Monthly Archives: June 2011

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Meeting Huang Rui

In June also managed to cross paths with Huang Rui, founder of the 798 arts district in Beijing and on-again-off-again agitator for freedom of expression in China. As is no doubt often the case when encountering such luminaries, one is usually impressed by their simplicity, humility, and straightforwardness. Yet, as ArtSpeakChina has it:

Huang Rui (黄锐) is one of China’s most respected and controversial contemporary artists. Since co-founding The Stars Group in 1979, Huang has been involved in numerous debates over the need for free expression. Despite living in self-exile for close to twenty years, Huang Rui is considered one of the founding members of China’s contemporary art movement.

Other issues aside, I still marvel at 798 every time I go there.  Huang’s contribution was early on modest; in effect, he needed a convenient place to work and the district that is now 798 was an empty nest of old factories awaiting demolition.  Of course, in years following (2005-2007) Huang’s organization skills came into full force, with major international arts festivals located at 798, followed by major struggles with authorities unnerved by massive foreign investment into such entrepreneurial activity, arts related or not.  Thus, Huang’s operation was shut down, 798 handed over the Beijing government, and Huang has since moved, for the moment, to a neighboring district named Huangtie (a few miles north).  Meanwhile, 798 continued to boom, if by boom we mean a proliferation of all manner of shop.  On most days, merely walking down the nominally pedestrian streets is a bit of a challenge.  The question of how we read such a success is an open one.  I know Huang Rui for one has rather mixed feelings.

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Naked Chinese (in literature and art)

Yang Feiyun 杨飞云

Nude in Front of Canvas

Oil on canvas, 100 x 83 cm, 1988

Ai Weiwei’s forays into nudity have me thinking of late about nudity in Chinese art and literature. In fact, I’m reminiscing a bit back to my first arrival in China (as a student largely ignorant of Chinese) in 1989, a few months after the Tiananmen Square incident of June 4th, but also a few months after the closing of the “first ever works of the Chinese Nude Oils Exhibition” in which the image above appeared.  The connection between these two points is striking.  Since at least 1984, the official campaign against “spiritual pollution” took such imagery as its target. Nonetheless, artists and others continued to defy this impossibly vague prohibition and by June of 1989 the general swell of public-driven demand for liberalization across institutions from the purely political to completely aesthetic can be said to have congealed into a single “movement.”

Subsequently, though, everyone goes their separate ways, with Ai Weiwei making a name for himself by, among other things, taking pictures of himself and friends in the nude.  Little remarked in the circulation of these images would be the somewhat more notable example of Ma Liuming, as photographed by Rong Rong in the Chinese “East Village.”  Below, even more famously, on the Great Wall:

MA LIUMING

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Meanwhile, the fact that the 1988 exhibition was nothing like the “first ever” is the historical anomaly I often ponder when looking at the remarkable way that Chinese contemporary art and literature have developed in the last 20 years. It is an ongoing curiosity for me to note the ways in which the contemporary Chinese scene 1. looks like the 1920s and 30s and 2. seems to be studiously unaware of this historical consistency. An additional disconnect can be found, moreover, in terms of the literary and artistic worlds.  For while this exhibition was taking place in 1988, the shift toward Third Generation Poetry was well underway, and shortly thereafter, the birth of “Lower-body Poetry” led by, among others, Yin Lichuan 尹丽川

点击进入尹丽川详细介绍页

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The challenges to sensitive sensibilities of government censors and general public alike are equally disturbed by the words of Yin Lichuan as any visual artist, Ai Weiwei among them.  Here in excellent translation by Stephen Bradbury:

I Still Can’t Get My Head Around Why

time and again
my flesh goes out the door without me
to do whatever it damn-well pleases
like getting hot and heavy
in a bathroom stall with some joker
I wouldn’t as a rule give the time of day to
before I break down into a jagging fit
while the real me is left stranded in some absurdly public forum
going on and on about god-knows-what
in some trivial dispute with a horde of characters
who aren’t even there

at other times I find
my flesh possessed
by someone else’s
as if I had become another person
and I’m the perfect model of decorum
as courteous and deferential as a guest

2002/10/7

But all this goes back much further.  In terms of literature, the poetry of Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 in the middle 1920s was scandalous。 And even before this, famed painter Liu Haisu, way back in 1914, was the instigator of the first (arguably) self-consciously NUDE controversy in the Chinese art world。

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Which brings us back to the contemporary scene, but not the contemporary of Ai Weiwei, precisely. I simply marvel at the way a contemporary (interminable?) conversation continues about the relationship between modernity, nudity, and obscenity, and continues typically as though none of this has ever been said before.

