New Export China: Translations across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art 9780520390010, 9780520392571

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Porcelain Production
2. Porcelain Past
3. Porcelain Renaissance
4. Porcelain Clay
Conclusion: A Porcelain Aesthetic?
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

NEW EXPORT CHINA

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THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE SUE TSAO ENDOWMENT FUND IN CHINESE STUDIES.

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NEW EXPORT CHINA Translations across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art

Alex Burchmore

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2023 by Alex Burchmore Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burchmore, Alexander, 1989– author. Title: New Export China : translations across time and place in contemporary Chinese porcelain art / Alex Burchmore. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022025025 | isbn 9780520390010 (cloth) | isbn 9780520392571 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Ai, Weiwei. | Liu, Jianhua, 1962– | Ah Xian, 1960– | Ho, Sin-ying. | Porcelain—Social aspects—21st century—Case studies. | Art, Chinese—21st century. Classification: lcc nk4370 .b795 2023 | ddc 738.20951—dc23/eng/20220719 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025025 Printed in Malaysia 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 10

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / vii

1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction / 1 Porcelain Production / 19 Porcelain Past / 59 Porcelain Renaissance / 121 Porcelain Clay / 173 Conclusion: A Porcelain Aesthetic? / 223 Notes / 235 Bibliography / 255 List of Illustrations / 263 Index / 267

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

been possible without the generous support and guidance provided by a community of valued friends and family members, colleagues and mentors, organizations and institutions. Above all, I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to Ah Xian, Ai Weiwei, Sin-ying Ho, and Liu Jianhua for the spirit of open inquiry with which they responded to my many questions and requests, and for creating the works of porcelain art discussed in the following pages. I would also like to thank Cai Guo-Qiang, Geng Xue, Ni Haifeng, and Guan Wei for their insights and inspiration. Most of the illustrations included in this book were kindly provided by the artists themselves, but, in my search for the highest quality images and the most accurate dimensions, I received invaluable assistance from colleagues in museums and galleries across the world. Thanks are due especially to Judy Gunning at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Jim Strickland at the Dangrove/White Rabbit Collection, Sydney; Eliza Williams and Madison Du at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Elizabeth Marsden at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Art Collection, Melbourne; Crystal Yu at M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and Fintan Ryan at Tate Images, London.

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE

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Special gratitude is owed as well to mentors and colleagues at the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University, and the University of Sydney, who helped to transform what could have been a laborious and solitary task into an enriching and rewarding experience: to my first doctoral supervisor, Professor Catherine Speck, for encouraging me to embark on this journey; to Associate Professors Claire Roberts and Robert Wellington, for their consistently useful advice and the many doors they have opened; to Dr. Charlotte Galloway, for her faith in my abilities as a scholar and an educator; and to valued colleagues in the ANU’s Centre for Art History and Art Theory and the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney for their friendship and collegiality, as well as colleagues elsewhere in these and other institutions who share my passion for porcelain art, especially Dr. Julie Bartholomew, Janet DeBoos, Luise Guest, Associate Professor Caroline Turner, and Professor David Williams. I have been greatly supported throughout this research by the Australian Government, with funding provided by an Australian Postgraduate Award (2014), a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship (2014), and a Research Training Program Fee-Offset Scholarship (2013–19). Further funding was received via a National Taiwan University Chinese Classics and Culture Scholarship (2016), ANU Research School of the Humanities and the Arts Visiting Scholars Grant (2017), and a Kathleen Woodroofe PhD Scholarship in the Humanities or Social Sciences (2016–19). This book is a testament not only to the inspiration, guidance, and support provided by all those just mentioned, but to the diligence and dedication of the editorial, design, and marketing staff at the University of California Press, and especially to Archna Patel. I would also like to acknowledge the three anonymous readers who took the time to review several drafts of this manuscript and ensured the publication of these ideas in their best possible form. Finally, I would like to thank Jeanette Burchmore for the lifetime of sacrifice and support that she has committed to my health and happiness, and my brilliant partner Dr. Blair Williams for her love and encouragement throughout my career and her unshakeable commitment to the role and responsibilities of a public intellectual, a model to which I can only hope to aspire.

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INTRODUCTION

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installation artist Liu Jianhua (刘建华, b. 1962) excavated one of the fastidiously cultivated lawns outside the Sino-Italia Design Exchange Centre in Shanghai and filled the cavity with an assortment of household items, reproduced in gleaming white porcelain. In a shallow pool opposite, he installed a comparable deposit of replica antique jars and vases, some intact but most in pieces, their jagged edges catching the dappled light that played on the surface of the water. Despite the luxury of their material and the purity of their glaze, the vessels in each funereal mound, almost without exception, were cracked, warped, shattered, or broken, piled in unruly heaps with little apparent sense of order. Liu staged his archaeological intervention, titled Discard (fig. 1), for an international audience familiar with the cryptic conceptualism favored by many contemporary artists. Yet the component parts of the installation had been manufactured in an ancient city made famous by the more overtly commercial interests of the China Trade from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: Jingdezhen, once regarded as the N 2011, GLOBALLY RENOWNED

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figure 1 Liu Jianhua, Discard (detail), 2011, installation of broken porcelain, Sino-Italia Design Exchange Centre, Shanghai, variable dimensions. Collection of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; courtesy of the artist.

“Porcelain Capital” of the world.1 Liu produced his porcelain commodities in one of the countless private workshops that have appeared in this city over the past few decades, assisted by friends and colleagues who he first met in the 1970s while employed as an assembly-line ceramicist in one of the state-owned factories of the Maoist era, the former premises of which now serve as a convenient home for such boutique studios. His reproduction antiques, on the other hand, were produced by some of the many professional replica-makers who comprise a large proportion of Jingdezhen’s working population. Discard transgressed many of the boundaries within which contemporary art is usually situated by creators and critics, drawing on the time-honored history of a traditional craft and vocational skills of professional artisans to create a highly conceptual work inspired by the preoccupations and paranoias of the contemporary. Liu’s installation also encapsulates the artistic phenomenon identified and studied in this book: the creation by a dispersed group of Chinese contemporary artists of a unique genre of ceramic art, a “New Export China” that blurs distinctions between the past and the present, the artistic and the artisanal, the legacies of porcelain export and the global mobility that artists today enjoy. New Export China is embedded in the experiences and emotions of our current era, and so it is inherently new in both form and conception. At the same time, it is immersed within historic currents of global trade and identified with the parallel that centuries of export have fostered between china, the material, and China, the country. It 2

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is an art of present relevance that derives much of its significance from the cultural, social, and political discussions animating our world, yet the perspective it brings to these discussions is one of profound historic resonance. The installations, sculptures, photographic series, and even performances associated with this art are unmistakably Chinese in their material symbolism and iconographic vocabularies, yet they also exemplify the extent to which national and global forms of identification have long been inextricably intertwined. To clarify, this book is not about contemporary ceramics per se but rather about the use of ceramics by a select group of contemporary artists identified as Chinese yet living and working both within and beyond the borders of mainland China. The term “export” has appeared with some frequency in discussions of contemporary Chinese art outside China since that art first gained widespread international notice in the early 1990s, with a range of connotations from the utopian to the cynical.2 A decidedly negative vision of export has tended to prevail, with criticisms of a perceived reduction of the aesthetic to the economic and the innovative to the mercantile animating the theoretical frameworks developed by some of the most respected voices in this field. Curator and critic Hou Hanru (b. 1963), for example, from the 1990s to the present, has distinguished what he regards as genuine from ersatz avant-garde art by highlighting relative levels of immersion in the global art world. Hou has known many leading artists since his days as a student of art history at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in the early 1980s and he has earned global renown as a defining authority in discussions of “what ‘Chinese’ art [is] and what it could be,” even while nurturing, by his own admission, “a different point of view on what that change . . . should be.”3 This point of view found its clearest expression following his relocation in 1990 to Paris, where he launched his reputation as a curator and critic. The tensions underlying the position of Chinese artists in the global art market have been one of Hou’s most enduring critical preoccupations. Since the mid-1990s, he has questioned the extent to which the wealth, celebrity, and creative freedom that can be gained by “going international” (zou xiang shijie 走向世界) are worth the cultural pigeonholing and capitulation to market forces that these frequently entail. He has tended to look unfavorably on artists who turn to the world for recognition, instead championing those members of “the real avant-garde” who confine their focus to internal issues of formal innovation and ideological resistance.4 To a certain extent, this distinction may have been inspired by Hou’s own distance from his birthplace and the heightened sense of China’s position in the world that he gained while in Paris. Melissa Chiu (b. 1972), one of the first writers to dedicate a book-length study to Chinese artists overseas, observes that such awareness is common among émigrés in France, where “long-held cultural assumptions of a strict binary division between the East and the West” often inspire a desire to resist this deterministic dualism or, as in Hou’s case, displace it to another realm of inquiry.5 Yet Hou’s separation of the avant-garde and the cosmopolitan remained a defining feature of his thinking even after his second relocation in 2006, from Paris to the Introduction

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United States, to accept an appointment at the San Francisco Art Institute. Writing for Flash Art a year before this move, he acknowledged that “a real fever for everything that is Chinese” had brought greater visibility and opportunity to the work of artists in China, yet he observed that many of the latter continued “to transform cultural activity into commodities” rather than cultivating a truly avant-garde position. As such, they continued to oscillate “between material improvement and spiritual liberation.”6 Six years later, in an open letter to Swiss “star curator” Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968), Hou introduced an explicitly political dimension to this binary, citing a lack of regulation in the global art market as the mark of a “neoliberal capitalism that seeks to achieve . . . maximum profit by all means [and] acts against its . . . social responsibility to promote openness, freedom, and democracy.”7 In Hou’s estimation, then, the logic of export is one of avaricious materialism, self-denying capitulation to external demands, and complicity with neo-imperialist projects of value extraction driven by an insatiable appetite for financial gain. Gao Minglu (b. 1949), another renowned curator and art historian now residing outside of China, has set out a comparable critical vision. Gao also studied at CAFA, albeit a decade before Hou in the early 1970s, specializing in the aesthetics of tenth- to twelfth-century ink landscape painting. He took up editorial duties in the 1980s for Meishu (美术) magazine, one of the most forward-thinking spaces for artistic debate of that era, until ordered to cease publication and apply himself to the study of Marxist thought after the events of June 1989. Two years later, he traveled to the United States for a visiting fellowship at Ohio State University, later completing a doctorate at Harvard and accepting his current professorial appointment at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. Gao is best known as the curator responsible for “Inside/Out: New Chinese Art” (1998), the first major survey of Chinese contemporary art in the United States. The weighty text published to accompany that exhibition, still regarded as a scholarly touchstone, also introduced US readers to Gao’s critical perspective. Like Hou, in this volume Gao drew a contrast between “avant-garde mythmaking and innocence” and the “subordination or dependency” enforced by the global art market, favoring those artists who signaled their distaste for the profiteering and thinly disguised neo-colonialism of this arena by turning away from the seductive allure of the cosmopolitan.8 Rather than seeking to succeed in a world where “the rich [compete] savagely for reputation [and] the art market [has become] one of [several] brutal conduits for the upgrading of social class,” Gao later wrote, artists should maintain their independence from market and state, regarding their work “as nothing but art, not as a commodity or something with use-value.”9 Despite their shared concerns about a neocolonial ransacking of China’s artistic treasures, or a corruption of avant-gardists by the glamour of the global market, Hou and Gao are prominent members of the overseas community of Chinese artists and critics. To a certain extent, the art-historical authority they possess should be acknowl-

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edged as a product of the same market appeal and foreign interest they have decried so vehemently. Hou, especially, now enjoys international renown as a member of the same coterie of “star curators” to which Obrist belongs, traveling the world at the invitation of the organizing committees responsible for the biennales, triennials, art fairs, and other blockbuster events through which the capital of the global art market circulates. Even in the circumstances of their own lives and careers, the distinctions that Hou and Gao draw between the foreign and the domestic, the economic and the aesthetic, or between genuine and ersatz avant-gardism, are not as clear as they seem. Their complicity with the forces they seek to critique does not undermine the authority or authenticity of their claims, but it does indicate the need for us to keep in mind the limits of binary thinking. In her previously noted study of émigré artists, Australian curator Melissa Chiu provides a more optimistic critical framework for understanding the logic of export. Chiu has lived in the United States since her appointment in 2001 as the inaugural curator of contemporary Asian and Asian-American art at New York’s Asia Society Museum, subsequently becoming the first person born outside of the United States to lead the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, in 2014. Before moving to the United States, Chiu played a pivotal role in the founding in 1996 of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, Australia, as the inaugural director and curator of several defining shows. Reflecting on this chapter in her career, Chiu has written of a radical shift toward Asia in the arts community of that time which reflected a larger “Asian turn” in Australian cultural life, or at least in the cultural life of metropolitan centers like Sydney. Mirroring the desire to “go international” that arose among mainland Chinese artists in the 1990s, this political and economic shift toward the AsiaPacific initially reflected the search for new markets for export and investment, as many nations, including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), pursued market reform. Yet commercial interest and the pathways for exchange this opened, along with increasing internal migration, inspired a broader cultural interest that found clearest expression in the inauguration in 1993 of the Queensland Art Gallery’s AsiaPacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT).10 In contrast to Gao and Hou, Chiu therefore formed an understanding of the tensions between global and local in Asian and specifically Chinese art while living in a city and country undergoing a transition away from colonial legacies and toward a regionally inflected cosmopolitanism. Chiu’s position at the 4A Centre allowed her to play a key role in shaping this transition, although it also brought to her attention the inequalities and prejudices that continued to endure. Among these, she has highlighted a tendency toward a binary separation of self and other as one of the most persistent biases preventing a more inclusive vision of Australia’s regional identity.11 It was the stubborn persistence of this tendency that later inspired Chiu to write Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (2006), adapted from doctoral research completed in Sydney and published after her

Introduction

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relocation to New York. Focusing on the work of fourteen artists in Australia, France, and the United States, Chiu sought to introduce a new appreciation of the many points of connection and spaces in between conventionally juxtaposed cultural environments. Reflecting, perhaps, on the distinct forms of Chineseness she had found in Australia and New York, she also hoped to shed new light on the extent to which these environments shape the identities of those who live within them. In her pursuit of these aims, Chiu found inspiration above all in the work of artisttraveler Chen Zhen (陈箴, 1955–2000) and especially his philosophy of “transexperience.” Contrasting this ideal with dualistic models of global exchange like those formulated by Hou and Gao, she summarizes Chen’s artistic outlook as one of fluid motion, cumulative growth, and flexible adaptation to ever-changing circumstances. Like Hou and Gao, Chen spent a significant proportion of his life outside China, drawing on his experience of travel and cultural translation to create complex evocations of fractured identity. He left Shanghai for Paris in 1986, several years before Hou’s arrival in the same city. While Hou came to understand the Chinese artistic community as one split between the mercantile and the avant-garde—often reserving a position for Chen among the latter—the older artist found greater fascination in the uncertainties of a nomadic life. French curator Jérôme Sans (b. 1960) has associated this curiosity with the chronic autoimmune disorder to which Chen would eventually succumb and which forced him to live in “a state of permanent emergency [that inspired him] to embrace as many cultural experiences as he could [to] live as fully as possible.” At the same time, Sans observes that a lack of representation for migrant artists in Paris in the 1990s—like the marginalization of Asian-Australian artists which later inspired Chiu—impressed Chen with a desire “to bridge East and West [through] a striking polyphony of cultural references [in] a complex oeuvre that resists classification.”12 Despite differences in age and life experience, the Parisian artist and Australian critic therefore cherished comparable ambitions. Chen first set out his philosophy of transexperience in an imagined dialogue between himself and his fictional alter-ego Zhu Xian published in 1998. Alongside reflections on travel, cultural contact, Chineseness, and the need to surpass a reductive East/West binary, Chen linked transexperience with the Chinese term zou (走), meaning “movement” or “to walk” but implying a broad range of connotations from searching, wandering, and escape, to abandonment, desertion, and seclusion. These associations are united in Chen’s aspiration for a “spiritual running-away . . . [a breaking] out of one’s own ‘cocoon,’ and [a desire to] to ‘break away from one’s own self.’ ”13 Etymologically, the term is associated with transmission, transition, and transcendence, drawing meaning from the prefix “trans-” to signal movement “across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, [and] from one place, person, thing, or state to another.”14 A correlation can therefore be noted with travel, yet transexperience describes so much more than feelings of displacement or discovery, pointing instead to a state of mind attainable in any situation: 6

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[Transexperience] does not mean the outward signs of an individual having travelled all over the world . . . [but rather] indicates a type of internal “loneliness of spirituality and the overlapping of experiences,” a . . . “cultural homelessness” [whereby] you do not belong to anybody yet are in possession of everything.15

Travel can be an important catalyst but is not an essential condition for this state. Liu Jianhua, for example, has never lived outside China but has nonetheless developed a transexperiential artistic practice with his movement between media, styles, and thematic concerns, striving to avoid the restrictive clarity of singular definition and the dictates of his past. Alongside Liu, three other artists have emerged since the 1990s as foundational representatives of the specific category of export art defined in this study: ChineseAustralian painter, sculptor, and installation and performance artist Ah Xian (阿仙, b. 1960); Hong Kong-born, now New York–based ceramicist Sin-ying Ho (He Shanying 何善影, b. 1963); and the ever-divisive Ai Weiwei (艾未未, b. 1957). These four artists are distinguished not only by their shared use of porcelain but by their exemplary cultivation of four distinct attitudes toward this medium. Liu has the longest professional and artistic affiliation with the material and with Jingdezhen, where he trained as an assembly-line ceramicist in the 1970s and 1980s. His relationship with porcelain is driven by an extensive knowledge of its history and production yet colored by a persistent uncertainty about his artistic credentials. Ah Xian, on the other hand, initially experimented with porcelain five years after moving from Beijing to Sydney, inspired at first by a desire to reconnect with his heritage. As a self-taught artist who had formerly worked in oil paints and plaster, his turn to ceramics was motivated by a spirit of artistic inquiry, and he created only one substantial series before moving on to other materials. Ho’s discovery of ceramics was awakened by a comparable curiosity, yet her relocation to Canada inspired a more sustained academic study of the medium. Although, unlike Liu and Ah Xian, Ho works within the Euro-American tradition of studio ceramics, she too has experienced some uncertainty about the fluctuating definition of her work alternately as craft or art. Finally, Ai Weiwei, like Ah Xian, has received no formal ceramics training and was drawn to porcelain above all by a desire to broaden his artistic horizons. While the latter artist valued the medium’s aesthetic appeal, however, Ai found greater inspiration in its historic associations, incorporating ceramics within a larger project of political and socio-cultural demystification. Despite their different backgrounds, varying levels of expertise, and widely divergent experiences with and understandings of ceramics, these four artists share a passionate interest in the history of the porcelain industry and its long association with China and Chineseness. They are further united by generational experiences that reflect their birth between 1957 and 1963, including the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, the decades of “Reform and Opening” initiated by Premier Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) in 1978, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Many Introduction

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other artists belong to the same generation and have used porcelain, but they tend to lack the same clarity and resolution. While such parallels indicate the extent to which Liu, Ah Xian, Ho, and Ai are participants in a broader field of artistic engagement that continues to develop in new directions, their distinction as leading figures in the emergence and development of New Export China is the primary subject of this book. In contrast to more conventionally “contemporary” media, porcelain is frequently overlooked in studies of current Chinese artistic practice, despite its extensive use by prominent artists and its utility for propagandists as a fitting vehicle for national promotion on an international stage. Ink, on the other hand, as an equally “un-contemporary” and culturally marked material, has recently experienced something of a renaissance in the contemporary art world and, to a certain extent, could be regarded as a model for the use of porcelain. Appropriated since the 1980s by multiple high-profile artists such as Gu Wenda (谷文达, b. 1955) and Xu Bing (徐冰, b. 1955) to interrogate the conservative elitism with which calligraphy and scholarly ink painting have for centuries been associated, “ink art” is defined as a distinct genre in many survey texts, especially those published in the wake of the blockbuster exhibition “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” (2013) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.16 Ink painting, however, with its ties to the literati tradition and an enduring cultural cachet, can be assimilated with relatively little friction or real transgression into canonical hierarchies of art-historical analysis. Porcelain, on the other hand, as an artisanal or “craft” medium manufactured on a commercial scale for everyday use by a broad spectrum of consumers, holds greater potential for categorical innovation and, perhaps because of this, has yet to receive sustained critical attention in a contemporary art-historical context.17 In response to both the current lack of attention given to contemporary artistic uses of porcelain and this transgressive potential, this book arose from a desire to redress some of the assumptions that prevail in the study of Chinese art. The most significant and yet most frequently overlooked of these assumptions, perhaps due to its very centrality, is the belief that the term “Chinese art” refers only to those forms of artistic practice which are defined by the expression of self-evidently Chinese content and created by artists born within the borders of mainland China for an audience who share the same cultural traditions and preoccupations. Liu Jianhua, Ah Xian, Sinying Ho, and Ai Weiwei, along with many other artists, past and present, do not conform to these interpretive confines. On the contrary, their varied careers and eclectic artistic approaches transgress singular cultural or geographic identification, prompting the need for an art-historical model that can take such “in-between” spaces of inquiry into account by foregrounding the extent to which works of art acquire meaning in multiple frames of reference. This model need not discount the formative influence of place for an artist’s view of the world—the artists discussed in this book have each drawn crucial inspiration from the many places they have called home, as well as from a shared fascination with the local history of Jingdezhen. China, as a geopolitical 8

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entity, a set of cultural traditions, and a realm of imaginative speculation, is a ubiquitous presence in their work but by no means the only animating force for their creative endeavors or the sole context within which their work is and can be interpreted. Rather than a single “Chinese art,” they reveal the existence of multiple Chinese arts, inflected by the historic, cultural, social, and spatial qualities of specific interpretive contexts and by their various overlapping points of contact and exchange. Porcelain, as an expressive medium and a category of material culture, is uniquely suited to an analysis informed by export and transexperience, or movement and metamorphosis. At the most fundamental level, vessels and sculptures of porcelain are the product of an almost alchemical process of transmutation, fusing water, kaolin clay, feldspathic petuntse, and mineral pigments in various combinations to transform malleable clay into vitrified ceramic through sustained yet controlled exposure to extreme heat. These vessels and sculptures are then subjected to further transformation by their mobility within, across, and between interpretive contexts. Exported for centuries from China to countries where they became symbolic of both “the East” and the allure of distance in general, porcelain objects have long been ideal vehicles for the interplay of diverse iconographies that such movement inspires. At the same time, they retain a utilitarian function, bridging the divide that customarily separates the awe-inspiring and exotic from the humble and domestic. International yet intimate, mysterious yet mundane, works of porcelain art perform multiple roles in diverse settings and shift with ease between material functions and historical associations to suit the changing needs and desires of various collectors and consumers. Yet porcelain vessels and sculptures are not entirely nomadic or cast adrift from definite origins and have long been closely tied to Chinese national and cultural identity, inside and outside the borders of mainland China. In English-speaking countries, medium and nation are synonymous—an etymological bond that can be traced to Venetian merchant and traveler Marco Polo’s (1254–1324) use of the word “Chin” in his Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), one of the first glimpses of China to circulate across Europe (albeit disputed, at the time of publication and subsequently), as well as the first known description of porcelain in a European language. In the Devisement, Polo recorded that his Yuan-dynasty (1279–1368) Mongol hosts had used “Chin”—his transliteration of Jin (金), a defeated rival dynasty in China’s north—to refer to those provinces in the south that remained resistant to their control. Following this imperial example, Polo used the same term for what would later become a primary means of access to porcelain for European merchants: the East China Sea, or “Sea of Chin.” With the first translation of the Devisement into English in 1502, “Chinware” or “China-ware” became the accepted term for porcelain and perhaps inspired the subsequent naming of the country, although this etymology cannot be conclusively traced. Whatever the truth of this tale, it is at least certain that China and china have long been synonymous for anglophone consumers, collectors, and connoisseurs.18 Introduction

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The multiple identity of porcelain as a globally mobile material that remains grounded in popular visions of Chinese culture is crucial to its appeal for Liu, Ah Xian, Ai, and Ho, and has played a key part in their decision to incorporate this medium within their artistic practices. At the same time, however, their use of porcelain reflects a range of impulses and inspirations that can be broadly divided into four core motivations: its suitability for modular and mass production; the historical narratives and myths with which it is associated; a personal affinity with ceramics as the key to a lost identity, especially for artists living outside of China; and the sensual appeal of clay and glaze as tactile registers of the exotic and erotic. The enduring bond between china and China is central to each of these motivations, and the subjects of this book were at least partially inspired to use porcelain by a desire to harness the essential “Chineseness” with which they identified it. Ah Xian, for example, turned to porcelain in hope of rediscovering his heritage after moving from Beijing to Sydney in 1990, while Ai Weiwei was motivated by a comparable desire on his return to Beijing from New York in 1993. At the same time, however, each artist subsequently came to realize that the Chineseness they sought was a fictional and fragmentary construct that could never express the many cultural, contextual, and historical influences and allegiances brought together in their personal worlds, as artists and as individuals. Seeking access to a stable identity, they discovered that cultural identification, like porcelain, is a composite product of diverse influences shaped as much by travel and trade as by more static or situated forms of knowledge. The works of porcelain art introduced in this book have principally been incorporated within past art-historical frameworks of reference by way of their inclusion in several survey exhibitions held over the last decade in Europe and North America. These exhibitions in turn arose from a broader interest in ceramics ascendant in contemporary art circles, the inspiration for which is generally attributed to the presentation of the 2003 Turner Prize to English artist Grayson Perry (b. 1960) for his Village of Penians (2001), an earthenware vase painted with a fusion of historically derived and highly idiosyncratic imagery. An alternative point of origin for this interest can also be traced, however, to the equally unprecedented porcelain installation that Liu Jianhua created for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Even earlier precedents could be cited: the inclusion of porcelain busts by Ah Xian in the third APT in 1999; the installation of a clay diorama inspired by one of the most iconic artistic endeavors of the Cultural Revolution at the 48th Venice Biennale by Cai Guo-Qiang (蔡国强, b. 1957), also in 1999; even the creation of Ai Weiwei’s photographic triptych Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn (1995), frequently cited alongside French modernist Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) notorious Fountain (1917) as one of the most influential twentieth-century appropriations of a ceramic artifact for artistic ends. Leaving aside questions of priority, by 2005, international interest in this medium had grown to such an extent that the organizers of the 3rd World Ceramics Biennale, held in the Republic of Korea, predicted a record attendance of five million or 10 percent of the country’s population at that time.19 10

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Many explanations have been given for this escalating regard: some associate the popularity of ceramics with a broadening of artistic attitudes after the decline of high modernism; others note the appeal of the medium’s ancient heritage and the almost primal compulsion allegedly felt by many artists to connect “with something deep in the earth [and] our collective human memory.”20 More cynical commentators have ascribed this popularity to the opening of renovated ceramics displays in global museums and galleries, notably including the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and to the increasing prices that ceramics now attract at art fairs and auctions.21 While the emergence of New Export China undoubtedly reflects the influence of these and other shifts across the world, porcelain holds additional and more specific aspects of significance for Chinese artists that should be acknowledged. The appeal of porcelain for many of those who have chosen to use this medium lies above all in its conceptual affinities and potential to bypass the artificial divide between elite and popular culture, art and craft, utilitarian and conceptual, domestic and global audiences. It holds special appeal, however, for those with ties to a culture and country that has become synonymous with this material and has claimed porcelain as one of its foremost inventions and gifts to the world. The defining qualities of this appeal are made clear in the points of focus adopted by the survey exhibitions previously noted, which have together served to define a canon for New Export China as an emergent category of contemporary Chinese artistic practice. The most important exhibition for the initial formation of the genre was the comprehensive “New ‘China’: Porcelain Art from Jingdezhen, 1910–2012” at New York’s China Institute Gallery in late 2012, by which time a global taste for contemporary ceramic art had stimulated a broad revival of interest in the history of porcelain export and exchange. In this exhibition, works by twenty-four Chinese or Chinese-born and one North American artist, all created in Jingdezhen, were used to demonstrate the city’s artistic development in the last century. Curators Fang Lili, a respected scholar of Chinese ceramic history, and Nancy Selvage, director of Harvard University’s Ceramics Program from 1978 until 2009, aimed with this survey to indicate the ongoing importance of the erstwhile Porcelain Capital. Their emphasis on Jingdezhen and the artistic and utilitarian products manufactured there for global export, with little acknowledgment of other kiln sites or product lines intended for domestic buyers, clearly reveals the extent to which this city had been branded a must-visit destination for cultural heritage tourists, including artists. In her contribution to the exhibition text, Selvage hails Jingdezhen as “a mecca for Chinese and international talent,” while Fang draws a comparison with Beijing’s 798 Art District and describes the city as “an ‘incubator’ [for] the inspirations and dreams of ceramicists [across] the world.”22 In their selection of works for “New ‘China,’ ” Fang and Selvage also show a preference for studio ceramicists and independent creators who identify explicitly as artists (yishujia 艺术家), with only a passing mention of the highly specialized yet anonymous artisans (gongjiang 工匠) who make up most of the city’s population. This is Introduction

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partially a reflection of the city’s civic transformation, but also indicates a clear preference for the contemporary: most of the works chosen were created after the turn of the millennium, with earlier pieces positioned as precedents for recent activity. This curatorial rationale revealed several traits of New Export China that served to distinguish it from other forms of contemporary ceramic art: a close connection with the locality of Jingdezhen and the global extent of the export trade in which this city played a central role; a strong historical perspective, albeit shaped by contemporary concerns and preoccupations; and a preference for the conceptual over the artisanal. Just under a year before “New ‘China,’ ” a comparable display had opened across the Atlantic at the V&A: “Porcelain City—Jingdezhen” (2011–12). Organized by independent curator Amanda Game, this relatively modest selection of recent work by ceramicists Roger Law, Takeshi Yasuda, Ah Xian, and Felicity Aylieff drew inspiration from the V&A’s refurbished ceramics galleries and the “new buzz around pots” they had prompted.23 Progressively reopened in September 2009 and June 2010, these galleries were completely transformed to better showcase the comprehensive extent of the collection they were designed to hold, and to address the issues of access and clarity that had prompted their closure in 2005. Published accounts of this transformation have focused above all on the Making Ceramics Gallery—in which visitors are introduced to various aspects of ceramics-making and invited to interact with specially commissioned “touch-objects”—and the global survey of ceramics history from 3000 BCE to the turn of the twenty-first century installed as the centerpiece of the World Ceramics Gallery. A handful of contemporary pieces were also commissioned for the space, including an oversized blue-and-white vase designed by Aylieff and created with the help of artisans at a workshop in Jingdezhen in 2006.24 This emphasis on points of contact—between the ancient and contemporary, makers and viewers, artists and artisans, the metropolitan capital of England and the Porcelain Capital of China—is evident throughout the refurbished galleries, likely prompting many visitors at the time and subsequently to reassess their received knowledge of ceramic history and current practice. “Porcelain City,” installed in one of the new galleries a year after the second phase of reopening, can be regarded in hindsight as an effective condensation of these aims. Like Fang and Selvage, Game also drew inspiration from Jingdezhen’s recent shift from industrial center to artistic hub, and her choice of artists can be read as a reflection of this transformation. Ah Xian and Law first traveled to the city in the mid-1990s, when international conferences and university exchange programs brought about a sudden increase in the population of visiting ceramicists, artists, and tourists. Yasuda and Aylieff—now husband and wife—were directly involved in founding several of these initiatives, as well as the operation of some of Jingdezhen’s first residency institutions. Once again, we can clearly trace the defining characteristics of New Export China: a focus on the export trade; a longue-durée historical perspective; and privileging of studio-based practice over artisanal labor. The curatorial staging of “Porcelain City” and “New China” in London and New York, respectively, also indicates the extent to which 12

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works of New Export China have primarily been shown in the United States, Europe, and Australia, while retaining ties to a Chinese industrial hub with which many viewers in these regions are likely unfamiliar, despite its historic global renown. By 2012, then, New Export China had been firmly established as a genre of ceramic art typified by a series of clearly defined criteria (a focus on Jingdezhen, the export industry, global mobility, and a preference for the conceptual over the artisanal) which set it apart within the broader field of contemporary ceramic art. These qualities have been emphasized in almost all later exhibitions of such art, two examples of which will suffice to indicate the select but cohesive community of artists, writers, and curators who have contributed to the creation of an institutional setting for this type of work. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s “Ahead of the Curve: New China from China” (2014– 15) brought together fifteen ceramics artists and five glass artists who co-curators Claire Blakey of the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery Stoke-on-Trent, Helen Brown of the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, and Bristol Museum’s Kate Newnham had met while traveling through Shanghai, Beijing, and Jingdezhen in 2010 and 2012.25 Many of these artists had previously shown together in “New ‘China’ ” and “Porcelain City,” as well as several other displays in the intervening years. In “Ahead of the Curve,” their work was shown alongside historic export ceramics from the collections of the participating museums, while an essay in the exhibition text reaffirmed the link between the China Trade and a contemporary Jingdezhen that “welcomes pilgrims from . . . around the world.”26 The third defining quality of New Export China—a preference for the conceptual—was evident in the choice of works “at the crossroads of tradition-modern and Chinese-Western,” in the curators’ stated desire “to re-interpret the conceptual and material definition of ceramics,” and in their communication of “the search for identity and understanding.”27 Alongside these generic criteria, the inclusion of glass artists in “Ahead of the Curve” introduced a comparative dimension to this exhibition’s definition of New Export China that reinforced such traits, drawing attention to the material specificity and contemporary artistic credentials of the genre. “Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Ceramics from East Asia” (2015–16) at the University of Southern California Pacific Asia Museum likewise positioned works of New Export China within a comparative perspective, pairing ceramics by Ai Weiwei, Liu Jianhua, and Ah Xian with those by artists from the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Curator Christine Yu, now chair of Asian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, identified all works included with an ambition “[to] build on tradition while innovating outside established manners and aesthetics,” thereby emphasizing their historical pedigree and cultural affiliations rather than materiality and contemporaneity.28 Despite their slightly different focus, the very fact that Yu and the curators of “Ahead of the Curve” could position works of ceramic art by Chinese contemporary artists as a clearly defined standard of comparison indicates the extent to which such works were by that time widely acknowledged as products of a unified artistic tendency. Rather than expressions of certain ideas or Introduction

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themes that happened to be created in a ceramic medium, or ceramics that happened to have been either shaped or commissioned by Chinese artists, the works selected for these displays were presented as examples of a unified genre. Building on this curatorial canon, New Export China expands and enriches the discursive context for such works by applying Chen Zhen’s model of transexperience to historical and contemporary models of global export. The contested history of the China Trade has been comprehensively discussed in a range of texts too numerous to list, yet few writers on this subject have devoted more than a passing mention to the ongoing implications of this history and its relevance for our understanding of the comparably booming global trade in works of contemporary Chinese art. Ceramics historian Stacey Pierson, the most notable of those who have considered at least some of these rippling dimensions of meaning, has shown that the afterlives of exported ceramics, their conceptual implications, and the multicentered nature of their trade require us to [look] away from surviving . . . objects toward the traces that these objects left behind— literary and pictorial references, changes in local approaches to ceramic production, and importantly the physical spaces for Chinese ceramics in different cultures.29

Alongside these four traces, this book highlights a fifth area of study: the continuing influence of the China Trade on contemporary global perceptions of Chinese porcelain, affecting its reception by exhibition viewers, its acquisition by collectors, and its use by contemporary artists. To better understand this influence, key themes drawn from the history of export are identified in the following four chapters with various forms of contemporary artistic expression in porcelain, highlighting shared or divergent aesthetic and conceptual motivations to arrive at a multifaceted definition of New Export China as both a category of artistic practice and a theoretical framework for approaching contemporary Chinese art in general. These themes also reflect the key motivating factors that unite Ai Weiwei, Liu Jianhua, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho: the suitability of porcelain for modular and mass production; its historical pedigree; their association of the medium with a lost heritage; and its sensuous material appeal, resonating with issues of cultural and bodily identity. These motivations in turn establish four primary criteria for defining an expansive field of creative practice: an uneasy relationship with craft or industrial production; a critical and revisionist view of history; a focus on overlapping personal experiences; and an appreciation for visual and tactile appeal. The conceptual model of export remains a constant presence throughout, bringing together each motivation and criteria within a critical paradigm for a certain category of porcelain art and, more broadly, a counter-narrative in the field of contemporary Chinese artistic expression that acknowledges in-between spaces of discursive exploration. The first and second chapters highlight the most notable impulses driving contemporary Chinese artistic use of porcelain: an attraction to the productive potential, 14

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historic prestige, and cultural authority of the medium, and a corresponding desire to question these attributes by introducing a subversive ambiguity into mythologized narratives and generating new working relationships between artists and artisans. These impulses are most apparent in the work of Ai Weiwei and Liu Jianhua, both of whom have exposed the fragility and artificiality of historic convention through aesthetic strategies of destruction, preservation, containment, and reproduction, while working almost exclusively with commissioned artisans in Jingdezhen. The manufacture of their work in the Porcelain Capital also reveals the importance of this city for the development of New Export China, and especially its reputation as a center for global export and historical reproductions. Liu and Ai, however, have consistently concealed or marginalized the central role of hired labor in the making of their work, even while foregrounding ideas of modular and mass production. As a foundational condition for the creation of New Export China, this tension between the artistic and artisanal is the focus of the first chapter, in which various approaches to the multiple in Ai’s Sunflower Seeds (2010), Liu’s Regular-Fragile (2001–10), and North American ceramicist Barbara Diduk’s (d. 2017) The Vase Project: Made in China—Landscape in Blue (2004–6) are exposed and compared to define a continuum of interactions between artists and artisans in Jingdezhen, from outright exploitation to the promise of empowerment. In contrast to such primarily deconstructive aims, the third chapter considers the use of porcelain by migrant artists like Ah Xian and Sin-ying Ho as a vehicle for a rediscovery and reconstruction of Chineseness, albeit complicated by the realization that such seemingly straightforward cultural allegiances are always complex and contingent fabrications. Applying the theoretical framework of “ornamental personhood” set out by comparative race theorist Anne Anlin Cheng, this chapter exposes the negotiations between the individual and collective, and between the idiosyncratic and stereotypical, through which Ah Xian, Ho, and other émigré artists have found a sense of self using strategies of accumulation and synthesis. In Ah Xian’s China China porcelain busts (1998–2004) and Ho’s Identity (2001), Binary Code: The Link (2004), Matrix no. 1 (2005), and Gibberish (2005), archetypal markers of culture are dissolved in a fusion of linguistic and ornamental codes that draw from multiple private worlds, concealed beneath apparently monolithic classifications. A comparable yearning for revival has prompted a more essentialist vision in projects overseen by Li Jianshen (李见深, b. 1959) and Caroline Cheng (郑祎, b. 1963), artist-entrepreneurs with whom Ah Xian and especially Ho have worked closely to realize their creative aspirations in the Porcelain Capital. Li gave material form to his vision of an idyllic classical China with the opening of Sanbao International Ceramics Village just outside Jingdezhen, while Cheng offers ceramicists passing through the city an opportunity to imbue their work with an “authentic” Chineseness at the Pottery Workshop. Despite their divergent approaches to cultural identity, Ah Xian, Ho, Li, and Cheng all rely on porcelain as a vehicle for explorations of self, family, and heritage, and as a medium for transmitting their discoveries to the world. Introduction

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Beyond and before any engagement with historic or cultural meaning, Ah Xian and Ho, as well as Ai and Liu, have also shown consistent appreciation for porcelain’s visual and tactile appeal, using this to critique consumerism and commodity culture, or to imbue that which seems shallow with greater profundity. As such, their works seem to offer consummate case studies for the category of “Material Art” that Chicagobased art historian Wu Hung and curator Orianna Cacchione have proposed as a counter-narrative in the development of Chinese contemporary art from the 1980s to the present. The materiality of porcelain is also the primary focus of our final chapter, in which Wu and Cacchione’s ideas are applied to ceramic works by Ai, Liu, Ho, and Ah Xian which appear to privilege material allure over critical depth. Ai’s The Wave (2005), Bowl of Pearls (2006), and Watermelon, Oil Spill, and Dress series (all 2006), for example, are visually appealing but could be seen to lack real substance. Nevertheless, beneath their eye-catching surfaces lies a scathing critique of contemporary global consumerism and the commodification of Chinese art notable also in Liu’s Obsessive Memories (1998–2000) series of headless and armless porcelain women sprawled on armchairs and in bathtubs. A more positive note is struck in Ho’s Hero, no. 1 and no. 2 (2007–9), and 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central (2014), in which the artist plumbs the depths concealed within the denigrated products of the entertainment industry, using the icons of popular culture as emblems for both private life experiences and public political statements. The ambiguous divide between inside and outside, authentic and superficial, is further troubled in works by Liu and Ah Xian in which the presentation of porcelain as a proxy for an exotic Chinese Other has been complicated by the introduction of a universal, corporeal dimension of meaning. Drawing again on the idea of ornamental personhood, and especially Cheng’s understanding of the “Yellow Woman” as a cultural stereotype exposing the implication of politics and aesthetics, we can identify this fusion of the particular and the universal as a meeting of the exotic and erotic. In Ah Xian’s China China, stereotyped signs of Chineseness become a medium of self-expressive embellishment, transforming that which could be seen as superficial or denigrating into a badge of pride to be celebrated and cherished. Liu’s Merriment series of nameless women decapitated, dismembered, and “served up” on plates, on the other hand, emphasizes an objectified sexuality over bodily autonomy, reducing these porcelain femmes fatales to little more than icons of their sex. Despite their divergent approaches, however, both Ah Xian and Liu introduce a corporeal dimension into their visions of the exotic which draws attention to the instability of this category and gestures toward more universally appealing yet also more flexible forms of personhood. Underlying the motivations and defining criteria for New Export China to which these chapters are dedicated is an enduring awareness of porcelain’s mobility, exported and enjoyed around the world for centuries. The artists and works discussed occupy an in-between space of making and meaning, at the intersection of multiple cultural and historic contexts. At the same time, they are grounded not only by their specific 16

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life experiences but by a shared fascination with Jingdezhen, and with the clay from which the residents of this city have shaped its reputation as the world’s Porcelain Capital. Rather than a clearly defined classification, “New Export China” is intended to suggest an open critical framework for these works and for contemporary Chinese art in general, through which the enduring assumption that Chinese artists must be confined to a single context can be superseded by a recognition of the multiple frames of reference in which all artists and works of art coexist. The works discussed in these pages, then, to paraphrase Chen Zhen, are the product of an “overlapping of experiences” and so reflect diverse perspectives on history, culture, and identity. For their creators, they are just one part of a lifelong construction of self, within and in response to multiple contexts of influence and inspiration.

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1 PORCELAIN PRODUCTION

I

N HIS STUDY OF THE TECHNIQUES and technologies of mass production that have shaped many forms of material culture in China, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (2000), art historian Lothar Ledderose situates modularity as a defining aspect of Chinese culture from prehistory to the modern era. He traces seven primary expressions of this trend: quantity, interchangeability, division of labor, additive growth, standardization, proportional scaling, and creation of the new by adapting the old.1 These expressions of modularity are also central to the appeal of porcelain for those artists who have turned to this medium in recent decades. For many of these artists, the ability to create in multiple with speed and efficiency is a crucial prerequisite for the realization of their aims, and most of the works featured in this book were manufactured by teams of artisans whose labor is central to their meaning (and making). On a practical level, the access to inexpensive labor, materials, and equipment available in Jingdezhen has provided a fertile ground for the creation of large-scale or multipart works that would be difficult

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or even impossible to produce elsewhere, and for which abundance and excess are unifying premises. The works chosen for this first chapter are exemplary case studies for these conjoined conceptual and practical considerations, exposing the material, social, cultural, and economic conditions that have given rise to New Export China. Liu Jianhua’s Regular-Fragile (2001–10) series of installations derive their visual appeal and critical substance to a large extent from their overwhelming scale. Ledderose’s seven expressions of modularity are evident in each of the many iterations of this work, the meaning and making of which are defined by quantity: the sculptural pieces comprising the installation are mass-produced and usually shown in multiple; their exponentially increasing number in each iteration follows the principles of additive growth and proportional scale; and this exponential increase is itself enabled by a standardization and interchangeability of parts. Above all, the central premise of the project derives from a creation of the new through strategic adaptation of the old: the material and form of the sculptural pieces are obsolete but imbued with greater meaning by their combination, multiplication, and transposition to diverse contexts, drawing attention to the many frictions that unsettle customary binaries of original/imitation, antique/contemporary, transient/permanent, and global/local.2 Regular-Fragile also recreates the conditions of production in which Liu first learned to work with porcelain, initially as an apprentice and then as a line worker at a collective factory in Jingdezhen from 1977 until 1985, when he left to pursue his artistic ambitions. This phase in his life provides a snapshot of broader changes unfolding across China in the wake of economic reform. By 2001, when Liu began production of Regular-Fragile, he had come to realize the potential of ceramics as an expressive medium and hired former co-workers to replicate the mode of collective labor with which he had once been so familiar, in the name of contemporary artistic expression rather than socialist realism. Co-production is another defining trait of New Export China, building on a long history of such practices from the committee- and compilation-based forms of making that developed in parallel with a national self-imagination in early-twentieth-century China, to the radical populism and immersion in the lives of the masses endorsed in the Maoist era. Liu’s recollection of these ideals for RegularFragile also recalls Cai Guo-Qiang’s reproduction for the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) of the Rent Collection Courtyard (Shouzuyuan 收租院), a sculptural tableau that served as a model for collective artistic production when first created in 1965. The allegations of copyright infringement leveled at Cai’s installation have overshadowed his method and medium, but, when these are brought back into focus, this milestone in the development of Chinese art outside China offers a key precedent for the principles of modularity, reproduction, and adaptation underlying the artistic revival of porcelain. While Liu and Cai share an apparent commitment to collectivist ideals, other artists included in this book vary greatly in their application of such principles. Some, like Liu, have cultivated open-ended collaboration albeit with one voice retaining authority, while others, like Cai, have adopted a more result-oriented approach. The latter 20

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extreme on this continuum of working relationships is exemplified by Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010). As in Regular-Fragile, the meaning of this work arises from the spectacle of its massed components: 100 million porcelain seeds, manufactured in Jingdezhen and shipped to London for exhibition at the Tate Modern. While Liu participated in the production of his porcelain replicas, however, Ai employed 1600 artisans to produce the work on his behalf in a factory-style approach. In projects like this, rather than an equal participant or collaborator, the artisan becomes an anonymous laborer, while the artist takes on the supervisory role of an enterprising investor, allocating funds in hope of a profitable return. Such projects also revive a pattern of export first established in the eighteenth century, whereby trading companies in Europe with little knowledge of working conditions in China purchased the labor of artisans with little idea of the destination for their efforts, and so reinforce an enduring binary of China-as-producer and Europe-asconsumer. Liu has likewise engaged with this history, but, rather than perpetuating past binaries he has instead sought to critique their continuity in Yiwu Survey (2006) and Export-Cargo Transit (2007), a pair of mixed-media installations that build on issues raised by Regular-Fragile. Drawing on extensive research into past relations of power and current global disparities, in these works Liu exposes the legacies of European imperialism within China’s contemporary dominance of the low-end commodity market and the global “recycling” industry. Despite their different modes of making and of engaging with the politics of production, both Liu and Ai rigorously separate material and conceptual modularity. While Liu makes little attempt to disguise the industrial origins of his sculptural pieces, he sublimates their mass production into a more abstract profundity. The familiarity of the commodities replicated and their arrangement in modular configurations support a hypothetically infinite range of readings inspired by the past lives of the objects chosen for replication, their ties to places distant in space and time, and their conjuring of moments outgrown or forgotten. On one hand, his installations are expressions of a desire to redeem his earlier career as a factory ceramicist, elevating assembly-line techniques to the realm of fine art. On the other, his emphasis on concept establishes a strategic distance from the denigrated realm of industry, isolating the artisanal and artistic. A comparable isolation was evident in the Tate installation of Sunflower Seeds, for which the symbolism of the work and the labor of its making were rendered entirely discrete, one implicitly more worthy of interest than the other. This is a recurring feature of many works of New Export China and reflects a separation in the wider field of contemporary ceramic art between artists who hire artisans with no thought for their working conditions and those who seek to engage with social realities. For Ai and Liu, as for many others, a desire to separate concept from matter, to shed the lowly status of artisanal production for the more prestigious aura of artistic creation, is a compelling incentive to turn a blind eye to the possibility of exploitation or disempowerment. Porcelain Production

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There are, nevertheless, some artists who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the generation of positive change through collective action. Within the field of New Export China defined in this book, the most successful expression of these aims to date has been The Vase Project: Made in China—Landscape in Blue (2004–6), a collaboration between the late North American ceramicist and ceramics educator Barbara Diduk, her colleague and friend Zhao Yu, now on the faculty of the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute (Jingdezhen Taoci Xueyuan景德镇陶瓷学院; JCI), and porcelain painters resident across the city. In contrast to the thousands of components comprising Regular-Fragile and the millions of seeds created for Sunflower Seeds, Diduk limited her commission to a relatively modest one hundred and one blue-and-white vases adorned with an eclectic range of designs, the diversity of which reflects the call-and-response method of collaborative production central to their making. While Sunflower Seeds and Regular-Fragile, in their separation of making and meaning, appeared to endorse a stereotype of China as the workshop of the world, The Vase Project showcased not only the productive but the creative capabilities of participants, drawing attention to their agency as individuals with private experiences, perspectives, and desires. Diduk and Zhao could therefore be regarded as socially minded entrepreneurs rather than enterprising investors, fostering lateral ties of collaboration. The Vase Project reflects yet another stage in the development of collectivism in China, cultivating organic and open-ended forms of co-production founded on a synthesis of individual perspectives and moving away from the extractive logic of factory production toward a mutual realization of diverse aims. MIND OVER MATTER

The interchangeability and standardization of the parts that comprise Regular-Fragile allow for a division of labor in its manufacture. Because each component is identical with many others, the work’s production could be delegated to several teams of professional ceramicists, each assigned one of a series of tasks, using production techniques with which Liu himself had once been all too familiar when he worked alongside many of these artisans several decades earlier. In 1977, just before his fifteenth birthday, Liu left his birthplace, Ji’an, to serve an apprenticeship in Jingdezhen with his uncle, Liu Yuanchang (刘远长). The revival of such master-apprentice lineages, formerly prohibited during the Cultural Revolution as a relic of the feudal past, marked a thawing of the national political climate and a realization among Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders that they were essential for the continuity of artisanal industries. The elder Liu secured his nephew a position at the Sculpture Factory (Diaosu Cichang 雕塑瓷厂), a collective enterprise where he himself had worked since 1964 and where he would remain for his entire career, going on to serve as director and, in 1996, gaining the coveted status of a “national-level master artisan” (guojiaji gongyi meishu dashi 国家级工艺美术大师).3 Liu Jianhua also gained official recognition at the Sculpture Factory, receiving the prestigious Hundred Flowers Prize (百花奖) and 22

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National Light Industry Arts-and-Crafts First-Class Award (国家轻功部工艺美术评 比一等奖) when he was just nineteen years old.4 Like the revival of apprenticeship, these awards reflect a political shift away from the Maoist collectivism of the 1960s toward a program of national development driven by entrepreneurial investment and the promotion of China’s industries on the world stage. In August 1977, not long after Liu arrived in Jingdezhen, a conclusion to the Cultural Revolution had been announced at the 11th CCP Congress following Mao’s death on September 9, 1976, and the arrest of the Gang of Four on October 6 by his heirapparent, Hua Guofeng (1921–2008). Yet the Party remained locked in factional disputes, with little consensus about the course the nation should pursue in the wake of these momentous changes, until the restoration of Deng Xiaoping to the position of vice chairman. Deng had played a pivotal role in CCP leadership since the 1930s but, like many Party members, lost favor with the dominant faction on several occasions, most notably in early 1976. At the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978, he announced what has subsequently been termed his policy of “Reform and Opening,” securing the authority of the Party while reducing Chairman Hua to a symbolic figurehead. Rather than a single ordinance, this policy encompassed a wide range of directives and guidelines intended to inaugurate a transition into a more politically progressive and economically rationalist era. The core directive of “Four Modernizations” (Sihua 四化), for example, promoted agricultural, industrial, military or scientific, and technological advancement, while Deng’s principle of “Two Hundreds” (Shuangbai 双百)—a contraction of his slogan, “Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom and One Hundred Schools Contend”—promised an open atmosphere for public and intellectual debate. Alongside domestic political and institutional reform, Deng also provided a foundation for China’s increasing global profile, building on the momentous formal recognition of the PRC by the United Nations General Assembly in October 1971 and subsequent diplomatic missions sent by Australia, the United States, and several European nations. In October 1978, Deng made an official state visit to Japan, traveling there again in February 1979 after touring the United States—the first such state visit by a Chinese political leader—to ratify the transfer of American diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. These overseas delegations strengthened his conviction that the PRC should seek to emulate the “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), pursuing an export-driven model of economic growth along the lines of the “flying geese pattern of development” proposed in 1932 by Japanese economist Akamatsu Kaname (1896–1974). With Japan as the lead “goose,” Akamatsu argued that Asian nations could advance their global interests by adopting Japanese manufacturing technologies to produce high-quality export goods, thereby perpetuating a chain of imitation.5 To accomplish this aim, Deng not only opened China to imports and investment but set out to transform what had once been collective factories—like the Sculpture Factory—into semi-commercial enterprises where a quota of goods could be produced Porcelain Production

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for export. When Liu embarked on his apprenticeship, then, he entered a sphere of production on the brink of radical transformation, as the collectivist ideals with which his uncle would have been familiar gave way to a globally oriented plan for national reform. Nevertheless, and despite the prestigious accolades he received for his work, Liu found the Sculpture Factory stifling and unfulfilling, coming to realize that he did not wish to follow his uncle’s example. He has traced the source of this realization to a chance encounter in 1978 with a translated edition of Auguste Rodin’s (1840–1917) L’Art (1911).6 The works of French modernist sculpture reproduced in this volume impressed Liu with an enduring awareness of the power of art as a material manifestation of emotion, memory, and desire. He discovered a passionate interest in artistic expression, taking classes in charcoal drawing and subscribing to as many art journals as possible: While it seemed like a chance occurrence, it influenced me greatly . . . I was moved by the images of [Rodin’s] work and understood the possibilities of sculpture as if for the first time, specifically the extent to which clay could be moulded to imitate muscle and flesh. . . . I was only fifteen years old when I found [the book, yet] it marked the beginning of my artistic pursuits and career, providing a motivation for me to go to college.7 At the same time, Liu’s reading of Rodin reinforced his belief that ceramics could never compete with “genuine works of art,” and that the discipline in which he had been trained was “insignificant and unworthy . . . an artisanal skill with no relevance for the higher category of art.”8 He dedicated his non-working hours to this higher category, studying for the newly reinstated college entrance exams and finally gaining admission in 1985 to JCI, one of only two students from Jiangxi province admitted in that year. Here, he abandoned ceramics entirely for the conventionally modernist sculptural media of bronze and cast plaster, expanding his knowledge of the European canon to include the work of Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929), Aristide Maillol (1861– 1944), and Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957), among other prominent modernists.9 Liu’s artistic awakening, marked by a shift in aesthetic preferences from the collective labor of the assembly line to the emphasis on self-expression valorized in European modernism, can be understood in part as a reflection of broader social and cultural changes sweeping across China. If we append his tenure at the Sculpture Factory to that of his uncle, to include the two decades between 1964 (when Liu Yuanchang gained employment) until 1985 (when Liu Jianhua resigned), this parallel becomes even clearer. Mirroring the political twists and turns of these decades, the artistic ecology in which uncle and nephew played such pivotal roles saw a transition from collectivist production to a new fascination with the passions and anxieties of the individual. Following the founding of the PRC, the first state-owned porcelain factory in 24

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Jingdezhen opened in April 1950, offering payment in rice with bonuses for those who exceeded quota, access to a union, a barber, literacy and applied mathematics classes, and medical services. By January 1956, all aspects of porcelain production in the city had been organized into fifty-two cooperatives that were consolidated in February into ten state-owned enterprises and twenty collective factories.10 The Sculpture Factory took pride of place among these new endeavors, fostering the talents of ceramicists who were tasked with creating socialist realist figurines and tableaux. The creation of Maoist memorabilia was not, however, the primary motive for the opening of the Sculpture Factory and other such institutions, which were conceived above all as venues for the cultivation of collectivism as a mode of production suited to the political ethos of the time. Many forms of collective creation have gained popularity in China over the centuries. We could note, for example, the division of labor in court workshops charged with producing vessels and sculptures of porcelain, lacquer, or bronze. Even in the rarefied sphere of ink painting, some small measure of cocreation can be seen in the pooling of talents and resources required to create the monumental handscrolls produced for the emperor’s pleasure, or the network of inscriptions, colophons, and other additions through which scholarly works gained canonical significance. Yet these forms of collective creation are clearly distinct from those arising in the twentieth century, especially under Maoist rule. While the imperial workshop and scholarly studio prioritize the group over the individual, they are also defined by the blending of independent voices in this group within a unified aesthetic, emphasizing conformity to a certain standard, model, or lineage. The collectivist work of art, on the other hand, makes a virtue of multiple production, prioritizing diversity and dialogue over the synthesis of a singular product. Collectivism as a modern artistic strategy arose in China in the 1920s and 1930s, parallel with the rise of a national self-imagination and avant-gardist approach to cultural production. Gao Minglu has traced the first use of the term avant-garde (translated as xianfeng [先锋] for literary works and qianwei [前卫] for works of art) to the publication in the early 1920s of journalistic accounts covering radical literary movements in Europe.11 Following the lead of Chen Duxiu (1880–1939), Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), and other progressive intellectuals, artists and writers affiliated with the New Culture Movement scanned these reports for inspiration in their efforts to foster a “cultural consciousness” (wenhua yishi 文化意识). Early models of “collective production” (jiti chuangzuo 集体创作) gained popularity in the same milieu, with this term appearing first in print in a study of Soviet author Maxim Gorky’s (1868–1936) socialist realist literature published in a 1934 issue of World Discussion (Shijie luntan 世界论坛).12 Yet similar ideas had gained currency even earlier with calls by Chen and Cai in late 1917 and 1918 for an “art for people’s life” (yishu wei rensheng 艺术为人生) that could adhere to the Confucian maxim that “literature and culture [must] serve the universal law” (wen yi zai dao 文艺在道).13 Such aspirations presumed a close alignment of the individual with the community, endorsing a vision of artists as prophets of modernization. Porcelain Production

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As a method of writing and painting, collective production gained popularity among left-leaning authors and artists who sought to respond to a disregard for their efforts in these years of struggle. Accused of indulging an apolitical aestheticism, creatives turned to collectivist methods to increase the social relevance of their work, while also noting the extent to which these ways of working could strengthen their networks of affiliation. Such methods were broadly conceived to include two main approaches: creation by committee, within which writers and painters took responsibility for various aspects of a work but sought to reduce their personal involvement with cooperation and compromise; and creation by compilation, a “seeking, accumulating, and assembling [of ] texts on a single theme [in] an accretive process.” This second approach tended to be the most radical, fostering a dispersed authorial voice in which individual contributions could be discerned only as parts of a larger whole, with no one author or artist predominating.14 Theorized at a time of national crisis, both approaches were inspired by a desire for unity and solidarity to preserve a way of life perceived to be under threat. By 1942, when Mao called for a “massification” (dazhonghua 大众化) of creative production from the Communist base in Yan’an, collectivist methods had become firmly embedded in the artistic and literary community. To a certain extent, Mao’s understanding of dazhonghua drew heavily from ideas earlier put forward by Chen and Cai, and indeed many New Culture artists and writers traveled to Yan’an to lend their pens and brushes to the formation of a “proletarian avant-garde” (wuchanjieji xianfengdui 无产阶级先锋队). A lingering proclivity for self-cultivation, however, did not sit easily with Mao’s desire for a “propagandist art of [class] struggle and revolution.”15 His use of the term dazhong, meaning “mass” or “crowd,” and his vision of “an art that serves the people” (wenyi wei dazhong fuwu 文艺为大众服务) departed from earlier appeals to the collective (jiti). While the latter implied “[a] joining [of] the rich diversity of classes, voices, and motivations [in] a glorification of multiplicity,” the masses (dazhong) were treated as “a revolutionary medium [and] unruly energy to be channelled, a surging sea to be persuaded [by] a charismatic leader.” Collectivist methods that developed in response to this prompted a shift from collaboration and compilation toward immersion in “the psychologies, emotions, and subjectivity of the masses [to] incorporate . . . a plenitude of voices disenfranchised, minority, or otherwise unheard.”16 After 1949, this instrumentalist form of collectivism came to dominate official artistic and literary production, conceived not only as a creative counterpart for political and social revolution but as a mechanism for generating revolutionary change by forging new bonds between the classes and amplifying the voice of the proletariat. Mao proclaimed that artists and writers should align their activities more closely with the needs of peasants and workers, abandoning confidence in their own abilities to direct China’s modernization and admitting “that the masses were wiser [in] the standards and forms of art.” His program of “continual revolution” (jixu geming 继续革命) elab26

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orated on New Culture ideals, especially the desire for a “cultural consciousness” that would unite the Chinese people. Yet, rather than a society guided by the few, he envisaged a world in which the many would become “self-enlightened” (ziji jiaoyu ziji 自己 教育自己) or “self-emancipated” (ziji jiefang ziji 自己解放自己).17 It was with such aspirations in mind that collectivist endeavors like the Sculpture Factory were founded as venues for autonomous awakening, organizing formerly independent artisans into work-units to mobilize their revolutionary potential. When Liu Yuanchang entered the Sculpture Factory in 1964, this Maoist form of collectivism had gained several additional points of ideological support presaging a third phase of transformation. The first of these was a renewed emphasis on “entering into life” (shenru shenghuo 深入生活) by traveling to rural and industrial areas, speaking with agricultural or factory workers, learning folk techniques and traditions, then combining these with a knowledge of Maoism to create works of art and literature that embodied the life of the people.18 Closely affiliated with this approach was the ever more strident affirmation of what David Holm has termed a “mass line creative method,” an inflexible codification of the collective that brought writers and artists in line with the aims of the CCP by highlighting the intersections of official and popular forms of revolutionary action.19 During the Cultural Revolution, these conjoined efforts toward the embedding of artistic practice in everyday life and its alignment with the ambitions of the state prompted the emergence of an art in which the aesthetic is almost entirely subordinated to the politic, and the individual subsumed in the collective. Gaining national approbation and global attention at the height of the Cold War, the popularity of this approach provoked an enduring stereotype of the collective as a despotic mechanism of “mindless exploitation . . . [as] a compulsory agreement to negate individual will [or to be] conflated with the dangerously mercurial crowd whose surging impulses overcome reason.”20 As our brief journey through the history of this creative method makes clear, however, collectivism was a far more complex ideal. This complexity is evident in one of the most celebrated works of collective production, arguably also one of the first works of Chinese contemporary ceramic art, created one year after Liu Yuanchang entered the Sculpture Factory. This is the globally renowned Rent Collection Courtyard, a tableau of 114 life-size clay figures created and installed in 1965 in an estate in Dayi, Sichuan province, formerly owned by landlord Liu Wencai (刘文彩, 1887–1949).21 While published accounts of Rent Collection Courtyard focus on its political content and context, it was the method of its making that attracted most attention when it first opened to the public.22 Disputes arose throughout the duration of the project, forcing frequent compromise, yet negotiation was acknowledged as an indispensable aspect of collectivist production necessary to achieve a genuinely de-individualized consensus. Official accounts of the making of such collective works devote considerable attention to episodes of “discord, conflict, debate, and disagreement” which enabled “negotiation, brokering, discussion, and mediation,” usually with reference to the guiding wisdom of Maoist thought.23 Porcelain Production

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Although contrived to suit ideological needs, such accounts reveal an idealized vision of collective production as a process marked by tension between the incoherence of the everyday and the harmonious union of diverse voices. Another aspect of Rent Collection Courtyard that has been frequently overlooked is the choice of clay as the material best suited to convey these aims. Again, this was a key aspect of its appeal when first produced. Vessels and sculpture of high-fired porcelain are generally associated, in China as elsewhere, with a refined elegance and a privileging of aesthetics over utility, yet unfired or low-fired clay is tied to humility, lowly status, bucolic simplicity, and organic transience. It was for this reason that clay was chosen as a suitable medium for Rent Collection Courtyard, setting up an explicit contrast with the bronze, granite, and marble customarily used for socialist realist sculpture.24 The project’s success inspired a new wave of interest in clay and other such humble materials, making the labor of ceramicists like Liu Yuanchang and his nephew essential for the national narrative of revolutionary transformation. Liu Jianhua recalls a formative encounter with the Rent Collection Courtyard and the collective ideals that it embodied during his first years of study with his uncle: I was young when I first saw the Rent Collection Courtyard . . . still working in the factory and still learning. At the time, I believed that . . . this work was the highest standard of sculpture, that it excelled in pushing artistic boundaries. So, this was what I also hoped to develop and establish in my learning at the factory.25

By 1985, however, when he resigned his post at the Sculpture Factory to enroll at JCI, ideological applications of collectivism and the populist appeal of clay had lost their luster, superseded by a fascination with the human condition and the pull of worlds beyond China. This year also marked the apex of an artistic impulse variously referred to as the ’85 New Wave or ’85 Movement, terms first proposed by Gao Minglu in 1986.26 This impulse arose, like Liu’s artistic ambitions, from a passionate interest in works of European and North American philosophical, psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and cultural theory among young artists and writers of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a parallel commitment to ancient fountainheads of philosophical, cultural, and religious thought. Affectionately diagnosed with an incurable “philosophy/aesthetic fever” (哲学热/美学 热 zhexue re/meixue re), intellectuals and artists initiated a flourishing of collective activity that seemed to herald an overdue revival of the New Culture Movement, closer to the original expression of this impulse than its previous Maoist reimagining.27 Like their forebears, ’85 Movement artists and intellectuals declared that a “cultural falseness and inauthenticity [had] caused the backwardness present in society” and so sought “to enlighten the multitude with a modern cultural and philosophical thought system.” Yet they drew inspiration as well from the revolutionary spirit of the Maoist decades, “breaking down boundaries between art and daily life and pursuing true involvement.”28 This is evident, for example, in the group (qunti 群体) mentality of these years, 28

