Monthly Archives: December 2010

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the concrete poem

Back to work on poetry again after what seems a long foray into art-only (+ politics, I guess) topics.  Of late, current writing concerns self-portraits in word and image, with an ancillary focus on the concrete poem.  The latter is inspired by the work of Luo Qing 羅青 , a poet-painter from Taiwan who has also done extensive research on modern Chinese poetry and Chinese culture. In the course of exploring Luo’s work I was further introduced the the following 1965 “Self-Portrait” by Chinese concrete poetry pioneer Zhan Bing 詹冰（綠血球 Taipei: 笠, 1965)


The image-poem is composed of three Chinese characters.  The top xing 星 or star, the bottom hua 花 or flower, and the center lei 淚 or tear.  The reading being something along the lines of : the revolution of the natural life cycle, from the universe-level life of stars to the locally observed course of single flowers, brings about a sadness in the lyrical subject, the “unchanging” center of ongoing impermanence.

Apart from what can be said about this intriguing work, I post it here only to complain about a strikingly contrasting reprint I’ve recently discovered.  The new version appears in Zhan’s collected works (Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Wenxueguan, 2008) as such:

The difference between the two versions of this “same” poem is extraordinary.  Whether or not the poet himself was involved in the selection of font or page layout is unknown to me (though I will endeavor to find out).  Still, the former and presumably original version strikes me as more “accurate” in the graphic sense, which is to say that the look of the Chinese fonts, with the much larger and calligraphically arrayed “tear” is more intimate, vulnerable, and affective than the colder and far more angular reprint.  There is also too much space surrounding the single tear.  It could perhaps be argued that the second version reinforces the loneliness of human existence (space) and the remote nature of a relentlessly cyclical Nature (including emotional states such cycles give rise to), but I find these concepts already well-enough expressed in the first version.

Nonetheless, this concrete poem is a good case for meditation on the relationship between word-image-meaning.  That some editor (or even the poet) thought this was the same poem strikes me as in and of itself worthy of note.

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Wu Yuren

Go to fullsize image
If its any consolation to Liu Xiaobo (though I expect its not), he is in good company as so many are locked up in Chinese prisons on trumped up charges. In this case, I’m thinking of Wu Yuren 吴玉仁 , imprisoned this summer and now still in jail for allegedly injuring the finger of a police officer who, by many accounts, was beating him at the time.

In fact, Wu’s wife, a Canadian citizen now no doubt fairly frantic over the extended incarceration of her husband, believes the imprisonment has as much to do with a political demonstration Wu and others (among them Ai Weiwei….again) engaged in in February 22, 2010 than it does with the specific altercation at a Beijing police station that he was charged with in June. The focus of the February demonstration was the imminent destruction of the Chuangyi Zhengyang Art Zone 创意正阳艺术区 in the Chaoyang district of Beijing, a destruction which was preceded by the beating of many of the artists residents of the area by “Black Society” thugs 黑社会 .  The event was reported in this July New York Times piece by Edward Wong, weeks after Wu’s June imprisonment

Wong’s account follows others, including Yan Xianniang, blogger for Sina.com describes:

事件起因于今日凌晨2点左右，位于北京朝阳区的创意正阳艺术区发生强制拆迁，据目击者称来了近200个黑社会的流氓，带着凶器，槁棒，大砍刀，面戴口罩，打伤艺术家七人。

[the incident occurred this morning at 2 am, when eye-witness accounts describe 200 or so Dark Society agents arrived with bats and knives and wounded seven artists living in the Chuangyi Zhengyang Art District in Chaoyang area of Beijing]

and in the weeks leading up to the destruction, “large character” posters the like of:

[inhumane developers have cut our heat and electricity--image from report on event from 99 Art Web ]

I’m interested in this event among other things because Zhong Biao’s studio, mentioned elsewhere in this blog, is another Beijing-area art district slated for destruction in the not-too-distant future. Zhong himself seems to face this fact with a resigned shrug which is no doubt partially why no one has seen fit to send goons to his front door. Nonetheless, how others in his compound may respond to the arrival of bulldozers remains to be seen.

Yet an important point of contrast: the Zhengyang installation was raised to make way for new development.  The Blackbridge area is slated to become an ever-widening ‘greenification’ program led by the Beijing government.  Trading art for trees…

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798 Website

image from ArtSignal

For the few readers not already aware, the 798 Art District in Beijing is wonderful thing to behold, by which I mean a location in China which brings about jaw-dropped wonder.  The sheer scale of the installation, with its buildings and restaurants, galleries, auction houses, and so many other art-related facilities, is already a cause for deep impression.  But in addition to this typical grandeur, one also gains a strong historical sense of where this place has come from, as the original buildings of the 1950′s East German-funded technology factory center are still largely intact, right down to the strangely airborne heating and plumbing system which lines many of the “foot-traffic only” (in quotes because it is traveled by both feet and wheeled vehicles of just about every stripe).  The presence of these structures, from infrastructure “on up” so to speak coupled with the swanky new installations both artistic and shamelessly commercial somehow so entirely encapsulates cutting-edge contemporary Chinese culture that, for expediency sake, I can’t think of a better place to visit for one who might be interested in “what’s going on” in China today.

