinese contemporary art actually shows a multivariant creative style, although it is hard for some of the contemporary art which is not obviously showing characteristic attributes of a Chinese image to be included in the system of Western exhibitions, such as the new experiments of ink painting, abstract art, installation and mixed media. The kind of Chinese contemporary art capable of becoming famous in the West is often obviously characterised by a ‘Chinese landscape’, that is to say, in the ‘Western box’ that contains typical images of China, and, in some sense, is interpreted as the twisted nature and history of the Chinese people in the political reality and the rebellion against and awakening from the political totalitarianism by the younger generation of Chinese artists, with an emphasis on the universalism of contemporary Western art and its influence on China. The ‘Chinese landscape’, popular in contemporary Western art over the past fifteen years, mainly include (1) images of Mao, pictures of the Cultural Revolution and works that feature ideological symbols, such as

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political pop; (2) art that utilizes traditional Chinese symbols and material, such as the images of traditional Chinese landscape painting, the furniture of Ming and Qing Dynasty, the rockery stones and the Great Wall, as well as gun powder, compass, Buddhism, and material of traditional ink painting; (3) cynicism and a popi attitude (literally ‘skin for pouring’, used figuratively to mean rude and unreasonable as well as shrewd) as depicted by tha author Wang Shuo, such as the cynical realism as exhibited by Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun; (4) the image of China that reflects Western consumer culture and capitalism, such as bath centres, escort girls, messy farmer’s markets, high-rises side by side with broken old houses where the city joins the country, and huge woven bags; and (5) weirdly represented Chinese expressions and body shapes, such as grinning faces and bodies that are made stupid and strange. Most of the high-profile scholars and museum directors in the West do not have a deep understanding of the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong and China’s tradition of art although they are deeply interested in them. At last year’s international forum in London, most of the responsible people from such well-known art galleries as the British Museum and Tate, including quite a few American scholars who study Chinese art, did not even have a basic knowledge of traditional Chinese painting. A scholar from Princeton University in the United States was even trying to approach Chinese tradition by taking on elements of Chinese contemporary art. Western scholars may view Cai Guoqiang and Xu Bing as the representative users of conceptual art in Asia although they do not have any definitive standards by which to evaluate them. Cai Guoqiang used the methods of land art and conceptual art, and by using such methods he absorbed the gunpowder technology of China and the narratives of wellknown traditional fiction, whereas Xu Bings illegible Chinese characters borrowed the concepts of Dada and continued to engage in plays with Chinese characters that defy understanding. In fact, Cai and Xu are more like cross-cultural translation artists as the basic elements that form part of their works, such as Chinese material and Western linguistic methods, are not their invention, only a combination of their making. Many Western audiences in fact have no idea which of those Chinese elements were invented by the artists and which were taken from Chinese tradition. Even less are they clear about the height that was once achieved in the history of Chinese art with these Chinese elements. For this reason, the Western audiences can only pay attention to the attraction of these elements themselves. Even the real standards for evaluating the use of these elements by the artists can only be based on the conceptual art. Therefore, strictly speaking, Cai and Xu are part of the system of Western art although they are often viewed as representative of China in the international exhibition system. The use of Mao Zedong and Chinese revolutionary elements in contemporary art is similar to that of traditional Chinese elements. Although Mao and the Chinese revolution are a very good theme, much use of Mao

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Zedong and Chinese revolutionary elements in contemporary art is quite superficial as it is only limited to the use of pop art. In the 1990s, Western exhibitions kept inviting Wang Guangyi to such a degree that Western critics should by now have seen that Wang was actually imitating Andy Warhol. Perhaps all the Western exhibitions need is just one such politicized Chinese image. As for whether it is copied from the West, it is not important. In the past ten years, quite a few Western scholars have noticed the superficiality of the use of ‘Chinese images’ and ideological symbols. However, these are being replaced by a higher level of ‘Chinese landscape’, namely a ‘Chinese landscape’ of the art language such as the use of a conceptual art involving rockery stones, Suzhou gardens, and traditional landscape painting elements, and the use of Buddhism, natural material and ideas involving the liberal style (xieyi) of traditional ink painting; many works seem to produce a Chinese linguistic landscape, similar to a mixture of conceptual art, Japanese Mono-ha and the xieyi style of Chinese ink painting. Such a linguistic landscape actually has nothing to do with Chinese tradition or Western traditions; it is more like a landscape of language designed for a high-level audience in the West.

I NTERPRE TATION IN E UROPE : C ULTUR AL D IFFERENCES AND P OST -C OMMUNISM Before Chinese art officially entered Europe, there had been two kinds of Chinese art: one in the eyes of Europe or the West and the other, a contemporary art in the Chinese eyes. The interpretation of Chinese contemporary art in Europe did not begin until the 1993 Venice Biennale and, subsequently, the pattern of exhibition for nearly all Chinese art overseas and the interpretation of that art have never gone beyond the Achille Bonito Oliva model, which consists mainly of two angles, cultural differentiation and post-Communism. ‘Cultural differentiation’ is a frame of reading that was applied in Europe to non-Western contemporary art since the early 1990s. Concretely speaking, cultural difference refers to the formalistic system of language and differences between taste and philosophical ideas. But it ignores two basic aspects in that it places too much emphasis on the cultural experience that had formed prior to the discovery of the New World, i.e. the historical concreteness of every continental cultural block as a whole and the formalistic system of language, and that, subsequent to the discovery of the New World, the mainstream change in the whole modern world was the modern experience and shared values in the system of industry, commerce and international trade, which in fact is beyond local and cultural differences. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a metaphor of a desire for recognition to cross the cultural boundary and to gain a view of the inner world

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by going deeply inside the Other. However, cultural differences cannot actually open up from within through visual imagery and concepts. The desire to cross the cultural boundary is basically kept on the surface of linguistic masks and sign-based symbols since recognition across the border has never really happened. International theme shows based on cultural differences have never really engaged in internal exchange, eventually ending up in a game of signs and a window on differences. After they have entered the modern world, although the differences between cultural blocks historically exist, irreplaceable by any other, they do not occupy an important place. First of all, as each region wants to step into the modern world, it must necessarily involve the selection of central cities with machinery, electronic power, enterprise-based production and company systems, and financial and credit systems, with large numbers of working-class people, white-collar workers, media reporters and people-elected governments; what is important is a free expression and imagination of such a modern experience and its spiritual values. Second, there will be the issue of historical and traditional reform, e.g. how to transform traditional languages and media or how to dig the mystic credos from regions of instruction or remarkable experiences in certain areas that such a cultural entity exhibited in the feudal period. International exhibitions, from various angles, explore the issue of the common modern experience and values that modern society has to face. However, there was a zone of errors involving this angle in the 1990s in that the artists who participated in the international exhibitions were viewed as representatives of their own cultures whereas in fact these artists could only represent themselves. Many of the European curators have a self-contradictory attitude in that they view Western artists as individuals capable of self-expression but regard non-Western artists as collective representatives of a cultural entity. This is a discriminatory view of nonWestern art on the part of Europe, based on cultural differences: using the cultural entity prior to the discovery of the New World as the background against which to interpret the self-expression of individuals in modern society, in order to turn this individual self-expression into the modern practice of a cultural entity but not as ‘an individual in change’ between tradition and modernity. In the 1990s, another model Europe had of interpreting Chinese contemporary art was that of ‘post-Communism’. The cultural entity, formed prior to the discovery of the New World, was regarded as a language and values system with its own self-differential characteristics. From the October Revolution to the success of the Chinese revolution in 1949, a communist model based on ideological modern totalitarianism had been formed. This political entity of communist totalitarianism was also regarded as something similar to the closed cultural entity prior to the discovery of the New World or the communist camp during the period of the Cold War. From the contemporary art prior to the collapse of the ex-Soviet Union in

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the 1980s to Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s, all is viewed as the representative of a post-Communist entity, not the individual in the shift from communism to market-oriented capitalism. In the international forum held last year in London, Western scholars and museum officials asked a number of key questions regarding the next ten years of Chinese contemporary art, e.g., What are the characteristics of Chinese contemporary art? What creative contributions have these characteristics made to the art of the world? How is Chinese contemporary art related to Chinese traditions? If there were problems with the holding of exhibitions on Chinese contemporary art in the last fifteen years in Europe and America, what are these problems? Are there any important Chinese artists who have not been introduced to the West? How can one properly explain works to Western audiences when the next exhibition on Chinese contemporary art is held in the West? Compared with their Chinese counterparts, Western or international scholars take a quite individualized approach to the writing of the history of Chinese contemporary art and the curation of exhibitions. With their own personal interests and the existing material, they begin the writing, the publishing as well as the curating of exhibitions without concerning themselves with the comprehensiveness and objectivity of what they do. However, most of their Chinese counterparts do not easily take up their pens and write this history as they regard it as a task with a mission for the future of new arts in China.

C AN O NE START OVER IN C HINA? Over the last fifteen years, Western exhibitions and academic systems have defined a Western box with ‘Chinese contemporary art’, a concept that confines Chinese contemporary art to a ‘Western box’ in that it could only understand and encourage the use of Chinese art in the Western box. However, such a system of encouragement seems to be an obstacle to the creation of new art in China. Chinese contemporary art cannot possibly have a real language creation within the system of Western art history. China has moved to a period similar to that of abstract expressionism in the 1950s America in that its contents and spiritual characteristics have elements of their own although artistic concepts and forms are still those of others. It is easier to abandon ‘Chinese landscape’ in terms of artistic content, which must place more emphasis on the expression of the political and social experience in China on a deeper level as well as of the spiritual model. Chinese contemporary art in the last thirty years can be summarized as the ‘use of Western language methods to describe the growing-up experience of China’, and in the coming ten years this should become the ‘use of Chinese methods to express a certain profundity existent in the spiritual reality in China’. It is impossible to discuss whether this profundity has a

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universality, although an expression of the in-depth experience of Chinese history and reality will definitely puzzle the West in its interpretation of China since the Western society has grown used to knowing about China through sign-based images and ideological description. Contemporary art has re-established its links to Chinese traditions in terms of language, gaining a level of practice such as ‘the new ink paintings’ and Chinese-style abstract art. However, these two art forms have not been taken note of in the West, which has no knowledge of the language system of the ink paintings in China, and the artistic groups engaging in experimentation with ink painting have little to do with the contemporary arts that have become famous in the West. The abstract art in China that absorbs organic images and Zen Buddhism has rarely caught attention in the West, either, nor can it find any explanation about itself in theory. There are no abstract concepts in Chinese traditions except yixiang (imagery, inner idea about a subject) and yijing (artistic conception, poetic imagery), for which there are hardly any equivalents in Western philosophy or aesthetics. Realist art was introduced from the West to China in the 17th century until the mid-19th century although China did not abandon its own traditional forms even as it absorbed the Western languages. Prior or subsequent to the May Fourth Movement, China had been abandoning the traditional forms of language and painting by fully adopting a contemporary Western system. By then China’s reality had come to be in a mixed state, which originated from the temporary formation of semi-colonialism after the late Qing Dynasty. It is thus not likely for an independent China to take shape in such a highly mixed state. The best opportunity to set out again from Chinese traditions had been missed. The in-depth problems of Chinese contemporary art are consistent with the symptoms at the end of the 19th Century when art made its modern changes in that, at the end of the 19th Century, China wanted to introduce individualism, subjectivity, and voluntarism, and had by then made up for the lack of methods involving expression of realities in Chinese traditions by absorbing the realist and artistic modelling methods from the West while abandoning the superior artistic traditions and the root foundation for growth of our own. An interesting artistic phenomenon that appeared at the end of the 19th Century showed that both the West and China were shifting towards each other’s language traditions. The fact that modern art in the West was shifting to subjectivity and expression in terms of language was exactly part of the tradition involving traditional landscape painting and calligraphy in China, just as the fact that modern painting in China placed an emphasis on drawing from nature (xiesheng) and realism was the tradition that the West was abandoning. Two mistakes were made in the transformation of art in China at the end of the 19th century: one involving the abandonment of transcendence that is characteristic of Chinese artistic traditions in that Chinese men of letters did not directly express their painful or suppressed feelings about

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the reality but would rather sublimate them by turning them into a Zenbased self-recognition: Although individual sentiments based on this sublimation appear serene, a sense of tension and subtle stirrings is hidden in the painting; however, such transcendental characteristics have disappeared from modern and contemporary art in China even though modern and existential art in the West has similar characteristics. The other mistake involves the abandonment of the non-representational language tradition in Chinese art in its shift to the Western-style representational realism. However, forms of language have their philosophical and religious basis on a deeper level. Once their links are cut off from the deeper level of traditional languages in China, modern Chinese art that has absorbed Western realism will lack a foundation for creation, becoming instead a semi-imitation of the ‘Western language box’. As a result, the language of Chinese contemporary art will not be able to go beyond Western post-modernism and imitation of conceptual art nor can it engage in real independent creation. Therein lies the whole issue. China’s contemporary art must seek a new route for language creation even though it would be unrealistic to return to the Chinese art at the end of the 19th century and to begin again where the West started. Western elements have become part of Chinese skin and flesh. After a century of thorough penetration into China with semi-colonization and political ideology, the basic Chinese experience has been transformed in relation to space, material and concepts of languages to such a degree that it would be impossible to clean up the Western elements in modern Chinese language, art and ideological concepts, and it would be equally impossible for China to return to the pure state of the classical literary language, and the literati painting. In order for language creation to take place in Chinese contemporary art, the originally existent transcendence and non-representational tradition must be revived in Chinese art. Such a form must reflect the space, the body, the mentality as well as the land-based experience of contemporary China. Contemporary art must return to China’s spiritual reality and its own forms, which involves the three dimensions of modernity, reality and transcendence. Modernity is not yet complete in China; reality is a filter index that judges whether tradition and the West are appropriate; and transcendence, finally, refers to the retrieval of a new cultural universality from the Chinese reality by way of Chinese methods. Only on this basis can a new art be produced that represents the future of China! Translated by Ouyang Yu

Pingyao and Lianzhou: Changes in the Situation of Contemporary Chinese Photography Jiang Wei

By the end of 2008, Pingyao International Photography Festival (PIP) in Shanxi, north China, had been held for the eighth time and the Lianzhou International Photo Festival (LIPF) for the fourth time. The large-scale annual photographic activities in the north and south can reflect the main features of Chinese photography as they include the past accumulation by Chinese photographers, their present thoughts, China’s attitude towards Western cultures as well as the imagination of, attestation to and impact on China by Western cultures. The two activities are similar in background, operation, resources, curation and objectives, but they are also quite different. It can be said that Pingyao and Lianzhou are two windows on Chinese photography. An examination of and look into these two photographic activities held in Pingyao and Lianzhou will help us see more clearly the situations and processes of change involving contemporary Chinese photography.

P INGYAO I NTERNATIONAL P HOTOGR APHY F ESTIVAL In autumn 2001, there were over 100 photographers from sixteen countries and regions as well as over 4,000 professionals from the world of photography both at home and abroad participating at the first Pingyao International Photography Festival. In 2007, there were over 300 participating photographers from thirty countries and regions. Gamma Photo Agency of France held an activity in celebration of the 40th anniversary of its agency in Pingyao. PIP for eight years has not only served as a window for countless Chinese photographers through which one sees a huge number of famous photographers from overseas but also as a bridge. Many Chinese photographers have told me that they go to Pingyao to have

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meetings with friends, old and new, and to obtain information as they may possibly have an opportunity to get published or exhibited. For the Chinese world of photography, the significance of Pingyao lies in the fact that certain issues have an opportunity to get examined and discussed. On the other hand, the world of photography overseas secures a channel through which to observe photographic culture in the transformation of Chinese society. In the years prior to the Lianzhou International Photo Festival, PIP had created an impact in the West and won attention as a representative activity of the Chinese world of photography. Like the Arles Photo Festival in France, the idea of creating PIP first came from intellectuals from the world of photography and art such as Si Shushi and Alain Jullien. When everything was ready, they made use of the power of local governments. Part of the allure that may have accounted for the keen responses was the importance of the tourist economy for the leadership of the Pingyao government as well as the Shanxi government, promoted in the nationwide ‘festival fever’ in those days. The slogan at PIP runs: ‘Build a home, a warm home in Pingyao for photographers; set up a platform, a platform of exchange in Pingyao for photographers; create a city, a market in Pingyao for photographers to make money.’ However, who would be there to build the home and set up the platform? Obviously, the local governments in China. The local governments had a specific purpose: to expand the influence, develop the local economy, and show their achievements. Over these eight years, there have already been exciting achievements that confirm the correctness of these initial decisions. Leaders of the local governments are very clear about the contributions photography has made to Pingyao as well as Shanxi. It would obviously be naïve to say no to the penetration of economics and political power. On the stage set by the government, the main player appears to be photography but in fact it is the economy. Since the principal purpose was to make profit, PIP has increased the grandeur of its size, the extent of its influence and the number of people every year. The main requirement seems to be the renao xiaoying (hot and noisy effect), more and more so year after year. From 2001 to 2008, each annual PIP has had a different theme. On close inspection, however, we find that only the theme of ‘Peace and Progress’ in 2005 seems to have some link to the concrete items on display as they were defined as coinciding with the victory over anti-fascist war in the world and the sixtieth anniversary of the Anti-Japanese War in China. Themes in other years reflected more the organizer’s and host’s wishes than those of the annual exhibitions, with titles such as ‘Be Open and Exchange’, ‘Century and China’, ‘Life and Culture’, ‘Civilization and Development’, ‘Pluralism and Harmony’, ‘Cooperation and All Win’ as well as ‘The Olympic Games and Great Love’. They were more in line with politics and economics than with any artistic and academic significance or values. Even though everything originated with photography, photography itself was brushed to the edge of the theme of the activity, playing a supporting role in the tourist and exhibition economy.

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In September 2007, when Robert Frank was invited to Pingyao, the greatest and only highlight of that year, it was a pity that this old man, aged 83, was organized to give so many speeches, surrounded with groups of security and dancers, that he became completely confused. ‘This is the first time I have seen all this. From my personal point of view at my age, I am proud to be standing here, and what makes me more proud is the fact that I am able to stand here as a photographer’, said Frank to the people. However, the interpreter omitted to say ‘more proud’. In a small restaurant in Pingyao, after eating a soup that had soured, he nearly died, not even carrying a camera with him. The fact that Robert Frank was able to get there was the greatest political achievement and the best decoration for the event. As for the rest, nothing was as important. This story of Robert Frank’s visit is a telling description and footnote to PIP. However, we must helplessly face the fact that, in China, with the exception of PIP, most Chinese photographers lack a large-scale and influential platform for exhibition and exchange. In recent years, activities such as international photography festivals were held in places like Guilin, Guangxi, and Wuyishan Mountain, Fujian. However, with these activities the first one was also the last one since they could not be continued because the funding local governments did not see that they would bring immediate economic benefits. Compared with Pingyao, these local governments would need to put in more funding in order to compete with it in scale but as they could not manage to do so they had to leave it at that. Activities involving photography festivals in Duyun, Guizhou, Lishui, Zhejiang and Xining, Qinghai, are still being maintained although such small-scale activities cannot possibly create enough interest for Chinese photographers and most media to participate in them, not only because of the funding but also because of the planning and preparation that is often ineffective and backward.

