The Rising Tide–not quite a review

I first mentioned Robert Adanto’s film Rising Tide (2008) in this blog early this year. I’ve not finally got my hands on it.  The film was produced in 2008, and features Chinese art and artists from Beijing, Shanghai, Los Angeles and New York. Following is a a rough form of my comments presented at the Rocky Mountain in Modern Language Association meeting early last month:

Rising Tide is a bold work, but not because it allows the filmmaker his own voice, subject to speculation, revision, polyphony in Chu Yingchi’s terms (on Chinese Documentary. Adanto does not appear in his film. He begins (via Gordon Chang, lawyer and author of the 2001 “coming collapse of China,” a not particularly prophetic work) that China is too vast to generalize about, and then aims to generalize. He does so, though, using contemporary art, most particularly contemporary video art, that of Cao Fei, Zhang O as well as photography of Yang Yong and others. In other words, the point of view of the work, bifurcated in Chang’s “China is coming to an end” and Victoria Lu’s (Creative Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai) more measured and certainly optimistic view, is prismatic. Authority is asserted and then dissolves, repeatedly, although a pervasive sense of menace (for Chang, the Chinese Communist Party) remains, increasingly unnamed, often associated with money, but ever ambivalent. The menace, if anything, is history itself, the violence of China’s recent past, a pressure seemingly connected with the current state of development, a new menace, sheer rapidity of change.

What comes out intact and clear from the otherwise mutually canceling perspectives of Adanto’s authorities is this element of change and its relationship to art. More specifically, and again beginning with Gordon Chang, but also including (predictably) such China arts-world figures as Colin Chinnery (then of Ullens) and Meg Maggio, former director of the Courtyard gallery in Caochangdi and others, is that artists are the best spokespeople for the changes taking place in China, the real documentarians, so to speak. Chen Qiulin, arguably the best example of this, and the most powerful to my mind in the film, frequently refers to herself as just such a documentarian. Adanto is not so much out of the way of this process, as the way itself for their somewhat uncanny integration. For in addition to the artists testimony, or even intimate shots of their working environments and people featured in, for instance, Alison Klayman’s recent work on Ai Weiwei, Adanto has used the artists own art, photography, and video in particular, to advance his edification project. The social point of view of the text, its authority, is thus delicately mashed-up with some highly potent in its own right aesthetic objects, objects which are seduced into the framework of “the document,” a setting at once befitting but also powerfully misplaced. Where Bill Nichols fourth-order voice, that of the filmmaker revealing him or herself in the network of perspectives s/he purports to document, Rising Tide , with a simple “courtesy of” (given gallery) shell games the voices to the point that the overlap fully drowns out the single authority. What emerges is a rich act of theft, a chaos that seems so clearly in tune with its subject that one senses significant, if perhaps ethically dubious, accomplishment.

Zhong Biao, photography, reality, and … the rest.

Working as well, of late, on a documentary film concerning Zhong Biao and the soon-to-be-demolished Blackbridge (Heiqiao) art district in Northeast Beijing.  The documentary project, its own configuration of possibilities and pitfalls, at the very least calls to mind the problem of re-presenting “reality” in some sense. And this “reality” leads me back to Zhong Biao’s method of using photographs as the basis for his creations.

The photographs, many of which he has taken himself, are like a database of raw information–elements or building block that form the basis of his. However, unlike bricks of concrete structures, the images are abstractions (excerpts), snapshots from “reality” on the other side of the lens that float freely in time and space. In years past, the photographic snippets appeared mostly in urban settings, often painstakingly reproduced in minute detail. Now, as Zhong Biao has moved to abstract method, the figures of his paintings appear amidst dynamic swathes of color and texture, as in this unfinished work:

Still the question arises: how do particular images rise to the forefront of the artist’s mind? In just a few short days during his visit to the Seattle area in 2006, Zhong Biao took 100s of pictures, a few of which are of my children:


 

Some of these have ended up in paintings, like “Mirage” 海市蜃楼 from 2009:

 

 

while others have not.  The key to his creative process lies in his selection, at any given point in time, of one image over another.