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when many avant-gardists sought a communal identity, solidarity, and a sharing of responsibility. Gao has attributed the prevalence of this mentality to three crucial functions of collective activity: defensive, economic, and creative. Membership in a group could, on a practical level, shield those who sought to critique social or political norms from censure or retaliation, while the enhanced ability of the group to raise funds for venue hire, the purchase of materials, or transport costs enabled them to operate outside official channels. Creatively, group activity additionally “provided individuals with opportunities to vent what would otherwise have been suppressed . . . [and] to overcome their artistic and social inhibitions,” recalling the ideals of collective production nurtured by the early avant-garde.29 Although fascinated by the untapped potential of the individual and the promise of national regeneration through the ancient and the foreign, artists and intellectuals of the ’85 Movement therefore retained, albeit in modified form, the same emphasis on collectivism that had inspired their avant-gardist antecedents. Isolated from the center of the ’85 Movement by his residence in Jingdezhen and professional life as a factory ceramicist, Liu nevertheless sought to align his nascent artistic practice with the aims of this loose collective. He avidly followed the rise of radical trains of thought, scouring art journals for news of artistic activities nearby and traveling to neighboring cities to visit and document the latest exhibitions. He found little opportunity to participate, however, until his graduation in 1989, after which he was assigned a teaching position at the Yunnan Arts Institute in Kunming, one of the most dynamic centers of avant-garde activity in the 1980s.30 Here, Liu found a circle of like-minded artists committed to the enduring ideals of the Southwest Art Group, a relatively fleeting collective formed in August 1986. The group dissolved after only a few months of activity, yet former members remained influential in the local arts scene. These artists—notably including Zhang Xiaogang (张晓刚, b. 1958), Mao Xuhui (毛 旭辉, b. 1956), Ye Yongqing (叶永青, b. 1958), and Pan Dehai (潘德海, b. 1956)— shared Liu’s early fascination with French modernism, drawing inspiration from the Barbizon School as well as Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938). Although diverse in style and temperament, they found common ground in their ambition to create a “new figurative art” of contorted bodies, vivid color, and abrupt shifts in tone, through which they hoped to express the turmoil of their inner lives. Gao has identified this group with what he terms “current of life” (shengming zhiliu 生命直流) painting, in deference to the inspiration that Zhang, Mao, Ye, Pan, and others drew from French philosopher Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) conceptual model of élan vital. Opposing “a collective rationalisation that had suppressed individual consciousness,” they instead sought to cultivate “the natural disposition of [a] life that embraces violence, irrationality, and intuitive action” by opening “a channel for the soul of mankind [dalinghun 大 灵魂].”31 For the young Liu Jianhua, such ideals no doubt recalled his early encounter with the work of Bergson’s contemporary Rodin, renowned for the expressive spirit of his contorted forms and his ability to animate inert matter with a pulsing vitality. Porcelain Production

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When Liu arrived in Kunming in 1989, several years after the Southwest Art Group had disbanded, their initial commitment to self-expression had been tempered by an attention to the geographic and climatic characteristics of the region. Alongside the topography of the psyche, current-of-life painters now found inspiration in “the virginal ‘wild soil’ (retu [热土]) of southwest China” and “the noble purity of rustic life,” which they identified with the origins of existence and held to be the most genuine expression of a shared humanity.32 Mao Xuhui’s Guishan Series (1985) and Zhang Xiaogang’s Eternal Life (1988) exemplify this in their portrayal of idealized ethnic minorities, innately attuned to the natural world. In the former, farmers and shepherds flourish the tools and fruits of their trade in pastoral landscapes; in the latter, gaunt yet unashamedly naked figures sit, stand, or lie prostrate in more arid terrain, surrounded by symbols of fertility and agricultural abundance that create a mood of mystic union with the inscrutable forces of growth and decay.33 In the sculptural works that he created during his first years in Kunming, including the totemic Life (1989, fig. 2) and Stranger (1990, fig. 3) series in unpainted terracotta and untreated wood, respectively, Liu explored comparable themes. He recalls this as “an especially invigorating and optimistic time” when he enjoyed learning from the older artists: The artists from this collective were very influential, both locally and nationally. Being in Kunming, I could engage with them, and discuss and share ideas . . . We explored ways of making together, curated exhibitions, and reflected on social realities. The natural environment and cultural landscape there [in Yunnan] brought a kind of enlightenment for me. I included all that resonance, reflection, and even confusion in my work [of the time].34 Evoking the atavistic resonance of his materials, Liu fused the anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and vegetal in a sparse yet fertile iconography of the ancient and primal. In his subsequent Green Life (1991–92) and A Spiritual Direction: Leaving the Mainstream (1992–93) fiberglass series (figs. 4–5), he translated this into a longing for transcendence, merging the human and arboreal in figures that resemble sylphs escaping from the hollow trunks which bind them.35 These and other works of the same years are products of a relatively brief foray into expressionist abstraction to which Liu did not return, yet the attraction to the primal he inherited from the Southwest Art Group remained a fundamental aspect of his artistic approach. By 1998, Liu had realized that these experiments with primitivism could not sustain the aesthetic and material complexity he hoped to achieve, concluding after over a decade of abstention from the medium he knew most intimately that the fragility and preciousness of porcelain were better suited for his artistic aims. His return to ceramics closely preceded the spectacular entry of this medium into the global artistic mainstream a year later at the 48th Venice Biennale, at which Liu’s compatriot Cai 30

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figure 2 Liu Jianhua, Life: The Erect Body, 1989, terracotta, 50 × 40 × 3 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

Guo-Qiang inspired debate with his reproduction of the Rent Collection Courtyard (figs. 6–7). Cai’s installation can be compared with Liu’s equally spectacular Regular-Fragile, the selection of which for what would have been the inaugural Chinese Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale four years later may have been prompted by a desire among cultural officials to respond to the critical discussions Cai had provoked, superseding his wry take on socialist realism with a condemnation of global capital. Cai was invited to participate in the Biennale by that year’s creative director, Swiss curator and art historian Harald Szeemann (1933–2005). This iteration of the event was especially significant for the large contingent of mainland Chinese artists Szeemann chose to invite—twenty in total, outnumbering those of any other nation including Italy Porcelain Production

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figure 3 Liu Jianhua, Stranger, 1990, carved wood, 120 × 50 × 40 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

and the United States. Cai’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard not only earned him one of three coveted International Prizes but held great personal significance for Szeemann himself. The latter first learned of the 1965 tableau after acquiring a copy of Rent Collection Courtyard: Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt (1968), a state-endorsed publication distributed globally in the name of Cold War cultural diplomacy. When a member of the University of Kassel faculty cited the clay figures as a case study for collective production and sparked a rally calling for reform in arts education, Szeemann proposed that the work should be included in the 1972 Documenta. The CCP, however, refused his request, perhaps apprehensive of the political tension that such a display in a West German city might cause.36 Cai acknowledged this political history in his “reproduction” of 32

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figure 4 Liu Jianhua, Green Life, 1991–92, fiberglass. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

the work, distributing pamphlets to Biennale visitors which explained the rationale for the project and the collectivist methods through which it was accomplished. He employed one of the workers involved in the original project, Long Xu Li, to lead a team of sculptors who traveled to Venice.37 Their translation of his ideas into reality could even be seen as a revival of “open-door production,” completed entirely on-site, using locally sourced clay, for an audience who were free to watch the artists at work. Cai considered this relational transparency to be a defining feature of his installation, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of the tableau while elevating it to a more conceptual level of significance. “Apart from the narrative depicted,” he has observed, looking back on a formative encounter with Rent Collection Courtyard in his youth, “the Porcelain Production

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figure 5 Liu Jianhua, A Spiritual Direction: Leaving the Mainstream, 1992–93, fiberglass, variable dimensions. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

sculptural process was also depicted as a story.”38 Cai is likely referring here to the documentation of the sculptors’ working methods published at the height of their renown and promoted as evidence for the efficacy of collective production. His version of the tableau also exaggerated its radical materiality—while the clay used for the original had been treated to prevent degradation, Cai chose a more friable clay that started to crumble even while the sculptors were at work. Not only did this highlight the humility and natural origins of the medium, but, like Liu’s shattered porcelain commodities, the collapsing figures served as a visceral reminder of worldly transience, while Cai’s decision to leave the installation unfinished, ordering his work-team to put down their tools on the opening day of the Biennale, dissolved the mythic authority of the socialist realist grand narrative. While his return to porcelain preceded Cai’s experiment, the acclaim and notoriety that Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard attracted perhaps prompted Liu to continue developing his adaptation of this medium, combining a contemporary sensibility with the collectivist methods in which he had been trained. Regular-Fragile was not his first work of contemporary porcelain art, but it was the first for which Liu revisited these methods, and they are in turn central to the meaning of the work. He developed an exacting slip-cast technique to produce his replica commodities that permitted rapid mass production of 34

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figure 6 Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999, 108 life-size sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, sixty tons of clay, wire and wood armature, commissioned for the 48th Venice Biennale. Photograph by Elio Montanari; courtesy of Cai Studio.

identical forms on an assembly line not unlike that on which the original products would have been manufactured. Slip-casting involves the pouring of liquid clay or “slip” into a mold to create a ceramic shell that perfectly replicates the surface and shape of a molded object. By reducing the amount of slip used to the absolute minimum, Liu created extremely thin-walled pieces in which cracks, gaps between mold sections, and warping when fired were not only exposed but encouraged. He received assistance in this delicate task from former co-workers, recreating the collective labor force of the Sculpture Factory to manufacture a work of contemporary art rather than socialist realist sculpture.39 The subject matter and themes of Regular-Fragile further reinforce the emphasis on fragility and ephemerality implied by its production (fig. 8). Conceptually, Liu traces his inspiration to media coverage of several plane crashes in 2002, recalling that images of debris drove him to contemplate the impermanence of life and the fragility of material things.40 He has also cited the depression into which he and his wife fell after their newborn son’s diagnosis with a chronic medical condition in 1994, when Liu remembers he felt acutely aware of human vulnerability. Reflecting on these and other comparable experiences, he realized that porcelain would be an ideal vehicle for the expression of his thoughts: while it seems strong and can endure sustained use over decades, even centuries if handled with care, it remains inherently fragile.41 This Porcelain Production

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figure 7 Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (detail), 1999, 108 life-size sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, sixty tons of clay, wire and wood armature, commissioned for the 48th Venice Biennale. Photograph by Elio Montanari; courtesy of Cai Studio.

tension between endurance and fragility is evident as well in his choice of daily consumables as his subject, including hair driers, bottles, toys, shoes, books, hats, and handbags. The durability of these commodities is regularly taken for granted despite their status as objects designed to be discarded, while the comfort they afford is all too easily exposed as a palliative illusion in the face of our inescapable mortality. For art historian and curator Eugene Tan, the site of manufacture for Regular-Fragile and its core aesthetic conceit of formalist reduction recall the celebrated appropriation of a mass-produced ceramic object by another French modernist. In April 1917, Marcel Duchamp famously submitted a porcelain urinal manufactured by the J. L. Mott Iron Works for the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. While the selection committee rejected his proposal, a photograph of the offending piece taken by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) subsequently appeared in the second issue of The Blind Man in May 1917. For Tan, Liu’s re-packaging of consumer goods as “useless” objects of aesthetic appreciation immediately recalls Duchamp’s removal of a urinal from a public toilet to an art gallery. Like Duchamp, Liu was partially motivated by a desire to dissolve any “sculptural concepts,” replacing personal taste with impersonal, standardized forms. Like the French artist, he sought to “knowingly [transform] everyday objects into [products of] cultural consumption, for the art system,” expos36

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figure 8 Liu Jianhua, Regular-Fragile (detail), 2003, installation of qingbai-glazed porcelain sculpture, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, variable dimensions. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

ing the extent to which “economic progress and financial rewards [are] overriding concerns of contemporary Chinese society, at the expense of everything else”—just as Duchamp, eight decades earlier, had deftly exposed the hypocrisy of an avant-garde that claimed to reward innovation but continued to privilege the market.42 Yet here the similarities between Fountain and Regular-Fragile end. While Duchamp removed his urinal from the conditions of its manufacture, Liu overtly emphasized the industrial origins of his appropriated objects, not only by presenting them as interchangeable artifacts of assembly-line production, but by participating in their making. Furthermore, while the significance of Fountain derives from the act of its recontextualization—the “original” urinal was in fact so unimportant that Duchamp misplaced it in 1918, not long after the scandal surrounding its appropriation—it is, on the other hand, precisely in their materiality and manufacture that Liu’s objects gain new meaning. As doubly reproduced goods, they are inextricably tied to his adolescent Porcelain Production

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employment as an assembly-line ceramicist and the industrial processes of production in which he was trained. At the same time, like Fountain, the homely familiarity of Liu’s porcelain commodities and their arrangement in various configurations open Regular-Fragile to many associations that generate an interpretive multiplicity, parallel with but distinct from their material modularity. Approaching the project through a semiotic frame of reference, art critic and curator Pi Li has compared Liu’s commodities to words removed from syntax, cast adrift in arbitrary combinations that dissolve the logic of the sentence into a series of fragments, legible in isolation but lacking any semblance of mutual coherence. Rather than a denial of communication, Pi explains, this “[allows] viewers from different cultural backgrounds [to interpret the work] according to their . . . life and cultural experience.”43 Separated from their initial context and denied the function that once gave them meaning, Liu’s replica commodities support a hypothetically infinite range of readings. Liu has further extended this dislocation by remaking the objects in a material that renders them wholly unusable and therefore entirely conceptual in significance, in contrast to the eminent suitability of the unaltered, thick-bodied porcelain of Duchamp’s urinal for its originally intended purpose. Nevertheless, these replica commodities do retain some traces of their former meaning: just as the word “fragile” carries affective associations, a discarded toy or shoe evokes feelings of abject impermanence that recall Liu’s conception of the work as a meditation on mortality, catastrophe, and vulnerability. Liu himself has noted this, writing in 2014 that, the different configurations of the work, in different contexts and display spaces, [are intended to inspire a] range of viewer experiences, [and to] create completely different affective sensations—[from] joy, pain, excitement, fantasy [and] secrecy, [to] fear.44

His replica commodities, then, are not rendered meaningless by their dislocation but are thereby opened to associations that might not have emerged in their intended context. Their material modularity disguises an equally multivalent conceptual flexibility as parts of a complex whole arranged and rearranged in countless narrative permutations. Liu’s use of porcelain certainly gives his work a culturally specific inflection, yet the phantoms of his objects’ past lives, of places distant in space and time, and his own former life as an assembly-line ceramicist, open his project to the currents of memory and translation that are so central to the concept of transexperience. Regular-Fragile can therefore be read as an ode to the vagaries of a modular existence. Dispersed across space and time, its components become traces of lives outgrown or forgotten in the palimpsest of experiences accrued by those dwelling “in-between.” Chiu has argued that “one of the most important principles of . . . transexperience is the idea of evolutionary change” across chronological and geographical distance, uniting past and 38

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present, departure and destination, within “an ongoing process of adapting to changing circumstances.”45 This process, by definition, must remain incomplete—in Chen Zhen’s words, it is “a special process of experience-accumulating . . . opposed to any attempt of theorising and mechanising.”46 Chiu and Hou have associated transexperience with émigré artists, like Chen, who are “displaced between cultures, societies, and languages,” and desire “to go beyond China as [a] sole reference point.”47 Yet this concept can equally be applied to artists, like Liu, who remain in China, as well as works of art (among other things) that exist between various contexts of meaning and making. It is to this material aspect of transexperience that we should turn in our reflection on Regular-Fragile, the component parts of which reproduce commodities that have journeyed far from their places of manufacture to inhabit contexts of consumption across the world, only to be reappropriated and “translated” into a common medium, then immersed within a network of global exchange as objects of aesthetic speculation. EXPLOITATION TO EMPOWERMENT

The privileging of concept over material is even more apparent in the reception of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, first shown at the Tate Modern in 2010 (fig. 9). Like RegularFragile, this work derived its meaning and impact from the spectacular quantity and massed display of its component parts. In contrast to the workshop-style production of Liu’s installation, however, Ai relied on a factory-style model which effaced any trace of labor in the final product. A comparable erasure is evident in many works of New Export China and reflects a wider separation in contemporary ceramic art in general between those artists who hire artisans with little thought for their working conditions and those who seek to actively engage with social realities. In practice, of course, this distinction is rarely clearcut, with most working at various points on a continuum of collaboration that extends from exploitation to empowerment. Sunflower Seeds is a case study in artistic mass production, bearing all the hallmarks of a category of material culture that can be broadly defined as “factory art.” For Lothar Ledderose, cited in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, works of art within this category are distinguished by their creation according to five basic principles: an organized workforce, division of labor, production in multiple, standardization, and rigorous quality control. The supervisor of this process is usually not an artisan and may have little knowledge of the work involved, responsible only for sourcing funds, materials, and equipment; overseeing workers; and setting quotas. Employees in a factory system are assigned strict hours and a clear roster of responsibilities and are required to produce a prearranged proportion of the daily output. Those in a workshop, on the other hand, identified by Ledderose as the primary alternative to a factory, learn their trade through master-apprentice lineages of practice, share responsibility for various aspects of the production process, alter their output to meet fluctuations in supply or demand, and generally prioritize collaboration.48 Porcelain Production

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figure 9 Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, installation of approximately 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, Tate Modern, London, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

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figure 10 Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds (detail), 2010, installation of approximately 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, Tate Modern, London, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

The basic principles of factory labor just outlined were essential to the making of Sunflower Seeds. Ai Weiwei and his studio team organized the artisans employed to manufacture the seeds into a highly efficient workforce, with designated work-units taking responsibility for each of the twenty to thirty aspects of the process, from the refining of raw clay and press-molding of seeds to their firing and painting with grey-black stripes (fig. 10). The latter was the most time-consuming task, requiring assigned artisans to work eight-hour days for a wage just above the minimum hourly rate in the city of about ¥6, or ninety cents. Those employed to do this were seated at workstations in a pair of repurposed residential buildings, “hunched over plywood tables,” where they emptied sacks of unpainted seeds in a haze of ink fumes and clay dust.49 Their supervisor—Ai’s Jingdezhen-based collaborator Liu Weiwei—oversaw the provision of supplies; supervision and payment of artisans; and quality control, ensuring that only the best-painted seeds were retained while those deemed unsatisfactory were dumped in a nearby landfill.50 In contrast to Liu Jianhua’s workshop-style model of manufacture, Ai therefore adhered closely to factory methods of delegation, mass production, and standardization. The details of manufacture cited are drawn from the text published alongside the installation of Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern. In this text, curator Juliet Bingham Porcelain Production

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explains that the making of the 100 million seeds, from the initial stages of experiment with materials and methods to their final export from Jingdezhen to London, required two and a half years of labor. In his recently published memoir, however, Ai condenses this time frame to include only the six months from the acceptance of his proposal in March 2010 to the opening of the exhibition in October. His recollection of the seeds’ manufacture also differs: It was through . . . meticulous, patient labour that the seeds steadily accumulated until the required volume was reached . . . [The artisans] would pick up a batch of seeds from the kiln, take them home, and get some painting done in any free moment when their child was playing, or their parents were preparing a meal . . . sunflower seeds piled high under the eaves of house after house.51

The production of the work is here presented as a communal activity, a cottage industry led by a spontaneous collective of equal collaborators with the right to choose their hours and produce at their own pace. This contrasts not only with the version of events outlined by Bingham and designer Brendan McGetrick in the 2010 exhibition text, but also with that offered in 2020 by Ai’s contact in the Porcelain Capital, Liu Weiwei: [An] extremely challenging project . . . We worked on this for almost three years. In the beginning we experimented slowly . . . There were so many steps involved . . . [The artisans] worked in about ten different locations. Some . . . in villages, some in city areas. I rented some factory spaces. It wasn’t easy to supervise them. We had a supervisor for each team. I had to oversee all of this.52

It isn’t clear why Ai would choose to alter the narrative of this work so significantly, although his divergent recollection may indicate some discomfort with the allegations of exploitation which he faced in the years following the Tate Modern exhibition. Such alteration or even erasure of the conditions of manufacture marks another distinction with Regular-Fragile. In the latter, traces of production are evident in the warping, exposed molding seams, and sagging forms of the component parts. The standardization of the mass-produced commodities from which these are molded further highlights their imperfections, prompting viewers to reflect on the factory origins of everyday items. In the display of Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern, on the other hand, a fifteen-minute documentary shown on two discreetly placed screens offered the only clear evidence of two and a half years of back-breaking labor. Photographs of artisans at work were also included in the exhibition text, along with the details of manufacture outlined above and comments from one of the artisans involved. Yet these gestures toward demystification were supplementary to the main display and likely read or viewed only by a select few visitors. Furthermore, Ai assumes the role of protagonist 42

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and sole narrator throughout the video, explaining his intentions in detail and summarizing the stages of production, largely in English, while those employed to produce the seeds are entirely absorbed in their labor, silent except when requested to speak. They remain unnamed, circumscribed by their role as hired hands with no opportunity to express their understanding of the installation or reflect on the process of its manufacture. Although central to the work’s making and meaning, these laborers are as interchangeable and apparently unremarkable as the seeds they were hired to produce. Hong Kong–based artist and activist Zheng Bo has identified Ai’s documentary film as an attempt to divide the meaning and making of his work into two discrete spheres of meaning. The first of these, evoked by footage of the seeds’ production, foregrounds practical and economic concerns, including employment contracts and the stages of manufacture, but with a conspicuous erasure of sensitive elements like the payment of wages or questions of working conditions. The second sphere encompasses symbolic, aesthetic, and political significance, with scenes of Ai seated in a gallery, speaking directly to the viewer about his intentions. Not only are the artisans who created Sunflower Seeds deprived of individual identity or recognition for their efforts, they are thereby removed from the “higher” functions of the work as an artistic statement and instead relegated to the factories of a distant industrial center.53 The finished installation and the years of labor involved in its making are presented as entirely discrete, with the former implicitly deemed more worthy of interest. This division in the documentary is reinforced by its screening as a supplement in the Tate display, rather than the record of an integral aspect of the work. The separation of making from meaning is also apparent in many reviews and scholarly analyses of Sunflower Seeds, which have tended to focus on aesthetic or political associations with little more than a passing mention of production. Most critics have cast Ai’s actions as a statement on the role of the individual in society and the tensions between personal and collective identities, noting the extent to which the massive quantity and bland uniformity of the seeds contrast with their handmade idiosyncrasies. Mass production does admittedly feature in this interpretation, yet, rather than details of making, it is the act of mobilizing a substantial workforce to achieve a singular aim that has drawn most comment, as a model for the creative potential of collaborative authorship and the virtues of mutually defined goals.54 Several writers have further highlighted the symbolism of the sunflower seed as a popular Chinese snack and humble source of comfort, camaraderie, and community.55 This relational theme reflects the planned interactivity of the installation, which Ai had intended to invite visitors to walk across and sit within, tracing patterns in the carpet of seeds and enjoying the texture of their unglazed surface. Such an immersive and tactile experience would likely have significantly altered the meaning of the work, fostering what one writer has termed an “affective experience” that could potentially have enabled viewers in London to empathize with the artisans in Jingdezhen whose labor they were privileged to enjoy.56 Only two days after the exhibition’s opening, Porcelain Production

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however, barriers were installed to prevent visitors from entering and walking on the installation after health concerns were prompted by the appearance of clouds of hazardous porcelain dust and pigment residue—toxic respiratory irritants that can bring about chronic silicosis.57 Artisans in Jingdezhen are regularly exposed to such pollutants, with little protection, so the cordoning off of the seeds only served to reinforce the divide between their display and production and thereby confirm the separation of worker, artist, and viewer. Sunflower Seeds has also been subject to a range of explicitly political interpretations, some more overt than others but all grounded in an identification of the installation as a critique of authoritarian rule in China. While certain elements of the work do serve this purpose, its politicization further cements the divide enforced between the place of making and that of display, drawn in this case along reductive ideological lines. The seeds have been read, for example, as an oblique reference to Cultural Revolution imagery of Mao Zedong as a radiant red sun, surrounded by sunflowers with faces turned upward in adoration.58 They have also been described as an allusion to the exile in 1957 of over half a million students and intellectuals, including Ai’s father, to prison camps in Manchuria and Xinjiang in the wake of the infamous Hundred Flowers Campaign. For those who subscribe to this and other such politicized interpretations, the denial of the usual role of seeds as a source of new life brought about by their reproduction in the “dead” material of porcelain offers a poignant allegory for authoritarian censorship and propaganda.59 These readings of Sunflower Seeds are closely informed by current European and North American attitudes toward the PRC, as an authoritarian state where the violation of human rights, a lack of governmental accountability and bureaucratic transparency, and a denial of democratic elections have been endemic issues for decades. The denigration and distrust that these issues provoke among critics outside of China are visible in the public profile of the exhibition. Sunflower Seeds was routinely praised throughout the duration of its display as a subversive statement in support of human rights—intentionally or otherwise, it opened just four days after democracy activist Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) received a Nobel Peace Prize and less than a month before UK Prime Minister David Cameron made his first official visit to the PRC. Ai himself published an opinion piece in UK periodical The Guardian to coincide with this visit, urging England and other European nations to condemn the CCP for their ongoing human rights abuses.60 His highly publicized arrest on political grounds in April 2011, two months before Sunflower Seeds had been scheduled to close, further reinforced this image of the exhibition and gave it a new symbolic function as a rallying point for protesters demanding his release.61 Reflecting the rigid separation of making from meaning in its installation and interpretation, this popular idolizing of Sunflower Seeds as a subversive political statement strengthened an already perceived divide between the PRC as a bastion of repressive authoritarianism and Europe as an apparently beleaguered outpost of democracy. 44

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One source of such perceptions, at least in the art world, can be traced to the earlier reception of works in the “Political Pop” (Zhengzhi Bopu 政治波普) style which ignited the growth of a global market for Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s. Writing in response to this emerging trend in 1993, Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé noted the momentum initiated by the events of 1989, which “caught the world’s attention [at] the centre stage of electronic media fame,” provoking a fascination for things Chinese. Yet these events, he noted, had been radically simplified for public consumption, substituting “the crude and universal [for] harsh and contradictory realities,” and reduced to a battle of “the young against the old, the people against the powerholders, dissidents against ideologues, free spirits against an ossified status quo.” This appealing frisson of repression and resistance translated all too readily into the cultural sphere, as “the art markets of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West [welcomed] the perennial avant-garde of China with its alluring patina of the illicit underground,” transforming radical subversive art into “[a] jewel in the crown of Chinese socialism.”62 Writing in 1996, Hou Hanru observed the fulfillment of these portents, maligning “the frequent presence of [Political Pop] in art fairs, galleries, institutions, and the media” as well as the “superficial and manipulative reading [of Chinese realities]” that it supported. The “Cold-War ideological eye” to which such works sought to appeal played a pivotal role in his denigration of “export art” as an ersatz avant-gardism outlined in the introduction to this book.63 In 2011, Hou drew an insightful parallel between this conflation of ideology and commerce in the 1990s and the sudden interest in Chinese art following Ai’s arrest in that year. While he criticized the heavy-handed response to Ai’s dissidence, Hou urged readers “[to] look into the complexity of the situation and understand it from a broader perspective so [that] protests against the abuse of civil rights obtain a real criticality.” Too often, he observed, “images of dissidence . . . meet the consumer’s imaginations and projections of . . . the other, primed by the logic of the mass media,” taking precedence over “complex realities that require intellectual effort, moral engagement . . . intelligence and critical distance.” Such images, he explained, tend to serve “a . . . political exoticism and voyeurism that can only tacitly reinforce feelings of superiority,” indulging the “humanitarian reflex” that drives the imposition of neoliberal ideals and neocolonial interests propagated across the world in the name of democracy.64 Much the same could be said of the impulsive affiliation of Sunflower Seeds not only with Ai’s arrest, but with broader contests between authoritarianism and liberalism, collectivism and individuality, free speech and uniformity—themes which appear again and again in published commentary on this work. Such reductive dichotomies also reflect a division in the general category of factory art noted in the opening lines of this section: a divergence between those artists who employ artisans with little thought for their social or professional conditions and those who seek to engage with and support a range of interests. Artists who tend toward the former frequently position their artisan-collaborators as anonymous Porcelain Production

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workhands, equivalent in status to the migrant workers or gongren (工人) employed to shoulder the menial or degrading tasks shunned by those with the right to refuse. The act of collaboration therefore becomes a private enterprise motivated by personal economic interests. Although the term gongren and associated ideals of collective labor gained heroic connotations in the Maoist era, the increasingly dispersed population of migrant workers, their exploitation by multinational corporations, and their political powerlessness have shifted the significance of this epithet from a badge of pride to a mark of shame for the voiceless and disenfranchised. Gongren are now regarded as the inverse counterpart of gongmin (公民), a term which can be translated as “public person” and which is commonly used to refer to politically aware citizens who assert their rights and who oppose impositions of state authority. For artists whose actions align with the second attitude outlined in this paragraph, it is the potential of gongren to become gongmin that takes precedence in the process of collaboration, motivated at least in part by an entrepreneurial desire to transform existing social conditions. These paired concepts of enterprise/entrepreneurship and gongren/gongmin imply a continuum of relationships between artists and artisans, from passive exploitation at one extreme to active empowerment at the other. Enterprise and entrepreneurship are usually discussed in the field of economic theory but have notably been applied by business administration and management scholars Daniel Hjorth and Robin Holt to the parallel world of artistic practice, and specifically to the making and meaning of Sunflower Seeds. Hjorth and Holt distinguish these terms according to their respective emphases on the social and the economic, whereby the latter is emphasized in enterprise and the former in entrepreneurship. They associate enterprise with value-oriented self-interest and a desire for quantifiable results, like profit generation, while entrepreneurship endorses open-ended social outcomes and a questioning of established convention.65 In his critique of the film produced for display alongside Sunflower Seeds, Zheng Bo has used the second pair of concepts (gongren/gongmin) in much the same manner to describe two models of artistic collaboration. He explains that the “silent labour” of gongren has become an indispensable resource for artists seeking to create large-scale sculptures or installations. On the other hand, a gongren can become a gongmin through affiliation with projects that create platforms for these laborers to express their creativity as participants in the artistic process. Some inequalities of power and resources can remain in such projects, but this model at least aspires to foster equitable partnerships.66 If we consider these conceptual pairings in relation to each other, we see that the economics-driven model of enterprise depends on the silent labor of gongren, while the entrepreneur as initiator of social change is an ideal companion for the politically activist gongmin. Ai’s employment of artisans in Jingdezhen conforms unequivocally with the enterprise model of artistic production: the artisans he hired remained anonymous and voiceless as an economically viable means to an end. Yet Hjorth and Holt argue that 46

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Sunflower Seeds instead exemplified an entrepreneurial mode, casting Ai as a socially engaged artist determined to encourage the viewers and producers of his work in their respective social aspirations. In their interpretation, Sunflower Seeds challenged the stereotypical image of China as the workshop of the world by allowing “plural voices to be heard, in multiple ways, without the dominance of a single perspective.”67 Other European and North American critics have echoed this endorsement of Sunflower Seeds as a platform for social change, arguing that it supported the conservation of “traditional craft production in . . . village-led workshops,” “promoted satisfying employment for people in a faded region,” “provided work . . . in this now almost derelict town [Jingdezhen],” and “revitalised . . . a manufacturing sector [that had] become redundant,” to cite only a few of the more ebullient statements.68 Several qualifying points should be raised to contest this analysis of Ai’s installation. Above all, the claim that Sunflower Seeds revived the porcelain industry in Jingdezhen conjures an image of an ailing provincial outpost that can be readily refuted by reference to the reality of the city’s historic importance and contemporary renewal as an artistic hub. There is no evidence that Ai’s project substantially improved the welfare of artisans in the Porcelain Capital or the ceramics industry in general. Production figures for 2009 and 2010 show that his contribution to the local economy comprised less than 1 percent of the city’s annual porcelain production revenue. Even if his financial contribution to the making of each seed is set at ¥16 ($2.38), their 2012 sale price for orders over a hundred on internet shopping giant Alibaba—and we know that his contribution through wages amounted to far less than this—the roughly ¥160 million ($2.3 million) that this would have generated over two and a half years would have comprised only a fraction of the combined ceramics output of ¥26 billion ($3.8 billion) for 2009–10.69 This was moreover a one-time investment, so hardly substantiates the claim that Ai single-handedly revived the industry. Even Liu Weiwei could not entirely rely on Ai to support his workshop, and not one cent of the $1.3 million gained through the licensed sale of seeds to arts institutions around the world before May 2012—a figure that is likely now much greater—passed to the artisans who created them.70 It could be argued that this measure of social impact is couched in economic terms, and that the project had a more intangible benefit as a point of access to the opportunities of the global art world. Yet, while this access was indeed greater than that afforded to artisans by their usual work, it too was limited by the separation of making from meaning. The members of Ai’s workforce were aware neither of the purpose nor destination of their products. An unnamed artisan, asked about the function of the seeds and where they were to be shipped, is recorded in the exhibition text to have replied, “we don’t know, but we know they’ll be used to make money,” speculating that they were intended for “adornment.”71 Ai himself has justified this ignorance by stating that his workers “[would] never understand . . . that it’s for an exhibition,” so there was simply no reason to tell them.72 This denial of self-awareness is also a denial of any potential for the laborers to find their voice as gongmin, enforcing their continued Porcelain Production

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anonymity as voiceless gongren. Ironically, in the years since the Tate installation, the ceramic seeds have become an emblem of Ai’s ongoing crusade against authoritarian censorship and human rights abuses, distributed as keepsakes to those who have participated in his various activist campaigns. Rather than entrepreneurship, Sunflower Seeds is therefore an ideal case study for the opposing model of private enterprise. Far from transcending “the dominance of a single perspective” and amplifying multiple voices, as Hjorth and Holt assert, the work centers on Ai’s artistic vision and serves primarily to enhance his global reputation. Ledderose has shown that mass production generally discourages plurality, as the standardization and division of labor required to establish a modular system tend to support social, cultural, and political homogeneity, curtailing personal freedoms. 73 Regarding Hjorth and Holt’s argument that Sunflower Seeds upends the stereotype of China as a workshop for the world, it should be evident by now that the installation and its making instead perpetuated this image, following a pattern initiated by the historic export trade: porcelain products created for European clients by Chinese artisans with little or no knowledge of those consuming their labor. The manufacture of the seeds likewise mirrors the manufacture of contemporary commodities by offshore labor, once again reinforcing the binary of China-as-producer, Europe-as-consumer established and endorsed by global capital. These stereotyped commercial relations between China and Europe can also be seen as a defining influence in Liu Jianhua’s extensive and eclectic oeuvre. While Ai adheres to such structures with little apparent critical reflection, however, Liu’s approach is defined by a scathing social critique. This is most apparent in a pair of multimedia installations created in 2006 and 2007, the first of which, Yiwu Survey (2006), was commissioned to sit among the “large-scale, interactive, colourful, illuminated . . . endeavours” on show at the 6th Shanghai Biennale.74 Rather than following the logic of the spectacle, Liu chose to satirize the superficial abundance of the Biennale and the circuits of cultural and economic exchange that it represents. Yiwu is a manufacturing center in Zhejiang famed for its enormous output of massproduced low-end consumables. With a population of 1.2 million, it’s a relatively small municipality by Chinese standards, but, in 2006, the city’s factories oversaw the manufacture of 320,000 product varieties (of an estimated 500,000 worldwide), exported to 212 regions and countries at a volume of over 1,000 containers a day. Most of these were throwaway items—like those replicated in porcelain for Regular-Fragile—including imitation jewelry, cosmetics, hosiery, artificial flowers, plastic photograph frames and light fittings, destined for discount stores and street-side stalls.75 Yiwu’s dominance of the low-end market offered an archetypal image of China’s economic and social development since the 1970s. In the world system these numbers invoke, China figures largely as an inexhaustible source of inferior yet inexpensive commodities, mass-produced by faceless and voiceless laborers perceived to possess no more humanity than brute machines, and bought by distant consumers who decry low 48

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manufacturing standards and unsafe working practices even while eagerly devouring the products of such conditions. The title of Yiwu Survey also evokes the homophone yiwu (遗物), meaning “remnants” or “leftover things.” In A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012), Wu Hung explains that this term was once used to describe “possessions left behind either by a dead person or a defunct dynasty,” but it can be more generally understood to refer to “any object that points to the past [as] a surviving portion of a vanished whole . . . severed from its original context.” As such, yiwu hold double significance as traces of the past made meaningful by their survival to the present, and as vessels for the rebirth of a lost event, experience, location, or individual which possess transformative power only while they remain fractured, partial, or incomplete.76 Separated from their contexts of production and use, like the replicas in Regular-Fragile, the “leftover things” in Yiwu Survey exist in an interpretive void, their intended function and affect sustaining multiple associations with a limitless constellation of pasts, presents, and futures. At the same time, their low production standards and inbuilt obsolescence conjure the specter of our mortality and the realization that one day our own possessions, too, will be remnants of the dead and defunct. For the Biennale version of Yiwu Survey, Liu mounted the severed mouth of a shipping container on one wall of a gallery space in the Shanghai Art Museum, creating the impression that it had burst through the side of the building to release an avalanche of goods produced and purchased in Yiwu (figs. 11–12).77 A parallel with Regular-Fragile is evident, yet here it was not porcelain replicas but the commodities themselves that took the stage, albeit still united by a common material (plastic) as well as by their gaudy colors and patterns, no longer concealed beneath a monochrome glaze. This alluring yet superficial abundance may have been intended to echo the comparably eye-catching works of art on show elsewhere in the venue and the broader context of global trade in which commercial and artistic products alike circulate. Liu presented the conclusions he had drawn from his study of this circulation across one side of the container, exposing the exploitation and disempowerment on which our dreams of material splendor are predicated. While Ai would later uncritically reproduce these systemic inequalities by commissioning anonymous artisans to produce his work for distant consumption, Liu therefore sought to compel his viewers to confront the extent of their over-inflated and over-indulged appetites for excess. In the following year, Liu orchestrated an even more scathing indictment with a companion piece appropriately titled Export-Cargo Transit (2007). Like Yiwu Survey, this work drew on first-hand research, focused this time on the recycling industry in Guangdong. Liu spent a year traveling in this province, talking to workers in the industry and touring the landfills and open-air dumps to which much of the world’s garbage is illegally imported. Meticulously recording his findings, he was horrified to witness toxic waste burned or buried, “rivers . . . so black that it was impossible to see through the water . . . workers without any protective gear.”78 Liu discovered that the import of Porcelain Production

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figure 11 Liu Jianhua, Yiwu Survey, 2006, mixed media installation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, variable dimensions. Private Collection, Switzerland; courtesy of the artist. figure 12 Liu Jianhua, Yiwu Survey (detail), 2006, mixed media installation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, variable dimensions. Private Collection, Switzerland; courtesy of the artist.

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waste into China had become a $65 billion industry, with over 40 million tons entering the country every year, in direct violation of the UN Basel Convention enforced from 1992 to prevent export of hazardous waste from First-World to Third-World countries. While Yiwu Survey exposed an insatiable global appetite for low-end goods, ExportCargo Transit uncovered the underside of this exchange: a relentless flow of discarded remnants from the United States, Australia, and Europe, many of which originated in Yiwu or other Chinese industrial centers. In the accompanying presentation of his findings, Liu emphasized that the responsibility for this degradation lay as much with the CCP, who not only endorsed the importing of waste for a substantial fee but turned a blind eye to dumping by companies in China.79 With Export-Cargo Transit, Liu developed his social critique into a blistering denunciation of the ties of complicity that implicate us all in the workings of global capital. Liu presented his denunciation once again by reenacting the movement of goods (or, in this case, waste): he “exported” over ten tons of foreign refuse from Guangdong to the Shanghai Gallery of Art. Here, on the third floor of a building that also housed Armani and Hugo Boss—two of the many luxury boutiques now resident on the Bund, a colonial-era promenade along the Huangpu River—Liu scattered his cargo across the floor of the venue in piles, bound bales, and Plexiglas crates (fig. 13). As in Yiwu Survey, plastic predominates, with computer components, aluminum foil, packaging material, adhesive backings, and other detritus of everyday life. A view of Pudong’s skyscrapers on the opposite bank of the river could be seen through an open window, while the walls were plastered with passages of text in Chinese and English—excerpts from media coverage of the recycling industry that Liu had consulted for his research. In addition to the noise of Shanghai, speakers played looped recordings of shipyards and waste-processing plants, while a dilapidated compactor in the foyer completed the circuit, from warehouse, to sorting, to landfill. Liu chose the venue for Export-Cargo Transit with care, considering both its contemporary and historical associations. Constructed in 1916 to house the Union Insurance Society of Canton at a time when British companies held great power in the city, and in China in general, the former Union Building had reopened in 2004 as Three on the Bund after extensive renovation by US architect Michael Graves, now housing high-end boutiques and restaurants. It therefore simultaneously encapsulates past global power imbalances set in motion by imperialist aggression as well as the present ascendancy of the multinational corporations founded on these legacies of extraction and exploitation. Liu further complicated such contextual “hauntings” by drawing a parallel with the contemporary art market, with the words “Art Export” prominently stamped on the Plexiglas crates, rebranding their contents as works of art for purchase by foreign collectors and export overseas, perhaps even back to the country from which their component parts had been shipped as waste (fig. 14). As in RegularFragile, the unremarkable and undesirable were thereby transformed into objects of aesthetic appreciation, yet rather than encouraging interpretative plurality, here Liu Porcelain Production

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figure 13 Liu Jianhua, Export-Cargo Transit, 2007, mixed media installation, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, variable dimensions. Private Collection, Switzerland; courtesy of the artist.

aimed to expose the environmental crisis precipitated by mass production and mass consumption. Export-Cargo Transit and Yiwu Survey compel viewers to consider the ongoing consequences of market reform in China. Both works draw attention to a province and city, respectively, that have been at the forefront of this transformation. In July 1979, Guangdong was chosen as a test site for the first significant measure enacted to implement the reforms of late 1978: the naming of Shenzhen, Shantou, and Zhuhai in this province, as well as Xiamen in Fujian, as “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs). Following the example set by Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City, which had been named a dedicated “Export Processing Zone” in 1966 and had contributed greatly to the economic growth of the Republic of China, a series of preferential measures were introduced in the SEZs to entice foreign investment. This proved so effective that a further fourteen urban centers in eight provinces were named “Open Coastal Cities” in April 1984. Hainan was designated an SEZ in 1988, and Shanghai’s Pudong New Area was established in 1990, opposite the Bund. By the end of the 1980s, these commercial hubs had collectively attracted over 5,000 import-export companies, while revenue from foreign trade had increased from $21 billion in 1978, to $166 billion in 1992.80 The central role of Shanghai and the SEZs in Reform and Opening received further confirmation when Deng embarked on what has come to be known as his “southern tour” in January 1992. By November 1989, the octogenarian former leader had resigned from his last official position amid a storm of criticism surrounding his authorization of military deployment against the protesters who had gathered in Tiananmen Square earlier that year. Calls to abolish SEZs and other aspects of reform at the Eighth 52

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figure 14 Liu Jianhua, Export-Cargo Transit (detail), 2007, mixed media installation, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, variable dimensions. Private Collection, Switzerland; courtesy of the artist.

Plenum of the 13th Central Committee in November 1991, however, further intensified by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December, compelled him to emerge from retirement to defend his policies. Seeking to escape the stranglehold of the dominant conservative CCP faction in Beijing, on January 17, 1992, he left for Shenzhen, stopping along the way in Wuhan, and then traveling to Zhuhai, Zhongshan, and Shunde, finally bringing his tour to a conclusion in Shanghai. At each stop, he made sure to “[boast] of the accomplishments of the economic reform program and consistently attacked [his] post-Tiananmen opponents,” inspiring a series of special reports in the local press. These dispatches were later compiled and republished in the People’s Daily on March 31 to coincide with the unscheduled broadcast of a CCTV documentary Porcelain Production

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detailing his travels. This media coverage ensured that Deng’s legacy remained intact, prompting a new wave of reform under his successor Jiang Zemin (b. 1926), general secretary of the CCP from 1989 to 2002 and president from 1993 to 2003.81 When Liu created Export-Cargo Transit, Yiwu Survey, and, to a lesser extent, Regular-Fragile, he directed his critical gaze toward the consequences of this economic transformation, two decades in the making. If we compare Liu’s work with Sunflower Seeds, a question inevitably arises: could Ai Weiwei have done more to acknowledge, document, or transform the social realities exposed by the making of his installation? In response to the accusation that his work is a case study for the exploitation of faceless workers by private enterprise, could he have dismantled, or at least mitigated against the separation of making from meaning by highlighting production processes, and by explaining the purpose of the seeds to the artisans involved? The latter could, for example, have been granted greater access to the products of their labor, not necessarily with a trip to London, but perhaps with a video feed of the exhibition or a complimentary (Chinese-language) copy of the text. This text itself could have been enriched with passages of reflection and interpretation from China-based contributors to open a window on their world for readers elsewhere. Following Liu, Ai could have assumed an active role in the making of the seeds, rather than overseeing their production from a distance. Finally, a more fulfilling remuneration than minimum wage may have allowed those hired to turn their involvement to advantage—a certificate of participation, for instance, could have proven useful when searching for future employment or commissions. Any of these strategies may have greatly enhanced the potential for social transformation and opportunities for the gongren involved in Sunflower Seeds to claim independence as gongmin. Yet in the end, another question must be asked: why would Ai Weiwei, as an artist, want to develop a socially equitable model of factory production? What would he gain? For Ai, as for other creators of New Export China, the desire to separate his installation from its industrial origins, to cast off the denigrated status of artisanal production, is understandably a much more compelling incentive. CONTEMPORARY COLLECTIVISM

Despite a tension between entrepreneurial ideals and market-oriented enterprise, some projects in porcelain have successfully combined these competing ambitions, balancing the professional need to develop an independent artistic persona with support for social change. One of the most successful examples of this delicate equilibrium is The Vase Project: Made in China—Landscape in Blue (2004–6), another largescale installation comprising component parts manufactured by artisans in Jingdezhen under the guidance of a visiting contemporary artist: in this case, the late US-based ceramicist Barbara Diduk. The Vase Project opened to the public in 2006 at Jingdezhen’s Great China Museum, later touring throughout North America from 2011 to 2016. Like Ai and Liu, Diduk commissioned a large order of pieces for massed display, but, in contrast to the thousands of replicas made for Regular-Fragile and the 100 million 54

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seeds produced for Sunflower Seeds, she constrained her request to a relatively modest one hundred and one blue-and-white vases. The component parts of each installation were also distinct—those created for Liu and Ai are standardized products of modular manufacturing, while the diverse range of designs painted on Diduk’s vases, although inspired by a single source, are unique in style and composition. The Vase Project differs most in the circumstances of its making. Those who worked on Sunflower Seeds received little acknowledgment for their labor and even Liu’s studio assistants remained anonymous and unseen in the final work, yet Diduk’s participantcollaborators were a significant presence in each version of her installation. At the Great China Museum, photograph portraits of almost every artisan were shown at the entrance with images of the vases they painted, and their names appeared again in this and later displays in the labels for each vase. This emphasis on individual expression rather than economy of production likely arose from Diduk’s personal experience of creating ceramics in Jingdezhen—an experience radically distinct from Liu’s youthful employment at the Sculpture Factory. Her first ideas for the project arose in 2002, while undertaking an artist residency in the city. Two years later, her colleague and friend Zhao Yu, then a student at the JCI, introduced Diduk to Wang Zhangliu, a masterartisan specializing in the production of export porcelain. Diduk commissioned Wang to paint two vases with scenes of the city’s industrial landscape, focusing on the kilnchimneys that once pierced the horizon but are now increasingly scarce. Following standard practice, Diduk gave Wang several sketches, but he was free to interpret these as he wished.82 In contrast to Sunflower Seeds and Regular-Fragile, The Vase Project therefore grew from an open-ended sharing of creative duties. After selecting a design, Diduk and Zhao started recruiting painters to adapt Wang’s work. They relied primarily on word-of-mouth, visiting studios and factories from 2004 to 2006 but making sure to select artisans of various ages, genders, levels of employment, and stylistic schools. The form of the vase was modeled on a wheelthrown piece found on a factory floor and reproduced in bulk, using the slip-cast process that Liu adopted for Regular-Fragile but without his economy of materials. Each participant received two vases: a blank and the piece that had been painted by the previous artisan, from which they were asked to draw inspiration.83 They retained creative freedom, effectively collaborating with Diduk and Wang in a creation by compilation that recalls the collectivist ideals of the twentieth-century avant-garde, and that propelled Diduk’s initial sketch in many unexpected directions. In addition to creative autonomy, The Vase Project is also remarkable for the remuneration that artisans received, and the channel through which this was distributed. In contrast to Ai, who decided the rate at which workers would be paid but delegated payment to an associate, Diduk and Zhao invited participants to set their own rates and then personally distributed these funds. While most painters quoted a standard rate of only twenty cents, or about ¥1.60, Diduk and Zhao offered $5–10 (¥40–80), generally paying the higher price.84 For a single vase, a painter could receive not only as much as Porcelain Production

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fifty times their usual piece-rate, but an amount equal to that which those employed by Ai were paid for two eight-hour days of repetitive labor. It could be argued that Ai’s artisans benefited more in the long-term, yet the sheer number of those employed for Sunflower Seeds suggests a low rate of employee retention, especially as many would have been migrant laborers resident in the city for only a few days. The amount of remuneration, however, is not the salient point: the most important distinction between the projects is the fact that Diduk and Zhao negotiated on participants’ terms as collaborators rather than employers. The work they offered was also more creatively stimulating, in contrast to the monotony of painting stripes of ink on thousands of identical seeds. One of the defining qualities of entrepreneurship is the ability of the entrepreneur to connect social potential with economic realities. Entrepreneurs enable new modes of social behavior, extending, challenging, even overturning prevailing norms. Sunflower Seeds did little to alter such norms beyond assigning laborers to manufacture an uncommon product. The Vase Project, on the other hand, modeled several interventions into existing social conditions. Every artisan was named, for example, while their works were shown initially in Jingdezhen for family, friends, and colleagues, rather than in a distant gallery for people with very little understanding of their origin. Furthermore, in contrast to Ai’s laborers, participants in The Vase Project could contribute not just to the making but also the reception of their work, merging the productive and discursive spheres of meaning that were so rigidly separated at the Tate Modern. These aspects of The Vase Project clearly show the potential for social transformation within an entrepreneurial model of production. It seems entirely possible that working with Diduk could have fostered “a widened and richer sense of possibility,” inspiring self-confidence and ambition to explore new applications for artisanal expertise.85 Those who may formerly have painted only standardized designs gained an opportunity to experiment with new iconographic vocabularies, express their creativity with less restraint, and discover that an audience for such work does exist, in Jingdezhen and further afield. The project also held potential to foster innovation and renewal in the community of porcelain painters, or what Hjorth and Holt might term “a spilling over from the orthodox ways of doing things.”86 As art historian Ingrid Furniss notes in the exhibition text, many of the adaptations of Diduk’s sketch drew inspiration from ink painting, but, rather than imitating established styles, the artisans introduced their own innovations, revitalizing tradition and expanding their artistic horizons as well as the limits of the craft.87 The creative and career advantages that artisans gained have not been recorded, but it seems likely that their variations on Diduk’s motifs would have been reincorporated into the modular system of ornament shared within and between the workshops of Jingdezhen, perhaps inspiring future experiments. The entrepreneurship of The Vase Project is further apparent in Diduk’s resistance to the East-as-producer, West-as-consumer stereotype in favor of a more lateral engagement. Ai adhered in Sunflower Seeds to the one-way bias of global capital, yet Diduk embraced the responsibility of the entrepreneur to 56

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make others passionate . . . working on their energy and willingness to participate and creating awareness of transformative potential [with] no scripted endpoint, no known output . . . opening up possibility without known ends.88

While Diduk did predetermine the final number of vases, the project could have been sustained indefinitely through the iterative process of what she described as a “chain letter” of making.89 The extent to which this relational mode of production alters stereotypes of Chinese artisans as lacking creative agency is evident in the range of interpretation to which her initial sketch was subjected. The central chimney motif, for example, while present throughout the series, appears in several guises, sometimes abstracted, seen from diverse angles, transformed into a dissimilar but analogous object, or even reduced to the background setting for a bird-and-flower painting.90 Far from simply cementing China’s stereotyped role as workshop of the world, The Vase Project showcased the creative, not merely productive abilities of porcelain-painters in Jingdezhen. Finally, The Vase Project also fostered the social capacity of gongmin in contrast to the bonds of anonymous servitude that prevent gongren from enjoying full political participation. Unlike Ai Weiwei, Diduk engaged with her collaborators, “not as workers silently producing objects for export, but as citizens with rights to speak.”91 She acknowledged their private experiences, perspectives, and desires as individuals, not just as a source of cost- and time-efficient labor. A certain hierarchy did remain in the overall structure of the project—ownership of the vases and the circumstances of their display were entirely under Diduk’s control, and the use of her sketch to initiate the process means it was never a wholly organic endeavor. Nonetheless, the interaction between all those involved sets a valuable example for future collaborations, indicating the potential for innovation in such projects while inspiring new confidence, both personal and artistic, among the assembly-line laborers involved. Sunflower Seeds and The Vase Project demonstrate two modes of interaction between artists and artisans at opposite points on a continuum extending from results-oriented exploitation to open-ended collectivism. A professional relationship somewhere between these extremes is a defining characteristic of New Export China, so discussion of these and other models of interaction recur throughout this book. Even in this chapter, we can note a third mode of interaction in the making of Regular-Fragile, which drew on Liu’s personal experience as an assembly-line ceramicist. To an even greater extent than The Vase Project, this is a model defined by collaboration and casual friendship, yet, in contrast to Diduk’s participants, Liu’s assistants are not credited by name—this is neither a collectivist utopia, then, nor a profit-driven contract of convenience. Like many other projects of contemporary porcelain art that involve some outsourcing of labor or collaboration between artists and artisans, it exists at a point somewhere between these idealized extremes.

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2 PORCELAIN PAST

B

UILDING ON THE MATERIAL , social, and economic conditions for contemporary porcelain art outlined in the previous chapter, we turn now to one of the most appealing qualities of this medium for many artists: its equally complex historical pedigree. Rather than uncritically perpetuating or rejecting the authority of this history, the artists considered in this book have used porcelain to uncover slippages between fact and fiction, undermining the most entrenched assumptions and ideals by emphasizing the transient, contingent, and prosaic. Their work pries apart the tensions between “old poles of attraction represented by nation-states . . . institutions, and historical traditions” and the petit récits or “micro-narratives” of everyday life that French sociologist, literary theorist, and philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) identified as a defining symptom of the postmodern condition. In his 1979 book of that name, Lyotard wrote of a desecration of the “grand narratives” of modernism after the “blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War” and the valorization of “the individual

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enjoyment of goods and services” in a late capitalist global economy. These circumstances, he argued, had inspired a widespread belief “that legitimation can only spring from linguistic practice and . . . interaction.”1 Confronted with the realization that the institutions in which we once placed our trust are liable to collapse and are hopelessly contingent, and encouraged by those who profit from mass-consumption to privilege material desires above all else, we are compelled to seek meaning only in our immediate circumstances. Writing more recently, art historian Silvia Fok has identified this confidence in micro-narratives as a prominent theme in contemporary Chinese artistic practice, positioning such petit récits as “a reaction against [or] by-products of . . . the dominant national ideology of the People’s Republic.” Rather than the grand narratives of the Maoist era, Fok contends, artists now give voice to “the small, personal stories around them [in which] sentiments and reflections . . . be they optimistic, pessimistic, heroic or sarcastic . . . are embedded.”2 Although written with reference to the digital worlds created by Cao Fei (曹斐, b. 1978), Fok’s reading of Lyotard can equally be applied to the ceramic projects by Ai Weiwei and Liu Jianhua considered in this chapter, in which “great heroes, great voyages of discovery and exploration, and great social goals” of the past are “transformed into clusters of narrative . . . elements.”3 For these artists, too, the personal and the empirical hold greater relevance than myths and traditions. While Cao’s resistance takes place in the immaterial void of the digital, however, Ai and Liu anchor their micro-narratives within the tangible realities of porcelain as a material defined both by timeless endurance and transient mobility. Ai’s Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn (1995) is perhaps the most recognized work of New Export China considered in this book, and an ideal case study for the tension between endurance and mobility so central to the ceramic medium. Many have read this piece as a straightforward document of an intentionally destructive act, casting the artist as an iconoclastic dissident whose calculated irreverence for the imperial past disguises a critique of the present government. Yet this reading overlooks two key aspects of the work that are foregrounded in this chapter: the unreliability of its photographic medium, and Ai’s association of his chosen ceramic with a specific historical era. The Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) occupies a position of central significance for Chinese national identity, so Ai’s shattering of an artifact of this era implies a parallel shattering of the narratives of nationhood with which it is associated, not just of current state authority. Ai’s division of this act into a contrived sequence of static images must also be acknowledged—can we be sure the urn was a genuine antique? Is the same urn represented in each photograph? Do these images record a single continuous action, or a series of actions performed over several hours, days, or even months? Like the act of smashing itself, these and other questions raised by the presentation of this act imply a parallel interrogation of the historical record from which the authority and authenticity of the urn is derived. The limited circulation of these images among a select 60

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circle of close friends when first published in 1995, meanwhile, indicates their expression of Ai’s faith in another, more private telling of history that recalls Lyotard’s petit récits, as well as Gao Minglu’s definition of an “apartment art” committed to the individual and intimate. As such, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn becomes an artifact of the artist’s affinity with ceramics as vessels for the preservation and transmission of memory, extending from his first experiments with clay in 1977 to the time he spent in Beijing’s antique markets in the 1990s. These intimate micro-narratives inspired Ai to create other early ceramic works that we can now recognize as foundational expressions of his attraction to this medium, heralding a fascination with ideas of destruction and preservation to which he later returned on several occasions. His first and clearest statement of this interest can be noted in three pieces that predate Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn and which, like this work, were shown only to a select few friends: Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1993), Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] (1993), and Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle (1994). For the latter pair of works, Ai removed two tomb figurines, dated to the Song (960–1279) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, from their usual context of museum display, installing them instead inside bottles manufactured, respectively, to hold whiskey and vodka. This dislocation draws attention to the comparable curatorial removal of such figurines from their function as companions for the dead, disinterred from the sanctified microcosm of the tomb and exposed to public scrutiny. The implication here is that “preservation” in a vitrine may cause more harm than good, and that the safeguarding of burial goods from decay—like the conservation of an urn intended to be discarded after use—is a perverse inversion of a purpose that may have been better served by their destruction. Ai returned to this tension in Souvenir from Beijing (2002) and Dust to Dust (2009), using a brick salvaged from a demolished Qing-dynasty residence and the pulverized remains of a Neolithic jar to memorialize that which had been lost in a transformed city. These works, recalling those of Zhan Wang (展望, b. 1962) and Yin Xiuzhen (尹 秀真, b. 1963) created in the same city a decade earlier, can be regarded as signs of nostalgia for the private networks of meaning reduced to rubble to make way for grand vistas testifying to the glory of the state. Yet they also highlight a longer narrative of ruins and ruination that first gained legibility in the opening decades of the twentieth century. In this longue durée perspective, Ai’s works become expressions of a desire to let go of the past and explore new forms of national and cultural identity, escaping the fetish of preservation that transforms fragments into collectibles and condemned structures into touristic landmarks. Liu Jianhua’s Regular-Fragile also interrogates the grand narratives of history. In installations like Discard, Liu applies an archaeological point of view to the detritus of past and present, erasing the chronological limits that usually separate the antique and the contemporary by reducing both to an undifferentiated mass of quotidian remains, awaiting excavation. The fragility of his cracked and warped porcelain sculptures also Porcelain Past

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compels us to acknowledge the extent to which the myths that lend stability to our lives are constantly vulnerable to the ebb and flow of time. This is conveyed most effectively in Dream (2005–6), a variation of Regular-Fragile that Liu intended to serve as a memorial to the astronauts killed in the disintegration of US Space Shuttle Columbia, smashing his replica commodities and outlining a silhouette of the shuttle in their broken remains. Shown alongside edited footage of this and other aerospace disasters, these remnants implied that the grand narratives of the past have been shattered beyond repair, leaving us to salvage what we can from the debris. The first version of Regular-Fragile, created for the 50th Venice Biennale, demonstrated a comparable separation of ambition and reality. Commissioned for the inaugural Chinese Pavilion, this work had been planned to promote a fusion of traditional materials and methods with a topical critique of contemporary globalization. Yet the dislocation of the display in the wake of the first SARS epidemic, not to mention the standardized and flawed manufacture of its porcelain components, served instead to expose the uncertain foundations on which all such ambitions are grounded.4 Alongside this aesthetics of destruction and preservation, both Ai and Liu have adopted parallel strategies of ceramic fabrication and reproduction in their efforts to shatter the grand narratives of history. Ai’s appropriated antiques are of questionable authenticity, and several may even be replicas, while reproduction is central to the making and meaning of Regular-Fragile in its various iterations. Both artists have additionally benefited from the enthusiasm among the resident artisans of the Porcelain Capital for the lucrative business of historical reproduction. Ai first engaged with those involved in this industry in 1996, commissioning a series of replica Qing-dynasty blue-and-white bottles and vases. His most successful exercise in the aesthetics of reproduction, however, created in collaboration with Romanian-born artist Serge Spitzer (1951–2012), is Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain (2005–6)—an installation of ninety-six replicas of a Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white jar that rose to global fame when it sold at auction for a record £15.7 million ($19 million) in 2005. Rather than a precise reproduction, Ai fragmented the design adorning this jar to generate an anamorphic illusion that inspired reflection on the myths and manipulations of national identity underlying its record sale price. Destruction and deception have not always remained entirely separate in Ai’s oeuvre, appearing in combination in Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls (1995), another photographed performance contemporary with Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn. Several points of comparison can be noted between these works, yet the method of destruction chosen for the former—placing the eponymous bowls “under the hammer”—shifts focus from museum to auction room. This in turn prompts a corresponding shift in our understanding of the works considered in this chapter, which each imply a juxtaposition of museological display with the commodification of history for personal and political gain. Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo and the bottled figurines, for instance, alternately brand or package antiques as products of 62

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contemporary capital, drawing these ancient wares even further from the contexts for which they were intended and immersing them in global networks of commercial exchange. The qingbai (青白) or “blueish-white” glaze that Liu applied to his porcelain commodities, once one of China’s most widely desired exports at the height of its production in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126), establishes a comparable affiliation between these networks and those of the historic China Trade. The spectacular abundance of his installations suggests a vision of unsurpassed wealth associated with this canonical golden age in China’s global expansion, even while the fragility of their components compels a realization that material wealth is fleeting and rarely as fulfilling as anticipated. Similar tensions between the grand narratives of historical myth and the petits récits of the everyday recur throughout this chapter, accentuated in works of porcelain art that demonstrate the material power of ceramics as objects that transcend such straightforward dichotomies. FRAGILE FACTS

Ai Weiwei was one of the first Chinese contemporary artists to apply a conceptual sensibility to the ancient art of ceramics, and he remains one of the most widely known. Among the many works he has created either in or about this medium, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn (1995) is his most notorious, second only to Sunflower Seeds. Some critics might identify the photographic triptych as an image of a ceramic vessel rather than a work of ceramic art. Yet considering the catalytic role of this piece for Ai’s subsequent engagement with porcelain, as well as the extent to which the materiality of clay is central to its meaning, such doubts should be set aside (for now). Current critical estimation holds Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn to be an iconic work not only in the canon of contemporary Chinese art but also the development of avant-garde ceramics in the twentieth century. It takes pride of place, for instance, in ceramics historian Garth Clark’s pantheon of eminence in clay as the scion of an illustrious lineage that extends from the absurdist cynicism of Duchamp’s Fountain, discussed in our first chapter, to the atavistic nobility of Isamu Noguchi’s The Queen (1931), the uncanny discomfort of Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), and the visceral tactility of Kazuo Yagi’s Walk (1954), to the kitsch of Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988).5 Rejecting the boundaries that separate the stylistic categories to which these works are generally assigned, their juxtaposition in Clark’s review of “Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE–2010 CE)” (2010), a survey show at Arcadia University Art Gallery, Philadelphia, suggests a new hierarchy of ceramic innovation. Ai, Duchamp, Noguchi, Oppenheim, Yagi, and Koons are each notable for their idiosyncratic handling of their medium, defying convention and opening new perspectives on aspects of the creative process customarily hidden from view. In Ai’s selection of a “readymade” ceramic vessel and apparent preference for the conceptual over the material, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn is closest in conception to Fountain. Duchamp is almost habitually cited as a touchstone for the development of Porcelain Past

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contemporary Chinese art, reflecting the persistent assumption of a one-way line of inspiration from Europe and the United States. This is a reductive simplification of a complex reality, yet Fountain and Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, as innovations in ceramic art created in the opening and closing decades of the twentieth century, do make for a rewarding comparison. In addition to their appropriation of mass-produced functional vessels, one intended to hold grain and the other to dispose of bodily waste, both works are notable for their survival as photographs of momentary performative acts, immortalizing ceramics that have been intentionally misplaced or destroyed. Yet any comparison must acknowledge that the works were first created and shown in the divergent contexts of early twentieth-century New York and fin-de-siècle Beijing, and the vessels appropriated were chosen to embody quite distinct cultural and historical meanings. Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn is a series of three monochrome photographic prints, portrayed as a record of the eponymous action at beginning, middle, and end (figs. 15a–c). In the first frame, Ai stands in front of a brick wall, balancing an urn in his outstretched fingers; in the second, he has moved his hands apart and the urn is shown falling to the ground; in the third, his hands remain in the same position, but the urn lies in pieces at his feet, while the artist continues to stare impassively into the lens of the camera. Despite its apparent simplicity, the triptych has inspired several readings: as a document of a destructive act; a self-portrait of the artist as iconoclast; and as an illustration of an irreverent attitude toward the past and to contemporary political authoritarianism. Yet these readings overlook two crucial aspects of Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn: the artifice of its photographic medium, and Ai’s affiliation of his chosen ceramic with a specific dynasty and category of material culture. Photographs are not infallible and can be manipulated to support the most dubious distortions. Ceramics, on the other 64

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figure 15 a–c Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, 1995, gelatin silver photograph, triptych, 148 × 121 cm each. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

hand, are seen to possess a potent material authenticity and historical authority. In Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, these innate attributes are foregrounded by the shattering of the vessel and its identification as an antique, simultaneously recalling the distant past while destroying its present traces. The breaking of the urn implies a fracturing of the myths of nationhood associated in China with the opening of the common era. The authority of the Han dynasty is not based on empirical certainty or historiographic accuracy, however, but an adherence to tradition motivated by a desire to enhance the prestige of China’s modern and contemporary rulers. Dropping a Handynasty Urn should therefore be read not merely as an iconoclastic defiance of current politics, but as a denial of historical narrative in a more general sense that exposes the role of artifice and reconstruction in our visions of the past. Nevertheless, like Fountain, Ai’s triptych has generally been regarded by curators, critics, and art historians of the past two decades as a clear-cut questioning of present government authority, with attention generally focused on the event recorded. The act of dropping is given precedence, variously defined as opportunistic vandalism, targeted destruction, a severing of ties with history, a provocation of canonical authority, or a rebuttal to the prestige of antiques as traces of the past that must be preserved at any cost.6 Some writers have even noted a precedent for Ai’s actions in the obliteration of China’s material heritage during the Cultural Revolution, defining Dropping a Handynasty Urn as a satirical reenactment of this violence timed to coincide with the waning of Maoist thought in the PRC of the 1990s.7 Others have associated Ai’s impassive expression and candid recording of the eponymous event with a detached indifference to authority, the rage with which iconoclasm is generally associated superseded by what one writer has termed a “refined anarchism.”8 Porcelain Past

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Several objections can be raised to counter these prevailing readings. Above all, each line of interpretation presupposes the antiquity of the urn despite Ai’s experience in the making of ceramic reproductions, and despite the fact that he commissioned a series of replicas not long after the first publication of Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn. A more nuanced reading has been put forward by those who account for the possibility that the urn may have been a reproduction and therefore cast the triptych as a contemplation on “authenticity” and “value” as abstract philosophical ideas, disregarding the vessel itself as little more than a convenient prop.9 Ai himself has lent credibility to this interpretation, remarking in 2003 that any explanation of his performance as iconoclastic is misplaced and reveals more about the viewer’s attitudes than his intentions: “[the urn] is only grabbed by [its] weight and gravity. It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful.”10 It should be noted, however, that he also maintains the authenticity of the urn as an artifact of the Han dynasty and has dismissed suggestions to the contrary as irrelevant to the work’s meaning.11 Additionally, though it productively complicates other readings, this interrogation of value in the abstract continues to privilege the action represented over its medium. The wording of Ai’s title indicates that the jar chosen as a vehicle for his conceptual statement is central to the meaning of the work. Most notably, the visual and affective impact of the images arises directly from two qualities of fired clay: fragility and a tendency to shatter when dropped. While a similar effect could have been achieved with another comparably fragile antique, the same apprehension would not have been provoked by the dropping, for instance, of an ancient bronze or lacquer vessel, which would not shatter so spectacularly. Ai’s gesture could only have been achieved with a ceramic artifact. The identification of this ceramic as a “Han-dynasty urn” further indicates its singularity, gesturing to the historic authority of the medium and implying that the artist’s actions resonate far beyond the loss of a single antique. Speaking in general of his use of traditional media, including ceramics, Ai has explained that he tends to prefer materials [that] express high culture or expensive tastes, [or] are associated with a certain history, memory, status, or class [because] the status that those kinds of materials reflect is problematic [even though] we feel very safe about it. Every aspect is solid and unshakeable . . . But [when] that safety disappears [it] puts us in a new area of knowledge.12

The Han dynasty is a highly mythologized era in Chinese history, central to definitions of national identity, so the shattering of a relic of this era therefore implies a parallel shattering of the myths of nationhood. The ideal of a unified “Han people” (Han ren 汉人) first gained popularity in the centuries of division following the collapse of the Han dynasty, reviving the imagined community of a Huaxia (华夏) nation that had arisen several centuries earlier during the comparably divided Spring and Autumn era

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(770–476 BCE). Both concepts were pivotal for early forms of nationalism, coalescing around three unifying principles: the spatial priority of China as center of the known world; the cultural priority of the Han, as the rightful occupants of this geographic fulcrum; and their genetic superiority as the most advanced representatives of Chinese civilization. Sustained by the vaunted continuity of the empire, albeit under Mongol and Manchu as well as Han rule, these principles largely remained in place until the violent encroachment of European powers after the First Opium War (1839–42). The new terms of cultural, political, and economic subordination imposed on Qing China forced a widespread realization that “countries [formerly] addressed as ‘barbarians’ [were] no less developed . . . and were even more civilized, developed, and progressive [than China].”13 Two main forms of modern nationalism arose in the wake of this realization: those who hoped to unite the various peoples then living within the territorial limits of the nation and therefore to resist the imperialist ambitions of Europe and the United States, exemplified by Liang Qichao (1873–1929); and those, following Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), who called instead for the “revolutionary expulsion of the Manchu” (geming pai Man 革命拍满) and the foundation of a Han ethnostate. Liang is generally credited with the first use of the term nationalism (minzu zhuyi 民族主义) and vision of a “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu 中华民族), later incorporated within the constitution of the “republic of five nationalities” (wuzu gonghe 五族共和) declared in 1912. It is Sun’s more radical ambition for a “Han nation” (Han minzu 汉民 族), however, that has proven most enduring.14 The erasure of linguistic and regional variety among those who identify as Han that Sun’s homogenizing use of this term implies has faced little opposition in the century since he voiced his ambition, enshrined from 1949 on as a founding principle of the PRC. Ai’s selection of a Han-dynasty urn as the subject of his symbolic act, and his explicit identification of it as such, may therefore have been intended as an oblique provocation of this persistent desire for a Han nation. His use of the term “urn” reinforces this impression of the work as a challenge to those who seek to preserve the sanctity of their apparently antique origins, superseding the utilitarian qualities evoked by a more accurate identification of this vessel as a grain jar (hu 壶). “Urn” is redolent of state ceremony and religious ritual, signaling value, rarity, and the exclusive privileges of cultivation unavailable to those outside the realms of high culture. Grain jars, on the other hand, are intended for use. In design historian Glenn Adamson’s estimation, they are “the dispensable material culture of [their] time [ just] as mass-produced soda bottles are of ours.”15 Relative to other categories of ceramic antiquity, such vessels are now little valued by collectors and connoisseurs, within or beyond mainland China. The value that Ai has bestowed on his jar, then, is primarily symbolic, vested in its alleged provenance, in his renaming of it as an “urn” and, above all, in the materiality of ceramics as a fragile yet figuratively potent medium.