And by visit I mean, importantly, virtually.  Simply by hitting this link one arrives at a 798 digest, something I have been contemplating since my first visit to the area in 2003, when it was a mere Maoist blueprint of what it is today.  I had often thought, perhaps because I’ve never felt that I had adequate time to really investigate what is happening in this area, a fact compounded by the explosive growth, such that each time I return its to an exponentially larger territory populated by so many new sites (largely built upon the still warm ashes of the previous tenants).  So to have a website that lists artists and galleries, gives a bit of historical information, and links to art centers worldwide, that “pulls it all together” is something I’ve been looking for.

But what are the implications?  To have centrality reduces clearly the wily nature of the place, and its wily nature is so essential to its position on the cutting edge.  Many artists (Huang Rui, one of the first residents of 798 “before its fame”) are fed up with the commercialism that saps all creative energy and are obliged to leave, and many similar art districts have grown up around 798 in Beijing, not to mention other cities. As the above banner (from the website homepage) makes clear, the market is the driving force of this operation, and the operation with the creation of this website, now seems to have a driver.

Just who this driver is is a matter of some interest.  The “contact us” leads to Hong Kong, which is unsurprising given Hong Kong’s leadership in the promotion of Chinese contemporary art extending back into the 1980s.  China Avant-garde, one of the earliest exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art (though a full 10 years following the stars 1979 exhibition in Beijing) was largely made possible by Hong Kong support.

So the website comes as little surprise, and is certainly welcome from the point of view of the would-be visitor who does not have a week, month, or year to spend in Beijing.  That said, the negative implications of putting the entire area up for sale will also be observed in this blog, among other places.

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who’s your enemy?

what is lost in the conversation about government control of artistic (and other) expression in Chinese context is, basically, all the rest. of course, there are those like Ai Weiwei whose primary concern is the quality of political discourse in the public sphere.  there are many, though, who are otherwise concerned.  The dangerous, or just bad, assumption I find in much reporting on China is that the “other” concerns are somehow secondary to the strictly and actually very narrowly defined political.  Perhaps even more to the point, the more subtle forms of political dissent, which are in the long run more effective precisely because the elude censorship, are more worthy of attention than, say, street demonstrations or self-sacrificing political maneuverings.

Looking at Xu Yong’s 798 Space photography exhibition from April, 2010, for instance, we find an expert blurring of lines:

 

 

A Tiananmen so rendered is free to accrue meanings more broad and resonant than any particularized act of rebellion might (useful as those might be).  Similarly, the oft-reviewed tank image (1989 student protests) undergoes almost complete dissipation, again opening it up to more subtle readings.

 

 

Not that Xu always works with this blurred method.  His last exhibition in the same space was of a different variety, although one which I find even more powerfully interventionary.  For while the Euroamerican West is clamoring for more capitalist-based liberalization of Chinese society, old features of a market economy are taking shape.  One case in point being the relatively rampant sex culture that develops apace with nouveau-riche Chinese business experience.  It is this that Xu Yong 徐勇, teamed up with bar hostess and artist Yu Na 俞娜 explore in their exhibition “解决方案“

 

 

I would argue, along with many others, that one of the real threats to Chinese artists comes ironically from the very free-market that underpins the entire exercise of expression in the contemporary period.   The strategy for many (extending back into Political Pop of the 1980s) has been to comment ironically on the same market that, a strategy which has served artists well for the past twenty years or so.  Now, however, having taken over entirely from the Maoist-era art production machine, we see a similar machine-like cranking out works according to a different but no less confining dictum: “make what you want, as long as it sells.”

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Zhong Biao’s recent work

I was recently sent a collection of images which are part of a compilation of Zhong Biao’s recent work, no doubt in conjunction with an upcoming showing (I have yet to confirm this). His most recent (2010) works are demonstrating the same mix of his hyper-realist, digital photographed-based painting with pure abstraction that he began in 2008.  The result continues to be quite positive, even an improvement. For instance.

The title 水调歌头  refers to an ancient poetic form (Song dynasty).  It was used famously by Mao Zedong in a 1965 poem.  The occasion was Mao’s famous swim in the Changjiang River (Yangtze), which he used to demonstrate his ongoing good health in the face of stiff political opposition.

I saw this particular image in process when I visited Zhong in his studio in September (photograph October 8 in this blog). He’s added some children, and some ghostly faces.  Otherwise, the composition is the same.  In my conversation with Zhong about his approach to particularly abstract elements of his canvas, he explained that it was really a matter of establishing a balance of planes of the image.  Once these are secure, a process which could take anywhere from an instant to a month, the additional imagery would easily find its place.

Clearly, there is an architectural, or perhaps just spatial, aspect to this approach (common enough to all visual art).  What may be Zhong’s singular accomplishment is melding these planes with particularly the structures, contours, and planes of the human body.  One of the best examples of this melding (bird included) would be Today (今天) :

 


acrylic on canvas, 400 x 280
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There’s that line between “activist” and “aritst”?

