Monthly Archives: January 2012

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Zhong Biao, Commercialization, Liu Wei, and what is good in contemporary Chinese art

Liu Wei image from here

During Zhong Biao’s visit in December I found myself casting about for good questions to ask him. Once the “What are your influences?” “What materials?” “What process?”   –type inquiries were all behind us, there seemed to be need for going deeper into how he views artistic practice, particularly in China.  Never did I think  that such an obvious question (posed not by myself, for what its worth) would be so productive in this sense: “what’s good?”   I suppose I may have avoided such a question expecting Zhong to be difficult to pin down in terms of his likes and dislikes.  True enough, dislikes are not the type of thing he’s inclined to discuss, and I saw no point in pressing the issue.  What a surprise, then, when he effortlessly and emphatically took to the question of who paints well in China today.  He said, without missing a beat, Liu Wei 刘炜.

The ensuing conversation brought to mind the criticism leveled against Zhong from a number of quarters (that I wont identify in this setting), namely that he is too market oriented.  I’ve wrestled with this a bit, given that I would like to consider myself disinclined to interest in–much less promotion of–the blatantly commercial, and yet I’m fond of Zhong’s work.  In this regard, Zhong’s remarks about Liu Wei brought to light an important difference in his mind at least between what he does and what Liu Wei does.  Liu Wei is, according to Zhong Biao, purely a painter.  Zhong Biao, meanwhile, is an artist.  Liu Wei’s work is limited to the canvas, while Zhong’s extends out, to intercourse with the community, to performances of all kinds, to “projects” that are part installation, part promotion and finally part painting.   Zhong Biao is constantly engaged in what’s next in terms of the showing, the scene, the event.  What happens outside is at least as important as what happens on the canvas.

By contrast there is Liu Wei.  His work begins and ends on the confines of the canvas.  What happens there, though, and clearly what Zhong most appreciates, is the abandon, the transgression, the discovery of boundary, and the effortless, creative, and for Zhong even incredible disregard for the boundary.  Liu’s work speaks to Zhong’s creative spirit, and does so in ways Zhong cannot.

I had been vaguely familar with Liu’s work already, having an impression of ruddy faces and ill-kept teeth.  As I listened to Zhong, however, I realized that the artist is indeed extraordinary in his mercurial-ness: from those faces, which no doubt secured him some degree of audience, he moves to landscapes, and mixed-media. He moves, in fact, all about. And yet, as Zhong well observed, he remains on the canvas, where he belongs.  A painter’s painter whose work I will now be following along with Zhong Biao.

from here

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Zhong Biao Defines Harmonious Society

China Digital Times

 

In the soon-to-be-published Zhong Biao Dictionary one finds a definition of “Harmonious Society,” that slogan of contemporary Chinese politics that has led to much ironic comment about what it means to be “harmonized” by authoritarian force.  A portion of Zhong’s definition, in my tentative translation, as follows:

he

和谐社会，各就各位

【h. xi. sh. hu., g. ji. g. w.i】

①和谐，[俚]，河蟹。

和谐社会，各就各位。是指在一定

物质条件的保证下对多元化价值观

的无限认同，使个体的夙愿充分自

足，群体的利益无界共享。制度

上，保障生命在各自的轨道畅行，

又在社会系统的运行中相安无事，

为所欲为不逾矩.

…

HARMONY

In a harmonious society, each to its rightful place. Once material conditions have been met, limitless tolerance for infinite diversity of values emerges. Thus, reconciliation of desires of individuals and needs of the community is achieved. Institutionally speaking, there is the guarantee of security for individual trajectories, with social systems operating peacefully without incident, each to its own and without transgression.

…

:::::::::::::::::::::::

The entry, which seems optimistic to the point of irony, is worth noting as well for the text in red at the opening of the sequence.  “Harmonious Society” is glossed in two ways, first using the words in question he xie 和谐, and next using what is referred to in parenthesis as “colloquial” (俚) meaning “River Crab” 河蟹.   River crab, homophonous with “harmonious society,” is coinage of Ai Weiwei, and his “River Crab Festival” in Shanghai on November 7, 2010 was political performance art involving a tasty meal of crab served to, as far as I can tell from the video, hundreds of people.  The video is produced by An Xiao Mina and his available HERE. This event took place long after Ai had begun making himself unpopular with authorities, and shortly before the Shanghai studio which can be seen in the video was torn down by Shanghai authorities.