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MEMORY VESSELS

The iconic status that Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn enjoys is also the result of a discursive sleight of hand, supporting Ai’s current reputation as an arch-dissident while concealing the obscurity in which he worked throughout much of the 1990s. During this decade, in contrast to those artists who perfected the market-friendly style of Political Pop, Ai gravitated toward those who instead cultivated an intimate and hermetic practice that Gao Minglu has termed “apartment art” (gongyu yishu 公寓艺术). As the name implies, this was an art of the private and domestic, presaging the affinity for micro-narratives that Fok later identified with Cao Fei and exemplifying the movement toward petit récits that Lyotard ascribed to the postmodern. In contrast to artists like Yin Xiuzhen and Song Dong (宋冬, b. 1966), Ai did not consciously create apartment art and soon moved on to a form of practice that he compares with the Happenings of the 1970s, casting off the insular comforts of the domestic for the provocation and precarity of the public sphere.16 Yet the works discussed in this section did nevertheless mark a turning-point between his return from New York in 1993 and his promotion of a new, more confrontational form of performance art from the mid-1990s. The few artistic statements that he made in these years, most of them involving ceramics, were grounded in narratives of heritage, community, humility, and solitude that prefigured yet remained fundamentally distinct from his later work. Gao first defined apartment art in the text published to accompany “Inside/Out,” framing it as an exemplary case study for the nuanced understanding of Chinese contemporary artistic practice that he hoped this exhibition would convey. Seeking to contend with a hostile political environment and a lack of official or commercial venues for their work, as well as an insatiable appetite among European and American curators and dealers for the commodified dissidence of Political Pop, Gao argued that a select group of artists had retreated to the privacy of their homes and the camaraderie of friends and family. While their peers created increasingly excessive fusions of propagandistic and commercial imagery, these artists dedicated their efforts to the “unsaleable and unexhibitable,” producing “pseudo-religious meditations on highly personalized objects” intended to generate “[a] spiritual ‘aura’ [in] a materialist society.”17 Apartment art therefore extends the lineage of avant-garde artistic practice initiated by the New Culture Movement and revived in the 1980s, yet with a greater focus on the individual in a world of constant distraction and competing demands. Gao elaborated on this outline in subsequent writings, focusing especially on the spatial dynamics of the apartment as a venue for the creation, display, and reception of art, and on the political power of silence and restraint. In Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (2011), his comprehensive overview of the major artistic trends that rose and fell from the 1920s to the present, he notes the more literal translation of gongyu as a “government-owned residential complex,” highlighting the Maoist origins of these spaces for living and the ambiguous boundary between public and private that their residents must negotiate. Unlike the refuge from 68

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society provided by a studio, where the artist can indulge their most intimate flights of fancy, the gongyu is a functional space, an interface between the private and the social where the needs of the community must be considered alongside those of the self. Working within these networks of mutual responsibility, Gao observes, apartment artists “use the materials [and] surroundings of their own daily lives . . . to represent the true relationship between the avant-garde art space and the social,” positioning private moments as expressions of cultural and political tendencies.18 Alongside these tensions between the state and the individual, Gao has elsewhere observed a parallel tension in apartment art between the international and the local, remarking that artists who chose to work in these conditions were “limited in [their] communication with avant-garde peers, [yet they] looked toward international contemporary artistic practice.” Their reception, however, remained local and even community-based, due to their commitment to “the silent act of retreating . . . to private surroundings” and to humble, restrained forms of practice that evaded wider attention.19 Notably, Gao attributes the internationalism of apartment artists partially to the news of trends overseas brought by Ai Weiwei and others who returned to China in the mid-1990s. Working with fellow émigrés Xu Bing and Zeng Xiaojun (曾小俊, b. 1954), and with help from editor and curator Feng Boyi (馮博一, b. 1960), Ai provided a new platform for such exchange with the publication in 1994 of an untitled volume of essays, translated avant-gardist texts, reports on current events in the arts locally and overseas, and an assortment of photographs and statements documenting new work by twenty-eight artists across China.20 Designed in Shenzhen and printed in Hong Kong, three thousand copies were informally circulated through interpersonal networks of community and collaboration. Colloquially known as the Black Cover Book (Heipi shu 黑皮书), this volume was followed in 1995 and 1997 by the White Cover Book (Baipi shu 白皮书) and Grey Cover Book (Huipi shu 灰皮书), compiled by Ai and Zeng with editorial assistance from photographer Zhuang Hui (莊輝, b. 1963).21 These three volumes offered a creative outlet for those who sought to escape from the ostensibly opposed but implicitly united and comparably restrictive forces of the state and market. Their independent publication and limited circulation provided a shared forum for like-minded artists “to exchange ideas and keep a record for the future” that remained almost defiantly self-contained and resistant to widespread exposure. “At that time,” Ai has recalled, “I did not need to do artworks [sic], participate in activities, or earn recognition from the art circle, nothing of that sort.”22 Nevertheless, by including translated texts and news of events overseas, this forum could be extended to encompass a range of internationalist perspectives, illustrating the tension between the local and global, public and private, that was so central to apartment art. Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn was first published in the White Cover Book as a visual counterpoint for the ideas conveyed by Ai’s written remarks. Echoing other apartment artists, many of whom were featured in at least one of the three texts, in his editorial and creative contributions to these volumes Ai envisioned a defiantly independent art of Porcelain Past

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self-expression, political emancipation, and material autonomy. In the Grey Cover Book, he lamented the extent to which “Chinese modern cultural history . . . rejects individual value [and] assassinates human feelings,” imploring fellow artists “[to] turn away from . . . ‘trends’ and instead pay attention to individual methods . . . the plight of existence and of spiritual values.”23 Speaking with Xu and New York–based performance artist Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950) several years earlier, in much the same vein, Ai confided his profound anxieties about “the new structure of the world economy and . . . ‘new order’ [of a] global, pluralist culture,” professing his faith in “the force and effect of independent thought” to bring about “the spiritual development of humanity.” Recalling the restraint cultivated by apartment artists, he confessed his aspiration toward “a situation in which you don’t have to do anything . . . the effort required . . . is minimal, and limitations and influences [of] the surrounding environment are less,” a state of absolute independence.24 When viewed beside similar remarks in the White Cover Book, its first context of circulation, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn can therefore be recognized as an experiment in the making of such an art of expansive significance within limited means. Ai has consistently returned to these ideas in interviews and published remarks, frequently citing Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn and related works as precursors for this line of thought in his artistic practice. In 2003, for example, speaking with art historian and curator Charles Merewether, Ai shared his ambition to create art into which he need not “put any effort or skill [so] the thing itself speaks and I . . . fade away.”25 Two decades later, in 2015, on the occasion of his first survey show in England at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, he rebuffed curator Tim Marlow’s questions about Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn by dismissing it as a prank “to test my camera’s ability to catch those images . . . just this guy being bored. To me, it’s not so subversive, it’s just a silly act.”26 Most recently, in January 2022, Ai reaffirmed and expanded on this explanation: The Initial motivation for [Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn] was simple . . . I asked my brother [Ai Dan] to test my Nikon F3 camera and wanted to photograph how [the jar] fell. In fact, [this] is [a] second attempt because with the first attempt [he] missed the opportunity . . . No one paid any attention to these photographs after we took them . . . Unfortunately, it was considered by Western critics [to be] iconoclasm.27

The consistency with which Ai has returned to this disarmingly straightforward rationale for the thinking behind Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn contrasts with the complexity of critical speculation to which the work has been subjected. It also seems to indicate the persistence of an attitude first expressed in the volumes he co-edited with Xu Bing and Zeng Xiaojun, emphasizing the momentary, the nonsensical, and the inconsequential over the grand narratives of state and market. Repositioned as a private act rather than a portent of Ai’s now globally celebrated iconoclasm, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn draws attention to a complex relationship with ceramics as carriers of history and heritage apparent throughout Ai’s life and artistic career. 70

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Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957, shortly before his father, renowned poet Ai Qing (1910–96), became a target for denunciation in the purge of intellectuals following the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In the early months of 1958, Ai Qing and his young family were forced to leave the capital. They were assigned first to a forestry management station in sub-arctic Heilongjiang, then transferred in November 1959 to Xinjiang in the far west. Here they made a home in Shihezi, in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains on the border with Mongolia and Kazakhstan. The next few years passed relatively peacefully. Although labeled a “rightist” for his alleged transgressions against the state, Ai Qing retained a close friendship with senior government officials and spent most of his time composing unpublishable poems, seeking inspiration in a nearby botanic garden. The upheavals of the Cultural Revolution brought intensified persecution. The first indication of a shift in circumstances came in 1966, when Ai Weiwei left home one morning to find “a crowd . . . had gathered in the normally quiet street outside our house to read freshly written big character posters [denouncing Ai Qing].” Not long after this, a band of Red Guards forcibly searched their home, “prying up floorboards, flipping through [books], gathering up letters and photographs,” and seizing Ai Qing’s manuscripts and correspondences, “leaving the house a shambles.” In May 1967, the Ai family were ordered to leave for an isolated outpost known as “Little Siberia,” on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert. Here, Ai Qing was assigned “the most gruelling and unpleasant form of labour”—cleaning the camp’s communal latrines.28 The Ai family lived in Little Siberia until November 1972, when they were permitted for unknown reasons to return to Shihezi. In the summer of 1973, Ai Qing was given leave to seek medical care in Beijing for the cataracts and other ailments he had developed after years of malnutrition and grueling manual labor. After receiving approval for a second journey in May 1975, the poet and his family were at last allowed to remain in the capital, joined by Ai Weiwei after his graduation from high school in July 1976. The joy of homecoming was marred, however, by the devastating Tangshan earthquake, a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions that compelled many Beijing residents to sleep in the streets, anticipating aftershocks. This catastrophe seemed a grim portent of Mao Zedong’s death just two months later, heralding a momentous change of current in the tides of history. In August 1977, Chairman Hua Guofeng announced an official end to the violence of the Cultural Revolution, although Ai Qing did not receive his pardon until March 1979, finally lifting the cloud under which he and his family had lived for the past twenty-two years. On their initial return to Beijing in 1975, the Ai family stayed with one of the poet’s sisters. The residence that Ai Qing had purchased two years before his exile, an elegant siheyuan (四合院) or “courtyard house” in the heart of the city, had been commandeered by several other families who refused to relinquish their claim. With the restoration of his former official position, however, Ai Qing gained access to “a relatively spacious house with six rooms” where he could start rebuilding his reputation. For Ai Porcelain Past

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Weiwei, on the other hand, this return to a city he would only have dimly remembered, if at all, perhaps seemed just another in a long line of relocations. In words that echo the sentiments underlying his later destruction of an antique jar, he describes these as years spent “swinging, swaying, in idle, purposeless, uncertain motion [with] nothing better to do [than wait for] change.”29 Much like his father during his years of idleness in Shihezi, seeking relief from the monotony and ideological tension of this moment of transition, Ai turned to artistic pursuits: I would take a folding stool and easel . . . to Zhongshan Park to paint flowers or spend time at the [Railway Station] sketching people in the waiting room, or . . . cycle [to] the Summer Palace or the ruins of Yuanmingyuan to paint landscapes . . . I could employ an artistic language to achieve a sense of calm. The pleasure gained . . . gave me a feeling of release [and] the prospect of self-redemption.30

In this yearning for the tranquil order of cultivated nature, Ai Weiwei could be compared with many artists of his father’s generation who likewise found solace in the intimacy of landscape painting, either alone or with a few trusted friends. This desire to share moments of aesthetic contemplation grew in popularity in the 1970s, when informal and unofficial coteries like Beijing’s No Name Painting Society (无名花会 Wuming huahui) held clandestine meetings in the privacy of their homes or a quiet corner of a public park. Gao Minglu has identified the No Name Painting Society and other such coteries (huahui 花会) as practitioners of a third form of avant-gardism that arose in the final years of the Maoist era, preceding the revival of New Culture ideals in the ’85 Movement and setting out a template for artistic independence later taken up by the apartment artists of the 1990s. He traces the birth of No Name to the meeting in 1959 of several like-minded students at the Xihua Fine Arts Institute who shared a creative outlook that was based on principles of autonomous aestheticism and that gained new political relevance in tension with the collectivist ideals of the 1960s. In 1973, these artists formed the Yuyuantan Lake School of Painting (Yuyuantan huapai 玉渊潭画 派), traveling to the country around Beijing to paint en plein air and enjoy each other’s company. At first, these journeys arose from a simple desire for “truth, beauty, and harmony [in contrast to] the dirty [and] oppressively politicised” atmosphere of the city, while their location was above all one of convenience, where the artists could “work unwitnessed and unpunished . . . [enjoying] some small comfort and mental support . . . [even] a sense of freedom.” Over time, however, they came to recognize the radical potential of their actions, holding up virtues of “innocence and purity [as] symbols of beauty [and] a peaceful life . . . against the cruelty of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” The same ideals were central to the activities of the later No Name Painting Society, for whom art was fundamentally a practice of individual expression, “exiling the self from an ideal-less society.”31 72

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Ai Weiwei does not recall meeting, let alone working alongside any of these older artists and he professes little interest in their activities, but several points of comparison can be noted between their divergent yet parallel artistic approaches.32 Like the No Name artists, Ai lacked formal training and honed his skills through selfcultivation and occasional private instruction. He benefited greatly from the expertise of Ai Qing’s artist-friends, especially Jiang Feng (1910–1982), also purged in 1957 and rehabilitated in 1979, when he regained his former post as director of the Central Academy of Arts and Design (now CAFA) and shouldered new responsibilities as the director of the National Artists’ Association and adviser to the Ministry of Culture.33 Ai may also have received instruction or at least inspiration from his elder brother, Ai Xuan (b. 1947), who made a name for himself in the 1970s as a practitioner of “contemplative painting,” a style defined by images that perfectly capture the melancholy of those years. Again, this is a source of inspiration that Ai has not entirely confirmed, noting only that they “[walked] on two bridges [in] two different directions” but that he respected his brother’s talents as an artist.34 Nevertheless, the shared desire for solitude and natural harmony to which Ai Xuan, Ai Weiwei, and the No Name Painting Society each gave voice, even if coincidental, reflects the elegiac mood of the immediate post–Cultural Revolution era, when so many artists looked to the past in their search for clues to an unknown future. In August 1978, Ai was among the first cohort of students to enroll at the Beijing Film Academy after its post–Cultural Revolution reopening, majoring in animation. He maintained his interest in the intimate and familiar, now complemented with a newfound affinity for post-Impressionism. Although he recalls feeling “an aversion to all the norms and premises” that his classmates seemed unable or unwilling to challenge, his entry to the Academy did at least provide structure and an opportunity to discover “new things, new ideas, and new people to fill the gaps [created by the Cultural Revolution].”35 In 1979, however, his studies caused Ai to miss what is now regarded as a pivotal moment in the grand narrative of Chinese contemporary art: the inaugural exhibition on September 27 of works by an artist collective who identified themselves as “The Stars” (星星花会 Xingxing). Despite the endorsement of Jiang Feng and other prominent cultural officials, this unorthodox display of paintings, prints, sketches, and sculpture on and around the iron fence of the National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China) faced swift condemnation, taken down the next morning on the orders of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau. Members and supporters of the group came together to protest this shutdown on October 1, the thirtieth anniversary of the PRC. Their public action and the satirical intent of several works in the initial display, notably those of Wang Keping (王克平, b. 1949), have encouraged a tendency to focus on the political aims of the group. Yet much of the work on show bore a close resemblance to the ostensibly apolitical output of the No Name artists, consisting of familiar landscapes, still-life tableaux, and intimate portraits. Ai had been undertaking an internship with other animation students Porcelain Past

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at the Shanghai Art Film Studio in September-October 1979 and so could not participate in either the first public showing of work by The Stars or their protest march. On his return to the capital, however, he received an invitation to show in the enlarged and now officially sanctioned version of this display that opened on November 23 in the Huafangzhai (画舫斋; Painted Boat Studio) in Beihai Park, attracting almost twenty thousand visitors over the ten days that it remained open. Speaking with Andrew Cohen in 2011, Wang Keping recalls that Ai showed several “Impressionist-style paintings” with no discernible political content or satirical intent, although he notes that this avoidance of partisan affiliation could at that time be considered a political statement, in the preference for private over state mythologies that it implied.36 Ai’s precipitous rise from a childhood in exile to affiliation with the Stars regularly features in the ever-expanding body of literature dedicated to his life and work as a guarantee of countercultural authenticity. His global renown has transformed these events into pivotal chapters in an origin story of mythic proportions for a man hailed as “China’s leading artist dissident” and enshrined as “one of the most significant cultural figures of his generation.”37 Much like popular identifications of the Han dynasty as the cradle of Chinese nationhood, such mythologizing tends to glamourize historical fact and gild the reputations of all those involved, artist and critics alike, while reducing the complexity of Ai’s life and work to a straightforward narrative of persecution, dissidence, and vindication. Another event in Ai’s career that these retellings frequently overlook, for example, is his early encounter with ceramics, the first material in which he discovered a creative aptitude, long before his name became a byword for artistic dissidence and cultural revival. In the summer of 1977, a year before his enrollment at the Beijing Film Academy, two years before the first Stars exhibition, and a year after his departure from Shihezi, Ai studied for three months in a ceramics factory in Pengcheng, Hebei province, one of several production centers for the distinctive Cizhou wares associated with that region. Current archaeological evidence dates the emergence of this ceramic style to the decades of transition that marked the rise of the Northern Song in the late tenth century, after which the characteristic range of white, black, and caramel-brown glazes distinguishing the products of Cizhou gained popularity not only in Hebei, but also neighboring Henan, Shandong, and Shanxi provinces. In contrast to the refined elegance of Ding, Ru, Ge, Jun, and Longquan ware, the vaunted “Five Famous Kilns” (Wu Daming Yao 五大名窯) of the Song dynasty, Cizhou ware remained quotidian in function and rustic in form. Ceramicists of the region used the most inexpensive, widely available materials and drew inspiration from the local environment and pastoral ecology to imbue floral designs, birds, fish, insects, and figurative scenes with sympathetic vitality. At the same time, in their dynamic application of black pigment over white slip on the underglaze-painted wares most often associated with these ceramics, the ceramicists of Cizhou approached the fluid spontaneity of a literati ink painter, adding flourishes of idiosyncrasy to otherwise standard designs and varying the opacity of the 74

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pigment to create fine linework and atmospheric washes. This fusion of bucolic simplicity and aesthetic complexity may have held a special appeal for the young Ai Weiwei, raised in the farthest reaches of Xinjiang with a father who refused to relinquish his love of poetry, literature, and artistic expression. Under the tutelage of sculptor and ceramics enthusiast Zheng Ke, another old acquaintance of Ai Qing then on the faculty of the Central Academy of Arts and Design, Ai created a series of vessels and sculptural works in Pengcheng that included his first published piece: a sculptural image of a winking owl, reproduced alongside other amateur work in the People’s Pictorial (Renmin Huabao 人民画报). Ai has recalled that he “had no interest in ceramics at that time” and agreed to travel with Zheng largely to indulge the older man’s passion for this medium while taking advantage of an opportunity to visit another region. He remembers meeting “a lot of painters [in Pengcheng], and we could see the way they made beautiful porcelain works modelled after antiques . . . with a strong folk style.” Most of these were produced for overseas markets, in accord with the same visions of an export-led economic recovery that would later transform the Sculpture Factory. Ai, however, did not share this anticipation of a creative resurgence and “did not develop any special interest in ceramics,” only stopping to create “some small works . . . to see how the glaze came out after high temperature firing.”38 The ceramic owl attributed to Ai and reproduced in the People’s Pictorial, relatively small and unassuming in appearance, seems to confirm his lack of enthusiasm. At the same time, it could be considered typical of the humble, yet humorous and naturalistic style associated with Cizhou ware. Ai deftly emphasized the owl’s characteristically round eyes, one of which stands out from the bird’s face while the other is lightly incised into the surface of the clay, suggesting an enigmatic wink. He reduced its body to an abstract curvilinear form that resembles a peach, with a tapering contour following the line of the facial feathers. The viscous, red-brown glaze that covers the piece is its most distinguishing feature, giving it a dappled sheen that evokes the play of moonlight on tawny feathers. For those familiar with the historiography of contemporary art in China, Ai’s owl may recall an image of the same bird created several years earlier by writer and printmaker Huang Yongyu (黃永玉, b. 1924). This image is equally unassuming at first glance but gained fame for the role it came to play in one of the most notorious episodes of political denunciation in Chinese art history. The owl suffers in China from the ignominy of an ancient association with death, occult mysteries, and inauspicious omens. Owls appear repeatedly in the zoomorphic repertoire of Shang-dynasty bronzes and the wall-paintings that adorn Han-dynasty walls as guardians of the threshold which separates the realms of the living and the dead. Perhaps because of their morbid affiliation, owls do not feature in the genre of bird-and-flower painting (花鸟画 huaniao hua) until the twentieth century, and, even then, their representation was considered highly unusual. A concerted effort to recast the owl as an ally of the people in the years of famine after the Great Leap Forward introduced a note of Porcelain Past

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ambiguity into this lineage. In children’s books, especially, owls were recast as “lovable heroes dutifully guarding the crop fields against marauding . . . rats and sparrows.”39 As an illustrator of children’s books, Huang played a part in the dissemination of this new public image, and it may have been the memory of this campaign that inspired fellow artist Xu Linlu (1916–2011) to suggest in 1973 that Huang paint an owl in an album which their mutual acquaintance Song Wenzhi (1919–1999), another artist, asked Xu to fill with paintings by friends. The refined style of Huang’s painting reflects this intent: the owl introduces a pleasing note of eccentricity to the collection which Song would have appreciated, while the dexterous reduction of its form to a few essential elements demonstrates Huang’s skill as an ink painter. Winking Owl can therefore be identified with the intimate style cultivated by the No Name artists and other unofficial coteries of the 1970s. Yet public reception of the painting also illustrates the extent to which this seemingly innocuous channel for artistic expression could become entangled in political intrigue. In early 1974, the ambiguity of Huang’s image, its ties with the traditions of the feudal past, and, perhaps, the ancient affiliation of owls with otherworldly malevolence, led to its inclusion in one of several “Black Painting Exhibitions” (黑画展览 heihua zhanlan) intended to rekindle the flames of revolutionary ardor. Censured as “unruly, wayward, dark, and bizarre,” these paintings and their creators stood accused of counterrevolutionary sedition—the caption for Winking Owl, selected as the centerpiece of an exhibition in Beijing, labeled it “a self-portrait of the likes of Huang [and] their attitude: an animosity toward the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Socialist system.”40 For a public accustomed to the smiling faces of soldiers, workers, and farmers favored in official propaganda, Huang’s owl may have seemed decidedly unsettling, its conspiratorial wink evocative of secrets shared behind closed doors and dark purposes declared in midnight silence. At the same time, however, the exhibition of such works undoubtedly served to confirm the endurance of an independent artistic community beyond state control, reminding other aspiring artists that they were not alone. These clandestine creators found further justification in 1979 when the Stars took over the fence outside the very same institution where the Black Painting Exhibition had been held five years earlier. In this cultural thaw, Huang and other previously censured artists became figureheads for the new political order. Huang’s owl especially came to serve as a reminder of the “curious mixture of noise and silence” that had characterized the Cultural Revolution, when a “yearning for intimacy and trust” collided with a deep suspicion of “closeness and betrayal, wanting to speak yet fearing giving anything away, living in fear while nursing hope.”41 For art historian Eugene Y. Wang, the legacy of the owl is clear in works held to have marked the birth of contemporary art in China, including Wang Keping’s Silence (1978) and Idol (1979; retitled Buddha in 1980), sculptural figures notable for their one-eye-open expression.42 Seeking an artistic voice in this political atmosphere, Ai may also have found inspiration in Winking Owl, translating Huang’s calligraphic strokes into a three-dimensional form. 76

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He may have heard tell of the Black Painting Exhibition from his father’s friends, who moved in the same social circles. Or perhaps, like many children of the 1960s, he had enjoyed tales of the heroic owl defending crops and had chosen to give form to his childhood fantasies. Although he does not recall the latter, Ai has confirmed that he was aware of Huang’s example and that, at the very least, “a relation” exists between the works, albeit one that “does not mean a lot.” The conspiratorial wink that had provoked suspicion in Huang’s painting became, in Ai’s ceramic homage, “just a mockery, about opening and closing eyes.”43 Once again, presaging the resistance to explicit meaning and preference for privacy over partisanship that would later characterize Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, Ai here disavows the convenience of such explanations yet does not entirely discount their possible truth. Long before his formative artistic experience in Cizhou, Ai had gained a sensitivity to the value of ceramics as memory vessels through his father’s collection of souvenirs acquired at the height of his renown as a state-sanctioned poet and preserved throughout his exile. These were given pride of place on the shelves of their home in Shihezi, while one of Ai Qing’s first priorities on returning to Beijing was to contact friends who had safeguarded some of the more precious pieces during his absence.44 In his memoir, Ai offers a poetic evocation of the place that such objects occupied in their lives when all hope for a better future seemed lost: Every evening [in Little Siberia], I would help Father roll . . . cigarettes [to store] neatly in a blue-and-white [ jar] that had somehow managed to escape destruction during the Red Guard raids on our former home. The handle and lid were silver, and on the body of the jar were painted a little bridge over a stream and a . . . boy with a zither, next to a rocky outcrop, low-hanging weeping willows, and a thatched cottage . . . brighten[ing] even the dimmest corner with the lustre of its white porcelain and cobalt blue.45

Even in these earliest years of his life, Ai had acquired an appreciation of ceramics as vessels for the preservation of an otherwise fragile past. The attention to fine details in this recollection of events that occurred five decades earlier also suggests a deep appreciation for the expressive capability of certain materials. Speaking with Tim Marlow in 2017, Ai attributed this sensibility again to the influence of his father, who had endeavored to “totally [open] his senses to any kind of condition” and had encouraged his son to cultivate a similar spirit of receptive discovery: When I use materials, [I] study history, how those materials have been used before, in what kind of context, and what kind of form can [be created]. Then you start to feel [the] possibilities you can give it [to] create a new language.46

This approach to materials can be noted in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, in which the eponymous jar functions simultaneously as a vessel for collective memories, a carrier Porcelain Past

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of historically inflected Chineseness, and an expression of Ai’s personal investment in the medium. In addition to the memories of his father’s collection and his brief sojourn in Pengcheng, his entry to the world of collecting and connoisseurship after his second return to Beijing in 1993 provides an even closer and more directly relevant biographic correlation here. This return inspired a more sustained engagement with ceramics, out of which Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn and other works discussed in this chapter emerged. Ai had not initially intended to pursue an artistic career after his attempts to do so in New York proved fruitless, yet his homecoming catalyzed a fascination with classical art and culture that drew him to the capital’s antique markets, “of which there were many, piled high with artefacts from all over China and . . . all periods of history,” in the company of his brother Ai Dan, who “had established himself as an authority in identifying ancient relics.”47 Ai recalls that it was the direct access to the distant past apparently offered by such relics which proved most attractive for him: You could find Stone Age tools, Shang and Zhou ritual vessels, jade[s] [of] the Warring States and the Han, and [sancai] earthenware from the Tang, not to mention countless collectibles from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing . . . Immersing myself in traditional Chinese arts, I felt I had discovered a new continent . . . Every day I would explore a new corner of this broad territory, finding an ethical order and a sense of beauty embedded in each piece . . . imagining their history . . . my hungry spirit was nourished.48 With the benefit of Ai Dan’s connoisseurial skills, however, the access to the past that Ai found in these relics extended beyond the imaginary to include an almost forensic eye for detail already noted in his description of their father’s blue-and-white jar. “Like criminal evidence in the field of art,” he explains, “these artefacts . . . are marked with traces of history through their use, material, and [the means of] production [in] their respective eras.”49 This ability to identify and decode the residue of past events no doubt proved useful in his encounters with another aspect of ceramics collecting that would provoke his fascination: the creation of historical replicas and reproductions. Complicating the appeal of ceramics as authentic remnants of ancient dynasties, this discovery prompted a realization of the contingency of history and heritage that inspired Ai not only to visit Jingdezhen, but to commission his own set of reproductions, to which we’ll turn in the next part of this chapter. In Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, the shattering of the past takes precedence over its replication, yet both processes are agents of change that cast doubt on the authority of the antique. The photographic medium of the work assumes new significance in this reading. Photographs follow an ambiguous ontological trajectory as the record of a moment passed yet fixed in the present, mementos of that which has been lost. As a record of three such moments, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn further heightens the 78

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tension between presence and absence by introducing an indication of the passage of time and the fate to which all things will eventually succumb, regardless of their historical or cultural significance. The jar, no longer an immobile icon of a classical ideal, is immersed within the currents of this passage. It becomes a tangible, autonomous object rather than an abstract referent, a mirror for the artist’s realization of his personal and cultural identity, and an emblem of a historical narrative that is “malleable, pliant, and can ignore the strictures of chronology.”50 Several other writers on Ai’s work have noted this function of the photograph, remarking on the “liberation” of the urn from antiquarian classification and a parallel liberation of artist and viewer from the stifling weight of the past.51 Yet this interpretation remains grounded in the assumption that the vessel is authentic and the values it holds are coherent and continuous. Glenn Adamson offers a reading that is more sensitive to the potential artificiality of both object and value-system, noting that the order in which the photographs are shown can be reversed to suggest a narrative in which “a shattered vessel makes itself whole, and floats upwards into [Ai’s] hands.”52 This not only foregrounds the construction of the images but draws attention to the centrality of antique replicas at the heart of Ai’s engagement with ceramics. Adamson goes on to draw a comparison between Ai’s artistic development and his movement between cultural and historical contexts, prompting an engagement with the themes of mobility.53 This reading, too, can be emphasized by rearranging the narrative of the work: if the second photograph in the triptych is viewed in isolation, for instance, it becomes an exemplary image of the object (and artist) in a position of multiple allegiances and significations. Released from Ai’s hands, but not yet caught by its own weight, the urn hovers between preservation and destruction, origin and destination alike unknown. To return to the artist’s words cited earlier, the only certainty then becomes gravity, that irresistible power that terminates all flights of fancy—or, with a more forceful trajectory, an equilibrium that holds the traveler in perpetual motion, neither here nor there but caught in between. Drawing together these various readings of Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, we can situate the work between two perspectives on the past. Ai’s choice of vessel testifies to the historic authority of ceramics in China, while the affective power of his photographs rests partially on the enduring aura of the Han dynasty as a cradle of nationhood. His association of ceramics with two pivotal moments in his life further reinforces this vision of the medium as a carrier of Chineseness, evoking stories of exile and return, separation from and reunion with family and nation. Visiting Beijing’s antiques markets with his brother in the early 1990s, however, Ai discovered the relative ease with which the patina of the antique could be fabricated, and he may even have chosen to use a replica for his infamous performance. Much like ceramics, photographs are also a malleable medium, susceptible to manipulation and artifice, and can easily be used to alter our understanding of past events—or rearranged to suggest an alternative narrative. This tension between fact and fiction is central to the significance Porcelain Past

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of Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn as a work in which Ai engages with the affective power of ceramics as vessels for fleeting memories, vehicles of cultural identity, and an ideal means to introduce ambiguity into canonical historical narratives. FAKES AND FORGERIES As to my porcelain-based works, the central issue is one of authenticity. What is real and what is fake or a reproduction? . . . How do [the fake pieces] differ from authentic . . . pieces when they are exact replicas with no recognizable differences? If there is no recognizable difference . . . what does this do to the value of the original. . .?54

Imitation has long been central to Jingdezhen’s enduring preeminence as a global center for porcelain production (and reproduction). In A Record of Jingdezhen Ceramics (Jingdezhen tao lu 景德镇陶录), one of the earliest historical accounts of the region compiled in 1815 by scholar-officials Lan Pu and Zheng Tinggui, there are many references to this practice, including Yuan imitations of Song glazes, Ming replicas of Yuan ware, and Qing versions of famous Song, Yuan, and Ming ceramics. Even the most lucrative product of the city’s kilns at the time was a reproduction ware: “Official Old” (guan gu 官古), so called “because it is the fashion to prefer old things.”55 Lan and Zheng mention several Ming-dynasty ceramicists who are known to have excelled in replica-making: Cui Gong (fl. 1521–1571), whose imitations of earlier blue-and-white wares “were the crowning glory of the people’s kilns”; Zhou Danquan (fl. 1567–1620), whose reproductions attracted “bids of a thousand ounces of gold”; and Chen Zhongmi, admired for his skill in fabricating glazes and styles of the ancient past.56 This Ming-dynasty appetite for imitation extended as well to jade, metalwork, and, above all, calligraphy and ink painting, as the ability to purchase luxuries and a desire for social mobility spread from the old elite to the merchant class. The practice was so widespread and universally esteemed that even an outsider like Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) deemed it noteworthy, reporting to his ecclesiastic superiors in Rome that “counterfeiters of antiques are numerous, and clever at cheating the unwary.”57 Reproduction remains a core aspect of the porcelain industry in contemporary Jingdezhen, where most ceramicists engage in the lucrative manufacture of imitation antiques. This trade is driven by what one writer has described as “an insatiable desire for reproduction ware . . . at all levels of the market.”58 Yet its origins can be traced to the fashion for replicating the past previously noted, which continued to flourish after the transition to Qing authority in the seventeenth century. Even amid the decades of unrest that followed the abdication of the final Qing emperor in 1912, the market endured and in fact prospered as the dispersal of imperial collections provided new prototypes for imitation, while European and Japanese incursions into the Chinese hinterland brought a new clientele of overseas collectors. The 1920s and 1930s saw further developments, with dealers in Shanghai establishing a profitable sideline in the 80

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commissioned production of high-quality replicas for sale to the unwary as genuine antiques. The founding of the PRC brought a temporary pause as state-owned factories in Jingdezhen were instructed to focus on domestic, electrical, and engineering ceramics, yet a quota of antique-style wares nevertheless remained. At the Sculpture Factory, for example, Liu Jianhua and his uncle specialized not only in socialist realist statuary but also classical-style forms of sculpture. It was only with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution that this limited output was curtailed by a more rigorously enforced censure of reproductions as feudal, revisionist, capitalist, and counterrevolutionary.59 Yet even in this era of ideological ferment, exceptions could be made, as always, for senior government officials, notably including the “7501” series—a 138piece set of famille rose dinnerware created for Mao Zedong’s personal use.60 The contemporary reproduction industry gained momentum through the 1980s to the mid-1990s—the same decades, coincidentally, that artists like Ai and Liu developed an interest in porcelain as an expressive medium. In parallel with the contemporary art scene in Beijing and other cities, state-directed production gave way to a more market-oriented vision, permitting ceramicists the freedom to create a more diverse range of wares. In 1994, artisans were compelled to tie their production even more closely to the whims of the market after a state-mandated tightening of restrictions on bank loans, previously the main source of income for collective factories after the repeal of state funding in 1985. This decision brought about the closure of the first state-owned factory in 1995, swiftly followed by other such enterprises until, by October 1998, all the factories that had been established in the 1950s had been shuttered and between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand artisans found themselves unemployed.61 Facing competition from other kiln-cities, many turned again to reproduction as a familiar and lucrative line of work. By 2006, almost 20 percent of the 390,000 ceramicists then active in Jingdezhen supported themselves solely by creating replicas. At first, qingbai-glazed ware proved most popular—another reason, perhaps, for Liu Jianhua’s use of this glaze in RegularFragile—but this was soon eclipsed by blue-and-white in the styles of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasty; overglaze enameled wares in Ming- or Qing-dynasty style; and monochromes in imitation of Qing models.62 Turning to porcelain (or returning, in Liu’s case) in 1996 and 1998, respectively, pivotal years in Jingdezhen’s transition from state sponsorship to market-driven entrepreneurialism, Ai and Liu benefited greatly from the resurgent enthusiasm for imitation. Ai’s Jingdezhen-based collaborator, Liu Weiwei, for example, has been a conspicuous presence in the reproduction industry since 2001, when he sold the market stall where he first met Ai in Beijing in the early 1990s to instead dedicate his expertise as an antiques dealer to the manufacture of “convincing forgeries of Chinese porcelains that are inserted into auction sales.”63 With the benefit of his friend’s patronage, Liu maintains a workshop of about 2,100m2 (22,604 sq. ft.) with a staff of twenty and three firing kilns.64 Ai’s professional relationship with Liu, who considers himself “foremost a businessman and . . . describes his creations Porcelain Past

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not as works of art but feats of production,” exemplifies the bonds that unite the work of contemporary artists with the products of Jingdezhen’s replica industry.65 Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain (2005–6), a collaboration between Ai and Romanian-born artist Serge Spitzer, is one of the first major projects that Liu Weiwei helped the artist realize. Ai and Spitzer met while participating in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 (the same event for which Cai Guo-Qiang created Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard) and would later travel together across China in September 2005, spending a week in the Porcelain Capital. For Zhang Peili (張培力, b. 1957), another Chinese artist invited to take part in the Biennale, this iteration of the global art event marked an important advance in the international reception of Chinese contemporary art: At last, [we] were not treated sensationally [as] pandas and “endangered species”: the exhibition . . . created the possibility of a dialogue between contemporary Chinese art and the international art world.66

The collaboration that arose between Ai and Spitzer could be considered an exemplary instance of such dialogue, and Ghost Gu could even be understood as a fusion of the works that each artist submitted for the Biennale. For his Reality Models/Re-Cycle (Don’t Hold Your Breath) (1999), for example, Spitzer installed eight thousand goblets of Venetian Murano glass on the floor and in the rafters of a derelict warehouse, most of which were smashed by wild birds while on display—undeterred, Spitzer collected the shards and had them recycled to create new goblets. Ai’s 72 Standard (1997), on the other hand, recorded the stages of a lunar eclipse during Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu jie 中秋節), when the moon is traditionally predicted to be full, in a sequence of black-and-white photographs taken at five-minute intervals. These images echo the dispassionate observation of natural forces in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn while also making explicit the liberating potential of cyclic renewal that the latter had only implied. Ghost Gu brought together many of the themes explored in these works: the spectacle of harmonious multiplicity, the transformative effects of a change in perspective, the disparity between myth or tradition and reality, and, above all, the fusion of a historic material with a contemporary artistic sensibility. Displayed in four variations, the core component of Ghost Gu is an otherwise unremarkable guan (罐) jar, bearing a Yuan-dynasty design and reproduced ninety-six times (figs. 16–17). These reproductions are painted in either blue-and-white or redand-white and generally arranged in a square of eight jars by twelve. The design is taken from a mid-fourteenth-century jar that gained international fame in 2005 when it sold at auction for £15.7 million ($19 million), ten times higher than the estimate and over triple the highest auction price previously paid for an Asian work of art. The jar is one of eight currently known examples of this type, all decorated with images derived from classical literature—in this case a scene from the Han-dynasty epic Strategies of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce 战国策) representing “Guigu’s descent from the moun82

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figure 16 Ai Weiwei and Serge Spitzer, Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain, 2005, installation of ninety-six porcelain vessels with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, 27 × 35 cm each. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

tain” (Guigu xia shan 鬼谷下山) and copied “figure for figure” from a woodblock illustration for a pinghua (平话) version of the narrative (a fusion of history and myth penned by a professional storyteller). Even before its appropriation by Ai and Spitzer, then, the design was “a copy of a copy, a translation of an already inaccurate translation.”67 The eponymous protagonist is strategist Wang Yi, known as Guiguzi for his birth in Guigu (“Phantom Valley”) and shown in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a tiger and leopard. Other characters portrayed include Guigu’s two attendants; Su Dai, an emissary on horseback; and a second mounted figure identified as General Dugu Jiao.68 Ai and Spitzer replicated both the design and title of the scene, with Guigu translated as “Ghost Gu.” The four variations of Ghost Gu suggest a perspective on history that recalls Ai’s earlier efforts to expose, demystify, and deconstruct the distorting effects of nationalist myth. In the first iteration, created in 2005 for Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, each jar is painted in blue-and-white with a fragment of the overall design. The dimensions of their painted surfaces vary according to their display position, as shown in a photograph taken at Ai’s studio: those at the rear are painted with a narrow vertical Porcelain Past

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figure 17 Ai Weiwei and Serge Spitzer, Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain (reverse), 2005, installation of ninety-six porcelain vessels with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, 27 × 35 cm (each). Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

section of the full image while those in the front row bear about half of the design, and the same scene on the jars in between diminishes row by row in a gradual reduction to create a playful perspectival anamorphosis. Seen from a certain vantage, the complete design appears to be painted on every jar, but, viewed from the reverse, they seem entirely unpainted. This visual pun exposes the similar influence of perspective for our telling of past events, which can likewise appear to be authentic from one point of view while dissolving from another into an assemblage of artfully arranged fragments. Ghost Gu can therefore be noted alongside Ai’s earlier work as a parody of the selective typologies endorsed by nationalist visions of history that derive authority from their assertion of a singular reading of the multiple material remains of the past. A slightly different expression of this idea is suggested by the second variation of Ghost Gu (2006), in which the titular scene is painted on the interior rather than exterior of each jar. Pierson has associated this visual conceit with the historic production of internally decorated vases, although she notes that figurative scenes were painted in this style only from the eighteenth century and generally on smaller vessels. She also identifies a precedent in the long tradition of anhua (暗花) or “secret decoration,” popular from the early Ming and again primarily found on relatively small pieces. To achieve this effect, a lightly incised design is concealed under a viscous glaze, rendering it visible only to those privileged to study the vessel at length and so implying a 84

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validation of the social status signaled by ownership of such ornaments.69 This raises another aspect of historical myth implied but not explicitly critiqued in Ai’s earlier works: the privilege of the narrator. This is evident in Ghost Gu not only in the use of anhua-style painting, but also the subject of the design. Although, in Ai’s estimation, this narrative and others adapted from the epic Strategies of the Warring States are “really the most famous stories [in China, where] everybody knows them,” this is nevertheless an ancient text that holds meaning only for those who read classical Chinese and have some knowledge of the events portrayed.70 Ai has shown he is aware of the potential for misapprehension, observing that he has found “the understanding of Chinese art, whether in China or in the West, [to be] very superficial,” and that one of his aims with Ghost Gu and related works had been to “use a modern language to explain this traditional art and craft.”71 Once again, then, a tension arises between the fiction of a transparent window on the past and a more partial reality, shaped not only by time but by unequal access to knowledge. The remaining two iterations of Ghost Gu showcase the same visual strategies but are painted in red rather than blue. When viewed alongside their blue-and-white counterparts, this change in color highlights the materiality of the jars over their conceptual implications, invoking strategies of production and promotion characteristic of a consumerist economy. The focus of analysis is thereby returned to the initial Yuan jar, not only reproduced but now, like contemporary designer ceramics, available in two colors. Such irreverent handling draws attention to the incongruity of the jar’s astonishing monetary value in comparison to the more modest prices gained by other pieces of Yuan-dynasty porcelain, as well as its likely manufacture in multiple when first created. By reiterating the jar’s commodity status as a highly desirable but not singular vessel, simultaneously ornamental and functional, Ai once again restores this vessel to the realm of the quotidian in much the same manner as in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, albeit by less permanent means. The conceptual resonance of Ghost Gu is rendered even more complex, however, by the fact that Ai was not the only person to capitalize on the success of the jar at auction. In Jingdezhen, news of the unprecedented sale was swiftly followed by the manufacture of replicas by Huang Yunpeng, owner and chairman of the Jiayang Porcelain Company—a leading manufacturer of Yuan-, Ming-, and Qing-dynasty reproductions in blue-and-white. After one of Huang’s replicas appeared on a Chinese Central Television documentary in October 2005, not long after Ai and Spitzer travelled to Jingdezhen, rumors spread throughout the city that he sold the jar for as much as ¥200,000 ($30,000), inspiring many others to follow his example.72 Ghost Gu, then, in addition to being a reproduction of a Yuan-dynasty ceramic substitute for a woodcut illustration, based in turn on a popular retelling of a second-hand narrative, could be a reinterpretation as well of this other, much-admired reproduction. It may even have been created by Huang or one of his imitators, though Ai does not recall Huang’s name and has conceded only that his jars were manufactured “using the production techniques of the Yuan Porcelain Past

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figure 18 Ai Weiwei, Blue-and-White, 1996, porcelain vessels with underglaze blue decoration, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

dynasty completely, including the shape, colours, weight, opening, bottom, glaze, and the way of drawing—all followed the way it was made at the time.”73 Ai has never entirely revealed the circumstances in which the jars were created and likely never will, but a replica of this quality would certainly require the expertise of an experienced maker. Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain, although the most conceptually complex, was not the first work in Ai’s ceramic oeuvre to draw inspiration from the reproduction industry. A decade earlier, in 1996, Ai had created a series of porcelain vessels replicating blue-and-white forms and motifs attributed to the illustrious reigns of the Qingdynasty Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, when “[ceramics] were produced with a very specific standard and met extreme demands.” (fig. 18)74 Like his now more widely known photographic triptych, this series also drew inspiration from Beijing’s markets, where he had found countless replicas available for purchase, sometimes deceptively labeled as genuine antiques. Under his brother’s watchful eye, Ai became attuned to the methods by which counterfeit and authentic could be distinguished: It’s like a secret code . . . not based on scientific principles so much as personal feelings . . . whereby the touch or eye can be so refined and attuned . . . This is such a mystery. So, I thought, why not make a few copies according to all that knowledge.75

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figure 19 Ai Weiwei, Blue-and-White Moonflask, 1996, porcelain with underglaze blue decoration, 53 × 36.8 × 7.6 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Travelling to Jingdezhen, he commissioned artisans known to produce the best reproductions to carry out this ambition. Blue-and-White Moonflask (1996), an imitation of a Qing bianhu (扁壶) or baoyueping (宝月瓶), right down to the counterfeit Qianlong reign mark on the base, is the most consummate expression of the aims underlying the series (fig. 19). The imitation is so meticulous that it would likely pass the visual spot-check to which collectors and curators subject prospective purchases to confirm authenticity, its forgery detectable only by thermo-luminescence testing. Yet Ai did not intend to mislead, making sure to clearly label this and other Blue and White pieces as reproductions; rather, he hoped “to prove that counterfeits have no physical difference from the genuine [article], and sometimes they are [even] Porcelain Past

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better.”76 Even during the Qing dynasty, such vases had been manufactured in imitation of Ming wares, which were adaptations in turn of the ubiquitous pilgrim flask found in many guises across the Asian continent. The alleged authenticity of these vessels is inherently evasive, while the multiple sources for the ceramic form, and the lineage of reproduction from which it derives, undermine the certainty with which connoisseurs regard an immaculate provenance as a guarantee of originality. As well as a precedent for later works like Ghost Gu, Ai’s Blue-and-White series also suggests an alternative lineage for other works created at the same time, like Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn or Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1993). These are generally framed as “cultural readymades” marking a transition between the Duchampian inspiration of earlier pieces like Violin (1985), Safe Sex (1986), and One-Man Shoe (1987)— featured in Ai’s first and only solo show in New York, “Old Shoes, Safe Sex” (1988) at Ethan Cohen’s Art Waves Gallery—and his subsequent turn toward a critical engagement with China’s artisanal traditions. Considering his interest in reproduction and imitation, however, a more prescient model for later works could be found in Wu Street (1993–94), a tongue-in-cheek intervention into the closed circuits of art criticism that Ai set in motion not long before his return to Beijing, in collaboration with fellow émigré and future co-editor of the Black Cover Book, Xu Bing. This project grew from a stack of unsigned and unclaimed abstract paintings that the artists found on a street corner in the East Village, at the intersection of Fifth Street and Second Avenue, not far from their shared apartment. Seeking, perhaps, to expose the deference among their compatriots to imported artistic and critical models, with an incisive yet affectionate cynicism, the two artists commissioned a professional translator to rewrite an essay penned a year earlier by curator and art historian Melissa Feldman for a show by prominent New Yorker Jonathan Lasker (b. 1948). Renaming the artist “Jason Jones” and the critic “Harold Phillips”—names that recall, perhaps intentionally, those of Jasper Johns and Harold Rosenberg—Ai and Xu submitted the adapted essay for publication in the February 1994 edition of World Art (Shijie meishu 世界美术), illustrated with photographs of their salvaged paintings. Ai had by this time returned to Beijing, where he no doubt saw the article circulating among the city’s aspiring artists until Xu revealed their intervention later that year, at the opening of a retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.77 Although rarely mentioned in critical discussion of either artist’s work, Wu Street set a crucial precedent not only for their subsequent, more sincere efforts to share news of artistic trends in the Black Cover Book, but also for the comparably ambiguous blurring of fact and fiction in works like Blue-and-White and Ghost Gu. Ai’s destructive impulse has not always remained separate from his talent for artifice, with both strategies surfacing in another photographed performance that offers a counterpoint of sorts for Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn and a fitting final case study for this section: Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls (1995). In this work, the artist is shown seated on a leather couch in his studio in the moment following the 88

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figure 20 Ai Weiwei, Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, 1995, gelatin silver photograph, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

eponymous act of breaking, hammer in hand, with a selection of his New York readymades on the wall behind him and a burst of ceramic fragments suspended in the air between a fabric-draped stool and the studio floor (figs. 20–21). As in Dropping a Handynasty Urn, we are confronted with what appears to be the record of a destructive gesture, captured now in a single frame. The artist is again notable for his studied lack of emotion, matching the empirical detachment implied by the monochrome palette and the assertion that this is a candid record. Yet the clear staging of the scene, the immobility of the hammer in contrast to the apparently mobile fragments, and the inclusion of Ai’s readymades as an allusion to the artistic processes of selection and fabrication cast doubt on the authenticity of his captured actions. Like the now more widely known photographic triptych, this performance may be another artful construction, a staged scene orchestrated by a skilled image-manipulator. Once again, the certainty and universal relevance of historical fact are reduced to a potentially fictional domestic tableau, vulnerable to destruction and deceit. A parallel can be noted as well with Ghost Gu if we shift focus from the object and action recorded to the instrument of their coming together. Both works allude indirectly to the world of the art auction—the vessel imitated in Ghost Gu gained fame for its unprecedented sale price, while the positioning of a Chinese ceramic “under the hammer” in Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls conjures an immediate Porcelain Past

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figure 21 Ai Weiwei, Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, 1995, gelatin silver photograph, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

association with this value-oriented sphere. Both works imply that a certain violence is inflicted on the artifacts of the past when reduced to a monetary figure: an exceptional Yuan-dynasty jar becomes a reproducible commodity and two Qing bowls are reduced to a handful of shards, decimated by the very instrument of their transformation from the rarefied realm of the antique to the transactional logic of the global art market. Art historian and curator Jane Chin Davidson identifies photograph and installation alike with a staunch “resistance against neoliberal concepts for the new China,” observing that they prompt the question: “[is] value today . . . based on the unique aesthetic, the one-of-a-kind historical object, or on the appraised money worth?”78 A broader set of issues can, however, be introduced here in relation to the concepts of historical authority, value, and authenticity with which the works discussed in this chapter engage. These issues can be brought into focus by the events surrounding another record-breaking auction: the sale in 2010 of a Qianlong-reign famille rose vase for £43 million ($52 million). As in the case of the Guigu xia shan jar, reports of this sale tended to focus on the unprecedented price rather than any cultural or historical significance, although the discovery of the vase “in a dusty attic,” where it had been hidden from sight since the 1930s, did attract comment.79 Additionally, when the winning bidder (an anonymous Chinese collector) failed to provide the agreed funds, public 90

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speculation became increasingly sensational. Many even doubted the authenticity of the vase as a genuine antique, before the belated final confirmation of the sale in January 2013 confirmed “that it was the best object of its type to be seen on the market in decades.”80 The events prior to and surrounding this sale, and the fluctuation of popular opinion between auction and settlement, perfectly capture the fickle currents of historical contingency. The vase had remained unknown and unrecognized for almost a century before it was abruptly transformed in 2010 into an invaluable relic, “a very, very important, rare and splendid item,” returned with great fanfare to its place of manufacture.81 This return became a mythic event, part of a broader trend of cultural repatriation inspired by China’s economic growth and directly sponsored by the CCP. The Guigu xia shan jar, too, at its sale five years earlier, had almost been purchased by “a suspected ‘syndicate of Chinese buyers’ looking to bring the precious piece back home” but unwilling to bid higher than £10 million ($12 million).82 In the case of both vessels, historical authority is determined less by an illustrious pedigree than by chance discovery, fictional narratives of nationhood, and the sovereignty of wealth. PRESERVATION OR PACKAGING?

The allure of history is apparent in many guises in Ai Weiwei’s ceramic oeuvre, usually paired with a desire to question the sources of this allure and to disrupt inherited narratives of the past. In Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, Ghost Gu, Blue and White, and Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, this critical aim is expressed through acts of destruction, reproduction, even outright fabrication. In other works, however, Ai has achieved his goal through a comparably ambivalent preservation and quasimuseological safeguarding of the past. These notably include Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] (1993), Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle (1994), Souvenir from Beijing (2002), and Dust to Dust (2009). The benefits of preservation are measured in each of these works against the costs of an enforced stasis, in stark contrast to the liberating release pictured with such iconic assurance in Ai’s photographed performances. Removed from timeless ignominy and returned to the flux of everyday life, the jar featured in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn has been spared the temperature-controlled torpor of museum storage and is now constrained only by the eternal inertia of its image. The ceramics chosen for Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] and Tangdynasty Courtesan in Bottle (fig. 22), on the other hand, have been confined to a more tangible state of suspended animation. They were intended for burial with the dead, decisively separated from the world of the living—a separation that was in fact one of the defining qualities of such objects. The earliest known descriptions of tomb art, in Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals (呂氏春秋 Lüshi chunqiu, 239 BCE) and The Book of Rites (礼记 Li ji, compiled in the Han dynasty but composed in the fifth to third centuries BCE), define the act of burial as one of “hiding away [so] men should not see Porcelain Past

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[the dead].” This ruling has been found recorded as well in excavated tombs: a tomb in Cangshan, Shandong, dated to 151 CE, for example, was found to contain an inscription that concludes with the following lines addressed to the deceased: “[You] have entered the dark world . . . separated from the living. After the tomb is sealed, it will never be opened again.”83 Wu Hung identifies such concealment as an essential trait of Chinese rites for the dead, to the extent that no other civilisation in the pre-modern world was more obsessed in concealing images and objects [inside tombs] than China, where . . . from the fourth millennium BCE to the early twentieth century CE, people devoted an excessive amount of wealth and labour to constructing underground burial structures.84

The excavation of a tomb and the disinterring of its contents, not to mention their scrutiny by art historians and archaeologists and their subsequent exposure as artifacts on public display, therefore constitutes a fundamental inversion of purpose. In temporal and spatial terms, their exhibition is an irruption of the unchanging realm of the dead into the transient flux of the living, threatening to cast the ontological stability of each into a disruptive uncertainty. Tomb figurines (俑 yong) played an important role in the construction of a space for the dead. The earliest known examples, dated to the Eastern Zhou dynasty (721– 256 BCE), can be regarded as “the first major tradition of figurative representation in Chinese art” and they established “[the] dominant form of such representation for some five hundred years.” Initially created to resemble the servants, entertainers, and guards who served the deceased in life, the roles these figurines could perform multiplied over the centuries until, by the Tang dynasty, they had gained a “typological richness and stylistic sensitivity” that ensured their continued use.85 Ai’s bottled figures are representative of the apex of this tradition, before its Ming-dynasty decline as alternate visions of the realm beyond life emerged which favored monumental stone statuary above ground. They also exemplify one of the most representative types: the demure, dutiful attendant, standing ready at the side of her deceased mistress or master. Such figurines were created “to fashion a miniature world [that] not only substituted for the . . . human world but constituted a world free from natural laws . . . thereby extending life in perpetuity.”86 As the ritual definitions of the tomb just cited indicate, however, they can only fulfil this function while the realm of the deceased remains entirely self-contained. Removed from the ground and exposed to the eyes of the living, these figurines lose their world-making powers and become little more than lifeless effigies. Assuming Ai’s figurines are genuine antiques rather than reproductions, their return to the living after centuries of subterranean stasis has been partially reversed by their display in glass bottles that recreate the sanctified space of the vitrine in miniature. Enshrined, respectively, in a Johnnie Walker Red Label whiskey bottle and an 92

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figure 22 Ai Weiwei, Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994, earthenware, Absolut Kurant bottle, 23 × 8 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Absolut Kurant vodka bottle, they seem protected from damage or decay, made available for scrutiny, but secured against the polluting effect of outside influences which might disturb their historical authority and authenticity. The selection of bottles created to hold alcohol evokes the display of preserved specimens in jars of embalming fluid, drawing attention to the accepted typological classification of such figures as little more than samples for the study of ancient material culture. Ai’s use of whiskey and vodka bottles also recalls Adamson’s comparison of Han ceramic jars with contemporary glass soda-bottles—both vessels are intended to be discarded after use, not safeguarded for posterity, and certainly not repurposed as display cases. The careful preservation of bottle and figurine is a patently absurd act. Porcelain Past

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Additionally, while the specimen jar and museum vitrine at least offer the possibility of removal, Ai’s figures cannot be withdrawn from their confinement without smashing the bottles that hold them, damaging object and container alike. Preservation, then, in this case, does more harm than good, and yet, for Garth Clark, these works evoke the same memories of “childhood wonder” as a ship-in-a-bottle, leading viewers to question their seemingly impossible creation.87 A connection with Ai’s own childhood could also be noted in his selection of a Cizhou-ware figurine for Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle], perhaps in homage to his earliest experiment with ceramics-making. Ai himself has defined these works as “a kind of game or a mockery,” motivated by boredom and impulse rather than a deliberate aesthetic strategy: On my shelf there were too many Tang figurines . . . I felt happy for owning them, but on the other hand I felt that they did not have any use. So, I used some methods that I have always been using [sic] to defuse their original meanings.88

As in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, these works seem to imply that release from the determinism of a fixed narrative, personal or cultural, can be gained only through destruction while, with great irony, preservation is ensured only at the cost of indefinite stasis. In a third work created in the same phase of Ai’s career, Han-dynasty Urn with CocaCola Logo (fig. 23), conventionally dated to 1995 but more likely created in 1993, the tension between preservation and destruction is even more clearly expressed in a strategic act of disfiguration. This piece enjoys much more widespread recognition than the bottled figurines, likely due to its frequent curatorial and critical pairing with Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn. But, like the latter, when first created it was intended as little more than a prank to be shared with a few friends, as Ai explains in his memoir: I found something else to do with a Han earthenware urn. This one had classic proportions and was full and shapely in form, but it seemed to lack a certain element [and so I] painted the Coca-Cola logo on its surface [to add] more pizzazz.89

Speaking with Tim Marlow in 2015, Ai remarked that the notoriety of the work surprised him: “I never thought I would have the chance to show [it] . . . The first CocaCola vase . . . I just gave to [Swiss collector Uli Sigg], because it [had] stayed in my home for a long time and nobody paid . . . attention to it.”90 Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo and Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle were both so unimportant that Ai did not even choose to include them in the Black Cover Book, although the former did come to occupy some significance as the first of many jars adorned with this logo that Ai has created in the decades since that momentary whim. Like the jar in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, the allegedly antique ceramic appropriated for Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo would once have been intended for use 94

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figure 23 Ai Weiwei, Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1993, earthenware, synthetic pigment, 25 × 28 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

and discarded when it no longer served its purpose. Unlike the former, however, this particular jar remained intact until Sigg, emulating Ai’s performance, in 2012 commissioned Swiss artist Manuel Salvisberg to record his own destruction of the piece in a photographic triptych that meticulously replicates the iconic work, bringing the life of the jar to a natural end.91 While the figurines in Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle and Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] are, to some extent, protected against such intervention, removed from the passage of time by their makeshift vitrines, the unintended preservation of Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo was maintained only at the expense of the jar’s material integrity, violated by the addition of a gaudy corporate brand. But is this after all a violation? Ai’s apparent desecration of a cultural relic could be reframed once again as an act of restitution, inviting a recognition of the equivalence between this ancient jar and the bottles now used to hold the eponymous soft Porcelain Past

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drink. As in the bottled works, the antique is here held in tension with the contemporary, foregrounding the intended purpose of tomb figurines and storage jars as objects of ritual and everyday use. Yet chronological categories are not merely juxtaposed in this work but inseparably fused, as if the clay of the ancient artifact has expanded to conform to a glass container long since shattered, leaving only the imprint of the new in a cursive script that mimics the contours of the old. Ai’s blurring of destruction and preservation, in works that suggest an excavation of the antique for the edification or amusement of contemporary viewers, can be productively compared with the recent history of the ruin as an aesthetic category in China. In the introductory comments for his study of the ruined and ruinous, Wu Hung reports that his exhaustive search for ruin images in a selection of Chinese paintings created from the fifth century BCE until the 1850s yielded only six examples in which decaying architectural structures are explicitly shown. His survey of literary records proved even more fruitless, leading him to conclude that “there was not a single case in pre—twentieth-century China in which the ruined appearance of an old building [was] preserved” in a manner familiar to those of us born and raised in Europe, North America, or Australia.92 Aside from a belated and brief foray into the picturesque during the late nineteenth century, Wu finds little evidence for the existence of an aesthetic of ruins until the social unrest that marked the first decades of the twentieth century compelled artists to tackle the formerly taboo subjects of death and destruction. These maudlin subjects were first brought to public attention by photographers and photojournalists who sought to guide and inform public opinion, initially during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, then with greater urgency in the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. This far-reaching conflict, the outbreak of which has been officially antedated (since 2017) to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, prompted the creation of “a national allegory with the twin theme of suffering and survival” in which images of brutality and heroism played a vital role. Such images were used to document atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, as well as the acts of resistance that these inspired, earning the sobriquet jianzheng (见证)—a portmanteau that fuses “legal power (zheng, meaning evidence) and the presence of a testifying gaze (jian, meaning eyewitness).”93 This dual imperative remained a defining quality of subsequent ruin images created in a range of media, illustrating a narrative of national humiliation and restitution now enshrined within state-endorsed histories of China’s modern transformation. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria, also known as the Mukden Incident, provoked a change in attitude among New Culture intellectuals. In the first few decades of the century, many of these intellectuals had sought to align China’s national development with that of other previously colonized or semi-colonized nation-states, pursuing anti-imperialist and antifeudalist goals. After 1931, a vehemently nativist strain of nationalist thought emerged that recalled Sun Yat-sen’s desire for a Han ethnostate, with the Japanese aggressors superseding the Manchu as the enemy rejected to restore the purity of the body politic. 96

