Luo Qing’s Rewrite

Visual artist poet and scholar Lo Ching (Luo Qing) has been now and again inclined to rework famous pieces of the Chinese tradition. In most cases, the “rework” has to do with visual interpretations of the literary tradition, itself much overlapping with visual. In some cases, though, Lo also rewrites the poems, taking one jueju 絕句 line at a time as the basis for his own new poetic line. In the following poem, the very well known “Deer Hermitage” 鹿 柴  by Wang Wei, Lo takes the final image of sunlight penetrating a deep forest and illuminating moss, and militarizes it. Wang Wei’s poem is in bold, and Lo’s lines follow beneath.

空山不見人     (Empty mountain, no one seen)

因為我是原始太初
    Because I am the very first

第一個
                      Primeval animal

自覺為人的
             To become suddenly aware of my

獸

                                            Humanity

但聞人語響     (But human voices are heard)

因為我是大千世界
     Because I am the last person

最後一個
                      In the whole wide world still able

還能獸語的
                  To speak

人

                                                Animal talk

返景入深林     (Reflected light enters deep forest)

因為世上最後一線
     Because the very last thread of the world

爆炸光閃
                      Explodes in a flash

射穿我空洞肋骨的
     Penetrating deeply

深處                                            My bones and flesh

復照青苔上     (Again shinning on green moss)

因為整個黑暗的地球上
     Because what remains of the dark world

只剩下一小塊彈片
     Is but a bit of shrapnel, shimmering

在一層薄薄的青苔中
   Upon the thinnest layer

明滅                                            Of moss

Among the many versions of visual performance of the opening lines of this poem (empty mountain, no one seen), the one below is my favorites:

I like this image in particular for the way that the word for person (人) appears in the word for mountain (山) –where, in terms of the characters themselves it does strictly “belong”– is a bit lost even so, drifting about the bottom of the word, slightly off kilter. The two characters at the right, in fact, have come apart from themselves more or less entirely, with the center of emptiness falling down on to the mountain, leaving two watery dots above.

In terms of self-referentiality, a feature notably most out of sync with the Chinese literary-art tradition, there is the obvious presence of Lo’s ink stamp, again not where it “should be,” appearing in the center of the painting. This bold demonstration of self is deftly mitigated, however, by the even more central location of the word NO () that separates the two characters of Luo Qing’s name, becoming something like “Lo NO Qing,” or “Qing NO Lo,” or simple graphic (non-sequential) demonstration of negation.

Ai Weiwei documentary showing at Harvard Exit

Image 

Alison Klayman’s Never Sorry showed at Harvard Exit, to a good audience. My introductory remarks focused on what I expected to find in the film (as I’d not yet seen it) and what I expected would not be in the film. My expectations proved to be more or less on the mark in the following ways. The film was long on Ai heroics, and short on more subtle view of Ai’s relationship to his social and political context. The bravery of his (artistic) political stunts and his commitment to the people compellingly portrayed by, among others, Hung Huang, a media mogul who is a fascinating subject in her own right. But what really happens behind the scenes, and more nuanced view of Ai’s work in a global context (which is to say a somewhat more thorough appreciation of the documentary mode itself) is notably absent. Ai emerges as a kind of monumental structure, but the building blocks of that structure disappear in the process.  Indeed, it is the interest value of many of the “supporting cast” (one of my favorites being He Yunchang, about whom a documentary really should be made) that I find often exceeding the primary “subject” of Klayman’s documentary.

In any event, I found the most compelling moments of the Ai story to be short conversations about his son, born to a girlfriend (Wang Fen) rather than to his wife (Lu Qing). One element of good documentary filmmaking is to capture those moments when subjects are that wonderful blend of willingness to divulge information and fear of doing the same, and Ai is a beautiful study of ambivalence on this subject. Klayman’s ability to disarm his is both surprising and in and of itself worth the price of admission.

I must also confess that one impact of seeing the film on me, in contrast to what purports to be something of an attempt to galvanize efforts at effecting political change in China (how that is supposed to occur I’m not sure, but perhaps I’m a bit dense), has been to increase my concern for Ai’s safety. After all, in addition to all those adoring “associates” both near and far (a seemingly perpetually tearful mother Gao Ying, for instance), he now has a young son whose life would no doubt be better with a father than without one.