THE L IANZHOU I NTERNATIONAL P HOTO F ESTIVAL (LIPF) LIPF remains the only influential activity for a small, remote mountain city like Lianzhou. Pingyao is different from Lianzhou in that even if Pingyao does not hold photography festivals it is still an ancient Oriental city that was appraised by the UN as a ‘world heritage city’ as early as 1997, a well-known tourist scenic spot, one hour’s journey by bus from Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province, and with access to the freeway. By comparison, until the fourth annual event began, the freeway linking Lianzhou with Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, had not been open to traffic. The city remains the poorest and most backward region in Guangdong. The festival has brought many opportunities to Lianzhou, achieving economic impact as well as political and propaganda-related benefits. More importantly, though, started five years after the PIP, the LIPF has obviously done a great job, organized in a professional and serious manner.

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In November 2005, the first LIPF was opened in Lianzhou, a small city in the mountainous region of north Guangdong. Featuring the theme of ‘Dual Vision: Lianzhou Beginnings’, the festival intended to realize a multi-disciplinary cooperation on photography, art, sociology, anthropology and urban studies by moving from a discussion of photography to an exploration of image-based culture. In the interim, academic studies were focussed on a number of subjects, such as ‘journalist photography and their subjects’, ‘a nation’s biography and image investigation’, and ‘Who has influenced whom?’ In the second LIPF, held at the end of 2006, with the theme, ‘Between the Observer and the Observed’, curators discussed photography itself and attempted to conduct an in depth study of the relationship between photography and society, in order to find out where the social power of images and photographs lay. The curators were of the opinion that the observer and the observed jointly composed the real world of images and photographs, enabling people to recognize the historical details and values in this world. The third LIPF, titled the ‘Alchemy Shadows’, opened in December 2007 and coincided with the price explosion in the contemporary Chinese art market. Under that impact, the annual festival curating team made an important adjustment as most of the curators were active members of the contemporary world of art. As a result, a large number of materially and visually powerful works appeared in the exhibition that were both new and extraordinary. Since the 1990s, the Western ideological discourse has intervened in China at all levels, exerting a comprehensive influence on social and cultural life. Because of our anxious and continuous desire to join the ‘contemporary’ countries, we regarded ‘contemporaneity’ as a once-and-for-all solution. However, for lack of a systematic research into Western histories and cultures, we ignored the inherent defects and self-contradictions of this contemporaneity. The picture of contemporary Chinese art was established on this superficial and surface understanding, paying no attention to Chinese matters, the reality of a weak cultural foundation and the lack of contemporary ‘software’. More importantly, in the background in which contemporary art is being passionately pursued and a minority of successful artists engaging in contemporary art are being touted as heroes of our time, photography has deteriorated into another strongly subjective tool, randomly used as a ‘contemporary’ ideological conceptual medium. The objective functions of recording which are unique to photography, the unique linguistic idiom of photography as well as the values of photography have all been deliberately obscured, confused, demeaned and even deprived. A number of other people situated at the border of photography asked the question: Where is photography? They stressed one point: that photography is photography. By that time, one particular concept kept appearing with increasing frequency: the concept of pure photography. Photography stressed the nature of photography and its autonomy, refusing to let other

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considerations damage its qualities. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Chinese photography was frequently appropriated as a tool to serve political purposes, such as saving the country from falling or supporting class struggle; some were used on even more concrete propaganda projects. If the remark ‘literature is meant for carrying the dao (way)’ refers to an age-old tradition, then the theory of instrumentality was marked by its fast vulgarization—so much so that photography was broken down into various kinds of rigid, even false and absurd examples. It was not until the 1980s that a variety of rigid and absurd concepts were cleaned up, including the theory of photography as a tool. The claim of the autonomy of Chinese photography was part of the dismantling of the above concepts. Without doubt, pure photography provided theoretical protection for the self-discipline of photography. It cannot be denied that the theoretical drive emphasizing the essential nature of photography had a momentum capable of destroying everything in its path. Interestingly, even though photography took a firm posture in refusing to be a tool, it did not explicitly insist on anything. Human nature? Inner heart? Beauty? Form or language? In the new context, old issues generated new patterns. By now, the debate surrounding the essential nature of photography is far from over. In the fourth LIPF, opened in December 2008, the theme ‘My Camera and I’, proposed by Li Xianting and Bao Kun, indicated that the essential nature of photography was once again questioned in a high-profiled way since the show of that year proposed ‘to face and witness the feelings about today’s reality and life situation through the camera’, which initiated quite an intense debate. This result stemmed from the side effects of the previous exhibition: society, history, the masses at the bottom level, and ordinary life seemed to be abandoned again as photography was being gradually marginalized in a context where contemporary art had only itself to enjoy. This sounds like an old tune replayed but, when placed in the contemporary Chinese cultural and ecological environment, it has a special significance. Right from its inception, the LIPF differed from the PIP in that it emphasized its academic standard. The use of Western academic discourse made it possible for the ratio of contemporary works of art at the LIPF to increase year by year, peaking in 2007. Questions arose at such fast merging of discourses at a time when technology involving images changed on a daily basis: What does the exhibition want to say? What on earth is photography? The theme of ‘My camera’ can be understood as the result of a profound re-thinking of this issue by the organizers of this maturing show.

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F ROM P INGYAO TO L IANZHOU : V ARIOUS F E ATURES OF C HINESE P HOTOGR APHY BEHIND THE U NDERCL ASS AS THE O BJECT Whether it is the PIP, which has been going on for eight years, or LIPF, which has been in existence for four years now, the works of Chinese photographers exhibited at these exhibitions are mostly related to the ordinary lives, states of mind and processes of fate involving the masses at the underclass. Of course, the background and reasons for this were the enormous changes which China had experienced in the last century, particularly the recent thirty years. A brief scan through and analysis of these works provides an important approach to understanding and judging Chinese photography. For this reason, it is worth our attention. In the Chinese history of photography in the twentieth century, a series of close families of concepts existed behind underclass: bitter labourers, working people, proletarians, the humiliated and the damaged, workers, peasants and soldiers—all these notions have a close lineage to underclass. The underclass masses were often viewed as a vast social group, not as single and separate individuals. As a result, the talk about the underclass and the underclass as an object would often conceal the vision of a social structure: the metaphor for the position of underclass in this space had to appeal to the total shape of the social structure. By the end of the 1990s, Chinese photography had reduced its concern with the underclass issue. A large number of surfaces showed that many underclass people would keep ‘visiting’ photography. However, photography as a rule did not look at their human nature and ways of living in terms of social structure, not even in terms of the meaning of class confrontation. We can see that more facts were related to the generation of a unique visual aesthetic effect arising out of the underclass experience. We must clearly understand this fact that Chinese photographers do not represent the underclass experience in a linguistic form that the underclass is familiar with. On the synchronic level of time, photographers may often stand in a distance from the underclass experience. A number of critics advocating realism imagine that ‘realism’ may automatically solve this issue. They express this possibility as a contradiction between the world outlook and the ‘ways of creation’. They think that realism is characterized by a respect for lived experience and that the logic of life will effectively correct the fallacies in people’s world outlook. Looked at from today’s perspective, this view underestimates the complex relationship between experience and concept. Concrete experience may correct the concept, but that is only one aspect of the issue. On the other hand, experience is not a pure sensual impression as concepts and the secret codes of ideology have profoundly intervened in the experience. Take photography. On many occasions, the contents which a photographer sees are what he intended to see. To a large extent, so-called ‘realism’ cannot be photographic photocopying. Observations on and expressions of life by photographers

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are powerfully controlled by their political views, family backgrounds, personal tastes, lived experience and ways of photographing. From the 1990s to the present, contemporary art trends of thought from the West have challenged the traditional aesthetic styles of Chinese photography. They are not too much concerned with social and historical structures; instead, they are more mindful of the lonely, the materialized, the mediocre and the tiny individuals. Under this influence, young Chinese photographers often have their angles of vision based on individuals as the base. The existence of individuals—not a certain group or class—is the final explanation. They watch how the change of the nation’s transformation has produced a great impact on our lives and our hearts. They try hard to understand what has happened to the individuals and to the world around them. Following these developments, Chinese photography has entered into a new realm, creating new themes, styles and languages. However, we may still not have come out of the shock and excitement brought to us by the times and circumstances as our complex imagination rooted in these changes is far from fully developed. At the same time, in many works by Chinese photographers, we can also see that the diceng has returned to the viewers’ position and to the vision of social structure. These photographers have begun once again to pay attention to a series of sociological categories such as class, social group, education, globalization, wealth and poverty, environmental issues and victims, division of economic benefits, and the social roles of capitalism, etc. All these have found their proof in the PIP and LIPF in recent years. The ordinary life of the Chinese masses at the underclass has always been the main carrier of their world outlook, and the complexity of the issue is gradually revealing itself: Who is the expresser-stater for the photographic statements of the underclass experience? Who is the object of being expressed-stated? And who is the audience? Does a real acquiescence exist between the statement and the expressed-stated? Is there a cultural gap? I would like to say that the underclass experience does not have to be expressed or stated by the underclass. In fact, what exists between specific contents and the formalist system may not be a one-way road as there may exist a combination of multiple possibilities. A variety of simple, improvised and relatively crude forms actually represent the underclass experience. Such a representation is not just contents-based but it reflects the style of form. However, it cannot be denied that the underclass can also force another view, showing a different dimension. There is no reason to imagine the features of the underclass as one-sided. For example, in the angles of their vision, photographers may discern other aspects of the underclass images. Although their concept inevitably has an impact on the people and stories in their lenses, the richness of the underclass is reflected in a variety of views—how photographers express and state the underclass contains their relationship to the underclass. As already shown

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in the Chinese history of photography, the expression and statement of the underclass by some photographers are successful in the sense that an important reason is the presentation of historical scenes. Their works often cleverly represent the historical structure and reveal the area of activity in this structure that involves the underclass—usually those improvised and relatively simple and crude linguistic forms that are unable to undertake such complex aesthetic effects. However, in our country, in our times, such complex aesthetic effects have to rely on the mass media and ways of mass cultural transmission for representational possibilities. Mass media in China as they are today not only stage a variety of cultural repertoire but they also include complex political and economic activities. It must be admitted that, in China, there is a lack at the underclass of sufficient administrative power and professional knowledge to operate things from newspapers and magazines to television and the internet. For this reason, in terms of photography as a concrete form of a mass medium, the largest part of discourse is in the hands of officials and intellectuals, whether in production or in transmission. If the underclass masses and their lives are pre-set as one of the main carriers of Chinese photography, guaranteed without question to last forever, then their voices must be chosen by others, and others such as the government organizations, professionals and scholars who control PIP and LIPF, must speak for them—an issue that has never been thoroughly resolved since May Fourth. In addition, since the 1990s, ideologies and capital from the West have dominated and even manufactured ways of thinking and methods of production for quite a number of Chinese photographers to such a degree that in their works they only have direct ‘emotions’ and ‘patterns’ but lack the image-based relationship between images and the foundation of methodology, with their works significantly characterized by the way in which they are produced by the batch-load, basically satisfying the West’s consistent needs for imagining China. A number of main points must be singled out from miscellaneous debates in the studies of Chinese photography culture. First, the beauty of photography, characteristics of formalist systems or the complexity of human nature in them must be admitted. However, studies of photographic culture hold that none of these are natural, fixed, cross-cultural, or beyond history. For this reason, photographic culture has the purpose of explaining beauty, form or human nature in accordance with cultural pedigree, historical conditions and ideological patterns—of explaining Chinese photography. Secondly, we can see that there is still the danger of vulgarization in Chinese photography. Analysis of photographic discourse or interpretation of signs often turns into sociological reports without realizing it. To avoid falling into the old traps, photographic discourse must have a subtle sense of measurement. When quoting social or historical ideological patterns in explaining photography, critics must not reverse the simple example of photographic description as social, historical or ideological patterns. Studies of photographic culture are responsible for revealing the complex

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network of relationships between them instead of putting photography in a square labelled ‘theory of tools’ like a ready-made parcel. Only in that way can Chinese photography possibly become a route of expression with an autonomous consciousness. In conclusion, beginning in the 1930s, Chinese photography gradually became a tool for political propaganda. It was not until the 1980s that it began its process of enlightenment. After entering into the 1990s, it moved towards the discovery and expression of body, desire, daily life and the social circumstances involving people in the process of marketization. This, of course, had to do with the great process of marketization that began in this period in China, but it also reflected the discoveries and expanding impulses that Chinese photography had by itself. In the early 1980s, as Chinese photographers re-started, they did not have a language or theme that belonged to themselves. In the following three decades, they quickly did what their forefathers had done in the first half of the twentieth century or what their Western colleagues had done in the past 100 years: liberating people from the shackles of ideologies by engaging in large-scale exploration, recognition and imagination of people, trying to find a form and a language for our experiences and circumstances. As a result, in these thirty years Chinese photographers have been hurrying on their way, with frequent changes, but they were in such a big hurry that they did not have time to do it well. In that sense, Chinese photography may have required more calm. Now, in a context in which contemporary Chinese art is experiencing enormous popularity, there are commentators who propose the concept of contemporary photography, thinking that there have been great changes in Chinese photography since the (beginning of the) twenty-first century. I, for one, think that real changes may have already taken place in or around 1998 and 1999. Back then, we had strong feelings about the arrival of things like the internet, consumption, globalization, mass media and pop culture; within a very short period of time, Chinese photographers found that they seemed to be situated in an environment with a totally new language, communications and culture, while traditional ways of photography and values faced a stern challenge. By now, Chinese photography has to some extent become part of the culture of consumption. Translated by Ouyang Yu

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Evolution of Conceptual Photography and Its Position in the History of New Art Dao Zi

P HOTOGR APHY AS A RT The history of photography as art is a perfect story of pictures, each a unique image refined in the historical evolution of such major events as technology, economy, politics and mass culture. However, each unique image is placed on the time line of proper creation only after it is deprived of its context and meaning. In addition, when people engage in creation, they consciously regard photography as an art, in order to align it with the context of aesthetics, deliberately turning photography into something that is artistically beautiful and that also contains values. As a visual tool of expression, photography has an importance that goes without saying. However, in the history of photography as art, attention is not given to the photographs that carry information. Instead, it is focused on how to present their aesthetic features. For historians following this line of enquiry, a typical approach is to focus on the photographs and works of certain special practitioners. For this reason, the story of photography as art often becomes the history of individual photographers who are considered ‘great’ or ‘masters’. When explaining how photography became a fine art, accounts with such views are not only detached from the vast history of photography (photographic practice is omnipresent) but are also hardly related to the wider political debates and social contexts. Many claim that photography is an art, and they speak highly of art as being able to discern the human situation. Artists are characterized by the fact that they have a certain strange ‘foresight’ or that they may be able to bring some insight that is related to the ‘truth’ as well as being able to express it in an ideal manner. In terms of photography, people are of the opinion that such artists do not only keep a mere record of things but are even able to provide people with their own unique views on or insight into certain situations, things, relationships and circumstances. The arrival of photography had a strong impact on the role and posi-

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tion of painting. Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1930s that the ‘aura’ of a number of fine arts works would grow pale because of the appearence of photographs. He welcomed the arrival of photographs because they had the potential of being reproduced in large numbers, becoming a more democratic or, in other words, they were a less exclusive medium. What photography stresses here is the characteristic it has of being anti-elitist. That photography could become an art relates to a re-expression of the concept of art because it no longer supports material or formal perfectionism. When art was detached from consumption, it became a practice of signs that was different from others—a concept which previously had had nothing to do with art. Commentators may assess the sensitivities and worth of photographic works by claiming that they are as pure as the traditional forms of art. In its beginnings, the concept of photography had an obvious ability to accurately reflect reality and the potential of expressing meaning or emotions. Modernism stresses that photographs are a special medium with unique characteristics or properties. The post-modern theory that followed no longer emphasizes form but treats photographs as a special kind of language or system of signs. For a long time, the histories of photography and of art have been separated as two unrelated realms. It is only in the recent twenty years that with the decline of the historical deterministic views of art history, when new theories of art history became the order of the day, art photography has been seriously included in the writing and has gained a place that cannot be ignored.

THE M ODERNIT Y OF P HOTOGR APHIC I MAGES The concept of modernity began to gather force and make progress in the mid-1800s. Between 1890 and the 1940s, the use of the word ‘modern’ became even more accurate and evolved into a category in a number of art movements. By the 1950s, it was possible to distinguish between ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Contemporary Art’. Modernism, however, refers more to the avantgarde art movement, stressing specific media and forms of expression instead of the subject itself. Modern Chinese photographic art had its origins in the May Fourth Movement of 1919 claiming for a renewal of culture, simultaneous with modern poetry and modern painting movements. In 1919, with the proposal by Chen Wanli and Huang Zhenyu, the first exhibition of photography was held at Peking University. In 1923, the ‘Photographic Art Society’ (yishu xiezhen yanjiu hui) was officially established, which later changed its name to ‘Peking Light Society’(Beijing guang she). Because of its dissatisfaction with the vulgar photography that was popular then, it did its best in promoting fine arts photography. Echoing the ‘Peking Light Society’, people like Lang Jingshan and Hu Boxiang established the ‘Chinese Society of Photography’ (Zhonghua shying xueshe) in Shanghai in 1928 with the initial intention to ‘correct the popular ideas regarding photography among the people of this country’, thereby

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establishing the modern consciousness of beauty in aesthetics, revealing the politically and non-commercially spiritual purity of practice. It is not until the 1960s that modern art occupied a relatively independent and obviously elitist position, and the internationality of modern art, on the basis of this self-independence, could be viewed as a bridge across cultures once it was no longer limited to a specific cultural background. Broadly speaking, modern photography tries to provide new perception and new ideas in ways that are real and that contain hidden metaphors by using lighting, forms, contrasts between composition and pictorial images. In the first decade of the 1900s, the example of the painterly school of photography was beginning to collapse in Europe whereas in China the way of ‘highlight photography’ (jijin shying) was increasingly on the rise in imitation of the artistic conception of traditional Chinese painting. It seemed to presuppose a national identity although it did not lift itself to a higher realm; instead, it declined gradually. Right from the inception of civilization, art was an activity imbued with human characteristics. In whatever age, artists would express humanity to an extreme degree with their special talents. By their understanding of pure perception and models of expression, visual artists managed to reach this goal. Such qualities created a category in which art became a self-contained human activity, totally independent of the social and political life in the daily world. The very self-contained nature of visual art means that the questions that are posed can only exist within the rules that are unique to art, and so are the answers; any other forms of questioning can only be irrelevant. In this modern society, in this technological environment that is gradually destroying human nature, art functions for the only purpose of trying to preserve and lift the values of educating human nature with art itself. The modernity of visual art tries hard to keep its sublime body but weakens the intervention of criticism in moving away from patterns of social consciousness. It can be seen from the general patterns of the development of modern international photography that the search for forms in modern Chinese photography has been lagging behind and displaced, unable to form a continuous and dynamic historical process that is self-serving and selfreliable, particularly because the instrumental political pragmatism as a way of so-called ‘authentic record’ has dominated the production of Chinese photographic images for a century. Even with the ‘April Photography Exhibition’ and the ‘Modern Photography Saloon’ in the 1980s, which pursued modernism as a fashion, the influential works were are still social documentaries whose photographic concepts and methods did not go beyond the level of the nationalist period. The photographers engaged in news reporting were used to generating exciting images of the age’s central theme by striking a fake, non-governmental pose, something that had been cultivated in the atmosphere of an imperial world. Strictly speaking, conceptual photography had its inception after the June 4th Incident in 1989. It is only when the orthodoxy and the legally constituted authority of an age thoroughly collapsed that the literary tradi-

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tion of that age officially ended and photographs of the ordinary people surfaced that were individual-based and representative. In Lü Nan’s Mental Patients series, Yang Yankang’s Village Christianity series, Hou Dengke’s Wheat Guests series, Liu Zheng’s Nationals series, Yuan Dongping’s The Poor series, and, slightly later, Zhao Tielin’s The Hainan Prostitutes series, unjust, dark, repressive, violent and absurd realities are represented in a clear and sharp manner by using square pictorial compositions and black and white photographic tones. There is nothing avant-garde or modern here. In the structure of their knowledge, there is no philosophy or art theory, and not even any vulgar desire for winning an award. There is only intuitive knowledge and the free expression that only grassroots people could have chosen in their long-term fear and suffering.