(fuck your mother)

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当下 －－Dinner at Karin’s

For those who wonder how contemporary art in China “works” (as I have on occasion), the answer is, for those familiar with China, not very surprising–eating.  Elaborate dinners are the tool of choice for artists and their enthusiasts, and by enthusiasts I mean principally those who buy and sell art.  The hosts of such soirees are in other words vital components in the mechanics of contemporary Chinese art world, and an excellent example of such a host is Karin Chenlin, curator, collector and self-professor “Life Artist.”

We visited Karin’s home/studio in the Caochangdi district of Beijing the night prior to our return to Seattle.  The meal went on for hours, as is typical (day break on most occasions), and was as voluminous as it was excellent.  Zhong Biao’s paintings (among other works) hung on the walls, some of which had been brought in for the occasion of the dinner itself, and small birds twittered freely about the small bamboo grove situated in the middle of the living room.

Conversation at such events is wine-fueled, philosophical, and almost studiously un-political.  But above all, and what is perhaps most striking about this group of successful Chinese artists and art lovers, is the absence of a plan.  The “organization of distances,” to quote early twentieth-century poet Bian Zhilin, is an appointment (never early morning), perhaps a plane reservation, typically no more than a day or two away. As I inquire of this group about the more distant future, the like of which one might commit to a calendar, I get blank stares in return.  ”We live in the moment” 当下. Apparently, that’s not where my question lies.

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Ai Weiwei released

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The big news has arrived.

Here the beginnings of an editorial on the subject.  More to come soon, no dout:

“Ai Weiwei in Context”

On the news of the release of Ai Weiwei we all breathe a sigh of relief. Still, its worth noting that this relief is going to be felt more acutely in the West than in any place in China, even by the Chinese artists whose fortunes are most closely tied to Ai’s. To understand this we need to think about Ai’s work in the larger context of contemporary Chinese art, something which news media seem stubbornly disinclined to do. Thorough consideration of such a context not only clarifies understanding of the contemporary Chinese art scene, but is also more in the spirit of Ai Weiwei’s work both as artist and activist than any petition signing, street demonstrations or other political posturing could be.

Further questions to be addressed:

what is the role of global media in this process (both in getting Ai into prison in the first place, and also in getting him released).

what is going on in contemporary Chinese art presently that will go entirely unnoticed because of the barrage of reporting on the Ai case?

In the end, what was accomplished?

 

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Wang Qiang (Mai Cheng) or, Two Poetic Nights in Dalian

I met the poet Mai Cheng 麦城 (pen name of Wang Qiang 王强, left, pictured here with Yan Li 严力) a number of years back in Seattle, which is to say totally out of his element.  I met him again two weeks ago, this time in Dalian, his very own city.  By ‘his very own’ I mean that the man seems to own the city, and not only because he is a wealthy real estate developer,  wealthy enough in fact that he doesn’t bother to develop much anymore.  I say “owns” because his command of his environment, via the highly understimated medium of the language of poetry, is near complete.  Wang Qiang is, in other words, a successful contemporary Chinese business man who also happens also to be Mai Cheng, one of the best poets of his generation.