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figure 24 Ai Weiwei, Souvenir from Beijing, 2002, earthenware, ironwood, 9.5 × 35.5 × 22.5 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Calls to “revive China” (zhenxing Zhonghua 振兴中华), a phrase that Sun coined in the final years of the Qing dynasty, were sounded alongside aspirations for a new cultural consciousness, adding a note of violence and xenophobia to these essentially reconstructive aims.94 This blending of the desire for a New China with the wish for a Han nation, which has only ever existed as an imagined ideal, remains evident in popular forms of nationalism current in the contemporary PRC, to which we shall return. Before we discuss contemporary nationalisms, however, the desire to memorialize and preserve for an imagined national posterity that is evident in the recent history of ruins representation can also be noted in a second pair of Ai’s cultural readymades, created in the first decade of the present century and clearly marked with an aesthetic of ruination. For the first of these, Souvenir from Beijing (2002) (fig. 24), Ai enshrined a grey clay brick in a bespoke wooden case, creating a contrast between the coarseness of the brick and the sophistication of its container that recalls his earlier pairing of ceramic and glass. Another layer of significance arises when the viewer knows that Ai allegedly salvaged the brick from a siheyuan dismantled to make way for redevelopment in China’s capital, recycling the ironwood of the box from the columns of a Qingdynasty temple torn down for the same reason. A second readymade work, Dust to Dust (2009), also disguises historical significance beneath a deliberately unassuming exterior: for this piece, apothecary jars are partially filled with a sandy powder claimed to be the remains of Neolithic ceramics ground to dust. Both Dust to Dust and Souvenir from Beijing again derive their conceptual intensity from strategic acts of destruction—perpetrated in the latter by the government and, in the former, by the artist himself—the targets of which have been preserved to avoid further damage or dispersal and to allow the emergence of something new. Their titles Porcelain Past

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make clear this implied cycle of destruction and creation. The word “souvenir” derives from the French, “to remember” or, literally, “to come to mind,” evoking the restorative powers of memory and nostalgia and thereby imbuing brick and wood, funerary jar and coffin, with a talismanic significance as aides-mémoires. Poet and literary critic Susan Stewart has defined souvenirs as a medium “for the objectification of desire,” through which a nostalgia or longing for something separated from the possessor by time or distance can be soothed by a collapsing of that separation into an identification with the self: [Through a] transformation of exterior into interior [the] souvenir reduces the public [and] the monumental . . . into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body [and] appropriated within the privatised view of the individual.95

To fulfil this transformation, Stewart explains, the souvenir must maintain a material connection to its origin, it must arouse “the romance of contraband” and thereby give form to an authentic bond between its possessor and the desired primal scene. Yet it must also remain fundamentally incomplete, “impoverished and partial,” resisting the resolution of a too-perfect reconstruction that might seem to return that which has been lost but would dispel the metonymic hold of the souvenir as a vessel for memories and sensations.96 Ai’s brick is an exemplary case study for this power of the fragment as a relic of a Beijing that now exists only in memory, assuming different aspects and associations for its residents which would dissolve if the artist had chosen instead to precisely replicate the siheyuan from which the brick was taken. The phrase “dust to dust,” on the other hand, is drawn from the liturgy performed at Christian funerals to remind mourners of the cyclic renewal of birth and death.97 The use of this phrase to describe the disintegration of Neolithic ceramics provides a sequel to the destructive act depicted in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, once again returning an antique to the ebb and flow of time by reasserting its material vulnerability. This impression is reinforced by Ai’s choice of an apothecary jar to hold the powdered remains, drawing a parallel with the use of medicine to prolong life, and so ascribing restorative properties to traces of the past. The ceramic dust also evokes comparison with the fine particles of charred bone material given to relatives of the deceased after cremation, adding a further layer of meaning to Ai’s reclassification of the jar in his first photographic triptych as an urn, the usual receptacle for such fragments. This comparison situates the work alongside his bottled figures as an uncovering of that which should be hidden, exposing the realms of the dead to scrutiny and removing their mysterious power. Or we could identify the dust as a sample of the “lone and level sands” surrounding the broken monument to the forgotten ancient despot Ozymandias, immortalized by English poet Percy Shelley (1792–1822). Yet the minute particles so meticulously preserved in Dust to Dust are neither calcinated bone nor desiccated masonry, but finely ground ceramic (figs. 25–26). Unlike these other 98

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figure 25 Ai Weiwei, Dust to Dust, 2009, ceramic powder, glass, 26 × 20 × 18 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

figure 26 Ai Weiwei, Dust to Dust (installation), 2009, ceramic powder, glass, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

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materials, if mixed with water or another binding agent, they could be recycled and used to create new forms, drawing attention once again to the cyclic intertwining of destruction and creation. Alongside their individual connotations, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, Dust to Dust, and Souvenir from Beijing, for obvious reasons, have each been read as expressions of the destruction wrought by urban development. This interpretation positions Ai’s readymades alongside the work of other artists of the same generation who have commented less obliquely on Beijing’s transformation, several of whom offer useful counterexamples to throw his idiosyncratic association of this process with ceramics into sharp relief. Ai has consistently defined Souvenir from Beijing as a witness to “the memory of the old town’s demolition,” although it should be noted that he regards Dust to Dust in broader terms as a record of “[the] complete cycle of how cultural artefacts [return] to earth.” He has also disavowed the possibility of any connection between these works and those of other artists who sought to engage with redevelopment and the cycles of creation and destruction.98 Yet these pieces cannot be considered an anomaly in the history of Chinese contemporary art or reduced to isolated statements of independent significance. They should be recognized collectively as the most recent expression of an aesthetic of ruination that developed in tension with the reshaping of Beijing initiated in the 1950s. This violent metamorphosis has also been consistently presented as an unavoidable prerequisite for the emergence of New China— the birth pangs of a modern nation-state coinciding with the death throes of the dynastic past. Prior to the city’s “liberation,” Beijing had largely retained its imperial topography as a series of walled sub-cities situated on a north-south axis in “a rhythmic continuum . . . incomparable for its supreme architectural precision,” and intended to evoke the equally incomparable harmony of the empire.99 This order was first disturbed by the construction of broad avenues uniting the eastern and western districts as part of a project of urban renewal initiated in the 1920s, in response to population growth and the need for a metropolis suited to growing nationalist aspirations. Such efforts to rebuild were curtailed following the relocation of the seat of state to Nanjing in 1927, but, under Communist rule, a new phase of jiucheng gaizao (旧城改造) or “transformation of the old city” began with the razing of the walls and gates that previously delineated the boundaries of Beijing’s urban space. Guided by the credo of the Four Modernizations, the new government aimed to reshape the city to suit the ideal of zhong er xin (中而新) or “Chinese yet new.” The third and final phase in this remaking of Beijing coincided with the Reform Era. From the 1980s, the justification given for destruction shifted from modernization to development (fazhan 发展), opening new “avenues of change [that included] privatization, housing reform, real estate development, and urban renewal,” while the principle of zhong er xin found expanded relevance in this era of cosmopolitan ambitions.100 In 1988, inspired perhaps by a successful bid to host the 1990 Asian 100

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Games—China’s first international sporting event—over half of the remaining Mingand Qing-dynasty siheyuan and hutong (胡同; laneways) that had endured as some of the few traces of old Beijing were marked for redevelopment and demolished over the next decade. This demolition intensified following the 2001 selection of Beijing to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, when a further 5 million square meters (53 million sq. ft.) of siheyuan and hutong were condemned, dislocating three hundred thousand households in a few short years. Urban historian Maurizio Marinelli has described this culminating phase in the city’s redevelopment as “a total revolution of the senses . . . unravelling and reconfiguring the meaning of the urban in China today.”101 For Yu Hua, one of China’s most celebrated contemporary authors, a parallel can be noted with earlier revolutionary precedents in the emergence of what he has aptly described as a “developmental model saturated with [the] violence of the Cultural Revolution.”102 It was this violence that inspired many artists to enact their own narratives of destruction, preservation, and renewal, excavating various layers in the history of the city. The artist most frequently cited as the leading critic of Beijing’s redevelopment is Zhang Dali, who courted confusion and controversy in the 1990s with his silhouette self-portraits spray-painted on the walls of condemned or demolished buildings. A closer parallel with Ai’s work can be noted, however, in that of Zhan Wang, another artist whose name often appears in discussions of urban redevelopment. In 1994, for Ruins Cleaning Project, Zhan spent hours washing, repainting, and restoring sections of a partially demolished building in preparation for its final destruction later that day. He subsequently explained that his actions “[were] not about nostalgia, but about my . . . embarrassment and impotence, knowing that nothing I could do could . . . stop this process.”103 By demonstrating his affection for the past, Zhan’s performance reaffirmed the humanity of the building and the significance it had held for generations of former occupants, just as Ai’s purchase and destruction of a Han-dynasty jar restored this vessel to the ephemeral function for which it had been intended. Zhan’s public display of the usually private act of domestic maintenance and repair also drew attention to another defining aspect of the ruin: the extent to which ruination “confuses the interior with the exterior” and exposes that which usually evades our gaze: The recession of a colonnade is transformed when parts of [it] are broken or missing; the shadows cast by open roofs upon interiors were never meant to be viewed . . . Our eye continually returns to places where the façade has fallen away and [that which] should have remained hidden is exposed.104

In addition to Ai’s dethroning of an antique jar from the pedestal on which it would ordinarily be preserved, then, we could draw a comparison here as well with his unearthing of tomb figurines intended only for the eyes of the dead. Porcelain Past

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Also in 1994, Zhan and other teachers at CAFA received word from municipal authorities that the campus had been leased to a Hong Kong real-estate magnate to construct a “City of Commerce” (Shangcheng 商城). This announcement drew condemnation from artists and intellectuals across the city, who viewed the academy’s demolition as a harbinger of “the complete defeat of art and education under the invasion of a market economy.”105 With fellow faculty members and artists Sui Jianguo (隋建國, b. 1964) and Yu Fan (于凡, b. 1966), Zhan formed Three Men United Studio (Sanren Lianhe Gongzuoshi 三人联合工作室) to organize collective actions in response to the relocation. For their first installation in August 1995, Property Development, held in the remains of the former Department of Sculpture two days after teachers and students were evicted, Zhan scattered clay figurines that had been created as classroom exercises across a mound of dirt and discarded bricks cascading from a broken window, through which the site for the future City of Commerce could be seen on the horizon. Wu Hung has identified the figurines as a substitute for the absent bodies of their student creators, “human subjects . . . not destroyed, but debased; their experiences [signaling] confusion and disorientation.”106 Although perhaps incidental to the work, their medium contributes to this effect, intensifying a sense of abject vulnerability and exposure—the suitability of clay as an analog for flesh is another theme frequently explored by creators of New Export China to which we’ll return in the final chapter of this study. While this offers an evocative counterpoint for Ai’s staging of his inability to prevent destruction in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, his attempts to preserve remnants of the past in Souvenir from Beijing and Dust to Dust find closer comparison with a series of installations by Yin Xiuzhen. For the earliest of these, Ruined City (1996), Yin arranged fourteen hundred grey ceramic roof tiles salvaged from demolition sites across Beijing in rows on the floor of the Capital Normal University’s Art Museum, surrounded by items of furniture that she and her husband, artist Song Dong, bought or received as a gift for their marital home. Art historian Lin Xiaoping has published a vivid firsthand account of the installation: [An] expansive ensemble of dark grey roof tiles [lay] on the ground in straight columns, with just a few gently curving rows of tiles to disrupt the unbending gravity . . . a single motif that expanded [to suggest] the whole city of Beijing . . . viewed from above . . . In the middle of this assemblage . . . stood four yellowish wooden chairs . . . At the very end of the roof tiles’ grim sweep, there was a reddish wooden double bed . . . To the left . . . a washing stand and a dressing table . . . To the right, a tall wooden wardrobe with a mirror . . . Farther away and behind the chest, a lone cane chair . . . set against the wall.107

Lin explains that the significance of these specific items of furniture would have been evident for most visitors as “big pieces” considered indispensable for a newly married couple, but difficult to purchase in the Maoist era. In Yin’s installation, this elegiac 102

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sentimentality was heightened by the blanketing of tiles and furniture alike under four tons of cement powder, piled in funereal drifts and suspended in the air like a suffocating shroud. For Lin, this “desolate vision” echoed the death of household traditions brought about by the demolition of siheyuan and hutong, signaling that “marriage, love, and family, which . . . survived even under impoverished circumstances, [had been] brought to an end.”108 Arts writer and poet Meiling Cheng has identified the installation not only with a single household, but a lost community in which “each roof tile [is] a family—crisscrossed by tiny hutong,” transformed now into a necropolis commemorating the network of social and historical relationships that such neighborhoods represented.109 Like the brick enshrined in Ai’s Souvenir from Beijing, Yin’s tiles served as metonymic signifiers for a lost past and the cherished values with which that past had been associated for those who once held it most dear, while the cement powder, like the ceramic particles in Dust to Dust, implied an irrecoverable destruction beyond recognition or salvation. Yin returned to these themes of loss and destruction in Transformation (1997), in which roof tiles figure once again as melancholy souvenirs of demolished communities. For this installation, Yin arranged the tiles in a hutong near the High School of Fine Art, a secondary school affiliated with CAFA, and attached to each a black-andwhite photograph recording the siheyuan from which they had been salvaged. Despite the absence of the cement dust used to signal death in Ruined City and the location of the tiles in a public space, where students and other passersby would be forced to navigate them, the inclusion of these images greatly intensified the commemorative, funereal connotations of her reclamation. Wu Hung recalls that Transformation bore “an uncanny resemblance to a graveyard, in which rows of gravestones identify deceased individuals [and] the ‘dead’ . . . are victims of a single holocaust.”110 For Cheng, however, such connotations are partially redeemed by the return of the tiles to the world of the living and their transformation “from dust-buried relics to revitalized memory carriers,” extending an invitation “[to] ponder . . . the mutability and transformation of [the] metropolis.”111 Destruction again contains the possibility of creation, and might even be a necessary condition for renewal. Most writers on Ai’s work have noted the allusion to urban renewal in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn as a critique, “a satire of the ruling regime’s approach to its patrimony [and] curious relation to its past,” in which the jar “becomes a cenotaph to an irreversible destructive force.”112 Similar sentiments have been associated with the installation and performance pieces by Yin and Zhan previously discussed. Yet redevelopment can also be a force for creative change, replacing antiquated or dilapidated structures with an environment amenable to contemporary needs. Ai Weiwei’s own contributions to the transformation of Beijing spring to mind. In 1999, he commissioned the building of a studio and living space in Caochangdi, for example, then a relatively uninhabited site near Beijing’s airport. His fascination with reproduction and fabrication, like his interest in urban redevelopment, is reflected in the architectural practice which this project Porcelain Past

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inspired and which he directed through a studio named FAKE Design, a play on the English word “fake” and the Chinese transliteration of “fuck” as fa-ke (法克). This sobriquet likely reflects the desire evident in so many of Ai’s works to distance his practice from orthodoxy (implying that his is a “fake” architecture), to question accepted ideas of authenticity, and to court public controversy. In the wake of Ai’s global fame, Caochangdi soon drew the attention of other developers, causing an inflation in property values and the emergence of a thriving artists’ colony on what were then the outskirts of the capital. From 2004 to 2007, between the making of Souvenir from Beijing and Dust to Dust, Ai designed several other additions to this community, including Galerie Urs Meile, the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, and the Red Brick Art Gallery, before collaborating with Swiss architectural partners Herzog & de Meuron on his most notorious commission: the National Stadium, which would become the centerpiece of Beijing’s rebranding as a cosmopolitan metropolis in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics. While using his art to critique redevelopment, Ai has therefore contributed at the same time to a drive toward modernization—yet his stated aims and working methods were, of course, radically distinct from those of the CCP. The primary distinctions that set apart Ai’s architectural projects from those of commercial developers are his constructive aspirations and his desire to create structures of real public benefit in previously neglected areas. Applying these same ideals to his artistic practice, we can recast Ai’s apparent disregard for an emblem of China’s heritage as a symbolic letting go of the past motivated by a desire to explore more beneficial understandings of national and cultural identity. In an interview with Richard Vine in 2008, Ai eloquently expressed the ambiguity of his creative perspective: China is a nation that needs change . . . given that the old part is really rotten and cannot meet contemporary standards . . . The question is how to change things and to what degree and . . . who reaps the benefits? What is going to be damaged in the process?. . . I think that the government is using this necessary change to its own advantage. The Party takes not only the . . . profit but the glory [while] society becomes very corrupt and very miserable.113

With these comments, the artist explains that the extent to which urban redevelopment and, by extension, any act of eradicating the past to make way for the new can be considered an act of destruction or of renewal rests in the vested interests motivating change. In the case of Beijing’s redevelopment, the demolition of historic architecture and relocation of previous residents has been driven by propaganda and profit rather than a genuine desire to improve living conditions. Whether similar motives drove Ai to destroy an antique remains an unresolved question: Should his destructive act be interpreted as a liberation from the past to clear space for a more equitable future? Or is it little more than a provocative attempt to foster a marketable notoriety? The work is intentionally ambiguous and can sustain many possible lines of interpretation. 104

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Souvenir from Beijing and Dust to Dust can also sustain a range of readings, exposing not only the ambiguities of redevelopment but those of museum display. The acquisition of a memento from a condemned site and the transformation of this souvenir into an object of aesthetic appreciation, for example, call to mind the “museumization” of the few lone siheyuan and hutong safeguarded from destruction by determined Beijing residents, only to be renovated beyond recognition and labeled sites of “historic interest.” In response to the desperate pleas of preservationists, several hutong were spared the fate of their neighbors and sold instead to private investors who have transformed these historic laneways into tourist hotspots, where visitors enjoy the illusion of an idealized past with all the amenities and comforts of the present. Recognizing the lucrative potential of such investment, the city government has dedicated an increasingly substantial portion of public funds to the revival (and recreation) of architectural heritage. The tensions inherent in such fabrications will be discussed in the next chapter, but there is one project that holds special relevance for Souvenir from Beijing. The year of this work’s creation, 2002, also saw the opening of the Ming-dynasty City Wall Ruins Park (Ming Chengqiang Yizhi Gongyuan 明城墙遗址公园) marking the site of a surviving corner of the old city wall that had escaped demolition in the 1950s. The rediscovery of this ruin in the late 1990s aroused widespread public excitement and presented the government with a unique opportunity to differentiate their redevelopment projects from the “Maoist revolutionary zeal” of the past, “constantly cited by liberal intellectuals as a historical crime [against] traditional Chinese culture.” Following the turn of the millennium, municipal authorities announced their intentions to preserve the ruin and inaugurated a citywide collection of the Ming-dynasty bricks that had been scattered half a century earlier. The public response was so overwhelming that the government extended the call across Hebei province and even neighboring Shanxi, eventually receiving over four hundred thousand bricks.114 Ai has unequivocally identified the brick in Souvenir from Beijing as a relic of a siheyuan and does not recall the campaign surrounding the reconstruction of the old city wall.115 Yet this work can nevertheless be read as a reminder of the elevated status that such quotidian construction materials enjoyed at the time, as signifiers of historic prestige and communal solidarity. Additionally, like the jar and tomb figurines appropriated for his previous works, when viewed without the benefit of an explanatory caption Ai’s brick becomes far more ambiguous—it could be two hundred years old or manufactured days before its acquisition by the artist, an artifact of the Ming dynasty displaced in Beijing’s Maoist transformation, part of a Qing-dynasty siheyuan removed in preparation for the 1990 Asian Games, or even a brick from the construction site of one of Ai’s own architectural projects. Like Ai’s bottled works, Souvenir from Beijing and Dust to Dust satirize the antiquarian desire to catalog all traces of the past, no matter how small or quotidian, by reclassifying fragments as collectibles and condemned structures as must-see destinations. Yet there is another aspect of Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] and Porcelain Past

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Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle that departs from this analogy, complementing the temporal ambiguity of the later works with a comparable spatial multiplicity. This is apparent above all in their association with global commerce, drawing Ai’s tomb figurines even further from the otherworldly context for which they were produced and closer to contemporary understandings of export as a very worldly process of exchange for material satisfaction and monetary gain. Foreshadowing his subsequent appeal for a questioning of the vested interests underlying urban redevelopment, however, Ai’s choice of mass-produced liquor bottles also reminds us that the making of such figurines would have been just as inflected by material as well as spiritual concerns. Charles Merewether, one of the few writers to discuss these early ceramic works in any detail, has observed that Ai’s packaging of the antique implies “the capture of Chinese culture [by] a US-led commodity economy . . . ‘bottled up’ for consumption.”116 In his reading, the bottles stand in for the brand names emblazoned across their surfaces, thereby equating Chinese tomb figurines with Scottish whiskey and Swedish blackcurrant vodka as emblematic products of their respective national cultures. Garth Clark draws a similar parallel, noting that Johnnie Walker Red was at the time the preferred brand of China’s elite, so the choice of this bottle may imply “a sly dig at a regime [practicing] communism for profit.”117 This analogy could be supported by reference to Ai’s direct application of a global brand on another ancient ceramic in Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, which Merewether defines as a “challenge [to] the distinction between high and low culture” and a revelation of “[the] object’s commodity-based affiliation . . . stripping the urn of its value so that it is seen as little more than a fabrication [even while] re-inscribing it as authentic by virtue of its branding.”118 Ai himself offers a more down-to-earth and characteristically sardonic explanation: The reason is that my brother likes drinking whiskey and I find these bottles beautiful. When Tang figurines are placed in whiskey bottles, they [are] protected, and [yet] also intoxicated.119

Setting aside these connotations, the bottles appropriated for Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] and Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle can further be read in purely material terms as vessels for transporting a precious cargo from obscurity and into the world. We could return here to Clark’s recollection of the ship-in-a-bottle, or perhaps in a similar vein we might imagine stranded sailors dispatching seaborne messages of salvation to ensure their survival. Both analogies evoke maritime travel and recall the history of global trade so central to the contemporary identity of ceramics. Yet Ai’s decision to suggest this quality using tomb figurines disinterred from Chinese soil, rather than the logical choice of sculptures created for export, indicates that it is the global transmission of the idea of China that is here subject to critique. While those who are committed to the promotion of national identity might look on the Tang and Song 106

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dynasties as epochs of open exchange with the world, enlightened governance, and social mobility, Ai reminds us that these centuries also fostered a culture of commerce and consumption that resembles our own more closely than we might like to think. As a collector of ceramics and other antiquities, Ai would have been familiar at this point in his career with the history of export and the pivotal moment within this history ascribed to the Tang and Song dynasties, when global trade expanded to an unprecedented scale and the rudiments of a mythology of nationhood gained definition. The Tang dynasty is widely regarded, within and beyond China’s borders, as an era of reunification and the consolidation of national power after the centuries of conflict and disunion that followed the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century. Historian Nicolas Tackett, a leading authority on the so-called Tang-Song transition, has observed that the extent of social, economic, and political transformation at this time, and especially from the eighth through twelfth centuries, has prompted many scholars to cite the era as a watershed between the medieval and the early modern. He notes three phenomena above all as indicators of this shift: a revolution in commerce, “entailing a significant monetisation of the economy [and] diversification [of] mass consumption”; a tendency toward urbanization, frequently motivated by private interests rather than state planning; and a demographic shift to the south, again inspired partly by the increasing importance of southern coastal hubs for maritime trade.120 These social, economic, and political vectors of change set the stage for a comparably significant transition in the ceramics industry, both domestically and overseas. Ceramics historian Li Zhiyan has identified the Tang dynasty with “a true renaissance [in this] art,” noting the extent to which the phenomena just noted ensured a wider social distribution of wealth and therefore fostered a taste for ostentation, in this world as well as in the realm beyond death.121 Tomb figurines like the two showcased in Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] and Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle were one of many avenues of expression for material comfort, which also stimulated a passionate enthusiasm for the social habits and material cultures that arose around the drinking of tea and rice-wine. Advances in shipbuilding and navigation greatly expanded the opportunities to share such cultural innovations beyond China’s borders, thereby generating greater wealth for those who aspired to join the elite. The imperial court fostered diplomatic relations with over three hundred states and territories in the Asian region, especially in Persia, while bustling port-cities like Ningbo and Hangzhou in Zhejiang, Yangzhou in Jiangsu, Guangzhou in Guangdong, and Quanzhou in Fujian, gained prominence as China’s new economic centers, dispatching “ships loaded with silks, ceramics, and [other] precious goods [to] participate in the growing worldwide trade system.”122 Narratives of nation frequently gain their strongest expression during such times of cosmopolitan expansion, and Tackett has observed that the growth of overseas trade in the Song dynasty found reflection in “ ‘proto-nationalist’ sentiments among educated elites [which included] new uses . . . of the term Zhongguo.” He notes, however, that these growing sentiments did not Porcelain Past

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inspire “a mass movement akin to modern nationalism, but [remained confined to] an emerging idea circulating among [China’s] elites.”123 In each of the works by Ai Weiwei discussed in this section, the role of ceramics as vessels for the safekeeping and transmission of historical, personal, and commercial value is a recurring theme. Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn depicts the literal passage of a ceramic jar through the air between the artist’s hands and the unyielding surface of the ground, yet it also alludes to the passage of historical fact into mythologized fiction, and to Ai’s own passage to and from Beijing. In Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle] and Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, glass vessels “preserve” while also facilitating the transport of the figurines they hold, recalling the historic export of Chinese ceramics across the world and the desire for profit that inspired this trade. The ambiguities of preservation and transmission are comparably central to Souvenir from Beijing and Dust to Dust, both of which imply that the need to safeguard the past frequently becomes apparent only after its traces have been destroyed, and that preservation can cause more harm than benefit. Each work can be situated at the intersection of two spheres of meaning: museological display, and the monetization or commodification of history for commercial gain. Both realms of inquiry are inflected by often unequal relations of power, inspiring a range of factual and fictional narratives that can be manipulated to suit the needs and desires of the privileged few. As eminently mobile, affectively overdetermined, and historically ubiquitous objects, ceramics are susceptible to such manipulation; but, as in the case of Ai’s readymades, they can inspire a disruptive multiplicity of interpretation through which those without the power to narrate can challenge the unobstructed reiteration of myth, replacing the grand narratives of the past with the micro-narratives of the quotidian, the private, and the fragmented. SHATTERED DREAMS

While Ai Weiwei’s appropriation of global brands can be read as an oblique reference to the mercantilism of the historic China Trade, Liu Jianhua has cultivated a more explicit connection with this history through his recreation of a specific ceramic type produced in China for export around the world: qingbai-glazed porcelain. Like Ai, Liu draws attention to the role of ceramics as vessels for the transmission of the past, using his training as a ceramicist to imbue the sculptural components of his Regular-Fragile installations with multiple layers of significance as emblems of both twenty-first-century consumerism and the epic histories of dynastic ascendancy and collapse. The spectacular abundance of these installations also likewise seems to endorse an association of China’s canonical golden age of global expansion in the Tang and Song dynasties with unsurpassed wealth. The fragility of their components, however, once again compels a visceral awareness that such dreams are unsustainable and destined to disintegrate. Regular-Fragile therefore interrogates many of the same grand narratives that Ai Weiwei has sought to critique throughout his career, exposing the uneasy relationship between reality and myth by reducing the latter to an untidy heap of shards. 108

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In the versions of Regular-Fragile created for the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the inaugural MC1 International Biennial of Contemporary Chinese Art (2005) in Montpellier, France, and the first Singapore Biennale in 2006, Liu filled the space set aside for him in each venue with porcelain commodities bearing a translucent glaze that imbued them with a frosty ethereality. Their spectral appearance and unsettling fragility—especially in Montpellier and Singapore, where they were smashed and displayed in pieces—added a visceral affective dimension to the artist’s (and curators’) desire to fracture inherited grand narratives of the past. Reflecting on Ai Weiwei’s work, Merewether identifies this deconstructive aim as a defining trait of contemporary Chinese art in general, usually expressed in the “favoured tropes of Tiananmen Square, Mao’s visage, and the human figure,” but he warns that it can become mired in “labyrinthine identity politics.” One means to avoid this entrapment, Merewether notes, is to shift focus from “dislocation and ennui” to “an ordered disorder [with] an eclectic range [of objects] stripped of their standard identities and reconfigured as a question about integrity and objectivity.”124 Regular-Fragile is a consummate case study for this solution, bringing together a mass of dislocated objects that cast doubt not only on cherished narratives of nationhood, but on the authority of history itself as a mode of understanding the past. The historic significance of qingbai is not explicitly apparent in Regular-Fragile, but Liu’s decision to use this glaze, like Ai’s choice of cultural relics identified with the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties, implies an awareness at least of its heritage. Qingbaiglazed porcelain occupied a prime position in China’s global ceramics trade during the Song dynasty, and especially following the relocation of the imperial court from Kaifeng to Hangzhou which inaugurated the era of the Southern Song (1127–1279). As ongoing conflict with the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) to the north weakened Song authority, however, the popularity and production of qingbai declined. Liu may have been motivated to use this glaze, then, for its resonance with those aspects of meaning that Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) identified in “The Modern Cult of Monuments” (1903) with the “historical value” of an artifact or work of art, arising from “the specificity and irreplaceability of [its] historical context [but] only [visible] from . . . the present.”125 The imprints of the historical (gu 古) are also one of four traces of the past (ji 跡) that Wu Hung has associated with an aesthetic of ruins and ruination in China, along with “divine traces” (shen ji 神跡), “remnant traces” (yi ji 遗 跡), and historical sites (sheng ji 胜跡), each defined by their distinct chronologies and sentiments. While a divine trace, for example, “register[s] a supernatural event beyond human history,” and a remnant “stands for the recent dead,” historical traces “[pinpoint] a specific moment in dynastic chronology” and give that moment new relevance through the parallel or contrast thereby implied.126 By staging his porcelain installations as spectacles of consumerist desire, Liu recreates the lavish abundance with which qingbai-glazed porcelain would have been associated at the height of its popularity. This recreation arises from his combination of the Porcelain Past

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historic glaze with the contemporary production technique of slip-casting outlined in the previous chapter, adapted to ensure that his porcelain pieces are as fragile and visibly frail as possible. Such contrived fragility implies that Liu’s installation, rather than indexing historical mutability, could be more closely tied to the material qualities that Riegl identified as signs of “age value”: the traces of antiquity and constant use that “trigger in the beholder a sense of the life cycle [or] of the emergence of the particular from the general and its gradual but inevitable dissolution.”127 The vision of abundance in decay that Liu’s flawed components create recalls the shifting fortunes of the Song dynasty, their fragility masked by a lustrous glaze that suggests a perceptive analogy for the comparably fragile cultural prestige of the Song, threatened and then destroyed by internal corruption and military ineptitude. Beyond this historic grand narrative, the manufactured patina of Liu’s components also prompts viewers to consider the cycles of decay and renewal in which all forms of life are ceaselessly involved: [The] material characteristics of porcelain always convey a tension between durability and fragility . . . implying that [our] fantasies and sensations are ultimately fleeting, and that we live in a state of uncertainty about what is reality and what is illusion.128

The myths that lend stability and continuity to our lives are threatened in RegularFragile with destruction and demystification, using the inherent fragility of ceramics to convey the shock that follows an abrupt reentry into the ebb and flow of everyday time (fig. 27). This tension between the stability of myth and the impermanence of lived existence has been a central trait of Regular-Fragile since its initial display in 2003. As one of five pieces commissioned for what would have been the inaugural Chinese Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale, Liu’s work should be regarded alongside Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn as one of the earliest and most influential statements of New Export China, setting a key precedent for the future development of the genre. The display planned for the erstwhile Pavilion, although forestalled by the outbreak of the SARS epidemic, should also be acknowledged as a pivotal turning-point in the globalization of contemporary Chinese art and an important model for the subsequent 2005 Pavilion that many writers outside China now describe as the first. Planning for the installation began in August 2002, when the Ministry of Culture oversaw the formation of a committee of senior art historians and critics to assess proposals from aspiring curators across the country. The idea eventually chosen for development was submitted to this committee by Fan Di’an, vice president of CAFA, and Huang Du, a doctoral candidate at the same institution. Unable to agree on the direction the proposal should take, the committee asked Wang Yong, deputy director of the Research Institute of Fine Arts at the China Academy of Art, to assist Fan and Huang.129 In the Biennale text, it should be noted, only Wang and Fan are named as co-curators while Huang is demoted to the role of an assistant. 110

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figure 27 Liu Jianhua, Regular-Fragile, 2003, installation of qingbai-glazed porcelain sculpture, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, variable dimensions. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

The title chosen for the exhibition was “Synthi-Scapes” (zaojing 造景), a portmanteau that can be literally translated as “creating an environment” and that reflects a thematic preoccupation with urban renewal and export-led integration into the global economy. In their curatorial statement, Fan and Wang compare the Pavilion to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and the selection of Beijing as host city for the 2008 Olympics, both formalized in 2001, thereby inserting it into a series of events indicating that “China has become an inseparable part of the international community.” At the same time, they assured their readers that the works chosen would provide a glimpse into “the realities of a country undergoing dramatic ‘urbanisation’ and . . . subject to ‘globalisation.’ ”130 To ensure the clarity of their intended message, these works were deliberately selected for their deviation from the types of art that viewers outside China had come to expect (i.e., Political Pop), as well as their predilection for the forms of installation and video art that the curators recognized as representative of the global artistic mainstream. This desire to join the mainstream as a nation among equals, while displacing externally imposed stereotypes with internally approved narratives of Chinese art and culture, parallels the opening to the world set in motion by Deng Xiaoping that Porcelain Past

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culminated with the unapologetic celebration of populist nationalism at the Olympic ceremony. Alongside domestic reform and the creation of SEZs to attract foreign capital, a third principal ambition of the reform era had been to achieve a closer integration with the world economy. In April 1980, China’s membership of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund formally passed from the Republican government of Taiwan to the CCP, signaling acceptance of the PRC by the international economic community. In July 1986, following the success of the SEZs and Open Coastal Cities, an application was made for membership of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a forerunner of the WTO, yet a mutual refusal to compromise on the part of China and the United States slowed the pace of negotiations to a painful crawl. In November 1991, several months before Deng’s southern tour, the PRC gained acceptance to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), going on to play a pivotal role in the Chiang Mai Initiative at the turn of the millennium, which led to the establishment of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area in November 2002. A year earlier, on December 10, 2001, almost two decades after applying to join GATT, China secured membership in the WTO. This progressive strengthening of global authority and removal of the barriers that had once slowed the circulation of Chinese products enabled the PRC to not only compete with but to surpass the Asian Tiger economies to which Deng had once turned for inspiration. The year 2001 also marked the confirmation of Beijing as host city for the 2008 Summer Olympics, now regarded as a spectacular expression of China’s entry onto the global stage. At the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in November 2002, noting these signs of international recognition, Jiang Zemin advised those in attendance to “carry forward the fine tradition of our national culture” and to bear in mind that, In the present-day world, culture [interacts] with economic and political activities, and its status and functions are becoming . . . more outstanding in the competition [between nations]. The power of culture is deeply rooted in the vitality, creativity, and cohesion of a nation.131

In October 2007, Hu Jintao (b. 1942), Jiang’s successor as general secretary of the CCP from 2002–12 and president of the PRC from 2003–13, likewise implored two thousand delegates at the 17th National Congress to “publicise the . . . traditions of Chinese culture and strengthen international exchanges to enhance the influence of Chinese culture worldwide.”132 To a certain extent, these statements of official policy could be said to reflect a need to respond to a groundswell of populist nationalism that journalist and scholar of public administration Haiyang Yu has identified with a nostalgia for “the glorious memory of Imperial China and its historical legacy.” Based on a mythic image of the Ming dynasty as the peak of China’s cultural development and as an era allegedly defined by benevolent Confucian governance, social and political 112

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stability, and a tribute system that ensured regional authority and national prosperity, such nationalism endorsed more aggressive forms of diplomacy to restore the former imperial order.133 The grandeur of the Olympic ceremony may have been partially intended to prove to those who held these ideals that the government tacitly shared their ambition. Before an audience of ninety-one thousand spectators and an estimated 1.5 billion TV viewers around the world, an extravagant celebration of Chinese culture overseen by Zhang Yimou (b. 1951), one of China’s most acclaimed directors, marked the opening of the games. Initiated by Hu’s presidential reception, the fourhour ceremony included presentations of landscape painting, calligraphy, and Beijing Opera (Jingju 京剧), performative recreations of the Silk Road trade and the voyages of Ming-dynasty eunuch-admiral Zheng He (1371–1433), and a series of incendiary displays coordinated by Cai Guo-Qiang. The message was clear: China had again joined the world and intended to recreate the glories of a lost imperial era. In contrast to this nativist celebration of tradition, the curatorial aims and overarching themes of the display planned for the Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale five years earlier seem more restrained and even critical, in some respects, of China’s market-based transformation. Given the focus on urbanization and globalization, we might expect a similarity between the works chosen and the responses to the physical and psychological devastation of redevelopment previously discussed. Zhan Wang numbered among the artists selected for inclusion, with his Urban Landscape (2003) further extending the ideas of metamorphosis and renovation introduced in his photographs and performances of the mid-1990s. Yet the passion and politics of his early work were conspicuously absent, superseded by a foregrounding of quintessentially Chinese materials and cultural sources disguised beneath a thin veneer of contemporaneity that Fan, Wang, and their CCP sponsors perhaps hoped would appeal to European tastes. For the Pavilion, Zhan created a variation on his ongoing project to revive the cultural symbolism of the scholars’ rock, initiated seven years earlier with his stainless-steel Ornamental Rock (1996), contributing an installation of tableware and cooking utensils arranged to resemble the mist-wreathed mountains of an ink landscape. In much the same vein, architect Wang Shu (王澍, b. 1963) used grey bricks (not unlike the brick appropriated for Souvenir from Beijing), steel, and glass to recreate the characteristic fretwork walls of a Song garden, while Lü Shengzhong (吕胜中, b. 1952) installed a collection of books in various languages detailing the essential contribution of ink painting to human civilization, their outward-facing spines painted to suggest a monumental landscape. Video artist Yang Fudong (杨福东, b. 1971), the youngest of the five chosen, likewise sought to recreate the air of lyrical contemplation suffusing such paintings by applying this sentiment to a meditation on “the lifestyle and love of young urbanites in Shanghai.”134 In conversation with a reporter for China Newsweek (Zhongguo Xinwen Zhoukan 中國新聞周刊), Fan explained that he chose these artists because “they all apply elements [of] traditional Chinese culture [to] the experiments of contemporary art.”135 Porcelain Past

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Comments made to the same reporter by Yan Dong, the cultural official assigned as the Pavilion’s lead coordinator, are also revealing: Considering the status that . . . Chinese art should possess in the international art world, the negative international influence [of] the uneven qualities of art works by Chinese artists who participated in the Biennale on an individual basis, and the fact that Taiwan established a regional pavilion . . . [the] Ministry of Culture has decided to establish a national pavilion.136

With the parallel that Fan and Wang draw in the Biennale text between their curatorial model of “Synthi-scapes” and China’s entry into global society, these comments indicate that the pavilion would likely have served as an ideal case study for the desire among artists and critics in China at the time for a broader recognition of Chinese history and culture. Writing in 1994, Hou Hanru identified this with a “pluralisation of international political, economic, and cultural relationships as well as the contradictions and conflicts that have emerged in the process,” likening global shifts in allegiance to the organic action of entropy, “when a stable order of matter enters a period of disintegration [from which] more varied new orders arise.” He equates the previous stability of matter in this analogy with the hegemony of European and North American societies, for so long “regarded as universal and dominant . . . [but] now at the edge of corruption.” Additionally, among those “different, various, and rich new orders” arising in the wake of decay, Hou reserves a place of special note for China as a nation that can transcend the dialectic of “colonial master and slave in the postcolonial period,” the frequent recourse to which, he argued, had only served to support the attempted redemption of “a self-correcting West.”137 Among those who have sought to shed a lingering attachment to the existing world order, Hou has consistently drawn attention over the past three decades to artists who engage with history and tradition. These artists, he asserts, have “challenged the . . . oppressive influences of western consumerism . . . by resorting to their own cultural heritage and proposing possible alternatives,” incorporating allusions to the foundational sources of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics like the Yijing, feng shui, or Confucian ideals which foster “[new] perspectives on the process of ‘world making’ . . . beyond the tradition of Western modernity [and] that [which] we have been defining for centuries as ‘international,’ [but which is] based on the tradition of the Enlightenment.”138 As such, his vision of cultural reclamation can be compared with the concept of Cultural China put forward around the same time by New Confucian philosopher Tu Wei-ming. In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (1994), Tu defined this as “a ‘common awareness’ among Chinese intellectuals throughout the world” united by a desire to reclaim “the birthright of the ru (the scholar or minister of the moral order)” and to safeguard “[the] unique form of life, profoundly different from other styles of living,” that had arisen from the principles of Daoist and Confu114

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cian thought. Writing five years after the Tiananmen Massacre, Tu positioned this revival as a challenge to the legitimacy of the CCP, placing his faith in the power of tradition to overcome the injustices of a regime that he believed had diverted the true course of Chinese history.139 Since the turn of the millennium, however, cultural critics like Tu and Hou have been forced to contend with a parallel requisition of tradition by the CCP. Art historian and critical theorist Paul Gladston, among others, identifies this “officially sanctioned return to traditional Chinese cultural values” as a strategy calculated to encourage social cohesion and national pride in the absence of the shared identity once found in the grand narratives of Maoist revolutionary doctrine, which are now increasingly beset by the forces of market reform. A central component of this strategy has been a renewal of the cultural touchstones that Tu and Hou championed as weapons in the struggle against authoritarian rule and Euro-American hegemony, “a rich wellspring of symbolic resources” used by CCP apparatchiks “to define their worth [as] guardians of . . . tradition” and “to gloss over . . . social differences and uncertainties.”140 Schools of thought or forms of artistic expression once denigrated as relics of the imperial past are now promoted by official channels as a shared birthright of which PRC citizens should be proud. Rather than a force for revolutionary change, within this narrative the CCP adopts the role of paternal guardian and preserver, ensuring the continuity of a hallowed tradition while elevating China onto the world stage. Commissioned for the inaugural Chinese Pavilion in a venue of global significance, Liu’s qingbai-glazed commodities may have been intended to complement the evocation of literati aesthetics by his co-exhibitors with another form of art long tied to Chineseness and, perhaps at the same time, to critique the superficial abundance of contemporary capitalism. His porcelain replicas appear as ghostly apparitions of the objects they reproduce, their fragility inspiring an awareness of mortality and the transience of material things. Yet their standardized and flawed manufacture additionally implies a critical appraisal of the homogeneous design aesthetic and lack of construction standards that many have identified as the most disappointing and dangerous aspects of China’s urban redevelopment. The cancellation of the Pavilion following the outbreak of the SARS epidemic could also be noted here for its effect on Liu’s work, providing a further indication of the precarity of life that had initially inspired him to embark on this project. Regular-Fragile and other works chosen were shown instead at the Guangdong Museum of Art, broadcast to Venice via video link.141 Even when fame and fortune seem assured, little can be done to resist circumstances beyond our control, and the apparently relentless momentum of history remains ever vulnerable to unexpected impediments that can divert its passage or even bring it to a grinding halt. The fragility of historical narrative was exposed with greater intention in the next variation of the Regular-Fragile series: Dream, created for “Montpellier/Chine: Biennale International” or MC1, the first (and only) International Biennial of Contemporary Chinese Art in the southern French city, held from June to October 2005. For this Porcelain Past

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installation, over six thousand porcelain sculptural components were shipped from Jingdezhen to Montpellier, where the artist smashed them and arranged their fragments on the venue’s floor to form the outlined silhouette of a space shuttle. Liu intended this as a memorial to the seven astronauts who had died in the disintegration of US Space Shuttle Columbia upon its reentry on February 1, 2003. Television coverage of the disaster was projected on the wall facing the “nose” of the craft with footage of the earlier disintegration of US Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, which also claimed the lives of its crew. Both tragedies were thereby positioned as chapters in a longue durée history of interstellar exploration, highlighting a tension between our dream to discover new worlds and the risks inherent in such ventures. Liu explains that he had hoped to emphasize that exploration of the profound mysteries of the universe has been achieved at a . . . high price [and], while we are now excessively dependent on the latest technologies, the security that these seem to offer is in fact extremely fragile.142

The video and installation also recall the inspiration for the project that Liu derived from news coverage of plane crashes in 2002 and the revelation of mortality that these provoked. His decision to substantiate the previously only implied fragility of his porcelain pieces by smashing them renders this iteration even more melancholy, implying that the worst has come to pass, and that we are left only to salvage what we can from the debris. Liu further confirmed this reading in a second installation of Dream for the Singapore Biennale in 2006 (fig. 28). Housed in Sculpture Square, a church established in 1870 and repurposed as an arts venue in 1999 after falling into disrepair, the installation extended along the length of the nave with the accompanying video enshrined in the apse on three vertical screens that recall the panels of an altarpiece. For critic Huang Zhuan, this version recalled Jean Baudrillard’s vision of the “hyperreal,” exposing the divide between reality and simulation that our subjection to excessive visual stimuli has forced open.143 For Huang, the footage of the Columbia and Challenger disasters offered a disturbing simulacrum of these events, rendering them hyper-visible while casting doubt on their authenticity. The fragments on the floor of the church confused the distinction between the real and the simulated even more with their double replication of commodities on one hand, and the silhouette of a space shuttle on the other. Finally, the exhibition was itself a spectacle as the centerpiece of a biennale that had provided, according to one reviewer, little more than “window dressing for an [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank conference . . . representing [the elite of] Singapore to well-heeled investors [as] an art-interested, cosmopolitan populace.”144 Nonetheless, as in the final frame of Ai’s Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, Liu reduces all such dreams, from the narrative of religious salvation implied by the architecture of the former church to the worldly aspirations of a 116

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figure 28 Liu Jianhua, Dream, 2006, installation of qingbai-glazed porcelain sculpture and three-channel DVD projection, Sculpture Square, Singapore, variable dimensions. Private Collection, Korea; courtesy of the artist.

global business elite, to a disorderly accumulation of shards strewn across the floor (fig. 29). Liu’s disregard for grand narratives finds its clearest expression in Discard, introduced in the first pages of this book, for which a selection of his replicas were unceremoniously deposited in what Liu has termed an “excavation of waste [feiwu 废物].”145 This installation implies an archaeological approach to history, creating an impression of typological strata unearthed and exposed. The detritus of our lives—computer monitors, oil drums, car tires, bottles, and other emblems of a throwaway culture driven by cycles of technological obsolescence—were made to resemble the remains of a mysterious and unknown civilization, distant in time and sensibility from the present. Liu reinforced this impression by juxtaposing his porcelain commodities with a comparable mass of smashed vessels of various historic types submerged in a shallow pool that he subsequently identified as a restaging of the destruction of misfired wares in the imperial kilns of the Porcelain Capital, the fragments of which were discarded in the river bisecting the city (fig. 30).146 Although these submerged vessels appeared antique in origin, they too were replicas, manufactured even more recently than the qingbai-glazed commodities. With this installation, Liu therefore shattered our perception of the past as a self-contained moment independent of present realities by literally immersing the antique within the currents of a lived existence. Yet Porcelain Past

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figure 29 Liu Jianhua, Dream (detail), 2006, installation of qingbai-glazed porcelain sculpture and three-channel DVD projection, Sculpture Square, Singapore, variable dimensions. Private Collection, Korea; courtesy of the artist. figure 30 Liu Jianhua, Discard, 2011, installation of broken porcelain, Sino-Italia Design Exchange Centre, Shanghai, variable dimensions. Collection of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; courtesy of the artist.

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he also further confused this demystification and disorientation by suggesting that our present era may one day be distorted by the same archaeological lens through which we view antiquity. In both cases of perspectival confusion, Liu introduces a disruptive ambiguity that undermines the certainty with which mythic narratives of the past assume their authority. Like Ai Weiwei’s ceramic readymades, the various iterations of Regular-Fragile generate a tension between the appeal of history and a desire to critique the narratives of the past. To communicate this tension, Liu developed comparable strategies of destruction paired with “preservation” or restoration, emphasizing the inherent historical and affective force of ceramics. In the variations of Regular-Fragile created for Venice, Montpellier, Singapore, and Shanghai, he appropriated the significance of qingbai-glazed porcelain as an index of a pivotal moment in the history of ceramics production and export to recreate visions of elite sophistication and global expansion associated with the Song dynasty. At the same time, like Ai, Liu used the fragility of his medium to cast doubt on this mythologized narrative, and to reveal the impermanence and inevitable disintegration of material wealth. In both artists’ work, the dividing line between past and present is blurred, while cherished narratives of nationhood and heritage are exposed as impotent fictions, superficially appealing but hollow within and subject to an inevitable dissolution.

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3 PORCELAIN RENAISSANCE

C

a familiar presence in the Porcelain Capital, enticed by access to materials, equipment, and labor as well as by the allure of a vaunted history, with their arrival prompting ecstatic pronouncements of a “porcelain renaissance.”1 This “Jingdezhen phenomenon” (Jingdezhen xianxiang 景德镇现象), as outlined in the first chapter of this study, has prompted a range of interactions between resident artisans and visiting artists, from the empowering to the exploitative.2 The motivations of those who travel to Jingdezhen are equally diverse—the city’s attraction for European, Australian, and North American visitors, for example, can be traced in many cases to exotic appeal, while others are compelled by the more prosaic desire to broaden artistic horizons. Whatever their motive, the fascination of the Porcelain Capital arises from the city’s enduring prestige as a place of pilgrimage for those seeking the mysteries of china/China. This fascination has greatly accelerated the growth of a heritage tourism industry centered on the history of Jingdezhen as an ONTEMPORARY ARTISTS HAVE BECOME

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imperially sanctioned kiln-city, and of porcelain as a uniquely Chinese invention that has captivated generations of collectors and consumers across the world. Initiated during the early years of the reform era as part of a nationwide enthusiasm for the revenue and renown that tourism could bring, municipal efforts to transform the city into a destination for global travelers and China’s nouveaux riches culminated with a radical reshaping of Jingdezhen’s urban fabric, comparable with that in Beijing. Both were inspired by economic and political rather than conservationist ambitions, enlisting tradition to ascendant narratives of national pride while offering visitors from beyond China’s borders an image of the nation as a member of the global order and, at the same time, an independent civilization of great antiquity. Many artists have benefited from, or even directly participated in this repackaging of the past—Li Jianshen, for example, a Jingdezhen-born ceramicist resident for many years in Canada and the United States, directed the transformation in the 1990s of a cluster of Ming-dynasty workshops on the city’s outskirts into the Sanbao International Ceramics Village. This exchange and residency initiative is now one of Jingdezhen’s most highly regarded attractions for tourists and artist-travelers, drawn by its allegedly authentic recreation of the area’s past. Like the historical replicas discussed in the previous chapter, however, Sanbao is an artful fabrication that reveals more about Li’s artistic persona than it does about local heritage. The same could be said about the Pottery Workshop (PWS), another initiative established several years later by Hong Kong–born artist and entrepreneur Caroline Cheng in a series of studios and apartments in the former Sculpture Factory. Rather than reviving the past, Cheng provides her European, Australian, and North American clientele with access to the local expertise and assistance required to burnish their work with a veneer of Chineseness. Her sprawling commercial empire is founded on the same principles of modular adaptation and harnessing of collective labor analyzed in our first chapter yet, rather than drawing attention to material or conceptual multiplicity, she seeks to fabricate a restorative wholeness for those who desire an escape from the ambiguities of identity in the era of the global contemporary. For Chinese-born artists, on the other hand, especially those living outside China, the Porcelain Capital provides an ideal setting for the rediscovery of a lost inheritance. Sin-ying Ho and Ah Xian, now resident in New York and Sydney, respectively, have spoken and written about Jingdezhen as a conduit for their rediscovery of a heritage from which they had felt alienated by time, distance, and politics. Ho envisioned her first journey to the city in 1996 as a return to a birthright denied, first by her birth and childhood in colonial Hong Kong, then by emigration to Canada and the United States. Her subsequent trips coincided with the establishment of Sanbao, and she has benefited greatly from the packaging of tradition that accompanied the rise of heritage tourism in China, not only in terms of ready access to the city and its resident artisans but also in the development of her artistic practice. In 2014 and 2018, for example, Ho received a pair of commissions to create sculptural installations for luxury hotels in 122

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Hong Kong and Ningbo which evoke comparison with the merging of classical and contemporary envisioned for the Chinese Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale, and which undoubtedly reflected similar promotional aspirations. Ah Xian first turned to ceramics in a spirit of artistic inquiry, searching for a material that could serve his technical and aesthetic aims, yet he likewise later came to associate it with a birthright denied and a heritage that he perceived to have been neglected by other Chinese artists. His first journey to Jingdezhen, also in 1996, grew from and strengthened his desire to “rescue” traditions of porcelain making from the oblivion to which he feared they had been consigned. The parallel professional trajectories pursued by Ho and Ah Xian, alongside those of Liu and Ai already discussed, mirror pivotal moments in the larger social and political framework of reform and opening (table 1). Yet the wellspring of Chineseness that they and other émigré artists hoped to find in Jingdezhen, like narratives of nationhood, has no concrete existence. The China to which artists and reformers alike aspire is an imagined composite of memory and fantasy, an illusion of distance that appears tangible from afar but dissolves on closer inspection. The return to the PRC that Ah Xian and Ho envisioned as a triumphant homecoming therefore forced them instead to abandon their search for ancient roots and embrace the idiosyncrasies of a transcultural existence. Rather than a prodigal daughter welcomed home with open arms, Ho arrived in Jingdezhen as a foreign intermediary between her Canadian mentor and their local hosts, with whom she shared little in common beyond a similar appearance and language. The complexities and breakdowns in communication that arose from even these few points of apparent commonality are visible in her earliest work, especially Binary Code: The Link (2004), Gibberish no. 1 (2005), and Matrix No. 1 (2005). Ornament and text are combined in these composite vessels, their fractured surfaces sustaining a fragile union of partial and obscured passages of meaning that seems ready to collapse at any moment. An aesthetic of deformation is apparent as well in their form, which Ho created using a process of mold-making perfected over many years that has allowed her to experiment with a modularity comparable with that found in Regular-Fragile. Ho applies this technique most effectively in her hotel commissions, exposing the hidden intimacies and frictions underlying the economic, cultural, and political landscapes of Hong Kong and Ningbo. Tensions between the idiosyncratic and stereotypical in Ah Xian’s China China imply a parallel fragmenting of identity. Yet a persistent preoccupation with the fluid interaction of personal and cultural dimensions of self poses a new set of questions for which one possible solution can be found in the concept of “ornamental personhood” proposed by comparative race theorist Anne Anlin Cheng. Cheng notes a tendency in the critical discourse of the post-human to overlook the derivation of “the crisis between persons and things [from] the material, legal, and imaginative history of persons made into things”—the legacies, that is, of slavery and misogyny which haunt our Porcelain Renaissance

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table 1.  new export china, 1950–2015 Year

Event

1950

First state-owned porcelain factory opens in Jingdezhen

1956

Porcelain industry in Jingdezhen becomes fully state-owned and collectivized Sculpture Factory is established

1958

Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute is established

1965

Rent Collection Courtyard is installed at the Dayi Landlord Class-Education Exhibition Hall, Sichuan province

1971

The PRC is officially recognized by the United Nations

1976

Mao Zedong dies The Gang of Four are arrested

1977

Ai Weiwei spends three months at a ceramics workshop in Pengcheng, Hebei Liu Jianhua commences an apprenticeship with his uncle, Liu Yuanchang, in Jingdezhen

1978

Deng Xiaoping announces his policies of “Reform and Opening” at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party

1979

Construction of replica Ming-dynasty workshops begins on the site of the future Ceramics Museum in Jingdezhen The PRC is officially recognized by the United States Shantou, Shenzhen, Xiamen, and Zhuhai are named as Special Economic Zones

1980

The PRC is granted membership in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund

1981

Ai Weiwei leaves Beijing for New York

1982

Jingdezhen is honored as a National Famous Historical and Cultural City

1984

The PRC and United Kingdom sign the Sino-British Joint Declaration The Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum is established The Special Economic Zones are expanded to include fourteen Open Coastal Cities

1985

State funding is withdrawn from Jingdezhen Liu Jianhua enrolls at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute Mak Yee-fun founds The Pottery Workshop (PWS) in Hong Kong

1986

The PRC applies to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), forerunner to the World Trade Organization (WTO)

1989

The Tiananmen Square Massacre takes place Liu Jianhua graduates from the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute and is assigned a teaching position at the Yunnan Arts Institute

1990

Ah Xian leaves Beijing for Sydney, Australia Pudong New Area is established in Shanghai

1991

The PRC is granted membership in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

1992

Sin-ying Ho leaves Hong Kong for Toronto, Canada Deng Xiaoping embarks on his “southern tour”

1993

Ai Weiwei returns to Beijing Li Jianshen leaves Jingdezhen for New York

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1994

Tightened restrictions are imposed on bank loans in Jingdezhen Xu Yihui travels to Jingdezhen

1995

The first closure of a previously state-owned factory occurs in Jingdezhen Li Jianshen returns to Jingdezhen Caroline Cheng assumes directorship of PWS in Hong Kong

1996

Ai Weiwei first travels to Jingdezhen Sin-ying Ho first travels to Jingdezhen Ah Xian first travels to Jingdezhen Walter Ostrom becomes a resident scholar and instructor at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute Li Jianshen becomes a resident scholar and instructor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

1997

Authority in Hong Kong formally passes from the United Kingdom to the PRC, commemorated with a Jingdezhen-made porcelain plaque

1998

Final state-owned factory closes in Jingdezhen Sanbao International Ceramics Village is established on the outskirts of Jingdezhen Caroline Cheng first visits Jingdezhen, at Sin-ying Ho’s invitation Liu Jianhua returns to porcelain

1999

Cai Guo-Qiang’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard is shown at the 48th Venice Biennale, which includes a record number of Chinese artists Ah Xian makes a second trip to Jingdezhen

2001

The APEC summit is held in Shanghai, culminating in a banquet served on dinnerware made in Jingdezhen that receives praise from US President George W. Bush, who subsequently receives a set of his own in 2002 The PRC is granted membership in the WTO Beijing is selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympics

2002

Barbara Diduk completes an artist residency in Jingdezhen Ah Xian makes a third trip to Jingdezhen Caroline Cheng opens a PWS retail outlet in Shanghai The ASEAN-China Free Trade Area is established

2003

The inaugural Chinese Pavilion that was planned for the 50th Venice Biennale is shown instead at the Guangdong Museum of Art when the SARS epidemic prevents travel

2004

Celebration of Jingdezhen’s millennial anniversary takes place Ah Xian makes a fourth trip to Jingdezhen Liu Yuanchang opens an artist exchange program on the premises of the former Sculpture Factory in Jingdezhen

2005

The Guigu xia shan jar sells at auction for £15.7 million ($19 million), more than tripling the highest auction price previously paid for an Asian work of art Caroline Cheng opens PWS at the former Sculpture Factory in Jingdezhen

2007

Caroline Cheng opens a PWS retail outlet in Beijing

2008

The Summer Olympics is held in Beijing

2010

“Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE–2010 CE)” opens at Arcadia University Art Gallery, Philadelphia

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table 1.  (continued) Year

Event The Ruislip vase sells at auction for £43 million ($52 million), far exceeding the record previously set by the Guigu xia shan jar. “Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds” opens at Tate Modern, London

2011

“Porcelain City—Jingdezhen,” opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London Ai Weiwei is arrested

2012

“New ‘China’: Porcelain Art from Jingdezhen, 1910–2012” opens at the China Institute Gallery, New York

2014

“Ahead of the Curve: New China from China” opens at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol Jingdezhen is named a UNESCO Creative City of Crafts and Folk Arts The Occupy Central campaign is launched in Hong Kong

2015

“Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Ceramics from East Asia,” opens at the University of Southern California Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena

narratives of the human. She frames her study of “the complex dynamics between subjecthood and objecthood” as a step toward a broadening of these narratives by recognizing “an alternative track [in] the making of modern Western personhood” which counters “the ideal of a biological, organized, and masculine body” with one that is “peculiarly synthetic, aggregated, feminine, and non-European.” This form of personhood is neither organic nor genetic, but “conceived through ornamental gestures [of] the sartorial, the prosthetic, and the decorative.”3 It is a personhood defined by accumulation, accretion, appropriation, and adaptation, sometimes constrictive, but potentially liberating in the opportunities it affords for modular self-construction. The works by Ho and Ah Xian discussed in this chapter embody many parallels between the accumulative generation of an ornamental personhood and the processes of cultural and historical formation that drive heritage tourism. Beyond her fascination with breakdowns in communication, Ho’s coded vessels expose the mutual complicity of ornament and language in the realization of identity, whether personal or cultural. This is clearest in her first work in porcelain, Identity (2001), a superficially unassuming blue-and-white guan jar in which the historical and contemporary are combined, image and text blended, and motifs that appear Chinese reveal Renaissance Italian and ancient Greek inspiration, seen through the eyes of a nineteenth-century English architect. Ho incorporates these disparate elements within a narrative of self that is at once personal yet grounded in social, historical, and cultural conditions. The same could be said of Ah Xian’s China China porcelain replicas of friends and family, recreating the idiosyncrasies of facial features with a tender verisimilitude but adorned with conventional, even stereotypical motifs. In these works, the project of the self becomes an ongoing negotiation with various dimensions of personal and cultural meaning, a palimpsest of experiences in which the frequently self-referential dynamics 126

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of cultural identification remain ever visible. Just as Sanbao reflects Li Jianshen’s private fantasies of classical China, and just as PWS offers the opportunity for artists to endow their creations with a patina of cultural authenticity, so Ah Xian’s and Ho’s works in porcelain reflect their discovery of an inner source for what they once believed to be external realities. Moving from the self to a national frame of reference, each artist’s work can further be recognized as a product, to some extent, of the heritage tourism industry that first arose in the PRC in the 1970s, driven by a combination of private interest and public gain. FRACTURING CULTURAL CODES

Sin-ying Ho’s first trip to Jingdezhen in 1996 also marked her first return to the Sinosphere after leaving Hong Kong four years earlier for Toronto, Canada, as well as her first sojourn in the PRC. Her father grew up in Guangzhou, but, as the son of a landlord, the threat of enforced poverty and persecution after 1949 compelled him to swim across the South China Sea, seeking a better life in the British-controlled New Territories.4 The story of his search for asylum is central to Ho’s self-mythology, providing both a motivation and counterpoint for her own “homecoming” to southern China, “the land of her parents and grandparents,” where she hoped to find her roots and the “keys to understand herself as a whole and unique human being.”5 In this narrative, Jingdezhen becomes the seat of an ancestral birthright and the gateway to a heritage from which Ho had long felt separated. Ho traveled to Jingdezhen with her mentor at the time, Canadian ceramicist Walter Ostrom (b. 1944), who she met a year earlier in 1995 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). Here, Ostrom had profoundly influenced several generations of studio potters as director of the ceramics department from 1969 to 2008. He had harbored a fascination for Chinese ceramics for over two decades and traveled to Jingdezhen regularly after his first visit to the city in 1976.6 This prompted the JCI to grant him a yearlong honorary professorship to oversee a new exchange program for Canadian students. Ho could not participate directly in this program, as she had not completed the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses that all NSCAD students from countries beyond the Anglosphere were required to undertake, yet Ostrom agreed to take her on as a translator, using to advantage the fluency in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin that her youth in Hong Kong had provided.7 Rather than a prodigal daughter received with open arms, Ho therefore arrived in China as a “foreign” intermediary between her mentor and their mainland hosts, identified more with the complex diversity of her residential background than with any sense of shared Chineseness. Ho was forced to negotiate these complexities throughout her stay in the city, frequently caught between the many different facets of her identity. She came to realize that her memories of Hong Kong, while somewhat comparable with the experiences of people in the Porcelain Capital, were far from identical—the China she remembered was not the China they or their families knew. At the same time, she valued the privileges her unique Porcelain Renaissance

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status afforded and recalls that she enjoyed preferential treatment especially when in Ostrom’s company: I knew that I could go to Jingdezhen myself at any time, but . . . in the mid-90s, if I went to Jingdezhen by myself . . . I wouldn’t learn anything, everyone would just treat me as one of the local little girls . . . And I was proven right—I was treated very well when I was with him [Ostrom], but then when I was by myself . . . nobody would pay any attention.8

Paradoxically, although her language skills and familiarity with Chinese social and cultural mores secured Ho’s passage to Jingdezhen, these qualities were less useful and even obstructive once she arrived, when her experience overseas proved most valuable. Neither entirely Chinese nor completely Canadian, Ho slipped easily between cultural spheres, turning each to her advantage. This feeling of shuttling between cultures found expression in her earliest works in porcelain, in which the constant accumulation of cultural detritus that defines a life in motion is apparent in subject, material, and form. Identity (2001) is the clearest realization of these ideas, juxtaposing underglaze painted decoration in cobalt blue and red-hued digital decal transfers in what would become a signature style for Ho (fig. 31). The form and ornament appear unequivocally Chinese: the work could be mistaken for a relatively unremarkable blue-and-white guan jar, with spherical body, broad shoulders, and a narrow-collared mouth, like those produced for centuries in Jingdezhen and like the Yuan piece that Ai later chose to replicate for Ghost Gu. This misidentification is further compounded by Ho’s decision to adorn the jar with a design of floral motifs, foliate medallions, a wave-pattern band, and a fu lu shou (福祿 壽) wish for prosperity, status, and longevity around the collar. She has written that the unassuming appearance of the work was intentional, that she wanted “nobody [to] notice it, [to] say . . . it’s just another export ware.”9 I densely paint motifs from both East and West on classical porcelain vessels [which] are familiar [and] traditional transformed into an unfamiliar and unidentified sculptural form to illustrate the intercourse of East and West, new and old.10

A correlation could be drawn here with the dismissive attitudes that Ho encountered as a new citizen in Canada, where many labeled her simply as “Chinese” based solely on her appearance, without considering the existence of aspects of self below the surface. Identity, too, is more complex than it appears. The contrasting red images around the belly of the jar, for example, stand apart from the surrounding motifs as official identity documents, partially obscured by their reproduction in five of the six encircling foliate medallions (fig. 32). Each document is a form of identification gathered on Ho’s travels: Hong Kong ID card, British National (Overseas) passport, Chinese travel visa, Canadian passport, and US Green Card. The sixth medallion stands empty, 128

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figure 31 Sin-ying Ho, Identity, 2001, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, 28 × 30.5 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

ready for the next documentary record of the artist’s movement across national borders. Closer inspection further shows that the bands separating the horizontal panels are a repetition of the name CASSANDRA in a pseudo-classical Greek script. This is Ho’s chosen first name, adopted in high school and retained for convenience, as Hong Kong residents with English names gained better treatment under colonial rule.11 Porcelain Renaissance

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figure 32 Sin-ying Ho, Identity (detail), 2001, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, 28 × 30.5 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

Although more difficult to discern, the motifs that cover the surface of Identity also incorporate text, spelling “Sin-ying Ho” in characters and letters. These motifs are themselves multiple in origin: the peacock-feather pattern on the shoulder derives from Italian majolica, the foliate medallions on the belly from ancient Greek terracotta, and the floral medallions on the foot from Qing-dynasty porcelain. Ho did not adapt these motifs from examples of each ceramic type, however, but from their reproductions in The Grammar of Ornament, an anthology of designs compiled in 1856 by English architect and designer Owen Jones (1809–1874).12 Each motif is therefore several times removed from its origin, blurring authenticity with artifice, and resisting identification with a unified cultural essence. What appears to be historical is in fact 130

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contemporary, image becomes text, and motifs which seem unequivocally Chinese are imitations of Renaissance Italian, ancient Greek, and Manchu ornament, as seen through the eyes of a nineteenth-century English architect and reappropriated by a North American émigré from Hong Kong. The final revelation is the idiosyncrasy of the jar itself, perhaps dismissed at first glance as a piece of mass-produced chinoiserie but appreciated on closer inspection as an intricate pastiche of Ho’s various identities. This artful veiling of self with a deceptive attention to detail invites viewers to question whether reductive terms like “Chinese” and “Asian-American” can truly encompass the constantly multiplying complexities of cultural identity. At the same time, by literally writing herself into her motifs, Ho unites the disparate elements of her personality within the logic of the composition. Though dense and chaotic, they coexist in relative harmony, recalling Chen Zhen’s view of travel (physical or imagined) as “a special process of experienceaccumulating.”13 In Identity, movement across space and place is tied to the chronological journey of the self, acquiring new forms of identification and means of expression in a ceaseless process of creative adaptation. Yet this is not an entirely personal process: the self that Ho creates is also a social and cultural subject, represented by official documents and names as well as stereotyped regional motifs. Identity alludes not only to a private resolution of cultural allegiances but a desire for universal symbiosis, while the narrative of travel and transformation that it conveys holds meaning for all global drifters and is not restricted to Ho’s personal journey alone. Ho has written and spoken of the difficulties she encountered as a visible other in Canada and the United States, where she regularly found herself forced to navigate unfamiliar environments as well as cultural and linguistic differences.14 Even before her move overseas, “growing up in a colony like Hong Kong [had fostered] a sense of displacement [and required] constant negotiation of my identity,” causing Ho to feel that she “was never a member of any kind of cultural group.”15 My experiences with cross-culturalisation [sic] began in . . . Hong Kong, where I witnessed the dominance of a colonial society by a foreign culture. To fit into society, I changed my Chinese name to an English one, use[d] an English identity card, stud[ied] the English language, sample[d] Western foods and [went] to a Christian church.16

Ho asserts that such dislocation is now “a universal phenomenon” presaging a future society in which “nationalities and cultures will merge . . . into an unknown global culture.”17 While this vision may seem to imply a loss of individuality, in Identity and subsequent works Ho portrays it instead as a multiplying of opportunities for collective understanding, merging previously isolated lines of development into a more complex, mutually beneficial whole. This oscillation between cultural spheres is key to Ho’s use of porcelain. Her artistic relationship with ceramics began in the 1980s, when she enrolled in evening classes at Porcelain Renaissance

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the Pottery Workshop (Letian taoshe 乐天陶社, “Carefree Pottery Society”), a small studio in Hong Kong. She attended intermittently for four years, regarding ceramics as a diversion from her profession at the time: acting with the multilingual Chung-Ying Theatre Company. During her tenure with the Company, from 1984 until she left for Toronto in 1992, Ho worked with two artistic directors—Bernard Goss and Christine Johnson— whose approaches to theatre shaped her understanding of artistic expression. While previous directors had required performers to speak in English, Goss—perhaps inspired by the public desire for local identity in the wake of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984—encouraged greater use of Cantonese and a focus on Hong Kong life and culture. Ho recalls their staging of a series of Shakespeare’s plays as an exemplary instance of this: We performed [them] in Cantonese . . . Goss [didn’t] speak any Chinese language, [so,] based on the rhythms of iambic pentameter [and] our movements [he would] direct a show . . . I look back [and] this is really affecting my work nowadays.18

Johnson inherited her predecessor’s enthusiasm for localization, combining this with a desire to expand the Company’s educational role. Ho’s work with Goss and Johnson sparked an enduring fascination for the nuances of cultural and linguistic exchange. Her experiments with clay in these years, initially taken up as a hobby, retained an imprint of her daily activities with the Company, establishing an enduring association of this medium in her artistic practice with metamorphosis, the performance of the self, and the creative work of translation. Ho continued to pursue her interest in clay after relocating to Toronto, where she enrolled in a diploma-level ceramics program at Sheridan College. This new vocation was not the result of a deliberate decision to leave the theatre for the studio, but, like her journey to Jingdezhen several years later, a happy accident brought about by a breakdown in communication. Ho had planned to enroll in musical theatre, yet her application had been rejected when (foreshadowing the same setback at NSCAD, and despite her fluent English) she neglected to complete an EFL examination. She instead received an invitation to enroll in her second choice—ceramics and glaze technology—and found herself pursuing her former hobby as a vocation, and her former vocation as a hobby: I did try to work with local alternative theatre [groups], but most of the roles were like Miss Saigon . . . stereotype Asian work, and because my English has an accent, because I’m not speaking that Royal Shakespearean English, I decided I wasn’t going to talk, I’ll use a mask and my body . . . I made my own mask [using] papier-mâché [with] clay as a backdrop for the design.19

In Toronto, as in Hong Kong, theatre and ceramics were intertwined for Ho, while their inherent association with linguistic and cultural difference seemed inescapable. She explains that she had been at least partially drawn to porcelain for its perceived Chi132

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neseness and lingering significance as “a tool for communicating” across cultural boundaries.20 Her recollection of the stereotypes at play in Canadian local theatre and the disguise she created to avoid these stereotypes, however, suggest that the tension between authenticity and artifice inherent to the medium may also have provided some inspiration. In her work, porcelain is not only a material for artistic expression but a vehicle for self-construction and a cipher for the transmission of cultural meaning. Bearing this in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that Ho felt drawn to blue-andwhite, that most quintessentially “Chinese” yet globally distributed commodity. When she gained the opportunity to travel to Jingdezhen, after studying the history of the China Trade, Ho hoped that she would receive instruction in conventional production techniques and the gongbi (工笔), “fine-line” painting style first adapted for porcelain in the Ming dynasty, thereafter enshrined as an industry standard. She enrolled in classes at JCI, yet, unlike local students, she was not required to attend the sessions on Mao Zedong Thought and instead enjoyed a flexible routine—yet another benefit of her in-between status.21 Assigned a private studio in the Foreigner Compound, she and other exchange students were permitted to pursue their own projects while their local counterparts reproduced set forms and designs, expected to master classical models before they could indulge private inspiration.22 The influence of her Jingdezhen-based training in gongbi can be clearly discerned in Ho’s strategic juxtaposition of this emblem of Chineseness with an equally calculated imposition of the foreign and unfamiliar on Identity. This strategy is most evident in her use of the culturally indeterminate process of digital decal transfer, applied to highlight her disjunctive inclusion of ID documents.23 When fired, the iron particles in the ink Ho uses for her decal transfer sheets oxidize and take on a red hue comparable with that of iron-based pigments, historically paired with cobalt blue on Yuan and Ming-dynasty underglaze-painted wares. Ho gained her first experience with the use of decal transfers while studying for a postgraduate fine arts degree at Louisiana State University (LSU). She identifies her pairing of this technique with gongbi as a conflict of “old and new . . . [of] technology and hand tools,” setting up a dialogue between the present and past.24 Yet the visual parallel that their combination evokes with the historic precedents previously noted complicates this reading in the same manner as her adaptation of motifs from The Grammar of Ornament rather than their original sources complicates any straightforward cultural derivation, denying singular significance. Rather than a conflict of old and new, Ho’s digital decals are more evocative of an organic fusion of historic and contemporary, and of a continuity with the past that simultaneously acknowledges the need for change in the future. This fusion is even more apparent in Ho’s later elaboration of the hybrid language/ ornament with which she first experimented on Identity. In Gibberish no. 1 (2005), one of a series of four vessels, Chinese characters and English letters are juxtaposed in bands around the body of a meiping (梅瓶) or “plum vase,” another standard vessel form (fig. 33). While names on Identity are disguised, letters, characters, and symbols Porcelain Renaissance

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figure 33 Sin-ying Ho, Gibberish no. 1, 2005, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decal, 39 × 25.5 cm. Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary; courtesy of the artist.