THE I MPLOSION AND E XPANSION OF C ONCEP TUAL P HOTOGR APHY Since the 1970s, photography has been a way for conceptual artists to escape the closedness of modernism (a practice by which things could be made comprehensible). However, most conceptual artists had such a lack of interest in photography itself that photography did not have to become a self-conscious medium in theory, although the dynamic role of criticism could still be played out in the photographic images. Therefore, photography has an additional albeit indirect role in making it possible for conceptual art to connect itself to the social surfaces of the world without having to resort to the protest which pre-modernism engaged in on behalf of the painterly group of photography. Modernist theory is concerned with the media whereas conceptual art is focused on ideas. Artists attempt to bring attention to ways of expression and vocabulary at the same time as they want people to care for the contexts of explication such as the impact of the context and the situation (in which the audience may respond to the spectacle or the works of art). On many occasions, artists may have different opinions on the placement of their works in the art museum because their focus is on the ideas not on the objects themselves (the object may not even have been finished). From a postmodern point of view, it is not surprising at all to expect the audience to intervene with their own explanations. However, conceptual art, particularly with its more critical forms and political positions, has challenged the artistic achievements. In conceptual art photography, even the characteristics of the media themselves can be used. For example, the Gao Brothers used the unfinished building projects as a spatial medium for performance, a theatre of the absurd, which, to some extent, is the use of metaphoric language, rendered strange, to refer to social and cultural symptoms. In addition, the surreal style ensures that photographers need to represent the symptoms of realities that cover a large area through a series of continuous temporal exposures. Marxist epistemological logic, interwoven, confused and mixed with capitalist bigwig authoritarian logic, is just like the ‘sim-

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ulation of hyper-reality’ repeatedly proposed by Jean Baudrillard. For this reason, documentary narrative in the political dimension of criticism still keeps its avant-garde position in concepts. The de luxe executive administrative offices photographed by Qu Yan in recent years bear witness to an attempt to leave the position of editing and directing, scene-setting and stagesetting, by giving documentation the sharp power of a witness in his time. Obviously, conceptual art challenges the dominant position of formalism, but this does not mean that it ignores the importance of the form. Instead, it takes form into its commentaries with social, political and philosophical views. However, when conceptual art accepted photography, people turned their attention to photographs and the history of photography (such as the painterly photographers, the formalists, and the documentary photographers). In fact, conceptual art provided a bridge that entered into the art museum. In 1989, not a single work of conceptual photography appeared in the ‘Modern Art Exhibition’ at the National Art Museum of China, whereas in the new century they have become items for auction and collection. Although conceptual art absorbed aesthetic features of formalism, it was still being challenged during this period of time, coming as they were more from the perspective of society than of aesthetics. In the context of a certain level, conceptual photography also challenged the historical identification with mainstream aesthetics. Such challenges were normally based on a certain politically prescribed belief. The question that is closely related to the political representation is whose experience is effective and to what extent is political unconsciousness concealed or clarified? Beginning in the 1990s, photographic art practice experienced a number of important developments, which came from a critical review of conceptual art and were also closely related to the movement that was later often referred to as a return to figural expression. Certainly, symbols have never really disappeared. The meaning of ‘return’ actually has something to do with the resumed interest in reproduction of reality shown by a number of curators and critics whose interest now is unlike that of the modernists, who were preoccupied with finding the characteristics of various kinds of media. For example, conceptual artists have used a number of images and materials that have nothing to do with former exquisite arts. Art has stopped indulging itself and has started to go beyond the limitations of art museums in search of an external world. Art is now presenting contemporary issues, expanding the scope of reference and moving further away from the modernism that insisted on the autonomy of art. In 1997, I proposed for the first time the concept of ‘conceptual photography’ and exhibited works by 11 artists, including Zhang Peili, Liu Shuyong, Hong Lei, Qiu Zhijie and Mo Yi. In 1998, the art critic Zhu Qi curated ‘An Account of Photographic Images: an Exhibition of New Concept Photographic Art in China’ at the Institute of Fine Arts, Shanghai University. With these two as a starting point, conceptual photography gradually entered into the exhibition projects on contemporary art, launching a lasting assault on the future of art history. We can find that in contemporary Chinese art since

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the late 1990s photography is a dividing line between modernity and postmodernity. In a more thorough appraisal, the position photography occupies in the eyes of contemporary artists and critics would be second to none among any of the traditional visual art media, and its credos are similar to the construction of the methodology in the history of new art. New principles and new angles have emerged in the appreciation of photography. Works of photography listed as classics are expanding. Prices in the photography market are rising steadily. Obviously, we can discover information related to postmodernism by following traces of this photographic shift, whose basic vocabulary is gradually being used more widely in the world of art and is even seen everywhere in the large-scale photographic festivals. As a result of ideas emphasizing concept and critical practice, photography has come to occupy a position in the art museum. In addition, conceptual photography helps change dynasties in art practice in the same way as conceptual architecture pervades contemporary urban context and residential ideals of citizens. The reasons for this shift are quite complex. First of all, young artists emerging from the fine arts colleges broke into the realm of conceptual photography by beginning to record performance art and using their own visual angles, thus reversing the limitations and routines of recording, such as the East Village artists in Beijing photographed by Rong Rong and Xing Danwen. In the meantime, creative photographic images appeared that were virtual and edited, such as the ones by Hong Lei, Wang Qingsong, Hai Bo and Zheng Guogu. Digital images provide cyberspace with opportunities as well. As a result, accomplished photographers in documentary photography made a shift, both younger ones such as Han Lei and Liu Zheng and more qualified ones such as Yu Yong, who had made a name for herself by photographing Beijing’s hutongs, as well as Wang Xiaohui, a German-based female photographer. In the late 1990s, the fact that ‘New Documentary’ photography did not gain momentum is in large measure due to the rise of the independent recording movement with digital video, which correspondingly replaced the static recording functions of video photography and their professional scope of transmission. Art education, on the other hand, has also reflected these changes. Photography courses have risen in position from amateur classes to the awarding of academic degrees, moving from the original discipline of journalism to that of fine arts. This has to do with changing views of art history as it emerged from common sense to more purposeful and critical comments. Graduates from the courses on theory of history in art colleges—who have become the new generation of curators in art galleries and art museums —are more familiar with and interested in works based on concepts. More broadly speaking, not only has photography entered into the halls of art museums but critical thinking has also become part of the courses on photography education. In addition, feminist views and critiques have an increasingly profound impact on a daily basis. A number of new degree titles related to photography have been established, and in this wave digital

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photography has joined with its own voice. However, the routes of progress have not always been in order or interconnected as they have all gone through a process of suppression, trial and errors and debate. At the time when digital works, accompanied by pure photography and constructed images, gradually took their position, the number of photographs collected by some important exhibitions were still relatively insufficient. This fact demonstrates that photography is still regarded by some as an inferior art. In particular, the position of photography changed partly because of fashion and the impact from the focus on post-modernism. Since the 1990s, the fine arts practice of an extensive meaning has absorbed the lens-based media, including photography, video, slide projection and installation art to such a degree that irony, pastiche and collage have all become weapons of the artists.

THE N E W C ONSTRUCT OF P OST -P HOTOGR APHY Contemporary photographers focus their efforts on constructing or creating scenes for their cameras in order for these scenes to correspond to their own inner vision. For them, the so-called ‘in-situ reports’ have become the work of video artists—with the tradition of documentary films backing them up. For people carrying cameras in the 1990s, realism was a thing of the past in the early years of photography. Like the artists in the period of the 1985 New-Wave Fine Arts, they have also stepped onto the road in pursuit of another aesthetics. However, what captures their eye is not the romantic symbolism that photographic modernity equipped itself with (by emphasizing the abstract beauty of matters) but a new concern with the narrative drama and an attention to the subjective description of conceived moments by the camera. No longer viewed as description of a reality, photographs have now become a thing created, expressing what people may be able to feel that they may not necessarily see. The key emphasis in post-modernism is on construction, fiction, staging or fabrication. Fully aware of the contents, the artist constructs photographs that include photographic montages, stage imagery, works containing image-texts, slide installations as well as photographs based on landscape art. It is true that any photographic images obviously come from the design made by artists based on concepts. Among contemporary photographers who have different interests, those who belong in this extensive category include the Gao Brothers, Liu Zheng, Hong Lei, Hai Bo, Yang Fudong, Mou Xiaochun, Wang Qingsong, Cui Xiuwen, Chen Lingyang and those who came after them, such as Xu Yong, Liu Xinhua and Zhang Dali, as well as the Taiwanbased Chen Chieh-jen, Wu Tien-chang, Ku Shi-yung and Yao Chung-rui. In addition, in post-modern terms, ‘construct’ as well as the theory of deconstruction and practice are directly related. These two refuse to accept the face values of the world. In fact, the constructed images themselves are a criticism of the surface phenomenon that focuses on things as they are as well as the self-evident reasons that are wrong even as they appear to be right.

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Figure 34: Chen Lingyang, Flower February (from a series of one picture for each month)

Figure 35: Cui Xiuwen, Angel No 2

Figure 36: Cui Xiuwen, One Day in 2004, No 5

Figure 37: Gao Brothers, Unfinished, No 4

Figure 38: Lin Xinhua, Three People, 2006

Figure 39: Lin Xinhua, Acting for the army

Figure 40: Hong Lei, I dreamed I hang up listen Emperor Hui Zhong playing Chin instrument with Mao, 2004

Figure 41: Xu Yong, Solution Scheme, 2006 (artistic collaboration between artist/photographer Xu Yong and former bar hostess/sex worker Yu Na; Yu Na tells her true-life story in a series of a dozen photographs accompanied by autobiographical texts; in each photo Yu Na holds a button that controls the camera shutter)

Figure 42: Xu Yong, Chairman Mao Memorial Hall

Figure 43: Zhang Dali, edited historical photograph

Figure 44: Dao Zi, My encounter with Jesus Christ in Chinese tunic suit on the cross

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Figure 45: Dao Zi, My encounter with Dao Zi Written texts are often accompanied with single images, group photos or sequences of photos, which appear together with the texts. Extensively, writing includes titles, captions to the photographs, statements, poems or prefaces printed in the exhibitions or on the books. Titles as well as authors’ signatures assist in the claim that the position of the photographic images is as important as that of art. Titles may be obscure or metaphoric, or they may depend on a description whose manipulation may lead to extensive resonances. The act of writing is very complex, particularly in the construction of images. In this process, written texts are often collaged and juxtaposed, turning into one of the elements of the whole. In this regard, the role of speech is not just a richly imaginative reference but also one of the visual elements. Colours, hand-writing or style of printing, editing, measurements and the process of presentation: all these elements impact on how we interpret a work as a whole. On the contrary, the statements of an artist no longer exist as pure reference for people or serve to help the audience decide on interpreting works from a certain angle, although they once did have such functions. Only when people decide that

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an artist is a special observer providing us with his special insight about this world of experience can his or her statements benefit the shaping of this sense of prestige. Image-texts merge visual images with the images of written texts, thus able to create thought-provoking effects between the two. The concept of texts enlightened a number of artists in re-assessing historical photographs. For example, when Zhang Dali examined the faking procedures used by hired photographers in portraying a number of VIPs and historical events, he found large numbers of single photographs in different versions as the photographers deliberately beautified the images of the people in question in order to coincide with the deceitful propaganda in trying to cover things up. Zhang Dali compared different forms of text in order to reveal historical issues in an objective manner. On the other hand, Liu Xinhua’s experimentation has been ignored for a long time. For as long as a decade, he has made unstinting efforts in examining the political propaganda and advertisements in different periods by stacking up the texts, drawing far-fetched analogies as well as juxtaposed, so that the fakeness of the mainstream ideological patterns were revealed. In a different way to the irony of pop art, he revealed that the structure of mass psychology was not only kitsch like a prop, but he did so on its own initiative, like an octopus. These two represent the constructive interest in image-texts, whose importance lies in the fact that truth is told by getting rid of the falsehood through a deconstruction of the micro-structure of power, an observation of the historical truths as well as the venomous influence on the political unconscious, until the omnipresent organized lies were clarified. This is a serious shouldering of the construction of contemporary ethical values. Regretfully, it is not until recently that Liu Xinhua’s case has been discovered by Du Xiyun, a young critic, and is being gradually displayed. Post-photography is an extension and deepening of conceptual photography, whose influence is extensive and profound. These days, documentary photography is also spread before the sharp eyes of the critics. What the commentators question is the exclusive way in which documentary photography has always looked at certain groups and exploited them, treating poverty as a spectacle to appeal to the voyeuristic tendency of consumers. This leads to an ignorance of a number of new rhetorical strategies in documentary photography, including the use of fill-in flashes and such strategies as the use of colours, specifications, photograph captions, sequences, and the insertion of texts in the images. As a matter of fact, trends in the way art galleries are run, art criticisms, and international art markets have all excluded practices of certain areas. Any attempt to define these trends and developments must acknowledge this.

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C ONCLUSION Theoretically, contemporaneity is post-modernity. It all depends on the question whether artists living in the present world or contemporary artists have contemporaneity. The key to contemporaneity is a re-construction of the relationship between the subject of individuals and others by awakening the sacredness of human nature and the original truth of things. The contemporaneity of art is opposed to such concepts that human beings and their ethnic cultures are born with inherently fixed identities or identifications. On the contrary, the concept is the notion that identity (or identification) is fluid, uncertain. For anyone at any time meaning is unfixed and does not have a truth that is universal. And the subject is constructed through desire, imagination and unconscious parts of memory. For this reason, writing about contemporary art in a critical discourse based on social trends or with a totalist view of art history is obviously obsolete and exclusive. Only by acknowledging difference and dissidence, by returning to the individuality of the individuals and holding a continuous dialogue with the metaphysical world can there be hope. From today’s point of view, contemporary art practice seems to be characterized by its pluralism and multiplicity. We think that this changing pluralism and multiplicity reflects the issue of identity (or identification). The theory of psychoanalysis holds that images provide the restless subject with imaginary answers through the provision of identity (or identification) views. The identification in this context refers to a process in which individual subject absorbs views, characteristics and properties, and people are of the opinion that this is the result in such cases the reference is to the models provided by the images (as a whole or in part) of the transformation by the Other. For this reason, it can be thought that art satisfies our needs for definite identity (or identification) and cultural belonging. This is a process of anxiety and peace of mind, which is continuing because identity (or identification) is not fixed or rigid as it is able to subject itself to challenge and transformation. In other words, any selfpositioning through photographic images is but temporary. However, a desire for peace of mind and for questioning the heart in meditation, with a forest of doubts in the ‘Platonic Cave’ or the cave of one’s own body, can become one of the reasons for actually pushing us in our continual watching of the images. Translated by Ouyang Yu

How Much Space of Exchange is there on the Internet in Relation to Contemporary Art? Jin Feng

The internet is not only changing people’s ways of life and expanding their views of the world but it is also transforming as well as ‘revising’ their ways of exchange. All this seems to have naturally and reasonably become part of our lives. In such circumstances, we are rendered speechless if we face things that happen around us while still in our habitual mindset as we will find that our habitual mindset is passive and slavish. As a matter of fact, this is also the situation of art. We always try to keep pace with the rhythm of the times as if it was a breath of air that advanced culture is able to hold. Whether such air comes from Western culture(s) or originates from ourselves, we are contemporary as long as we carry the name of ‘epoch’ shidai. However, such thinking is habitual, passive and slavish because we have not confronted a very direct issue, which is the individual entity of being ‘I’. Has the spirituality of ‘I’ generated a relationship with contemporary times? If it has, at what contact point did it begin generating it? What on earth did ‘I’ want to do in such an occurrence? If similar questions do not deal with the confrontation, all will remain superficial, however contemporary our works and however artisticized our identity may be, because the self is not in the scheme of ‘contemporaneity’ at all. It is cruel to ask this question but it is precisely such cruelty which contains the most authentic of human nature. On the contrary, habitual ways of thinking often ignore such questions. Here I shall discuss some essential issues of contemporary art. Because this article only refers to internet culture, I shall link the art-related issues to the internet for the sole reason that art is not a mere representation of work but can also be genuinely exchanged.

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L IMITATIONS TO THE E XCHANGE OF A RT 1. Limitations to the exchange of art are historically caused Looking comprehensively at the development in art history, we find that art history, to some degree, is also a history of change in form, and such forms change mainly based on the self-discipline of art. But, of course, social factors are also extremely important. The basic situation, however, is that works of art tend to resemble products made in the ‘ivory tower’, inside which the pleasure as much as the madness is the artist’s own affair. This, undoubtedly, makes art a ‘skill’ that only a minority of people can understand. In order to mingle with men of letters and pose as lovers of culture, the powerful and the rich of the bourgeoisie became the consumers of such ‘skills’ and attached values to the ‘skills’. For this reason, art is on the one hand an ‘ivory tower’ and, on the other hand, a decoration embedded in the upper strata of society by the powerful and the rich. Artists rarely explain their works, but a large amount of explanation is subsequently attached, the meaning of which is reliant on the ‘inner needs’ of the powerful and the rich. Art is thus severed from real society. Even in modernist works, such severance still continues. The selfdiscipline of art requires art to exist for itself, which seems to be a quality historically given to art, a rule for art. Art rebels against traditional patterns but it cannot do that against its own ‘self-discipline’ because changes happen quietly within art. In the days when ‘art was for art’s sake’, it was not easy for the outside world to find out what was going on inside art. Consequently, we rarely see in art history how art engages in exchange. All we see is art in the formalist sense and changes in a multitude of forms. Apart from the sentiments it presents or reveals in forms, what art bears in society is really hard to understand. Exchange based on art’s self-discipline is obviously a joke, just like trying to communicate with society by using rules of professional modern physics. However, the upper society seems to know the secrets. Ideology hopes that art is self-disciplined because only by being so can art be safe to society. Art history tells us that art is a noble thing which not everyone can own. Only a minority of people can look down on art or raise it, which is to say that the space in which art wants to speak is artificially limited, its limitations restricted by: (1) art’s own self-discipline; (2) the needs of the upper society and restrictions of art that stem from needs (the art market being one example); and (3) external forces which ideology places on art. (The points above are about art as history, that is to say, restrictions for art in its development that are posed by art history itself.)