Take, for instance, “After a Dream Passes Over”

A dream paved my way to the city
A glimpse provided by a surge
From an out-of-date battery
Showed a different view of my native ground
The silence on the left side of the road
Persuaded the silence on the right
By order of the street light
A Glass elevator
Slowly lifted my social standing
And the marriage that fell in line behind it
Was bottled by pop songs from Taiwan
With their imported melodies
As Theresa Teng’s singing style
Moved from outer to inner regions
There I was, sitting at the most reflective part
Of a transparent screen
Watching mannerisms of wealth enter and leave
My gaze was hijacked
By lurid signs winking through glass
But behind that gaze
Was yet another gaze
A teenager’s red mini-skirt
Scorched by toughness under her skin
Opens a split at the seam
The bartender measures precisely
Two densities of liquor in a glass
A woman pours liquor for a man
His spinning head leaps toward her recesses
In places where nightfall lies in heaps
New darkness embraces old darkness
Spurred by the dream, I try on a new status
Leather shoes, neckties, trench coat
Like a turned-off lamp
Turned on once again
I hurry after another lamp’s light
At a crossing the signal light
Brings my dream to a halt
Along with the self that rambled in dreams
Now night-blue air stretches before me
I try to use it, to elevate the night to higher quality
Then, over the canyon of discarded experience
To make the leap
To go or not to go?
After the dream passes over
(translation is by Denis Mair and appears in Selected Poems: Mai Cheng [London: Shearsman Books, 2008], pp 57-59)

Sight is the operative sense in the work, appropriately for the city, particularly at night.  Mai Cheng is seeing–mini skirts and skin, liquor glasses, glass elevators, and street lamps. But he is also seen, in new clothes, in an orderly marriage, in reflections.  While occupying a rather difficult space of both agent and object of gaze, he can also be found listening carefully, to pop songs, and to the commanding sound of silence that both frames his native ground, again street level, and opens it up as a “night-blue air” that remarkably “stretches” before him.  This unbroken transition from the concrete to the abstract, a rising to higher quality over “discarded experience” seems so familiar, so apt, even for the reader who is none of the things Mai Cheng is.

There is no question that the “value” of Mai Cheng’s voice can be in part attributed to his financial success, a fact which pervades a contemporary Chinese society reduced too often to crass calculations and cost-benefit analysis.  In such a context, if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.  And poetry doesn’t sell.  On the other and I believe equally important hand, the successful business wo/man in contemporary China is increasingly in need of poetry, and all that poetry symbolizes.  The question, I suppose, is when that need for poetry becomes more acute (such that poetry might in fact jus sell), will there be anyone there to write it?  At the moment, fortunately, Wang Qiang is on the scene.   Let’s hope he lasts.

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Heiqiao Art District 黑桥艺术区

Our time in Beijing this trip was replete with social engagements.  These centered upon Blackbridge ( 黑桥) district, where Zhong Biao’s studio stands as the first installation going back to 2005.  Since then, roughly 400 artists have moved into the area, making for a vibrant social scene to go along with the already well-developed arts center at 798 roughly 5 kilometers away.  Despite this vibrancy, Blackbridge is slated for destruction in the next two years, something that will result in extraordinary level of wasted resources and a grand shuffle of the artists currently residing there.  Some photographs:

There seems to be no chance that the impending destruction will be canceled.  The reason, quite simply, is that this area was never zoned for such living spaces to begin with.  Indeed, it is not at all clear that the authorities would refuse to grant permits for such an art district.  Among other things, it provides, at least for the moment, a very successful economy, with local and foreign investment and a wide array of jobs ranging from the high tech to the entirely unskilled.  Even so, it would be necessary to completely destroy all of the un-permitted building before this could happen, which is something the artists themselves are not likely to accept (they’d likely rather leave and rebuild elsewhere, if rebuilding is a requirement).

The appeal of Blackbridge, meanwhile, is that it is perfectly situated close to 798 art district, which is now a major center of contemporary art globally speaking, but not so close that the daily dose of gallery openings, concerts, and even corporate shows (with major car manufacturers, for instance, choosing 798 as launching pad for new products) that actually producing art becomes an impossibility.  The lack of government oversight is another appealing attribute, and the single greatest reason behind the thriving social scene that Blackbridge is becoming.  All of this will come to an end soon enough, though, at which point another boom in creative building in some as yet undeveloped land not far from Blackbridge will no doubt be underway.