Ai Weiwei documentary making the rounds

 

Ai Weiwei. Photo by Ted Alcorn. A Sundance Selects release.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-cm-adv-ai-weiwei-20120801,0,7266384.story

“Never Sorry”

Ai Weiwei documentary appearing in theaters world-wide, and garnering much positive response for his work, and Alison Klayman’s.

What continues to surprise me in the unfolding of Ai’s work is the degree to which a more subtle understanding of contemporary China remains ever elusive to most media outlets, even very good ones. The principal blind-spot (for Chinese 盲点 ) for most journalistic authors is the notion that Chinese “authorities” are monolithic, such that Ai can have an ongoing struggle with “them.” The varieties of “authority” in China are many, and Ai does indeed engage regularly in poking them respectively in their eyes, stamping on their toes, and giving occasional wedgies. For this he has paid imprisonment, and now faces massive financial loss. That loss, however, should ever be understood in context of what he gains in global profile.

Another rather curious point about the LA Times article in particular is mention of “first major exhibition.” I suppose key word here is “major”, though 12 massive bronze heads traveling installed in New York City seems to me to have its “major” dimensions to it. In any event, the upcoming exhibition will hopefully occasion more subtle reading of Ai’s work.

Meantime, I will finally be able to see the documentary in Seattle this week. Hopefully some interesting conversation will be generated at the event itself, about which I can offer some report.

The Joys of Being Ai Weiwei

News of late of end of Ai Weiwei’s probation, and thus release from non confinement, which means that he is free (not exactly) to do as he likes (certainly not), unless that involves leaving the country (for instance to appear at his “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” retrospective).

Official documentation of such a momentous not-so-entire event is dropped to the ground in this photograph:

My thought is what a joy it must be to be an artist who can say so much by merely dropping a piece of paper to the ground and photographing it. The “series,” like his nude series, middle finger series, and others, plugs in to a repertoire of political performance art that seems so effortlessly meaningful.

This particular series (dropping) has been my favorite for its clever and so to-the-point exploration of value in contemporary Chinese setting, something which is also key to Ai’s legal troubles in terms of tax evasion. What, in other words, is the worth of a given Ai Weiwei artwork, who is decide, and what is to become of the fetishized object itself? One way of looking at contemporary Chinese experience, in fact, is a massive shift in value (UP) of a wide array of material objects, among them, and to return to the beginning of the series, antique Chinese art:

Short poems for contemporary world

Reading new short poems by Yan Li, now, and thinking that they are indeed an excellent (won’t say “best”) literary medium for a visually-oriented, multi-media barraged contemporary mind-space.

And with that thought, the recollection that short poems are anything but contemporary. There are of course the “short poems” 短歌 , a genre of Japanese poetry even more condensed than the globally well known haiku. And even in the modern period, the last century, during the ebbs and flows of modernism. Yagi Juichi’s 八木重吉 (1898-1927) poem from early in the twentieth century:

If you lay a plain koto
in this brightness
it will begin playing quietly,
unable to endure autumn’s beauty.
(from ‘A Plain Koto’)
 

Regardless of when or where, the condensation increases the pressure of attention, so that every syllable (even material of the words themselves) come into focus. The experimental of these have been frequent occurrence as well. Taiwan poet Xia Yu’s 夏宇 “Reading” 閱讀, for example:

舌頭上
一隻蟹
On the tongue’s tip
A crab

Yan Li has been composing what he calls ‘poetry gum’ since the early 1990s, and has by this time amassed literally thousands of such short poems. They serve multiple purposes, but for the most part I would say they are occasions to change perspective. As the poetry gum series is alternatively titled: ‘polyhedral mirror’ (otherwise known as a ‘disco ball’) refracting images in ways that we don’t expect, can’t see coming, but are lucid in certain light. Here I offer a few with one of my favorite Yan Li paintings, “Mother and Child”

 
 
无论你是什么样的炸药
语言都能够充当导火线
No matter what kind of explosive you are
Language can serve as the fuse
 
 
理想所搭建的积木之城
在人与人的互动中倒塌出来的形状
就是我们如今生活在其中的城市
A city of wooden blocks is erected by our ideals\
Through give and take they tumble into a certain shape
And this is the metropolis we live in
 