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2. Epistemolog y as an obstacle The system of knowledge that runs parallel to art history is aesthetics, which ‘historically’ shoulders the task of expounding art. Both art and aesthetics have many strands of relationship with philosophy. Right from Plato, philosophy began to demean art. As a result, art was always handed over to the institution of power for its management. And when aesthetics separated from philosophy, its approach to art never departed from philosophy again. For this reason, when aesthetics serve as an explicator of art, the language it uses nearly always takes a parasitic existence in philosophy. If art criticism is an exchange, aesthetic criticism always terminates the exchange. Because it is very hard for us to exchange in the language of philosophy, exchange becomes a privilege of the few. Epistemology is a static form, and if its concepts are used to interpret art it will undoubtedly make art move to an abstract level. It is precisely on this point that aesthetics puts the abstractness of art in a full package. The package works by sealing it. What is sealed in appears secretive and sacred. In fact, art and aesthetics go down different paths although they give one the impression that they are one and the same. This is the overall impression that aesthetics leads to when it is in the habit of speaking abstractly for art. Perhaps art history itself does desire an exchange but there are many hard and obscure thresholds which lie across the path to such exchange. When people find it hard to enter, art does not find it easy to come out. Exhibitions should be able to create opportunities for certain exchanges. However, in past history, we do not see this unfolding. On the contrary, exhibitions succeed in making the secrets of art appear more beautiful and decent than they are. How does epistemology lace the theory of art and become an obstacle to exchange? With doors closed, we may not find it hard to understand what is so strange about it all. An art that escapes from social realities can be systematized and can also be spiritually played like a game. By borrowing psychoanalysis and fuzzy theory, aesthetics definitely can arm such arts with theories. The fact that we may not see God does not affect the construction of theology, and it is precisely because we cannot see God that the construction of theology appears so refined, so profound and so perfect. In the same way, aesthetics tries to describe art’s self-discipline as complete; it talks about things outside the self-discipline but does not directly talk about what the self-discipline is because this would make such knowledge appear more epistemological. That is where the hardness of exchange comes from.

3. The publicness of art is but a dream It is only in recent years that the publicness of art was discussed in China, but can art be made truly popular? The recent hot topic has been how art can intervene in society. From what we can see at present, such interven-

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tion is but wishful thinking. In a social context that is far removed from the required publicness of art, our design and expectation in relation to publicness may be problematic. We try to piece thoughts together in a top-down manner, but society’s acceptance is only our imagined acceptance. Such publicness is less appropriate than forced. When the exchange mechanism of such publicness is not yet built, the publicness of art is but a dream. The publicness of art is a time-based project that is built gradually from the bottom to the top. The more effective way of doing things is in the area of education. Art enjoyment and art exchange can only enter ordinary life or become part of ways of living by beginning with education. The publicness of art is both a social taste and a quality of the masses. This situation can be reached with administrative measures, but obviously its social effect is a falsehood that is a distorted publicness. Theories today pre-empt things by embedding contemporary art in social sites, which is not where the masses place their psychological expectations. For this reason, even when works enter these sites, their effects remain separated from society. That is why such ways of operation are excessively intellectualized, meaning that they engage too much in imagination of the masses on an ideal level. The publicness of art needs creative ways of social exchange. It requires the new cooperation or project development of art galleries, art spaces, educational institutions, internet and media on the combined levels, and it requires an interaction with the masses. In the long term, such interactions are spiritual in taste and quality, not mere participation on the surface. Contemporary art should perform the function of social intervention, but because art has a great element of a self-loving complex, its publicness to this day is yet to begin.

THE I NTERNE T IS ALSO AN A RT G ALLERY 1. The narrow-minded mechanism of exhibition assessment and appraisal Why do I say that the mechanism of exhibition assessment and appraisal is narrow-minded? This is an old topic. As soon as we touch upon such issues, we will not be able to avoid so-called ‘standards’, exactly the objects which the so-called authority today may want to question. One quality of contemporary art is its ability to target issues in a free and democratic expression, which is conveyed through works. It speaks against a background and possibly in opposition to the system, whereas if the so-called standards come from the system it will still be for an ideologicalised assessment and appraisal that are only too familiar to us. There is no essential difference between these standards and those held by the fine arts associations in the past.

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We are not likely to accept such criticisms because the model of our great exhibitions is internationalized. However, this internationalized model is still institutionalized when transformed with Chinese characteristics, a transformation which it is worth pondering. On the contrary, more interesting works in China are not included in the great exhibitions. Instead, they appear in experimental spaces of all kinds. The system is characterized by its ‘intervention’, and anything that has gone through ‘intervention’ comes at a discount. This is the case in art in an official background as much as in other areas.

2. The narcissistic system of curation The curatorial system is an imported way of operating exhibitions. When the right to hold an exhibition is concentrated in one person, this person in fact owns a system. Naturally, if it is an individual who operates a system, it is a practice that is expected as it can critique the reality with this thing that resembles democracy. However, the actual situation renders one helpless. Once one owns the ‘system’ one owns power. In the great cultural background of China, such power seems at the sole discretion of the official system which has this experience. Over time, the curatorial system becomes to some degree synonymous with the official system.

3. The openness of the internet The appearance of the internet seems to be a gift from God. A suppressed society needs a platform for the demonstration of its sentiments, and the internet provides just such a stage. There, people can anonymously communicate with each other; they can talk truth; and they can relax from their fatigue or make complaints. In virtual space, a rare humanity is seen. For this reason, the internet represents progress. In various kinds of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), what we see is the existence of a certain ‘flowing space’ which is open, and we can even more capably experience the dynamics of such openness. As it is very hard to advance culture in reality, the virtual internet culture, by contrast, reveals its role in critiquing the reality. To be sure, the openness of the internet is only relative as internet management in China is also institutionalized. Still, the internet is where people speak the truth and express their opinions.

4. The grassroots consciousness at the level of exchange Exchange on the internet is conducted in a different way than normal exchange as it is characterized by spontaneity, brevity, randomness and outspokenness. However, expressing one’s thoughts via the internet will involve a holistic cultivation in an internet context. Already we can sense a simple and direct manner of speaking, which contains folk wisdom. The

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so-called public exchange, therefore, has its embryonic form of future development on the internet; the putting of subversive or funny cheap copy on the internet is such an example. What the grassroots consciousness in the internet exchange means is freedom, equality, honesty, truthfulness, simplicity, self-strength, tenacity, practicality and exploratoriness. All these are very different from the sense of reservedness in normal exchange, which, undoubtedly, has brought opportunities for the representation of art on the internet. Art websites today are as many as a cow’s hairs, but exploratory BBS are still rare. Most websites are set up to convey information or hang the artists’ works out, which is still a limited borrowing from the internet. The concept that ‘the internet is also an art gallery’ obviously has gone a step further. The critic Wang Naming has provided a professional description of this approach: It is a trend of contemporary art to form a dialogue with the public through one’s work. Such an art requires one to overcome the complete soliloquy and obscurity. Instead, it requires works of art to have possibilities for social discussion. Thus, the display of such an art does not mind whether it is in such a professional art space as an art gallery. In fact, newspaper pictures such as ‘The Small Hand-prints’ by Shalanzhen Town Primary School and short films like ‘A Bloody Case Induced by a Steamed Bread’ and ‘Uncle Bus’ have indicated a new relationship between art and the public, meaning that when artists watch and wait to have a dialogue with the public in such art spaces as art galleries the result is that they lack the dialogue with the public, and works by those who are non-artists can be turned into a dialogue with the public on the internet, then quickly becoming a force of pictorial critique. This is a new liberation of art and artists, enough for the artists to think back. Which is to say that the internet today can become a new approach that challenges the art galleries.

C RITICISM AND SELF - CRITICISM 1. How can dialogues with different realms become possible? ‘The internet is also an art gallery’. This approach has essentially changed the subject masses facing the single mode of art galleries at the same time as it elicits questions such as how works can go outside the art gallery and how they can exchange with groups in other social areas. These topics are of realistic significance in the context of the times. For a long time, art has been limited to small circles. It is an attempt to walk out of this limitation, to display works on the internet in a planned, systematic and creative way. An effective internet curatorial plan would help a work reach 50,000 or even more viewers a day, an unimaginable figure for a regular art gallery. Works displayed on the internet are characterized also

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by the viewers’ words, in which they put forward their critical views from unexpected angles. Although most of the opinions are boring, a majority of them is sincere and objectively expressed. These viewers are scattered across various social strata and different arenas, so their points of view and ways of expression are often quite alternative, thus undermining the common narcissism of the artist. For this reason, if the internet is an exchange, such an exchange is constructive. That is to say that, on the internet, it is easier for common people to understand what art is and take part in it based on their understanding.

2. The artists’ psychological forbearance The internet exchange is also a test of the artists’ psychological forbearance. Because they are used to the ways of exchange in small circles over time, artists are in the habit of displaying their works in ‘regular’ art spaces and taking part in academic activities based on small circles. What such habits provide is exactly an academic ‘safety’ model. In addition intellectuals have long been used as such safeties, with the result that the artist’s narcissistic complex is cultivated, which is a very fragile thing and can hardly be got rid of from within, undoubtedly limiting possibilities of exchange in larger spaces. Consequently, on this point, there are hidden limitations to real exchange for artists. The internet exchange is sometimes very ‘violent’, and it is a violence that has no directions. It thus all depends on how an artist faces the ‘internet violence’ and in what state of mind. Artists who are used to exchange in a safe context naturally avoid internet exchange. We may find it harsh to describe internet exchange as violent criticism, but internet exchange is also a very direct criticism as it provides an opportunity for self-criticism and self-reflection. If we consider this important, then we will naturally and healthily absorb the beneficial parts of such internet exchange, however ‘violent’ it may be.

3. Management of self Management of self by artists constitutes a new learning today. The result of thinking back on the self in a safe mode must be different from that of thinking back on the self in criticism. If they have a platform of thinking that belongs to themselves, artists will gradually establish a certain way of managing the self. Of this, criticism and self-criticism is a pretty ordinary lesson as management of self directly involves a re-integration of self-thoughts. Self-management involves the following aspects: (1) Adjustment of knowledge structure; (2) What are artists used for today?—Self-positioning; (3) Learning how to make mistakes and how to accumulate new experience in mistakes;

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(4) How to use one’s own platform of thinking for exchange—by critiquing sentiments and narcissism; (5) Self-criticism—walking out of the safety mode by thinking in pain; (6) Must have things to say when expressing—preparation prior to creation and exchange; and (7) Others.

F ORMS OF E XCHANGE ON THE I NTERNE T 1. Internet exhibitions Holding exhibitions on the internet is no longer new today. Internet exhibitions are characterized by the principles: (1) that it is helpful to avoid small circles; (2) that they move from privacy to the public—the relationship between the pre-thinking and post-thinking of a work is exposed to the public; (3) that they are cheap, convenient and fast; (4) that they cover spaces and regions which cannot be measured, a totally non-system way of operation; and (5) that the success of an exhibition is not dependent on one person but that the internet itself will give a fair answer.

2. Internet dialogues In-situ dialogues on the internet are also a platform that can test the qualities of artists. The so-called ‘questions thrust upon one who must answer’ is a quality of such dialogues. A number of excellent in-situ interviews in China provide a very good way of exchange. Such dialogues are a most direct form of tempering combined qualities. Often, when an exhibition is ended, or when an art incident takes place, the internet will organize the people involved to hold a dialogue on the spot. In such an exchange, both the viewers and the participants can more intimately sense the heart-traces of the interviewees, which is not something that can be read or interpreted in books.

3. Blogs and e-zines Blogs by artists and e-zines provide a good window on how to systematically understand artists’ creative processes and the dynamics of their thinking. Today, blogs have been popularized and e-zines are also gaining momentum. On such individualized fronts, artists can display their prowess in their creation of fronts. Both blogs and e-zines have areas for posting remarks, a space of exchange for interested parties in the artists. In such boards, artists can not only display their works, conceptualizations and designs but also become internet writers without realizing it.

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4. Others Internet exchange may lead to other things, such as the information involving real people, which can cause particular people to think about the works. Naturally, this can move from being virtual to reality via the internet, e.g. a live meeting with such people. Such examples are quite numerous today, all challenges or projects that derive from internet exchanges.

C ONCLUSION The description above gives us the impression that the change in the ways of exchange is a trend and revolution in exchange. Exchange involves struggles but these struggles can update the self and lead it out of its narrow-mindedness. Without doubt, this is a choice given us by the times. Whatever we say, however, our ‘habits’ are problematic as artistic narcissism stops us from leaving the small circles. The information age requires that we think about art in a wider field of vision. As for where we want to take things from here, this is entirely up to the artists themselves. Translated by Ouyang Yu

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The Paradox of the Individual and the Collective: An Angle of Observation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre Tao Qingmei

The changes that hold place in Chinese society during the last thirty years literally put everything upside down. Such overturning changes are so fast and so dramatic that theatre in the vortex of social life is also immersed in the impact created by these dramatic changes. Very interestingly, over the thirty years, influential plays and influential characters in the plays may have all been hit by the entanglements of individuals and collectives and connections formed of individuals and collectives during different periods of time, and they may have all contributed to the social impact theatre had in various periods of time. Looked at in a more macro perspective, the paradox of the individuals and collectives that is prominently shown in the theatre has truly reflected the clearing away of the old ideologies by the new since the period of Reform and Opening-up, the problems encountered by the ideologies of Reform and Opening-up in contemporary Chinese society and the profundity of sedimented anxieties in the spiritual life of Chinese people.

P L AYS ABOUT SOCIAL PROBLEMS (SHEHUI WENTI JU) AND E XPLOR ATORY PL AYS (TANSUO JU): FROM SHOUTS OF THE COLLECTIVE TO THE INDIVIDUAL E XPLOR ATION

Collectivism forms an important content of socialist ideology and the Cultural Revolution pushed this collectivism to an extreme: its large-scale scenes could be the great gatherings of the Red Guards on the Tiananmen Square and its small-scaled scenes could be as concrete as the school-organized “learning from soldiers and peasants” (xuejun xuenong). For this reason, cleaning up the Cultural Revolution, to some extent, includes a re-think on the collectivism, a clean up of the extreme disregard for indi-

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viduals as a result of over-blown collectivism during the Cultural Revolution. However, changes in ideologies have always been quiet. In the new ideology, there must necessarily remain the shadows of the old ideology. The stage play In the Silence (Yu wusheng chu), the first play that heralded contemporary Chinese theatre, did indeed perform the political function of cleaning up the Cultural Revolution although it was ambiguous in terms of ideology. In the Silence indirectly announced the failure of the Cultural Revolution by performing the political function of reversing the verdict on the youths who had participated at the Tian’anmen incident of 5th April 1976 (siwu qingnian). Weirdly, though, the political cleaning up of the Cultural Revolution, completed in In the Silence, occurs in the scene of collectivism by using collective protest most common during the Cultural Revolution. The most typical scene happened on the night of the play’s premier in Beijing when the representatives of the Tian’anmen incident went on the stage and, together with the players, received an enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Figure 46: The Sound of Silence, 1978 (photo: Li Yan)

Plays about social problems that were staged after In the Silence were again in such a narrative frame. China’s plays about social problems were said to have originated with Ibsen but that is obviously a misreading. Individuals in our plays about social problems were, simply put, like pieces in a board game, unlike the self-consciousness, pride, puzzlement and hesitation of the individuals that came from God as depicted in Ibsen’s works or the greatness, smallness and weakness of the individuals described by Ibsen in his poetic plays. To this day, we can still remember the play Primrose

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Spring (Bao Chun Hua) that deals with the issue involving the ‘bloodlinetheory’1 and the play Power and Law (Quan yu Fa) that targets the legal construction, but we can not remember at all anything about the personal thoughts of a certain individual in these works. This is a wonderful historical progression, in which the old ideology of the Cultural Revolution had to be deconstructed and the new ideology of ‘reform’ had to be establishedüthe new ideology laid in the collective way would have to dismantle this collective ideology. In this paradox, the plays about social problems would naturally move to the end of the road except that people in those days were not aware of the tension hidden deeply within the ideology. Instead, they simply interpreted all this as a restriction in form. So, in the exploratory plays that appeared subsequently, its beginnings were a simply exploration of form. How to express became a subject stage plays were most concerned with, from stream of consciousness, to alienation (jianli) and liberal style (xieyi), and, in the depth of its concealment, there was the impulse of the ‘individual’ to get out of the collective. For the creators then, what they were passionate about was the ‘exploration of the theatre’ as they were all trying to transcend the plays about social problems in structure by creating a new dramatic language. However, the ‘controversy’ their works induced and what eventually led to the incident involving the banning of such exploratory plays like WM and Rubik Cube (Mofang) were both because of the social phenomena of that period that they had described and the psychology that lay behind the phenomena. “If all the young people are as represented on the stage, then what hope is there for this society?” “When the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (sanzhong quanhui) was held a few years ago, why are the young still feeling depressed and hesitant?” The depressed and hesitant young were feeling that way not because they were ‘young’ but because they were the ‘individuals’ who felt gloomy in the new society. Like Jiu Shan and Ban Che in the play WM, they both had to face the loss of their ideal and a sense of estrangement from the society, which is to say, they faced the real personal issues and the position of individuals in this society. *** What is equally paradoxical is that the protagonists of the exploratory plays were not really clear about the individuals who were waking up from this obscurity or blurriness (menglong). Artists who had walked out of the collective consciousness unconsciously placed the individuals blurrily appearing and the individual beliefs they had blurrily wanted to construct still in the remnants of the collective ideology that had been going on for a long 1 | Theory of judging an individual based on their bloodline, believing that one’s class standing, political attitude, and moral character are determined by their genetic origin (translator’s note).

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time. Their imagination and construction of the future were also directed towards the collectivism. However, in fact, they had also absorbed the new ideology of the Reform and Opening-Up and they had also accepted a society based on individuality. There was something that was extremely unmatched between the individuals and the collective, shown as a most complex entanglement in the exploratory plays. Among the ‘young people’ of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, as part of the ‘exploratory play’ group, there was indeed an enthusiastic ideal about the society as well as about themselves. Their sentiments like those commonly found in the society, they had a simple imagination that a beautiful collective society would automatically come if individuals fought for it. Meanwhile, they had in fact ignored the fact that this society founded on the idea of individuality was actually calling for a collective future. In that alone, there was a profound paradox. Exploratory plays like WM and Rubik Cube touched upon this profound paradox without realizing what they were doing. Although they appealed to a ‘collective society’, the ‘collective’ thoroughly lost its tongue after being called for again and again in the process of constructing a new ideology of Reform and Opening-Up. In their works, what happened simultaneously with this collective call was the construction of an individual ideology except that artists of the exploratory plays were not able to engage in serious thinking on this profound challenge of the times. As a result, with the banning of WM and Rubik Cube, the ‘individual’ ideology that was of crucial importance to the Reform and Opening-Up was shelved.

M OU S EN : A N I NDIVIDUAL C ONCE ALED Those who really came out of the collective ideology were the ‘new people’ who had been growing up in the spirit of the 1980s, the ‘new ones’ who were not within the System and, for that reason, were even more clear about where their belief lay. Mou Sen was certainly the representative of these ‘new people’ in the dramatic art. As an amateur lover of drama, the young Mou Sen worshipped Jerzy Grotowski as his dramatic bible and, based on Grotowski’s description of his ideas of performance, the ‘individual’ in the Ibsenian sense was able to finally step onto the stage. The ‘sacred players’ as narrated by Mou Sen, or works like Rhinoceros or The Great God Brown, that he directed in the 1980s, were all a treatment of how the awaken individuals existed except that equally amazing was the fact that the ‘individual’ facing alienation in modernist art in the West turned into the ‘new individual’ that was called for in the Reform and Opening-Up, after being wonderfully collaged in the description of the Reform and Opening-Up. The appearance of this individual, like Bei Dao’s remark ‘I don’t believe’, expressed dissatisfaction with the socially suppressed individuals, a consciousness of individual growth. However, the political incident in the 1989 caused this ‘individual’

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to run into a cul de sac, who was beginning to construct himself and to quickly move to the other side of political life. In 1991, jointly with a group of amateur actors, Mou Sen staged The Other Shore (Bi‘an), at Beijing Film Academy. In an intense atmosphere that was similar to ‘collective reading’, where the audience and the players participated in close quarters, what he had predicted was a group of individuals who had nowhere to go, the individuals who had lost their other shore.