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are here clearly visible. The central band is comprised of several sections of a poem, “Prelude to Water Melody” (Shui diao ge tou 水调歌头) by Song-dynasty scholar Su Dongpo (1037–1101), written vertically and right-to-left in characters, with the English recorded horizontally, left-to-right.25 Both are obstructed by horizontal lines of the eponymous nonsense language—symbols and letters in no order, interspersed with seemingly arbitrary combinations of words. Ho drew these enigmatic phrases and the nonsense from which they emerge from the accidental corruption of emails sent by her sister, typed in characters which Ho’s computer could not display without downloading the required language pack and so rendered instead in an algorithmic approximation that removed all meaning. Ho has traced the inspiration for this fusion of sense and nonsense to an improvisation exercise that she recalls performing with the Chung-Ying Theatre Company: one participant would speak in a “language” of their own making, to which other performers would respond with nonsensical sounds. The poem, on the other hand, is one Ho memorized at school but has admitted she never completely understood.26 A connection can therefore be noted here between rote memorization, repetition, and a collapse of meaning, while the binary code on the foot and shoulder reinforces the overlapping of linguistic and technological forms of communication implicit in the computer-generated lines of gibberish. As in Identity, meaning is disguised and fractured, while disparate cultural elements and a digital language of potentially universal significance come together in an all-encompassing compositional unity. In both Gibberish and Identity, language and ornament are combined and confused, yet in the former there are no floral motifs, foliate medallions, or wave-pattern bands to disguise the text, and it would be difficult to confuse this with a vase produced for export. The shift in emphasis from image to text, surface appeal to coded message, points to the linguistic aspects of cultural adaptation alluded to but not yet directly addressed in Identity: the need to translate between languages and the inevitable silences that arise in the process of translation. Language has long been a source of confusion and conflict for Ho, even in Hong Kong, where different aspects of her life were defined by their association with different languages: English at school, Mandarin in public, Cantonese at home.27 This linguistic division gained even greater complexity in Canada, where it also assumed greater consequences: You say that you fit into society, you learn all the systems, you try to be the best, but you cannot compete with others, people [for whom] English is [their] native language . . . that kind of social tension . . . is very strong in . . . Canada, [and] in the US.28

In this context of tense social competition, Ho realized the extent to which language can become a coded system accessible completely only to those who have mastered its logic, while those who lack this aptitude—like computers without the necessary language pack—see only nonsensical gibberish rather than meaningful letters and characters. Porcelain Renaissance

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Beyond their function as media of communication, Ho’s coded vessels expose the extent to which ornament and language alike have a secondary symbolic function as sites for the formation of identity, whether personal, like her various names on Identity, or cultural, like a classical poem: Gibberish uses language as composition and metaphor to express [the] collisions between cultures [that are] central to my . . . journeying between cultures and language. Images and text can be viewed simply as . . . symbols, but their personal characteristics [also] connect the intimacy of memories specific to each language.29

Most viewers of Gibberish, even if unable to read either version of the poem, can recognize the characters as Chinese, the letters as English, and so infer that the work alludes to a fusion of these cultural spheres. It is therefore not the meaning or content of the text that is important, but what it represents as a marker (or ornament) of contact. As in Identity, culture becomes a synthesis of disparate elements, yet here the unity of these components approaches complete disintegration, any semblance of coherent meaning fractured and obscured. VISIONS OF A CLASSICAL PAST

Li Jianshen is another artist-traveler who embeds fragments of the past within a contemporary aesthetic. Li was born and raised in Jingdezhen, leaving in 1993 to become the first Chinese-born MFA graduate at Alfred University’s New York State College of Ceramic Arts. His experiences in New York and Nova Scotia, where he later served as interim director for the NSCAD ceramics department while Ostrom was in Jingdezhen, inspired many subsequent trips between China and North America. His concepts of home and heritage, like Ho’s, came to be indelibly colored by this movement between cultural spheres, yet the view of China that Li communicates in his work is one of idealized classical purity rather than blending and syncretism. His yearning for the past has found its clearest expression in his role as founding director of Sanbao International Ceramics Village, an artist residency initiative through which he has shared his vision/version of China with hundreds of visiting ceramicists since the late 1990s. Li founded Sanbao on the site of a former farming community, Sijiali (四家里, “Four Household Village”), by then reduced to a group of dilapidated Ming-dynasty farmhouses on the outskirts of Jingdezhen. Returning from New York in 1995, like Ai Weiwei in Beijing two years earlier, Li was alarmed by the momentous changes wrought by urban renewal. While Ai chose to respond with works in which a blurring of preservation with destruction casts new light on the vested interests motivating this renewal, Li instead attempted to intervene by purchasing the three farmhouses remaining in Sijiali.30 He left the site untouched for a year, as a reminder, perhaps, of the classical past on which he could reflect during his temporary residence in Nova Scotia. 136

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In 1997, Li first announced his intentions for the site to a group of Canadian artists touring China for the opening in Shanghai of the survey show “White on White: Contemporary Canadian Ceramics.” One of these artists, Paul Mathieu, recalled Sijiali at that time as “a field with three old farmhouses, nestled against a small hill,” betraying few signs of the “cultural masterpiece dedicated to clay . . . where Western visitors would someday reside and work within a web of Chinese history and culture.”31 Li drew inspiration for this “masterpiece” from the residencies he had himself undertaken in the United States, determined to generate similar opportunities in China at a time when such initiatives were almost entirely unknown there, even in Beijing and Shanghai.32 Like Sin-ying Ho, then, although Li valued porcelain as a point of access to his heritage, his experiences overseas were crucial to the development of his artistic vision. Ultimately, however, Sanbao owed more to Li’s imagined ideals than to any overseas precedent. Li announced the opening of Sanbao at the inaugural Yixing International Ceramic Conference in 1998, which he co-organized with ceramicist Luo Xiaoping, a JCI graduate then resident in Yixing to the northeast of the Porcelain Capital in coastal Jiangsu.33 Sin-ying Ho was among the delegates and accompanied Li on his return trip to Jingdezhen to attend the opening. The event was marked with the burial of a porcelain time capsule filled with mementos and documents related to the site, in a fitting testament to the reminder of the past that Sanbao itself was to become, furnished with antiques handpicked by Li to conjure idyllic visions of classical China. Or, rather, his vision of classical China, for Sanbao is above all an extension of Li’s artistic persona. Sanbao rapidly grew into a world-class residency initiative, encompassing not only the original three farmhouses but also extensive workshops, functioning reconstructions of historic kiln types, a gallery, commercial outlet, restaurant, canteen and teahouse, and a private museum housing contemporary ceramics acquired across the world. It is now one of Jingdezhen’s most popular attractions for artist-travelers, who are enticed both by its reputation for residencies and its touristic appeal as an allegedly pristine repository of cultural heritage. Yet the glimpse of classical China that Sanbao offers is not the window on the past that many might imagine. Like the products of the reproduction industry, it is an artful fabrication seemingly untouched by the currents of modernity yet reliant on those same currents for its continued existence within the contemporary package tour economy. Li envisioned Sanbao as a rural retreat where residents could live their fantasies of misty bamboo forests and verdant mountains, playing the part of the reclusive scholar surrounded by simple yet humble farmers. This is perhaps the China that Ho, too, imagined she would find on her first trip to Jingdezhen in 1996, only to discover the breakdowns in communication that became the primary inspiration for her work. In Sanbao, however, such complexities are hidden beneath an immaculate facade, a masterfully applied glaze that conceals all flaws and impurities.34 Although advertised to residents as a unique experience, Sanbao is in fact just one indication of a broader trend toward the touristic in Jingdezhen, where many other Porcelain Renaissance

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projects of heritage-driven redevelopment have arisen since the 1970s. The master plan for the city proposed by municipal authorities for 1976–85 marked a significant shift in focus from the emphasis in previous plans on industrial advancement, detailing an ambition to become “a famous historical and cultural city, a base of the porcelain industry, and the famous porcelain capital.”35 Initial steps toward realizing this ambition included the construction in 1979 of replica Ming-dynasty workshops on the site of the present Ceramics Museum (opened in 1984), while Jingdezhen’s inclusion in 1982 among the twenty-four National Famous Historical and Cultural Cities (Guojia lishi wenhua mingcheng 国家历史文化名城) provided state endorsement for such projects. By 2007, however, one visitor has remarked, the Museum had become a “tourist trap” boasting not only Ming- but also Qing-style workshops, functioning historic kilns, demonstrations of traditional wheel-throwing techniques, even a retail outlet stocked with reproductions created on-site.36 Readers could be forgiven for some confusion with the facilities on offer at Sanbao. Nevertheless, in 2014, private, municipal, and national initiatives gained international approval when UNESCO named Jingdezhen a Creative City of Crafts and Folk Arts, in recognition of its history as the world’s Porcelain Capital as well as its contemporary artistic revival. The impact of this designation for the local tourism industry has not yet been measured, but a statistical analysis of domestic and international visitation from 1980 to 2020 shows that Jingdezhen received almost ten times as many visitors in 2017 (54.55 million) as in 2005—a phenomenal rate of growth for just over a decade of development.37 In preparation for, and in the wake of this surge of interest, the urban fabric of Jingdezhen has been extensively reshaped over the past few decades. One aspect of this has been the demolition of antiquated or dilapidated residential and industrial structures, to be replaced with glass-and-steel apartment complexes and boutique workshops. Municipal and national plans to preserve the heritage of the city have likewise inspired a themed program of public sculpture and urban beautification. These trends found greatest expression in 2004, when municipal authorities marked the millennial anniversary of the imperial patronage granted to Jingdezhen by the third Song-dynasty emperor, Zhenzong (r. 997–1022), who gave the city its current name in honor of his second reign era (Jingde 景德, 1004–7): Jingdezhen hummed with makeover activities: four-lane streets, wide sidewalks, two vast central plazas . . . apartment buildings, elegant four-star hotels . . . and, in homage to the city’s blue-and-white heritage, lampposts . . . with porcelain cylinders depicting dragons, flowers and village scenes.38

By 2011, commemorative ornaments had been extended not only to lampposts, but traffic lights and even litter bins, while “the pièce de résistance is a gigantic dragon made from several hundred pieces of blue and white tableware [installed] in the middle of [the] biggest roundabout.” Similar works of sculpture were installed on the road to 138

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the new international airport, including “[a] 20-foot-high vase in the middle of a junction, a massive porcelain frieze decorated with a writhing dragon, and stately porcelain pillars in blue and white.”39 While these elaborate testaments to Jingdezhen’s imperial past and its planned future as a must-see tourist destination may appear impressive to those traveling in search of lost traditions, and they undoubtedly provide an ideal backdrop for government functions, the first impressions recorded by more cynical visitors are sober in tone. Gallerist and ceramics enthusiast Gu Li, for example, who traveled to the city in 2013, could not reconcile what he found with the elegant sights that he had anticipated after reading other accounts: Jingdezhen is not a place for nostalgic daydreamers and romantics—far from it . . . In summer, torrential rain for days in a row causes the river to rise . . . and foul water and excreta would ooze out on the streets . . . With its unbearable dullness and conformity, Jingdezhen is not a “gigantic town” any [longer], for the gigantic blue-and-white . . . jar that is several metres high and the gigantic blue-and-white plate . . . three metres in diameter are nothing but a proof of the vulgar taste of contemporary people.40

Even the urban ornaments installed to commemorate the millennial anniversary failed to arouse any patriotic pride in Gu, who decried what he saw as a wasteful diversion of funds “earmarked for strengthening the river dyke to install these vulgar and cheap lampposts.”41 Resolving never to visit the city again, Gu concluded that Jingdezhen could be best enjoyed in literary accounts of the fabled Porcelain Capital, penned by those who had traveled there in its glory days to uncover the mysteries of what was then one of the most valuable industrial secrets in human history. This distinction between an immaculate antiquity and a denigrated present, between a living city and literary fantasy, reflects broader structural divisions within the cultural heritage tourism industry in China. Tourism for leisure is a relatively recent phenomenon in the PRC: from 1949 to 1976, the only sightseeing not decried as bourgeois was the pilgrimage which Red Guards were encouraged to make to sites deemed important for the history of the revolution. Even in 1982, when Jingdezhen and other historic sites first gained national recognition, Tourism (Lüyou 旅游) magazine, one of several publications launched in 1979 by the Beijing Tourism Press, envisioned its namesake as an exclusively European and North American pastime. The PRC now boasts more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other Asian nation, yet the 1972 World Heritage Convention did not gain CCP approval until 1985, with the first five sites proposed for World Heritage status listed in 1987. Nevertheless, by 1998, tourism had come to occupy a key place in state strategies for economic development as a privilege of the monied elite, coinciding with the promotion of “leisure culture” (xiuxian wenhua 休闲文化) in the wake of market-based reform.42 As the example of Jingdezhen amply illustrates, cultural heritage tourism is now a crucial aspect of the Porcelain Renaissance

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face that China presents to the world and a key source of prestige and profit for many cities across the country. Jingdezhen’s contemporary revival also indicates the extent to which current understandings of tourism and cultural heritage have been derived, despite the disruptions of the Maoist era, from earlier conceptions of travel for self-cultivation. The terms commonly used to describe places of touristic interest are of venerable pedigree: fengjing (风景), literally “winds and views,” used since the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) to mean “scenery,” and mingsheng (名胜), a contraction of the four-character phrase mingshan shengdi (名山胜地), “famous mountains and unexcelled places,” used since the Northern Qi dynasty (550–77) for places of special beauty. An authoritative canon of mingsheng was established as early as the sixteenth century and circulated in anthologies of woodblock prints and poems that members of the elite could use as an itinerary for their travels, following in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors and ensuring their knowledge of the correct poetic mood for each site. These anthologies provided a key reference for cultural officials tasked with creating a contemporary tourism industry in the 1970s—Travel Literature (Lüyou wenxue 旅游文学) magazine, for example, a highbrow counterpart to the more populist Tourism launched in 1983, often featured excerpts from these texts, while many local and municipal governments sponsored the compilation of new poetic anthologies.43 In their opening comments for the landmark anthology Cultural Heritage Politics in China (2013), Helaine Silverman and Tami Blumenfield identify three points of policy underlying this revival of the mingsheng tradition: First, China has been employing a national strategy of cultural soft power on the global stage. Second, cultural heritage promotion serves goals of regional and local economic development. Third, China has set up a mechanism that brings [World Heritage sites] into the national cultural treasury first through a . . . system of heritage administration and then by placement in the international repository of wonders.44

In her contribution to the same volume, Margaret Byrne Swain explains the goal of these policies as a fusion of two complementary forms of Chinese cosmopolitanism: tianxia guan (天下观), “all under heaven,” used to describe “[an] inward-looking order, a kind of soft power [which] shapes official nationalism, state sovereignty, and territorial integrity”; and shijie zhuyi (世界主义), or “world-ism,” used to describe “[an] outward-looking engagement . . . [that] stresses a dynamic and relational understanding.” Applying these ideas to the tourism industry, Byrne Swain associates tianxia guan with an emphasis on “China’s place in the world, China’s heritage, [and] the unity of China’s peoples,” and shijie zhuyi with “global marketing [and] international branding.”45 A close correlation can therefore be identified between heritage sites and projects of cultural diplomacy like the Chinese Pavilion for the 50th Venice Biennale. In both cases, aspects of time-honored tradition are pressed into the service of politi140

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cal agendas, endorsing inward-facing narratives of national pride while presenting audiences beyond China’s borders with an image of the PRC not only as a member of the international order, but as a lofty civilization of inscrutable antiquity, under the benevolent guidance of an enlightened regime. The network of state-endorsed mingsheng has achieved gargantuan proportions, yet many of the famous sites incorporated in this network have been endowed with a remarkably consistent range of narrative associations. We have encountered some of these in our discussion of the Ming-dynasty City Wall Ruins Park: the glories of the imperial past, the reclamation of that which has been lost or forgotten, and creation of a communal identity through collective effort. One site above all others, however, can claim a special significance for such associations: Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park (Yuanmingyuan Yizhi Gongyuan 圆明园遗址公园), usually referred to in guidebooks as the Old Summer Palace. Wu Hung defines Yuanmingyuan as “a kind of degree zero for the reconceptualization [of ruins in China],” tracing the history of its reconstruction from the earliest “pitiful efforts to restore the garden” made by the beleaguered Qing court after its destruction and desecration by Anglo-French troops in 1860, to its transformation in 1988 “into a tool of official propaganda and a mindless entertainment ground.” This final stage began in 1983, when the gardens were defined as a delineated historical site, “a conglomerate of a . . . museum, a public park for recreation and relaxation, and a Disneyesque entertainment space to form a ‘patriotic educational base’.”46 As an imperial pleasure ground, Yuanmingyuan sustained a much broader diversity of topographic definitions and imaginative projections, encompassing a loosely connected series of gardens of various sizes and themes covering almost eight hundred acres. As a state-endorsed Ruins Park however, it has become a conduit for a narrower range of meaning and is defined above all as a reminder of the humiliation inflicted by European imperial powers, and of the political salvation, cultural revival, and economic prosperity allegedly offered by the CCP. Like Yuanmingyuan, Jingdezhen has also been subject to political appropriation. Several instances of this are cited in glowing terms in Jingdezhen: A City with Kiln-Fire Burning a Thousand Years (2006), a text commissioned by the municipal government to appeal to potential tourists: in 1997, following the transfer of sovereignty in Hong Kong to the PRC, a commemorative porcelain tablet entitled Return to the Fatherland was presented to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre; in 2001, a pair of matching dinner services were created for use at Zhongnanhai and the APEC summit; in 2002, US President George W. Bush, overheard complimenting the tableware at the summit, received a service “modelled after [imperial] ware [but] glazed with the most advanced dirt- and water-resistant nano-coating”; and finally, in 2005, President Hu Jintao presented a pair of vases to Lien Chan, chairman of the Kuomintang in the Republic of China, and James Soong Chu-yu, founding chairman of Taiwan’s People First Party, as “a symbol of dialogue” between these nations.47 The city’s heritage has also been imbued with political relevance in more subtle respects that closely mirror the enduring association of Yuanmingyuan with a Porcelain Renaissance

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narrative of humiliation and redemption. The same visitor who labeled the Ceramics Museum a “tourist trap” in 2007, for example, found a collection of brick tiles identified as remnants of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, destroyed by the Taiping Rebels, looted by Anglo-French forces, and now piled up for display in the courtyard of the Jingdezhen City Archaeological Ceramic Research Institute, to be much more impressive.48 Porcelain, as a uniquely Chinese invention and a globally circulated commodity, a captivating mystery for generations of European collectors and an essential material component of our daily lives, is an ideal vehicle for narratives of national ascendancy and cultural continuity, perfectly combining the dual imperatives of preservation and promotion. VISIONS OF A COMPOSITE FUTURE

Sin-ying Ho has also benefited from the heritage tourism industry in China and the packaging of tradition it has encouraged. Her association with these developments is clearest in her sculptural installations for hotel reception areas, those most transitional and cosmopolitan of spaces. In 2018, Ho was invited to create a piece for Yan Toh Heen, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Regent Hong Kong (formerly the InterContinental Hong Kong), one of several luxury hotels in the tourist hub of Tsim Sha Tsui. Tilt and Flow (2018; fig. 34) departs from her usual style and instead reflects the aesthetic vision of Shanghai-based gallerist Belinda Chow, enlisted by the restaurant owners to ensure a consistent overall design for the space: They didn’t want cobalt-blue painting at all—they wanted that flavour of . . . jade, and if [porcelain] isn’t painted it almost looks like white jade. They wanted [it] to be . . . calm, and [as] the hotel is near the water they wanted . . . something that [could] acclimate . . . So, I [suggested we could] use gold flow[ing] on top of it [to evoke four of] the five elements . . . clay, water, fire, and metal.49

These negotiations between Ho and the design team reflect several points of tension in deciding an appropriate level of Chineseness for the site and its various clientele. On one hand, the hotel’s predominantly European and North American guests likely expect a certain exotic appeal for which the chinoiserie of blue-and-white would, ordinarily, provide an ideal vehicle. In Hong Kong, however, an aesthetic so closely tied to the mainland, and so frequently used to represent China’s imperial past and present cosmopolitanism, could have unwanted political implications. Chow and her design team chose instead to emphasize the material qualities of Ho’s medium through the visual parallel between porcelain and jade, shifting the association of the sculpture from the potentially unsettling sphere of global trade to more ambivalent vistas of the ancient past and the scholar’s studio. This interpretive shift is reinforced by Ho’s evocation of the comparably ancient Five Elements (Wuxing 五行), a cosmological framework given coherence during the Warring States era (476–221 BCE) by philosopher Zou Yan (c. 350–270 BCE) but present in Chinese thought for millennia. 142

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figure 34 Sin-ying Ho, Tilt and Flow, 2018, monochrome-glazed porcelain, gold leaf, 175 cm (height). Collection of Yan Toh Heen, Regent Hotel, Hong Kong; courtesy of the artist.

The apolitical appeal of the Wuxing and the yearning for harmony expressed by this system of mutually dependent relationships has long provided a vital source of inspiration for Hong Kong–based public sculptors. Zou Yan and subsequent scholars taught that the origins of the cosmos consisted in the division of a primordial oneness, infinite and absolute, into the duality of yin (阴) and yang (阳), shadow and light, feminine and masculine, passive and active, and so on. From these principles arose the Five Elements comprising all material phenomena as well as the recurring cycles of decline and renewal which mark the passage of celestial and earthly time. For residents of a city defined by tension between opposing powers and the uncertainty that provokes, this philosophy holds an understandable fascination. Van Lau (Lou Wen 文樓, b. 1933), Porcelain Renaissance

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one of Hong Kong’s most noted modern sculptors, created an especially influential expression of this in 1989 for the newly built Hong Kong Cultural Centre, also in Tsim Sha Tsui. The Meeting of Yin and Yang (1989), like Tilt and Flow, is not as noticeably Chinese as, for example, the commemorative tablet presented to the Centre by Jingdezhen’s municipal government in 1997, defined instead by an emphasis on the allure of a gilded surface and a vaguely Chinese-inspired sculptural style. Though the composition is dominated by an abstracted yin-yang, the Art Deco–inspired winged figures that flank this central emblem position it within a universal rather than local heritage, while their atavistic frontality suggests the unearthing of an ancient essence untouched by the shifting sands of contemporary politics. For David Clarke, The Meeting of Yin and Yang encapsulates the “East Meets West” narrative promoted by Hong Kong’s colonial government and the subsequent “One Country, Two Systems” framework endorsed following the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. In the later stages of colonial rule, divested of the authority they held before the disintegration of the British Empire and forced to contend with a resurgent Chinese state, public officials in Hong Kong retreated to the relative safety of the economic by adopting a rhetoric of “stability and prosperity” that appealed to a broad range of stakeholders—including proponents of market-based reform on the mainland. Colonization, in this reordering of history, could be glossed as an auspicious meeting of trading partners in which both allegedly stood to profit financially even while preserving their cultural independence. “This ideology of a modernisation that somehow retained Chineseness intact,” Clarke writes, “was to mutate . . . into the idea that material progress and prosperity would be guaranteed by [a] hybrid model.”50 The events of 1989, however, the same year in which Van Lau’s sculpture was unveiled, made it very clear that a harmonious fusion of cultural traditions and “happy future co-existence [of] Hong Kong capitalism and Chinese Communism” would not come to pass.51 Even in 2018, the incompatibility of these ideologies and such endlessly deferred promises of stability continued to create an unsettling uncertainty that Ho has acknowledged as a subtext for Tilt and Flow: I titled the piece Tilt and Flow because . . . after it was made, it was slightly tilted to one side [but] it [also] echoes the situation in Hong Kong—economically and politically, they always have that. . . constant flow and instability.52

In an earlier sculptural installation for the InterContinental Ningbo, Unearth (2014; fig. 35), Ho’s citation of tradition seems more straightforward, even comparable with state projects of cultural diplomacy like the Chinese Pavilion proposed for the 2003 Venice Biennale or the gifts and emblems created in Jingdezhen’s kilns. Drawing inspiration from excavations of the prehistoric Hemudu Culture uncovered near the site of the hotel, Ho applied her signature aesthetic to a layered arrangement of porcelain sculpture intended to evoke the strata of an archaeological dig. As in the tableware 144

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figure 35 Sin-ying Ho, Unearth, 2014, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, aluminum steel, 120 × 150 cm. Collection of the InterContinental Hotel, Ningbo; courtesy of the artist.

created for President Bush, she paired this ancient precedent with current themes and advanced design, thereby endorsing, intentionally or otherwise, a state narrative of technological progress united with cultural continuity: Ningbo is an archaeological site [of ] the Hemudu Culture, as old as Longshan, before China’s first dynasty . . . I had this image [in my mind] of all these shards, accumulated layer by layer [and,] as you dig, you reveal different layers of time. So, you can see the Neolithic images [on the bottom layer] then blue-and-white, then on top [are] forty-six different languages and binary code . . . I used 3ds Max software to do the mock-up and decide how many pieces I need . . . how it’s going to be presented.53

The sculptural profile of the completed installation resembles the mountainous silhouette of the ornamental rockeries or jiashan shi (假山石, “fake mountain rocks”) customarily installed in the gardens or courtyards of temples, palaces, and private estates to remind the occupants of the inscrutable power of nature. These are now associated with a more abstract air of tradition or scholarly self-cultivation and have become increasingly ubiquitous in China’s cities, installed in the foyers of contemporary office buildings and residential complexes as well as the landscaped gardens of cultural heritage tourist sites. As the conventional name for these rocks implies, Porcelain Renaissance

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however, their irregular and seemingly spontaneous knots and outcroppings of twisted stone are usually a product of human artifice rather than natural erosion, and even those that have formed spontaneously are cleaned, polished, artistically arranged or otherwise enhanced. In Unearth, as in many of her works, Ho draws attention to this usually hidden process of artistic adjustment, leaving the aluminum steel dowels supporting the components of the piece exposed. On closer inspection, it can be noted that this is not a single sculpture but a composite of multiple vessels of various sizes, each one a replica in miniature of the overall logic of the composition. The manufacturing process that Ho followed to create these pieces is comparable to that adopted by Liu Jianhua for Regular-Fragile: We had to take it to [a factory in] Shanghai, where I worked with local workers. Then, they [took] it apart, moved it to the hotel, and put it back together . . . They’re individual pieces, supported with aluminum steel . . . units, or modules, composed into an installation.54

The method of modular composition, like her fusion of gongbi painting and digital decal transfers, is a signature aspect of Ho’s ceramic art, perfected over many years. The inspiration for this can be traced once again to her time at LSU, where she studied the use of plaster and papier-mâché molds, and to a second trip to mainland China, where she learned to make multipart plaster molds in Foshan, Guangdong province. In Louisiana, Ho first experimented with papier-mâché rather than plaster for the outer shell needed to support these molds and to hold their position while the clay dries, thereby making the composite lighter and the process less strenuous. Her most notable innovation, however, was to combine factory production with her studio training: after wheel-throwing a standard vessel, like the guan and meiping forms used for Identity and Gibberish, Ho creates a plaster mold of the finished piece, cuts this into sections, then combines these with partial molds taken from other wheel-thrown vessels to create new assemblages.55 By extending the combinatory logic of her iconographic vocabulary and surface decoration to the form of her work, Ho could achieve an even closer approximation of her comparably composite understanding of cultural identity. Two of the earliest pieces in which Ho most effectively combined these techniques and aesthetic strategies are Binary Code: The Link (2004; fig. 36) and Matrix no. 1 (2005; fig. 37). In the former, conventional vases are distorted and fused into an abstract organic sequence of rounded shapes, resembling a spinal column or strand of DNA. In Matrix, bulging curves, attenuated contours, and severed edges taper without a clear sense of balance or logic to an absurdly slender neck. Rather than a work of aesthetic creation, it more closely resembles a misfiring or “sea sculpture”—the fused remains of potsherds, sediment, and crustaceans salvaged from shipwrecks.56 Alternatively, considering the etymology of the title—one meaning of the Latin matrix is “womb”— bodily analogies cannot be overlooked, especially when the work is turned to reveal an 146

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figure 36 Sin-ying Ho, Binary Code: The Link, 2004, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, terra sigillata, 20 × 80 × 15 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

opening in its base that resembles the intestinal valve or artery of a disembodied stomach or heart. Ho has explained that the mutability of these works is intended to shift the attention of the viewer from the utilitarian associations of her more conventional vessels to the eclectic range of motifs adorning their surfaces.57 Yet form remains essential to the meaning of both Binary Code and Matrix, not only in their suggestion of combined fragments but in the awareness of bodily existence that this combination adds to Ho’s focus on personal and cultural identity. The biomorphism of these works suggests a life beyond culture, a world of pulsating viscera defined and sustained by the flow of vital fluids—an analog, perhaps, for Ho’s vision of the global contemporary as a superorganism, in which we each maintain some parts of our identity and jettison others while merging with those around us. Although different in form, Binary Code and Matrix are comparable with Identity and Gibberish in terms of surface ornament. On Binary Code, floral and foliate motifs are interspersed with the eponymous programming language and nonsensical code, while Matrix adds Mayan hieroglyphs, Roman terracotta designs, a Celtic “infinite knot,” and pseudo-Arabic calligraphy to this linguistic cornucopia.58 The Roman and Celtic motifs are again adapted from The Grammar of Ornament; the Mayan hieroglyphs from Porcelain Renaissance

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figure 37 Sin-ying Ho, Matrix no. 1, 2005, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, terra sigillata, 20 × 10 × 20 cm. Collection of Alberta College of Art & Design, Calgary; courtesy of the artist.

texts on ancient Mexico, inspired by a trip to Chichén Itzá; and the pseudo-calligraphy from Kufic passages that Ho found on historic Chinese export ceramics.59 In each work, a fundamental affinity between language and ornament is affirmed. On Binary Code, linguistic elements are reduced to an abstract pattern, rendered arbitrary and meaningless. The same is true of Matrix, yet the merging of image and word is given a more nuanced emphasis here by the inclusion of pictographic script and a style of calligraphy often used pictorially. Despite their combination and the visual or conceptual parallels that Ho draws between these scripts, they remain, like the computer-generated nonsense on Gibberish and the lines of poetry it obscures, mutually unintelligible and unable to communi148

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cate a singular underlying meaning. Speaking of the universal culture she foresees as the endpoint of globalization, Ho has remarked, we [will] still have [a] gap that we cannot [resolve], but we [will] work at it together, and that’s how we appreciate it . . . there is something we [must] give and take, and people won’t lose their different cultures.60

With these words, Ho exposes both the inability of increased opportunities for global travel and communication to ensure common understanding, and the impossibility of globalization reducing human diversity to a homogenous mass. Rather, as suggested by the DNA-like structure, yawning apertures, and combinatory motifs of Binary Code, she seems to suggest that the languages and images of different cultural contexts are imprinted in our genetic makeup, even while we remain open to the unfamiliar and untranslatable. These same ideals of mutual adaptability and open-ended multiplication can be noted as well in the composite forms of Binary Code and Matrix. Both works exemplify the modular production process made possible by composite molds. While wheelthrown vessels are mass-produced in great numbers in Jingdezhen, the use of molds ensures a level of mechanical consistency that would be difficult to replicate by hand. Once Ho has created a composite mold, she can use this to create as many identical works as the mold will sustain before degrading, while the sections of each composite can be adapted and recombined in almost infinite permutations. This modular approach is evident in the rhythmic repetitions of Binary Code, for which Ho combined five forms from the same mold, as well as in her habit of re-using one composite for multiple pieces, differentiated only by their display in different orientations or by their surface ornament. In her work, then, not only motifs but forms of the past are collected to create a dispersed pattern-book from which the artist draws at will—a personal Grammar of Ornament. Nevertheless, despite this modularity, and unlike the standardized components of Regular-Fragile, the deciding factor of taste preserves an idiosyncrasy in Ho’s sculptures that reiterates the connection between their composite surfaces and forms and her (trans)experience as a global artist-traveler. RECONCILING SURFACE AND DEPTH

Tensions between the individual and the modular are evident as well in Ah Xian’s China China series (1998–2004) of porcelain busts, in which a shifting relationship between internal and external selfhood implies a fragmenting of identity much like that embodied in Ho’s fractured vessels. The first ten busts in the series, though ornamented with conventional motifs adapted from pattern books and museum pieces, show an undeniable idiosyncrasy that splits the personalities of their sitters into multiple coexistent forms. On one hand, the motifs expose the models to stereotype, recalling the typecasting of culturally marked migrants; yet, on the other hand, an Porcelain Renaissance

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additional layer of meaning can be read into these images as markers of the subjects’ individuality and various relationships with the artist. This blurring of cultural affiliation with ties of family and friendship reflects Ah Xian’s association of porcelain both with Chineseness and with the feeling that he lost an essential aspect of his identity when he moved to Australia.61 After the success of China China, Ah Xian incorporated other “traditional” Chinese media into his artistic practice, asserting his self-assigned duty as an artist of Chinese heritage to revive historic forms for a contemporary context. In pursuing this duty, he has benefited from the advantages of a life in-between, based in Sydney but traveling as needed between China and Australia. Most of his busts were produced in the country of his birth, molded by the artist but painted and fired by artisans in Jingdezhen. In contrast to the first ten busts, these pieces draw on a limited range of designs combined in various permutations to create a sense of collective identity in which the cultural takes precedence, and in which any indication of a relationship between model and motif is abandoned. Although these could be associated with an acceptance of stereotype, they also emphasize the artifice of any alleged essence, reducing traits that seem inherent to a patchwork of fragments adopted or discarded at will. Selfhood is thereby revealed to be an ongoing project of negotiation with various dimensions of personal and cultural meaning. The first ten China China busts were created in 1998 at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), where Ah Xian developed the method of mold-making that remains central to his artistic practice. The process of creating these and later busts, in porcelain and other media, begins with a plaster-cast of the head and shoulders of the model— usually a friend or family member. To create a cast, the model must first strip to the waist so Ah Xian can swath their head and upper body in cling wrap, leaving only their nostrils uncovered; they are then wrapped tightly with bandages soaked in plaster and, after several layers of these have been applied, they must sit for almost an hour, waiting for the plaster to harden and remaining as still as possible. The resulting cast can be used to produce an impression in porcelain or any other moldable material. Ah Xian chose to ornament his porcelain busts with a range of stereotypically Chinese motifs, including floral patterns, dragons, plum trees in blossom, lotuses, and waves. In the SCA busts, these are superimposed over the features of three models: a young woman of Asian heritage, likely a student; Ah Xian’s brother, photographer Liu Xiaoxian (刘晓先, b. 1963); and the artist’s wife, Mali Hong. Both Liu and Hong moved with Ah Xian from Beijing to Sydney in 1990. They are each precisely replicated in porcelain, their faces rendered so uniform by the clay that ornament has become their primary distinguishing quality. A parallel can be drawn here with Ho’s Identity in the tension created between superficial forms of identification and deeper dimensions of self. Just as the apparently conventional appearance of Ho’s jar mimics that of an unremarkable piece of blue-and-white export ware, so the ornament of Ah Xian’s busts exposes them to stereotype. At first, some might assume these are relatively straight150

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figure 38 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 4, 1998, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue and copper-red decoration, 32 × 36 × 19 cm. Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; courtesy of the artist.

forward portraits of Chinese people in a Chinese medium, painted with Chinese motifs by a Chinese artist—yet another analogy for the typecasting of the culturally marked migrant. This reading is encouraged by the identification of each bust with a number rather than a name, imparting a universalizing relatability, and by the doubled title of the series, with its play on the two meanings of “China.” On closer inspection, however, the motifs reveal additional meaning as markers of identity and sensitive registers of the subject’s relationship with the artist. Cultural affiliation is overlayed with family and friendship, while iconographic interpretation intersects with a deeply personal sphere of significance. The restrained underglaze blue and overglaze copper red ornament on Bust 4, for example, a portrait of Mali Hong, implies a balance of intimacy and convention that likely reflects the artist’s affection for his subject (fig. 38). Her lifelike expression is the most striking feature of the work, suffused with tranquil contemplation and animated by a slight smile that lingers on the upturned corner of her mouth. The endearing irreverence of this subtle Porcelain Renaissance

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figure 39 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 10, 1998, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, 31 × 40 × 21.5 cm. Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; courtesy of the artist.

movement is enhanced by a paired lotus bud and leaf that respectively cover and sit just above Hong’s closed eyes, suggesting a wink and a raised eyebrow. The slender stalks of this lotus emerge from the lustrous white skin of her collarbones, reaching up her neck and across her cheeks to mingle with the leafy canopy of her hairline. Another leaf rests on her right shoulder and her collarbone. In China, the lotus (hehua 荷花, or lianhua 莲花) has long been associated with Buddhist practice and thought as a plant that “rises undefiled from impure muddy waters” to produce a pure white flower—an analogy for the life of integrity rising above the pollutions of the everyday. They are additionally an emblem of love, homophonous with he (合), meaning harmony and he (和), peace, as well as with lian (连), connection, and lian (联), attachment or longing.62 Ah Xian’s choice of a lotus to ornament Hong’s features, then, could allude to their shared affection and perhaps also to his vision of her rising above the struggles of daily life to a higher realm of being. A comparable reading could be applied to the artist’s portrayal of his brother in Bust 10, the final addition to the China China series entirely created by his own hands (fig. 39). 152

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In contrast to Bust 4, flowers are not the primary decorative element here and the design is neither restrained nor subtle. Liu’s shoulders and neck bear a rhythmic seascape of tempestuous waves, his head covered with an uneven ground of blue pigment punctuated by a stylized cloud pattern. His eyes and nose are obscured by the face of a dragon encircling the crown of his head and extending over his ear to assume a central, confrontational position that has prompted some writers to describe the work as claustrophobic.63 The presence of a dragon rather than floral motifs, and the vigor with which this image has been applied have also given rise to associations with Liu’s masculinity: flowers, it is argued, are feminine, implying elegance and restraint, while dragons and waves are masculine, painted with forthright audacity.64 However, while the dragon is associated in China with ferocity and natural power, it also denotes benevolence and nurturing protection. The creature encircling Liu’s head, then, rather than a suffocating constraint, could be an apotropaic talisman. This reading is reinforced by the clouds (yun 云), homophonous with yun (运), good fortune, and by the “wish-granting jewel” (ruyi baozhu 如意宝珠) that the dragon pursues, resting on Liu’s chin. Like the lotus, this jewel is an emblem of transcendence and of the emergence of purity from the mire of daily existence, symbolizing a third association of the dragon with the natural processes of growth and metamorphosis.65 The combination of these elements—dragon, clouds, waves and jewel—has been common since the Song dynasty, intended to emphasize the dragon’s role as a bringer of life-sustaining waters, signifying abundance, longevity, and cosmic union.66 In addition to masculine virility, then, the motifs on Bust 10 can also be read as a wish for good fortune from the artist to his brother, a reassurance that life and the potential for transcendence will always endure, even in the most overwhelming circumstances. In Bust 10, as in Bust 4 and the remaining SCA busts, cultural motifs gain new significance as markers of personality, family, and friendship, transforming culture from a restrictive mark of imposed difference to an internal wellspring of communal support. Ah Xian’s turn to porcelain can likewise be traced to his vision of this medium as an ancestral inheritance. Like Ai Weiwei, he was born in Beijing on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, but, unlike the older artist, as a son of two scholars he spent his formative years on the relatively tranquil campuses of Renmin University and Beijing Institute of Technology, rather than in the harsh and unforgiving desert of Xinjiang. After graduating high school, he was assigned employment as a fitter in a state-owned factory before deciding, in 1982, to pursue his dreams of becoming an artist—a radical statement at the time. In 1983, while in Shenzhen, he adopted the pseudonym “Ah Xian” in preference to his birth name, Liu Jixian (刘继先). Like Sin-ying/Cassandra Ho, then, his name signals an identity complicated by movement between cultural spheres and by a desire to transcend singular origin. After his return to Beijing, he gained some notoriety for a relatively substantial body of work in oils on canvas that reflect the atmosphere of the ’85 Movement. In January 1989, however, he again left the city for a Porcelain Renaissance

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two-month artist residency at the University of Tasmania, Hobart. The unfortunate coincidence of his second return to the capital with the Tiananmen Square protests then prompted him to accept a follow-up invitation to show his work in Sydney in September 1990 as an opportunity to relocate permanently to Australia. Like Ho, Ah Xian’s journey back to the Sinosphere following this move overseas involved a stay in Jingdezhen, yet the circumstances of his visit were quite different. He traveled first to Beijing to see his mother, who had contracted an illness to which she succumbed two days before his arrival, delayed by visa complications. Stopping in Jingdezhen on the return leg, the frustrations of an in-between existence, separated from family and past, may have been etched in his mind, perhaps strengthening his attraction to porcelain as a means to bridge this divide. His motivations could be compared with those driving Ai Weiwei when he arrived in Beijing three years earlier, in 1993, after his own father’s diagnosis with a terminal illness. For both artists, the cultural authenticity of porcelain, a material so embedded within understandings of Chinese heritage that it is now synonymous with the country of its birth, perhaps proved reassuring amid familial disintegration. The idea to create cast-porcelain figures occurred to Ah Xian two years earlier, however, in 1994, after he had completed several installations that included plaster-cast replicas of hands and feet. Although these works were successful, he found plaster aesthetically unappealing, clinical, and dull, while porcelain, in contrast, seemed alluring and evocative, durable yet just as malleable, and enlivened by a precious fragility. He read manuals on ceramics-making and built a small kiln in his garden to fire porcelain versions of his casts. In 1995, he met Wu Yan, a young woman who had moved to Sydney from Jingdezhen and who put him in touch with Zou Xiaosong, vice director of JCI. Ah Xian and Zou exchanged letters for several months until, in May 1996, following his homecoming, he found an opportunity to continue his studies in the Porcelain Capital. He had learned of the city’s history and wished to explore any possibility for further training. While his mother’s illness was, of course, the primary reason for his return to China, Ah Xian therefore also shared with Ho a desire to reignite feelings of cultural belonging and reclaim a lost birthright that soon became inextricably entangled with Jingdezhen and porcelain. Ah Xian had turned to ceramics in a spirit of artistic inquiry, searching for a material that could be cast in the same way as plaster while yielding a more appealing result, yet it was this sense of reviving his heritage that gained greater significance. As a self-taught artist, he has experimented with many materials over his career, from oil painting and mixed-media collage to plaster-casting and installation. In hindsight, porcelain is just the first of many “traditional” media that he adopted after the success of China China, including cloisonné, lacquer, jade, bronze, semi-precious stones, and scholar’s rocks. He announced his intent to adapt tradition not long after embarking on this series, in a paper presented at the Asian Arts Society of Australia Contemporary Asian Art Forum in October 1998: 154

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In my understanding, we [Chinese artists] possess a richness of cultural resources and wealth that are beautiful and almost unassailable. So why do we let them go to waste instead of constructing them into new treasures?67

Porcelain is elevated here from a mere substitute for plaster to a precious “cultural resource” in need of salvation by those who have inherited it as a birthright but have been denied access to their heritage through historical and political circumstance. Ah Xian clarified this aspiration just over a decade later in conversation with Kathryn Wells, reaffirming its centrality for his work: Among the ideas of why I use these materials in my artwork is to show that they are not just about ancient heritage and traditions, they are also current, creative, up-to-date and compatible [with] contemporary art concepts and ideas.68

As these extracts illustrate, Ah Xian identifies his duty as a Chinese artist with the “revival” of traditional forms for contemporary audiences. A parallel could be drawn here with Li Jianshen’s transformation of Sijiali into Sanbao, yet Ah Xian has defined his turn to traditional media, like Sin-ying Ho, as an “issue of survival,” inspired by a need to “remain true to myself and the specific culture from which I draw strength.”69 Speaking with Melissa Chiu in 2001, he noted that, “even if someone is away from China, they recognise themselves as being Chinese,” and “have a clearer vision of China and Chinese culture.”70 He discovered this clarity in Sydney, separated by distance and time from his birthplace, but more aware than ever of the complexities of cultural identity and determined to explore these through his art. Several crucial points of distinction nevertheless separate Ah Xian’s and Sin-ying Ho’s otherwise comparable visions of porcelain, drawing attention to their divergent life experiences and artistic approaches. First, many writers on Ah Xian’s work have linked his use of traditional materials with the political violence and repression he witnessed during the 1960s and ’70s, from which Ho would have been relatively sheltered in Hong Kong. Ah Xian’s access to art during these years had been frustrated by the destruction of books deemed counterrevolutionary. His parents attempted to counter this negative influence by enrolling him in after-school classes, where he studied drawing, calligraphy, ink painting, and seal-carving. They had also preserved an encyclopedia of artisanal arts at their home, “a splendid silk-bound hard-cover first edition of Arts and Crafts of China [Zhongguo gongyi meishu 中国工艺美术, 1959],” lavishly illustrated with samples of porcelain, lacquer, cloisonné, and other media which may have prompted his fascination with these materials.71 Like Ai Weiwei, who first encountered ceramics among the souvenirs that Ai Qing had preserved from his days as a state-sanctioned poet, Ah Xian came to know this medium in an intimate and circumspect context. It was perhaps the memory of these childhood experiences that inspired his later use of porcelain to evoke an internal world. Porcelain Renaissance

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Beyond the limited resources of this private sphere, Ah Xian’s access to art was almost nonexistent. Antiques were considered too redolent of the past to be displayed in public, while temples and palaces that housed collections of such objects were deemed irrelevant and were repurposed into schools or community centers. Denied access to China’s heritage in his formative years, Ah Xian may have developed a strong attraction to the material traces of this heritage later in life, a heightened awareness of its value, and a deep appreciation of the need to protect it from the threat of obliteration. A second distinction between Ah Xian and Ho lies in their differing views of globalization. For Ho, globalization is a liberating movement away from self-contained cultural spheres toward a transcultural blending of languages, iconographies, and worldviews. Ah Xian, on the other hand, has described globalization as a selfdenying entrapment and has criticized those artists who “cast themselves into the mainstream . . . co-operatively participating in [a] globalised art culture in a globalised form,” just to foster wider appreciation for their work. These artists, he asserts, in their haste “[to] catch the last carriage of the last departing train,” are responsible for a destabilizing of the continuity that previously defined China’s artistic development, “dropping every valuable that we had but, because of its familiarity, didn’t appreciate,” and deluding themselves with the misguided belief that “Western” approaches would secure their success.72 Yet Ah Xian developed this view only after he had left China and lived in Sydney for eight years; many of the works he created before 1990, on the other hand, and even several years later, show an interest in European styles typical of the ’85 Movement. His oil-on-canvas series Palace Lady (1985–87; fig. 40) and The Wall (1987–89; fig. 41), for example, reveal a Surrealist influence that persists in the Heavy Wounds series (1991–93), discussed in more detail in our fourth and final chapter, while the collage Just what is it that makes today’s families so different? So appealing? (1990), created immediately after his arrival in Sydney, quotes directly from English Pop artist Richard Hamilton (1922–2011). It seems likely that Ah Xian’s change in heart—like his attraction to porcelain—may have been motivated by his departure from Beijing and the isolation from Chinese culture that colored his first impressions of Sydney. He subsequently tempered his criticism to some extent, yet he remains defiantly independent of global trends. Although both Ah Xian and Ho chose to use porcelain following their relocation overseas, then, their experiences after relocating led to quite distinct understandings of global contemporary art. Additionally, despite Ah Xian’s initial resistance to “Western” styles and art-world structures, his use of porcelain has been greatly enabled by the institutional framework for the arts in Australia. Just as Sin-ying Ho’s access to training and resources in Jingdezhen arose from her affiliation with North American tertiary institutions, the progression of Ah Xian’s career has been shaped by his navigation of different cultural contexts. The first China China busts were created during an artist residency at SCA, with the benefit of materials, equipment, training, and a cohort of enthusiastic stu156

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figure 40 Ah Xian, Palace Lady, 1985, oil on canvas, 75 × 64 cm. Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; courtesy of the artist.

dents. In the following year, Ah Xian received an Australia Council New Work Grant to fund a nine-month stay in Jingdezhen, his second trip to the city, during which he commissioned artisans to mold and paint forty-three additional busts. He sold his first bust in that year to the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (formerly the Powerhouse Museum) in Sydney, followed by sales to the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2000. The latter then awarded Ah Xian the inaugural National Sculpture Prize in 2001, funding Porcelain Renaissance

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figure 41 Ah Xian, The Wall no. 40, 1987, ink and synthetic polymer paint on xuan paper, 110 × 110 cm. Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; courtesy of the artist.

his third trip to Jingdezhen in 2002, and he then received an Australia Council Fellowship to support his final journey in 2004. Although Ah Xian once denied the authority of the “Western” art world, he has undoubtedly benefitted from his current residence in Australia. A final distinction between Ah Xian and Sin-ying Ho can be noted in the former’s resistance to the technique-driven, virtuosic approach that Ho has cultivated in favor of what he defines as a conceptualist attitude. An emphasis on concept is present as well in Ho’s work but, as a trained ceramicist, she engages with the medium in a manner that is entirely distinct from Ah Xian’s autodidactic style. A concise explanation of this approach can be found in another of his published statements, delivered in his capacity as a judge for the tenth Sidney Myer Fund International Ceramics Award 158

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(2008), in which he set forth a manifesto for a conceptually motivated vision of ceramic art. Recasting his earlier statement on the need to adapt traditional techniques in a more declamatory mode, he began by decrying the isolation of ceramics from the artistic mainstream, “stuck to one side in a grey and shady area,” and the conservatism with which they had customarily been associated. To combat this and “inject new blood and energy” into the medium, he called for ceramicists to abandon technique and to “disrupt the definition of Ceramic Art as one of process and redefine it as [one] of critical conceptualisation,” albeit with an emphasis on “skilled technical ability.” Technique, he asserted, when given primary importance, becomes “a large yet invisible cocoon [suppressing] the desire, passion and courage to break . . . barriers and cross the border to the ‘outside.’ ”73 Ho, with the benefit of studio and workshop training, views the technical aspects of her work as central to their meaning; Ah Xian, the independent amateur, holds conceptual content to be most significant. While the core message of Ah Xian’s 2008 address is consistent with his SCA busts, a contradiction emerges when we turn to the seventy-three busts that he commissioned artisans in Jingdezhen to produce in 1999, 2002, and 2004. These heralded a shift toward a less conceptually rigorous, more superficially appealing style perhaps prompted by the increasing interest from galleries and private collectors that he enjoyed as he established a signature style. The first ten works in the series are intimate pieces, cast and painted personally by the artist during a year of great personal and artistic discovery. Those produced in Jingdezhen, in contrast, suggest a fascination with aesthetic variety, technical virtuosity, and the potential for modular mass production afforded by a system of labor delegation. In these works, the cultural takes priority over the personal, both because their quantity and variety make the search for the private an almost impossible task, and because the relationship between model and motif has been largely abandoned. Yet these busts proved so appealing for collectors and lucrative for the artist that several other Chinese-Australian artists subsequently created limited series in porcelain, notably including Guan Wei (关伟, b. 1957) and Zhou Xiaoping (周小平, b. 1960). Further building on Ah Xian’s precedent, these artists combined the exotic allure of a Chinese medium for Australian buyers with locally sourced imagery, drawing inspiration from Australian Aboriginal designs and iconographies.74 This fusion, to some extent, elevates their work beyond the reductive logic of the market, but, nevertheless, all three artists were no doubt aware, at the very least, of the beneficial returns that a material as desirable as porcelain might attract. Despite the deviation of his Jingdezhen busts from his earlier style, for many writers on Ah Xian’s work in Australia and the United States, the former represent the true blossoming of his artistic vision, while the SCA busts are frequently dismissed as prototypes, blueprints, “hesitant and crude,” or lacking authenticity.75 Ah Xian himself, at the time of their creation, regarded the first ten busts as experiments and was not entirely satisfied with his results, a feeling perhaps partially derived from his sense that he lacked the required technical skills.76 This perceived lack likely inspired his Porcelain Renaissance

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desire to visit Jingdezhen to improve his technique and reinforced his association of porcelain with a heritage denied. From this perspective, the Jingdezhen busts signify an acceptance, even an embrace of the cultural stereotypes applied to migrants, concealing the private beneath an ornamented surface. Interior and exterior are now decisively separated, with a “skin” of culture stretched over an inner world that remains inaccessible to all but those who dwell within. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this shift, starting with the final three works in the series: Bust 78, Bust 79, and Bust 80 (all 2004; figs. 42–44). Each bust is adorned with lotus flowers that recall those on Bust 4 but that have been shaped in a completely different style. While the lotuses on the SCA bust are painted under the glaze, here they rest on the surface as applied decoration, unfurling in paper-thin blooms across the subject’s skin and coated in a viscous celadon glaze that pools in undulations of flesh and flower alike. The luminous translucence of this glaze insulates the sitter from the external world, encasing them within a heavy shroud quite unlike the transparent glaze of the SCA busts, beneath which the white clay and the subject’s features remain clearly visible. At the same time, the lotus flowers in the later busts do not adhere to the figure or follow the lines of their features, as in Bust 4, but rest gently on their skin as if about to peel away, like the leaf on the shoulder of Bust 79. Inner and outer meaning are thereby made independent, caught in a last fleeting moment of contact before their final separation. Any lingering suggestion of the personal is dispelled by the impassivity of the models’ features. Each bust recreates a different woman, yet their lack of hair, shared ornament, and uniform celadon glaze render them difficult to discern, aloof and alien, almost inhuman. Although similar in ornament and subject to Bust 4, these pieces could not be more distinct in their tension between different forms of identification. A comparable impassivity and separation of model and motif can be noted in Bust 45 (1999) and Bust 67 (2002). Bust 45 extends the wave pattern seen on Bust 10 across the figure—in this case, Ah Xian’s father. In the earlier piece, the waves were linked to the central dragon motif, standing in for a tempestuous ocean or reservoir of lifegiving waters and evoking a familial bond shared by artist and subject. In Bust 45 (fig. 45), however, they are frozen in repetitive uniformity, carved in light relief into the surface of the porcelain and, as in Busts 78, 79, and 80, coated with an unctuous glaze more suggestive of an impenetrable carapace than a tender embrace. The sitter’s features are hidden by rhythmic incised lines, his mouth reduced to a sinuous curve, his nose visible only by its protuberance from the subtle creases of his cheeks, and the hollows of his eyes almost imperceptibly divided by a meeting of eyelids. Again, there is no correlation between model and motif—the inner world of the subject is concealed within an ornamental shell. The same impression of a hardened carapace is apparent in Bust 67 (fig. 46), in which the anonymity of the figure has become so acute that s/he is almost androgy160

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figure 42 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 78, 2004, celadon-glazed porcelain with applied ornament, 43 × 41 × 24 cm. Collection of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne; courtesy of the artist.

nous, in contrast to the gendering of motifs on the SCA busts. For this work, Ah Xian developed the all-over pattern used on Bust 45 into a close-fitting mantle, a threedimensional rendering of a motif that has long been used as a decorative filler. The iridescent glaze bleeds slightly into the grey-white biscuit porcelain, yet the two remain distinct. In contrast to the partial obscuring of facial features in Bust 45, here the face Porcelain Renaissance

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figure 43 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 79, 2004, celadon-glazed porcelain with applied ornament, 41 × 39 × 24 cm. Private Collection; courtesy of the artist.

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figure 44 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 80, 2004, celadon-glazed porcelain with applied ornament, 41 × 39 × 24 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; courtesy of the artist.

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figure 45 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 45, 1999, monochrome-glazed porcelain, 35 × 43 × 25 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

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figure 46 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 67, 2002, monochrome-glazed and biscuit porcelain. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

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is defiantly unadorned, even if the personality of the sitter remains elusive. The motif is neither fused with the skin, nor attached like a shell, but is instead overlaid like a fitted piece of clothing. The separation of model and motif is comparable to that seen in Busts 78, 79, and 80, but, while the glaze unified all elements in the latter into a single composition, on Bust 67 even this concession to aesthetic harmony is abandoned. The sitter’s internal world is impenetrable, ornamented but not suffocated by a sumptuous, alluring mantle that seems to be worn by choice rather than compulsion. These few examples of the Jingdezhen busts, while they show a clear separation of the personal and cultural, offer only a suggestion of the overwhelming modularity of the entire series. As the repetition of motifs from the SCA busts in Busts 78, 79, 80, and 45 shows, Ah Xian reuses and adapts a relatively limited range of designs: dragons and other creatures of myth appear on nine busts, landscapes and various combinations of flowers, birds, and butterflies each appear on thirteen, comprising a third of the entire group. Almost all the motifs are sourced from pattern-books and catalogs of antique ceramics, given to artisans whose careers now depend on their talent for reproducing historic wares. In one workshop, for example, Ah Xian employed ten artisans celebrated for their replication of Ming- and Qing-dynasty blue-and-white vases, plates, and sculptures—colleagues, perhaps, of those employed by Ai Weiwei to produce his more conventional facsimiles.77 Ironically, replication of the past is one of the aspects of the porcelain industry that Ah Xian has most vehemently critiqued as evidence for a loss of “artistic soul.”78 The virtuosity with which the artisans fulfill their role in his work seems to contradict his cautions against reliance on technique, yet a comparison could be drawn with Sin-ying Ho’s similar appropriation of standardized forms. In each case, potentially cliché parts are transformed into modules of a multifaceted whole. Their permutations suggest aesthetic abundance, yet when viewed as a group it becomes evident that they are derived from a limited range of sources. As in their composite constructions of identity, that which appears essential in Ah Xian’s and Ho’s work is a patchwork of fragments, within which even the most recalcitrant of stereotypes can be dissected and reassembled. Such reassembly of fragments is complicated in the Jingdezhen busts, however, by the fracturing effect of collective production. Ho’s combinatory vessels, created by a single hand, preserve an aesthetic unity despite their multiple inspirations. Conversely, while Ah Xian directed the creative process, all aspects of this process aside from the initial casting and molding of the busts—using a press-molding technique like that used for Sunflower Seeds, not the slip-casting process that Ah Xian had learned at SCA—were completed by teams of artisans, each responsible for a single painted, incised, carved, or applied motif, glazing technique, or overglaze enamel. Artisans and motifs alike were selected by the artist after visiting workshops across Jingdezhen, poring over pattern books and studying exemplary wares. The concept-driven aspects of making, from contact with models and molding busts to the selection of designs, therefore remained under Ah Xian’s control, while more practical tasks were delegated 166

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to artisans. Yet mind and matter were not as separate as in Ai Weiwei’s monumental installation. The adaptation of certain motifs to the irregular forms of several busts, for example, required great expertise and was a time-consuming task, involving extended interaction between artist and artisans over long periods of time.79 Nevertheless, a division can again be noted here between the production and conceptualization of the work, with the former “there” in Jingdezhen and the latter “here” in Australia, the United States, and Europe, where the busts have primarily been exhibited. Ah Xian has remarked that the artisans he employed, like those later employed by Ai, did not understand or share his artistic intentions. He received mixed reactions of laughter, incredulity, surprise, curiosity, even some suspicion and accusations of instability, with many of those he approached “shaking their heads and laughing as if . . . executing a madman’s commission.”80 The busts created through this bipartite process are caught between worlds: between the personal and the cultural, between an artisanal and a conceptual view of ceramics, and between their sites of production and display. At heart, despite the differences in their making, the SCA and Jingdezhen busts are united by a shared sense of fractured identity that reflects the artist’s experiences of the in-between. While his works in porcelain and other media are produced in China, Ah Xian is almost unknown in that country and has only exhibited there once, in April 2000, at Beijing Normal University. Even this exhibition, largely due to its venue, attracted a limited audience of students and friends, leaving a relatively shallow impression in the city’s arts community. Ah Xian’s displays in Australia, the United States, and Europe, on the other hand, attract large audiences, and he is now recognized as a leading Australian contemporary artist. He is therefore the quintessential transexperiential creator, living in multiple contexts but never completely at home, “doomed to play over again . . . the vicissitudes of a metaphysical homelessness.”81 Like Chen Zhen, he is a perpetual peripatetic: his summary of this experience in an interview in 2000, “I feel I belong to nowhere, and that I am in between or outside of everything,” could easily be mistaken for a quote from Chen.82 Even his pseudonym, “Ah Xian,” like the fictional “Zhu Xian” of Chen’s creation, or Sin-ying Ho’s selfnaming as Cassandra, is an artificial persona. Originating in his desire to reconnect with a lost heritage after moving to Australia, China China and later series served only to confirm for Ah Xian that this vision of culture was comparably artificial, and that his Chineseness is more complex than any stereotype allows. Shot through with personal and experiential dimensions of meaning and intersected by bonds of family and friendship, it is a fabrication of his own making, on his own terms. TRANSCENDENCE AND CONSTRICTION

To conclude our reflection on the tensions between personal and cultural identity, I’d like to turn to another artist whose career both casts these tensions in high relief and sheds further light on the emergence of New Export China. Like Ah Xian and Ho, Porcelain Renaissance

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Caroline Cheng travels regularly between her various homes, while her parallel creative and supportive roles as a ceramic artist and director of the Pottery Workshop exemplify the pairing of constriction and transcendence noted in the works so far discussed. Like Li Jianshen, recognized for his custodianship of Sanbao, Cheng offers a counterpoint for the protagonists of our study, with whom she has frequently crossed paths as both a fellow artist and an enterprising organizer of artist residencies. In Cheng’s Prosperity series (2010–16) of “butterfly dresses,” her most resolved body of work, she captures a moment of metamorphosis that simultaneously evokes the stifling weight of cultural stereotype and the release of a transcultural existence. Like Ah Xian, she envisions culture as an ornament, a costume that viewers could drape around their shoulders, to be suffocated by the weight of these composite garments or carried aloft by the thousands of porcelain butterflies from which each dress is assembled. For the nameless artisans hired to produce these butterflies, however, constriction remains the only likely outcome, relegated like those who manufactured Sunflower Seeds to the ignoble status of gongren. A comparable discrepancy arises in her most successful venture, the Pottery Workshop (PWS), a residency initiative that gives artists an opportunity to gild their work with a veneer of Chineseness. Like her butterfly dresses, this overlay is a form of adornment that offers a liberating release from the constraints of culture, even while the artisans hired to assist remain fixed in place. Cheng’s parallel roles as artist and entrepreneur embody the uneasy dualism of ornamental personhood introduced in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. On one hand, she offers artists and collectors a transcendence through material means, yet, on the other, this promise is fulfilled through the manual labor of those employed to procure and process these materials. The motif that Cheng has chosen as the signature element of Prosperity—a butterfly—suggests an organic metamorphosis. Weaving thousands of insects into a swarming robe of outstretched wings, her composite garments provoke wonder as well as unease, even disgust. A human face strikes a familiar note in Ah Xian’s comparably biomorphic Bust 67, yet Cheng’s dresses only imply the possibility of adornment, their sleeves outstretched as if to take flight. Like the apertures in Ho’s Binary Code and Matrix, they invite viewers to complete the composition with an imagined insertion of their body. Yet the question of whether these are tools of liberation or suppression remains unresolved. As in China China, Cheng’s dresses combine self-possession and poise with the asphyxiating weight of an imposed, culturally inflected construct. While Cheng’s work can be compared on a conceptual level with that of Ah Xian and Ho, in its production it more closely follows Regular-Fragile or Sunflower Seeds. Each dress is comprised of between five and twenty-five thousand butterflies, attached with embroidery thread to a linen support by artisans working under Cheng’s direction. Like those employed by Ai and Liu, they are not credited for their labor, relegated to a subsidiary position further complicated by Cheng’s decision to only employ women. The sobering effect of this knowledge, for many viewers, likely mirrors the 168

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dissipation of the fantasy of flight they perhaps entertained on first encountering the work, only to find that the folds of ceramic-encrusted fabric would stifle the wearer beneath their asphyxiating weight. Cheng has not only obscured the collective making of her butterfly-dresses but, as director of the Jingdezhen PWS, she has paired her artistic practice with a commercial packaging of the cultural transcendence these garments evoke. Cheng’s leadership of this institution echoes Li Jianshen’s part in the redevelopment of Sanbao, yet, rather than a facsimile of the past, she offers resident artists a readymade Chineseness that can be applied to their work like an additional layer of glaze. No linguistic or cultural knowledge is required to take up this opportunity—materials, tools, and personnel are all paid for and arranged in advance, thereby demonstrating the ease with which cultural identity can be fabricated, quite literally, when the correct components are at hand. Cheng opened the Jingdezhen PWS in 2005, taking over a series of studios and apartments within the former Sculpture Factory, where Liu Jianhua had worked in the 1970s and 1980s. Even before Cheng made her mark on this dilapidated complex, former employees and unemployed artisans across Jingdezhen had taken the opportunity to partition the space into studios. When English-Australian ceramicist Roger Law (b. 1941) visited the Factory in 2003, he found a “rabbit warren of broken-down buildings [where] many an aspiring Chinese and foreign contemporary artist can be found.”83 By 2009, these had been superseded by towering glass-and-steel boutiques created for a new generation of affluent young artist-entrepreneurs, inspiring another visitor in 2012 to proclaim it “a ceramics 798.”84 The tenants were primarily overseas visitors, including designers, artists, and entrepreneurs as well as ceramicists, drawn by the promise of the city’s ascendant porcelain renaissance. PWS became a gateway to Jingdezhen for this transient population of opportunistic visitors, but there had been earlier attempts to transform the Sculpture Factory into a point of entry to the Porcelain Capital. Liu Yuanchang, for example, Liu Jianhua’s uncle, also established a residency program in his former workplace. When the collective factory closed in 1997, Liu rented a small studio in the complex, continuing at first to produce sculptures in the style of his former output but later adopting an abstract style when these proved difficult to sell. In 2003, municipal officials suggested he should rent more space, so he expanded to a team of twenty employees, producing art porcelain at a high price point. The following year he opened a limited number of residencies with the ambition of promoting the city to a wider audience.85 These primarily attracted visitors from outside China, so Liu started to offer access to materials, equipment, and labor as well as space. His daughter, Liu Danyuan, has explained the rationale behind this decision: We are a bridge. We help foreign artists get what they need so they can work. We help them find raw materials, ceramists to make things for them, throwers, mould-makers, glaze-makers, firing—whatever our foreign artists need.86 Porcelain Renaissance

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Yet what Liu’s residencies offered above all, like PWS, was access to a wellspring of authenticity—a means to elevate the value and appeal of a work of art by association with an attractive (and lucrative) Chineseness. In May 2005, Cheng opened PWS in another part of the Factory, noting the clientele that Liu had found among overseas artists and eclipsing his smaller residency initiative. Cheng first visited the Porcelain Capital at Ostrom and Ho’s invitation in 1998, after attending the Yixing International Ceramic Conference.87 Before this, she had studied in the United States in the 1980s, returning in 1991 to Hong Kong, where she spent most of her childhood when not with her parents in Cambridge, England. Like Ho, Cheng has a complex cultural and linguistic background, and it was partially her awareness of this fragmented identity that drew her to Jingdezhen, where she too hoped to find a reassuring stability.88 Yet it was not only a yearning to discover her roots that appealed to her. In 1995, in Hong Kong, she had assumed leadership of the first PWS from another English-born ceramicist, Mak Yee-fun, who founded it in 1985 as an informal space for enthusiasts (including Ho) to share their passion.89 Cheng set out to expand the reach of Mak’s operation by inviting contacts in the United States and England to give guest lectures, increasing attendance of open classes from less than ten students to over a hundred. In 2002, buoyed by this success, she opened a retail outlet in Shanghai’s Tianzifang arts district to sell ceramics produced in the Hong Kong studio, followed in 2007 by a branch on Nanluoguxiang, a tourist-oriented shopping street in Beijing. From a communal space in Hong Kong, Cheng thereby extended the reach of the PWS brand across the mainland.90 Like her artistic practice, her commercial empire is founded on a talent for modular adaptation, an ability to harness collective effort, and, above all, the long-standing role of china as a gateway to China. As both an artist and entrepreneur, Cheng relies on the slippage of meaning between these terms, promoting an image of China that is essentially a fabrication but, from a distance, gives the impression of a restorative wholeness. In Ah Xian’s Bust 67, the personal and cultural are definitively separated, the latter worn around the subject’s shoulders and head like a close-fitting mantle, ornamenting rather than obscuring facial features. The same separation of inner and outer life is apparent throughout the China China series, yet this work stands apart for the biomorphism of the motif: although adapted from a conventional pattern, it could be mistaken for scales or feathers growing from the anonymous model’s skin and marking them as a hybrid creature, part-human, part-fish/bird. A comparable biomorphism appears in Ho’s Matrix and Binary Code, evoking a realm beyond culture that recalls the artist’s yearning for transcendence through symbiotic union. Each work suggests an organic metamorphosis that complicates unequivocal identifications of Chineseness, despite the use of customary motifs and a quintessentially Chinese material. Their conflation of ontological categories exemplifies the “haunting alchemy between persons and things” that Cheng implies with her proposition of an ornamental personhood, testing the limits of a “racial [identity] . . . assembled not through organic flesh 170

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but [through] synthetic inventions . . . that are metonymic and hence superficial, detachable, and migratory.” Defying the boundaries conventionally used to separate the living and non-living, human and animal, animate and inanimate, “oppositional concepts such as authenticity versus illusion, interiority versus surface, real person versus synthetic construct cannot . . . address this kind of figure.”91 Paradoxically, perhaps, the externalized objectification of cultural identity in these works, imagining that which is usually held to be essential as a superficial ornament, opens opportunities for self-construction beyond the fatalism of genes and geography.

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4 PORCELAIN CLAY

A

I WEIWEI, LIU JIANHUA, AH XIAN, AND SIN-YING HO have found in porcelain an ideal means to explore the uneasy boundaries between artistic and artisanal production, the ambiguities of history, and the mutability of personal and cultural identity. They were first drawn to this material, however, by the more superficially appealing translucent luster and glossy smoothness of glazed clay, and by the desire to possess and caress that these qualities inspire. Searching Beijing’s markets for antiques and reproductions, Ai discovered an enduring fascination for the “shape, colour and markings” of the wares on display and a great admiration for “the enormous skill [and] refined workmanship” they embodied.1 For Ho, the contrast of cobalt-blue and iron-red with which she experimented in her earliest works proved so alluring that she chose to use it throughout her career to evoke the blending of cultures and chronologies. Ah Xian first turned to porcelain as a substitute for plaster, attracted by its alluring beauty and irresistible tactility. And Liu, after rejecting his professional

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training in 1985, eventually returned to ceramics over a decade later in search of a medium that could imbue his work with an ornamental charm.2 In their work, these artists sometimes even seem to privilege visual and tactile appeal over conceptual depth, using surface attraction to mask critical aims. Between his first experiments with ceramics in the early 1990s and the installation of Sunflower Seeds at the Tate in 2010, Ai commissioned his artisan-assistants in Jingdezhen to produce several sculptural pieces from 2004 to 2007 that exemplify such a merging of the superficial and insightful. The earliest of these, The Wave (2005), a technically sophisticated play on his cultural readymades, draws attention to the stereotyping of his previous work along with that of other Chinese artists in the global market by reducing one of the most recognized (and commodified) icons of Asian art to an unthreatening ornamentality. Ai further complicated this critique with Bowl of Pearls (2006), in which the baroque abundance implied by the title is undermined by a realization that these pearls heaped so generously in a vessel of gleaming porcelain are discolored, irregular, or damaged, and so essentially worthless. Again, a veiled critique arises here of the ongoing tension between value and vacuity provoked by the increasing global visibility of Chinese art in that year of record-breaking auctions. Also in 2006, the Watermelon, Oil Spill, and Dress series signaled Ai’s infatuation with the traditions of skeuomorphic imitation still alive in Jingdezhen. Each appears to be little more than a visual pun, but, when the specific items chosen for replication are held up to scrutiny, more jarring visions of consumerist excess, environmental degradation, spiritual emptiness, and sweatshop exploitation emerge. This strategic engagement with the visual and tactile allure of porcelain can be allied with another defining quality of the medium that Ai, Liu, Ah Xian, and Ho have each separately emphasized: its association with the body. Like their championing of materiality, this shared interest encompasses many forms of identification, but the most visible are those of race and gender expressed in ideas of the exotic and erotic. These vectors of desire and captivation have also long been conjoined for the artworld audiences beyond China’s borders who comprise the principal consumers of New Export China, and for whom, in Anne Anlin Cheng’s evocative phrasing, The ornament has almost always been associated, even downright identified, with the Oriental . . . because [it] triggers [a] fluctuation between essence and supplement, depth and surface, interiority and exteriority, [organic and] inorganic, femininity and masculinity, and finally, Western discipline and Oriental excess.3

The ornamental is denigrated within this essentializing frame of reference as an emissary of “the insignificant, the superfluous, [the] decorative, the shallow, and the excessive,” an enervating influence at worst or, at best, “a distraction, leading us astray from true moral value and genuine beauty.”4 Yet we cannot entirely shed our fascination with that which we disparage as superficial or contaminating, so we minimize the risk 174

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by imposing constraints of stereotype and prejudice to curtail uncontrollable difference. This logic of ornamentalism is essential to narratives of both the exotic and erotic, blurring the ambiguous boundary between terror and desire, otherworldly beauty and abject deformity, violence and affection. The ornamentalism of the exotic is clearest in Ah Xian’s China China series, in which the features of unnamed men and women of Chinese descent are overlaid and frequently obscured by an eclectic iconography of traditional motifs. These are almost identical with those found on mass-produced utilitarian wares, with which the artisans in Jingdezhen whose labor Ah Xian hired may perhaps have been more accustomed. Most writers on Ah Xian’s work note this tension between personal identity and stereotyping conformity as the principal theme of the series, drawing attention to an apparent erasure of idiosyncrasies in favor of a static, generic Chineseness. Further support for this reading can be drawn from a comparison of China China with the artist’s earlier Heavy Wounds (1991) series of oil paintings and Site Perspectives and Pervasive Spirit (1991–92) installations, as crucial precedents for the making and meaning of his busts. Created following the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the artist’s decision to leave the PRC, these works indicate a preoccupation with constriction, concealment, and psychological release in their visceral representations of death, amputation, and bodily injury. When China China is regarded as an extension of such themes, colored by Ah Xian’s encounters with racial prejudice in Australia, his seemingly ossified busts come to resemble death masks, with their subjects forced to endure the stifling confinement of stereotypes that render them superfluous and superficial. Scholars of exoticism, in their attempts to map the constantly shifting boundary between the horror of a reductive ornamentalism and the fascination that its products arouse, have long relied on psychoanalytic theories of self and other. For our purposes, foregrounding the desire to know and possess that animates this binary, a useful point of entry is offered in second wave feminist ideas of the male gaze and sexual objectification. Although subject to much critique and revision, these retain their value as theoretical frameworks through which to interrogate stereotypes of gender and race. Art historian John Berger presented one of the most frequently cited iterations of these ideas in Ways of Seeing (1972), exposing the extent to which women are defined in patriarchal social systems as “object[s] of vision: a sight [held in] the keeping of men,” as playthings for those who seize the right to survey their exposed flesh.5 Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s canonical analysis of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) is another point of reference, tying the frustrated pleasure of a (heterosexual male) viewer gazing on a woman’s body with the reduction of that body to a sexual object defined only by a perceived desirability, or “to-be-looked-at-ness.” At the heart of this delimiting act is the allure of “scopophilia,” a term Mulvey uses to refer to the pleasure of vision, “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” under which the woman regarded becomes “isolated . . . on display [and] sexualised [for the] enjoyment of men.”6 Porcelain Clay

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Divested of any identity aside from their sexual characteristics and hypersexualized clothing, the nameless, headless, and armless subjects of Liu Jianhua’s Obsessive Memories series (1998–2000), sprawled seductively in overstuffed armchairs and distended bathtubs, exemplify this reduction of women to the sexual logic of “what can and cannot be done to [them].”7 In Liu’s hands, however, their erotic allure becomes the vehicle for a scathing critique of contemporary life in post-reform China, foreshadowing Ai Weiwei’s use of porcelain a few years later to satirize the vacuous excesses and degradations of consumerism. In contrast to the absurdism of Ai’s sculptural series, however, the critical thrust of Liu’s artistic vision is more violent, almost threatening in intent. The beguiling surfaces of his icons of delayed gratification conceal a hollow interior, devoid of human qualities and hostile to the touch. The brutality enacted on these porcelain women implies not only that the pleasures of consumerism are unfulfilling, but that they might even be harmful, eroding our sense of self until we become little more than an attractive but psychologically desiccated shell. The series could therefore be defined as a final gasp of the “Gaudy Art” (Yansu yishu 艳俗艺术) aesthetic developed in the 1990s by artists including Xu Yihui (徐一晖, b. 1964), who traveled to Jingdezhen in 1994, two years before Ai, Ho, and Ah Xian, to oversee the creation of sculptural pieces like his Little Red Book (1994). Gaudy Art is generally positioned in histories of Chinese contemporary art as a response to the corruption of cultural and political ideals within a market-driven economy and associated with works typified by an emphasis on lustrous surfaces and lurid colors, in imitation of commercial packaging and promotional materials. As such, it could be cited as a touchstone for many works discussed in this chapter. In applying this aesthetic to Obsessive Memories, however, we must not overlook the implications of Liu’s depiction of women as objects of voyeuristic enjoyment. This aspect of Obsessive Memories has all too often been rationalized as an innocuous aesthetic device by writers within and beyond China’s borders, for whom the sexual content remains secondary to critical intent. Yet a sustained interest in sexuality is evident in Liu’s artistic practice throughout the 1990s and even, to some extent, in the late 1980s, first taking shape in his painted fiberglass series Secrecy and Disharmony (1993–97). The latter marked a shift away from his inclination for primitivist abstraction toward an interest in figurative sculpture that eventually led to a return to porcelain in 1998, marking the end of his search for a material that could convey the sensations of skin and fabric. A tension arises in each series between an unseen masculinity associated with lust denied, and a hyper-visible feminine sexuality that threatens to exceed externally imposed limits. Even if intended as an aesthetic conceit, Liu’s dismembered femmes fatales nevertheless portray sexual objectification as a mode of isolation and control, drawing affective power from his memories of gendered violence in the Cultural Revolution. We can gain further insight into this simultaneously psychosocial and historical context for Liu’s work by turning once again to Cheng’s model of ornamental personhood, and specifically to her understanding of the “Yellow Woman”—an epithet she 176

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favors over “Asian Woman” as a more emphatic recognition of the racial logic underlying all such terms of classification. The condition of Yellow Womanhood, Cheng argues, is aligned with the intersection of politics and aesthetics in ornamental identities that cast an unsettling doubt over the boundaries that usually separate persons and things. Rather than a substance, Yellow Womanhood connotes “a style, promising yet supplanting skin and flesh, an insistently aesthetic presence that is prized and despoiled . . . radically undone yet luminously constructed . . . degraded and disposable.” The figure of the Yellow Woman exposes “the distressing affinity . . . between agency and complicity, anti-essentialism and authenticity . . . affirmation and reification,” embodying the potential for personhood to emerge from the artificial and aesthetic rather than the organic and authentic, in “ornamental forms and fungible surfaces,” rather than the density of flesh or the imagined depth of the psyche.8 Departing from the emphasis on disempowerment in the theoretical frameworks formulated by writers like Berger and Mulvey, Cheng’s Yellow Woman possesses a certain destabilizing power. The ornamental personhood that this synthetic yet organic category of gendered and racialized identity embodies generates possibilities of self-construction as well as self-annihilation. Cheng’s critical framework also, and more crucially, draws attention to the role of race in differentiating the objectifications endured by women across geographic and historical contexts. Porcelain, for example, is eminently suited for expressing tensions between desire and obsession that color stereotypes of Chinese womanhood, because of its alchemical and seemingly impossible properties . . . its glossy beauty, its refinement, its receptivity to . . . manipulation [and] miraculous capacity to sustain the extreme high heat that lends it its translucency . . . [possessing a] fragile daintiness and insensate coolness: a mixture of antithetical symbolic meanings that . . . become the very “stuff ” of Asiatic femininity.9

Liu’s Merriment series (2000–2002), an extension of Obsessive Memories, combines these exotic and erotic connotations in an especially effective yet unsettling manner. The central motif in both series is the qipao (旗袍), or cheongsam in Cantonese (changshan 长衫, literally “long shirt”), a distinctively Chinese dress that gained popularity during the tumultuous years of transition from Qing to Republican rule. Conceived as an emblem of women’s empowerment, cosmopolitanism, and forward-thinking politics, by the 1930s the qipao had become an overtly feminine garment, in line with the rigid gender roles enforced by the regime of the time. It is this hypersexualized qipao that Liu emulates in Merriment and Obsessive Memories, in which folds of fabric recreated in porcelain cling tightly to his fragmented women, who sit, lay, or kneel with hemlines raised to expose parted thighs, painted toenails, and high-heeled shoes. Exotic and erotic are seamlessly combined, presenting those viewers who know the history of the qipao with an allegory for the commodification of Chinese culture on the Porcelain Clay

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global stage, while those unfamiliar with this history can regard the works as a comment on the broader fetishism of the Yellow Woman. To these feminist theoretical frameworks, we can add another point of reference for our study of the exotic and erotic, drawn from anthropological theory: the act of writing or imaging the self through appropriation and transgression of colonial narratives, whereby the subaltern author or artist reclaims some independence. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt has defined this “authoethnographic” act as a tool with which those who live under colonial rule can “represent themselves [by] appropriating the idioms of the conqueror.”10 Unlike ethnographic texts, created and distributed by the colonizer to propagate a view of the colonized that endorses a subordinate position, autoethnographic texts present a response or interjection to this control. By appropriating the linguistic and visual codes of the colonizer and adapting these to the interrogation rather than reification of stereotype, the artist or author can introduce an unassimilable difference into the dialogue between cultures.11 Neither Liu nor Ah Xian have worked in a colonial context, yet their use of stereotypically Chinese motifs as a symbolic vocabulary for self-fashioning echoes such autoethnographic representation. The autoethnographic potential of China China has drawn comment from critic Marita Bullock, who finds in these works an effacing of individual features beneath a “generic, visually defined . . . ‘Otherness,’ ” yet who argues that this visualization of the self as stereotype exposes the stasis of all such assertions of cultural essence and reclaims the artist’s motifs as emblems of a heritage shared with his subjects.12 A comparable reclamation could be noted in Obsessive Memories and Merriment, though Liu’s appropriation of essentialist stasis does not redeem the qipao as a source of pride—his works are instead relentlessly critical. In each series, elements of the human are rendered ornamental and overlaid with motifs implying the imposition of a cultural or gendered essence. In Ah Xian’s busts, this can be read as a critique of the constriction and confinement felt by the visible other, reflecting the artist’s own experience of this during his first years in Sydney. Yet China China can also be read as an autoethnographic engagement with cultural stereotype, appropriating and recreating overdetermined motifs to reclaim their use as emblems of self and to reinsert them within the flow of lived existence. As such, it could be cited as a study in ornamental personhood, blurring the boundaries between organic and synthetic life. While Liu’s sexually objectified and dismembered Yellow Women illustrate the self-annihilating tendencies of this model of personhood, Ah Xian’s busts offer a more redemptive narrative of selfconstruction. Rather than the suffocating stasis of a death mask, a closer analogy for the combination of the personal and cultural here might therefore be the tattoo, as an index of worldliness and self-transformation that fuses internal and external dimensions of identity. Sin-ying Ho has achieved a similar fusion of the private and public in her composite sculptural works, devoting close attention to ornament and appearing to privilege the 178

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gaudy and superficial in her choice of subject matter. Unlike Ai and Liu, she has neither parodied surface appeal nor used it to provoke critical discomfort—instead, as in China China, that which seems superficial in her sculptures is embedded within a dense network of symbolic contexts. These works transpose her earlier exploration of linguistic and ornamental codes from the individual to the sociocultural while maintaining a focus on the layers of meaning and narratives of self that can be expressed through popular and mass-cultural forms. The paired vessels Hero no. 1 and no. 2 (2007–9) are a notable indication of this shift in artistic aims, with their decal portraits of Chinese American cinematic icon Bruce Lee (Lee Jun-fan 李振藩, 1940–1973) and African American boxer Muhammad Ali (1942–2016). These juxtaposed cult figures appear to offer little more than a parody of the anachronistic combination of signs thrown together by the mass media, with little coherence or consistency, yet Ali and Lee serve in these works as conduits for Ho’s memories of a childhood and adolescence saturated with European and US cultural imports. Like the many other fictional and factual characters that populate her composite sculptures, they become iconic representatives for the multiple divergent strands of her heritage and the various cultures in which she has lived. At the same time, as their title suggests, these paired works also draw attention to the heroic ideals of community solidarity with which Ali and Lee are now associated, binding this with Ho’s enduring desire for global harmony and reconciliation of contradictory perspectives. She has communicated this ambition most powerfully in 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central (2014), created in response to the Occupy Central protests that both united and divided the population of her birthplace. Rather than a straightforward statement of protest, however, in this work Ho sought to highlight the disharmony that the movement had provoked and the fraught negotiation of multiple allegiances that it revealed to be a daily reality for the city’s residents. In this, as in Hero no. 1 and no. 2, the closely intertwined relationship between the popular and the personal therefore emerges as a unifying theme, not merely in Ho’s motifs and her chosen cast of characters but, more importantly, in her strategic variations of the surface treatment and material presence of her works. SUPERFICIAL AND GAUDY

Between 2004 and 2007, Ai Weiwei commissioned the creation of a series of sculptural works in porcelain that exemplify the fascination with surface and materials highlighted in this chapter. These works are small in scale, in contrast to the tendency for the spectacular with which he subsequently came to be associated, and appear far removed as well from the high conceptualism of Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn or Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain. Even in the latter, however, there is an awareness of aesthetic appeal evident in Ai’s meticulous attention to surface detail, stylistic definition, and the nuances of display. Furthermore, despite their innocuous subject matter, the captivating luster of the later sculptural series masks an incisive critique of Porcelain Clay

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consumerism and the global commercialization of Chinese art that is just as insightful as his earlier historiographic interrogations and interjections. Some writers have noted a comparable intent in Sunflower Seeds, yet this installation proved far less successful in communicating these aims. As discussed in our first chapter, Sunflower Seeds suffered from a surfeit of ambition and attention—it was too overwhelming in scale, too closely tied to Ai’s burgeoning celebrity, and too compromised by his carefully veiled reliance on factory labor to sustain an effective critique. A discrepancy between themes of individual resistance to authoritarianism through communal sharing, the degrading conditions of the work’s production, a visual impression of bland conformity, and the silence of those who created the seeds cannot be easily reconciled. Ai’s earlier sculptural series, on the other hand, are less explicitly tied to the details of his life and offer a much clearer expression of the tensions between superficial appeal and a lack of substance that typify global capitalism, echoing Liu Jianhua’s use of waste in Export-Cargo Transit and low-end commodities in Yiwu Survey. In these works, the superficial and the material are used not only as a source of visual and tactile appeal, but to compel an interrogation of consumerist desire and even to question the foundations of our contemporary world order. Ai first signaled his fascination with superficiality in The Wave, a technically sophisticated play on his previously established cultural readymade strategy in which surface appeal is complicated by the introduction of a recognizable subject. Several writers on Ai’s work have explained the title as an explicit allusion to Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760–1849) renowned woodblock print Under the wave off Kanagawa (c. 1830–32).13 Ai, however, has refuted this reading of the work: People always compare [The Wave] to this famous Japanese [print], but I’ve only seen [it reproduced] in posters in museums [and] never paid much attention . . . It’s not my salute to that. Actually, what happened is that, in 2004, before the tsunami [in the Indian Ocean], I had a dream [in which] the ocean suddenly stood up.14

Much like Liu Jianhua’s Regular-Fragile, then, The Wave arose from a realization (or rather a premonition) of human fragility and endurance in the face of catastrophic tragedy (fig. 47). While Liu sought to recreate the overwhelming scale and violence of such events, however, Ai chose to isolate and immobilize the savage beauty of unconstrained natural forces, forever deferring the awful moment of their devastating impact. In The Wave, the crest of the tsunami which caused such damage to coastal communities across India and Southeast Asia, ending an estimated 227,898 lives, is reduced to an ornamental flourish. Where Liu compels viewers to witness the lingering consequences of a momentary catastrophe, Ai provokes us to imagine the languid resignation of those final seconds before the end. The allure of this piece seems almost perverse in contrast to the horror of its model, here reduced to unnatural stasis. Yet the analogy between a glazed porcelain surface 180

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figure 47 Ai Weiwei, The Wave, 2005, celadon-glazed porcelain, 25 × 40 × 40 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

and the liquid sheen of water also imbues the image with a poignant naturalism, using the luster of its medium to merge form and subject in a unified aesthetic. Curator Maxwell K. Hearn has identified another source for The Wave in the haunting ink seascapes of Ma Yuan (c. 1160/65–1225), a court painter of the Southern Song Dynasty, noting a shared rectilinear composition and mutual fascination with the power of nature.15 This is a source that Ai has unequivocally confirmed, even remarking that he provided reproductions of these paintings to the artisans who were commissioned to create the work as “a reference for them to study.”16 Hearn goes on to draw another parallel with Southern Song-dynasty ceramics, many of which are also ornamented with a rhythmic impression of rolling waves, incised in shallow relief and smothered, like The Wave, with a celadon glaze that pools in the incisions and thereby echoes the liquid element represented.17 Although ceramicists of that era likely did not have access to ink seascapes like those by Ma Yuan, this aesthetic resonance is a sign, perhaps, of an unconsciously shared preoccupation with fluidity and calamity in this era of momentous sociocultural change and frequent conflict. Porcelain Clay

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figure 48 Ai Weiwei, The Wave (prototype), 2004, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, 32.5 × 23 × 12 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Beyond these erudite analogies with the history of ink and ceramic art, the critical association of this work with an emblematic example of the general (and generalized) category of “Asian art” imbues it with an appropriative referentiality that suggests another reading, even if this was not intended by the artist. On one hand, the imagined transformation of Hokusai’s motif could be considered an homage to his legacy. On the other, the reduction of the overwhelming power of nature that Hokusai intended to convey to a distinctly unthreatening ornamentality implies a less respectful intent and recalls the posters and other gift-shop souvenirs with which Ai and many others now associate the print. This impression is reinforced by a prototype of 2004, in which the wave motif is more rudimentary and painted in cobalt blue with a cartoon-like bed of marine plants (fig. 48). For critic and curator Philip Tinari, such irreverence signaled the advent of “a new vein in Ai’s practice . . . [of] objects that served as vignettes, even jokes,” coinciding with a time in his career when “renown was beginning to accrue and critics were beginning to pigeonhole [his] practice.”18 Rather than a celebration of surface appeal, then, The Wave can be read as a critique of the superficial, reducing one of the most globally recognized works of Asian art to a vacuous ornament. The same reading could be applied to Bowl of Pearls (2006), a pair of porcelain vessels measuring precisely one meter in diameter (3.2 feet) and filled almost to the brim with the eponymous gemstones (fig. 49). These seem to lack any subject other than 182

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figure 49 Ai Weiwei, Bowl of Pearls, 2006, monochrome-glazed porcelain, freshwater pearls, 43 × 100 × 100 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

that suggested by their physical form, monochrome glazes (yellow outside, celadon inside), and the pearls they hold. There are imperfections in the latter, however, that introduce a critical dimension: these are freshwater pearls, rarely perfectly spherical and generally less lustrous than their saltwater counterparts, which makes them less desirable, while Ai’s deliberate selection of discolored and damaged stones reduces their value even further. Their spectacular volume may imply an extravagant abundance, but they are worth little in monetary terms. Curator Sue-an van der Zijpp has noted this disparity as an allusion to the rapid inflation of China’s economy and the “passion for material wealth” this inspired, despite the shaky foundations of many investments or enterprises.19 Like the miniaturization of Hokusai’s motif, Bowl of Pearls can therefore be read as a critique of the interest in Chinese contemporary art that emerged in these years among overseas collectors, many of whom set out to accumulate as much as they could with little regard for the artistic value of their purchases, just as long as these looked recognizably Chinese. In an interview with arts publisher Robert Bernell in 2000, Ai spoke of the compulsion he had witnessed among his fellow artists “[to] take on the requirements of the market, a ‘regional dress’ [rather than] real things.”20 Over a decade later, speaking with Angie Baecker for The New Statesman, he denigrated such work as “a fake smile,” devoid of value and suitable only for decoration.21 Bowl of Pearls may have been Porcelain Clay

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intended as a material expression of this disdain, in which the sublime is reduced to the ornamental and any remaining vestige of substance is concealed beneath an alluring surface. A comparable tension between authentic and artificial appears in the Watermelon, Oil Spill, and Dress series on which Ai embarked in 2006, each of which appears seductive but once again ultimately offers an unfulfilling or dysfunctional reflection of a society in which appearances take precedence. Like the reproductions commissioned for Blue-and-White and Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain, these works were manufactured in Jingdezhen, and they draw on one of this city’s oldest traditions: that of the skeuomorph, defined by its mimicry of other materials, from vegetables and rocks to leather and woven cloth. Unlike his earlier replicas, Ai’s skeuomorphic watermelons, dresses, and pools of oil, like their historical precedents, are not intended to deceive but rather to showcase the skill of their makers and to entertain with the playful trickery of trompe l’oeil, much like the anamorphic perspective so central to Ghost Gu. Garth Clark has dismissed these additions to the artist’s expansive portfolio as “Ai lite: charming and fun but with no great meaning attached,” little more than an “unpretentious pleasure.”22 Yet their superficiality, though beguiling, veils a sincere critique of a society in which Ai has noted a tendency for “environment, education, social standards [and] morals [to be] sacrificed just to get rich quick.”23 Watermelons, despite their bulbous girth, are refreshing but nutritionally unfulfilling—a lack that is emphasized in Ai’s distended but hollow replicas (fig. 50). Crude oil, refined for fuel and plastics, is not only one of the most desired commodities in the contemporary global economy, igniting bitter disputes and even wars, but a leading cause of the rampant pollution engulfing large parts of the world. In Oil Spill, both the seductive value and the undesirable permanence of this contested resource are enhanced (fig. 51). Finally, the prêt-à-porter dresses replicated in Dress, in contrast to the haute couture prototypes emulated by Caroline Cheng discussed in the previous chapter, are inexpensive garments mass-produced in Chinese factories and then shipped to low-end department stores across the world (fig. 52). Like Bowl of Pearls, they seem attractive but are inherently flawed by careless design and unsuitable materials. Furthermore, when created in porcelain, they become unwearable, unwieldy, and inconveniently fragile, frequently shattering or losing their ornament when transported for display. The items chosen for replication, then, further extend the critique of global commodification raised by The Wave and Bowl of Pearls by obliquely highlighting some of the more insidious effects of consumer-driven economics, from environmental degradation and spiritual emptiness to the ongoing exploitation of sweatshop labor. Liu Jianhua has also used the superficial allure of porcelain to critique consumerist discontent in Obsessive Memories (1998–2000), the first substantial body of work for which he adapted his professional training to contemporary artistic expression (fig. 53). The sculptural pieces in this series are unified by a recurrent central motif: a headless and armless feminine figure clad only in a qipao and high-heeled shoes, reclining 184

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figure 50 Ai Weiwei, Watermelon, 2006, porcelain with overglaze polychrome enamel decoration, 45 × 38 cm (each). Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

luxuriously within an armchair, sofa, or bathtub, frequently atop a mound of porcelain blossoms. Since their initial display in 1999, these hypersexualized works have been regarded by most curators and critics as a comment on China’s transition from a statedirected to a market economy and the rampant materialism that many artists and intellectuals, including Liu, predicted would ensue. As such, Obsessive Memories seems to recall the “Gaudy Art” aesthetic of the early 1990s, a consciously flamboyant style typified by the blending of folk genres with consumerist branding found in the work of artists like Xu Yihui, who created several pieces in porcelain in the early to Porcelain Clay

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figure 51 Ai Weiwei, Oil Spill, 2006, monochrome-glazed porcelain, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio. figure 52 Ai Weiwei, Dress with Flowers, 2007, porcelain with overglaze polychrome enamel decoration and applied ornament, 90 × 65 × 7 cm. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

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figure 53 Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 1997–99, porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, 60 × 42 × 41 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

mid-1990s.24 Both Liu and Xu were first enticed by the lustrous surface, vibrant colors, and “preciousness” of this material, yet, in their work, superficial appeal gains deeper meaning through juxtaposition with inner vacuity and a barely concealed air of frustration, generating a critique of consumerism as a comparably attractive but vacuous phenomenon. Although trained as an assembly-line ceramicist and employed in a collective factory for much of his youth, Liu did not incorporate porcelain into his artistic practice until the later 1990s. Xu’s first work in porcelain in 1994 therefore preceded Liu’s belated return to the medium by several years, perhaps even partially inspiring his decision. Xu chose to experiment with porcelain because of the similarity he saw between its luxurious material qualities and the comparably glossy packaging used to advertise the latest consumer products. After working primarily in oils since the start of his artistic career, he received his introduction to ceramics from Beijing-based critic Li Xianting who, like Liu, had a parental connection to the porcelain industry and who offered to accompany Xu on a trip to the Cizhou kilns in his home province of Hebei, where Ai Weiwei had traveled in 1977. The ceramicists in Hebei advised that Jingdezhen would be a more apt place of production, so Xu traveled to the Porcelain Capital in September 1994 to work on a series of sculptures that adhere closely to the Gaudy Art Porcelain Clay

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aesthetic.25 The defining traits of this style are most evident in Little Red Book (1994), in which the titular Maoist emblem is rendered garish and superficial, implying a debasement of the politics it represents within an increasingly commercialized society. Liu was also enticed to return to porcelain by the medium’s visual and tactile appeal, rather than and perhaps even despite his training. He had created several pieces in fiberglass under the series title Obsessive Memories in 1998 (fig. 54), yet he couldn’t achieve the “fast colour, vibrant tones and . . . smooth, lustrous surface” that he had envisioned.26 These traits, now so suited to his aims, were precisely the qualities he had once cited to denigrate porcelain: For me, porcelain is a very beautiful yet also very fragile material, with a lustre that makes it ideally suited to the representation of superficial prosperity, susceptible . . . to evaporate into nothingness . . . [and] Jingdezhen ceramics are exceptionally exquisite, complex and resplendently colourful.27

For both Liu and Xu, then, despite their divergent depths of experience with porcelain, the appeal of the medium lay above all in its surface attraction and the parallel this evoked with the gaudy products of a consumer-driven economy. This emphasis on surface also establishes the clearest connection between their work and the contemporary style of Gaudy Art, a short-lived tendency in Chinese art of the 1990s defined by Li Xianting as a critique of commercialization. Locating the inspiration for this trend in the earlier fashion for Cynical Realism and Political Pop, Li identified Gaudy Art with works that featured “symbols of consumerism, such as money, TVs, images of overnight millionaires, or . . . beautiful women,” fused with auspicious emblems drawn from folk culture and depicted in “gaudy or garish colours and materials.”28 The aim of this contrast, he explained, was to satirize the superficiality of consumer culture and exaggerate the visual appeal of folk-cultural forms, “the multi-coloured fantasy of hitting it big and getting rich,” thereby drawing a parallel between these spheres. With the acceptance of consumerism in China, “the longexiled God of Prosperity was invited back [and] the East Wind blew in old skeletons and spirits from the past.”29 The garish palette and bold design of New Year pictures (nianhua 年画) are the most noted source for many practitioners of Gaudy Art, but other popular media such as papercuts, lacquer, and porcelain have also been used. Among Xu’s limited range of porcelain sculptures, the markers of Gaudy Art are most evident in Little Red Book, created during his first trip to Jingdezhen. In this work, a porcelain replica of the titular book, implied to be Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Mao zhuxi yulu 毛主席语录), the “Little Red Book” (Hong bao shu 红宝书), appears on a bed of brightly colored pinch-flowers (niehua 捏花). The latter have been used to adorn folk-kiln (minyao 民窑) wares in Jingdezhen since at least the Qing dynasty, but their application here is motivated more by their gaudy appearance than any desire to sustain a historical parallel.30 A Maoist emblem is reduced to something 188

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garish and superficial, opened to reveal only the pristine whiteness of blank pages instead of the Great Leader’s words. Yet this is not “a meaningless empty shell,” as one writer has argued, but rather, like the motif appropriated for The Wave, the book retains an iconic significance indicated by the title and the reverence with which it is displayed, albeit parodied by its flamboyant decoration.31 While Ai later sought to miniaturize the reputation of a famous artist and work of art, here it is the integrity of Maoist politics that is undermined by a trivializing commodification. The critical thrust of Liu’s sculptures seems much more threatening in contrast to these works by Xu and Ai, juxtaposing superficial allure with an unsettling violence enacted on the dismembered bodies of porcelain women. Ideological or art-historical points of reference have been studiously avoided, transforming his sculptures into a parody of consumerism and superficiality alone. While Xu contrasted the gaudiness of glazed porcelain with the substance of authoritarian conformity, the women and furnishings in Liu’s series are eminently vacuous. The artist has explained that he chose these subjects for their evocation of materialist pleasures: The symbolic image of [Obsessive Memories] is a combination of [the qipao] and sofa. The [qipao] will arouse the imagination and a desire for possession [while] the sofa reminds us of modernity, power, money, sex, comfort.32

Many commentators on Liu’s work have played up these associations—Zhu Qi, for example, has celebrated “[a] release of the senses and sensual pleasure” in the artist’s imaging of “conspicuous consumption . . . passionate social life; private existences preoccupied with interiors; exquisite . . . décor; fashion [and] recreation.”33 Pi Li has compared the sensation aroused by the works to that felt when “flipping through fashionable magazines,” entranced by “a visual orgy [in which] the existence and experience of . . . self are deliberately ignored.”34 For both critics, as for Liu, content and meaning reside entirely in the surface of these icons of desire, consumption, and gratification, unashamedly superficial and devoid of hidden meaning. Their only concession to depth is the realization, when one of the sculptures is held and turned in the bearer’s hands, that its beguiling surface conceals a hollow interior which Zhu and Pi associate with the insubstantial satisfactions of consumerist pleasure, devoid of human or even human-like qualities, and hostile to the touch. As Pi’s comments indicate, however, something more sinister arises in the denial of selfhood that these sculptures imply, and in Liu’s dismembering and decapitation of the represented women. Like the models featured in the glossy pages of a magazine, they are reduced to their sex and clothing, intended only to arouse a desire to seduce, or to imitate their seduction. Denied the expressive capabilities of face and hands, their identity is entirely externalized, as mute and featureless as the furniture on which they’re posed. The artist has explained that this denial is deliberate and intended to reflect the effects of China’s transition to a market economy: Porcelain Clay

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figure 54 Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 1997–99, porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, 42 × 37 × 33 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

The Chinese economy has developed [yet] I doubt if the inner world of individuals has proceeded [at] such a pace . . . Superficial beauty is not able to conceal the loneliness and frailty of our heart[s] . . . in an unstable, insecure and highly sensitive materialistic world.35

The implication here, as in Ai’s sculptural series, is that the fleeting pleasures of consumerism are unfulfilling, even harmful, eroding our sense of self until we become little more than an attractive but psychologically desiccated shell. This implied message is plainly revealed by the inclusion of a photograph, reproduced in an exhibition text for one of the first displays of this series, which shows Liu strolling through a supermarket in Kunming between shelves of merchandise. Visitors to the exhibition may have noticed a parallel between the arrangement of these goods and the installation of Liu’s porcelain women on a commercial shelving unit, shown as “commodities . . . to browse, select and enjoy.” (fig. 55)36 As in Ai’s sculptural series, the deceptive vacuity of an attractive façade here artfully conceals an implied critique of 190

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figure 55 Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 1997–99, installation of porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

consumerist pleasure, exposing the deliberate construction of such displays as a mask for a more insidious evacuation of substance. The photograph of Liu in a supermarket just noted—a publicity shot for “Delight and Illusion” (March 28–April 10, 2001) at ShanghART Gallery—may have been partially inspired by another exhibition two years earlier, in the comparable setting of Shanghai Square. “Art for Sale” (Chaoshi Yishuzhan 超市艺术展, sometimes translated as “Supermarket”), co-curated by artists Xu Zhen (徐震, b. 1977), Yang Zhenzhong (杨振中, b. 1968), and Alexander Brandt (Fei Pingguo 飞苹果, b. 1971), opened in a rented space on the fourth floor of this commercial center on April 10, 1999. The works selected were shown in two complementary sections: a “supermarket space,” visible to passersby through a glass façade and arranged in imitation of a retail display with “products” stacked on shelves and priced for purchase; and an “installation space” in the rear, for which the same artists were invited to create video and installation works conceptually related to the pieces in the front. The latter ranged from the bizarre to Porcelain Clay

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the grotesque, including phallic bars of soap designed by Hu Jieming (胡介鸣, b. 1957), jewelry-encrusted pig trotters by Liu Wei (刘韡, b. 1972), and jars that allegedly contained human brain matter blended into paste by Zhu Yu (朱昱, b. 1970), yet each drew inspiration from the city’s transformed architectural and psychological character in the wake of accelerated market reforms. Setting a precedent for the works by Ai and Liu discussed in this chapter, the thirty-three artists involved sought to emulate the public face of consumer capitalism, advertising their work in an accompanying exhibition text designed to mimic a promotional catalog, while simultaneously exposing the greed, lust, and desire for profit concealed beneath this glossy façade.37 The organizers of “Art for Sale” were forced by the local security bureau to shutter their display after only three days, two weeks before the anticipated date of closure, following accusations that those involved were distributing pornography and selling illegal merchandise. The effects of the exhibition have proven far more enduring, inspiring many artists in Shanghai and across China to question the allure of the market and the aspirational narratives of reform by probing hidden aspects of China’s transformation. Xu, Yang, and Brandt went on to curate a series of exhibitions on similar themes, including, in 2004, the unconventional “Dial 62761232—Courier Exhibition” (September 10–20, 2004), a selection of works displayed within a suitcase that interested viewers could arrange for delivery to their door by a courier trained as a traveling docent.38 Invited to participate, Liu created Donation (2004), a series of intentionally saccharine moneyboxes in the shape of a London telephone booth (fig. 56), an anthropomorphic letterbox, and a baby with an oversized head. Donation has received little critical attention but marks a crucial moment of transition in Liu’s career, following his relocation from Kunming to Shanghai in July that year to take up a new appointment at Shanghai University Fine Arts College. In conversation with Yan Yuting in 2009, Liu provided some context for his participation in this project: When I moved to Shanghai . . . some artists there had planned an exhibition called “Dial 62761232—Courier Exhibition” to consider the limitations of gallery-based exhibitions and the potential of a relational curatorial mode. I found out about a girl sponsored by the Red Cross who needed help, and so we asked all those who saw the exhibition to donate one yuan for her . . . It was also a turning-point for me personally, inspiring a new train of thought for my future works.39

Considering these remarks, Donation could be positioned in Liu’s oeuvre as a work that unites his exploration of commodity fetishism in Obsessive Memories and RegularFragile with the activist aims of Yiwu Survey and Export Cargo-Transit. In the latter, Liu set aside any attempt to emulate the superficial appeal of the commercial, forcing viewers instead to confront the naked social and environmental impact of excessive consumption. The gaudy sentimentality of the moneyboxes in Donation, however, like the beguiling allure of the qipao-clad women in Obsessive Memories—and the grotesque 192

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figure 56 Liu Jianhua, Donation, 2004, porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, variable dimensions. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

yet enticing products made available for purchase in “Art for Sale”—retained a link with the visual imaginary of consumerist desire. Ultimately, Liu’s attempts to fundraise proved less successful than he had anticipated when the moneyboxes were returned as empty as they had been when sent, providing yet another confirmation, perhaps, of the self-interest, amorality, and absence of humanity that arise in the wake of consumer capitalism. OBJECTS OF DESIRE

While Donation and Regular-Fragile focus on economic and affective dimensions of consumerist excess, Obsessive Memories highlights another aspect of this phenomenon which embodies the allure of surface and sensation even more effectively, but which has been frequently overlooked in critical assessments. This is, of course, the sexual politics of Yellow Womanhood arising from the simultaneously erotic and Porcelain Clay

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figure 57 Liu Jianhua, Merriment, 1999–2000, porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, 58 × 58 × 18 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

exotic connotations of these porcelain fetishes. Even when writers on Liu’s work have noted his objectification of women, this is usually framed as an appealing rather than unsettling quality and seldom subjected to sustained analysis. We’ve already noted Zhu Qi’s association of Obsessive Memories, for example, with a “release of the senses and sensual pleasure,” as well as Pi Li’s comparison of the women portrayed with the models featured in fashionable magazines.40 Several years earlier, in the exhibition text for the first display of Obsessive Memories, Hong Kong-based critic and curator Johnson Tsong-zung Chang wrote that Liu “[invites] viewers to caress . . . with their eyes, to relish [their] sensuousness,” that he “[views] the female body as an object of desire [and takes] no interest in its features.”41 In the essay by Pi Li cited earlier, he offers comparable praise for “the eroticism of milk-white thighs and pert breasts,” describing Liu’s sculptures as “playthings” which the viewer “cannot help but . . . fondle.”42 Descriptions like these also cannot help but foreground the erotic in gendered terms. Neither Zhu, Pi, nor Chang interrogate this sexuality—considering only their personal desires, they reduce the dismembering of nameless women to an aesthetic strategy, with no mention of the broader historical and social contexts for such representation. 194

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This sublimation of scopophilia within a critique of consumerist desire has already been discussed with reference to Obsessive Memories, yet the reinterpretation of the erotic as exotic in Liu’s ensuing Merriment series draws on more complex historical contexts and associations that require some further explanation. The central element again is the qipao, a form of dress that originated in China’s transition from imperial to Republican rule in the early twentieth century. This dress developed in contrast and competition with the standard type of women’s clothing worn in China for centuries, a loose-fitting jacket (袄 ao) over a skirt (裙 qun) or trousers (裤 ku), and was likely either adapted from or inspired by Manchu robes.43 As a witness to a pivotal moment in Chinese history, it touches the heart of modern national identity, recalling an alternately maligned and venerated past of imperial splendor while also heralding the dawn of New China. Liu’s choice of this garment could therefore be interpreted as a critique of such iconic images and their use to reinforce stereotyped narratives of nationhood, in China and elsewhere. Extending the exposure of vacuity beneath an alluring surface that Liu had achieved with Obsessive Memories, Merriment digs even deeper to reveal the emptiness and fragility of such ideals, recalling Ai’s iconic undermining of nationalist myth in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn. Yet the rise of the qipao also reflects fluctuations in the expression and repression of femininity in these same decades—a parallel lineage of special relevance for Liu’s sculptural series. Its initial popularity greatly benefited from the growth of a women’s rights movement, as women eagerly took up this single-piece garment without the cumbersome folds of aoqun/aoku, the sleeves of which were often cut so wide that a mother could slip her baby inside when breastfeeding.44 The earliest qipao resembled men’s changpao (长袍), or “long robes,” allowing the reform-conscious to cultivate an androgynous appearance in line with their aspiration for a collapsing of gender distinctions and their desire to be equal participants in the transformation of China.45 Those who chose to wear qipao primarily belonged to the well-educated, financially secure, and politically progressive middle-class resident in the port-cities of Shanghai, Tianjin, Hankou, and Guangzhou, while women in the country tended to prefer aoqun/ aoku.46 The qipao was therefore conceived as an emblem of empowerment, affluent cosmopolitanism and forward-thinking politics, striking a contrast with the conservatism of customary, male-designed garments. The appeal of this early qipao was also limited, however, by its androgyny and isolation to a relatively small group of privileged women—qualities that alienated those of a lower socioeconomic level and those who did not wish to shed outward signs of gender. In the 1920s and 1930s, an overtly feminine garment gained popularity in response to these complaints. Skirts grew shorter, fabric was cut to cling to the wearer’s chest and hips, narrowing the waist, while the splits down each side were widened to draw attention to the legs. This second, now definitive form of the qipao featured prominently in calendar posters of the time which vividly portray the urbane elegance then associated with Shanghai as the “Paris of the East,” a city of socialites and debutantes Porcelain Clay

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unashamed of their femininity.47 It is this version of the qipao that Liu chose to recreate in Obsessive Memories and Merriment, perhaps conjuring a fantasy for some viewers of the excess and cosmopolitanism of these decades. This may especially have been the case when both series were shown together in “Porcelain-Like Skin” (May 18–June 6, 2001) at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, a sequel of sorts for “Delight and Illusion” in Shanghai. The exhibition closed several weeks before the fourth anniversary of Hong Kong’s transfer to Chinese sovereignty, when competing visions of the city circulated widely. For some of Hong Kong’s wealthier residents, including collectors and connoisseurs of contemporary art, 1930s’ Shanghai figured prominently in such visions, both as the model for a Chineseness compatible with conspicuous consumption, and as a “capitalist city that had been taken over by the Communist regime,” prefiguring Hong Kong’s uncertain future.48 The feminized qipao of the 1930s also found favor with the authoritarian political powers of the time. Like fascist governments elsewhere, officials in the Republic of China propagandized the restoration of a lost national essence, one aspect of which was a reversal of the progress toward gender equality achieved in the opening decades of the century. Under Republican rule, “women were supposed to be women” and a further, even more exaggerated feminization of qipao was promoted.49 In a 1928 issue of the Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang Zazhi 东方杂志), for example, one writer argued that qipao should be “cut to the shape of the body, showing the curvaceous beauty of the female and in this way displaying [her] sex, what it is . . . that makes her a woman.”50 Although initially intended to signal equality, progressive politics, and urbane elegance, from the 1920s on qipao became a means to exaggerate and objectify sexuality, reinforcing rather than contesting established norms. Far from nostalgia for an idealized cosmopolitan past, Liu’s reduction of his qipaoclad women to sexual objects suggests that it was this “curvaceous beauty” that he sought to emphasize above all. Nevertheless, in the critical reception of the series to date, most writers have associated his qipao more with the earlier role of the dress as an expression of national identity. Zhu Qi, for example, writing in the text published to accompany “Porcelain-Like Skin” and perhaps seeking to appeal to the nostalgia for 1930s’ Shanghai then popular in Hong Kong, noted a parallel between the rising consumerism of the 1990s and the “peace and prosperity . . . conspicuous consumption . . . passionate social life . . . exquisite interior décor; fashion [and] matters of the heart” that defined popular memories of the 1930s.51 In the catalog for an earlier exhibition of Liu’s work in Shanghai, Johnson Chang offered comparable praise for the artist’s “gentle time warp . . . bringing back romantic fantasies about . . . the old dynamics of seduction and conquest.”52 For Zhu and Chang, the significance of the qipao is above all nostalgic, with little relation to women’s rights despite the overt gendering of the sculpted figures. Chang’s “dynamics of seduction and conquest” does imply some acknowledgment of the role that sexuality plays in these works, yet his association of this dynamic with “romantic fantasies” of the past bears closer relation to a more critical interpretation of 196

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figure 58 Liu Jianhua, Merriment, 1999–2000, installation of porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

the qipao as an emblem of Chinese national identity on the global stage. This reading has been most clearly expressed by Pi Li, who identifies Merriment as a satirical image of the unequal balance of power between contemporary European and North American artworld elites and artists in the “Third World,” including China, too often reduced to representatives of an exotic cultural essence (fig. 58). Pi asserts that Liu sought to expose such stereotypes by preparing “a scrumptious dish . . . with Chinese culture as its recipe.” It is for this reason, he argues, that Liu chose the qipao as the archetypal Chinese dress, porcelain as the quintessential Chinese medium, and women’s bodies on plates as an analogy for the “serving-up” of Chinese culture.53 This view of Liu’s series has since become the canonical reading, within and outside of China, reducing sexual objectification to an aesthetic strategy and qipao to a straightforward emblem of national identity. As previously noted, qipao developed not only alongside the nationalist schools of thought discussed in our second chapter, but in conjunction with a shift in public perceptions of women’s sexuality. Considering both this and the extensive display of Liu’s work outside China, Obsessive Memories and Merriment speak far more powerfully to Porcelain Clay

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the visuality of Asiatic femininity in general than to any specific narrative of Chinese nationhood. While qipao and the Republic may be synonymous in China, where the alternately nostalgic or postcolonial associations of Liu’s series are perhaps selfevident, the same cannot be said for viewers elsewhere in the world—and, after their initial display in Shanghai and Hong Kong, both series have largely been shown outside China. In Europe, North America, and Australia, qipao are a much less nuanced marker of Chineseness in general, imprinted with an objectified sexuality that closely conforms to and derives much of its symbolic power from the hyperfemininity of the dress in the 1930s. This shift in our reading of Liu’s work arises from its context of display but can be closely related as well to a sustained interest in sexuality animating his practice in the 1990s and the final years of the 1980s. The artist himself has noted this conceptual interest, observing, while [both Obsessive Memories and Merriment] carry elements of social critique, [they are] more concerned with . . . clothing and women’s bodies [and] an unfolding of personal desires . . . [The qipao is] very erotic; those of us born in the 1960s were very inhibited and unable to openly express our feelings . . . so I decided to bring out my desires.54

Conversely, when asked whether Merriment could be read as an analogy for global relations in the art world, Liu has noted that he did not consider this when he conceived the series, and that he only came to realize its validity after reading reviews.55 Both the reception and conception of these works therefore indicate that gender, not culture is here the primary subject of stereotype. The figures are not visibly Chinese, but they are explicitly women, albeit deprived of selfhood by their dismemberment, decapitation, and transformation into playthings for an implied male gaze. Liu’s admission of adolescent desires is essential to this analysis, implying that his sculptures can be read as a displacement of repressed lust. In mainland China, the late 1960s and 1970s were fractured by the violence of the Cultural Revolution, during which qipao came to be regarded as excessively luxurious and gendered attire. Those found wearing or even in possession of such a garment could risk public assault and disrobing, their homes ransacked so that other offending items could be confiscated or destroyed. Women and men alike were instead required to wear a grey or navy-blue jacket over a pair of trousers, known as a zhifu (制服) or “uniform.”56 For many of those who grew up within this oppressive environment, qipao became emblematic of a sexuality once considered taboo but free to be indulged in the more open political climate of the 1990s, even if marred by memories of violence. This tension between an innocent eroticism and a more sinister sadism is evident in Liu’s portrayal of women without heads or arms, reduced to the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of breasts, genitals, buttocks, and legs. Recalling Mulvey’s filmic analogy, a parallel can be drawn with cinematic close-ups on women’s bodies, used to heighten their erotic appeal by fragmenting and so deny198

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ing their subjectivity. Liu, however, has explained his removal of head and arms as a solely aesthetic decision, arguing that these would distract the viewer from the content of the work. He notes that fragmentation is a conventional sculptural technique, used to great effect, for example, by his artistic role model, Rodin.57 Yet the dismemberment of women in Obsessive Memories and Merriment is irrefutably disquieting, whether unintentional or by design. It is revealing, in this connection, to note that Liu has associated his adolescent desires with “communist films, [in which] only the evil women [are] pretty.”58 Even if intended as a largely aesthetic conceit, Liu’s dismembered femmes fatales unavoidably emphasize objectification as a tool to isolate or control women’s sexuality, drawing affective power from memories of gendered violence during the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, recalling Liu’s early involvement with the legacies of the Southwest Art Group in Yunnan, his women could also be read as fetish-like emblems of a primal sexuality which he may have wanted to contrast with the superficial appetites of conspicuous consumption. This reading not only draws together consecutive phases in Liu’s development as an artist but also allows us to reconcile the various frameworks for understanding Obsessive Memories and Merriment that have been considered so far in this chapter: as a critique of market reforms, a throwback to the incipient nationalism of the 1930s, a satirical comment on the stereotyping of artists in the global art market, and an expression of the artist’s repressed adolescent desires. Founding members of the Southwest Art Group, as discussed in our first chapter, sought to fuse their creative practices with the “current of life” expressed most powerfully, to their eyes, in the beliefs, cultural systems, and daily habits of those who lived close to the land, following the cyclic rhythm of the seasons and investing faith in atavistic natural forces of fecundity and decay. Ethnic minorities are central to representative works like Mao Xuhui’s Guishan Series (1985) and Zhang Xiaogang’s Eternal Life (1988), embodying “a conflict between the idealized ‘primitive life’ and modern civilisation [that is] basic to the psychology of [those who] oppose modern society for its suppression of human nature.”59 Anthropologist Dru C. Gladney has observed that this “definition and representation of the ‘minority’ as exotic, colourful, and ‘primitive’ ” is a necessary foil for Han identity, an “oriental orientalism” that parallels externally imposed stereotypes of China as the Other to a European Self. In official narratives of China’s rise as a nation-state, he explains, “minorities [are] a marked category, characterised by sensuality, colourfulness, and exotic custom,” thereby “emphasising Han solidarity, civility, and modernity.”60 Gladney goes on to draw attention to the specific role that minority women have been compelled to play in this narrative, at the intersection of various forms of differentiation along genetic and gendered lines. He cites several examples of this in the visual culture of the 1980s and 1990s, the most notable of which for our purposes are the works of the so-called “Yunnan School” (Yunnan Huapai 云南画派) paintings created by artists such as Ting Shao Kuang (Ding Shaoguang 丁绍光, b. 1939), Jiang Tiefeng (蒋铁峰, b. 1938), and Liu Bingjiang (刘秉江, b. 1937). Like the Southwest Art Porcelain Clay

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Group, these artists sought “to revolutionise . . . painting [by introducing] minority subjects, sexuality, and heavy oil colours, in . . . Western-influenced styles.”61 In their expression of these themes, however, they cultivated a far more fetishistic aesthetic of “erotic subservience” in which minority women appear “[in] submissive poses . . . voluptuous [and] scantily clothed.”62 As such, they offer a striking precedent for the comparably sexually available postures in which Liu chose to model his porcelain women, who, while not identified with any specific ethnicity, are also not explicitly identified as Han and are certainly colorful, sensual, and exotic. Significantly, Gladney has observed that depictions of minority women “unsullied by Chinese political machinations and the degradations of modern society” could be used to conceal “a cultural critique, or rejection, of modern Han China” and became “an accepted venue for criticizing the depersonalizing, totalizing state.” This, in turn, enhanced the popularity of such works in the United States, where urban collectors and connoisseurs were drawn to their bucolic eroticism and apparent opposition to the regime.63 The parallels with Merriment and Obsessive Memories continue to accrue, implying that these works, too, may represent a fusion of atavistic eroticism and resistance to market forces with exotic fantasy. The exaggeration of sexuality became a recurring motif in Liu’s output of the 1990s, first taking explicit form in his painted fiberglass sculptural series Secrecy and Disharmony (1993–97). These mark a pivotal turning-point in his career, from abstraction to figuration. Liu has explained that the inspiration for this transition arose from a visit to Kunming’s Qiongzhu Buddhist Temple in 1988, where he saw a set of painted clay sculptures (caisu 彩塑) of the five hundred luohan that inspired him to explore naturalistic modeling and experiment with a brighter palette.64 Thinking back to our discussion of the Rent Collection Courtyard, it is interesting to recall that the makers of the latter also drew inspiration from Buddhist statuary. It was the ubiquity of such images and the hold they exercised over the minds of the people that prompted Ma Li to propose a socialist realist equivalent, in the hope that this would realign the popular imagination with revolutionary aims rather than feudal superstition. While designing the installation, the sculptors who were employed to give form to Ma’s idea toured several temples to study the techniques used to convey emotion and compose complex narratives perfected by their folk counterparts, including a set of luohan at Baoguang Temple in Sichuan very similar to those which Liu encountered in Kunming.65 Liu’s sculptural images, however, are markedly distinct from those created for Buddhist temples or for Rent Collection Courtyard. In Secrecy, Sun Yat-sen suits, military uniforms, and breasted jackets (duijinshan 对襟衫) are juxtaposed with women’s legs and arms, wrapped around or emerging from folds of sculpted fiberglass (figs. 59–60). These have been read as a comment on political corruption—the items of clothing represented are linked to political, military, or social authority, while the women’s limbs, as well as the title, imply a selfish lust concealed beneath a respectable façade.66 Yet they also convey a tension between stereotypically gendered traits: masculine 200

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figure 59 Liu Jianhua, Secrecy, 1993–95, fiberglass, 172 × 60 × 35 cm. Collection of the He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen; courtesy of the artist.

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figure 60 Liu Jianhua, Secrecy, 1993–95, fiberglass, 182 × 58 × 43 cm. Collection of the He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen; courtesy of the artist.

control is here juxtaposed with a voluptuous feminine sexuality that transgresses externally imposed limits. As such, they can be read as an early manifestation of Liu’s memories of the Cultural Revolution, when he and other boys were compelled to hide their sexual desires. In Disharmony (fig. 61), this objectified sexuality is made more explicit by the separation of such gendered elements and the suggestion of a narrative of exposure and possession, presaging the later expression of these same themes in Obsessive Memories and Merriment. The sculptural tableaux created for this series are explicitly sexual: in one, an older man’s hand lingers on the naked thigh of a younger woman, while in another a buttoned jacket inspects two women reduced to legs, genitals, and a partial 202

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figure 61 Liu Jianhua, Disharmony, 1993–97, fiberglass, 140 × 60 × 39 cm (each figure). Collection and courtesy of the artist.

torso. Early fiberglass works in the Obsessive Memories series continue the same themes, pairing Sun Yat-sen suits, military uniforms, and buttoned jackets with qipao. The veiling of flesh in Secrecy is combined here with the baring of genitals in Disharmony to create a flirtatious but hypersexualized fetish, using the associations of a form-fitting dress and high heels with sexual availability to arouse what Chang described as the “dynamics of seduction and conquest.” Liu has explained in published interviews that, for him, the forms of men’s clothing depicted in Secrecy and Disharmony are not only “political icons” but are “something I wear myself . . . [while the] qipao is very trendy yet traditional and feminine.”67 His juxtaposition of these two sartorial styles is therefore intended to provoke a sense of contradiction, and to recall the parallel disparity between external appearance and inner desires enforced by the effacing of gendered distinctions in the Cultural Revolution, when the ubiquitous zhifu projected an austerity that Liu associates with the repression of masculine sexuality. We could also note a link here with the juxtaposition of Han Chinese and ethnic minority identities discussed earlier, citing another of Gladney’s case studies for this tension. In his discussion of the Yunnan School painters, Gladney draws a parallel between their images of minority women and the dancers enlisted to perform in the CCTV New Year’s Gala, broadcast annually since 1983: Porcelain Clay

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After a brief introduction to the evening’s program, four well-known television hosts . . . initiated the first choreographed program . . . [as] Tibetans, then Mongols, Zhuang, Uzbek, Korean, Wa, Hui, and other minority dancers [presented] gifts and cups of tea and wine to the studio audience . . . uniformly (as in uniforms) dressed in conservative suits with ties, Mao jackets, or other formal, dark “Western” attire.68

Once again, we could note a precedent here for the pairing in Disharmony and Secrecy of Sun Yat-sen suits, military uniforms, and breasted jackets with sexually available women. The works in Disharmony resonate more profoundly, however, with the violence and volatility of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially the forcible removal of women’s clothes, the invasion of their privacy, the scrutiny of their lives, and, perhaps, Liu’s adolescent desire to direct a comparable disrobing, to view the bodies of women around him who were forced to hide their sexuality. In 1998, searching for a material with which he could convey the eroticism of skin and fabric, Liu shifted his attention from fiberglass to porcelain. Working within the constraints of this medium, he reduced the scale of his sculptural motifs and incorporated sofas, armchairs, and bathtubs to reflect an interest in the commodification of sexuality inspired in part by the similarity of these works to mass-produced ornaments.69 In 2000, Liu started work on Merriment, replacing items of furniture with dishes bearing stereotypically Chinese motifs. The appearance of a disembodied hand in some Obsessive Memories pieces recalls Secrecy and Disharmony, yet Liu removed any reference to masculine clothing in these series to focus solely on qipao. The tropes of patriarchal authority and ownership that Sun Yat-sen suits, military uniforms, and buttoned jackets embody were not, however, completely effaced, but rather transferred to the viewer, now placed in the unsettling position of a desiring voyeur. A line of development can be traced, then, from Secrecy and Disharmony to Obsessive Memories and Merriment, drawn together by a shared emphasis on sexuality and frustrated desire, and reinforced by but ultimately independent of a scathing critique of political corruption, superficial materialism, and the global stereotyping of Chineseness as a desirable cultural product. CULTURAL FOSSILS

There are several points of comparison between Merriment, Obsessive Memories, and Ah Xian’s China China busts that indicate a shared merging of the exotic and erotic. First, at a generic level, the works within each of these series are examples of “plinth sculpture” (jiashang diaosu 架上雕塑), defined by their small size, their visual appeal from multiple angles, and their similarity with the souvenirs usually produced in the factories where they were created from 1998 to 2004. Each series also focuses on the body, fragmented and objectified to suit the artist’s creative vision but consistently reduced in size and reproduced en masse to emphasize the fragile preciousness of the material. Above all, the most important parallel resides in their adaptation of conventional 204

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motifs, applied in imitation of those which generally adorn mass-produced vases, dishes, and other utilitarian ceramics. For the unnamed men and women replicated in porcelain in China China, Merriment, and Obsessive Memories, these seem to offer a sole point of difference, veiling individuality beneath a commodified Chineseness. Setting aside the redemption and reclamation of cultural markers in the China China series, most writers on Ah Xian’s work have aligned his busts with a deconstructive critique of an irredeemably ossified essence, much like that seen in Obsessive Memories and Merriment. These writers privilege the ornamental and external as the primary subject matter of the busts over the private or interior, noting that painted, applied, or carved motifs conceal the subjects’ facial features. Roni Feinstein, Stephan von der Schulenburg, and Hans-Jürgen Schwalm, for example, identify these ornamental mantles with “the weight of history and culture” and the “beauty of a time longforgotten” which “devour[s] the individuality of the person [beneath],” obliterating and smothering the self under “rampant arabesques.”70 Even Bullock, despite her generally more nuanced perspective, describes the adornment of the busts as “generic” and “overwritten.”71 For these and other critics who have written in the same vein, the busts are images of erasure and disempowerment that mirror the deconstructive intent of Liu’s objectified porcelain women. Yet this reading not only overlooks the redemptive power of Ah Xian’s autoethnography but also neglects to consider his published statements, in which he voices a desire to reclaim “cultural resources . . . that are beautiful and almost unassailable,” and to which his heritage grants some measure of access.72 Nevertheless, the association of China China with constriction and concealment cannot be wholly dismissed. Like the underlying message of objectification in Merriment and Obsessive Memories, the air of constraint coloring impressions of Ah Xian’s busts reflects the lingering effect of ideas explored in earlier work. In his Heavy Wounds series of oil paintings (1991), for example, created not long after his arrival in Australia, and partly in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, anonymous figures are wrapped in white bandages, some with their heads entirely shrouded by sterile folds of material (fig. 62). Painted in a clinical, socialist realist-inspired style, these works satirize the Red Cross posters that circulated in China in the 1960s and 1970s to illustrate methods for dressing wounds. They are suffused with an abject mood of melancholy and isolation, the blank eyes of their subjects denying any connection with the viewer or with the other figures depicted, their anonymity emphasized by an arbitrary sequence of numbers across the bottom register of each painting. Some critics have interpreted the bandages in these works as “subliminal metaphors for lobotomy or imposed amnesia,” recalling the stifling malaise provoked by life under totalitarian rule that Liu also identified in his memories of qipao.73 Ah Xian continued to explore these themes in Site Perspectives and Pervasive Spirit (1991–92), a pair of installations that also marked his earliest experiments with bodycasting. For the first of these two bodies of work, he extended the bandage motif in Porcelain Clay

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figure 62 Ah Xian, Heavy Wounds no. 15, 1991, oil on canvas, 110 × 90 cm. Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; courtesy of the artist.

Heavy Wounds by piling layers of white gauze and cast-plaster replicas of hands and feet on towers of poured plaster, hoping again to invoke the horror of Tiananmen Square, “something terrible . . . like a real sight, like what happened in China.”74 For Pervasive Spirit (fig. 63), these appendages were variously nailed to the gallery wall, enclosed in military ammunition boxes, or piled as in Site Perspectives on columns of 206

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figure 63 Ah Xian, Pervasive Spirit no. 2, 1992, plaster, lead, steel nails, wax, ink, cotton bandages, ammunition box, 72 × 56 × 59 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

poured plaster, “from the crevices of which red or blue paint seems to seep like the blood of the dead and wounded.”75 In both installations, as in Heavy Wounds, constriction and concealment are primary themes used to express a psychological release through which the artist perhaps hoped to come to terms with the traumatic events he had witnessed prior to his departure from Beijing. As Ah Xian’s first works following his relocation to Sydney, and the first in which he experimented with the implications of the body-casting process that became such a signature aspect of his artistic style, Heavy Wounds, Site Perspectives, and Pervasive Spirit set the tone for the reception of China China. These series also share many points of practical and conceptual overlap: his idea for creating busts of friends and family using cast-plaster molds, for example, grew from the experience of taking casts of his hands and feet, while the numbers in Heavy Wounds perhaps inspired his decision to identify his busts in a similar manner. The influence of Site Perspectives and Pervasive Spirit is apparent as well in the initial concept for the China China busts, which Ah Xian had intended to distort by flattening the subjects’ heads and compressing their facial features within narrow Perspex boxes.76 Yet Ah Xian’s decision to add another layer of meaning to his casts by using them as a mold for more resolved sculptural forms in porcelain marks a crucial watershed between these moments in his career. His choice of plaster, as we have seen, was Porcelain Clay

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figure 64 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 34, 1999, porcelain with underglaze copper-red decoration and applied ornament, 42 × 40 × 22 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

motivated primarily by its affordability and the ease with which it could be cast into a range of forms, yet he eventually came to dislike its clinical appearance, turning to porcelain as a more visually appealing as well as conceptually evocative material. The tactility of porcelain brought life and warmth to his work, the softness of an unctuous glaze contrasting starkly with the brittle, unyielding solidity of plaster, luminous and resonant rather than dull and opaque. Porcelain allowed Ah Xian to create lifelike replicas of his friends and family, capturing their inner vitality to a previously unachievable extent and replacing earlier images of constriction with a focus on physicality and empathetic connection. The contrast between these two phases in Ah Xian’s career, and between the persistent view of his busts as lifeless versus an opposing recognition of their life208

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affirming qualities, emerges most clearly in their association with death, decay, and disease. Writing of China China: Bust 34 (1999; fig. 64) and other pieces with applied ornament, for example, Linda Jaivin has likened such motifs to ridges of scarred flesh, while Roni Feinstein has described the painted ornament on other busts as evocative of “a rash or disfiguring . . . birthmark.”77 Stuart Koop takes this analogy further, writing of “pustulating weals [and] bulbous cancerous growths bursting [through] the skin, or inflamed spreading sores . . . on a stony pallor.”78 The most frequent parallel invoked by these authors is the death mask—a parallel inspired by Ah Xian’s depiction of his subjects with closed eyes.79 The busts do sustain a comparison with death masks in their manufacture—like funerary portraits, they are molded directly from the upper body of the subject—and in their apparent stasis, suggestive of morbidity and bodily decay. Yet they can also be equated with the related aesthetic lineage of life masks, historically produced in fewer numbers for “vanity, curiosity or fashion,” or to achieve a lifelike portrait.80 This shift in emphasis draws attention to the shift in the emotive content of these works, from an emphasis on psychological trauma in Ah Xian’s paintings and installations to a desire for the redemption of stereotype. When considered as life masks—which, by definition, they are, as the subjects were alive at the time of casting—the agency of representation moves from the voyeuristic and even prejudiced viewer to the men and women replicated. No longer passive and concealed, these nameless individuals are physically present within the material of their reproduction, while the motifs adorning their skin become reclaimed markers of a cultural identity to be celebrated, not scars, welts, or marks of disease. This identification of the busts with life masks also reinforces yet another shift in emphasis that again supports their reevaluation: from painted motifs to the materiality of the clay from which they are formed, and which retains the imprint of each sitter’s features. Death and life masks alike, despite divergent bonds of agency uniting viewer and subject, are uniquely indexical forms of representation created through the physical contact of flesh and plaster, by which the former is literally impressed into the latter. Along with the largely abstract significance of the symbolic (the designs covering their surfaces) and the imitative resemblance of the iconic (their verisimilitude), the busts therefore carry an indexical connection with their subjects. There is a palpable sensuality about body-casts that imbues them with a living presence, and it is this that most distinguishes the taking of a life or death mask as diametrically opposed processes. While the fixed, compliant features of a death mask betray the lifelessness of its subject, signs of discomfort in life masks, such as clenched lips, creases around eyes and brow, and tension in shoulder and neck muscles, although incidental to the casting process, impress the viewer with an awareness of humanity. Foremost among these side effects of the casting process are, of course, closed eyes. Although habitually interpreted as a sign of death, denial of vision, or a refusal of empathetic connection, the eyes of Ah Xian’s busts could also be indicators of an Porcelain Clay

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unrepresented and un-representable inner world, enhancing rather than suppressing the presence of the subject. Speaking with Kathryn Wells in 2011, Ah Xian explained the significance of closed eyes as the marker of “a much wider spiritual space . . . in which to be living and enjoying life.”81 They are a sign of retreat into reflection and tranquility, a world only known by the anonymous subjects of his busts, never voyeuristically intruded on by those who judge the surface alone. Far from being constricted by the motifs that adorn them, then, Ah Xian’s replicated friends and family shrug off such stereotypes, secure in the knowledge that the core of their being remains intact. Unlike the sexually objectified husks depicted in Merriment and Obsessive Memories, the China China busts are neither deterministic nor irredeemably critical. Their subjects, while they remain anonymous, retain a self-confidence and private existence beneath their embellished surfaces. It is in this celebration of the capacity to escape stereotyping and reincorporate cultural emblems as markers of identity that these busts achieve their most potent resonance. These are not images of suffocation and death, but monuments to the mundane, the humble, and the inner world of the individual. Every crease and wrinkle, hollow and undulation of muscle and bone, contour of posture, mark and scar accumulated over the course of a life well lived—all are tenderly recorded and recreated. Ah Xian neither idealizes his sitters nor attempts to disguise “slouched shoulders, weak chins and prominent ears,” but cherishes such idiosyncrasies as the most expressive marks of identity, “small memorials for the flawed human condition.”82 These works are neither cold nor devoid of life; they are intimate portraits that commemorate the personalities of their subjects, marked by outward signs of Chinese identity but retaining an inner dignity, poise, and confidence. One further shift in the terms of analogy used to describe China China can be noted to reiterate our recognition of these works as indices for the possibility of self-transformation: from the stasis of death/life masks to the vitality of tattooed clay/flesh. The analogy of the tattoo has appeared in previous studies of Ah Xian’s work but has yet to receive sustained analysis, mentioned only in passing and swiftly forgotten despite the crucial shift in our view of these porcelain effigies that it can inspire.83 Tattoos are applied to (usually living) skin, so a suggestion that the busts resemble tattooed figures transforms their glazed surfaces from unyielding shell to soft epidermal canvas. Additionally, tattoos are commonly and now almost universally perceived, not as an involuntary imposition like a wound or scar, but as an adorning expression of identity. We must acknowledge the history in China, as in other nations, of punitive branding, yet we can counter this legacy with a parallel line of development through which tattoos have gained recognition as signs of worldliness, travel, and the transformations of identity accompanying such movement across borders.84 Like clothing, jewelry, or other wearable accessories, tattoos play a central role in our personal definitions and presentations of identity. Unlike other adornments, however, their permanence and closeness to the body imbue the identities thereby represented with an indelible authenticity. Tattoos are constantly worn, altering the 210

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appearance of those who bear them to conform to the personal values, tastes, and social groupings thereby expressed. In situations where clothing or other external means to express identity are reduced by enforced conformity, marking the skin with ink can become a symbolic act of self-assertion, a reclamation of individuality. Conversely, against the deluge of images and opportunities for expression in contemporary society, tattoos provide a reassuring stability, a line of defense against accusations of superficiality or dilettantism. The relative stability of tattoos evokes an implicit contrast with the constantly shifting dictates of fashion, exemplified by the history of the qipao. While this dress was subject to multiple changes in appearance and meaning over a few short decades, tattoos are resistant to such variation. This has led some writers to define the tattoo as a form of “anti-fashion,” a mode of adornment outside the currents of the garment industry and a deliberate attempt to resist its excesses.85 Above all else, it is the application of tattoos directly to the body that renders them so effective as an anti-fashion statement, imprinted indelibly in a subcutaneous guarantee of authenticity. Embedded within the flesh rather than covering it, they cannot be easily removed and yet, at the same time, they fail to conceal that which they adorn. They are both permanent and undeceiving (except for medical and cosmetic tattoos, intended to replace or enhance an aspect of the bearer’s body). This distinction between fashion and anti-fashion can be applied to the different understandings of bodily identity that we see in Liu’s and Ah Xian’s porcelain sculptures. In Obsessive Memories, Merriment, Secrecy, and Disharmony, (women’s) bodies are defined by the presence or absence of clothing. Finely sculpted folds of material cling to the contours of figures who would otherwise be invisible, while exposed thighs and genitals are eroticized by an implied disrobement and the absence of clothing to cover their nakedness. At the same time, the diversity of motifs with which Liu has chosen to ornament his qipao emphasizes the superficiality of these sexualized garments, reinforcing their invitation to caress and consume, to indulge in fleeting pleasures. China China, on the other hand, like an ancient lineage of ancestral portraits, seems immovable and eternal. While Ah Xian’s figures are adorned with a comparably eclectic range of motifs, the embedding of these within their porcelain skin imbues superficial appeal with a more tangible authenticity. Like tattoos, they appear intrinsic to the identity of those who bear them, expressions of an inner truth laid bare. The women in Liu’s series are divested of any power to resist and are exposed for the scopic pleasure of those who view them, yet Ah Xian’s anonymous subjects maintain absolute control of their representation and ownership of their identity, external and internal alike. These complementary facets of the self, social and personal, are fused by the application of the artist’s tattoo-like designs, not only signaling the heritage of the sitter but highlighting minute details of their anatomy. Blooming below the skin, lotus petals accentuate the firm yet yielding pressure of closed lips, a drifting cloud enhances the subtle hollow of a collarbone, a billowing wave reveals the curve of a closed eyelid. Porcelain Clay

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This blurring of underglaze motifs with subcutaneous designs isn’t the only parallel between the China China busts and the art of tattooing—both forms of figuration are also united by a mutual relation to travel and the allure of the exotic. The origin of the term “tattoo” can be traced to the Polynesian tatau, recorded for Anglophone readers by Captain James Cook (1728–79) in a journal entry of July 1769.86 Cook and his crew saw many tattoos in the South Pacific, acquiring a few of their own as intimate keepsakes of their time in the tropics. For readers in England, this practice exemplified all that was “fascinating, repellent, appealing, and absurd” about these distant lands and their inscrutable inhabitants.87 Following his return from a second expedition in 1774, Cook appealed to a popular appetite for the exotic by introducing English audiences to Mai, a “guest” from Raiatea whose tattooed flesh inspired a comparison with inlaid mahogany veneer.88 This description echoes another, attributed to a surgeon who accompanied Cook on his first voyage, likening the tattoos emblazoned across the forehead of a man encountered on their journey with the designs incised in a printing plate.89 In China as well tattoos were widely understood from the Han to the Qing dynasty as markers of exotic difference, gaining notoriety as “the epitome of uncivilized practice, since it patterns the human body like the skin of an animal.”90 This attribution of animalistic qualities was not always derogatory and could signal curiosity or even admiration. In his “Wu Capital Rhapsody” (Wudu fu 吴都赋), for example, using terms that seem to presage much later European descriptions of Mai, third-century scholar Zuo Si (左思, c. 250–305) praised the military skill of “warriors with tattooed foreheads [and of ] soldiers with stippled bodies . . . as gorgeously adorned as the curly dragon.”91 Some of the terms used to describe tattoos in historical texts also find parallel with accounts of Mai’s illustrated flesh, referring to those who “engrave the body” (lou shen 鏤身/lou ti 鏤体) and “embroider the face” (xiu mian 繡面).92 For European and Chinese viewers alike, tattoos have long been a marker of difference transforming the body into a canvas for the projection of the exotic. The exoticism of Ah Xian’s busts, however, is not imposed by an external observer, but is instead an autoethnographic display that reveals the artificial origins of cultural identity. The motifs with which his figures are adorned suggest a flexible identity, a chameleon-like donning and shedding of cultural “skins.” In these works, the body is a register for a continuous self-generation, “a plastic resource onto which a reflexive sense of the self is projected” to suit the various inclinations and identifications of its “owner.”93 The art of tattooing is also one of self-genesis, a rite of passage by which the tattooed can embody the changing of their identity. Tattoos are markers of transition, of “something that has arrived from somewhere else—from another culture, another country, another epoch.”94 Following Cook’s voyages, they became popular with European sailors as a sign of their “maritime fraternity” outside of conventional society, proof of exposure to otherness that marked the traveler as a native of “[the] watery limen . . . that separates and links the known and unknown, the familiar and the dangerous . . . neither here nor there.”95 212

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Tattoos later came to be seen in China, too, as markers of boundary-crossing. In his Miscellaneous morsels from Youyang (Youyang zazu 酉阳杂俎), Tang-dynasty scholar Duan Chengshi (段成式; c. 800–863) equated tattoos with dreams and lightning as phenomena linked by the entrance into the human world of light, sound, wonder, and danger from the heavens; the entrance into the waking, conscious world of events and things from the sleeping unconscious; and the entrance into the realm of civilised, proper folk . . . of the markings of the uncivilised or deviant.96

As an insertion between the layers of the skin, neither entirely inside nor outside the body, the tattoo is uniquely suited to this symbolism, literally created by the incorporation of a foreign body within the intimate boundaries of the self. Ah Xian’s insertion of notably Chinese motifs between the clay and glaze of his porcelain busts suggests a comparable incorporation, although in these works the “foreign body” is only partially internalized. Furthermore, this external element is only partially alien to the artist and his subjects, representing a fusion of their shared cultural heritage and the stereotypes with which this heritage is frequently associated outside China. Like a tattoo, these designs are neither entirely self nor other, internal nor external, familiar nor foreign— they occupy the ambiguous boundaries that separate these categories, marking their wearers/bearers as travelers between worlds, at home both nowhere and everywhere. SIN-YING HO’S SYNCRETIC UTOPIA

Sin-ying Ho has also devoted great attention to the ornamented surfaces of her work, and, in her choice of subject, she likewise seems to privilege visual and tactile appeal. Unlike Ai Weiwei and Liu Jianhua, however, she neither parodies this appeal nor uses it to provoke discomfort. As in Ah Xian’s busts, that which appears superficial in her sculptural ceramics is embedded within a network of dynamic contexts that imbues these works with a veiled authenticity, extending her earlier exploration of linguistic codes from the individual to the cultural. At the same time, Ho’s focus on identity remains evident in the layers of meaning that she adds to icons of popular culture, inserted within narratives of family and self that endow them with deeper significance. One of the first indications of this conceptual shift from linguistic and ornamental codes to a pop-inflected composite identity can be found in the paired sculptures Hero no. 1 and no. 2 (2007–9; figs. 65–67). Ornament is a primary indicator of Ho’s intent here: most of the surface of Hero no. 1 is densely painted with a range of patterns, notably including an accumulation of red decal “peace” symbols across the base and in groups of four on the side and reverse to form a geometric floral design. This is paired with a standard floral pattern in cobalt-blue on the front and an attenuated grid of juxtaposed motifs on the reverse: a foliate arabesque; a diaper pattern echoing the conjoined peace symbols; and a patchwork of conventional designs, including foliage, Porcelain Clay

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figure 65 Sin-ying Ho, Hero no. 1, 2007–9, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, 38.5 × 28.5 × 21 cm. Private Collection; courtesy of the artist.

geometric grids, and a swastika pattern, each enclosed in separate tiles divided by floral medallions. Such eclecticism highlights the formal qualities of these designs, foregrounding the process rather than the subject of representation in the same manner as Ho’s recombined vessel forms. This effect is clearest on Hero no. 1, the decoration of which is especially dense and complex, less tied to any single cultural context and defined instead by a balance of natural and geometric elements evoking a sphere of representation detached from coded meaning and rendered purely formal. In addition to the ornamental syncretism of Hero no. 1, the front of the piece bears decal portraits of US-born Kung Fu cinema icon Bruce Lee and African American professional boxer Muhammad Ali, set within a central medallion. While these could be read as representatives of West and East, their significance is more complex and serves in fact to dissolve the already fragile coherence of such reductive definitions. Ho draws attention to this by pairing their images with another motif that likewise defies singu214

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figure 66 Sin-ying Ho, Hero no. 1 (reverse), 2007–9, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, 38.5 × 28.5 × 21 cm. Private Collection; courtesy of the artist.

lar interpretation: a border of arabesques and pseudo-Arabic script appropriated from Yuan-dynasty wares created for export to West Asia.97 This Arabic-inspired imagery recalls Matrix, on which Ho combined Kufic calligraphy and Chinese motifs. Its appearance here, however, can be tied directly to Ali, whose Muslim faith drew public comment after his acceptance into the Nation of Islam in 1964 and provoked instances of cultural collision throughout his career, most famously including his refusal to serve in the Vietnam War. Bruce Lee, too, while apparently adding a Chinese or Asian-American element to the composition, is a much more complex figure. After his birth in San Francisco in 1940, Lee’s parents returned to their home in Hong Kong, where Lee spent his formative years until his own return to the United States in 1959. Building on experiences in the Hong Kong film industry, as well as his extensive martial arts training, Lee found roles in several television series and films before traveling again to Hong Kong to Porcelain Clay

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figure 67 Sin-ying Ho, Hero no. 2: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2007–9, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals. Private Collection; courtesy of the artist.

direct and star in the Kung Fu epics that established his celebrity.98 In addition to his popularity among viewers of Chinese heritage across the world, in the Euro-American cinematic pantheon Lee became “a James Dean figure of the seventies,” enjoying an affiliation with Kung Fu cinema parallel to John Wayne’s emblematic significance for the Western.99 Like Ali, he is therefore a quintessentially transcultural figure. As global representatives of a hyphenated cultural identity, Lee and Ali embody heroic ideals of community solidarity that resonate with Ho’s vision of a world united by mutual recognition and combination. This aspect of their public activities was central to her decision to include them on the Hero pieces, to emphasize that they and other public figures “weren’t just [boxing or acting] for their own interests, but to bring the community together.”100 Ali passionately advocated for and represented African American issues and interests throughout his career. Ever “flamboyant, immodest and defiantly confident,” he modeled an unapologetic pride of his race and actively participated in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, earning the respect and admiration of prominent community leaders.101 Although frequently overlooked 216

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today, his actions contributed greatly to the struggle for civil rights and inspired many fans, who saw him as “a champion of Blackness.”102 Bruce Lee led a similar championing of Asian American identity, fighting against derogatory media stereotypes like that of Fu-Manchu, first envisioned by English writer Sax Rohmer (Arthur S. Ward, 1883–1959) as “[an] enemy of the white race [and an] inhuman being” who epitomized “the cool, calculated cruelty of his race.”103 To combat such stereotyping, Lee sought to embody a new form of Chinese-American masculinity in competition with that modeled for White viewers by John Wayne, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and Marlon Brando, earning recognition as “a symbol of and for multiple ethnic, diasporic, civil rights, anti-racist and post-colonial cultural movements across the globe.”104 He became so emblematic of China that Ho recollects being asked while traveling around Europe in the 1980s whether she knew Lee personally.105 Where once porcelain served as a vehicle for global translations of Chinese culture, in a contemporary context Lee and other media icons now play this role. Yet, in contrast to the exotic vision of China as the land of china, the Asian American solidarity that Lee embodied is a self-determined and socially constructive ideal. It is this aspect of both his and Ali’s public personae that takes centerstage in Hero no. 1. Personal reasons for Ho’s choice of motifs can also be identified. Ali, Lee, and the peace emblem, in addition to their individual significance, collectively evoke memories of the 1960s and 1970s—the decades of Ho’s childhood and adolescence when Hong Kong, under British colonial rule, had been saturated with European and US cultural products but isolated from the Chinese mainland, mired in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Ho recounts that, while her family did not own a television, she and her sisters watched televised serials and films at a neighbor’s house. It was here that she first saw Lee’s films and Ali’s bouts in the ring, and her decision to appropriate their images derives in part from her recollection of these years—she even presented one of the Hero pieces as a gift to a neighbor’s son.106 Yet the 1960s and 1970s, in the United States and Europe as in China, retain a larger significance as decades of social transformation, “jangling discord and generational conflict,” when protest against domestic prejudice and international conflict gained widespread support.107 Ali and Lee are neither solely athletic and cinematic heroes, nor merely figureheads of Ho’s formative years; without effacing either role, they appear on her composite sculptures as heroic representatives of a desire for global harmony. This desire remains an unattainable ambition in Hero no. 1 and no. 2, envisioned through the imagined meeting of community leaders with whom Ho had identified at various points in her life. In other works, however, she has applied the same principles for a harmonious reconciliation of difference to currently unfolding events. We have already encountered one work in which Ho drew attention to a parallel between her combinatory aesthetic and the constant adjustment to changing circumstance required to navigate political tensions in Hong Kong. This is, of course, Tilt and Flow, in which the ancient theory of the Five Elements becomes an analogy for the ebb and flow of Porcelain Clay

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figure 68 Sin-ying Ho, 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central, 2014, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue and overglaze enamel decoration, terra sigillata, 50 × 29 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

ideological allegiances in the island city. Four years earlier, in 2014, Ho created another sculpture in which these political implications are more explicitly identified: 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central (2014; fig. 68). In this piece, as in Hero no. 1 and no. 2, the personal and political are closely intertwined, making clear the extent to which an emphasis on material and surface allure doesn’t necessarily preclude critical depth. As the title of the piece implies, Ho created this work in response to the Occupy Central protests that simultaneously united and divided Hong Kong in 2014. These protests were the culminating expression of a popular desire for change that had been gaining momentum for decades, at least since news of the Tiananmen Square 218

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massacre reached Hong Kong in June 1989, and even since the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. The date memorialized in the title of Ho’s work marks the formal recognition of a student-led “occupation” of Civic Square from September 26, 2014, by University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai, who had first proposed the idea of occupying the city’s financial and political heart in an article of January 2013. Although initially reluctant to depart from the more orderly process he had envisioned, Tai ultimately gave into pressure when the police brutality that these protesters endured sparked a wave of sympathy across the city.108 Yet, rather than a straightforward message of solidarity, 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central is in fact a statement on the disharmony that the protests provoked and the union of opposing forces that Ho envisioned as an escape from this political impasse. This statement is most visibly communicated, as in her other work, through variations in ornament and surface treatment. The sculpture is notable, for example, for its juxtaposition of two palettes (blue and yellow) and two types of glaze: a transparent glaze and terra sigillata, with which Ho aimed “to break the surface into pieces [and] give a feeling of imperfection, splitting, crumbling.”109 The primary motifs further accentuate this impression of decay and disunity—although conventionally used to share wishes of prosperity and good luck, the bat, mythical qilin (麒麟), and “double-happiness” emblem (shuangxi 双喜) are here fragmented or obscured, implying a betrayal of ideals. Blue and yellow ribbons scattered across the surface, on the other hand, stand in for the students and blue-collar workers identified by Ho as the main parties involved. Rather than an expression of ongoing ideological conflict between the CCP and those who fight for civic representation in Hong Kong, Ho thereby envisioned the Occupy Central movement as an irruption into the equilibrium of the everyday: [The students] put up barricades and protested for . . . three months, on the street, so the blue-collar [workers] couldn’t go to work. I was trying to be . . . neutral, that’s the position I’m taking [without] making any judgment at all about the blue or yellow. But, at that time, I was very sad [to see] my hometown breaking apart.

When invited to reflect on the political conditions that inspired the movement and to speculate on the possible outcome of the protests, Ho reiterated this strategically reserved, even apolitical perspective: I [tried] to make sure that the piece does not talk about left or right, yes or [no], blue or yellow . . . because, in my position, living in [New York], I don’t think I have a right to interrupt [with] my opinion, politically, into the situation . . . But, [having] been born in Hong Kong, and [having lived] in Hong Kong, I [felt] really hurt.110

Rather than a work of protest art, 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central is therefore closer in conception to a commemorative souvenir—an attempt to give concrete form Porcelain Clay

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to a memory at risk of dissolution, transforming a public moment of rupture into a private narrative of reflection. Yet neither is Ho unequivocally supportive of the current government, and she has on several occasions expressed her dissent and outrage at past atrocities as well as continuing inequalities. Her decision to leave Hong Kong for Toronto in 1992, for example, was partially motivated by the events of 1989: I remember we were performing . . . in the Arts Centre, [a production of Tom Stoppard’s 1966] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead [when] it really happened, they started to shoot the students . . . so we stopped the play right away [in] respect . . . We [didn’t] know much as outsiders, we were very naïve, but believed [in] equality, human rights, justice, and so . . . we went out and did a lot of street performance, and . . . photos ended up on the news . . . My sister [who] was in Canada [didn’t realise that] I wasn’t in danger . . . she suggested to me, “why don’t you immigrate to Canada?”111

In her recollection of the Tiananmen Massacre and Occupy Central protests, although critical of the denial of civic freedoms and human rights, Ho consistently identifies herself as an “outsider” removed from the mainstream of events either by distance or a lack of familiarity with the parties involved. The desire for harmony shown in 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central and Tilt and Flow, rather than an indication of acquiescence, should therefore be understood as an expression of her desire to negotiate multiple allegiances—the perpetual adaptability of the self-designated global citizen, forever seeking an ideal fusion of competing and complementary forces. Nevertheless, the dismay that Ho felt during the Occupy Central protests and her sentimental evocation of childhood memories in works like Hero demonstrate a commitment to local identity that could be compared with the demands for autonomy voiced by the protesters. Denied the security provided by the grand narratives of nation and culture over which the mainland holds authority, Hong Kong artists and writers have long sought to express a shared identity instead through the provincial and particular, “looking to the past for signifiers of the local, [especially] a recent past of memory and lived experience as opposed to . . . official written history.” David Clarke, among the first to draw attention to this trend, has observed that such ambitions “tend . . . to be fragile or tentative,” favoring the oblique and contingent, and consistently drawing attention to the materials and narratives of popular culture as “tools for a fragile alternate history.”112 Aspects of popular culture find comparable relevance throughout Ho’s oeuvre, often intersecting with or indicating a desire for allegiance with the aims of those who seek political autonomy. The unashamedly superficial and materialistic works by Ai Weiwei, Liu Jianhua, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho discussed in this chapter may appear to lack substance, yet it would be more accurate to regard this absence as a displacement from subject to surface, or from concept to material. Ai’s skeuomorphic replicas, Liu’s qipao-clad women, 220

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Ah Xian’s ornamental masks, and Ho’s fusions of cultural icons are not wholly without metaphoric or metonymic association, yet the critical thrust of these works is above all a direct result of their shared material. In another medium, the meaning of each piece would be far less compelling. It is precisely the combination of voluptuous sensuality and inhuman perfection, the implied disparity between supple skin and unyielding glaze, the illusion of an enduring stability, and the lingering threat of violent fragmentation—all qualities unique to porcelain—which here impart meaning.

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CONCLUSION A Porcelain Aesthetic?

I

published to accompany the equally extensive exhibition “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” (2013) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator Maxwell K. Hearn recalls the thought process underlying his coordination of this ambitious survey. This process began with an idea of the types of work that he thought would be suitable for inclusion, namely those “that adhered quite literally to the media (ink and paper), formats (scrolls and albums), and techniques (brushwork) that have long characterised . . . ink painting.” As he delved deeper into the world of contemporary ink art, however, Hearn discovered other forms of artistic practice “that resonate powerfully with ancient traditions while making use of more recently developed and globalised media (oil on canvas, photography, and video . . .) and forms of expression (including abstraction, installation, and performance).” Rather than a straightforward display of painting through the ages, he therefore ultimately came to conceive “Ink Art” as a platform for “a contemporary ‘ink aesthetic’ in which references to traditional pictorial and calligraphic N THE SUBSTANTIAL VOLUME

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figure 69 Interior view of Ah Xian’s studio, Beijing, 2014. Photograph by Alex Burchmore.

concepts remain a defining feature of an artist’s vision without limiting [their] formal solutions.”1 This definition encompasses an extraordinarily broad range of media, formats, and techniques beyond those of ink and paper, scrolls and albums, and the traditional emphasis on mastery of the brush, shifting focus from the material and technical components of a work to the concepts and intentions motivating its creation. New Export China arose from a comparably incremental elaboration, from a narrow and relatively convention-bound focus to a more expansive and broadly inclusive perspective on contemporary porcelain art. I embarked on this negotiation between scholarly precision and an increasing mass of artistic case studies as a graduate student at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in late 2013. Inspired by the juxtaposition of a display of eighteenth-century blanc-de-chine with one of Ah Xian’s China China busts at the Art Gallery of South Australia, I set out to explore the extent to which these forms of ceramic art and the parallel moments of global exchange they embodied could be identified with a shared ability to cross historical and cultural boundaries. In 2014, after receiving a Prime Minister’s Asia-Australia Endeavour Postgraduate Award to support a year of research in Beijing, I gained an opportunity to experience such a crossing of boundaries firsthand. Here, I accompanied Ah Xian on trips to antique markets across the city and spent time in his studio (figs. 69–70) in the Songzhuang art district, where I also met Guan Wei and first encountered the works in porcelain he had created earlier that year, partially in response to the success of Ah 224

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figure 70 Workbench in Ah Xian’s studio, Beijing, 2014. Photograph by Alex Burchmore.

Xian’s China China. After my return to Australia, in 2016 I relocated from Adelaide to Canberra to take up doctoral candidacy at the Australian National University. It was there that the thematic structure of this book started to take shape, as I looked back on the varied journeys, physical and imagined, that had brought me to this city, and ahead to the resolution of these diverse trajectories in a coherent narrative. As I write these reflections, however, the world is in the grip of a deadly pandemic with no clear end point in sight. Millions have died, tens of millions have suffered and continue to suffer with varying degrees of illness and disability, and every aspect of our lives, from the most intimate of everyday encounters to the all-encompassing networks of economic and political codependency that draw us together, has been irreversibly transformed. The ideals of travel and translation set out in this book were conceived at a time when it seemed that border-crossing and the mixing of diverse peoples and cultures would only increase in complexity and intensity. Sadly, the visions of utopian synthesis and the accumulation of multiple identities outlined in these pages are no longer as near or as pressing as they once seemed. Nevertheless, even as border controls become ever tighter, prejudice and nationalism are on the rise, and individual convenience is prioritized over communal well-being, I remain hopeful that we will one day soon realize our interconnectedness and our ability as a collective to overcome almost any challenge. The work by Sin-ying Ho chosen as the cover image for this book, Beyond Borders: Passage of Time (2020), stands as a testament to this ambition (fig. 71). In the artist’s words, Conclusion

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figure 71 Sin-ying Ho, Beyond Borders: Passage of Time, 2020, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, digital decals, terra sigillata, 67.5 × 50 × 37.5 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

we are no longer living in a singular society or country. We are connected . . . not only in a macroscopic world but also in a microscopic world, and the virtual world. I was inspired [to create this piece] by the images of the coronavirus, the 5G cloud, corporate logos, and stock market index charts . . . [together these express] the relationship between the neverchanging human nature and the continuing change of our physical world.2

Reflecting now on the eclectic range of photographic, performative, readymade, installation, and sculptural works included in this study, we could follow Hearn’s example and assert the existence of a “porcelain aesthetic” that extends the boundaries of the type of work here chosen for analysis beyond material and technique alone, with a few points of distinction. Although just as venerable and refined as ink, porcelain 226

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never quite attained the same cultural cachet enjoyed by calligraphy and landscape painting, tarnished by its association with manual labor and mercantile professionalism. Rather than the taste of the scholar gentry and the cultivated “classical” tradition with which contemporary Ink Art has been associated, we must look elsewhere in our search for the defining qualities of a porcelain aesthetic. Four such qualities have emerged in our discussion of works by Ai Weiwei, Liu Jianhua, Sin-ying Ho, and Ah Xian completed since the mid-1990s: the modular and mass production of porcelain in factories and workshops; its function as a vessel for historical experience and, simultaneously, a reminder of our mortal fragility; its conflation of the intimate and stereotypical; and the glossy surfaces and vivid motifs through which the makers of porcelain art have long sought to captivate the eye and the hand, activating the erotic and exotic connotations of this alluring and mystifying material. The term “New Export China” is not intended as an unassailable classification, but as an open-ended interpretive framework to renew the call, too seldom voiced, for an arthistorical model in which the assumption that works by Chinese artists must be solely derived from or reflective of a Chinese context can be displaced by a recognition of the many frames of reference in which all works of art exist. Without entirely disregarding grounded aspects of Chinese artistic practice, I hope this book can contribute to the formation of such a model, championing the indeterminate, ambiguous, and combinatory. Historical and cultural specificity cannot be ignored—artists always derive inspiration from the environments in which they live and work, intentionally or otherwise, and are driven to engage with the motifs and materials associated with those environments. Yet this does not limit them to a single form of expression or a single context. To test the limits of our porcelain aesthetic, we should seek some evidence of the qualities just listed in works that differ from what we might usually define as porcelain art. Following Hearn’s designation in Ink Art of video as one of the “more recently developed and globalized media” in which artists have communicated a contemporary ink aesthetic, we could turn first to Geng Xue (耿雪, b. 1983), an artist of a later generation than the protagonists of this study but who trained with their peers and collaborators Xu Bing and Lü Shengzhong at CAFA. She has also traveled and lived extensively outside the PRC—after graduating in 2007, for example, Geng traveled in 2013 to Germany to study video production at Karslruhe University of Arts and Design, and then returned to Beijing to complete postgraduate studies in 2014, under Xu Bing’s supervision. Although Geng has to date worked almost entirely in porcelain, earning international renown for her anthropomorphic sculptural installations, she identifies herself as a mixed-media artist rather than a ceramicist, and describes the motivations underlying her choice of medium in primarily aesthetic rather than material or technical terms: I like ceramic, especially porcelain, [as] it is . . . a delicate material [with a] long history, during [which] people from all over the world [have made] different kinds of ceramics, Conclusion

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[in] China, Japan, Korea, India, Egypt . . . My first inspiration [came] during my college [years], when I visited a museum in Beijing or Shanghai [and there saw] Song-dynasty Longquan porcelain . . . beautiful and green, like Chinese jade . . . shining and cold, warm and delicate . . . like the skin of a beautiful human . . . Porcelain helped me to find . . . my art language at the beginning, and still now I love to make porcelain, but I need to find a strong concept.3

Already, in this recollection of the qualities that drew her to porcelain, we can see a fascination with some of the same aspects of the medium that inspired Ai, Liu, Ho, and Ah Xian: its historical pedigree, transcultural relevance, material allure, and anthropomorphic resonance. Unlike these artists, however, Geng has consistently chosen to present her sculptural installations not as static objects but as animated dreamscapes in which the materiality of their components dissolves into a play of light, sound, and sensation. She has explained this transformation as a literal animation or enlivening of the medium: I’ve been attempting to dig out a new language from such traditional material . . . using animation film work to bring porcelain [to life]. “Alive” here not only means “moving” but also emphasising [that] the [created] form . . . has fresh life force. The jade-like light of porcelain, [reflected] light from moving, and [the] light of films . . . combine and form [a] specific “language of lights” [at the intersection of] porcelain, sculpture, and film.4

Geng has achieved this enlivening most effectively in Mr Sea (2014), a stop-motion animation in which jointed porcelain puppets enact scenes of violence, desire, and death, inspired by one of the many tales in Qing-dynasty author Pu Songling’s (蒲松齡, 1640–1715) Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi 聊齋誌異), compiled c. 1679 and first published in 1740. The tale that Geng has chosen to recreate in clay (fig. 72), translated by John Minford as “Snake Island,” relates the arrival of “a gentleman named Zhang of Dengzhou, who was fond of hunting and adventure” on the mysterious Island of Antiquities, where trees grow to an enormous girth and “jasmine flowers of every colour bloom throughout the four seasons of the year.” Here, he encounters “a woman of a beauty beyond compare, wearing a dazzling crimson gown” who entrances with her singing and invites him to share her bed; as they make love, however, a gigantic snake bursts from the trees and, holding Zhang tightly within the folds of its body, pierces the tip of his nose and begins to drink his blood. As his consciousness slips away, Zhang remembers a bag of fox-poison hanging from his belt— mixing a pinch of this with the blood dripping from his nose, he entices the serpent to drink. Almost instantaneously, it succumbs to the poison, “thrashing its tail with a thunderous sound [until it] lay dead on the ground, straight and still as a log.”5 This and other tales in Pu’s collection have been interpreted as critiques of the abuse of power in Qing China and as allegorical case studies in Confucian ethics, yet Geng 228

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figure 72 Geng Xue, Mr Sea, 2014, stop-motion animation of porcelain sculpture, thirteen minutes and fifteen seconds duration. White Rabbit Collection, Sydney; courtesy of the artist.

chose this story for its archetypal resonance: “ancient . . . literature, stories, novels, and poems are more powerful than my own writing . . . a key which can guide you or can unlock the door and show you into a room.”6 In Mr Sea, this archetypal significance is further intensified by the reduction of the narrative to a mesmerizing sequence of ceramic tableaux, their shimmering surfaces animated by the flickering play of light and the fluid motion of water, variously dyed to mimic the brackish tides of the ocean, the rice-wine that the protagonist shares with his enchanting yet mysterious companion, and the pulsing spurts of his blood. Gently swaying in seaborne breezes, Geng’s porcelain trees provide an ambient soundscape of rhythmic chimes, rising to a deafening cacophony as they are caught in the violent contortions of the dying serpent (fig. 73). The tender embrace and erotic self-exploration that Zhang shares with his companion are also accompanied by the sound of glaze on glaze as porcelain hands reach out to caress porcelain skin, while his struggles with the snake are instead punctuated by earrending shrieks and scrapes of tortured ceramic. In Mr Sea and Geng’s other stopmotion animations, the affective and aesthetic capacities of porcelain take precedence over solely material or technical criteria, testing the limits of an art defined by medium alone. Ah Xian, too, in his most recent work, has sought to breathe new life into his medium, further expanding the conceptual boundaries of a porcelain aesthetic. While Geng transforms what could be considered relatively conventional ceramic sculptural tableaux with light, sound, and motion, in his Serenity: Self-Portrait (2016) performances Ah Xian abandoned the comfort of a material support and transformed his own Conclusion

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figure 73 Geng Xue, Mr Sea, 2014, porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration, variable dimensions. White Rabbit Collection, Sydney; courtesy of the artist.

body into art—a literal instantiation of ornamental personhood. For the first iteration of this work, performed at the opening of a group exhibition in Sydney, the artist sat motionless within a hollow plinth, his bare head and shoulders exposed to view beneath a Perspex display case and coated with talcum powder to enhance the luminosity of his skin, and to absorb the perspiration and condensation that accrued during the three-hour duration of the performance. Eyes closed and features set in impassive neutrality, Ah Xian thereby became one of his signature busts. He traces the inspiration for this work to his desire to create a bust in his own likeness, for which, of course, he would be unable to produce a plaster mold without some assistance, yet he also describes Serenity as a tentative step in a new direction, “an expression of my vision [of] the outside world, my political views and the [confusions] of humanness.”7 The title, he explains, is intended as a nod to the discomfort often discernible in the frozen features of his seemingly placid subjects: It’s rather an ironic statement . . . while isolating myself [in] a narrow . . . uncomfortable space, in a difficult posture ([half-seated], halfway on knees) without any movement, eyes closed constantly yet maintaining not to fall asleep . . . a shutdown but alert state . . . The entire duration of the performance [requires] silence, physically staying steady for long hours . . . It needs both [bodily] and mental strength.8

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Yet he also recalls the experience as one of transcendent self-containment and absorption, as an effort to gain better openness (away from swarming and streams) but in-siding [sic] myself into the squashed plinth [to cultivate] a temporary meditative peaceful mind . . . I felt excitingly-tiring and willingly-uncomforting as well as blindly-responsive . . . It’s like [closing] windows but opening skylights.9

Serenity: Self-Portrait was, therefore, a clear repetition and elaboration of ideas first explored in his China China busts, exposing the tension between internal and external forms of identity, the self we present to those around us and that which we conceal within our thoughts and dreams. By mimicking the appearance of one of these busts and placing himself on display, Ah Xian also revealed the extent to which a conflation of the stereotypical and private, captivating material allure and fragile impermanence, and a blurring of the boundary between ornament and human so central to our porcelain aesthetic, can be expressed in terms that exceed the material itself. In addition to the context of Ah Xian’s own practice, Serenity: Self-Portrait can be positioned within a lineage of comparable performances by other artists of Chinese heritage. We could draw a parallel, for example, with the more harrowing feats of endurance and self-exposure performed by Zhang Huan (張洹, b. 1965), most notably including his notorious 12 Square Meters (1994), or the acts of simultaneous selfinscription and self-denial that he and Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰, b. 1969) have recorded in works like Zhang’s Family Tree (2000) and Qiu’s Tattoo series (1994). One work that bears a striking similarity, not only with Ah Xian’s Serenity: Self-Portrait but also with China China, is Huang Yan’s (黃岩, b. 1966) Chinese Landscape Tattoo (1999), a series of twelve photographs that show sections of a literati-style landscape painting applied to the artist’s torso and arms. Ah Xian remembers meeting Huang at the first (and only) display of his busts in the PRC, at the Beijing Normal University in April 2000, and he speculates that the younger artist may have drawn inspiration from China China for his exploration of similar ideas in Four Seasons (2005), another photographic series for which Huang painted his face, eyes closed, with seasonal designs.10 Yet rather than an imitation, Chinese Landscape Tattoo and Four Seasons might instead suggest a fascination with the same porcelain aesthetic that Ah Xian would later develop further in Serenity: Self-Portrait, implying a progression from sculpture, to photography, to performance. In addition to Huang Yan, Ah Xian has speculated that another visitor to his exhibition at Beijing Normal University may have been inspired by his China China busts, developing the porcelain aesthetic to which these and the other works previously cited have contributed in a new direction of special relevance for the subject of this study: Ni Haifeng (倪海峰, b. 1964). Like Ah Xian, Ni is an émigré who had returned to the capital to see new work and old friends after having relocated to Amsterdam in 1994, Conclusion

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figure 74 Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History, 1999–2001, C-type photograph, 165 × 217 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

and who had discovered an ardent interest in porcelain only after he left China. In 1999, while Ah Xian struggled to communicate his vision for China China to the artisans in Jingdezhen who had accepted his commission, in the Netherlands Ni Haifeng embarked on his own negotiation of the history of export that connected his adopted and ancestral homes across the boundaries of time and distance, developing a form of ornamental selfhood that closely parallels that portrayed in Ah Xian’s busts and Huang’s photographs.11 Self-Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History (1999– 2001), the photographic series that emerged from this negotiation, consists of seven images of the artist’s body, adorned with foliate patterns, a ship motif, and passages of English text, painted directly on his skin in blue (figs. 74–75). As the title suggests, these are drawn from export ware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the foliate patterns were a conventional design on such ware, while the ship motif mimics those often found on pieces produced to European specifications. A citation just below a passage of text in one photograph identifies the source of this and the other passages as China for the West (1978), a canonical study of export porcelain by English authors 232

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figure 75 Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History, 1999–2001, C-type photograph, 165 × 217 cm. Collection and courtesy of the artist.

David Howard and John Ayers. While Ni chose not to work in porcelain for this work, the series nevertheless draws directly from the stylistic conventions and the long history of the medium, literalizing its connection with the body and with China. Overlaying his skin with Chinese motifs and passages of scholarly exposition written for readers outside of China, Ni presents an autoethnographic expression of cultural identity that clearly draws inspiration or at least validation from the similar narrative of self-construction expressed in China China. Like Ah Xian, Ni has appropriated the representational tools of the “colonizer” and reclaimed them for his own purposes, exoticizing himself as an object of curiosity while inserting his voice and body into the history of such objects. It is the latter aspect of this dichotomy that takes precedence here; when asked whether his work is intended to embody “the pain of colonisation,” Ni explained: The inscriptions I used are not . . . tattoos, but paint that can be washed off and put on again and again. They show the body as a palimpsest. They’re not there to expose the pain

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caused by colonisation, but to reclaim the lost body in order to name it again, in order to redefine who you are.12

Like Ah Xian, then, Ni envisions the body as an ongoing project, “as something that can be . . . used, transformed, improved.”13 Rather than creating a porcelain replica on and through which to enact such transformations, he objectifies his own body, here fragmented by the composition of the photographs into seven discrete “canvases.” In each artist’s work, the body becomes a vehicle to express a flexibility of identity, to incorporate, adapt, and disempower essentializing impositions. The definition of Self-Portrait as a work of New Export China is essentially a matter of the artist’s (and the viewer’s) chosen framing—neither the material, format, nor technique that many would expect to find in a work of ceramic art are present. Yet the conceptual and aesthetic affiliation of Ni’s painted body with the painted surfaces of porcelain vessels as carriers of cultural identity and globally desired commodities is central to the work’s meaning, and to the artist’s intention. Like the open definition of Ink Art that Hearn applied in his curatorial selection for the exhibition of the same name, and that allowed him to include classical landscapes and calligraphy alongside works like Ai’s The Wave or Huang’s Chinese Landscape Tattoo, the comparably broad definition for a porcelain aesthetic proposed here can be applied to a range of works and artistic practices, not all of which contain or even represent porcelain. From Ni’s photographs of painted skin and Ah Xian’s performative reenactment of the process of making his busts, to Geng Xue’s enlivening of her ceramic sculptural tableaux, works of contemporary art that can be said to adhere to this aesthetic are defined above all by their immersion within the historical, cultural, and affective significance of porcelain, not merely by its material and technical characteristics.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. For further discussion of Jingdezhen’s history and contemporary transformation, see Maris Boyd Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 2. The following discussion of the concept of export elaborates on comments first made by the author in Alex Burchmore, “The Aesthetics of Export in Chinese Art Outside China,” Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art 9, nos. 1 & 2 (2022): 19–43. 3. Hou Hanru, “Théâtre du Monde: To Be Unthought,” in Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, edited by Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari, and Hou Hanru (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2017), 71. Italics added. 4. Hou Hanru, “Beyond the Cynical: China Avant-Garde in the 1990s,” Art Asia Pacific 3, no. 1 (1996): 44. 5. Melissa Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (Milan: Charta, 2006), 119–20. 6. Hou Hanru, “China Today: Negotiating with the Real, Longing for Paradise,” Flash Art 38, no. 241 (March–April 2005): 96–97. 7. Hou Hanru, “Urgent Is to Take a Distance: A Letter from Hou Hanru to Hans Ulrich Obrist,” Yishu 10, no. 5 (September/October 2011): 8–9. 8. Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity: An Overview of Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” in Inside/Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 21, 28.

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9. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Art since the Mid 1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, no. 2–3 (2012): 210–13, 218. 10. Chiu, Breakout, 159–65. 11. Melissa Chiu, “The Transcultural Dilemma: Asian Australian Artists in the Asia Debate,” Journal of Australian Studies 24, no. 65 (January 2000): 27. 12. Jérôme Sans, “A Field of Energy,” in Chen Zhen, edited by Lisa G. Corrin (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2001), 6. 13. Chen Zhen, Transexperiences (Kitakyushu, Japan: Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, 1998), 1, 82n2. 14. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Trans-, Prefix.” 15. Chen, Transexperiences, 1–5, 82n2. 16. Maxwell K. Hearn, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 17. For further discussion of the use of ink and porcelain by contemporary artists, see Alex Burchmore, “Material Chineseness: Ink and Porcelain in Contemporary Art Beyond National Borders,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 21, no. 1 (September 2021): 58–74. 18. The reciprocal relationship between global and local that this etymological slippage indicates is also apparent in the other term by which china is now known across Europe: “porcelain,” or porcelaine in French, porselein in Dutch, porzellan in German, porcellana in Italian, and porcelana in Spanish and Portuguese. This term too originated in the Devisement, first put to paper by Polo’s Occitan scribe Rustichello da Pisa (1272–1300) while both men were detained in a Genoan prison in 1298, and is a translation of the Venetian porcellane, a feminine diminutive of porcus (pig) used across medieval Europe to refer to cowry shells because of their perceived resemblance to the snout and arched back of a piglet. The word first appears in the Devisement as a reference to the use of such shells as currency but is then later used to describe some pieces of porcelain that Polo found to be just as glossy and milky-white in color. For further discussion of porcelain in a global context, see Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 70–71. 19. Rupert Winchester, “Kiln Me Softly: The 3rd World Ceramics Biennale,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 46 (Fall 2005): 26. 20. Emmanuel Cooper, Contemporary Ceramics (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 6–7. 21. Claire Lilley, “A Haptic Art,” in Vitamin C: Clay + Ceramic in Contemporary Art, edited by Louisa Elderton (London: Phaidon, 2017), 10, 15. 22. Nancy Selvage, “Porcelain: A Contemporary Cultural Touchstone,” in New “China”: Porcelain Art from Jingdezhen, 1910–2012, by Fang Lili and Nancy Selvage, edited by Willow Weilan Hai Chang and J. May Lee Barrett (New York: China Institute Gallery, 2012), 25; Fang, “Jingdezhen and the Artist: 1910–2012,” in New “China,” 13. The 798 Art District is a sprawling complex of decommissioned military and factory buildings in Beijing, repurposed in the mid-1990s into galleries and artist studios. It has now grown into a hub for contemporary artistic activity and a popular tourist destination, home to an ever-increasing number of arts venues, designer boutiques, bookshops, cafes, and performance spaces. 23. Amanda Game, Porcelain City: Jingdezhen (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2011), unpaginated. 24. For further discussion of these galleries, see Hilary Young, “The V&A’s New Ceramic Galleries: Encircling the Globe,” Apollo 170, no. 569 (October 2009): 62–68; and Reino Liefkes, “New Ceramics Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum,” Arts of Asia 41, no. 6 (November /December 2011): 81–88.

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25. Claire Blakey, “Ahead of the Curve: Behind the Scenes,” in Ahead of the Curve: New China from China, edited by Alexandra Nachescu and Kate Newnham (Bristol, UK: Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, 2014), 7–8. 26. Shannon Guo, “Ahead of the Curve: Artistic Context,” in Nachescu and Newnham, Ahead of the Curve, 14. 27. Ibid, 15. 28. Christina Yu, Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Ceramics from East Asia (Pasadena: University of Southern California Pacific Asia Museum, 2015), unpaginated. 29. Stacey Pierson, “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History,” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (March 2012): 12–13. 1. PORCELAIN PRODUCTION

1. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6. 2. For further discussion of these frictions with reference to one specific iteration of RegularFragile, see Alex Burchmore, “La maladie de porcelaine: Liu Jianhua’s Regular/Fragile (2007) at Oxburgh Hall and the History of Massed Porcelain Display in English Aristocratic Interiors,” Oxford Art Journal 42, no. 3 (December 2019): 253–81. 3. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 102. 4. Jin Simeng, «刘建华: 给艺术做减去» [Liu Jianhua: An Art of Subtraction], L’Officiel Art China (January 2013): 89. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 5. Zhang Yuyan, “China’s Opening Up: Idea, Process and Logic,” Social Sciences in China 40, no. 2 (2019): 135–37. 6. Yan Yuting and Liu Jianhua, «嬗变中的刘建华: 艺术转变的内在逻辑—阎玉婷对话刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua: Internal Logic for Art Transformation—Yan Yuting in Dialogue with Liu Jianhua], Dongfang Yishu, no. 3 (2009): 40. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 7. Interview with Liu Jianhua, December 3, 2021. Translated by Annette Liu. 8. Liu Jianhua and Zhu Qi, «如果迷茫的话, 我会不知所措—对刘建华的访谈» [If You’re Confused, Then I Have No Idea—an Interview with Liu Jianhua], ShanghART, March 23, 2001. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 9. Ibid. The city government founded JCI in June 1958, following a central government directive to accelerate the Great Leap Forward. It was closed from December 1968 until April 1973, during the height of the Cultural Revolution, but has since maintained continuous operation and has become an influential presence in the cultural and economic climate of the city. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 57, 67–68, 75. 10. Ibid, 47–52. 11. Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 33–36. 12. Christine I. Ho, “ ‘The People Eat for Free’ and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China,” Art Bulletin 98, no. 3 (September 2016): 352. 13. Gao, Total Modernity, 36–37. 14. Ho, “The People Eat for Free,” 352–54. 15. Gao, Total Modernity, 40–46. 16. Ho, “ ‘The People Eat for Free,’ ” 349, 353. 17. Gao, Total Modernity, 34–35, 44. 18. Chang Tan, “Art for/of the Masses: Revisiting the Communist Legacy in Chinese Art,” Third Text 26, no. 2 (March 2012): 184.

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19. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), 96–97. 20. Ho, “ ‘The People Eat for Free,’ ” 348, 363. 21. These figures were arranged in six scenes depicting consecutive moments in a narrative of oppression and extortion, each with multiple sub-narratives allegedly inspired by the testimony of those who had lived on Liu’s land, many of whom modeled for the sculptors and donated tools and furniture as props. In accounts of their process published at the time, the sculptors emphasized their dedication to “open-door production” (kaimen chuangzuo 开门创作), inviting passersby to watch their work and even suggest revisions. The installation was promoted as a case-study for “entering into life” and ensuring popular appeal, following the mass line creative method. Vivian Li, “Redefining Artistic Value in Communist China: Rent Collection Courtyard,” Oxford Art Journal 39, no. 3 (2016): 379, 382–84 22. The tableau was created by a work-unit overseen by cultural official Ma Li (马力, 1915–1995), then head of the Wenjiang District Propaganda Department. This unit included seven students and teachers from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute; four amateur artists employed as custodial staff at Liu Wencai’s estate, converted into a class-education museum in 1958; a photographer and scriptwriter; and a team of voluntary assistants enlisted from a nearby school. Li, “Redefining Artistic Value,” 382, 385–86. 23. Ho, “ ‘The People Eat for Free,’ ” 356. 24. Ma Li’s decision to source the clay from the neighborhood of Liu Wencai’s estate also reflected a desire to contradict stereotypes of state-sponsored public art as “urban, expensive, and . . . inaccessible to the masses” by rejecting “the corrupt authorities in the city and [honoring] artless peasants and workers in the countryside.” Li, “Redefining Artistic Value,” 392–93. 25. Interview with Liu Jianhua, December 3, 2021. Translated by Annette Liu. 26. Gao, Total Modernity, 34. 27. Ibid, 101–2. 28. Ibid, 33. 29. Ibid, 135–36. 30. Jin, «刘建华» [Liu Jianhua], 89. 31. Gao, Total Modernity, 170–75. 32. Ibid, 191–94. 33. Ibid; Gao Minglu, “From Elite to Small Man: The Many Faces of a Transitional Avant-Garde in Mainland China,” in Inside/Out, 154–55. 34. Interview with Liu Jianhua, December 3, 2021. Translated by Annette Liu. 35. Monica Dematté, “Projecting Dreams: Liu Jianhua’s Spiritual Things,” Yishu 9, no. 1 (February 2010): 21–23. 36. Li, “Redefining Artistic Value,” 396; Zhu Qi, “We Are All Too Sensitive When It Comes to Awards! Cai Guoqiang and the Copyright Infringement Problems Surrounding Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard,” in Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West, edited by Wu Hung and translated by Krista van Fleit (Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2001), 58. 37. Zhu, “We Are All Too Sensitive,” 59; Joan Kee, “The Property of Contemporary Chinese Art,” Law and Humanities 12, no. 2 (2018): 256–57. 38. Cai Guo-Qiang, cited in Li, “Redefining Artistic Value,” 396. 39. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 55, 72. Liu Jianhua, email communication, January 16, 2018. 40. The three ill-fated flights were Air China Flight 129, which crashed in Busan, South Korea, on April 15, 2002, killing 129 passengers and crew; China Northern Airlines Flight 6136, which crashed near Dalian, Liaoning Province, on May 7. 2002, killing all 112 onboard; and China Airlines Flight 611, which disintegrated above the Taiwan Strait, killing all 225 onboard. The

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41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

four American Airlines and United Airlines flights hijacked to commit the September 11 attacks in the previous year, as well as the notorious Hainan Island incident of April 1, 2001, may have provided Liu with further inspiration, conscious or otherwise. Yan and Liu, «嬗变中的刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua], 42. Translated by Alex Burchmore. Eugene Tan, “Transformation of the Everyday,” in Liu Jianhua: Regular-Fragile, edited by Dan Dang (New York: Arario, 2008), unpaginated; Yan and Liu, «嬗变中的刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua], 42. Translated by Alex Burchmore. Pi Li, “Presence of Matter and Absence of Personality,” in Regular-Fragile—Liu Jianhua, translated by Karen Smith (Shanghai: ShanghART, 2003), unpaginated. Liu Jianhua, «思维的连贯性: 关于我这些年的作品» [Collected Thoughts: About My Work over the Years], Suzhou gongyi meishu zhiye jishu xueyuan xuebao, no. 2 (2014): 77. Translated by Alex Burchmore. Chiu, Breakout, 37. Chen, Transexperiences, 1–3. Hou, “ ‘Transexperience’ in the Art of Chen Zhen,” in Chen Zhen, edited by Lisa G. Corrin (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2001), 15; Chiu, Breakout, 49. Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 4, 75–76. Brendan McGetrick, “ ‘Everything Is Necessary,’ in Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds,” edited by Juliet Bingham (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 68–70. Ibid. Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir, translated by Allan H. Barr (London: Bodley Head, 2021), 283–84. Liu Weiwei, cited in Ai Weiwei, edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth (Cologne: Taschen, 2020), 126. Zheng Bo, “From Gongren to Gongmin: A Comparative Analysis of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds and Nian,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, no. 2/3 (December 2012): 117–33. See, for example, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, “A Seedbed to Celebrate the Downtrodden Individual and Vastness of the Masses,” The Times, October 12, 2010. See, for example, John Jervis, “Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 72 (April 2011): 133. Jane Chin Davidson, “Affirmative Precarity: Ai Weiwei and Margarita Cabrera,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 1 (April 2013): 139. Valentine Low, “Tate Modern ‘Seeds’ Artwork Closed Off as Health Risk,” The Times, October 16, 2010. See, for example, Voon Pow Bartlett, “The Harmonisation of Ai Weiwei,” Yishu 10, no. 1 (February 2011): 84. See, for example, David Barrett, “Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds,” Art Monthly, no. 343 (February 2011): 24. Ai Weiwei, “David Cameron, as You Visit China Please Listen to Us,” The Guardian, November 8, 2010. Richard Brooks, “Tate to Pile High Seeds of Solidarity for Detained Artist,” Sunday Times, May 1, 2011. Geremie R. Barmé, “Exploit, Export, Expropriate: Artful Marketing from China, 1989–93,” Third Text 7, no. 25 (1993): 67, 72–73. Hou, “Beyond the Cynical,” 44. Hou, “Urgent Is to Take a Distance,” 7–9.

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65. Daniel Hjorth and Robin Holt, “It’s Entrepreneurship, Not Enterprise: Ai Weiwei as Entrepreneur,” Journal of Business Venturing Insights 5 (June 2016): 50–54. 66. Zheng, “From Gongren to Gongmin,” 119–20. 67. Hjorth and Holt, “It’s Entrepreneurship,” 52–53. 68. Barrett, “Ai Weiwei,” 25; Christie Davies, “The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei,” New Criterion 29, no. 5 (January 2011): 53; Bartlett, “The Harmonisation of Ai Weiwei,” 90; Sarah Maloney, “Ai Weiwei,” Border Crossings 30, no. 4 (December 2011): 99. 69. Zheng, “From Gongren to Gongmin,” 120–21, 121n1. 70. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 117, 130. 71. McGetrick, “Everything Is Necessary,” 70. 72. Ai Weiwei, Juliet Bingham, and Marko Daniel, “A Conversation,” in Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds, 89. 73. Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 5. 74. Joe Martin Hill, “A Tale of Two Biennales: Singapore and Shanghai,” Yishu 5, no. 4 (December 2006): 13. 75. Victoria Lu, “Unharmonious Variation: Liu Jianhua, Who Will Never Compromise,” in Dialectical Views on Social Spectacle: Liu Jianhua, edited by Dang Dan (Seoul: Arario, 2007), unpaginated; Mathieu Borysevicz, “Export-Cargo Transit,” Yishu 6, no. 4 (December 2007): 86. 76. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 60. 77. In 2012, the Shanghai Art Museum became the China Art Museum following a relocation from its original premises on West Nanjing Road to the former China Pavilion building constructed for Expo 2010. 78. Liu Jianhua, in David Ho Yeung Chan and Liu Jianhua, “About Export—Cargo Transit: An Interview with Liu Jianhua / September 4, 2007,” Yishu 6, no. 4 (December 2007): 92. 79. Ibid; Borysevicz, “Export-Cargo Transit,” 88. 80. Zhang, “China’s Opening Up,” 141. 81. For a detailed discussion of Deng’s southern tour and the circumstances immediately preceding and following these events, see Suisheng Zhao, “Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour: Elite Politics in Post-Tiananmen China,” Asian Survey 33, no. 8 (August 1993): 739–56. 82. Barbara Diduk and Zhao Yu, The Vase Project: Made in China—Landscape in Blue (Easton, PA: Lafayette College Williams Center Gallery, 2012), 7–9. 83. Ibid, 7–8. 84. Ibid, 9. 85. Hjorth and Holt, “It’s Entrepreneurship,” 53. 86. Ibid. 87. Ingrid M. Furniss, “101 Vases: Remembering an Old China, Collecting a New One,” in The Vase Project, 39–40. 88. Hjorth and Holt, “It’s Entrepreneurship,” 51–53. 89. Diduk and Zhao, The Vase Project, 8. 90. Furniss, “101 Vases,” 39–40. 91. Zheng, “From Gongren to Gongmin,” 130–31. 2. PORCELAIN PAST

1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 14, 37–38, 41, 60.

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2. Silvia Fok, “Micro-narratives in Contemporary Chinese Art: A Case Study of Cao Fei’s Pearl River Delta Anti-heroes,” Asian Studies Review 35, no. 4 (2011): 503–4. 3. Ibid, 503. 4. For further discussion of the aesthetics of destruction in Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn and Regular-Fragile, see Alex Burchmore, “Smashing Vases: Ceramics and the Aesthetics of Destruction in Works by Ai Weiwei and Liu Jianhua,” Espace Art Actuel, no. 122 (Spring-Summer 2019): 36–45. 5. Garth Clark, “Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE–2010 CE),” Art Asia Pacific, no. 70 (October 2010): 159. 6. See, for example, Charles Merewether, ed., Ai Weiwei—Works: Beijing 1993–2003 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003), 13–14. 7. See, for example, Dario Gamboni, “Portrait of the Artist as an Iconoclast,” in Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE–2010 CE), edited by Gregg Moore and Richard Torchia (Glenside, PA: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2010), 86. 8. Sarah Tiffin, “Refined Anarchy,” in The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, edited by Lynne Seear and Suhanya Raffel (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2006), 52. 9. See, for example, Philip Tinari, “Postures in Clay: The Vessels of Ai Weiwei,” in Moore and Torchia, Dropping the Urn, 33–34. 10. Ai Weiwei, cited in Merewether, Ai Weiwei—Works, 30–31. 11. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 25, 2022. 12. Ai Weiwei, cited in Brendan McGetrick, “Ai Weiwei: Cultural Evidence,” Flash Art International 43, no. 275 (November–December 2010): 57. 13. Dahua Zheng, “On Modern Chinese Nationalism and Its Conceptualisation,” translated by Wu Guo, Journal of Modern Chinese History 6, no. 2 (2012): 218. 14. Ibid, 219–25. 15. Glenn Adamson, “The Real Thing,” in Moore and Torchia, Dropping the Urn, 52. 16. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 25, 2022. 17. Gao, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” in Inside/Out, 31–36; Gao, “From Elite to Small Man,” in Inside/Out, 161. 18. Gao, Total Modernity, 7–8, 269–70, 305. 19. Gao, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Art,” 212; Gao, Total Modernity, 273–76. 20. Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Zeng Xiaojun, eds., Hei pi shu [Black Cover Book] (Hong Kong: Tai Tei Publishing Company, 1994). The volume opens with a twenty-five-page transcript of a conversation between the editors and New York-based artist Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950), followed by a selection of writings on Hsieh’s early work by Claire Fergusson and Jonathan Siskin, translations of texts by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol (1928–87), and Jeff Koons (b. 1955), and commentary on art world events ranging from the participation of Chinese artists in the 22nd São Paulo Biennial to the latest project by international artist couple Christo (1935–2020) and JeanneClaude (1935–2009). The “Studio” (Gongzuoshi 工作室) section is the most substantial, featuring an assortment of sketches, artist statements, and works in photographic reproduction, including Ai’s own Shutting Down the Museum (1994), Propaganda Poster (1994), and Recording (1994). For a translation of the conversation with Hsieh, see Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Hsieh Tehching, “A Conversation with Hsieh Tehching, from The Black Cover Book,” translated by Jon Solomon, ARTMargins 4, no. 2 (June 2015): 108–18. 21. Ai Weiwei and Zeng Xiaojun, eds., Bai pi shu [White Cover Book] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Publishing and Printing Company, 1995). This volume featured a transcribed interview with Ai, translated texts by Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), and a greatly expanded

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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section of artist pages. Ai Weiwei and Zeng Xiaojun, eds., Hui pi shu [Grey Cover Book] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Publishing and Printing Company, 1997). In addition to the obligatory artist pages, this third and final volume featured a second interview with Ai, critical essays by Zhu Fadong and Xu Yihui, and translated texts by James Johnson Sweeney (1900–86), Jeanne Siegel (b. 1929), and Jenny Holzer (b. 1950). Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Ai Weiwei, in Hui pi shu [Grey Cover Book], cited in Stephanie H. Tung, “Black, White, and Grey: Ai Weiwei in Beijing, 1993–1997,” Yishu 16, no. 6 (November/December 2017): 61–62. Ai Weiwei, in Ai, Xu, and Hsieh, “A Conversation,” 109–10, 113. Ai Weiwei, in Merewether, Ai Weiwei—Works, 31–32. Ai Weiwei, in Ai Weiwei and Tim Marlow, “Ai Weiwei in Conversation,” in Ai Weiwei, edited by Adrian Locke (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015), 19–20. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, 131–33, 5, 73. Ibid, 151, 147–48. Ibid, 149–50. Gao, Total Modernity, 84–85, 88–91 Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Ai Weiwei and Zheng Shengtian, “A Conversation with Ai Weiwei,” Yishu 12, no. 6 (December 2013): 13; Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History 1970s-2000s (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 30. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, 157–62. Wang Keping, cited in Andrew Cohen, “Ai Weiwei,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 74 (August 2011): 74. Lisa Mövius, “Censorship: Chinese Roulette,” Art in America 99, no. 1 (January 2011): 19; Anon, “Traditional & Innovative Production,” Aesthetica, no. 40 (May 2011): 14. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Eugene Y. Wang, “The Winking Owl: Visual Effect and Its Art Historical Thick Description,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 444–45. Fang Dan, «批黑画原始材料» [The original document of the Castigation of the Black Paintings], 南北極, no. 105 (February 1979), cited in Wang, “The Winking Owl,” 435, 449. Wang, “The Winking Owl,” 466–67. Ibid, 469. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Garth Clark, “Mind Mud: Ai Weiwei’s Conceptual Ceramics,” in Ceramics in America, edited by Robert Hunter (Lebanon: Chipstone, 2011), 70. Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, 13. Ai Weiwei, “Conversation with Tim Marlow,” in Conversations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 52. Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, 197. Ibid, 198–99. Interview with Ai Weiwei, 18 January 2022. Clark, “Mind Mud,” 54–55. See, for example, Carol Yinghua Lu, “Ai Weiwei’s Relevance,” in Bingham, Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds, 36–37. Adamson, “The Real Thing,” in Moore and Torchia, 49. Ibid, 49–50.

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54. Ai Weiwei and Robert Bernell, “Ai Weiwei with Robert Bernell,” in Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium, edited by John Clark (Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2000), 176–78. 55. Lan Pu and Zheng Tinggui, Ching-Te-Chen T’ao-Lu or The Potteries of China, translated by Geoffrey R. Sayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 15–16, 21–25. 56. Ibid, 46, 114. 57. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, translated by Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953): 79–80. 58. Anna Wu, “Jingdezhen Today,” Arts of Asia 41, no. 6 (December 2011): 90. 59. Maris Boyd Gillette, “Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China: Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Industry,” Modern China 36, no. 4 (July 2010): 376. 60. Anon, “For Sale: Porcelain Made Secretly for Mao,” New York Times, December 12, 1996. 61. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 76–77, 86, 91–95. 62. Ibid, 370–77. 63. Clark, “Mind Mud,” 68–69. 64. Liu Weiwei, cited in Holzwarth, ed., Ai Weiwei, 126. 65. McGetrick, “Everything is Necessary,” in Bingham, Ai Weiwei, 70. 66. Zhang Peili, cited in Francesca dal Lago, “Open and Everywhere: Chinese Artists at the Venice Biennale,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 25 (2000): 24. 67. Philip Tinari, “The Leopard and the Tiger: Circular Narratives in Blue and White,” in Touching the Stones: China Art Now, edited by Waling Boers and Pi Li (Cologne: Walther König, 2007), 135. 68. Rosemary E. Scott, “A Newly Discovered Yuan Dynasty Narrative Jar,” TAASA Review 14, no. 4 (December 2005): 5–6. 69. Stacey Pierson, “Historical and Cultural Contexts for Ceramics in China,” in Moore and Torchia, Dropping the Urn, 101. 70. Ai Weiwei, in Holzwarth, ed., Ai Weiwei, 254. 71. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. 72. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 368. 73. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. 74. Ibid. 75. Ai Weiwei, cited in Merewether, Ai Weiwei—Works, 29. 76. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. 77. Orianna Cacchione, “Wu Street: Tracing Lineages of the Internationalisation of the Art World,” Yishu 11, no. 1 (January/February 2012): 6–15. The essay by Feldman that Ai and Xu chose for translation was first published in the booklet for “Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1985–1991” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, January 23–April 26, 1992. It was republished as «贾森琼斯: 策划中的绘画» [Jiasen Qiongsi: Cehua zhongdi huihua], Shijie Meishu, no. 2 (February 1994): 28–31. The intervention was revealed at “Xu Bing: Recent Work,” Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, July 15–September 11, 1994. 78. Davidson, “Affirmative Precarity,” 138. 79. See, for example, John F. Burns, “Qing Dynasty Relic Yields Record Price at Auction,” New York Times, November 12, 2010. 80. Ivan Macquisten, “Happy End to Tale of Bainbridge’s Vase,” Antiques Trade Gazette, January 21, 2013. 81. Anonymous Chinese translator, cited in Anon, “Sensational £43m Record for Chinese Work of Art in Ruislip,” Antiques Trade Gazette, November 15, 2010. 82. Tinari, “The Leopard and the Tiger,” 134.

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83. These sources are cited in Wu Hung, The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 7–9. 84. Ibid, 10. 85. Wu Hung, “On Tomb Figurines: The Beginning of a Visual Tradition,” in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, edited by Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center/Harvard University Press, 2005), 13–14; Wu, The Art of the Yellow Springs, 106. 86. Wu, “On Tomb Figurines,” 25. 87. Clark, “Mind Mud,” 53. 88. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. 89. Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, 199–200. 90. Ai Weiwei, quoted in Ai and Marlow, “Ai Weiwei in Conversation,” in Locke, Ai Weiwei, 19. 91. Chin-chin Yap, “Devastating History,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 78 (June 2012): 80–81. 92. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 7–13. 93. Ibid, 121, 133–43. 94. Zheng, “On Modern Chinese Nationalism,” 226–29. 95. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), xii–xiii, 137–38. 96. Ibid, 135–36. 97. From a passage in The Book of Common Prayer: “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” which is in turn derived from Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” 98. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. 99. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 230–31. 100. Adam Yuet Chau, “An Awful Mark: Symbolic Violence and Urban Renewal in Reform-era China,” Visual Studies 23, no. 3 (2008): 198. 101. Maurizio Marinelli, “Urban Revolution and Chinese Contemporary Art: A Total Revolution of the Senses,” China Information 29, no. 2 (2015): 156. 102. Yu Hua, China in Ten Words, translated by Allan H. Barr (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 127. 103. Zhan Wang, cited in Francesca dal Lago, “Space and Public: Site Specificity in Beijing,” Art Journal 59, no. 1 (March 2000): 84. 104. Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), 35–38. 105. Robin Visser, “Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 39 (2004): 292. 106. Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art/University of Chicago Press, 2005), 112. 107. Lin Xiaoping, Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 60. 108. Ibid, 60–62. 109. Meiling Cheng, “Metropolis Ecologies: Yin Xiuzhen’s Parallel Cities,” Positions: Asia Critique 28, no. 1 (February 2020): 152–53. 110. Wu, Transience, 122–23. 111. Cheng, “Metropolis Ecologies,” 153–54. 112. Tinari, “Postures in Clay,” in Moore and Torchia, Dropping the Urn, 33–34. 113. Ai Weiwei, cited in Ai Weiwei and Richard Vine, “The Way We Were, the Way We Are,” Art in America 96, no. 6 (July 2008): 100. 114. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 252–53. 244

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115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143.

144.

Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Charles Merewether, “Made in China,” Parkett, no. 81 (2007): 146–48. Clark, “Mind Mud,” 53. Merewether, “Made in China,” 146. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 18, 2022. Nicolas Tackett, “A Tang-Song Turning Point,” in A Companion to Chinese History, edited by Michael Szonyi (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 118, 122. Li Zhiyan, “Ceramics of the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties,” in Chinese Ceramics: From the Paleolithic Period through the Qing Dynasty, edited by Li Zhiyan, Virginia L. Bower, and He Li (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 200, 203–4. Ibid, 202–23, 220–21, 246. Tackett, “A Tang-Song Turning Point,” in Szonyi, A Companion, 127. Merewether, Ai Weiwei—Works, 8. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” cited in Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 16. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 62–64, 85. Riegl, cited in Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 16. Liu, «思维的连贯性» [Collected Thoughts], 77. Translated by Alex Burchmore. Meiqin Wang, “Officialising the Unofficial: Presenting New Chinese Art to the World,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 102–24. Fan Di’an and Wang Yong, “People’s Republic of China: Synthi-Scape,” in Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer—Biennale Di Venezia, 50th International Art Exhibition, edited by Francesco Bonami (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 582. Jiang Zemin, “Full Text of Jiang Zemin’s Report at the 16th Party Congress,” Xinhua News Agency, November 17, 2002. Hu Jintao, “Full Text of Hu Jintao’s Report at the 17th Party Congress,” China Daily, October 24, 2007. Haiyang Yu, “Glorious Memories of Imperial China and the Rise of Chinese Populist Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary China 23, no. 90 (2014): 1174–75. Wang, “Officialising the Unofficial,” 106–10. Fan Di’an, «中国美术的威尼斯困局» [The Venice Predicament of Chinese Fine Arts], Zhongguo Xinwen Zhoukan, no. 135 (June 16, 2003), cited in Wang, “Officialising the Unofficial,” 128. Ibid, 125–26. Hou Hanru, “Entropy; Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994), 79–80; Hou Hanru, “Departure Lounge Art: Chinese Artists Abroad,” Art Asia Pacific 1, no. 2 (1994): 38. Hou, “Entropy,” 80, 85–87; Hou, “Théâtre du Monde: To Be Unthought,” 70. Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Centre,” in The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 13–14, 25–27 Paul Gladston, “Somewhere (and Nowhere) between Modernity and Tradition: Towards a Critique of International and Indigenous Perspectives on the Significance of Contemporary Chinese Art,” Tate Papers, no. 21 (Spring 2014). Jin, «刘建华» [Liu Jianhua], 90. Translated by Alex Burchmore. Liu, «思维的连贯性» [Collected Thoughts], 77. Translated by Alex Burchmore. Huang Zhuan, «无所遁形: 爱德文斯瓦克曼—刘建华对话展» [Vanished Boundaries: A Dialogue between Edwin Zwakman and Liu Jianhua], Rongbaozhai: Dangdai Yishu Ban, no. 6 (2011): 143. Hill, “A Tale of Two Biennales,” 7. NOTES

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145. Liu, «思维的连贯性» [Collected Thoughts], 82. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 146. Ibid. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 3. PORCELAIN RENAISSANCE

1. The term “porcelain renaissance” is cited here from Colin Martin, “International Ceramic Artists Working in China,” Craft Arts International, no. 86 (January 2012): 99. 2. The term “Jingdezhen phenomenon” is cited here from Chen Jie, «景德镇陶瓷的民间审美样 式与当代艳俗艺术» [Folk Aesthetics in Jingdezhen Ceramics and Contemporary Gaudy Art], Dazhong wenyi: Xueshu ban, no. 2 (February 2012): 40. 3. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), xiii, 3, 17–18, 106. Emphasis added. 4. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 5. Michele Vicat, “Sin-Ying Ho—Binary Codes: From Cobalt to Coca-Cola,” 3 Dots Water: A Virtual Publication on Contemporary Chinese and Global Art, 2012. 6. Rachel Gotlieb, Go East: Canadians Create in China (Toronto: Gardiner Museum, 2012), unpaginated. 7. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 8. Ibid. 9. Sin-ying Ho, cited in J. Penney Burton, “Tradition in Flux,” Cahiers Metiers d’art 1, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 33. 10. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid; Ho likely used the reprinted version of The Grammar of Ornament published in 1982 by Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York. 13. Chen, Transexperiences, 1–3. 14. Sin-ying Ho, cited in James Tarrant, “The Medium Is the Message,” Ceramics: Art and Perception, no. 64 (2006): 27–28. 15. Ibid, 27; Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 16. Sin-ying Ho, cited in Judith S. Schwartz, Confrontational Ceramics: The Artist as Social Critic (London: A&C Black, 2008), 58. 17. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ho, cited in Vicat, “Sin-Ying Ho.” 21. Sin-Ying Ho and Philip Read, “Studying Ceramics in Jingdezhen,” Contact, no. 112 (Spring 1998): 18. 22. Ibid, 18–19. 23. Digital decal transfer is a technique for applying readymade designs to glazed and fired porcelain for which motifs are designed on a computer (or appropriated from preexisting sources) and then printed using a laser printer onto sheets of acetate. These are soaked in warm water to detach the image, which can be transferred to a fired ceramic surface using a rubber printer’s brayer, or roller. The ceramic is coated with a transparent glaze and fired again in a low-temperature kiln to fuse the design to the surface. 24. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 25. Lines 1–7 of the first verse are written in Chinese characters: “明月几时有? / 把酒问青天. / 不 知天上宫阙, / 今夕是何年. / 我欲乘风归去, / 又恐琼楼玉宇, / 高处不胜寒.” The entire first verse and line 1 of the second verse are written in English: “How long will the full moon appear?

246

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

/ Wine cup in hand, I ask the sky. / I do not know what time of the year / It would be tonight in the palace on high. / Riding the wind, there I would fly, / Yet I’m afraid the crystalline palace would be / Too high and cold for me. / I rise and dance, with my shadow I play. / On high as on earth, would it be as gay? / The moon goes round the mansions red . . .” Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. Ibid. Ho, cited in Burton, “Tradition in Flux,” 29. Ho, cited in Schwartz, Confrontational Ceramics, 58. Zhang Ming, «从制陶到造村: 李见深与三宝国际陶艺村» [From Making Ceramics to Building a Village: Jackson Li & Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute at Jingdezhen], Zhuangshi, no. 8 (2014): 52. Elaine Hardman, “Paul Mathieu: Chinese Elements,” Ceramics: Art and Perception, no. 63 (2006): 24. Zhang, «从制陶到造村» [From Making Ceramics to Building a Village], 54. Luo Xiaoping, “A Potter’s Journey,” Ceramics: Art and Perception, no. 38 (1999): 43. For further discussion of Sanbao and the cultural gentrification of Jingdezhen, see Alex Burchmore, “Drifting through the Porcelain Capital: Art Residencies and the Enforced Continuity of an Illustrious Past in Jingdezhen, China,” Kunstlicht 39, no. 2 (2018): 39–49. Zhang Xinmin, Xie Hualin, Zhou Caihua, and Zeng Bindan, “Jingdezhen: The Millennium Porcelain Capital,” Cities 98 (March 2020): 7. Emphasis added. Hajni Elias, “In Search of China’s Ceramic Past: A Visit to Jingdezhen and Laohudong,” Arts of Asia 37, no. 2 (March-April 2007): 147–48. Zhang, Xie, Zhou, and Zeng, “Jingdezhen,” 5. Carla Coch, “Jingdezhen: Tradition and Promise,” Ceramics Monthly 53, no. 7 (September 2005): 64. Wu, “Jingdezhen Today,” 89. Gu Li, ‘Jingdezhen, Tenacity with Grace,’ in Across China: Travelogues, Unforgettable Moments on the Road, edited by Liu Hongmei and translated by Zhu Bang Qian (Beijing: New Star, 2013), 172. Ibid, 166. Pál Nyíri, Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 3–6. Ibid, 7–12. Helaine Silverman and Tami Blumenfield, “Cultural Heritage Politics in China: An Introduction,” in Cultural Heritage Politics in China (New York: Springer, 2013), 6. Margaret Byrne Swain, “Chinese Cosmopolitanism (Tianxia He Shijie Zhuyi) in China’s Heritage Tourism,” in Silverman and Blumenfield, Cultural Heritage Politics in China, 37, 47–48. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 155–63, 200–201, 253–54. Feng Guoping, Hu Yinjiao, and Shao Jimei, Jingdezhen: A City with Kiln-Fire Burning a Thousand Years, edited by The Jingdezhen People’s Government News Office (Beijing: Intercontinental Press, 2006), 87–92. Elias, “In Search of China’s Ceramic Past,” 146. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, July 10, 2020. David Clarke, Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization (London: Reaktion, 2001), 100–11. Ibid, 114. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, July 10, 2020. Ibid.

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54. Ibid. 55. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 56. For further discussion of the resemblance between Ho’s sculptural ceramics, misfires, and sea sculptures, see Alex Burchmore, “ ‘Splendid Deformities’: An Emancipatory Critique of Cultural Homogeneity in Sin-ying Ho’s Deformed Ceramics,” View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, no. 24 (January 2020). 57. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 58. The surface effect of terra sigillata used on these works also derives from Roman terracotta—the term can be used to refer either to a category of ceramics created and used predominantly in ancient Rome or, as in this case, to a type of slip applied to the surface of an unfired piece that creates a crackled effect when fired. 59. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 60. Ho, cited in Burton, “Tradition in Flux,” 33. 61. For further discussion of Ah Xian’s exploration of Chinese-Australian identities in China China, see Alex Burchmore, “Negotiating ‘Chinese-Australian’ Identity: Ah Xian’s Dr John Yu (2004) and his China China Series (1998–2004),” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 17, no. 1 (2017): 33–53. 62. Patricia Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 2008), 27–28. 63. See, for example, Roni Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” Art in America 90, no. 2 (February 2002): 111. 64. See, for example, Stefano Catalani, “From Iconic to Symbolic: Ah Xian’s Semiotic Interface Between China and the West,” Yishu 4, no. 1 (March 2005): 84. 65. Eva Ströber, Symbols on Chinese Porcelain: 10,000 Times Happiness (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2011), 34. 66. Welch, Chinese Art, 124–26, 249. There is an equally venerable tradition of the miraculous transformation of especially courageous or powerful individuals into dragons. 67. Ah Xian, “Self-Exile of the Soul,” TAASA Review 8, no. 1 (1999): 9. 68. Ah Xian and Kathryn Wells, “Ah Xian: Ancient Crafts, Contemporary Practice—A New Language of Art,” Craft Australia, September 28, 2011. 69. Ah Xian, “Self-Exile of the Soul,” 8. 70. Ah Xian, cited in Chiu, Breakout, 183. 71. Mabel Lee, “Ah Xian: Challenging the Spatial Limitations of Sculptural Art,” Humanities Australia, no. 6 (2015): 49–50. 72. Ah Xian, “Self-Exile of the Soul,” 9–10. 73. Ah Xian and Jo Ely, “Engaging Contemporary Art Audiences,” Journal of Australian Ceramics 47, no. 2 (July 2008): 16–17. 74. For further discussion of the “Australerie” evident in Guan Wei’s porcelain series, see Alex Burchmore, “Guan Wei’s ‘Australerie’ ceramics and the binary bind of identity politics,” Index Journal, no. 1 (March 2020). 75. Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” 111. See also, for example, Claire Roberts, “The Slow Art of Ah Xian,” Art & Australia 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2006), 393. 76. Claire Roberts, email communication, May 2, 2018. 77. Rhana Devenport, “Ah Xian’s China: An Artistic Journey through a Lost Art-Form,” Object, no. 50 (2000): 54. 78. Ah Xian, “Self-Exile of the Soul,” 10; Ah Xian and Ely, “Engaging Contemporary Art Audiences,” 17. 79. Claire Roberts, email communication, May 5, 2018.

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80. Stephan von der Schulenburg, “À La Recherche de La Porcelaine Perdue [In Search of Lost Porcelain],” in Ah Xian: Skulpturen, edited by Marc Gundel et al. (Bonn: Edition Braus, 2007), 25–26. 81. Jonathan Goodman, “Ah Xian,” Sculpture 22, no. 5 (June 2003): 73. 82. Ah Xian, cited in VCE Art, “Ah Xian | Ideas, Inspirations & Influences.” VCE Art, 2000. 83. Roger Law, “Imperial Potters,” Ceramic Review, no. 235 (February 2009): 50–52. 84. Ibid, 50; Fang, “Jingdezhen and the Artist,” in Fang and Selvage, New “China,” 10. 85. Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 102. 86. Liu Danyuan, cited in Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 125. 87. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 88. Feng Jiaxue, «郑祎: 乐在陶中» [Caroline Cheng: The Joy of Ceramics], Zhongguo Xin Shidai, no. 4 (2011): 48–51. 89. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 13, 2017. 90. Feng, «郑祎» [Caroline Cheng], 48. 91. Cheng, Ornamentalism, 14–19. 4. PORCELAIN CLAY

1. Ai Weiwei, cited in Cohen, “Ai Weiwei,” 78; Mark Wilson and Sue-an Van der Zijpp (eds.), Ai Weiwei (Groningen, Netherlands: Groninger Museum, 2008), 9. 2. For further discussion of the material qualities of porcelain that have enticed these and other artists, see Alex Burchmore, “The Fugitive Luxury of Porcelain in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in The Allure of Matter: Materiality Across Chinese Art, edited by Orianna Cacchione and WeiCheng Lin (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art/University of Chicago Press, 2021), 276–303. 3. Cheng, Ornamentalism, 15–16. 4. Ibid, 14–15. 5. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008), 39–40. 6. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 16–21. 7. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 39–40. 8. Cheng, Ornamentalism, ix–xii, 1–2. 9. Ibid, 93–94. Emphasis added. 10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 9. 11. Ibid, 9. 12. Marita Bullock, “ ‘China, China’: Autoethnography as Literal Translation in Ah Xian’s Porcelain Forms,” in Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012), 122, 110–11. 13. See, for example, Philip Tinari, “Chairs and Visitors,” in Ai Weiwei: Works 2004–2007, edited by Urs Meile (Lucerne, Switzerland: Galerie Urs Meile, 2007), 11. 14. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 25, 2022. 15. Hearn, Ink Art, 170–71. 16. Interview with Ai Weiwei, January 25, 2022. 17. Hearn, Ink Art, 170–71. 18. Tinari, “Postures in Clay,” in Moore and Torchia, Dropping the Urn, 35–36. 19. Wilson and Van der Zijpp, Ai Weiwei, 10–11. 20. Ai Weiwei, cited in Ai and Bernell, “Ai Weiwei with Robert Bernell,” in Clark, Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium, 180.

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21. Ai Weiwei, cited in Ai Weiwei and Angie Baecker, “You Aren’t Born a Good Artist. You Have to Fight,” New Statesman (October 22, 2012), 63. 22. Clark, “Mind Mud,” 66. 23. Ai Weiwei, cited in Ai, Bingham, and Daniel, “A Conversation,” in Bingham, Ai Weiwei, 80–81. 24. The term su (俗), usually translated as “vulgar” in opposition to ya (雅), meaning “elegant,” has long been used in the literature of Chinese connoisseurship to imply “a cluster of meanings which all operate [in] social classification and . . . are analogous to the descendants in the Romance languages of the Latin vulgus.” The use of this word in the epithet Yansu yishu to imply affiliation with a folk-derived artistic vocabulary is in keeping with this established polarity. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 82–83. 25. Li Xianting, “Some More Thoughts on the Raison d’être of Gaudy Art,” in Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium, 84–85. 26. Pi Li, “Polychrome Ceramics, Cheongsam and Chinese Porcelain,” in Porcelain-Like Skin, edited by Zhu Qi and Pi Li, translated by Trevor Morris (Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 2001), 17. 27. Liu and Zhu, «如果迷茫的话» [If You’re Confused]. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 28. Li Xianting, “The Pluralistic Look of Chinese Contemporary Art Since the Mid-1990s,” in Clark, Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium, 78; Li, “Some More Thoughts,” 81. 29. Li, “The Pluralistic Look,” 79. 30. Chen, «景德镇陶瓷的民间审美样式» [Folk Aesthetics in Jingdezhen Ceramics], 40; Dianne Perry Vanderlip and Gwen Finkel Chanzit, Radar: Selections from the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2006), 174–75. 31. Thomas J. Whitten, “China on the Radar: Post-1989 Chinese Art from the Logan Collection,” Arts of Asia 37, no. 1 (January 2007): 76. 32. Liu Jianhua, in Liu Jianhua and Mao Xuhui, “Infatuated Memory,” in Three Artists from Kunming, edited by Marcello Kwan (Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 1999), 15. 33. Zhu Qi, “How Does the Body Adorn Itself with Clothes? The Everyday Nature of Post-Political Society,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 10–11. 34. Pi, “Polychrome Ceramics,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 19. 35. Liu, in Liu and Mao, “Infatuated Memory,” in Kwan, Three Artists from Kunming, 15. 36. Liu and Zhu, «如果迷茫的话» [If You’re Confused]; Dematté, “Projecting Dreams,” 26. 37. Anthony Yung and Jane DeBevoise, “Exhibitions, Events, and Projects,” in Munroe, Tinari, and Hou, Art and China after 1989, 300; Philippe Pirotte, “Believing is Seeing,” in Xu Zhen, edited by Chris Moore (Berlin: Distanz, 2014), 43. 38. Dematté, “Projecting Dreams,” 32. 39. Liu Jianhua, in Yan and Liu, «嬗变中的刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua], 45. 40. Zhu, “How Does the Body Adorn Itself,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 10–11; Pi, “Polychrome Ceramics,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 19. 41. Johnson Chang, “Flesh in Porcelain: Liu Jianhua,” in Kwan, Three Artists from Kunming, 3. 42. Pi, “Polychrome Ceramics,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 16. 43. Claire Roberts, “The Way of Dress,” in Evolution & Revolution: Chinese Dress 1700s–1990s, edited by Claire Roberts (Sydney: Powerhouse Museum, 1997), 17–18; Antonia Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear? A National Problem,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (April 1996): 106–7. 44. Naomi Yin-yin Szeto, “Cheungsam: Fashion, Culture and Gender,” in Roberts, Evolution & Revolution, 55–57. 45. Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear,” 113–15. 46. Ibid, 111, 119–20. 47. Roberts, “The Way of Dress,” in Evolution & Revolution, 21. 250

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48. Oscar Ho, “Hong Kong: A Curatorial Journey for an Identity,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 41–42; Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 187. Clarke traces several manifestations of this nostalgia, including the popularity of films such as Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad (1995) and the opening in 1991 of the China Club by entrepreneur David Tang, a collector of Liu’s work who found his greatest success with Shanghai Tang, a boutique fashion house founded in Hong Kong in 1994, now with branches across mainland China. Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 187–88. 49. Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear,” 117. 50. Li Yuyi, «美装, 新装与奇装衣服» [Beautiful dress, new dress, weird and wonderful dress], Dongfang zazhi 14, no. 9 (1928), cited in Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear,” 115–16. 51. Zhu, “How Does the Body Adorn Itself,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 11. 52. Chang, “Flesh in Porcelain,” in Kwan, Three Artists from Kunming,3. 53. Pi, “Polychrome Ceramics,” in Zhu and Pi, Porcelain-Like Skin, 18–20. 54. Yan and Liu, «嬗变中的刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua], 41. Translated by Alex Burchmore. 55. Ibid. 56. Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear,” 120–22. 57. Yan and Liu, «嬗变中的刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua], 41. 58. Liu Jianhua, cited in Lisa Mövius, “Material World: The Works of Artist Liu Jianhua Poke Fun at the Wealthy New China,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 20, 2006. 59. Gao, Total Modernity, 194. 60. Dru C. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 93–94, 102, 107–8. 61. Ting Shao Kuang, July 11, 1992, cited in Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China,” 108. 62. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China,” 109. 63. Ibid, 109–11, 117. 64. Jin, «刘建华» [Liu Jianhua], 89. 65. Li, “Redefining Artistic Value,” 382–83. 66. Dematté, “Projecting Dreams,” 24. 67. Liu Jianhua, cited in Mövius, “Material World.” 68. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China,” 95–96. Gladney is here describing the Gala program for 1991. 69. Dematté, “Projecting Dreams,” 25–26. 70. Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” 111; von der Schulenburg, “À La Recherche de La Porcelaine Perdue,” in Gundel, Ah Xian: Skulpturen, 27; Hans-Jürgen Schwalm, “ ‘China, China’ Oder ‘ “Ich” Ist Das, Wozu “Du” Gesagt Wird’ ” [“ ‘China, China’ or ‘ “I” is what you say “you” to’ ”], in Gundel, Ah Xian: Skulpturen, 30–31. 71. Bullock, “China, China,” 100, 122. 72. Ah Xian, “Self-Exile of the Soul,” 9. 73. Lee, “Ah Xian,” 51. See also Russell Storer, “Ah Xian; Healing the Wounds,” Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art + Culture 43, no. 1 (2014): 39–40. 74. Ah Xian, cited in Claire Roberts, “Ah Xian: ‘China. China.’ Recent Works in Porcelain,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, edited by Jennifer Webb (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999), 228. 75. Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” 110. 76. Ibid. 77. Linda Jaivin, “Ah Xian: Recent Works in Porcelain,” Art Asia Pacific 33, no. 1 (2002): 29; Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” 111. NOTES

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78. Stuart Koop, Beep . . . Crackle . . .: Contemporary Art from the Middle of Nowhere (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2008), 167. 79. See, for example, Dieter Brunner, “Die Büste und die Unsterblichkeit: Ein Chinesischer Künstler auf den Pfaden Westlicher Kultur” [“The Bust and Immortality: A Chinese Artist on the Paths of Western Culture”], in Gundel, Ah Xian: Skulpturen, 45. 80. M. H. Kaufman and Robert McNeil, “Death Masks and Life Masks at Edinburgh University,” British Medical Journal 298, no. 6672 (February 25, 1989): 506. 81. Ah Xian and Wells, “Ah Xian.” 82. Storer, “Ah Xian,” 41. 83. See, for example, Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” 109; Jaivin, “Ah Xian,” 29; Chiu, Breakout, 188; Schwalm, “China, China,” in Gundel, Ah Xian, 31; and Storer, “Ah Xian,” 39. 84. The marking of slaves and prisoners was a primary function of tattoos throughout much of Chinese history, and especially during the Song, Yuan, and Qing dynasties. The effectiveness of this punishment derived from the stigma attached in Confucian societies to any mutilation or marking of the body, and the shame the tattooed would feel on returning to civil society deprived of the fullness and complexity of their identity by a reduction to the singular role of “criminal.” Carrie E. Reed, “Tattoo in Early China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120, no. 3 (September 2000): 364–65. 85. See, for example, Paul Sweetman, “Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity,” Body & Society 5, no. 2/3 (1999): 62–63. 86. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Tattoo, n.2.” 87. William Cummings, “Orientalism’s Corporeal Dimension,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 2 (Fall 2003). 88. Harriet Guest, “Curiously Marked: Tattooing and Gender Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, edited by Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 83–87. 89. Ibid, 95. 90. Reed, “Tattoo in Early China,” 363. 91. Zuo Si, “Wu Capital Rhapsody,” cited in Reed, 362. 92. Reed, “Tattoo in Early China,” 361. 93. Sweetman, “Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self,” 68. 94. Caplan, Written on the Body, xv. 95. Cummings, “Orientalism’s Corporeal Dimension.” 96. Reed, “Tattoo in Early China,” 375. 97. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 14, 2017. 98. Chiao Hsiung-ping, “Bruce Lee: His Influence on the Evolution of the Kung Fu Genre,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 32 99. Phil Ochs, The Legend of Bruce Lee, 1977, cited in Chiao, “Bruce Lee,” 30. 100. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 14, 2017. 101. Gamal Abdel-Shehid, “Muhammad Ali: America’s B-Side,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 26, no. 3 (August 2002): 321–22. 102. Ibid, 324. 103. Sax Rohmer, The Return of Fu-Manchu, 1916, cited in Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (St. Ives, UK: Penguin, 1998), 141. 104. Paul Bowman, “Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Rey Chow’s Queer Cultural Translation,” Social Semiotics 20, no. 4 (2010): 394. 105. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 14, 2017. 252

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1 06. Ibid. 107. Joseph Dorinson, “Black Heroes in Sport: From Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali,” Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 3 (Winter 1997): 128. 108. For further discussion of the Occupy Central protests, see Ming-sho Ho, “Opportunities, Threat, and Standoff in Hong Kong,” in Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), 117–49. 109. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 14, 2017. 110. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, July 10, 2020. 111. Interview with Sin-ying Ho, April 14, 2017. 112. Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 36, 55, 72. CONCLUSION



1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

Hearn, Ink Art, 8, 13–14. Sin-ying Ho, email communication, December 29, 2021. Interview with Geng Xue, July 18. 2020. Geng Xue, cited in Zhao Li and Chen Lin, Stories of Life: Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition (Sydney: China Cultural Centre, 2016), 26. Pu Songling, “Snake Island,” in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, translated by John Minford (London: Penguin, 2006), 185–88. Geng Xue, cited in Luise Guest, “Translation, Transformation and Refiguration: The Significance of Jingdezhen and the Materiality of Porcelain in the Work of Two Contemporary Chinese Artists,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2/3 (2019): 218. Interview with Ah Xian, July 16, 2020. Interview with Ah Xian, July 20, 2020. Ibid. Interview with Ah Xian, July 16, 2020. For discussion of other works in porcelain by Ni Haifeng, see Burchmore, “The Aesthetics of Export,” 27–32. Ni Haifeng and Marianne Brouwer, “A Zero Degree of Writing and Other Subversive Moments: An Interview with Ni Haifeng,” in Ni Haifeng: No-Man’s Land, edited by Roel Arkesteijn and Ni Haifeng (Amsterdam: Artimo, 2003), 52–53. Ibid, 52.

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Liu Jianhua, Discard (detail), 2011.  /  2 Liu Jianhua, Life: The Erect Body, 1989.  /  31 Liu Jianhua, Stranger, 1990.  /  32 Liu Jianhua, Green Life, 1991–92.  /  33 Liu Jianhua, A Spiritual Direction: Leaving the Mainstream, 1992–93.  /  34 Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999.  /  35 Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (detail), 1999.  /  36 Liu Jianhua, Regular-Fragile (detail), 2003.  /  37 Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010.  /  40 Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds (detail), 2010.  /  41 Liu Jianhua, Yiwu Survey, 2006.  /  50 Liu Jianhua, Yiwu Survey (detail), 2006.  /  50 Liu Jianhua, Export-Cargo Transit, 2007.  /  52 Liu Jianhua, Export-Cargo Transit (detail), 2007.  /  53 Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, 1995.  /  65 Ai Weiwei and Serge Spitzer, Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain, 2005.  /  83 Ai Weiwei and Serge Spitzer, Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain (reverse), 2005.  /  84 Ai Weiwei, Blue-and-White, 1996.  /  86 Ai Weiwei, Blue-and-White Moonflask, 1996.  /  87 Ai Weiwei, Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, 1995.  /  89 Ai Weiwei, Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, 1995.  /  90

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Ai Weiwei, Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994.  /  93 Ai Weiwei, Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1993.  /  95 Ai Weiwei, Souvenir from Beijing, 2002.  /  97 Ai Weiwei, Dust to Dust, 2009.  /  99 Ai Weiwei, Dust to Dust (installation), 2009.  /  99 Liu Jianhua, Regular-Fragile, 2003.  /  111 Liu Jianhua, Dream, 2006.  /  117 Liu Jianhua, Dream (detail), 2006.  /  118 Liu Jianhua, Discard, 2011.  /  118 Sin-ying Ho, Identity, 2001.  /  129 Sin-ying Ho, Identity (detail), 2001.  /  130 Sin-ying Ho, Gibberish no. 1, 2005.  /  134 Sin-ying Ho, Tilt and Flow, 2018.  /  143 Sin-ying Ho, Unearth, 2014.  /  145 Sin-ying Ho, Binary Code: The Link, 2004.  /  147 Sin-ying Ho, Matrix no. 1, 2005.  /  148 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 4, 1998.  /  151 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 10, 1998.  /  152 Ah Xian, Palace Lady, 1985.  /  157 Ah Xian, The Wall no. 40, 1987.  /  158 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 78, 2004.  /  161 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 79, 2004.  /  162 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 80, 2004.  /  163 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 45, 1999.  /  164 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 67, 2002.  /  165 Ai Weiwei, The Wave, 2005.  /  181 Ai Weiwei, The Wave (prototype), 2004.  /  182 Ai Weiwei, Bowl of Pearls, 2006.  /  183 Ai Weiwei, Watermelon, 2006.  /  185 Ai Weiwei, Oil Spill, 2006.  /  186 Ai Weiwei, Dress with Flowers, 2007.  /  186 Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 1997–99.  /  187 Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 1997–99.  /  190 Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 1997–99.  /  191 Liu Jianhua, Donation, 2004.  /  193 Liu Jianhua, Merriment, 1999–2000.  /  194 Liu Jianhua, Merriment, 1999–2000.  /  197 Liu Jianhua, Secrecy, 1993–95.  /  201 Liu Jianhua, Secrecy, 1993–95.  /  202 Liu Jianhua, Disharmony, 1993–97.  /  203 Ah Xian, Heavy Wounds no. 15, 1991.  /  206 Ah Xian, Pervasive Spirit no. 2, 1992.  /  207 Ah Xian, China China: Bust 34, 1999.  /  208 Sin-ying Ho, Hero no. 1, 2007–9.  /  214 Sin-ying Ho, Hero no. 1 (reverse), 2007–9.  /  215 Sin-ying Ho, Hero no. 2: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2007–9.  /  216 Sin-ying Ho, 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central, 2014.  /  218

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Interior view of Ah Xian’s studio, Beijing, 2014.  /  224 Workbench in Ah Xian’s studio, Beijing, 2014.  /  225 Sin-ying Ho, Beyond Borders: Passage of Time, 2020.  /  226 Geng Xue, Mr Sea, 2014.  /  229 Geng Xue, Mr Sea, 2014.  /  230 Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History, 1999–2001.  /  232 Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History, 1999–2001.  /  233

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INDEX

Ah Xian, 7–8, 10, 12–16, 122–123, 126–127, 149, 153, 156, 174, 176, 220–221, 224, 224fig., 225fig., 227–228, 232–234; and Jingdezhen, 154, 157–159, 166–167, 175; and the Cultural Revolution, 155–156; and use of traditional media, 150, 154–155, 158–159, 173, 208; China China, 10, 15–16, 123, 126, 149–153, 151fig., 152fig., 154–167, 161fig., 162fig., 163fig., 164fig., 165fig., 168, 170, 175, 178–179, 204–205, 207–213, 208fig., 224–225, 230–233; Heavy Wounds, 156, 175, 205–207, 206fig.; Just what is it that makes today’s families so different? So appealing?, 156; Palace Lady, 156, 157fig.; Pervasive Spirit, 175, 205–207, 207fig.; Serenity: Self-Portrait, 229–231; Site Perspectives, 175, 205–207; The Wall, 156, 158fig. Ai Dan, 70, 78. See also Ai Qing; Ai Weiwei; Ai Xuan Ai Qing, 71, 73, 75, 77, 155. See also Ai Dan; Ai Weiwei; Ai Xuan

Ai Weiwei, 7–8, 10, 13–16, 21, 68, 73–74, 79, 91, 108–109, 119, 123, 136, 154–155, 168, 173–174, 176, 179, 187, 189, 228; and Jingdezhen, 21–22, 41–44, 46–47, 55–56, 62, 81, 85, 174, 184; and the Cultural Revolution, 71–72; and use of traditional media, 66, 74–78; architectural practice, 103–104; Black, White, and Grey Cover Books, 69–70, 88, 94, 241n20, 241n21; Blue-and-White, 62, 86–88, 86fig., 87fig., 184; Bowl of Pearls, 16, 174, 182–184, 183fig.; Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, 62, 88–91, 89fig., 90fig.; Dress, 16, 174, 184, 186fig.; Dropping a Han-dynasty Urn, 10, 60–66, 64fig., 65fig., 68–70, 77–80, 82, 85, 88–89, 91, 94, 98, 100, 102–103, 108, 110, 116, 179, 195; Dust to Dust, 61, 91, 97–100, 99fig., 102–105, 108; Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain, 62, 82–86, 83fig., 84fig., 88–89, 91, 128, 179, 184; Han-dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 61–62, 88, 94–95, 95fig., 106;

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Ai Weiwei (continued) Oil Spill, 16, 174, 184, 186fig.; Safe Sex, 88; 72 Standard, 82; Souvenir from Beijing, 61, 91, 97–98, 97fig., 100, 102–105, 108, 113; Sunflower Seeds, 15, 21–22, 39, 40fig., 41fig., 41–48, 54–57, 63, 166, 168, 174, 180; Tang-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 61, 91–95, 93fig., 105–108; The Wave, 16, 174, 180–182, 181fig., 182fig., 184, 189, 234; Untitled [Song-dynasty Courtesan in Bottle], 61, 91–95, 105–108; Violin, 88; Watermelon, 16, 174, 184, 185fig.; Wu Street, 88, 243n77. See also Ai Dan; Ai Qing; Ai Xuan Ai Xuan, 73. See also Ai Dan; Ai Qing; Ai Weiwei apartment art, 61, 68–72. See also micro-narratives appropriation, 8, 10, 36–37, 39, 62, 64, 83, 94–95, 105–106, 108, 113, 126, 130–131, 166, 178, 182, 188–189, 214–215, 217, 233; and readymades, 63, 88–89, 97, 100, 108, 119, 174, 180. See also Duchamp, Marcel art market, 3–5, 51, 90, 199; and Chinese artists, 4, 45, 68, 82, 174, 197; art fairs and auctions, 5, 11, 45, 62, 80–82, 85, 89–91, 174; critique of, 16, 89–90, 106, 174, 179–80, 182–184. See also collecting and connoisseurship autoethnography. See exoticism Black Painting Exhibitions. See Cultural Revolution blue-and-white, 12, 22, 55, 77–78, 80–91, 126, 128, 133, 138–139, 142, 145, 150, 166 bodily experience, 14, 16, 146–147, 174, 229–234; affect, 38, 43–44, 66, 109, 176, 199, 208–209, 229; biomorphism, 147, 168, 170; deformity and disfiguration, 16, 29, 175–176, 178, 189, 194, 198–199, 205–207, 209–210, 228–229; eroticism and sexuality, 10, 16, 174–178, 185, 189, 193–200, 202–204, 210–211, 227–229; illness and injury, 6, 35, 44, 62, 71, 97–98, 110, 115, 154, 205–207, 209, 225; mortality, 33–36, 38, 49, 102, 115–116, 175; nudity, 30, 175, 177, 198, 202–204, 211, 230–234; skin, 160, 176, 204, 209–213, 228–234; suffocation and constriction, 153, 160, 168–169, 175–176, 178, 189, 205–207. See also death; gender Cai Guo-Qiang, 113; Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 10, 20, 30–34, 35fig., 36fig., 82 calligraphy. See ink art celadon glaze, 160, 181, 183 Central Academy of Fine Arts, 3–4, 73, 75, 102–103, 110, 227 Chen Zhen. See transexperience Cheng, Caroline, 15, 122, 168–170, 184. See also Pottery Workshop

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Chinese artistic diaspora, 3–7, 15, 20, 39, 114–115, 122–123, 231 Chinese Communist Party, 22–23, 27, 32, 44, 51–54, 91, 104, 112–115, 139, 141, 219; propaganda, 8, 26, 44, 76, 141. See also Cultural Revolution; Deng Xiaoping; Hu Jintao; Hua Guofeng; Jiang Zemin; Mao Zedong Chineseness, 6–7, 10, 15–16, 78–79, 115, 122–123, 127, 133, 142–144, 150, 167–170, 175, 196–198, 204–205. See also exoticism Chiu, Melissa, 3, 5–6, 38–39, 155 Cizhou ware, 74–75, 77, 94, 187 clay, 66, 142, 173; and primitivism, 11, 28, 30, 63, 74–75; and transience, 28, 34; as an analogue for flesh, 24, 102, 210. See also materiality collecting and connoisseurship, 67, 77–78, 80, 87–88, 90, 94, 107, 142, 156, 183, 196, 200; antique markets, 61, 78–79, 224; authenticity, 60, 62, 66, 78–81, 84, 86–93, 104, 106, 116, 122, 130, 170; social status, 84–85, 250n24. See also art market collectivism, 20, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 32–34, 42–43, 55–57, 72–73, 102, 140–141, 192, 225; and conformity, 20, 23, 26–28, 46, 71, 149, 175, 178, 180, 189, 211; and individuals, 43, 45, 150 colonialism, 51, 96, 114, 122, 129, 131, 178, 233–234; European powers, 21, 51, 67, 127–128, 141–142, 144, 217 conservation. See heritage consumerism and commodity capitalism, 1–2, 4, 8–9, 16, 21, 23, 34–39, 42, 45, 48–49, 52, 68, 85, 90, 102–104, 106–109, 114–117, 133, 174, 177, 180, 184, 187–193, 196, 199, 204–205; enterprise and entrepreneurship, 21–23, 46–48, 54, 56–57, 81; packaging and brands, 51, 62–63, 95, 106, 122, 140, 142, 169–170, 176, 185, 187. See also mass production corporeality. See bodily experience cultural diplomacy, 8, 32, 106, 111–115, 123, 140–142, 144–145; 50th Venice Biennale, 10, 31, 62, 109–111, 113–115, 123, 140, 144 Cultural Revolution, 7, 10, 22–23, 27, 44, 72–73, 153, 203, 217; Black Painting Exhibitions, 76–77; destruction of counterrevolutionary material, 65, 71, 77, 101, 155, 198; purges, 71, 73, 75–76, 81, 176, 198–199, 202. See also Chinese Communist Party; Mao Zedong death, 49, 75, 96, 98, 103, 109, 175, 207, 209, 228; death masks, 175, 178, 209; tomb figurines, 61, 91–92, 96, 101, 105–107. See also bodily experience; impermanence

INDEX

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Deng Xiaoping, 7, 23, 52–54, 111–112. See also Chinese Communist Party; reform era destruction, 60–65, 77, 79, 88–89, 94–98, 102–104, 110, 117, 141–142; crisis and catastrophe, 35, 62, 71, 116, 180; iconoclasm, 60, 64–66, 70, 94; urban redevelopment, 61, 97, 100–107, 111–113, 115, 122, 136, 138–139, 169. See also ruins Diduk, Barbara. See Vase Project, The Duchamp, Marcel, 10, 36–38, 63, 88. See also appropriation 85 Movement, 28–29, 72, 153, 156 eroticism. See bodily experience; gender exoticism, 45, 121, 142, 159, 177, 195, 197, 212, 217; and autoethnography, 114, 178, 205, 209, 212, 233–234; and ornamentalism, 15–16, 123, 126, 168, 170, 175–178, 230, 232; and prejudice, 3, 5–6, 111, 128, 131–133, 149–151, 160, 166–168, 174–175, 178, 182, 195, 197, 204, 210, 213, 217, 225; and primitivism, 30, 176, 199–200, 203–204. See also Chineseness export, 2, 5, 9, 11–14, 23, 48–52, 75, 106–108, 111–113, 142–144, 180, 192; China as workshop of the world, 21–22, 47–48, 56–57; China Trade, 1, 13–14, 21, 51, 63, 108–109, 133; export art, 3–6, 45; trade ceramics, 13, 16, 55, 80, 128, 148, 150, 215, 232–234 fakes and fabrication, 48, 62, 64–65, 79–81, 83, 86–89, 91, 103–106, 122, 130, 137, 145, 167–170, 177, 184; deception and illusion, 62, 84, 105, 110, 116, 123, 150, 174, 183–184, 192, 231–232. See also reproduction fashion, 126, 166, 168–169, 184, 189, 195–196, 200, 203–204, 210–211; anti-fashion, 211; qipao, 177–178, 184, 189, 192, 195–198, 203–204, 211 feminism. See gender Gao Minglu, 4–6, 25, 28–29, 61, 68–69, 72 Gaudy Art, 176, 185, 187–188. See also Xu Yihui gender, 174–175, 177–178, 199–200, 203; androgyny, 160–161, 195; femininity, 126, 143, 153, 174, 177, 193–196, 198; feminism, 175, 177–178, 195–196; masculinity, 143, 153, 174, 176, 203–204, 217; sexual objectification, 16, 175–178, 194, 196–205; violence, 123, 176, 198–199. See also bodily experience Geng Xue, 227–229, 229fig., 230fig., 234 globalization, 31, 48, 51, 60, 62, 70, 110–114, 180, 184, 227; cosmopolitanism, 3–5, 100, 104, 116, 140, 142, 177, 195–196; universalism, 131, 135, 144, 147, 149, 170, 179, 217, 219; Westernization, 21, 28, 44,

51, 68, 113–114, 121–122, 126, 131, 139, 142, 156, 158, 174, 179, 197–200, 217 Han dynasty, 60, 65–67, 75, 78–79, 91, 107, 109, 212 heritage; ancient, 11, 28–30, 75, 78, 80, 85, 93, 95–96, 98, 142–144, 217, 223, 229; architectural, 71, 97–98, 101–105; as birthright, 114–115, 122–123, 127, 153–155; recovery of, 7, 10, 14–15, 56, 150, 154–156, 167; salvage and conservation, 1, 47, 61, 92, 96–97, 101–103, 117, 122, 141, 144–146; tourism, 11–12, 61, 105, 121–122, 126–127, 136–142, 145, 170. See also ruins Ho, Sin-ying, 7–8, 10, 14–16, 122–123, 126, 131, 155–156, 158–159, 173–174, 178, 213, 220–221, 227–228; 9.28.2014 Hong Kong Occupied Central, 16, 179, 218–220, 218fig.; and Jingdezhen, 15, 122–123, 127–128, 133, 137; and theatre, 132–133, 135; Beyond Borders: Passage of Time, 225–226, 226fig.; Binary Code: The Link, 15, 123, 146–149, 146fig., 168, 170; Gibberish, 15, 123, 133, 134fig., 135–136, 146–148; Hero, 16, 179, 213–217, 214fig., 215fig., 216fig., 220; Identity, 15, 126, 128–131, 129fig., 130fig., 133, 135–136, 146–147, 150; Matrix no. 1, 15, 123, 146–149, 148fig., 168, 170, 215; Tilt and Flow, 142–144, 143fig., 217, 220; Unearth, 144–146, 145fig. Hong Kong, 7, 23, 45, 69, 102, 123, 127–128, 142–144, 155, 170, 194, 215; colonialism, 122, 129, 131, 135, 217; Occupy Central, 179, 218–220; transfer of sovereignty, 132, 141, 144, 196, 219–220 Hou Hanru, 3–6, 39, 45, 114–115 Hu Jintao, 112, 141. See also Chinese Communist Party; cultural diplomacy Hua Guofeng, 23, 71. See also Chinese Communist Party Huang Yan, 231 Huang Yongyu, 75–76 iconoclasm. See destruction identity, 5, 9, 13–15, 29, 60–62, 66, 80, 104, 106, 109, 115, 126, 132, 141, 195–197, 220; denial of, 43, 47, 176, 189–190, 198, 205, 209; essentialism, 5–6, 128, 131, 150, 174–178, 199, 214–217, 234; family, 15, 68, 79, 94, 103, 126, 150–155, 160, 167, 179, 208, 213, 217, 220; fractured, 10, 122–123, 127, 131, 146–147, 149–150, 153, 155, 166–167, 170, 216, 220; inner world, 22, 29, 57, 68–70, 72, 77, 101, 108, 127, 160, 168, 170, 189–190, 203, 208–211, 230–231; official identification, 128, 131, 151; personhood, 15–16, 123, 126, 168, 170–171, 176–178; self-construction, 6, 15–17, 26–27, 38–39, 79, 126, 131–133, 136, 140, 145, 150, 169, 170–171, 173, 177–179, 210–213, 217, 233–234. See also Chineseness; gender

INDEX

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impermanence, 28, 34–35, 38, 59–61, 92–93, 96, 98, 108, 110, 115, 119, 136, 209, 219, 231; and imperfection, 34, 42, 146, 174, 183, 219; and renewal, 30, 62, 82, 98, 100, 110, 114, 143, 199; and stasis, 91–94, 175, 178, 180, 205, 209–211. See also death; ruins ink art, 8, 25, 41, 56, 74, 76, 80, 155, 182, 223–224, 227; bird-and-flower, 57, 75; calligraphy, 8, 76, 80, 113, 147–148, 155, 215, 223, 227, 234; landscape, 4, 72, 113, 181, 227, 231. See also literati tradition Jiang Zemin, 54, 112. See also Chinese Communist Party Jingdezhen, 7–9, 11, 17, 23, 29, 85, 122–123, 132, 141, 149; artisans, 11, 22, 27, 55–57; artist residencies, 12, 15, 55, 122, 127–128, 133, 136–138, 169–170; collaboration between artists and artisans, 2, 12, 15, 19, 21–22, 39, 41–48, 54–57, 62, 66, 78, 87, 116, 121–122, 150, 154, 156–160, 166–168, 174–176, 179, 181, 184, 187–188, 232; contemporary transformation, 11–13, 47, 121, 138–139, 142, 169; Porcelain Capital, 1–2, 12, 80; privatization, 81, 169; state-owned factories, 2, 20, 23–25, 81, 169, 187 Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, 22, 24, 28, 55, 127, 133, 137, 154, 237n9 Li Jianshen, 15, 122, 127, 136–137, 155, 168–169. See also Sanbao International Ceramics Village literati tradition, 8, 25, 74, 78, 80, 82, 85, 112–113, 135–137, 140–143, 145–146, 154, 212–213, 227–229, 231, 234; Cultural China, 114–115. See also ink art Liu Jianhua, 1–2, 7–8, 10, 13–16, 20–21, 29–31, 39, 60, 173–174, 178, 228; A Spiritual Direction: Leaving the Mainstream, 30, 34fig.; and Jingdezhen, 7, 15, 20–24, 28, 34–35, 81; Discard, 1–2, 2fig., 61, 117, 118fig.; Disharmony, 176, 200, 202–204, 203fig., 211; Donation, 192–193, 193fig.; Dream, 62, 115–116, 117fig., 118fig.; Export-Cargo Transit, 21, 49, 51–52, 52fig., 53fig., 54, 180; Green Life, 30, 33fig.,; Life, 30, 31fig.; Merriment, 16, 177–178, 194fig., 195–200, 197fig., 202, 204–205, 210–211; Obsessive Memories, 16, 176–178, 184–185, 187fig., 188–191, 190fig., 191fig., 192–200, 202–205, 210–211; Regular-Fragile, 15, 20–22, 31, 34–39, 37fig., 42, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 57, 61–62, 81, 108–110, 111fig., 115, 119, 123, 146, 149, 168, 180, 192–193; Secrecy, 176, 200, 201fig., 202fig., 202–204, 211; Stranger, 30, 32fig.; Yiwu Survey, 21, 48–49, 50fig., 51–52, 54, 180, 192 Liu Weiwei, 41–42, 47, 81–82. See also Ai Weiwei; Jingdezhen; reproduction

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Liu Yuanchang, 22–24, 27–28, 169–170. See also Jingdezhen; Liu Jianhua; Sculpture Factory Mao Xuhui, 44, 81, 109. See also Southwest Art Group Mao Zedong, 44, 81, 109; death, 23, 71; Mao Zedong Thought, 26–27, 65, 105, 115, 133, 188–189; Maoist era, 2, 20, 23, 25, 28, 46, 60, 68, 72, 102, 140. See also Chinese Communist Party; Cultural Revolution mass production, 10, 14–15, 19–21, 34, 36, 39, 41–43, 48, 52, 64, 67, 106, 131, 149, 159, 175, 184, 204–205, 227; accumulation and abundance, 15, 20–21, 26, 31, 39, 42, 48–49, 54, 63, 82, 108–110, 115, 117, 126, 166; exploitative working conditions, 15, 21, 39, 42–44, 46, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 57, 121, 168, 174, 180, 184; factory-style organization, 2, 7, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 35, 37–39, 41–42, 45, 48, 54, 57, 146, 159, 180, 187; low production standards, 21, 48–49, 51, 117, 180, 184; modularity and standardization, 10, 14–15, 19–22, 36–39, 41–43, 48, 55–56, 62, 115, 122–123, 126, 146, 149, 159, 166, 170, 227. See also collectivism materiality, 16, 34, 37, 63, 67, 85, 174, 209, 228; authenticity, 65, 154, 177, 210–213; expressive capability, 9, 20, 77, 81; luxury and splendor, 1, 80, 176, 184, 187–189, 192; sensuous appeal, 10, 14, 16, 43, 63, 77, 110, 144, 152, 154, 159, 166, 173–174, 176, 180, 183–184, 188–189, 193–195, 199, 208–209, 213, 218, 221, 231. See also clay memory, 11, 24, 38, 61, 66, 77–78, 80, 94, 98, 100, 103, 112, 123, 127, 136, 155, 176, 179, 198–199, 202, 205, 217, 220; commemoration, 103, 137–139, 141, 144, 210, 219; nostalgia, 61, 98, 101, 112, 139, 196, 198; souvenirs and mementos, 48, 61, 77–78, 98, 103, 105, 137, 155, 182, 204, 212, 219; micro-narratives, 59–61, 68, 108. See also apartment art Ming dynasty, 78, 80–81, 84–85, 88, 92, 101, 105, 112–113, 122, 133, 136, 138, 141, 166 Ming-dynasty City Walls Ruins Park. See ruins museums, 62, 91, 180; classification and typology, 79, 84, 93–94, 117; display, 61, 92, 94–95, 105, 108 nationalism, 20, 25, 60, 67, 83–84, 97, 100, 107–108, 112–113, 115, 122, 140, 195–197, 199, 225; and ethnic minorities, 67, 199–200, 203–204; grand narratives of, 34, 59–63, 70, 108–110, 115, 117, 220; Han nativism, 60, 65–67, 74, 96–97, 199–200, 203; national humiliation, 96, 141–142;

INDEX

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regeneration and modernization, 23–24, 26, 29, 96, 100 New Culture Movement, 25–28, 68, 72, 96 Ni Haifeng, 231–234, 232fig., 233fig. No Name Painting Society, 72–73, 76 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 127, 132, 136. See also Ostrom, Walter nudity. See bodily experience; gender ornament, 56, 123, 128, 130–131, 133, 135–136, 147–152, 160, 168, 231; as adornment, 16, 122, 126, 168, 205, 209–212, 232; as superficial, 150, 171, 174–177, 179–180, 182, 184–185, 187–190, 192–193, 195, 199, 204, 209–211, 213, 218–220, 227–229, 234 ornamentalism. See exoticism Ostrom, Walter, 127–128, 136, 170. See also Nova Scotia College of Art and Design performance art, 3, 7, 60, 62, 64–66, 68, 79, 88–91, 95, 101, 103, 113, 132, 135, 220, 223, 226, 229–231, 234 photography, 3, 10, 36, 60, 62–65, 70, 78–79, 82, 86, 88–90, 95–96, 103, 113, 223, 226, 231–234 Political Pop, 45, 68, 111, 188 political statements, 7, 16, 43; activism and protest, 45, 48, 60, 73–74, 192, 220; apolitical aestheticism, 4, 26, 68–70, 72–74, 143–144, 217–219, 230; Cold War binaries, 27, 32, 44–45; critique of authoritarianism, 4, 44–45, 48, 64–65, 104, 115, 176, 180, 200, 204, 220; satire and parody, 48, 63, 65, 73, 84, 93, 103, 105, 176, 188–189, 197, 199, 205 popular culture, 11, 16, 179, 213, 220 Pottery Workshop, 15, 122, 127, 132, 168–170. See also Cheng, Caroline; Jingdezhen preservation, 15, 26, 61–62, 65, 67, 77, 79, 93, 95–98, 101–102, 105–106, 108, 114–115, 119, 136, 138, 142, 155–156; as stasis, 61, 91–92, 94 Qing dynasty, 61–62, 67, 78, 80–81, 85–88, 90, 97, 101, 105, 130, 138, 141, 166, 177, 188, 212, 228 qingbai glaze, 37, 63, 81, 108–109, 115, 117, 119 qipao. See fashion readymade. See appropriation reform era, 5, 7, 20, 23–24, 52–54, 100, 112, 115, 122–123, 139, 144, 174, 176, 184, 188, 192, 199, 205–206, 208–210, 220. See also Deng Xiaoping Rent Collection Courtyard. See socialist realism reproduction, 1–2, 15, 20–21, 31–32, 34–35, 37–39, 44, 48–49, 54–55, 62, 66, 79–80, 87–88, 90–92, 95,

98, 103, 115–117, 122, 126, 133, 138, 146, 149–150, 154, 173, 184, 204; reproduction industry in Jingdezhen, 2, 78, 80–83, 85–86, 137–138, 166. See also fakes and fabrication Republic of China, 52, 67, 112, 141, 177, 195–196, 198 Rodin, Auguste, 24, 29, 199 ruins, 61, 96–97, 100–103, 109; Ming-dynasty City Walls Ruins Park, 105, 141; remnants and debris, 14, 35–36, 38, 49, 51, 61–62, 65, 78, 98, 101–102, 105, 108–110, 116–117, 128, 142; Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park, 72, 141. See also destruction; heritage; impermanence Sanbao International Ceramics Village, 15, 122, 127, 136–138, 155, 168–169. See also Jingdezhen; Li Jianshen Sculpture Factory, 22–25, 27–28, 35, 55, 75, 81, 122, 169. See also collectivism; Jingdezhen; Liu Jianhua; Liu Yuanchang; mass production sexuality. See bodily experience; gender socialist realism, 20, 25, 28, 31, 34–35, 81, 200, 205; Rent Collection Courtyard, 20, 27–28, 31–33, 200, 238n21, 238n22, 238n24 Song dynasty, 61, 63, 74, 78, 80, 107–110, 113, 119, 135, 138, 153, 181, 228 Southwest Art Group, 29–30, 199–200; See also 85 Movement; Liu Jianhua; Mao Xuhui; Zhang Xiaogang souvenir. See memory Spitzer, Serge, 62, 82–83, 83fig., 84fig., 85. See also Ai Weiwei Stars, The, 73–74, 76; See also Wang Keping Tang dynasty, 61, 78, 92, 94, 106–109, 213 tattoos, 178, 210–213, 231, 233–234, 252n84. See also bodily experience; fashion; identity Tiananmen Square Massacre, 4, 7, 45, 52–53, 115, 144, 154, 175, 205–206, 218–220 tomb figurines. See death tourism. See heritage trade. See export transexperience, 6–7, 9, 14, 38–39, 167 translation, 6, 9, 24, 38, 69, 83, 88, 104, 123, 127–128, 132, 135, 225; and the untranslatable, 123, 126, 132, 135, 137, 147–148 travel, 5–7, 9–10, 12–13, 23, 26–27, 29, 33, 49, 53–54, 72, 75, 79, 82, 85, 87, 106, 121–122, 127–128, 131, 133, 136–137, 139–140, 149–150, 168, 176, 187, 192, 210, 212–213, 215, 217, 225, 227; and emigration, 3–4, 6–7, 15, 72, 122, 132, 149, 151, 154, 156, 160, 207, 220, 225, 231; and exile, 44, 74, 79, 127; and homecoming, 71, 78, 123, 127, 154

INDEX

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271

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urban redevelopment. See destruction; heritage Vase Project, The, 15, 22, 54–57 Venice Biennale. See cultural diplomacy Wang Keping, 73–74, 76. See also Stars, The Wu Hung, 16, 49, 92, 96, 102–103, 109, 141 Xu Bing, 8, 69–70, 88, 227 Xu Yihui, 176, 185, 187–189. See also Gaudy Art Xu Zhen, 191–192

272

65354int.indd 272

Yin Xiuzhen, 61, 68, 102–103 Yuan dynasty, 9, 62, 78, 80–82, 85, 90, 133, 215 Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park. See ruins Yunnan School, 199–200, 203 Zhan Wang, 61, 101–103, 113 Zhang Huan, 231 Zhang Xiaogang, 29–30, 199. See also Southwest Art Group

INDEX

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