Zhong Biao, as has been noted, is an almost studiously apolitical painter.  Yet, he includes the “slang” for Harmonious Society in his definition, a rather provocative move, to my mind.   It remains to be seen if this line remains in the published work (I have only a late draft at my disposal).  We will see.

 

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Xi Chuan at Seattle Public Library–My Introductory Comments

Below are notes from my introduction to Xi Chuan’s poetry reading at Seattle Public Library:

Xi Chuan is an important poet, influential in a way that defies understanding by people who have not lived in a place like China.  I don’t mean to suggest China is really such an exceptional country/culture (although some may argue this).   I refer instead to the emergence of China on the contemporary world stage, at once construction site and laboratory for experimenting with massive socio/economic and yes even political change over the past three decades. These are the same three decades, roughly speaking, during which Xi Chuan has been active as a poet.

To be influential in this context means more than finding a way to cause other poets to follow one’s example in style or substance.  It is a matter of literally finding a viable language in which to speak.  Viability in terms of poetry relates to some form of authenticity, which means some form of” truth,” a fact which separates literature generally but poetry in particular from other realms of linguistic experience.  Think politics, where the opposite is the case—Chinese politics in particular (though recent debates in the United States makes one think of this country as well): here we experience language not as something predicated on viability (it needs no such bolstering) or authenticity.  Political language in China is not truth to power, it is power to truth.

Journalism, regrettably, is similarly ensconced in something un-viable, at least in terms of what is printed (virtually and non) in China. And this corruption of language is not restricted to Chinese case, as in outside journalism (by which I mean that written by authors in sites beyond China’s borders) we find the same problem. In Western-press writing about China we find language suffering less from calculated or otherwise strategized intent to mislead, and more from the unwitting and unfortunate failure to grasp what is really happening.

Finally we have what we might conveniently call “Market Language,” one predicated on advertisement, and one obviously not concerned with the “viable” per se (though “authentic,” however phony, is a typical rhetorical thrust).

If we try to understand these three examples in concert, we could do worse than turn to the political slogan, popular in China during the past few decades, meaning simply “Look to the future”

向前看

This, in an almost Rick Perry-esque “oops” comes out perfectly homophonously as “Look to money”.

向钱看

Both have been true of China in the last 30 years, and both are bad news for poetic language.

Thus, appreciating the word “important” where Xi Chuan is concerned should follow from a more general appreciation of the importance of poetry itself.  For this we can return to something pithy, Ezra Poundian:

“poetry is news that stays news”

and amend it to simply:

[Xi Chuan’s] poetry is news [about China] that stays news

Of course, we should be careful not to make Xi Chuan into mere news reporter for Chinese realities.  He is more than that.  He is a poet.

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XI CHUAN with PAUL MANFREDI at Seattle Public Central Library

http://www.elliottbaybook.com/node/events/jan12/xi

Start: 01/09/2012 7:00 pm

Co-presented with the WASHINGTON CENTER FOR THE BOOK AT THE SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY. A welcome Seattle return is made this evening by one of the foremost poets at work in China today, Xi Chuan. He read with Zhou Zan this past September at the Seattle Asian Art Museum as part of a U.S. tour for an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, Push Open the Window (Copper Canyon Press). Later in spring 2012, New Directions will publish the first major collection of his to appear in English, Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems, translated by Lucas Klein. A chapbook which would include some of this work, Yours Truly & Other Poems (Tinfish), may be on hand for this evening. “In 1988, when he was twenty-five, Xi Chuan and some friends launched an unofficial literary journal, Tendency. At the time he was translating Ezra Pound and Tomas Tranströmer, Czeslaw Milosz and Jorge Luise Borges, and his own writing suggests a corresponding sophistication and aesthetic range.” – Robert Hass, The Believer. Xi Chuan lives in Beijing, where he teaches classical Chinese literature at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His awards include the Modern Chinese Poetry Award, the Lu Xun Prize, and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature. With Xi Chuan this evening will be Pacific Lutheran University professor Paul Manfredi. This should be thoroughly engaging, as those who attended his September reading can attest. Free admission is on a first-come, first-serve basis. The Seattle Public Central Library is at 1000 Fourth Avenue (between Madison and Spring). For more information, please call Elliott Bay at (206) 624-6600, The Seattle Public Library at (206) 386-4636, or see www.spl.org.

$23.00

ISBN-13: 9781556593307
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Copper Canyon Press, 8/2011

$18.95

ISBN-13: 9780811219877
Availability: Special Order – Subject to Availability
Published: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 4/2012

Location:
Seattle Public Central Library
1000 Fourth Avenue
Seattle

, Washington98104United States

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Zhong Biao at Elliott Bay on Ai Weiwei and Freedom of Expression

As part of Zhong Biao’s visit, we organized a small panel discussion at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.  Speaking were Zhong Biao and Jen Graves, visual arts editorial writer for Seattle paper The Stranger.  I served as translator, as best I could.

The event was very well attended, given the short notice, and the conversation wide ranging.  Sooner or later (later, as it turns out), the topic almost inevitably turns to Ai Weiwei.  I was pleased, though, to have the opportunity to mouth-piece an alternative view to the one that is frequently expressed in Western press.  Zhong’s response to the Ai Weiwei question–if we might frame it simply as such–focused entirely on the idea of freedom.  In Zhong’s view, an abstract “freedom” is not something we possess, or even “fight for,” and certainly not something handed to us like a trophy.  Freedom is defined in contrast to (and therefore limited by) what constrains it.  Like jumping up and down. One strives for the freedom that is above us, the clear sky.  If, though, we were to actually get there, it becomes a very different story. The feeling of freedom we get with our leaping to higher elevation is actually provided by the force that pushes us down—gravity.  Minus gravity, we’re just adrift.  Ai Weiwei (in grass horse/fuck your mother images) can be seen leaping literally against this gravity. His power to do so figuratively, which in Ai’s case is all-important, is defined by the authoritarian gravity which he challenges day in and day out.

But back to Zhong’s comments.  The discussion about freedom led abruptly to Zhong’s view about Chinese artists (and intellectuals) generally. In typically definitive fashion, he identifies two types of artist/intellectual: the destructive and constructive.  Both types are necessary to advance artistic progress, which I might add seems to be taken by Zhong as essentially necessary.  Ai Weiwei is an exemplar of the destructive type. Ai stakes out this position vis a vis existing power structures. Having clearly identified this target, he then endeavors to blow them up.  If he does his work well–and it seems  in Zhong’s estimate that he does–he can bring down the entire structure.  Meantime, the other side working on building things up.  These two are mutually dependent as one would be meaningless without the other.

This dichotomy aside, Zhong and Ai strike me as having an interesting common element, namely the powerful consistency between what they believe and what they do as artists and as people.  For both there is hardly any daylight between their lives as artists and as people, for lack of a better world.  Ai’s case is well documented.  Zhong, though, shares in this perhaps more than one would imagine.  His photorealism, his abstraction, his symbols, and his opinions are all part of an integrated whole.  Hence, while Ai Weiwei is challenging the limits of politically acceptable speech, Zhong is exploring gravities of other sorts.

…..

Schoolyard Daredevil

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Zhong’s visit, a series

[following will be a number of posts about having Zhong Biao and his wife Tiantian at the house over holiday season.]

What’s Zhong up to?

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Zhong Biao is a thoughtful painter, to put it mildly.  Engaging him on just about any topic leads to summary comments that are pithy, “definitive.”  Like a philosopher, he seems determined to nail down the shortest but still generally true observation, one not bogged down by, for instance, particulars of political policy or even historical events.  His notions of “xing” 形 and “tai” 态  (underlying force of the universe and its occasional and ever adjusting manifestation in the phenomenal world–in reverse order that is) are a good case in point.

So what’s an excessively philosophical visual artist to do with all these ideas?  Obviously, define them.  Thus, coming shortly will be the Zhong Biao Dictionary in which, in just under 200 pages, he’s going to finally put all of this in print.  I’m inclined to wonder whether or not the project stems in part from attending so many openings of his works and being faced with so many on-the-spot questions that run gamut from cogent to utterly confused.  From now on when engaged by viewers of all sorts about new works hanging on a wall he can conveniently reply: “page 23.”  Or, and just starting at the beginning:   “A is for…”

ai

爱的誓言【.i de sh. y.n】

①爱的，[形]；②誓言，[名]；

，爱的誓言是为了当下的渴望

而透支未来的情感，虽给力却不

能寄望。

Ai

The Vow of Love

The Vow of Love borrows against future emotion

for present desire. It gives power,

but can never be anticipated.

___________

Of course, each of these definitions will be accompanied by an image.  In fact, Zhong is rather adamant that this is a work of art, and not a “dictionary.”  The above definition, for instance, is paired with the perhaps still less definitive image (in regrettably poor reproduction):

 

 

Regardless, the Dictionary is slated for publication in early 2012.  I will say more about it in coming posts.