Figure 47: The Zero File, 1994 (photo: Li Yan) Such individuals who had nowhere to go just after they had stepped onto the stage of the spiritual world because of political suppression were most representatively reflected in the work The Zero File (Ling Dang’an). This play can be said to be an ‘experimental’ play that combined forms of contemporary expression as well as an avant-garde play that explicitly challenged the control of the System over the individuals. The somewhat exciting and violent ways of expression in the The Zero File very clearly presented the inner gloominess of some artists who had nowhere to go after 1989 and coincided with the general mentality in which the world looked at China. What was represented in this play was a form of expression that was almost synchronous with contemporary Western art. More importantly, that form almost perfectly expressed the squeeze and pressure on the individuals by totalitarianism and the individuals’ opposition to totalitarianism. With Mou Sen, individuals, after their opposition, were also looking for their own substance. Take Having to do with AIDS (yu aizi youguan), a work that remains one in the strongly contemporary art style. With a proposition, ‘having to do with AIDS’, that was half existent and half non-existent, the participating individuals (mostly artists) told of their own individual history of development in the process of cutting the meat, kneading the dough and

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steaming the baozi (buns with stuffings). It is a quite wonderful play. In the carefully planned and steaming scene of daily life, everyone is telling about the trouble and problems they have in their development, particularly about sex in the past period in which sex was suppressed. However, Mou Sen, an artist existing outside the System, had his exploration stranded as a result of the political incident fully politicized in 1989 in the process of his trying to fully portray the individuals and to establish the substance of the individuals in social life. In 1994, Mou Sen’s The Zero File was invited to appear in the Brussels Drama Festival. According to the regulations of the System, the ‘Play Workshop’ he set up for The Zero File was not eligible for being staged overseas. In a hurry, they went on a tour of performance overseas. In the special political atmosphere, it was ‘translated’ as an artistic rebellion against China’s political system. When trying to be connected with the areas of art in Europe and America, China’s avantgarde plays were violently stuck on with the ideological labels of rebels. Because they had this label put on too early, Mou Sen’s plays lost the opportunity to face true individuals in contemporary Chinese society. For this reason, the individual in Mou Sen’s work, who has very selfconsciously detached himself or herself from the collective, remains relatively vulnerable in his or her substance. The narration of the individual growth in Having to do with AIDS is more focused on sex-related life. In a somewhat suppressed society, this may have led to some conflict. However, after 1993, Chinese society became rapidly marketized. In an atmosphere in which nothing cannot be sold, the veiled sexual tension in Having to do with AIDS quickly losed its significance: female sex blogger Mu Zi Mei reduced all their metaphors to nothing. ‘Individualism’ that had its enlightened thought from Ibsen was able to present itself in China with the assistance of modern Western art but the individual remains an abstract and suppressed one who has not established his substantive substance. So, with the arrival of a consumer society, such individuals with no substance are quickly absorbed by the consumer society. This shift is reflected in Meng Jinghui, another representative of the avant-garde theatre.

M ENG J INGHUI : THE I NDIVIDUAL M ERGING INTO THE C OLLECTIVE OF C ONSUMERS Compared with Mou Sen, Meng Jinghui has made the greatest contribution to Chinese theatre by being the first to fully sinisise modernist theatre language. For the creative group dominated by Meng Jinghui, the most direct puzzlement in the 1990s was the suppression on individual creativity by the academic system. However, in their process of fighting against this suppression, they also touched upon the collective suppression of the society as a whole in the early 1990s. In the very beginning, such a tense relationship with the social life was also expressed albeit deviously in a modernist play. After performing a series of modernist classics, such

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as Waiting for Godot that they themselves did not even understand, they quickly announced their appearance on the stage in the powerful voice of ‘I love’, as in I Love XXX. In the atmosphere of ‘collective reading’ and ‘collective performance’ in I Love XXX, the language structure of ‘I love’ naturally pulled the individuals out of the collective memory. When describing these individuals, Meng Jinghui et al no longer borrowed the ‘other’s cup’ from the modernist plays in the West as they were able to use their own language and words and through their powerful linguistic force to express themselves in a dramatic language that they had imagined. The most moving individual representation in the theatre was injected with a lively native content and native expression by Meng Jinghui.

Figure 48: The Rhinoceros in Love, 1999 (photo: Li Yan) However, unlike Mou Sen who spent all the time travelling from one drama festival to another in foreign countries, in a relaxed atmosphere, Meng Jinghui had more to face in relation to the quickly changing Chinese so-

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ciety after a full marketization in 1993. After 1993, with the fast marketization following the Southern Tour by Deng Xiaoping, concept of a cultural market was quickly pushing from non-existence to existence. In the progression of the market as an ideology, Meng Jinghui made a shift, laughing playfully and angrily abusing. In The Rhinoceros in Love, the intense tension in the work quickly turned into the kind of clinging to love in a commercial play. The Rhinoceros in Love can be said to be in line with a kind of play needed in the market society. At the same time, what it calls for is another type of individuals, the consumption individuals in a consumer age. ‘Individuals’ in Meng Jinghui’s plays also contain ‘individuals’ in the face of consumerism in the process in which the collective ideology is quickly dismantled, an individual that loses itself as a subject as a result of being quickly engulfed by the consumer society for lack of substance. Individuals who grew up in the 1990s were unexpectedly carried away by the torrent of consumerism as they ran into it. There were neither artists nor thinkers who would give the ‘individuals’ thought and soul. As a result, the ‘individuals’ quickly became captivated by the consumer society and the ‘consumers’ that that society appealed to. The individuals who had come out of the collective that had restricted the individuals to an extreme have once again integrated into the ‘consumer groups’. Of course, in Meng Jinghui’s works, there still exists a certain tension between the individuals who have turned into consumers and the individuals who have become independent of that collective society. His works remain cynical and critical of the ‘consumer individuals’, the most typical remark being ‘the mass aesthetics is the stinking dog shit’, although the swelling of consumerism is very fast. Later on, commercial plays only appealed to consumers but never to the construction of individuals. The discussion runs to an abrupt end here of what substance and imagination the individuals who have walked out of the collective should have.

P EOPLE THE ATRE : I NJECTING R ICH C ONTENTS INTO THE I NDIVIDUALS Contemporary Chinese theatre has deconstructed the substance of the remaining collectivism with the concept of individualism although it has not fully resolved another concomitant issue as to how to inject richer and more substantive contents. Recently, various groups that have appeared under the banner of people theatre (minzhong xiju) are performing an important function by trying to find contents for the concept of ‘individuals’. After 2000, the concept of the people theatre ignited the urban young’s rethinking on their own life and a concern for the socially disadvantaged. Minjian (non-governmental or people) theatre troupes such as Cotton Flower (Mu Mian Hua) in Guangzhou and Grass Stage (Cao Tai Ban) in Shanghai were the new ones that grew under this stimulation. Many young people walked into the people theatre, not only vying for their

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own play power but also hoping to undertake social responsibilities in a place where individualism has been eschewed with their concern for social issues. Interestingly, in such works, the undertaking of social responsibilities is no longer a collective protest in the macro vision; it no longer appeals to the ups and downs of social groups. These works are so specific that they are down to individuals’ expressions. For example, in The little Society staged by Grass Stage in 2009, a play based on the starting point of solo performances, must inevitably bring individual perspectives which are open-eyed in their observation of social life. Whoever’s role they play, be it a beggar, a sex worker or a group of drifting people in the city, they treat them not as what they ‘possess’ but they use their own individual identities to clash with other people in the society and such clashes with other people are attempts to enrich and perfect the substance of these authentic individual lives. We may say that only by placing individuals in the real and complex social background and having them clash with others and relate to others can we establish the ‘individuals’ specific substance in the Chinese society.

Figure 49: The Little Society, by Grass Stage, 2009 (director and performing: Zhao Chuan)

In the meantime, another expression of individuals and the collective, the relationship between the individuals and the commonwealth that follows reveals itself, half-visibly and half-invisibly. The most typical of these is the New Workers’ Troupe. In the play, Our World, Our Dream, staged in 2009, Laizi, a character, says that since there are people who ‘are afraid that I may open my mouth to speak’, ‘I shall open my mouth to speak’. What is worth noticing is that this ‘I’ is no longer the young person who was pursuing an individual’s happiness after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1978. Nor is he an individual suppressed by the System in the avant-garde plays.

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The ‘I’ has the workers as a collective behind him. A collective enriched with historical experience of full-fledged individuals, the crying individuals because of the collective needs, the individuals and the collective meet again in this scene and get entangled again with each other, thus once again demonstrating that the reform ideology has arrived at another enticing moment.

C ONCLUSION : R E - CONSTRUCTION OF THE I NDIVIDUALS AND THE C OLLECTIVE IN THE C HINESE S OCIE T Y The individuals and the collective—‘the masses and the individuals’ in the German expressionist term—form a group of concepts, presenting a multi-coloured picture of change in the Chinese society. The individuals of the Chinese society, unlike the individuals who have galloped away from God as described by Ibsen, have split from the collective society and after thoroughly splitting from the collective, they have once again been integrated into the ‘collective’ of the consumers by the consumer society because of the sweeping power of the unique political situation and the consumer society. The dynamics of the individuals and the collective have staged intense conflicts against the background of the Chinese society. The ‘individuals’ of the Chinese society do not have concrete historical contents and, for this reason, need reconstruction. In this difficult process of individual construction, any artists and artistic behaviour, as long as they are rooted in the rich soil of the Chinese society, will discover that the individuals detached from the collective are not the lonely ones who have walked out of God’s embrace in Ibsen’s works as they have always been growing in a commonwealth that is closely related to them. The commonwealth does not necessarily suppress the individuality of the individuals although the key point is how the individuals can secure their selves and at the same time support the commonwealth by themselves. This complex dialectics between the individuals and the collective is not limited to artistic behaviour alone. In contemporary Chinese society, the difficult issue, commonly faced in the construction of the community and in volunteer’s behaviour, is how to establish the meaning of the ‘individuals’ involved therein and to position the relationship between the individuals and the collective. If the enlightenment in the age of Ibsen established a new ideology for the Reform and Opening-Up in China, if Ibsen’s ‘individuals’ as well as the ‘individuals’ facing alienation in Western modernism used to be resources of thought borrowed or misused in contemporary Chinese theatre, then the history and reality that are quickly changing in the face of Chinese society and people’s theatre are providing their own answers to the serious and thoughtful theme of ‘the individuals and the collective’ with their accumulated practice that has been hard won. Translated by Ouyang Yu

Can That Be? Why Can’t It Be? Zhang Xian

There is a proverb in China that says: “Do not die before you have reached the middle of the Yellow River”. What it means is: People who do not know that the Yellow River is unfordable will try to cross it even at the risk of their lives. They will not stop until they have reached their goal. China also has this saying: “Cross the river by feeling the stones”. This means: Although the river might seem to be unfordable, you can cross it step by step by feeling for the stones in the river bed. We could also say: “Test the ground before each step you take”. Many Chinese people are amazed by the Yellow River, pointing out correctly that it is the fastest flowing river in the world yet that in the dry season parts of the river get blocked up and people can walk on the river bed across to the other bank. The Yellow River has inspired China in a double sense: no doubt there are things that are impossible, and yet nothing is really quite impossible. After China, thanks to its revolutionary force, had achieved an apparently impossible victory, an absurd idea was born that no one had previously dared to entertain: the idea of creating a centrally governed nation-state with the biggest population in the world! That was in the year 1949. The political elites of China concentrated all of their hopes in a kind of Chinese Magna Carta which they called the ‘Common Programme of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’. This ‘Common Programme’ consolidated the existing political power and contained basic principles drafted by the various parties and social organizations for the establishment of the new state. It remodelled its institutions and formulated the following constitutionally guaranteed freedoms: freedom of thought, speech, publication, assembly, association, correspondence, person, domicile, change of domicile, religious belief, and the freedom to hold processions and demonstrations. In addition, the ‘people’s republic’ drew a lesson from history and had the programme stipulate that the representatives (daibiao) of the highest organ of the future state, the National People’s Congress, were to be elected by general election—a

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measure taken especially in case a one-party system should come to be set up. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, after more than half a century and up to the present day, there is quite simply no ‘generally elected representation’, since all the ‘representatives to the People’s Congress’ are appointed by the party. In step with the ever increasing population the few thousand ‘representatives of the people’ who gather annually for the meeting in Beijing have claimed to represent first four hundred million, then six hundred million, then eight hundred million Chinese citizens. At present they represent one billion three hundred thousand citizens, in the future they could well represent one billion eight hundred million, or two billion Chinese citizens. Can that be? Why can’t it be? It is said that what China has is a kind of ‘representation of identities system’. Based on the concept of some kind of mythological heroic identity, hundreds of millions of citizens are divided up into an extremely small number of minimal identities. The ‘representatives of the people’ separately represent workers, peasants, the liberation army, intellectuals, ethnic minorities and other ‘patriotic personages’. The ‘representatives of the people’ do not represent constituencies in specific areas, they represent nationwide phantom collective identities. One can well imagine the result: no one knows where the representatives actually come from or whom they really represent. All one knows is that they have all taken an oath of fealty to the Chinese Communist Party, and that, gradually, complete ‘Communist party memberization’ has been achieved: the workers’ representatives are party members; the peasants’ representatives are party members; the representatives of the Peoples Liberation Army are party members; the representatives of the intellectuals are party members; the ethnic minorities’ representatives are party members. As to the representatives of ‘other patriotic personages’, they are generally capitalists, religious leaders or overseas Chinese, and few of them are known to have party member status. However, because in the past they had always been reliable partners, with some training they came to be truer party members than all the others. The National People’s Congress held in Beijing has become a kind of traditional national ritual. Almost every year, in the papers and on television, the Chinese people follow the same unchanging national spectacle. The plenary meeting is held, as ever, in the Great Hall of the People, the hall being designed like a theatre. The ‘Party and National leaders’ are seated on the stage, the ‘people’s representatives’ sit in the audience seats. This arrangement is rich in symbolic meaning. It firmly establishes a very clear relationship between actors and audience, the ‘leaders’ being the actors and the ‘representatives of the people’ the audience. Or, rather, they are representatives of the audience, they are on the spot to watch the ‘state action’ performance while the general public sees ‘state action’ performance on faxed photos or on TV. What is acted out here is the ‘national

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drama’, and this ‘national drama’ continues in the ancient tradition of ritual court ceremonies; it has become the official ‘model opera’1 of this new theatre-state, the people’s republic. Following that example, the drama has been popularized all over the country (including in my birthplace Shanghai) in thousands and thousands of ‘branch theatres’. When attending the plenary session, the people’s representatives are required to wear apparel corresponding to their official identity: blue work clothes and peaked caps for the workers, for the peasants homespun cotton Chinese-style jackets with traditional fastenings and white head towels etc. Some of the ethnic minorities representatives, because their costume shows class distinctions and is therefore inappropriate for the occasion or because it looks too strange, have no choice but to wear a kind of fancy-dress: ‘ethnic minority dress’ specially created by real theatrical costume designers. The process of dressing up for the play includes proper hair-styling and even goes as far as training in posture and deportment, culminating in the astonishing uniformity of the language of the ‘people’s representatives’. In spite of changing trends, they continue to say exactly the same things, expressing exactly the same opinions, as though they had rehearsed over and over again. In truth they are not speaking, they are reciting actor’s lines. Once someone has become a ‘representative of the people’, he is no longer his original self, he immediately starts acting his pre-determined role. He studies how to make his smiling face freeze into a mask, studies how to raise his hand like the other ‘representatives’, how to become an untiring ‘hand-raising machine’. This kind of machine never functions alone, it always raises its hand in concert with all the other raised hands. Can that be? Why can’t it be? On the draft of the newly founded state’s constitution which had been submitted to him by the legal experts, Mao Zedong wrote: “What is a citizen?” Of course, every page of the constitution of a republic is full of references to citizens; indeed, it would not be a republican constitution if it did not mention citizens. Does Mao’s question really show that he was ignorant on this point? Or was he pretending ignorance? In fact, Mao strongly challenged and opposed the principle of ‘equality before the law’, which has been adopted by all modern countries. He needed enemies, and not once in his life did he mention the word ‘citizen’; what he emphasized, all his life, was ‘the people’. It was his party that had liberated the people out of the hands of the enemy. Now, in the face of new ‘enemies’, the masses needed Mao’s leadership, so they connived with him to become disciples of a kind of religion, a secular religion of the ‘great liberator’. When a million people gathered on Tiananmen Square and fanatically cheered their ‘saviour’ with cries of ‘Long live Chairman Mao’, and Mao responded with ‘Long live the people’, the advantage of the term finally became amply clear: ‘the people’ is everyone—except Mao! 1 | A reference to model operas of the Cultural Revolution (translator’s note).