 
人类有打动自己的能力
人类不可能做得比人类更坏
人类是制造科学的一种工具而已
人类必须发出些声音地
从人类的身旁走过去
Humanity is capable of touching itself deeply
Humanity cannot do any worse than humanity
Humanity is just a tool for manufacturing science
Humanity can’t help making sounds
As it walks on past humanity
 
 

Abstract art/poetry in contemporary China

The question of abstraction hinges on the question legibility or intelligibility, with communication of visual idea divided semiotically between the semic and asemic forms of expression. Works can be plotted along a spectrum, and I am particularly interested in relationship between word art and visual art in this context. But before this, perhaps a reference to the very eloquent defense of the illegible or ‘asemic’ side of the spectrum, provided in this case by T.J. Clark who was writing in this case with regard to the innovation of Jackson Pollock:

What Pollok invented from 1947 to 1950 was a repertoire of forms in which previously marginalized aspects of self-representation –the wordless, the somatic, the wild, the self-risking, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled, the “existential” the beyond or before our conscious activities of mind—could achieve a bit of clarity, and get themselves a relatively stable set of signifiers

(T.J. Clark, Farwell to an Idea, 308)

Such a stable set of signifiers the like of which Clark describes has long been in existence in ink painting and calligraphy in China. I am reminded of  Zhang Xu 張旭 and Huai Su 懷素, two great Tang calligraphers whose works exhibit asemic qualities (in Zhang’s case often because he was just drunk enough to “stop making sense”).

Huai Su

Zhang Xu

In the contemporary era, the tradition continues, reinvigorated by by a century or so of modernist practice in the West, but fundamentally no departure from the eigth century. This brings me back to my (ever!) ongoing (contemporary) visible (Chinese) poetry project.  I am trying to work out a nexus of visuality, Chinese poetry, modernism, and contemporary Chinese aesthetics. A thorny mix, perhaps, but conveniently summed up in the following image by Li Zhan’gang 李占剛 .  Here Li is echoing the Chinese literary tradition in calligraphically performing a well-known poetic text in this case namely, “A Generation” 一代人 by Gu Cheng 顧城

First, the poem,

黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛,我確用它尋找光明

The dark night has given me darkened eyes And I use

   them to look for light

Next, the calligraphic execution of the poem by Li Zhan’gang:

 

the tradition of re-inscribing a well-known poem can now be introduced into the realm of contemporary poetry. It is now possible to “return” to that work, to borrow from yet another medium, and “harmonize” 2009 sentiment (when Li inscribed it) with the 1979 “original.”  This in effect gives legs to a now considerably more mobile visual-verbal tradition, one which evolves anew into the future precisely for its solid anchor in the past.

New Abstract exhibition

by

Zhang Jianjun 张健君

from Mindmap Exhibition, curated by Gao Minglu

Another exhibition of contemporary Chinese abstract art, this one at Pearl Lam in Hong Kong. The historical time frame provided in title (80s to the present) seems a more standard fixture of literature about Chinese abstract art, but Gao Minglu’s brief description on the website intriguingly suggests that the last 10 years have seen the substantive development (thus change) in abstract art in China. I’ll be following this exhibition to see what Gao suggests accounts for these changes.

Also, and not to pick on what looks an exciting exhibition, but what’s up with the name? The Pearl Lam website has Mindmap, but I find Mindspace elsewhere, as in Depauw advert below. *Anything goes* with “mind” ?

MIND SPACE: MAXIMALISM IN CONTRASTS
SEPTEMBER 7 – DECEMBER 7, 2012
This exhibition of mixed media installations portrays a new realm of artistic expression.  Mind Space introduces 4 Chinese abstract artists who convey the concept of “Maximalism” to a global audience.  Maximalism is a term coined by curator Dr. Gao Minglu, one of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese contemporary art.  Maximalism expresses the meditative mind of the abstract artist during the creation process, emphasizing the spiritual experience of art-making.  The creations of Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Yu, Lei Hong, and He Xiangyu are a dialogue between artist and nature, an inventive response to a rapidly changed material world.
 
 

Zhang Yu
Scroll Fingerprint, 2008
Ink on Xuan paper
Courtesy of Pearl Lam Galleries, Shanghai, China