Quite by accident it would appear that two major strands of this blog have intersected: 8 days ago Ai Weiwei was on his way to attend the Liu Xiaobo Nobel Awards ceremony when he was detained at the Beijing airport. As usual, his film crew was on hand to record this EVENT, a fact which obviously suggests that he fully expected what was waiting for him at the airport before he headed out the door. This does not detract from the political theatre of the event. Indeed, looking also back at Ai’s August 12, 2010 attempt to confront the police who viciously beat him a year previously (video HERE), we see something of a consistent pattern developing: deliberate drawing out of representatives of state apparatus with careful (often undetected) placement of a lens to record them engaging in pointless acts of oppression. These clips then become the platform for Ai’s observations of how misguided government policy really is, often on English-language news broadcasts.

Last week’s video, however, is certainly not top-of-the-line political theatre.  In fact, its vapid on so many levels, from the entirely clueless response of the airport official (who only observes “you’re not allowed” to film here—a prohibition common to most airports) to the actually quite polite and equally non-threatening denial of passage that we hear—and only hear—Ai subjected to later in the clip. In fact, the woman who tells Ai that he cannot travel probably has no idea who he is. Clearly, at least, she doesn’t much believe that that allowing him to go will “harm national security” (the video’s title, by the way).

In any event, and on balance, I’d say we’re approaching the point when Ai Weiwei transitions from artist to activist.  Of course, the zero-sum, or mutually exclusive implication of that sentence is questionable—how many the venerable artist-activists in human history, and how many of them in China.  Indeed, the literati figure, well schooled in classics and fully imbued with a “art for society’s sake” 文以載道 mentality, is by definition (or at least by some definition) a social activist.  Yet, in the contemporary Chinese setting, the artist, particularly one as globally inflected as Ai, often curtails his or her ability to connect with a constituency.  I don’t mean just a Chinese constituency (which is commonly the argument against their legitimacy), but ANY constituency.  This is because by and large in the Euramerican West what Ai “means” is thorn in side of the Chinese government regardless (indeed, without “regard”) of his actual works.  In this case his status as activist amounts to a kind of barrier, obscuring his works from engagement or even the visibility they often deserve.

Of course, less than “curtailing” this can certainly be more a suspension of Ai’s contribution to the world of art per se.  He no doubt knows what he’s doing, and exchanging hats (because wearing these two simultaneously does not work) is certainly his prerogative. I just find myself wondering how much good (call it “better”) work might otherwise appear if Ai were to shift activities from politics back to making art.


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Between artist and architect

Continuing my theme of artists and architects.  It is well-known that Ai Weiwei was involved in the creation of the “Bird’s Nest” structure for the Beijing Olympics.  In my most recent trip to Zhong Biao’s studio, I find that he, too, has invested in architectual building software and is “advising” on, if not flat out creating, designs for structures himself.  In this case, it is a small development on the banks of the Lake Erhai in Yunnan Province.  The lake is increasingly trendy recreational spot, particularly for cultural producers in the Southwest.  Here a typical photo:

 

The Erhai Lake in Yunnan Province

 

Zhong Biao was kind enough to share with me the current version of his work on the project.  At the moment, it appears as follows:

 

 

 

I find most intriguing are the glass cubes which occupy the top floor and center of the structure.  The same from another vantage point:

 

 

 

shows how one could pass beneath the glass-encolsed sitting area.  Another intriguing question is how the structure would function (as far as I can tell the developers are still wrestling with this issue).  The children and dog in foreground of second image (no doubt selections from a template provided with the program) would suggest (perhaps?) single-family?  The various configurations of chairs and tables, meanwhile, suggest outdoor cafes, or other types of recreational spaces.

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architecture in art

But perhaps more than the facts of contemporary architecture itself (interesting enough), I find artistic engagement with the built environment to be one of the most compelling in China right now.  Contemporary artists whose language is even in part urban imagery have at their disposal a wealth of chronotopic possibility that is, because of China’s scale and pace of development, unprecedented. Zhong Biao, whose work I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog and whose success depends in large part on how he is able to provide acutely real and yet highly stylized versions of contemporary urban experience, often features buildings as ideological structures. They are “figures” of China’s modern history, whether as traditional compounds slated for demolition, skyscrapers symbolizing the arrival of new economic policy (and prosperity), or just piles of rubble, whose implications are rich but rather difficult to paraphrase.  In the following, entitled “Catchers in the  Rye”, a classic urban-rural contrast is in effect:

 

 

 

More subtly, the detritus of rapid development is first caught in his digital camera (one of the major elements of his creative process) as follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

and then rendered, charcoal, and acrylic on canvas, in the image: “Body Temperature”

 

 

 

 

 

Zhong’s approach is to combine images like the recently destroyed building above and an unmade bed in striking combination. I’ve described (Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Vol 9, #2, pp 8-21) the effect of such juxtaposition as uncanny, as the artist manages to tap deeply and simultaneously into what is both strange and also oddly familiar.  His ability to achieve such resonate combinations has a lot to do with growing up in this particular generation of China’s urban development.