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Academics comparing the success of India and China, the two great Far-Eastern nations who started building their states around the same time, criticize India’s inefficiency and weakness, and commend China’s efficiency and strength. If you consider only state-building and not social development, this observation is absolutely true. As far as state-building is concerned, the Chinese founders successfully banned almost every form of community organization from the very beginning, something that would have been inconceivable in India. China owes its success to its long imperial history, the only merit of empire being that it created the ‘state’. The empire had been created by the ‘body’ of the state being poured into the ‘body’ of the people. In this context, the two Chinese concepts of ‘state’ and ‘body’ are extremely important. The Chinese word for ‘state’ is composed of two characters: 國 (guo: country) and 家 (jia: family). In ancient texts there is a saying, ‘The prince for the country, the government official for the family’. The emperor with the bureaucrats are the state, and the state owes its origin to powerful living personages, not to its territory. Although modern Chinese has expanded the meaning of the word guojia to match the foreign words corresponding to ‘country’, ‘nation’, ‘state’, ‘land’ etc., to the Chinese mind the word stands for precisely the opposite of ‘rule of the people’. and basically, the notion of ‘sovereign rights of the people’ is not something they understand. The Chinese word for ‘body’ (身體: shenti) is also made up of two characters. The first character 身 is similar in form to a body seen from the side, the second character 體 is made up of a bone 骨 together with a sacrificial vessel. (In the simplified version of the character the bone is replaced by the symbol for a person.) Thus the two-character word stresses that the human body is the sacrifice in ritual sacrifices to the gods, that it is just one part in a whole system. The morphology of shenti is deeply embedded in the collective subconscious of the Chinese people. The individual body is seen as secret, filthy, not to be mentioned; it is only legitimized through its linking to the ‘state’; only in conjunction with the state can it enjoy an identity, only thus can it gain honour—for example as a representative at the People’s Congress, or as an imperial concubine, or as a champion at the Olympics with a role in the magnificent large-scale group calisthenics performance. The composition of Chinese pictographic writing, the system of political representation, the identification with ‘the greatest state’—all tend to deny the existence of individuals as individuals. They deny that individuals really exist, they do not recognize their otherness or their legitimacy, they constrict and abolish their life space. Man’s social life is assimilated and remoulded by nationalism, and then replaced by a gigantic, hollow ‘state society’. In this respect, modern nationalists adopt different tactics to those of their comrades in the old society. On the one hand, they belittle and suppress the individual, on the other hand, however, they embed every single individual in a sea of collective adulation. Every single wor-

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ker, peasant or cadre is designated a ‘national hero’, each and every one possesses incomparable virtues, they are the mightiest in the world, the most perfect people. Funnily enough, it was Mao Zedong who, in one of his poems, made the gross overstatement: “All the six hundred million people of the divine country are Shun or Yao”2 . According to tradition, Shun and Yao were the so-called earliest ancestors of the Chinese nation. The sentence is like saying each one of the six hundred million people is a Jesus, a Caesar, a Frederick the Great, an Elizabeth the First, a Mahatma Gandhi; or the most realistic implication: each and every one of them is Mao Zedong! In the age of the l’état c’est moi-people there is still a need for leaders who stand for the state. The most intelligent thing to do is to create the illusion that the leaders and the people are one, that jointly they stand for the state. Let the people identify totally with their leaders: their ideas are our ideas, their actions are our actions. In the course of the symbolic merger of people and leaders, the idea of the people as brainless, incorporeal abstract beings began to take shape. The formerly unimaginable sublime experiment had begun. Now the body of the individual, the body of the party, the body of the state, the body of ethnic minorities, the body of the leaders all merged into one, you are in me, I am in you, we cannot be separated. Simplify, simplify, simplify, abstract, abstract, abstract, until you have abolished every real living person, and all that is left is a little pile of symbols—the party, the leaders, the state, the minorities—all of which can be turned into perfect representatives of people. One may ask why, thirty years after his death, we are still talking about Mao Zedong. Could it be that Chinese society has not changed at all? My answer to the first question is this: We are still talking about Mao Zedong because, thirty years after his death, Chinese banknotes all carry his portrait. Thirty years ago things were different, we had portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, of workers, peasants, soldiers and members of ethnic minorities. Nowadays, all the banknotes, the one yuan, the two yuan, the five yuan, ten yuan, twenty yuan, fifty yuan notes, all of them show Mao Zedong! In the same way as the emperor’s persona educated the bodies of the ancient Chinese by means of the ‘imperialization’ rules, that is the daily rituals of respectful bowing, worship on bended knee and kowtow, Mao Zedong’s persona created the modern Chinese person’s body by means of ‘transformation of the people’ campaigns, that is mass carnivals with everyone raising their hands simultaneously to show agreement and everyone shouting together with raised fists. The emancipation of the Chinese person’s body is impossible without taking into account Mao Zedong’s historical legacy. 2 | From Mao Zedong’s poem ‘Saying goodbye to the God of Disease‘ (July 1958). Shun and Yao were semi-legendary emperors, said to have ruled China around 2000 BC, praised by Confucianists for their exemplary virtues (translator’s note).

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My reply to the second question is as follows: Chinese society has indeed experienced enormous change, but the state as a whole has not changed at all. Because the state is still paying the costs of the romantic fantasies of Mao’s time, it has to cope with the largest population in the world. The state machinery still continues its totalitarian campaigns and harbours romantic illusions that totalitarianism can be reconciled with the market economy and capitalism, and that after Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London and New York China can become the heart of the world economy. However, China’s population is really too big, it already totals not only the combined populations of Europe and the United States, but those of Russia and Pakistan in addition. What is such a populous ‘superpower’ most suitable for? For war, obviously—except that that really is not appropriate. The endless warfare during Mao Zedong’s ‘first republic’ demonstrated the superpower’s inexhaustible advantages. And yet in the thirty years of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘second republic’ with its policy of reform and opening up there was only one war, the one with Vietnam. He tried to change the main purpose of the state machinery, with the result that the vastness of the population weighed like a millstone on his projects for welfare schemes and equality: realizing ‘equal wealth for all’ became an impossible assignment. Just imagine what would happen if America’s primary welfare benefits had to be spread over the whole of the African population, which is about the same as the population of China. It is like the problem China is trying to solve, except that the number of people benefiting from welfare in China still do not add up to one tenth of the number in America. China’s welfare cannot be evenly distributed among all the people, it can only be symbolically given to a small number and to certain groups. The representative system continues to bring into play its versatile symbolic function: a few people, deputizing for the general public, enjoy social security and health insurance benefits, economic, educational and cultural rights. The majority of the people have lost their legal rights and actually have an ‘underclass’ status. Perceptive people rightly say: Discrimination in the Indian caste system is less common than one imagines, in China where there is no caste system, discrimination is more common than one imagines. For the dissociated people, who are sad and depressed, playing symbolic games easily becomes a way of forgetting and of release. These days the Olympic Games are used as a medicine to cure the nation’s depression: last time ‘we’ were in the second place for gold medals, this time we want to be in the first. The ‘second place for gold medals’ is a result of statistics based on whole nations, it creates the illusion that China is ‘the second strongest sports nation in the world’. Actually there is no escaping the fact that China won only one Olympic medal per more than twenty million people and on this basis came seventieth out of the seventy-five prize-winning countries. In all the rankings

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according to cultural, educational and health facilities, one ‘whole nation’ is simply ‘the best in the world’, but its ‘whole population’ stands at the bottom of the list. Our ‘leaders’ also know that. However, their desire for national victories is irrepressible for they need them to cover up the defeat of the people, constantly hoping that some mighty ‘other’ will come and ‘represent’ them, and deliver them from their insignificance and nullity. I think I have already spent enough time trying to make everyone understand what the word daibiao means for Chinese people. As a noun it is most frequently translated as ‘representation’, ‘delegate’, ‘deputy’, ‘exponent’ etc., but none of these translations are quite accurate. In modern Chinese, daibiao is used mainly as a verb in a wide range of meanings: it has something to do with power, namely the kind of conduct which has not been debated, for which approval has not been sought, which needs no authorization and which evolves from unilateral power. There is no place like China where it is so easy for anyone to say: ‘I represent the local people of our village’, ‘I represent the earthquake victims’, etc. Secondly, daibiao is used as a noun indicating something which exists independently of the person doing the representing, something of much higher standing. Its function is to replace the benefits, the status, even the actual existence of the representative. Daibiao’s real meaning is: outright violation of rights, expropriation, grabbing—it is like an evil curse. No wonder this character is made up of a man plus a flying arrow: the represented people really resemble shot birds, often they have lost their souls or their lives for ever. In my essay entitled From ‘Representation of the People’ Culture to People’s Culture I once described in detail how in the field of culture and art, particularly in the fields of theatre and dance, a small number of ‘People’s Representatives’ all at once came to ‘represent’ millions of people’s legitimate rights and creative power. To put it simply, the ‘representation’ of everything in the arts field is part of the political ‘representation of the people’, it consists of a few people from the general public who, as ‘representatives’ of the people’s right to cultural enjoyment and performance, accumulate power and form the cultural hub. Little by little people’s culture is hollowed out, the representatives grab people’s culture for themselves, until finally the culture of the people is transformed into the ‘delegation’s’ own culture. From the very beginning, the founding government of the People’s Republic banned all folk art organizations, closed all privately run theatres, and then used unprecedented sums of government funds to support state-run theatres, and to eliminate all other theatres and troupes (only one of each kind was left). A metropolis of over ten million inhabitants like Shanghai was left with only one drama company and one dance company to represent ‘modern drama’ and ‘dance’. The government either appointed professionals or found and promoted talented people to represent and replace workers, peasants or town-people in song and dance shows. Thus culture of the masses became culture for the masses, participants became onlookers, producers became consumers.

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Since the policy of ‘reform and opening up’, the government has been trying out a policy of limited ‘decentralization’ and has allowed the setting up of non-governmental artistic organizations. However, they cunningly used industrial policy in the place of cultural policy, thus driving inexperienced actors’ companies onto the capitalist market. For those taking the risk of setting up a commercial theatre or dance company such things as registration fees, taxation rates, the organization of affiliations and controls and audits all come together to make up a hangman’s noose to choke them. Once I made an application to a Shanghai arts official for a single dance performance. He believed that all shows had to be submitted to the long and complicated examination and approval procedures. I said: Do you not make an exception for non-ticketed events? He said: No exceptions. Not even for charity shows. I said: What if workers want to put on a show in their factory? He said: They have to come and report it. Any public performance is a matter for our office. I said: What if my son dances hip-hop in our street? He said: It is strictly forbidden. I said: And what if a bride and a bridegroom sing a song at their wedding reception? He said: Well, that depends if singing is something they generally do! What can you say to that? Living in such a place, it is difficult not to break the law. Consequently in recent years a large number of ‘law-breaking’ artist groups have appeared, by which I mean underground non-profit groups. Because of the term ‘underground’, they are often not accepted by either the oppressors or the oppressed. So we call ourselves ‘independent artist groups’. Living Dance Studio, Zuhe Niao, Grass Stage, Paper Tiger, J-Town, Fan Troupe, and several hundred other drama and dance groups have been set up one after the other in Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Jinan. Similarly, several not yet ‘sanctioned’ art festivals have started up: May Festival, Crossing Festival, Fringe Festival, Idea Festival, Free Cinema, etc. Among independent artists groups a large number of ‘dance theatres’ and ‘body theatres’ have emerged. Their performances of ‘language without words’ and ‘body language’ have caused astonishment. One explanation for the appearance of this kind of performance is that it is because of the severe controls, and because if you say what you want to say clearly you can easily be caught tripping. Actually, evasion is not the main issue here. To start with, one has to remember how the human body was subjugated and occupied by the state body; and how, through the ‘representation of the people’, the symbolic values of the ‘revolution’ superseded individual values. Silence is the beginning of the tête-à-tête between the individual and the state, the body is the source of ontological creation. To make movement and dance the passion of one’s life is to transform the power of fate.

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Westerners invariably ask: ‘Which of the topics that you have presented are actually prohibited?’ We can hardly answer that kind of question. Any topic can be allowed, but conversely any topic can be prohibited. Chinese rulers are not like the inheritors of the communist legacy, they are not like Western-type rationalists or dogmatists, they are not like their onetime Eastern European allies. They act according to the wisdom of antiquity, they are accustomed to variable domination, they like people to be apprehensive and fearful because they are uncertain about what they can do since there are no fixed laws and decrees. At the same time they enjoy the pleasure of capricious ‘personal rule’. Your attitude is the key: if you show docility, they might extend clemency. If you seem to have the ‘wrong attitude’, even though your topic is harmless they might be uneasy, they will consider you might be harbouring subversive plans and they will guard against you all your life. Such a system creates tacit agreement, every creative artist becoming complicit with the censors, becoming an element of national security. When an artist uses words to interpret a story, he is in actual fact delivering a written pledge to the public prosecutor in a language which both sides understand, guaranteeing the mutual enforcement of the law. This is a kind of subtle enslavement, and whatever efforts the artist makes, he is always working in collaboration with the system. Unless the artist can speak with another language. This other language is body language. It is not as though body language did not have its own logic or voice, but this logic and this voice have not as yet found a place within the government system, there are no criteria for law enforcement. This has encouraged the revolt of the body. Artists’ enthusiasm, their unrestrained vitality, their creative power erupted as soon as, for the first time, they discovered art through the enjoyment of their bodies. Now they can move as they wish, leap as they wish, they can show things they themselves had no idea of. They can explain or not explain, the main thing is that by not explaining things to the powers that be, you can truly display your own power, your oppositional power. Oh how authorities stand in need of explanations! But on the other hand they also have a great capacity for selfdelusion. As long as the recommendation to ‘tolerate heterodoxy’ stands beneath the controller’s name it is clear to them that what they are enjoying is a harmless play. But no, independent artists are not willing to submit. I even suspect that they are not submitting simply for the joy of not submitting and that basically they do not care what they might be expressing. They realize that what their body has acted out is a tiny bit of power. It is a brand new, authentic kind of power that generates refreshing symbolic energies (cf. Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of symbolique) which cannot be seized upon, which cannot be delegated. Self-determined action emboldens independent artists. They lose their illusions about governmental reform measures, and they do not count on the ever younger People’s Representatives’ ‘sympathetic understanding’ of the popular will or on their proposals for legislation. They begin to see that

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although they are all treading the same national soil it is as if there were two peoples from two different countries walking on separate paths into the future. Never mind that greater and greater sums of governmental art financing continue to go to the corrupt and uninnovative ‘representatives of the people culture’. Never mind that the Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation and the Shanghai Cultural Talents Foundation systematically channel taxpayers’ money into the purses of their own people. Confronted with the long-standing economic monopoly, social monopoly, cultural monopoly and the monopoly of the representative identity, the independent artists have invented any number of improvised art forms. Having walked out of the theatre they have sought a vaster performance space, they have sought out their own communities. They have finally come to understand that, even though the so-called ‘state-operated’ cultural organs ostensibly represent certain kinds of people, actually each one of them is an independent ‘vested interests group’. These cultural bodies became privatized in the wake of the covert privatizations by various local governments, and in recent years they have degenerated into ‘corrupt vested interests groups’. This is not just a question of ethics, it is a crime, it is stealing public property. ‘Corrupt vested interests groups’ in the cultural field is not the same thing as ‘corrupt vested interests groups’ in the fields of public construction or social security. As far as the corrupt vested interests groups in the cultural field are concerned, besides securing the people’s property and transferring it into what were in fact already privatized work units, they transformed the social and cultural capital as well as every kind of symbolic capital (Bourdieu’s capital symbolique)—all of which they had already monopolized—into financial capital. ‘State’, ‘government’, ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘philanthropy’, everything was mixed together and recycled for use in private investment and reproduction. The result of all this was to act as a catalyst for artists’ righteous moral indignation at the political rationale. They established more and more social forms, not only for the sake of art. They initiated all kinds of public readings, public lectures, seminars, forums, websites, blogs—thus approaching the field of ‘social performance’. They said: “They pretend to be a republic, we pretend to be the people, with the only result that make-believe becomes reality. On stage and off stage, cultural actors and social actors are identical in action.” ‘Action’ makes the utopia in the mind become a shared utopia in the physical world (heterotopia). Is that independent art, or is it independent politics (people’s politics)? Do we have to make a distinction? There are people who worry that we may be involving ourselves in politics. But if politics are inescapable, we cannot shrink back. In the first place, we have come to understand politics through a political science unknown to Chinese people until recently. ‘Political’ has to be seen as the opposite of ‘despotic’. The ‘political’ excludes the ‘despotic’, the ‘despotic’ excludes the ‘political’. Secondly, it is clear to all of us that the Chinese people’s so called ‘politics’ is nothing else but a synonym for ‘terror’—you

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must not touch it. The Chinese people greatly fear politics, yet politics continuously seek them out. If you are sitting at home drinking tea, that is not political; if the bulldozers turn up and demolish your house and you get up to resist, that still is not political; if you are arrested and your neighbours shout at the policemen: “You’ve got no right to arrest him!”—that is political. In the last decades, politics has gradually entered the privacy of people’s lives, and because our lives are more and more closely linked to the public sphere, there is no place that is free of politics. Finally, to finish our speech, let us use an allegory to describe the Chinese kind of politics. We are the master’s flock of sheep. Because there are too many of us, the master keeps us in a vast meadow. We feel extremely happy, but the master is very worried, he fears he cannot manage to keep his property under control. Therefore he surrounds us with an electrified wire netting fence. Some of us unwittingly touch the fence and are knocked down by the electric shock, and this causes a wave of panic. We all involuntarily shrink back and retreat to the centre. Upon this the master moves the electric fence, thus reducing its circumference. Again, some of us inadvertently touch the fence, and this again gives rise to panic. Everyone moves away from the electric fence, we all move further into the middle. Again and again we get electric shocks, bit by bit we shrink back until finally we are squeezed into a tiny living space, the most densely crowded space in the world. The electricity is politics. We warn each other: Do not touch, do not touch. Years and years pass by, the electricity in the fence soon falls away, there is no electricity any more, but not one of us touches the fence. Do we or do we not want to touch that fence? Do we really want to stay squeezed together for ever, squeezed together so tightly that we can hardly breathe? No, we can see that some of us have already begun to move, have broken out through the fence. More and more people have broken out, they cannot be held back. Is it possible that one day everyone will have broken out, leaving behind only empty pastures? Can that be? Why can’t it be? Translated by Helen Wallimann

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In the city outside my window, trucks carrying cubic meters of earth have been running all year round, and the noise of the construction sites has not stopped for decades. Construction and development have not only changed the face of things but also penetrated the earth. Are we encountering an age of unprecedented changes? In my opinion, people must have encountered changes in their respective ages. In connection with what has happened in the last two centuries, the recent two decades may not be particularly lucky or unlucky. Surely, greed induced by capitalism must have accelerated the changes in the world. The new has been forcibly brought right before us, while the old seems to break up rapidly behind us, particularly in China. Knowledge, detached from a human exploration of the world, accumulated and stored, seeks an extensive connection between things. Because of this ability, people are no longer willing to linger over such disparate things as light, darkness, flowers and fruit but they attempt to find out about the sun, the moon, the four seasons of spring and autumn, and what lies even further. Art, or alternatively, knowledge as a means to get a grip on the world attempts to keep and display its own understanding and imagination to a greater extent. What can knowledge and art do in an age of great changes? Unlike before, when one was obsessed with the twin thoughts of life and death in knowledge and art, that obsession is now to a great degree concealed by an obsession with rapid changes in response to the modern times. The search that was directed at the relationship between ‘person’ and ‘heaven’ has now turned to the relationship between ren (person) and ta ren (‘he person’, the other or the others) and that between ren (person) and wu (matters or things). Cognition produced in such circumstances inevitably emphasizes details and functions in response to a situation that involves shifts and changes. For this reason, with regards to art in the last decades we must arrive at the judgment that we have the moral right to need art and bear more social responsibilities, which in present day China is closely related to the influence exerted by the thoughts of traditional men of letters, modern enlightenment and the

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movement to save the nation from extinction, collectivist education and ideologies involving art and politics as a tool in socialist times.

THE O LD C OUNTRY In the house of a friend of mine there was a painting on an ochre piece of paper in which one looks down on a spread of Chinese-style buildings with magnificent houses overlapping each other and meandering through the landscape, an ensemble that looks like huge temples or imperial residences. The story of this painting is legendary as it was executed by the late Buddhist Master Hui Guan, of Tiantong Temple in Ningbo. Coming from a Shaolin background, Master Hui Guan had martial arts skills and was infinitely resourceful. He was a rightist during the Cultural Revolution and was imprisoned as well. However, nothing could keep this monk under lock and key, not even prison. It was said that he would have a walk outside it if he was feeling bored but as soon as he went out he found the world outside was even worse. Before he returned to prison he had bought paper and a brush. As soon as he got inside he drew a great temple that had once allegedly been in Beijing, based on a drawing he had hidden underneath his clothes. The prison guard confiscated his painting and his drawing later on when they found it. The drawing, now gone, had become a constant preoccupation of his. Subsequently, he kept drawing those great temples until he died in his 70s or 80s. The painting by Master Hui Guan that I have seen is the size of half a door. He did it with all sorts of pens, pencils, ballpoint pens or watercolour pens. It was almost as if he would use any pen that he could. It is said that there were model houses made of foam plastic under his bed in the temple, although they had all been rendered useless with constant gnawing by rats. It was in this way that Master Hui Guan kept drawing the picture of houses. He himself once said that all these paintings were also a response to problems in his mind. The temple that Master Hui Guan painted was related to his chujia (leaving home or becoming a monk) in his childhood. It was a temple which had been funded by his maternal uncle, a great warlord, who undertook the construction out of gratitude to an eminent monk for saving him. For most of his life, Master Hui Guan had painted the great temple and had stuck the paintings all over the walls in his house. He died shortly after my friend got the painting from him. A house of paintings was burned in a fire. To my way of thinking, the painting and the idea that was stuck in the mind of Master Hui Guan were both the expression of a feeling that one could hardly look back on the old country on a cowhide paper. It is now no longer possible for anyone to see with their own eyes how wonderful the Beijing-based temple and the drawing for its construction had been. That is part of the old country which hovers inside one’s mind but which no one can go back to any more—just as they cannot go back to the great wonder-

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fulness that defies re-creation. The painting by Master Hui Guan is quite simple; his feelings for the old country are tinged with the brilliance of sadness, brought out in a stubborn effort to put all his heart and mind into it.

Figure 50: Painting by Master Hui Guan

Wang Guowei, a great scholar who lived between the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, committed suicide by throwing himself into the Kunming Lake in Summer Palace in 1927, an inevitable expression in his heart of what he had to do for the civilization that experienced disaster after disaster and for the Dynasty. It was the same with Master Hui Guan. Nowadays, by contrast with these two, contemporary art is characterized by so much play with concepts that great works and speeches, clever and profound though they may be, are produced without real courage or feelings. Master Hui Guan’s drawing no longer exists. His effort to re-tell the tale of the old country that still exists for its territory and its people, although its spiritual edifice has since fallen, was futile. However big the temple is in the painting and however many temples there are, they are not the temple itself. This is art, and it is a demonstration of the power of art. Memories formed in making those paintings and subtle resistances in persistence both formed a powerful site of spirit, making it possible to reserve the independence and integrity of personality in a period of tortuous change.

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N ATION Wang Mo-lin, artist and forerunner of the Little Theatre Movement in Taiwan, staged an act of performance art in Taipei in 2002 in which the abstract ‘nation’ became the object of resistance, with the result that Wang Mo-lin cut the Nationalist Party banner and removed it from his ROC Veterans’ Certificate (Military Discharge Certificate) before he put it on his palm and drowned it with his phlegm. In addition, he wrote on the wall, “I used my own phlegm to certify my existence”. The means of expression employed by Wang Mo-lin, who is in his fifties, still seem angry and radical even though they are in fact directed towards his own heart. In this act, nation was regarded as a restriction on wo (‘I’). What Wang Mo-lin wanted to abandon was the number of years which the nation had spent in moulding the identity of wo (‘I’) and his heart. This act of seeking to rid oneself of the system was a hope to save oneself spiritually through a symbol and the experience of a process in order to arrive at the moral perfection of oneself. As Wang Mo-lin said, nation was an imaginary, a discourse, and a fake that was fictionalized. But it became a concrete existence through laws and safety systems.

Figure 51: Wang Mo-lin, performance, Taipei 2002

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The language of artists is contemporary. In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci says: “The starting point of critical investigation is the realization what it really means to be an individual, and this ‘knowing oneself’ is a product of the historical process whose infinite traces exist in you but that have no catalogues left. For this reason, it is absolutely necessary to compile such a catalogue right from the beginning.” The modern nation-state originated in or around the 14th century, whereas the idea of guojia (nationfamily or nation) that originated in the late Qing dynasty in China was a result of the disintegration of the Confucian ideal of tianli shehui (society of a heavenly reason). Such a guojia is acquired from the West and is based on a new recognition of the world map as well as an identification with the values of the historical evolution of Western colonization. At the same time, however, the traditional Chinese ideal of datong shehui (society of great harmony) involving tianren heyi (combination of heaven and man) still acts upon the minds of many. The ideological source of Wang Mo-lin’s nihilistic attitude to, and moral questioning of, the dangguo (party-nation) may be determined in a wider context. In his An Introduction to guoxue (nation studies or Chinese studies), Zhang Taiyan says that Zhuang Zi’s xiaoyao you (Roving Free and Unfettered) is about freedom, and his qiwu lun (On the Equality of Truth and Falsehood) is about equality. Unlike the West, Zhuang Zi’s freedom is wu dai (no waiting), i.e. no desire. Equality not only means that everything is equated but it also means that there is not even shifei zhi xin (right-wrong-heart or the heart that distinguishes between the right and the wrong). Although liji (Book of Rites) is the Confucian bible, its liyun (Ideal of a Commonwealth State) chapter is heavily tinged with Taoism since its highest ideal is based on personal morality as the bottom line in a society of abolished regulations. When the great Way becomes the order of the day, everything under heaven goes public. The virtuous and the capable are elected just as trust and harmony are stressed. For this reason, one neither limits oneself to one’s own beloved nor to one’s own offspring for the purpose of enabling the old to enjoy themselves in their old age, the strong to make use of themselves in their prime, and the young to grow up happily in their childhood. In addition, widows, widowers, orphans, old people without offspring and people of disabilities will all be well taken care of. And that is what is called datong or the Great Harmony. In the same chapter, mention is also made of an ordered society tempered by laws and democracy, although it is only referred to as xiaokang (small comfort or relatively well-off). Datong refers to an ideal moral society without any order. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, when Kang Youwei wrote his datong shu (The Book of Great Harmony), it was coloured by Buddhism although it still placed an emphasis on removing differences and the system. Even in the late 1950s, Mao Zedong recommended the book to the cadres when he promoted the People’s Commune. The modern guojia was a measure China took against the West until it intended to use the Western ways against the West. The datong ideal was

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also contained in a variety of modern political strategies, with characteristics similar to those of anarchy, Utopia and Communism. When it entered the social-critical consciousness of intellectuals such as Wang Mo-lin, however, it may have unconsciously come from the continuous source of the old country’s culture.

Z ULEI (C ATEGORY OF E THNICS AND C L AN) Yang Hui had not wanted to take photographs; he gathered material for the purpose of painting. Towards the end of the 1990s, this Shanghai avant-garde artist, once a ferocious personality, returned from overseas. From then on, he would wander about Zhejiang province, his birth place, every year, taking thousands of photographs of old people’s faces and taking them back overseas to where he was living at the time, as material for description and memory. When a European photographer of considerable achievement saw his photographs, he thought that he had no idea of what photography was. Yang Hui did not pursue the deliberate moments cherished by the followers of Bresson, nor did he show any taste for techniques. His ultimate interest lay in obtaining more material, a motive that had nothing to do with photography, and a motive that is strongly exhibited in front of the old men in the small town teahouses every time he goes to Zhejiang, and it is one that has continued for years. I have been beset with the question whether there is any need for such repeated accumulation of material. In the late 1990s, Yang Hui, who had previously done abstract drawings, began to draw large head portraits of old people with charcoal pencils, with an annual output of approximately one hundred portraits. Yang Hui went to Zhejiang in preparation for paintings. In subsequent years, photography gradually became an independent pursuit in its own right. Over the years, Yang Hui was quite limited in his approach to painting. He did, however, keep photographing the old men in teahouses, accumulating a huge number of photographs. Apparently he wanted to produce photographs of an archetypal model of different figures, whereas in fact he was doing the same thing over and over again. The differences between ten faces are obvious, and those between five hundred are limited. If one keeps photographing, these old men will become a zulei (category of ethnics or clan). Did Yang Hui gather this material for the mere purpose of assembling a face of the zulei of old men? Considered in this way, for Yang Hui, who had a background in abstract painting, the ‘old men’ have in fact been abstracted into images of life. He has continuously been summing up his view of the world and effectively tried to master the images of the world as he understands it. If some of the photographs are singled out for viewing, they do show literary glimpses into worldly affairs. But when similar head shots are caught on camera year in and year out, and when they are printed to show the ageing faces of the same lives, which are no longer romantic, it becomes a philo-

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sophical statement—no longer a mere description of life but a statement of the concept of naked life.

Figure 52: Yang Hui, Zhejiang, Bole 2, 2006

Figure 53: Yang Hui, Zhejiang, Yuyue 3, 2006 This can also be understood in a more general perspective. When the old men in the jiangnan (River South) teahouses drank the cheapest black tea or a bowl of old rice wine in the early mornings or evenings, Yang Hui would befriend them, talking and laughing with them, trying to take their snapshots in the dim light so that their old age, flickering like a candle in the wind, would be exposed in his negatives. Sometimes, outdoors on an early morning when the day had hardly broken, he would wait until a car went by on the road and release the shutters in the flash of its headlights. After the beam of light had passed, the world in front of him would drown the old men in darkness. The critic Jiang Wei said: These photographs, taken in the jiangnan towns and villages, surrounded and shocked by the waves of modernity, are an elegy before time of traditional ways of Chinese life and also ‘a dream of the past’ in a future shared by us all. But these ‘elegiac’ photographs are not sad. On the contrary, in my view they show human warmth, pleasure and a philosophical sense of things. A face is a world, an accumulation of a whole life. Yang Hui’s photographs are meant for those lives to be evidenced with dignity again and again before they burn themselves out.

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F AITH Song Haidong, one of the first Chinese artists included in the Venice Biennale in 1993, had begun his new experiment even before he was selected for inclusion. Abandoning installations, he returned to the paper, making traces with dust, dried pieces of watercolours, pen ink and bits of pencils that he gathered in his house on a daily basis, until he simply rinsed the paper in clear water without leaving much of a trace, in a close resemblance to Zen concepts. Song Haidong, who had been close to Buddhism, was working with the concept in visual arts—a language of ‘matter’— before he brought out the shadows of wu (matter) and wo (I) in traditional thinking. These huichen hua (dust paintings), widely known in the circle of Shanghai-based artists, are quite mysterious, connected as they are with the root source of their Chinese religions and ideologies. They combine form and the practice of concepts by pushing them to the limit. When Song Haidong went to the Dabieshan Mountain in Anhui in 1994, he did not take any material or plans with him. He went in order to have a look at the place, then piled up some stones. The next year, in the nine creeks and eighteen ravines in the wilderness outside Hangzhou, Song Haidong cut a few bamboos and, leaning against the growing bamboos, took a number of photographs. The kind of art he was working on was an attempt to add a small and non-extreme human element to Mother Nature. Shortly afterwards, he became a vegetarian and studied Buddhist sutras; he even began doing Buddhist paintings before he faded out of the avant-garde art of China which had emerged only recently. A few years later, Song Haidong told me that he was particularly sensitive when he worked on abstract dust paintings. But even though he was enriched with the art he worked on he would often feel hollow in real life. In addition, his inspiration seemed to be draining, and he had a feeling that he would like to seek something, that he would like to change the hollowness of his life. In the mid-1990s, a number of Shanghai-based artists sought to exclude art from profit and limitation by enquiring into the question of an artistic language of ‘absolutes’. But is it necessary to ask these questions, or if it is, on what basis can they be posed? On the basis of the West or of tradition? Would they eventually have to move towards nihilism? It seems that these questions lack a real, sustainable and powerful inner support. After a century in which concepts would arise just to be pulled down again, in the lead up to an age of broken values, can we simply return to tradition and belief? What has art helped us find? Puzzlement? At least, it appears to be an honest mirror for an honest person.

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E THICS Under the cement floor in an art site, the artist Jin Feng buried the ashes of a criminal who was executed in the name of the law. This was done in the shadows so that it almost remained a secret. The criminal had committed a crime which public opinion would not tolerate, so that his family dared not even take his ashes home for burial. Jin Feng went out of his way to visit the dead person’s home in south-western China and contacted the people concerned to take some of his ashes with the consent of his family, promising to take the dead to Shanghai where he had always wanted to go but had never been. Eventually, the ashes were placed below an independent art centre in Shanghai, sealed with cement, with no traces left on top so that people could continue to use the place as usual. It so happened that the street name was that of the dead person’s hometown. A dead person, deprived of political rights for life, had a wish to visit a certain city or to be buried in a certain place—a wish that may have been of little importance to most people. What is more, he was executed and his rights deprived, so that his wishes could apparently no longer be asserted. However, an artist seemed to realize that something here was missing and that there seemed to be a weak point somewhere. In the Greek tragedy Antigone, the king Creon represents the city and social order whereas the dead man Polynices is an enemy of the state and its laws. But Antigone wants to perform her duty as a family member and bury her older brother Polynices, a duty which remains the foundation of ethics and customs in a Greek city. It is said that it is a sacred law to bury one’s loved ones since interment signifies peace. Moreover, it is a respect that mankind pays to their own life and death. We often say that someone has committed a heinous crime because he has lost his human nature, but how can people respond to that by doing the same, by abandoning their own human nature? If the system seems rigid here, it is people themselves who need to be put to the test. Although justice has been done to the person whose political rights have been deprived for life, there is a relevant discussion to be had regarding his posthumous rights by people whose rights have not been deprived since this concerns not only the dead but also us and our future. Society is a powerful collective system that regulates political behaviour of a certain magnitude. Artistic creation is personal, and it is easy for a person to put it into action. Under the influence of Western enlightenment, art has often been regarded as a beautiful way for individuals to tear down the restrictions of public morality in the pursuit of private desires or in the pretty name of ‘humanity’. Jin Feng’s act seems to carry with it a sense of construction in his efforts. The artist touched on taboos with a subtle and imaginative gesture, expecting a change for the good in this age in which the human heart shifts, in spite of the fact that the situation in which he finds himself keeps avoiding, rejecting or prohibiting the exhibition of such art. Even the issues which it initiates seem to be buried underground; they become someone’s attitude and discussion as well as his

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politics of autonomy. However, in a number of his works Jin Feng tries to escape reality with art and to act upon the ethical construction of a society in which morality has lost its standards.

THE W ORLD Wu Wenguang, an influential documentary director and editor as well as artist, gave photo and video cameras to the villagers of rural China, so that they could photograph daily life in their villages. When the photographs were later collected, they were videoed and edited to become a documentary. As one of the villagers put it: “The video camera is like our eyes.” Did the photographs and videos equip Wu Wenguang, who was later able to show these images in his Beijing-based studio, with the eyes of the villagers? On the other hand, with their cameras, did the villagers have an eye that was close to that of Wu Wenguang’s? Although Wu Wenguang armed the villagers with modern photographic technology, he did not tell them of the possibility to distribute the photographs in order to communicate with the outside world as well as the international circle of arts and literature. Are the images, which he edited and published, mere village stories organized around Wu Wenguang’s own taste? Will the ways in which villagers look at their villages change after the ‘photographing’ because of this force applied from the outside? If it is not this incident, will there be another incident that will impact on the way in which they look at their villages? If what Wu Wenguang gave them had included not only cameras but also theoretical training and conversations about taste, while continuing to issue and purchase the photographs of the villages, thereby directly linking the villagers to the outside world and developing this into a wealth-creating industry, would the villagers begin to like this kind of play? Would the villages have no raison d’etre if Wu Wenguang did not give the villagers any cameras, or if no outsiders wanted to look at them? An examination of these questions would not affect the ability of photographers to release the shutters, although it might affect the mood at that moment as the photographed images would definitely be related to the mood. For people who intend to answer these questions, some of them may pose a dilemma. Does the world have windows? One window or many windows? Behind the window or windows, are the worlds the same or different? The world exists in our understanding. In the lens of the cameras, the world is no clearer than when it exists in one’s mind. It is also necessary to state that Wu Wenguang’s work involving the delivery of cameras and retrieval of images is part of a publicity plan in cooperation between the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China and the China-European Union Village Affairs Management and Training Programme. Talking about photography against the background of this incident, it would be very easy to move to issues of the West and China, observer and observed, along existing

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lines of thought. This angle may be valuable but it is a little outdated. More realistically, though, television sets with dozens of channels already existed in the villages, and young people were dressed in casual attire. In addition, the world outside rural China comprises not just Europe and the USA but also metropolitan cities like Beijing and Shanghai as well as glittering commodities from overseas. Like China itself, rural China is no longer an enclosed space. Issues involving differences between China and the West, and between inside and outside, are no longer distinctly opposed to each other. Globalization has not just arrived on our doorsteps but has become part of us. The ‘gazing’ in a globalized context is an impatience for consumption and the deconstruction and dismantling in the rapidity of consumption. Will there be, then, the firm look of one individual who is capable of exploring and maintaining knowledge and art through the existence, inspection and impact of others, who can face the confusion of worldly affairs in which one finds oneself in order to nalai and mould the way? An individual, as the great writer Lu Xun put it, who is “composed, brave, selfless and capable of distinguishing between things”? Only then can this person’s eye—after the shutters have been released and the art created— help us understand and imagine the changing world which is about to transcend the current focus on capital and demand for consumption as well as ethical calls for state politics and cultural power interests. Translated by Ouyang Yu

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Authors

Chang Tsong-zung, Curator, guest professor at the China Art Academy, art director of Hanart T Z Gallery, co-founder of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, co-founder of the Hong Kong chapter of AICA. Active in curating Chinese exhibitions since the 1980s. Pioneered the participation of Chinese art in international exhibitions and was instrumental in establishing the international image of Chinese contemporary art of the 1990s. As a curator with strong attachments to the literati tradition he firmly believes that contemporary art should have unique responsibilities in different contexts and take diverse paths. One of his main concerns are the ways in which Chinese art may contribute to world culture. In recent years, a new aspect of his activities centres around the revival of Chinese visual and material culture through the intervention of curatorial practices. These projects involve artefacts, space and ritual, forming a special and unique chapter in Chinese contemporary art. His exhibitions include “China’s New Art Post-1989” in 1993, Special Exhibitions at the Sao Paulo International Biennial in 1994 and 1996, Hong Kong participation at Sao Paulo Biennial 1996 and Venice Biennial 2001, the “Power of the Word” series of exhibitions, “Strange Heaven: Chinese Contemporary Photography”, “Open Asia International Sculpture Exhibition” in Venice 2005, “Yellow Box” series of research projects about contemporary art practice and Chinese space, co-curator of Guangzhou Triennial 2008.

Lu Dadong, born in 1973 in Yantai, Shandong. He is an artist and teacher at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou. He graduated with a Bachelor and Master of Literature from the Departments of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou. Since 1993 he has taken part in several exhibitions and performances in the fields of ‘Traditional Calligraphy’ and ‘Modern Calligraphy and Art’ in China. He is also the singer of the underground rock band “Yuren yuedui” and the author of several books. Selected Exhibitions—Modern Calligraphy and Art 2008 “Croisments” Modern Calligraphy with Catherine Denis, Gallerie1918 Art Space, Shanghai

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A N EW T HOUGHTFULNESS IN C ONTEMPORARY C HINA 2008 “Siji” (Four Seasons) Art Festival within the 80 th Anniversary of the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou 2007 “Guiling” (Point Zero) Modern Art Exhibition, Hongmai Art Gallery, Shanghai 2007 “Kai” Fun, Modern Calligraphy, Taipei Citiy Art Museum, Taipei Selected Exhibitions—Traditional Calligraphy and Sealing Art 2009 “Contemporary Context” Calligraphy Exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing Between 2002 and 2007 four exhibitions: Famous calligraphers born in the 70 th Between 2003 and 2005 several exhibitions on “Liuxing shufeng” (Trend Calligraphy) Calligraphy and Sealing Art, Today Art Museum, Beijing

Kong Guoqiao, born in 1968 in Hangzhou. He finished his Master Studies in Graphic Arts at the China Academy of Art (formerly Zhejing Academy of Fine Arts) in 1993. He then became an Assistant Professor there and finished his PhD in 2007. Today Kong Guoqiao is Professor at the China Academy of Art and Head of the Graphic Arts Departement.

Chen Anying, born in 1973, Associate Professor at the Deptartment of Art History, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing. He received his Ph.D. from the Philosophy Department of Peking University in 2001 and then began to work at the Art History Department of Tsinghua. He was a visiting scholar at the Art History Institute of Zurich University in 2006-2007. He has published many articles on art history, art theories and aesthetics. The main courses taught by him are Western Modern Art Theories, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture Studies.

Wang Chunchen is an art critic with a Ph.D in art history and an associate professor. Wang Chunchen now works as a research fellow and curator at the CAFA Art Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. His research interests include art history methodology and contemporary art theory and criticism. In 2009 he won the CCAA Art Critic Award and published the writing award book Art Intervenes in Society. His publications include translations of After the End of Art, The Abuse of Beauty, Art Since 1940, The Phenomenology of Painting, Language of Art History, Interpretation of Art, and Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. He curated the following exhibitions: Hetero-Imagery—A Kind of Psychology of Urban Image, Beijing; See-Through—China’s Contemporary Art, Hong Kong; Dynamics of Images, Beijing; Supernatural—China’s Photography in the New Century, New York; China’s Contemporary Art Today, Seoul, Korea (co-curated); Mixed Maze, London; Dao of Ink—Jizi’s Solo Exhibition, Beijing; ThisAbility—International New Media Art Exhibition, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, 2009; Walking

T HE A UTHORS Together—German & Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Wuhan Art Museum, Wuhan, 2009, etc.

Qiu Zhijie, born 1969 in Fujian Province, P.R.CHINA 1992 Graduated from The National Academy Of Fine Art. Printmaking department, now he lives in Beijing as a full time artist as well as an art critic and curator. As an artist Qiu is known for his calligraphy, photography and video-installation works. His works have had worldwide exposure in places such as ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’, P.S.I Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998; ‘Beijing in London’, ICA, London, 1999; ‘Power of the Word’, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Iowa/U.S., 2000; ‘Translated Acts’, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt. Berlin; Queens Museum, New York, 2001; the 25th San Polo Biennial in Brazil and the 53th Venice Biennial, 2009. In the mid-1990s Qiu also wrote extensively about Chinese conceptual art and performance art, leading to the so call “controversy of signification”, which is regarded as the most important debate in art theory in the Chinese art world. In 1996, Qiu Zhijie was the co-organizer of the first video art exhibition PHENOMENA & IMAGE in the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. He also edited two books which include most of the important documents world wide in the history of video art, making him one of the most important proponents in the field of new media art in China. In 1999, Qiu curated the exhibition Post-sense Sensibility—Alien Bodies & Delusion in the basement of a residential building in Beijing. It showed the radical experimental works of the young generation of artists which used the human flesh as an artistic material, leading to huge debate in art circles. From then on Qiu was regarded as the leader and spokesperson of the young generation of artists. In 2001, Qiu was one of the chief directors of the important art magazine NEXTWAVE. In 2002 he became the co-curator of the Long March project.

Chen Chieh-Jen, born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and graduated from a vocational high school for the arts. He currently lives in Taipei. Using guerrilla-style tactics in his artwork, Chen challenged Taiwan’s martial law system of the 1980s and organized several underground exhibitions outside of the art establishment. After martial law was lifted in 1987, Chen stopped working for several years to examine his experience growing up, which included the military courts and prisons, arsenals, industrial areas and illegal structures which existed on the island at the time. He later used these experiences to reflect upon the colonial domination of Taiwan, the Cold War/martial law period, the status of Taiwan as the world’s factory in the 1960s and 70s, Taiwan’s gradual transformation into a consumer society, the background of Taiwan’s inclusion in the neoliberal global economic and political systems, and Taiwan’s state of exceptionality in international politics. Chen Chieh-Jen believes that these years of domination have hidden or eliminated many layers of Taiwan’s historical experience and social context, and its so-

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A N EW T HOUGHTFULNESS IN C ONTEMPORARY C HINA ciety is becoming one that forgets easily and fails to measure its future with respect to its history. Resuming his artwork in 1996, Chen created a series of projects to re-imagine, re-narrate, re-write and re-connect, which started from his local experiences. Primarily a mixture of art actions, performances and installation videos, these works were motivated by a desire to create multiple dialogues with the audience through the liberating poetics of video art, experimental aesthetics and the circulation of the projected image. Chen re-explored memories being obliterated by mainstream discourses and consumerism and the plight of those being marginalized. He saw this work as resisting the loss of memories, as a way of creating connections and dialogue with the experiences of others, as well as a means of contending with the logic of neo-liberal domination. Chen Chieh-Jen exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; REDCAT art center in Los Angeles; the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; and the Asia Society in New York. International group exhibitions include: the Venice Biennale, Biennale de Lyon, São Paulo Art Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Gwang ju Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. Chen has also participated in photography festivals in Spain, Lisbon and Arles; and film festivals in London, Vancouver, Edinburgh and Rotterdam. Chen Chieh-Jen was the recipient of the Taiwan National Culture and Art Foundation’s National Award for Arts in 2009, and the Korean Gwang ju Biennale Special Award in 2000.

Gao Shiming, Executive Director of the School of Media and Art, China Art Academy. His subject is visual culture research, contemporary art studies and curatorial studies. He has organized many large exhibitions of academic standing, including The Migration of Asian Contemporary Art and Geo-politics (2002-2004), Techniques of the Visible: the 5th Shanghai Biennial (2004), Micrology: Micro-politics in Chinese Contemporary Art (2005), The Yellow Box: Contemporary Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space (2006), The Alchemy of Shadows: the Third International Lianzhou Photo Festival, Reversing Horizons: Artist Reflections of the Hong Kong Handover 10th Anniversary (2007), Farewell to Post-colonialism: the Third Guangzhou Triennial, 2008; Rehearsal: the 8th Shanghai Biennale, 2010, and others. He has published several books, including Visual Thinking: Intangible Dialogue between Art and Phenomenology, 2002; Edges of the Earth: Migration of Contemporary Art and Geo-politics in Asia, 2003; Mask and Mirror: Visual Studies on the Real and Reality. 2010.

Chan David Ho Yeung is a curator und author living in Shanghai. In 1999 he graduated with a Master’s degree from the Center of Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York. Since 1998 he has published many articles and books on Chinese and Asian Contemporary Art. He has also curated several exhibitions and projects in China and overseas. Since 2007 he has wor-

T HE A UTHORS ked as Manager and Director for a number of important Contemporary Art Galleries in Shanghai. Curatorial Projects (selected) 2004 Para/site: Open work, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver, Canada Dialogues…; Gu Dexin, Zhang Peili, and Wang Gongxin, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai Space anew; Yang Fudong, Wang Jianwai, and Qiu Zhijie, SGA 2005 Gu Dexin 2005.03.05, Gu Dexin, SGA In Between Realities, with Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Wenbo, Guan Wei, Li Dafung, Li Yongbin, Wang Xingwei, Zheng Guogu, Zhong Shan, SGA MVRDV—KM3, Proposals for Chinese Cities, curated by Terence Riley, SGA From Mundane to extraordinary, new project by Lin Tianmiao, Shen Yuan, and Yin Xiuzhen, SGA 2006 DODGE—Wang Jianwei, SGA Live from Zhang Jiang—City in Progress, Hung Keung, Ma Qingyun, Song Tao, Xu Zhen, Xu Tan, Zheng Guogu, SGA 2007 Support—Yan Lei, SGA Negative re-actions—Chen Wenbo, Geng Jianyi, Jiang Zhi, Liang Yue, Zhang Liaoyuan, SGA Export—Cargo transit—Liu Jianhua, SGA 2008 A Spatio-temporal Tunnel—Lin Yilin, SGA Realms of Myth—Liang Mee-ping, Liang Wei, Liu Chuang, Ouyang Chun, Qin Qi, SGA The end has no end…—Du Zhenjun, Zhou Xiaohu, SGA 2008. 6.21—Gu Dexin, SGA What a difference a day made—Michael Lin, SGA NOW—Jin Jiangbo, Zeng Li, SGA 2009 Surfacing—Chen Jie, Li Shurui, Wu Guangyu, You Si, SGA Alter Ego—Ouyang Chun, SGA 2010 Homestay—Chang Ren, Chen Yujun, Donna Ong, Liang Yue, Leung Meeping, Ni Haifeng, Maria Taniguchi, Yuan Yuan, Wang Jianwei

Wang Nanming, born in Shanghai in 1962, Critic, Curator & Artist Selected Curatorial Projects 2007 Power Space—Qu Yan’s Solo Exhibition, Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art 2007 Pain in Soul: Performance Art and Video Works by He Chengyao 2008 A Billion to One: He Chongyue’s Solo Exhibition, Vanessa Art Link, Beijing 2008 The World: Three Photo Series of Qu Yan, Beijing Wall Art Museum 2008 Booming?: Jin Jiangbo’s Solo Exhibition, Beijing Wall Art Museum

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A N EW T HOUGHTFULNESS IN C ONTEMPORARY C HINA 2008 Safe Advertisement: The Public Images of Liangyue, Beijing Wall Art Museum 2008 Key Words: Development and Harmony of Ni Werihua, Beijing Wall Art Museum Main Publications Metavant-garde: Art and Criticism, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2006 Art Must Die, Shanghai Fine Arts Publishers, 2006 Understanding of Modern Calligraphy: Calligraphy’s Transformation Towards the Modern and Vanguard art, Jiang Su Education Publishing House, 1994 The Honour of Postcolonialism: On the Chineseness of Art and Artists’ Chinese Identity Arts, System and Low: the Results of China’s International Contacts (not yet published) The Rise of Critical Art-Chinese Problem Situation and Theories of Liberal Society, 2009

Zhu Qi, born 1966 in Shanghai, China. Art critic and curator. Now lives in Beijing, China, and works at the China Art Research Institute. He has curated a series of important exhibitions with Chinese avant-garde artists in the 1990s and has published various articles of art commentary and theses on Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s. His published books include “New Art History and Visual Narrative”, “China Avant-garde Photography since 1990”, and “Video: New Media Art in Late 20 th -Century Art”. Main exhibitions 1996 “In the Name of Art—China Contemporary Art Exhibition”. This is the first installation exhibition in China. Shanghai, China 1997 “New Asia, New city, New art—’97 China-Korea Contemporary Art Exhibition”, Shanghai , China 1998 “Image Zhiyi—China New Concept Photograph Exhibition”. This is the first Chinese avantgarde photograph exhibition. Shanghai, China 1999 “Position of East Asia—China-Korea-Japan contemporary exhibition I”, Busan, Korea 2000 “Reincarnation Times—2000 China Contemporary Art Exhibition”, Chengdu, China “Position of East Asia—China-Korea-Japan contemporary exhibition II”, Yokohama, Japan “Between Market and”, Beijing, China. “Lead to Utopia Travel of Globlization—The First Asia Experiment Imagery Art Festival”, Nanjing, China 2002 “Youth-Cruelty” Painting, Beijing, China 2004 “Spellbound Aura—The New Vision of Chinese Photography”, Taibei Contemporary Art Museum, Taiwan

T HE A UTHORS 2005

Garret of Language—8 female artists in China Threequarter Gallery, Beijing The Game of being Low and Shallow: The Rising of the Cartoon Generation Contemporary Art Exhibition, 3818 Cool Gallery, Beijing. After 1970s: The Generation Changed by Market Today Art museum, Beijing. Ming Yuan Center of Art, Shanghai 2006 The Self-Made Generation: A Retrospective of New Paiting Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art. Beyond Experience—CHINA Arario Beijing Gallery, Beijing. Self-landscapes in Transition—Chinese Avant-guard Photography Since 1990, Asia Art Center, Beijing 2007 Beijing 798 art festival, 798 art Zone, Beijing. Top10 China contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, Asia Art Center (Beijing). Dragon’s Evolution: Chinese Contemporary Photography China Square, New York. Escape by Crafty Scheme-salvation from Traditional and Revolutional Language, Scqure Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nanjing. Narrative, beauty, future —Exhibition of Post-70’s New Art, Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand. New Changes: New Art from China, Art Seasons Gallery, Zurich 2008 Counter the landscape—The individual and his self-formation in the social transformation, Palazzo della Esposizioni, Rome, Italy. Consumption of History East Asia Contemporary, Shanghai 2009 The First Beijing 798 Biennale, 798 art Zone, Beijing

Jiang Wei, freelance curator, publisher and art critic. Curator of a number of highprofile photography exhibitions for the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai Library, Lianzhou International Photo Festival, Lishui International Photographic Cultural Festival, and others. Winner of the Best Curator Prizes in both the Lianzhou and the Lishui Festival. Named China’s Most Important Person in Photography by the Photographer’s Companion magazine in two consecutive years. Planned and helped publish over 30 books on photography and contributed to columns in various newspapers, magazines and websites. Wrote many critical articles published by professional media and presented in professional conferences. Recipient of the China Photography Golden Image Award in the category of Critique, the highest ranking award in photography in China, in recognition of his accomplishments. Holder of various positions, including: Theory Committee member of the China Photographers’ Association, Editorial Committee member of the China Photographic Annual, Committee Member of the Multi-media Short Film Festival South, Recommendation Committee member of the South Reading Festival, Academic Committee member of the Guangzhou Photo Biennial, juror of the National College Student Photo Competition, and others.

Dao Zi, poet, art critic, painter. Born in Qingdao on November 26 th, 1956. Dao Zi graduated from Northwestern University and from Beijing Normal University. He was deputy editor-in-chief of Chang An, a monthly journal organized by the Xi’an Association of Literature and Arts, as well as professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts

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A N EW T HOUGHTFULNESS IN C ONTEMPORARY C HINA Institute. Dao Zi is now a professor and Ph.D. supervisor at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University. He is a member of the International Aesthetics Association. His research interests include art criticism, modern art history and theory, Christian art, poetry, and Santism Water-Ink Art (Christian Water-Ink Art). Main works and translations Daozi Experimental Poetry, China Peace Press, 1987 Selected American Confessional Poetry, LiJiang Press, 1988 Witch Burning: Selected Sylvia Plath’s Poems, New Century Press, 1992 Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (by Jean-Francois Lyotard), Hunan Press, 1995 Studies on Chinese Contemporary Oil Painting: Ideological Metamorphosis, Guangxi Art Press, 2000 The Artistic Genealogy of Postmodernism (2 volumes), Chongqing Press, 2001 and re-edition, 2006 The Artist’s Reality.Philosophies of Art (by Mark Rothko), Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008 The New Paradigm In Architecture: The Language of Post-modernism (by Charles Jencks), Guangxi Normal University Press Recent Exhibitions Path, Truth, Life: Eastern Art Exhibition, The International Church of Christ, ICOC, Beijing, 2008 Chinese Contemporary Poets’ Art Exhibition, China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Hong Kong Asian Arts Center, Beijing 2008 A Tale of Two Cities: Contemporary Great Artists’ Exhibition, Tsingdao- Chengdu, 2008 International Art Annual Exhibition, Sunshine Art Gallery, Beijing 2008 21 Century Ink Academic Exhibition, Beijing 2008 Transformation Eastern Art Exhibition, The International Church of Christ, ICOC, Beijing, 2009 Xun Dao: Searching For Spirituality In Contemporpary Chinese Art. Frede-reke Taylor Gallery, N.Y. 2009 1st China Chinese Ink Biennale, Linzhou ,Beijing,Xian 2009-2010 To Give Witness About The Light, Chongqing 2009

Jin Feng, born 1962 Born in Shanghai. 1990 graduated from the Fine Art Department of Nanjing Normal University. Lives and works in Shanghai. Solo Exhibitions 2009 Luxun Invited the Intelligentsia for Banquet, Xianheng Restaurant, Shanghai 2008 The Problems Scenes, Zhendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai 2007 Insult Art, Jin Feng’s Solo Exhibition, BizArt Art Center, Shanghai, China

T HE A UTHORS 2006 Jin Feng’s solo exhibition, Creative Garden 2577, Shanghai, China 2003 Exhibitions of Jin Feng Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, China 2002 Jin Feng’s Photography, Art Moscow. Central House of Artist, Moscow, Russia Group Exhibitions 2010 3+1 Ge Zi Biao Shu Contemporary Art Exhibition, Arther M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University 2009 Contemporary Art in Song jiang, Song jiang, Shanghai 2008 798 Beijing Biennale, 798 Beijing 2007 Grassroots Humanism 21 Cases of Contemporary Art 2007 Soft Power Asian Attitude, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China 2006 Hiroshima Artists Archives Exhibition, Hiroshima, Japan 2005 Taiwan-China Performance Art Meeting, Taipei MoMA, Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan 2005 Macau International Live Performance Art Show, Ox Warehouse, Macau 2005 Blind date, Emstetten, Germany 2005 Montpellier/China: MC1, Montpellier, France 2004 Shanghai Duolun Exhibition of Young Artists, Shanghai, China2004 China—The Body Everywhere, Marseille, France 2003 Return Nature: Pastoral, Nanjing Shenghua Arts Center, China 2003 Strange Heaven, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague 2002 The First Guangzhou Triennial. Guangdong Museum of Art 2001 Asia-Multiply Raising Up (The 16th Asia International Art Show), Guangzhou 2001 Chengdu Biyearly Exhibition, Chengdu, China 1999 14th International Exhibition of Asia Art, FuKuoKa, Japan

Tao Qingmei, Associate professor at the Comparative Literature Department at the Institute of Chinese Literature of CASS (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing). Her main research interests are in the area of Modern Theatre with particular emphasis on the relationship of Chinese modern theatre with multicultural interaction and exchange. In 2000, she obtained her Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University.

Zhang Xian is one of the earliest independent Chinese playwrights in the PostMao Era. At the very start of his art career, he developed his underground art production and life practice in order to cope with the difficulties of his time. Following a long period of editing and writing for the press, magazines, screenplays and film scripts, he initiated and organized several non-governmental art organizations and theatre work spaces.

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A N EW T HOUGHTFULNESS IN C ONTEMPORARY C HINA As a playwright, director and producer, more than ten of Zhang Xian’s dramatic plays and dances have been performed in many cities around China, Europe and America. The first dance performance of Tongue’s Memory of Home won the ZKB Patronage prize of the Zurich Theater Spek takel 2006. As a film script writer, his film Those Left Behind won the Best Film of the Golden Pyramid Award at the 16th Cairo International Film Festival, and Jasmin Flower won the judges prize of the 7th Shanghai International Festival. As an organizer and curator, Zhang Xian initiated the independent drama group Z and the dance group Zuhe Niao and established the Hard Han Café Theater. He organized the first non-beneficial art and performance base Down Steam Garage in Shanghai as well as several of the earliest art festivals such as the Fringe festival, Idea Festival, or the Free Cinema Festival. Zhang Xian also acted as judge of the the 18th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater and DEON Fund Young Choreographer Project. Zhao Chuan is a writer, theatre worker and art critic. He writes art columns and regularly publishes in magazines and art periodicals in China and overseas. He published books of fiction and non-fiction, including on contemporary art history. He was awarded Taiwan’s prestigious Lianhe Wenxue (Unitas) New Fiction Writer’s Prize and received other international arts residencies and grants over the years. Zhao Chuan is the founder and director of Grass Stage, an important theatre group in China. Under his guidance, this collective became the focus for a lot of attention in the economic boom years currently experienced by China, both for their fresh thinking against the conventional mode of theatre production and for the independent position they maintain with regards to the mass community. His theater pieces were performed in cities in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan.