Eco-art History in East and Southeast Asia 1527522172, 9781527522176

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Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia

Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia Edited by

De-nin D. Lee

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia Edited byDe-ninD. Lee

This book first published 2019

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing

in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright© 2019 byDe-ninD. Lee and contributors

Cover image by Jaug Hanjong (1768-1815) Image from The National Museum of Korea

All rights for this book reserved. No part ofthis book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior pennission ofthe copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-2217-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-2217-6

For

�

{3f(: Sebastien, Ronan, and Kieran.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xvii Introduction .............................................................................................. xix De-nin D. Lee Chapter One Re-Reading Imagery of Tilling and Weaving in the Context of the Little Ice Age Sooa 1m McCormick

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Chapter Two Half the Picture: Korean Scholars and the Environment in the Early Nineteenth Century Nathaniel Kingdon

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Chapter Three Making the Art Object Disappear: Roberto Villanueva's Response to the Anthropocene Midori Yamamura

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Chapter Four Zhang Hongtu and Domesticated Landscapes in Chinese Painting De-nin D. Lee

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Chapter Five Bco-Art Histories as Practice: Woodcut and Cuttings of Wood in Island Southeast Asia Lucy Davis (The Migrant Ecologies Project)

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Table of Contents

Chapter Six An Art Historical Ecology of the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area in Bazhong Sonya S. Lee

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Chapter Seven Tree-Buddhas Greg Levine

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Notes on Contributors

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Attributed to Cheng Q i (active from mid to late 1200s), Detail of Tilling Rice, mid-to late 1200s. Handscroll; ink and color on paper. Freer and Sackler Galleries. Image Courtesy of Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase - Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F I954.21. Sim Sa-jeong (1707-1769), Rice Reaping, 1700s. Album leaf; Ink and light color on silk. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Bongwan 2514 Attributed to Kim Hong-do (1745-afier 1 806), Weaving a Mat, from Danwon Album, late 1700s. Album leaf; Ink and light on paper. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Bongwan 6504. Jin Jae-hae, Weaving, 1697. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Deoksu 4917. Jiao Bingzhen (1689-1726), Peiwen zhai gengzhi tu, 1696. Woodblock prints. Jangseogak Archives. Image Courtesy of Jangseogak Archives. Jiao Bingzhen (1689-1726), Peiwen zhai gengzhi tu, 1696. Woodblock prints. Jangseogak Archives. Image Courtesy of Jangseogak Archives. Jo Yeong-seok (1686-1761), Shoeing a Horse, 1700s. Album leaf; ink and light color on paper. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Dongwon 2307. Seven Jeweled Mountains, 1800s. Ten-panel folding screen; ink and light color on silk. Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund 1989.6. Cleveland Museum of Art. Image Courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art. Sim Sa-jeong (1707-1769), While Gulls and White Waves in the Sea Diamond. Album leaf; ink and light color on paper. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Deoksu 002292-00001.

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List of Illustrations

Kim Hong-do (1745-afier 1 806), Granary for Households, from Paintings after Zhu Xi 's Poem,1800. Eight-panel folding screen; ink and light color on silk. Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. Image Courtesy of Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. Kim Hong-do (1745-afier 1 806), Meal with a Bowl ofBarley and a Scallion Soup, from Paintings after ZhuXi 's Poem,1800. Eight­ panel folding screen; ink and light color on silk. Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. Image Courtesy of Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. Attributed to Kim Hong-do (1745-afier 1 806), Threshing, from the Danwon Album, late 1700s. Album leaf; ink and light color on paper. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Deoksu 4917. Attributed to Kim Hong-do (1745-afier 1 806), Wrestling, from the Danwon Album, late 1700s. Album leaf; ink and light color on paper. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Deoksu 4917. Attributed to Kim Hong-do (1745-afier 1 806), Young Dancer, from the Danwon Album, late 1700s. Album leaf; ink and light color on paper. National Museum of Korea. Image Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Deoksu 4917. Jang Hanjong (1768- 1815), Painting of Aquatic Life, an eight­ panel screen, early nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, each panel: 1 1 2 x 58 em (image combines eight individual photographs; panel order is reconstructed based on an early inventory image from the National Museum of Korea). The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Korea. Jang Hanjong (1768- 1815), Painting of Aquatic Life, an eight­ panel screen, early nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, 1 1 2 x 58cm (detail of panel witb crabs). The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Korea. Kim Hongdo (1745-1 806), Painting of Crabs, late eighteenth century. Ink on paper, 3 1 x 41cm. The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image provided by the National Museum of Korea. Jang Hanjong (1768- 1815), Painting of Aquatic Life, an eight­ panel screen, early nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper (detail of Japanese hermit crab). The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image courtesy oftbe National Museum of Korea.

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Terajima Ryoan (b.1654), Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia, vol. 1 p. 522 reprint of original woodblock print, 1712 (detail of Japanese hermit crab). Jang Hanjong (1768-18 15), "Crab and Stingray," from Album of Faintings of Aquatic Life, an eight-leaf album, early nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, 48 x 30 cm. The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Korea. Jeong Seon (1676-1759), Fainting of a Leaping Carp, eighteenth century. Ink on silk, 3 1 x 20 cm. The Korea University Museum, Seoul. Image provided by the Korea University Museum. Terajima Ryoan (b.1654), Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia, vol. 1 p.550 reprint of original woodblock print, 1712 (detail of "Human fish"). Narn Gyeu ( 1 8 1 1 - 1 890), Fainting ofFlowers and Butterflies, two hanging scrolls, nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, each hanging scroll: 128 x 29 cm. The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image provided by the National Museum of Korea. Jan JOllSton, Historiae Naturalis, vol. 5 plate. 1, copperplate engraving, 1657. Library Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA. Outline of the category of "Flatfish" in Jeong Yakjeon's Jasan Eobo. Adapted from a chart by Jeong Myeonghyeon: Jeong Myeonghyeon, "Jeong Yakjeonui," 28. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Taxonomy of the Animal Kingdom from Systema Naturae, 1735 (detail including the category of "Flatfish" [pleuronectes]). Copperplate engraving. Roberto Villanueva, Sacred Sanctuary (Acupuncture the Earth), June 24, 1994. Private collection. Roberto Villanueva, Archetypes: Cordillera 's Labyrinth, 1989. Runo reeds, stone, wood, etc., 150' wide 2,000' long. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila. Hiroshima city, ca. October 1945. The National Archives. Roberto Villanueva, Aqui descansa el rio defunto, Fasig: ano 1985 (Here Lies the Dead River, Fasig: Year 1985), ca. 1975, whereabouts unknown. Philippine Women's University. Roberto Yniguez, Untitled, 1985. Courtesy of Roberto Yniguez. Katrin de Guia, Roberto Villanueva at his exhibition, Ugat: A Tribute to the Ifugao Tribe Heritage, Renaissance Gallery, 1987. Courtesy ofKatrin de Guia.

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Roberto Villanueva, dap-ay from Archetypes: Cordillera's Labyrinth, 1989. Runo reeds, stone, wood, etc., 150' wide 2,000' long feet. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila. Courtesy of Eva Corazon Abundo-Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva. Roberto Villanueva, The Labyrinth 1988. Runo reeds, river stone, wood, etc. Burnham Park, Baguio. Courtesy of Eva Corazon Abundo-Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva. Uma Ii biyag, the Cordilleran way of planting rice. Courtesy of Katrin de Guia. Roberto Villanueva with his artwork, Archetypes: Cordillera's Labyrinth, 1989. Runo reeds, stone, wood, etc., 150' wide 2,000' long. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila. Courtesy of Eva Corazon Abundo-Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva. Kawayan de Guia, Re-enactment of Roberto Villanueva, Atang Ii Kararua, Baguio earthquake commemoration, 2005. Burnham Lake, Baguio. © Kawayan de Guia. Roberto Villanueva, Panhumuko (Surrender), Mt. Pinatubo Refugee Camp, Zambales, 1991. Courtesy of Eva Corazon Abundo-Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva. Roberto Villanueva, Burning Man 's Ego, wood, used clothing, fire, etc. December 22, 1991, South Beach, Staten Island. Linda Hattendorf. Roberto Villanueva with his work Ego 's Grave 1993. Installation and associated perfOlmance, The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APTl), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993. Carved earth figure in outdoor pit, glazed terracotta, wood. Pit: 600 x 250 x150 cm. Photograph: Christabelle Baranay. Image courtesy: Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modem Art. Queens Land Art Gallery of Modern Art. Roberto Villanueva, Sacred Sanctuary (Acupuncture the Earth), August 6, 1995, Central Park, Hiroshima. Midori Yamamura. Zhang Hongtu, Remake olMa Yuan 's Water Albums (780 Years Later), 2008. Oil on canvas, 50 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist. Zhang Hongtu, After Li Tang, from the Shan-Shui Today Series, 2009. Oil on canvas, 76 x 67 in. Courtesy of the artist. Zhang Hongtu, After Wang Yuanqi #2 (287 Years Later), 2008. Oil on canvas, 39 x 78 in. Courtesy of the artist. Detail. Wang Yuanqi, Wangchuan Villa, 1 7 1 1 . Handscroll: ink and color on paper, image: 14 in. x 17 ft. 10 % in. Ex coll: C. C.

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Wang Family, Purchase, Douglas Dillon Gift, 1977. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. Detail, beginning. Wang Yuanqi, Wangchuan Villa, 171 l . Handscroll: ink and color on paper, image: 14 in. x 17 ft. 10 % in. Ex coll: C. C. Wang Family, Purchase, Douglas Dillon Gift, 1977. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. Zhang Hongtu, Guo Xi - Van Gogh, 1998. Oil on canvas, 96 x 68 in. Courtesy of the artist. Zhang Hongtu, Fish, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 66 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist. Zhang Hongtu, Untitled (Four Monkeys and CCTV), 2010. Mixed media and oil, 74 y, x 64 in. Courtesy of tbe artist. Zhang Hongtu, Little Monkey, 2013. Ink and oil on rice paper mounted on panel, 48 y, x 46 in. Courtesy of tbe artist. Lim Yew Kuan, After the Fire (Bukit Ho Swee), circa 1966. 45.5 cm x 61 cm. Woodblock print on paper. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum. Lee Kee Boon, Nanyang University, 1955 (1999 print), woodblock print on paper, 20 cm x 3 1 cm. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum. Tan Tee Chie, Persuading, 1958, huang yang woodblock print on paper, 20.5 cm x 3 1 cm. Collection of National University of Singapore Museum. Lucy Davis, Bangku terentang, 2009, print of terentang stool with mixed ink & paper, 105 cm x 75 cm. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum. Chua Mia Tee, National Language Class. 1959 Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Lucy Davis, 'Terentang Stool Tree ' TerentanglCampnosperma Auriculata, 2009, assembled print fragments of found terentang stool with mixed ink and paper, 150 cm x 237 cm. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum. Sharmon Lee Castleman, 'Tree Wounds in a Konservasi Forest,' Scenesfrom an IslandAfter a Timber Boom, 2010 (Fig. 5-7) and 201 1 (Fig. 5-8), Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi. Sharmon Lee Castleman, 'Tree Wounds in a Konservasi Forest,' Scenesfrom an Island After a Timber Boom, 2010 (Fig. 5-7) and 201 1 (Fig. 5-8), Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi. The Muna team around tbe largest teak tree in tbe hutan hantu (haunted forest) witb a local youtbs who led us to tbe tree. Laksana Pelawi, Indonesia Country Project Officer for DoubleHelix (far

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List of Illustrations

left), and Adhya Yusof, our guide in Muna (far right). In the top left corner, we can see banyan roots beginning to grow up a teak tree. Photograph by Shannon Lee Castleman. Lucy Davis, Banyan and Teak, Muna, Southeast Sulawesi, 2010. Woodprint collage. Woodprints from a 1930's teak bed found in Singapore on paper, 240 x 150 em, 2012. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Animated film still from Jalan Jati Teak Road 2012. Wood-print fragments from a teak bed and charcoal. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Animated film still from Jalan Jati Teak Road 2012. Wood-print fragments from a teak bed and charcoal. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Animated film still from Jalan Jati Teak Road 2012. Wood-print fragments from a teak bed and charcoal. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Lucy Davis, Alex Bennuli and colleagues. Reproduction of a photograph of the Muna Island teak industry from the collection of Mr W. T. Bermuli, in woodprints from a 1930's teak bed found in Singapore and charcoal on paper. 240 x 150 em, 2012. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Lucy Davis, Simon Oei. Reproduction of a photograph of timber merchant Simon Oei as a child in the 1970's standing in the grounds of P. Bork A1S International Kranji where his father Allen Oei was employed. Reproduced in prints of one of the last logs from Burma to be imported to Singapore after a 3 1 March 2013 log export ban. 220 x 150 em, 2014. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum. Lucy Davis, David's Thumb. Woodprint collage reproduction of furniture dealer David's thumbprint in prints of a 1930's teak bed found in Singapore, made on paper, 240 x 150 em, 2012. Lucy Davis, Building Nanyang University. Balau scaffolding and woodprint shadow installation inspired by the woodblock print Nanyang University by Lee Kee Boon, 1955. Photograph by Norman Ng, 2014. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum. Lucy Davis, Together Again (Wood:Cut). Part N Art History: Persuading Photograph by Norman Ng, 2014. Collection of the National University of Singapore. Lucy Davis, Building Nanyang University, 2014. Detail of shadows. Photograph by Norman Ng, 2014.

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Lucy Davis, Malayan Timber Samples. Boxes of assorted timber samples with the Malay names of trees punched into each block, formerly belonged to the Botany department of the University of Malaya. Lucy Davis, Malayan Timber Samples. Boxes of assorted timber samples with the Malay names of trees punched into each block, formerly belonged to the Botany department of the University of Malaya. Overview of Nankan Caves, Bazhong, China; begun in the sixth century. Photograph by the author. Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base, Bazhong; 1982 at the current location. Photograph by tbe author. Vairochana Buddha, Niche 103, Nankan Caves, Bazhong; 877. Photograph by the autbor. A stone stele commemorating the inscription of Dazu Rock Carvings on the World Heritage List, Baodingshan, Dazu; after 1999. Photograph by tbe autbor. Confucius and disciples, Cave 6, Shizhuanshan, Dazu; 1088. Photograph by the autbor. Mother witb child, relief carvings depicting tbe Sutra Repaying Parents' Kindness Scripture, Baodingshan, Dazu; 12 th_13 th centuries. Photograph by tbe autbor. Inscriptions on the cliff face near Cave 12 at Nankan Caves, Bazhong; undated. Photograph by tbe author. "Ten Thousand Years to the Communist Party!"; 1930s. Photograph by the autbor; courtesy of the Museum of Sichuan­ Shaanxi Revolutionary Base. Plan of the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area. Photograph by tbe author. Stele Forest Memorial of Generals from the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Area, Nankan Mountain Scenic Area, Bazhong; 1993. Photograph by the autbor. Red Army Memorial, Nankan Scenic Area, Bazhong; 1997. Photograph by the autbor. Niche 77, Nankan Caves, Bazhong: begun in 8 th century and restored in 877. Photograph by the author. "Buddha head in a tree." Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya, Thailand. 2016. Photograph: J. G. Bailey. "Buddha head in a tree." Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya, Thailand. 2016. Photograph: J. G. Bailey.

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"Buddha head in a tree." Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya, Thailand. 1976. Photograph by Forrest McGill. Enkii (1632-1695) carving an icon into a tree. From Ban K6kei, Mikuma Katen, Biographies o/Contemporary Eccentrics (Kinsei kijin den, 1790), vol. 2. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of Califomia, Berkeley. Luohan Taming a Tiger, from an album, Twenty Leaves 0/ the Ficus Reiigiosa. Qing dynasty. Ink on leaf. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sack1er Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1911 .504a-l. Luc Ionesco, Western Entrance Pavilion, Third Enclosure, Eastern Far;ade. Ta Som, Angkor. 1962-1966. Photograph courtesy of the Ecole franyaise d'Extreme-Orient, Fonds Ionesco ref. EFEO IONL05246.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editing this anthology has been a deeply rewarding experience, providing opportlmities to meet new people and learn from them. Most especially, I want to thank the contributors for their scholarship as well as for their considerable efforts in gathering images, securing permissions, and attending to the manifold details in submitting a manuscript in the field of art history. I also wish to acknowledge the College Art Association (CAA), the professional organization for art historians. This anthology has its origins in a lively 2016 conference panel on eco-art history in East Asia. At that time, Cambridge Scholars Publishing approached me to put together this anthology. The anthology has expanded the geographical scope to encompass Southeast Asia, and in the course of soliciting additional essays, I have had the pleasure of corresponding with many more scholars whose research at the intersection of art history and environmental studies has been inspirational. I am grateful to Sonya Lee and Cher Knight, who have served as my models in scholarship. Several essays underwent double-blind peer review, and I am grateful to numerous, anonymous reviewers for their time. Thank you to Victoria Carruthers and James Brittain at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for shepherding this project. Finally, I want to acknowledge the support of Emerson College's Faculty Advancement Fund Grant and the offices of the President and Provost, which provided a partial leave. This support provided much needed time for research and writing.

INTRODUCTION DE-NIN D. LEE

This anthology of essays in the growing field of eco-art history takes seriously the perils of the Anthropocene. It does so by refusing to insulate art history from concerns about climate change, ecology, pollution, and so forth. A collection of essays, of course, cannot solve the intractable problems and vicious cycles generated by political economies that rely on a combination of cheap fossil fuels and consumption. But, individually and together, the authors reveal deep and abiding connections between art and environment. By understanding these connections, we take a necessary step toward realizing our complicity in perpetuating the problems and our capacity to work toward solutions. When we ignore the surrounding ecology and climatic conditions, our art historical interpretations are skewed, our understanding incomplete. If the environment is one area of new and urgent concern in art history, then the regions of Asia call for heightened attention, toO. 1 Not only is Asia home to great concentrations of people most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, but, in Amitav Ghosh's words, Asia is " ... conceptually critical to every aspect of global wanning."2 Thus, eco­ art historical approaches in the sub-field of Asian art present information and analyses that matter well beyond disciplinary and geographical borders. Within the broad area described by eco-art history and the regions of East and Southeast Asia, the authors of this anthology explore subjects as wide-ranging as the empirical paintings of aquatic creatures in 1 Following a panel at the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies, the Journal ofAsian Studies published in the November 2014 issue several essays examining how the Anthropocene affects Asian studies. See Journal of Asian Studies 73.4 (November 2014). 2 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 201 6), 88. For several scholarly responses to Ghosh's work, see "JAS ROlUld Table on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, " Journal ofAsian Studies 75.4 (November 2016): 929-55.

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the Korean Joseon court and the posthumous project of contemporary Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva to heal the earth, the long tradition of Chinese landscape and the tree-buddhas near Wat Mahiithat in Thailand. Collectively, they make the case that art in and related to regions of East and Southeast Asia is fertile ground for eco-art history. The fIrst pair of essays takes us to the Korean peninsula at the tum of the nineteenth century when severe environmental conditions faced the Joseon kings and when new approaches to understanding the natural world rivaled long-standing conventions of knowledge. Sooa 1m McConnick focuses on images depicting the paired activities of growing rice and making silk, known as pictures of "tilling and weaving" in the late eighteenth century. Such pictures have heretofore been analyzed within the context of geme painting, or in Korean, Sokhwa. Representing the mundane activities of labor and leisure, Sokhwa developed hand-in-hand with a growing interest in local phenomena and a tendency toward realism. Immediacy-whether in tenns of spatial proximity or instantaneous recognition of everyday experience---characterizes both the subject and style of Sokhwa. Subsequently, these qualities have fueled interpretations of pictures of "tilling and weaving" as documents of Joseon prosperity. Moreover, in implicit competition with an art history championing the West as having arrived first at Modernism's finish line, Sokhwa is proof that another contestant may have reached that destination earlier. However appealing, this interpretation overlooks crucial conditions caused by the Little Ice Age. Contrary to the idealized images of industry and industriousness in Sokhwa, the reigns of Kings Yeongjo (r. 1724-1776) and Jeongjo (r. 1777 - 1 800) were marked by severe cold, crop failures, famine, disease and unrest. McCOlmick draws the indirect but nevertheless operative connections between environmental conditions and artistic subject matter. Her essay reveals a history of images of "tilling and weaving" in Joseon Korea, focusing on the transmission from the Qing court of a woodblock copy of Pictures of Tilling and Weaving of Peiwen Studio. At that time, the Joseon court also requested and received famine relief from the Qing emperor. McCormick restores to the examination of agriculturally themed Sokhwa a complex and dynamic interaction of environmental conditions, socio-economic effects, and political actions. In this context, she reveals the various roles of artwork as a medium for diplomacy, instruction, propaganda, and efficacy. Nathaniel Kingdon presents further insights into the intersection of environment and art in the early nineteenth century, a moment when empirical observation figured increasingly in creating knowledge among scholars and painters at the Joseon court. Kingdon takes as his case studies

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textual and visual representations of aquatic creatures. In 1 8 14, scholar Jeong Yakjeon (1758-18 16) completed a registry of fish he observed while exiled to the remote island of Heuksando. Jeong's earlier draft included illustrations, but persuaded by his brother's criticism that pictures were "shallow," he abandoned images in favor of text alone. As a result, Jeong's registry, Jasan Eobo, met the scholarly expectation that text formed the basis of knowledge. But, Jeong departs significantly from Confucian precedents by focusing on animals he himself observed, naming and organizing animals on the basis of morphology, omitting lexicology, minimizing literary references, and proceeding directly to physical description. Still, Jeong's Jason Eobo perpetuated mytbs and generated gaps in understanding that illustrations by their very nature would have countered. To make the point, Kingdon compares Jeong's written registry with contemporaneous paintings by court artist Jang Hanjong (1768-1815), especially his eight-panel screen, Painting of Aquatic Life. Jang breaks with precedent, too. Eschewing generalizations and literary fOlTIlUlas, he draws on empirical observation. Jang's fish are precisely depicted, identifiable species organized according to several, different eco-systems: marine, freshwater, and inter-tidal. Moreover, his medium-painting­ demands plausibility and therefore makes no allowances for mythical creatures that text, even Jeong's groundbreaking fish registry, can accommodate. Kingdon recovers a significant moment in the development of natural history in Korea, a moment when the longstanding belief that human morality lies at the center of all intellectual inquiry no longer obtained. Instead, scholars and artists invented new methods and created new fOlTIlS for understanding the natural world. Shifting from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the Korean peninsula, the next three essays examine contemporary art and necessarily recognize its inherently global dimension. Midori Yarnamura's examination of the work of Roberto Villanueva (1947- 1995) takes her from the Philippines to Japan; De-nin Lee analyzes paintings by Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) who immigrated to and now lives and works in New York City; and Lucy Davis re-traces the migrations of wood and woodcut artists including herself in the Malaysian archipelago. Although separated by great distances and working in different mediums, each of the artists in question grapples with the present problems of the Anthropocene. The three essays are also infolTIled by the authors' particular experience or interest-curatorial, pedagogical, and artistic practice, respectively-and thus, they suggest a diversity of approaches to writing eco-art history.

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Midori Yamamura examines the intersection of indigenous aesthetics and environmental themes in the monumental, but ephemeral art of Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva. Inviting audience participation in ritual, Roberto's therapeutic strategies culminated in his posthumous project designed to heal the planet, Sacred Sanctuary: Acupuncture the Earth. The history behind this project includes Roberto's personal experience of battling leukemia caused possibly by exposure to radioactive waste, but it also draws on a history of colonialism, which exploited the natural abundance in the Philippines and degraded its environment. Roberto's earlier work took issue with the poisoning of rivers, illegal logging operations, and the negative impacts of swidden agriculture. He saw hope in indigenous practices of forest preservation, and he shifted his energies to local arts communities. His late work not only reveals the problems and their history, but it also adopts an ethics of low impact on the earth combined with audience collaboration toward positive socio­ political change, enacting what Yamamura calls "sustainability aesthetics." Roberto did not live to see the staging of Sacred Sanctuary: Acupuncture the Earth, but the artwork was realized posthumously at the symbolic location that he specified, Hiroshima. Yamamura rekindles the memory of his bold project, challenging us to forge art systems that likewise resist "capitalist circuits" and their ruinous, planet-wide effects. Seeing the frequency with which contemporary Chinese artists reference canonical Chinese landscapes as a rhetorical strategy for revealing anthropogenic change, De-nin Lee develops a case study of Zhang Hongtu's work. 'When juxtaposed with their artistic references, some paintings from Zhang's Shanshui Today series produce an implicit before-and-after narrative of a pristine past destroyed by industrial pollution and habitat destruction. Interpretations of his landscapes map easily onto a prelapsarian myth, and can invoke Orientalizing ideas of a closer-to-nature Other that becomes corrupted by adopting aspects of the modem industrial west. Yet, massive anthropogenic changes in Chinese regions occurred well before the Industrial Age, and Zhang's oeuvre offers an opportunity to dislodge myths that landscapes of the past and present, along with art historical practices of canon fOlmation and comparative analysis, have promoted. Instead of dichotomies of before-and-after or self-and-Other, Zhang's paintings attest to continuities. Using Zhang's artwork, Lee reveals the outlines of a genealogy of domesticated landscapes stretching back to the middle of the first millennium. She also finds-in Zhang's impulse to identify with the Other, both human and animal-a strategy for countering anthropocentricism. Such artwork can

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inspire and fuel eco-art history as part of a broad agenda to confront climate change. A practicing artist, Lucy Davis investigates intersecting lives of individuals and human populations on the one hand, and of trees, wood, and forests on the other hand. Art and artistic practices mediate between the two, taking the fOlTIlS of woodcut prints, spiritual and shamanic activities, scouring back streets for discarded wood furniture, enlisting the services of a private company to interpret DNA wood samples, photographic portraits of tree wounds, woodprint collages, an animated film, and a mixed media installation. Davis' searches for an artistic expression that responds to non-human narratives of wood, resists simple­ minded advocacy, and pays homage to the mid-twentieth century Malayan Modern Woodblock Movement, which provoked her initial interest. Her essay treats images and natural histories of frangipani, bakau, huang yang, terentang, banyan, and teak trees, or kulijawa as it is knO\vn in Muna, the native language of that island in southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. In her artwork and this essay, Davis knits together micro-histories and macro­ ecologies, demonstrating how "human and non-human agents have colonized and continue to make their presence felt across the archipelago." The final two essays by Sonya Lee and Gregory Levine, respectively, consider sites of cultural heritage and the complex ecological challenges they pose to their constituencies. Examining sites in China and Thailand, respectively, their essays bridge past and present, and they challenge us to reexamine the underlying values that govern our attitudes and our inclinations to preserve the past. Lee examines the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area in Northern Sichuan province, where Buddhist cliff-side carvings dating to the seventh century and the Museum of the Sichuan and Shaanxi Revolutionary Base featuring artifacts from the 1930s make strange bedfellows. For the Chinese government and its culture industry, however, the material remains of the region's remote religious history and its near political past offer a singularly attractive opportunity to balance the contradictions of a consumer-based economy within a Communist regime. In analyzing the use and uneven distribution of resources natural and otherwise of the N ankan Mountain Scenic Area, Lee adopts a method of art historical ecology. By doing so, she not only illuminates a complex political economy of cultural heritage, but also extends it to include concern for the site's natural environment and sustainability. Within the political economy that generated the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area, art historians played a key part by undertaking research and producing scholarship, which demonstrated historical value

xxiv

Introduction

and justified petitions to the state for recognition. Against the backdrop of the world heritage system and the international prestige granted by UNESCO, Lee reveals how the creation of "cultural heritage"-a process that in China requires the work of scholars, the promotion of local party members, the sponsorship of high-level political committees, the approval of international bodies, and the coordinated construction of infrastructure and other physical changes to the site, not to mention daily operation of the resulting attraction-facilitates "development and politics, consumer demands and party priorities." When granted the moniker "cultural heritage," a site undergoes marked transformation. In contrast to centuries past when religious practice motivated viewers to sponsor additions to and renewals of the Buddhist cliff carvings, for example, Lee observes that professional standards and commercial interests now drive unprecedented physical changes. 'Whereas visitors are now forbidden to sponsor changes to the cliff, site managers undertake massive adjustments to landscaping in the name of visitor amenities. Still, Lee reasons, visitors may regain a measure of agency, as they now constitute in toto the detelTIlinant of the site's (economic) viability. Viability is Levine's concern in his essay probing the meaning of tree-buddhas near Wat Mahiithiit in Ayutthaya. For Levine, these "conjoined arboreal and human-made entities" offer a case study for confronting realities that art history's anthropocentric orientation has dangerously obscured. Art history's conventional narratives of human exceptionalism disavow the field's basis and complicity in a destructive carbon economy, and such narratives are blind to the biosphere. Borrowing a telTIl from writer Amitav Ghosh, Levine sees in art history a "great derangement" that facilitates art-history-as-usual despite alanning signs of climate change and biospheric collapse. 3 To begin writing an art history free of derangement, Levine resists isolating the human-made component of the "Buddha head in a tree" and analyzing conventionally its date, iconography, style, and so forth. Instead, he attends to the head and the tree. "Buddha head in a tree" confounds even before analysis begins: should the art historian begin with describing the head or the tree? Levine wrestles with ontological distinctions to point out deeply seated priorities that have shaped art historical inquiry before applying the methods of art history to unpack the histories and significance of the sculpted head and the ficus tree. Head and tree align serendipitously in becoming a "coherent" object of religious worship. However tidy this conclusion, Levine recognizes its inherent anthropocentricism in seeing the tree only in

3 Ghosh, The Great Derangement.

Eco Art History in East and Southeast Asia

xxv

relationship to the human world. To "pay attention to trees as trees," he looks to botany and ecology to defamiliarize the tree-buddha, to reveal the artifice of human sign systems for understanding the tree, and to attempt an arboreo-centric narrative. Levine restores agency to this and other specimens of the ficus religiosa, sometimes called "strangler figs," for their capacity to "colonize" human-built structures. While art history has tended to lament (and to prevent or circumvent) the loss of art, he calls for a recognition that there never was anything but loss. Or, more accurately, symbiotic "becoming-and-making-with." Recognizing this reality regarding material, artistic entities, Levine urges us to reimagine art history by attending to "the biovisuality of the nonhuman as it alters human-made objects and 'creeps' into our visual experience .... " Indeed, reimagining art history lies at the heart of this anthology. In the age of climate change, as the impacts of the Anthropocene increasingly disrupt earth's systems, we are facing new, daunting problems. The reckoning may be different for everyone, but we all bear a measure of responsibility. The authors here see ways that art history-a field of human inquiry predicated on careful observation-can help reveal (rather than obscure) with greater accuracy the scope and complexity of the problems, and thereby ginde the thinking behind solutions. This anthology of essays in eco-art history is presented to you, dear reader and fellow traveler, in the sincerest hope that the ideas therein provoke and inspire, and that you will share the knowledge, advance the field, and contribute to the effort. Bibliography

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). "JAS Round Table on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, " Journal ofAsian Studies 75.4 (November 2016): 929-55. Journal ofAsian Studies 73.4 (November 2014).

CHAPTER ONE RE-READING IMAGERY OF TILLING AND WEAVING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE LITTLE ICE AGE SOOA 1M MCCORMICK

Introduction

Detailing multiple steps of cultivating rice and producing silk, the Southern Song Chinese official Lou Shou's (1090- 1 1 62) two handscrolls of poems and paintings are generally regarded to be the first examples of works inaugurating the tradition of Pictures of Tilling and Weaving mm 1iilI. (Fig. 1_1) 1 Thereafter, Pictures of Tilling and Weaving occupied a special position in pre-modem East Asian politics, warning rulers of moral laxity and urging them to tend the livelihood of their ordinary subjects.' I

Research for this essay was beglUl in 2015 and presented at the 2016 College Art Association annual conference and the 2016 Korean Art HistOIy workshop at Harvard University. The author gratefully acknowledges the input of colleagues at these two forums as well as the feedback from two, anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript in 2017. The work by the Chinese Yuan-period painter Cheng Qi (active in the late 13thcentury), which is now in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, is the geme's well-known example. In addition to paintings, many woodblock versions were also reproduced and widely circulated throughout the Yuan and Ming periods. For the early development of the tradition of tilling and weaving imagery in China, see Roslyn Lee Hanuners, Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art, Lahor, and Technology in Song and Yuan China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Un iversity Press, 2011). 2 Since knowledge about agriculture and sericulture was already widespread prior to its publication, Lou Shou ' s Pictures ofTilling andWeaving should not be recognized as a simple book for guiding farming and weaving teclmiques. In China, the meanings and roles of Pictures of Tilling and Weaving evolved throughout successive dynasties. For more, see Francesca Bray, "Agricultural Illustrations:

2

Chapter One

Even in Joseon Korea (1392-1910), where kingly patronage of art was generally viewed as an act of idle fancy,' this theme received much royal patronage for its powerful didactic nature.4 Since its first introduction to Korea in 1498 via Ming-dynasty copies, pictures of tilling and weaving gained great momentum by the eighteenth century, not only as an independent geme, but also as an essential iconographic element of Sokhwa %,j!!; (literally, "Pictures of Ordinary Customs"), customarily translated as "geme painting.'" (Figs. 1-2 and 1 -3) Scholars generally have noted the intellectual and socio-economic zeitgeist of the time as important factors contributing to the popularity of this subject and its stylistic distinction. Some maintain that an intellectual trend called SiThak 'j!f�, a school of thought that strives to solve practical matters through an empirical approach, inspired ruling elites to commission imagery that realistically renders daily scenes of ordinary people. 6 Regarding its Blueprint or Icon?" in Graphics and Text in the Production a/Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft (Leiden and Bostorr Brill, 2007); Julia K. Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007); Roslyn Lee (Roslyn Lee Hammers), "The Fabrication of Good Govemmmt: Images of Silk Production in Southern Song (1127-1279) and Yuan (1279-1368) China," Textde Society oJAmerica Symposium Proceedings 171 (1998): 194-203; Wu Hllllg, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Brian McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (Chicago: Un iversity of Chicago Press, 1971). 3 For Neo-Confucian statecraft in the Joseon dynasty, see James B. Palais, ConfUCian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyongwon and the Late Joseon Dynasty (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996); Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation ofKorea: A Study ofSociety and Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 1995); and William Theodore De Bary and JaHyun Kim Haboush, The Rise of NeG-ConfUcianism in Korea (New York: Colmnbia University Press, 1985). 4 Jeong Byeong-mo [Chung B)'lDlgrno] "Joseon sidae hubangi ui gyeongjikdo," [Late Joseon-period picture of tilling and weaving] Misul sahak yeongu no. 12 (1991): 32. 5 Accorchng to Jeong Byeong-ITK) [Clllmg Byungrno], Landscape ofFour Seasons (1744), a pair of handscrolls by two members of the royal family and court painters, Kim Du-ryang (16 96 - 1763) and Kim Deok-ha (1722- 1772), is among the earliest artworks that combine the iconographic elements of Picture ofTilling and Weaving with everyday scenes. Jeong Byeong-mo [Clllmg Byungrno], "Joseon sidae hubangi ui gyeongjikdo," [Pictures of Tilling and Weaving in the Late Joseon Period]Misul sahakyeongu no. 12 (1991): 40. 6 See Yi Jung-hui [Lee hmghee], "Joseonhugi plUlgsokhwa ui ba1saeng gwa gelllldaeseong," [Development of Late Joseon-period Geme Painting and its

Re-Reading Imagery of Tilling and Weaving

thematic distinctim, ethers JIopose that Soklnva is

an

3

artistic premonitim of

modem society because it deals with daily laoor of working class people, not the leisurely activities of aristocrats.?

(

Fig. 1-1. Attributed to Cheng Qi (active from mid to late 1200s), Detail of Tilling Rice, mid-to late 1200s. Handscroll; ink and color on paper. Freer and Sadier Galleries. Image Corutesy of Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. SadJer Gallery, Smithsonian

Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase - Charles Lang Freer

Endowment,F1954.21.

Modernity] Hanguk geundae misulsahak 13 (2004): 41-71; Yi Won-bok, "Joseon sidae pungsokhwa gue heureum gwa uiui," [Development of Joseon-Period Genre Painting and Its Significance] in Joseon sidae pungsokhwa [Joseon-Period Genre Painting] (Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2002); Jeong Byeong-mo [Chung Byungmo], Hanguk ui pungsokhwa [Korean Genre Painting] (Seoul: Hangil art, 2000); and An Hwi-jun [AIm Hwi-joon], "Hanguk pungsokhwa ui baldal," [Development of Korean Genre Painting] in Hakguk hoehwa-uijeontong [Tradition of Korean Painting] (Seoul: Munye chulpansa,1988),331. 7

Yi Tae-ho,Joseon hugi hoehwa ui sasiljeongsin [Spirit of Realism in Late Joseon­

Period Painting] (Seoul: Hakgojae, 1999); Kang Gwan-sik,"Jingyeong sidae hugi hwawonhwa ui sigakjeok sasilseong," GansongMunhwa 49 (1995): 58-60; and Yu Bong-hak,

"Joseon

hugi

pungsokhwa

byeoncheon

ui

sasangjeok

geomto,"

[Examination on Ideological Foundations of Late Joseon-Period Genre Painting and Development] Gansong munhwa 36 (1989): 87-110.

4

Chapter One

Fig. 1-2. Sim Sa-jeong (1707-1769), Rice Reaping, 1700s. Album leaf; Ink and light color on silk. National Museum of Korea. Image courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Bongwan 2514

Re-Reading Imagery of Tilling and Weaving

Fig. 1-3. Attributed to Kim Hong-do (l745-afier 1806),

Danwon Album,

Weaving a Mat,

5

from

late 1700s. Album leaf; Ink and light on paper. National Museum

of Korea. Image courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Bongwan 6504.

Such mainstream readings are anchored in one common assumption: eighteenth-century Korea was an age of peace and prosperity governed by the two sage monarchs, Yeongjo (r. 1724-1776) and Jeongjo (r. 1777-1800). This myth-like perspective toward their reigns has long been used to gloss over the period's extreme environmental and economic

6

Chapter One

conditions. Consequently, bucolic scenes in which men till their fields and women turn their spinning wheels were thought to be a "truthful" or "candid" renditions of Joseon's prospering society under right-minded rulers. In comparison with preceding centuries that were beset by successive foreign invasions (the Japanese invasions from 1592 to 1598; and two Manchu invasions in 1636 and 1 637), eighteenth-century Korea deserves the title of Pax Coreana, due to its relative political stability. Climate proxies ranging from tree rings data to historical archives, nevertheless demonstrate that the state, even under the rule of so-l1 -;; ".l . "Joseon sok-ui myeongnara: daebodan eul tonghaeseo bon joseon jibaecheung ui junghwa insik" [The Altar of Great Gratitude: Korean Elites' Adoration for Ming China under Manchu Dominance] s.1:! �� "il '-t4 : 'JA�� � � �1] 3J. � � � � 0] : -'a-{! 2.-". Jangseogak 1 4 (2000) 157-1 80.

Re-Reading Imagery of Tilling and Weaving

4S

Yu, Bong-hak iT-% �. "Joseon hugi pungsokhwa byeoncheon ill sasangjeok geomto." [Examination on Ideological Foundations of Late Joseon-Period Geme Painting and Development] $.1:! ��1 -%�!j. 'tl � � >+"J-'!j � ..§. Gansong munhwa 36 (1989) 87-110. Yu, Heung-jun iT-t7. Joseonsidae hwaron yeongu. [Study on Joseon­ Period Theories on Paintings] $.1:! ....1 +'!j � � Musulsahak4 (1 992), 3 1 -76. Yu, Ok-gyung iT�'J . "Joseon hugi pungsokhwa ui nongbeongi deulbap gwa sul." [Representation of Having a Meal and Drinks in the Field in Late Joseon-period Geme Painting] $. 1:! � �1 -%�!j.� � 'tl �1 � �J-� � Misul sahak 27 (2013) 371 -404. Wigley, T. M. 1 . , M J. Ingram & G. Farmer eds. Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1 9 8 1 . Zhang, Jiacheng and Thomas B . Crowley. "Historical Climate Records in China and the Reconstruction of Past Climate." Journal of Climate 2 (1989) 833-49. Zhang, Peiyuan and Gong Gaofa. "Three Cold Episodes in the Climatic History of China." In Ye Dezheng et aI. , eds., The Climate ofChina and Global Climate: Proceedings ofthe Beijing International Symposium on Climate. Berlin: Springer, 1987. Zhou, Fengxiang fliJmi�. Zhongguo zai hai tongshi qing daijuan [History of Chinese Disaster, Qing Part] ,

.: �1 ,i;).

!t �

1,�, ... -/: .II,

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J. . lJl VI -:J. !;, i� .l\ ii. f, lJ. /� r.}) ;.. ��� � !� �; � i. � Jr 1� i i .. iI.i ..t. �t � ,� {' J\. t "�.. P't, 1t � -� - ;. J o·

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.;\

Fig. 2-9. Nam Gyeu (1 8 1 1 - 1 890),

Painting of Flowers and Butteiflies,

two

hanging scrolls, nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, each hanging scroll: 128

x

29 cm. The National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Image provided by the

National Museum of Korea.

Half the Picture

75

different, Nam's meticulous attention to the details that differentiate multiple species of the same animal type in a single composition closely resembles the approach Jang takes in his screen of Fish and Aquatic Life. Often referred to as Nam Nabi, or "Nam Butterfly," Nam seems to have styled himself as a specialist in butterfly paintings in the same way that Jang achieved reno\Vll as a specialist in painting fish. Nam and Jang shared more than just an interest in animal subjects. In fact, Nam also adopted a scholarly approach to painting, basing his images of butterflies on first-hand observation. His contemporary, Go Jinseung (1 822-7, ���7t), claims that Nam trapped butterflies in a glass case to research them for his paintings. Additional evidence suggests that Nam preserved butterfly specimens between the pages of books and sometimes used them to trace the outlines of the insects in his paintings.35 As Lee Soyeon has pointed out, the dimensions of specific butterflies in Nam's paintings correspond precisely to the average size of species in the wild, and the shape of their wings is uncannily similar to real specimens.36 Although Nam's chosen subject is easier to preserve and examine than Jang's aquatic animals, both artists adopt a similarly precise approach based on direct observation of real animals. As a result, Nam's style of painting tends to flatten out the butterflies in order to better describe the specific details of their anatomy. Among artists in the late Joseon period, Nam comes closest to Jang in telTIlS of style. Nam Gyeu takes a step further than Jang in asserting his scholarly intentions. The inscriptions at the top of Flowers and Butterflies do not include quotations from poetry and elite literary culture that were customary in paintings of this type. Instead, the artist cites compendia of knowledge on the natural world. One scroll, for example, quotes the Jin period (265-420) text, Gujin zhu (Notes to Things Old and New, i1 £riff) attributed to Cui Bao (t!:.�'J, act. 290-306). The inscription reads: According to the Gujin zw another word for butterfly is yefeng (l'l':Iii ) and in Gangdong it is called tawei (M*). Among these, the large types are similar to bats. Other black or blue-spotted types are called fengzi ( ll T ) or else by the other name

lengche ( !i\ "' ). According to Youyang zazu (l"lM/;'ilE.ill ) butterfly paintings by Deng Wang (Li Yuanying, 630-684)

35 Son Jeonghui, " 1 9 segi bangrnulhakjeok chwihyanggwa hoehwa ui saerOlUl gyeonghyang" Hanguk munhwa, v. 44 (Seoul University, 200S) p. 5S. 36 Lee Soyeon, "Ilho Nam Gyeu hojeopdo ill yeon'gu" Misulsahak yeon 'gu, v. 242-243 (Han'guk rnisulsa hakhoe, 2004) p. 294.

76

Chapter Two include the names jiangxiaban (iT�l'lE), dahaiyan (7:: Wllle), xiaahaiyan eJ'wllle), cunlibaa (fil!'i'&), and chahuazi (!1(TI: r). There are also other names such as clnmju (*,�), tianji CR�l) and gan/an (MII) .37

The previous discussion of compendia examined the role of the "explanation of names," and clearly Nam's inscription belongs to that tradition. As in the case of compendia, the "explanation of names" functioned not only to provide identifying information but also to distinguish a scholarly work from a creative literary endeavor. By appropriating the "explanation of names," Nam Gyeu aligns his painting with scholarly efforts to identify animals and explicate the natural world. In short, he proposes that his painting be regarded as a work of natural history. The inscription on the companion scroll also adheres to this scholarly theme. Here, Nam excerpts directly from the entry on butterflies (jiadie, �!tlt:) in Bencao Gangmu, and he includes no fewer than seven quotations on the topic of butterfly metamorphosis. According to the Gujin ZW, the worm on the mandarin tree transforms into a butterfly, and according to the Erya (m:$:: ) the worm on a vegetable spreads its wings and transforms into a butterfly. According to the Liezi (JUT), the leaf of the wuzu C",JE) turns into a butterfly, and according to the Piya (",1lI), vegetable greens transform into butterflies. According the Xiyang zazu (§��ill ), lilies transform into butterflies, and according to the BeiluJlu (it;p�) tree leaves transform into colorful butterflies. According to an unofficial historical record from Danqing yeshi (ftW�.s!:) silk clothes transform into butterflies. All of these records are said to be grounded in observation.38 37 "isA'HM48 Under such circumstances, a study aimed at understanding change over long periods of time-this could be described of both the genre of landscape in Chinese art and of the domestication of wilderness in Chinese regions-is handicapped. What is to be done? Fortunately, art history's history has demonstrated vigorous critical self-examination and interdisciplinary capacities, important resources for meeting the unprecedented problems of the Anthropocene. Critical self­ examination has driven the expansion of art history's boundaries to expand its purview to include, for example, social, political, and economic dimensions of our world. For students today, art history has come to be intrinsically interdisciplinary. It requires little more reasoning to see that the social, political, and economic would not be possible in the absence of natural ecologies on which humans depend. Drawing on critical self-examination and interdisciplinary capacities can help issue new art historical narratives that effectively (1) counter myths such as the belief in pristine past and (2) deliver a sense of wanting when identification of art historical references masquerades as comprehensive analysis. Such goals animate this study, which has followed in more ways than one the work of Zhang Hongtu. Even as some of Zhang's landscapes elicit the before-and-after comparisons that lead to the prelapsarian fallacy, others counter this myth, and still others resist anthropocentricism altogether. His oeuvre challenges us to delve into the representation and possibilities of de-centering the human. As the problems of the Anthropocene are centuries in the making, we will need all manner of human culture-art history, too-to reckon with and to repair the damage. Bibliography

Richard M. Barnhart. "The Five Dynasties (907-960) and the Song Period (960-1279)," in Richard M. Barnhart et aI., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. James Cahill. The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth­ century Chinese Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. 48 Ghosh, The Great Derangement.

Zhang Hongtu and Domesticated Landscapes in Chinese Painting

163

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Originally serialized in the New Yorker 38: 17, 18, 19 (June 16, 12, 30, 1962), val. pag. Mark Elvin. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Ping Foong. The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities ofPainting at the Northern Song Court Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Greg Garrard. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012. Amitav Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Robert E. Harrist, Jr. Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-century China: Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Mary S. Lawton. "Li Tang," OxfordArt Online, n.p., 2003. De-nin D. Lee. "Contending Landscapes: Art Historical Ecology in the Classroom." Unpublished paper presented at the panel, "Art Historical Ecology: Asian Perspectives," College Art Association AImual Conference, Los Angeles, February 2018. -. "Domesticated Landscapes of Li Gonglin: A View from the Anthropocene." Journal ofSong-Yuan Studies 45 (2015): 139-174 -. "The Resonant Landscape." Unpublished paper presented at "The Resonant Object: A Symposium to Honor Charles W. Haxthausen," Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 19 May 2018. -. "A Single Artwork: A Conversation with Zhang Hongtu." Yishu 14.6 (NovemberlDecember 2015): 44-57. Hui-shu Lee. Empresses, Art and Agency in Song Dynasty China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Luchia Meihua Lee and Jerome Silbergeld, eds. Zhang Hongtu: Expanding Visions of a Shrinking World. New York: Queens Museum, 2015. Liu Heping. "'The Water Mill' and Northern Song Imperial Patronage of Art, Commerce, and Science." The Art Bulletin 84.4 (December 2002): 566-595. -. "Picturing Yu Controlling the Flood: Technology, Ecology, and Emperorship in Northern Song China." In Dagma Schafer, ed., Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History. Leiden: Brill, 2012. 91-126. -. "From Shanshui to Linquan: Guo Xi and Eleventh-century Landscape Painting of Eremitism and Ecology." Unpublished paper presented at

1 64

Chapter Four

the "Changing Landscapes in China" workshop, Harvard University, March 23-24, 2015. Robert Marks. China: An Environmental History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. W.lT. Mitchell, ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Susan E. Nelson, "Picturing Listeinng: The Sight of Sound in Chinese Painting," Archives ofAsian Art 5 1 (1998/1999): 30-55. Wallace Stevens. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. New York: Knopf, 1971. Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Guo Xi. "The Lofty Appeal of Forests and Streams Linquan gaozhi ji," in Victor H. Mair et al., eds., Hawai 'i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture. Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 2005. Anthony C. Yu, trans. Journey to the West, 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 2012. Pauline Yu. The Poetry of Wang Wei: New Translations and Commentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980. Ling Zhang. "Traditional Chinese and the Environment" in Naomi Standen, ed., Demystijj;ing China: New Understandings of Chinese History, 79-88. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

CHAPTER FIVE Eco-ART HISTORIES AS PRACTICE: WOODCUT AND CUTTINGS OF WOOD IN ISLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA Lucy DAVIS (THE MIGRANT ECOLOGIES PROJECT)

Author's Note

This chapter concerns an art historical, material and practice-led process, encircling stories of wood in island Southeast Asia under the auspices of The Migrant Ecologies Project1 and evolving through an ongoing series of exhibitions, art publications and hand-animated films. In the following, I trace a coming-together of perspectives of the natural world as inscribed in a migratory art historical fOlTIl, narrated through perspectives of plant genetics as well as practices of, for example, Southeast Sulawesi tree-lore and regional timber patriarchies. Comparisons and frictions between such perspectives and practices reveal a fecundity of ways that human and non-human agents have colonized and continue to make their presence felt across the archipelago. A prevailing concern has been to physically work-through the aesthetics, spirit, material and labor of the mid 20th century 1 Fmmded in 2010 as an umbrella for collaborative inquiries into nature and culture in Southeast Asia, The Migrant Ecologies Project " . . . embraces concerned explorers, cmious collectors, daughters of woodcutters, miners of memories and art by nature. The project evolves through and around past and present movements and migrations of naturecultures in art and life in Southeast Asia." "About The Migrant Ecologies Project," http://www.migrantecologies.org/About. Accessed 20 July 2016.

166

Chapter Five

Malayan Modem Woodcut movement; a form through which migrant artists of the Chinese left inscribed dreams of permanent residence in the South Seas or Nanyang. A second concern has been a critical-poetic investigation with Singapore's economic success-story, predicated upon the island-city's entrepot processing of regional "cheap nature," from rubber to palm oil. The resulting works aim to bring, macro and micro practices together and to re-work the micro-gestures of the Malayan Woodcut in a macro-ecological context of "cuttings of wood," in this case the modem deforestation of the archipelago from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

From 2005-2016 I was Assistant Professor at the School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, (NTU) Singapore, where, among other things I taught an introductory course to Southeast Asia Modern and Contemporary Art. In the process of teaching this course, I became fascinated by the processes, material, and energies of the mid-twentieth-century Malayan Modem Woodblock Movement. There is currently considerable interest in the turbulent, post­ World War II histories of Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and in the re-excavating, rehabilitating, and recasting of perspectives that were suppressed during the Cold War and by the US­ allied political entities that came to power during this period. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of idealistic jostling amongst a wide spectrum of nationalist positions in Malaya.2 And artworks, including woodblocks, were a vital medium in the struggle over which vision of modernity would prevail. I first encountered the woodblock artworks in an exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore in 1999 3 This was the first exhibition to critically reconsider the politics of some of the artists and included a series of parallel talks at the museum. At one such talk, historian Lim Cheng Tju 2 The modern woodblock movement was initiated during a time that has been called the Malayan Emergency (1948-1 960), when the Malayan Comrlllmist Party which had held out the most sustained resistance to the Japanese during WWII was left out of post-war power sharing arrangements and took up violent anti-colonial struggle in the plantations ofMalaya. 3 The exhibition History Through Prints: Woodblock Prints in Singapore (August 1998 March 1 999), was co-organised by the Singapore History Museum and the Printmaking Society (Singapore) and cmated by Joyce Fan in collaboration with then Singapore History Museum researcher Koh Nguang How.

Eco-Art Histories as Practice

1 67

presented a paper on political cartoons. A number of the woodblock artists were also political cartoonists, and their woodprints were reproduced alongside their cartoons in the Chinese press and in books published by the Chinese literati. The discussion following the presentation was led by artist and archivist Koh Nguang How (then a National Museum curator) and included suggestions as to various "messages" behind the more overtly political of the prints. Indeed, surviving woodblock artists I have interviewed have similarly seemed to favor didactic interpretations of their works.4 However, as much as I shared the excitement of being audience to a rare public discussion of political contexts and possible content of the woodblocks, I found myself equally drawn to the poetics of the medium.5

Fig. 5- 1 . Lim Yew Kuan, After the Fire (Bukit Ho Swee), circa 1 966. 45.5 cm

x

61

cm. Woodblock print on paper. Collection o f the National University of Singapore Museum.

4

Yew Kuan Lim, interview with author, 2007 and Tee Chie, Tan interview with

author and translator Daniel Lim, 200 8 . 5

Cheng Tju Lim, "Fragments o f the Past: Political Prints o f Post-war Singapore,"

The Heritage Journal 2, no. 1 (2005): 22-47

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Over a decade later I find myself still absorbed by the positive and negative spaces of the modem woodblock works and by the raw, emotional quality of the prints in ways that are mystical as much as they are political. Such emotional possibilities are masterfully evoked by founder of the movement, Lim Yew Kuan, in what is possibly his most celebrated work, After the Fire 1966, a print produced at the very end of the period in which this movement was active. (Fig. 5-1) Lim informed me that this print was compiled from a collage of photographs he had collected of kampung (village) fires during the 1960s 6 Memories of such fires have become part of a conflicted narrative about an end to kampung life, infOlmal subsistence fanning, and associated community spirit, which came about when the population was encouraged to move to modem, orderly but far more individualized, Housing Development Board (HDB) high-rise apartments in which 80 percent of the Singapore population (including Lim himself) now reside 7 Lim's print can be read as a monumental lament for urban life forms that by the late 1960s were burning out, the anthropomorphic remains of his blackened trees reaching into the sky. The medium enhances the emotive pathos of the scene. There is a depth in the counterpoint contrasts and layers of wood-grain, which is perhaps one reason why the woodblock medium has been a potent presence in times of antagonism and uncertainty. In Western art histories, the woodblock is poignantly remembered in medieval invocations of the Black Death and religious upheavals accompanying the Reformation. The medium was then reinvented by German expressionists during the impoverishments and idealisms of the Weimar period' and equally famously in Shanghai where the May Fourth Movement literary ideologue Lu Xun advocated that Shanghai woodcut artists (much-emulated in Singapore) 9 should embrace a living spirit of the woodblock in parallel with the political spirit of the time and let the woodblock speak via an "aesthetic of vigour"-li zhi mei. Lu Xun asked artists to let the material talk and let mistakes, slips of the 6 Yew Kuan Lim interview. See note 4. 7 Kah Seng Loh, Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making o/Modem Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012). 8 Kate Kangaslahti "Who Put the Woodis in the Woodcut?: Visions of the Forest in the Woodwork of Die Brucke and Jalan Jali," in Jalan Jati (Teak Road), ed. Yu­ Mei Balasingamchow. (Edinbmgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013), 61-80 9 Lim Yew Kuan spoke of the Singapore woodblock artists circulating textbooks on modem woodblock mailed to them from Shanghai, and teaching themselves the techniques from these books. Lim, interview. See note 4.

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hand, be part of a dance with the wood. 1 0 In After The Fire, this combination of ink and grain enables Lim Yew Kuan to draw us into the micro dramas of the tiny humans who are beginning to reassemble and tidy up, collecting the remains of their belongings, like ants on a burned forest floor. But the medium also leads Lim up and out via the "atms" of those burned-out arboreal familiars into a choppy sky, which moves like a tide, beyond tbe detritus and out of tbe top right comer oftbis patched-together collage of memories. When I interviewed Lim in his spacious HDB flat about his time with the Modem Woodblock Movement in 2007, he also emphasized a combination of a political and emotional-spiritual engagement with the practice. I was directed to participate in a demonstration as to how breathe correctly, so as to charmel the energy of a breathing piece of wood. This was an exercise which involved the septuagenarian Mr Lim having me follow him running around his living room, all apparently in order to ascertain that I had the correct level of respiratory-fitness to work with tbe material. 11 When I started this process, I had a vague idea of wanting to work through tbe possibilities of the woodblock in a way that was not merely a postmodem appropriation of a historic art fOlTIl. The raw materials and political-ecologies of modern Singapore are intertwined with the currents of seas and movements of the winds around the island as well as with visits by migratory flora and fauna. I wanted to explore what recasting the form and content of this migratory movement might mean in a contemporary context of the "cutting of wood," meaning macro-scale deforestation in Southeast Asia. I also knew that I wanted to do so in such a way that was not merely another illustration of things we already know (or ought to know) about ecological crisis. Wbat I did not realize at tbe time was quite how disparate an assemblage of conflicting stories would

1 0 Xiaobing Tang. Origins of the Chinese Avant Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 2008), 128. 11 During this interview, the charismatic Lim Yew Kuan, possibly most celebrated of the woodblock artists appeared to be reveling in and possibly exaggerating the heroic politics of his yOlmger days. Encomaged perhaps by the energies and cmiosities of a yOlmger generation, Lim recalled how the group had ordered and shared banned literature from China, exclaiming, "We were Marxists, we were all Marxists!" as well as the "Writings of Lu Xun on the woodblock. I read his attempts later the same day to teach me breathing and to emphasize a more mystical relationship to the energy of the wood as Lim similarly enjoying a master-pupil, gendered, cultured dynamic (while an audience of Lim's wife and teenage daughter tried lUlsuccessfully to repress their laughter!). Lim, interview. See note 4.

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eventually evolve from various sites where fingerprints meet wood-grain across the archipelago.

Fig.

5-2.

Nanyang University, 1955 (1999 print), woodblock print

Lee Kee Boon,

on paper,

20

em x

31

em.

Collection of the National University of Singapore

Museum.

Nanyang University 1 955

by Lee Kee Boon depicts the construction in

of the university popularly known as

Nantah.

(Fig.

5-2)

This was an

independent institution funded by diverse migrant Chinese philanthropists and communities. It has been described as having a "good claim to being the first Southeast Asian university" 12 because, although the medium of instruction was Chinese,

Nantah

was independent of colonial rule and

resolutely located in Malaya. 1 3 But both colonial and post-independence authoritie s regarded with suspicion the heroic, May Fourth Movement­ inspired visions of modem life in the archipelago espoused by 12

Anthony Reid, "A Saucer Model of Southeast Asian Identity,"

Nantah

Southeast Asian

Journal ofSocial Science 27 (1999), 1 1 . 13

Donors included clan associations, trishaw drivers, and dance hall hostesses.

Pookong Kee et aI,

A Pictorial History ofNantah, 2000), 2 1 .

Chinese Heritage Centre,

ed., Kwai Keong (Singapore:

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171

founders and the critical perspectives developed by Nantah faculty and students. 14 Amidst accusations that the institution had fostered communist and cultural chauvinist sentiments, Nanyang University was closed in 1979. In 1982, an engineering institution appeared on the fonner site, later metamorphosing into Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where I used to teach. Lee's Nanyang University presents a splintered dance between a raw, porous grain and the construction of a modem that was not to be. Concrete dreams of a modernizing China, transplanted onto a plot of equatorial-orange soil and carved out of jungles and plantations in northwest Singapore, are inscribed with much intensity-indeed, much labor-into a woodblock. The print shows the future Nantah administration building as it was in 1955, a "work-in-process." Still under construction, the building is held together in the print by a delicately-traced, exoskeleton of wooden scaffolding. This fragile depiction of wood-in-wood possibly depicts what were bakau mangrove poles shipped to Singapore from archipelago coastlines. Today, the Nantah building still stands, rebranded as NTU's "Chinese Heritage Centre," an attempt to co-opt disorderly historic material into official "Heritage. ,,15 But there were also other dreams and desires inscribed in the modem woodblocks. And, often one finds a tree not far from the frame. In another iconic print entitled Persuading, 1958, by Tan Tee Chie, a frangipani surrounds two men on a wooden bench. (Fig. 5-3) The older man taps the thigh of the youth with his fingertips, a gesture the latter does not appear to appreciate. Tan Tee Chie was fond of voyeuristic, film noir­ like scenes, with ambivalent titles and what is actually being "persuaded" in this print is unclear. Is this, as Tan himself explained to me a "guidance session" where the older man is counseling a reluctant youth? 16 Or is 14 Official histories portray leftist members of migrant Chinese commlUlities and schools as commlUlists. Others argue that the socially engaged culture of the Chinese in Singapore in the mid-twentieth century had less to do with cornrnlUlism, more to do with the May Fomth Movement efforts to modernize China following Chinese territory loss after World War 1. Souchou Yao, "All Quiet on Jurong Road: Nanyang University and Radical Vision in Singapore", in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Postwar Singapore, ed. Michael D. Barr and Carl A. Trocki (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 170-87. 15 Singapore discomse on heritage often concerns a struggle over which entities are considered (grand) Heritage-worthy and which must make way for economic grmvth. Calling something "Heritage" is also a means by which government agencies celebrate but gild-over contested historical matter. 16 In a 2008 presentation, oral historian and artist Koh Nguang How connected this print -..vith the Chinese left's "anti-yellow-culture movement" against westernization,

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something more shady perhaps being proposed?

Fig. 5 - 3 . Tan Tee Chie, Persuading, 1 9 58, huang yang woodblock print on pap er, 20.5 cm x 3 1 cm. Collection of National University of Singapore Museum.

The frangipani, like the bakau scaffolding in Nanyang University and the burned-tree witnesses of After The Fire, is yet another invocation of wood-in-wood. It appears first as anthropomorphic mirror of the older man, winding around the pair, heavy with flowers. A leafy rosette, a third spherical center, opens to the left of the men's heads. To the right, splayed leaves mirror the older man's gesticulating fingers. But what I find more persuasive is the way this frangipani, carved from a huang yang (boxwood) block, imported from China, slowly outgrows the ostensible human subj ect matter. Its branches stretch beyond and forward towards the viewer, disrupting both the composition and easy interpretation. Frangipanis, and especially the white-flowered Plumeria

obtusa Singapore (originating not from Singapore but Latin America), have been traditionally associated with death by both Malay and Chinese communities. To the former, the scent of frangipani (kemboja) at night is

materialism, and vice. Tan himself was more vague about what exactly was being "persuaded." Tan Tee Chie, interview with the author. See note 5 .

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said to mean that a pontianak (female vampire) is in the vicinity. In colonial Singapore such trees were only found alongside European buildings or Chinese cemeteries. The path beneath the frangipani slopes vertiginously out of the bottom corner of the image, suggesting subterranean movements that contrast with a light-cut shadow-world of modem construction in the space behind. It is very common to read accounts of Singapore's economic success story as the engineering of unwieldy tropical nature into a manicured modem city. The trope of Singapore as "Garden City" is a much-tended feature of official political discourse, Singapore Tourism Board promotions, popular imaginations and critical inquiry, producing a series of somewhat repetitive and top-down associations along the axis of culture/nature.17 A whole anthology dedicated to environmental histories of Singapore was launched in 2014 entitled Nature Contained, featuring one of the futuristic new supertrees18 at the new Gardens by the Bay on the front cover.19 Certainly much of modem Singapore's development has involved legal and illegal entrep6t processing of and profiting from natural materials, from opium to rubber to contemporary palm oil. 20 More recently, regional marine and mangrove ecologies and an estimated twenty-four Indonesian islands have disappeared, 21 together with sand shipped to Singapore for concrete and land reclamation. 22 This utilitarian

1 7 Aza Wee Sile, "Lee Kuan Yew was actually Singapore's chief gardener," CNBC corporation. https:llwww.cnbc.coml20 1 6/03127Ilee-kuan-yew-was-actually-singapores-chief­ gardener.html. Accessed 27 July 2017. 18 "Supertree Grove," Gardens By The Bay. "WWw.gardensbythebay.com.sgieniattractions/supertree-grove/visitor­ information.html. Accessed 9 August 2017. Ef Timothy P. Barnard ed. Nature Contained (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2014). 20 For an at once poetic, intimate and biting perspective of palm oil worldings, see Simryn Gill and Michael Taussig, Becoming Palm, Ute Meta Bauer and Anca Rujoiu, eds. (Singapore: SternberglNTU Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017). 21 Joshua Cormaroff, "Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk," Harvard Design Magazine 39, (2014). "WWw.harvarddesignrnagazine.org/issues/39Ibuilt-on-sand-singapore-and-the-new­ state-of-risk. Accessed 30 July 2017. 22 After Indonesia banned the sale of sand to Singapore, Singapore turned to Cambodian coastlines. See: Global Witness Press Release 1 0 May 2010: "Shifting Sand, How Singapore's demand for Cambodian sand threatens ecosystems and undermines good governance." www.globalwitness.org/enlarchive/shifting-sand-

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view of "cheap nature" 23 was of course not the sole purview of the capitalist bloc of Southeast Asian nations. Most versions of modernity competing for predominance in the region have regarded raw material exploitation as the primary way forward, be this via nationalized state endeavors, or by opening forest and mining concessions to government cronies and multinationals alike. As a consequence, Southeast Asia suffers the world's most rapid rate of deforestation and continues to be a major world center of the illegal wildlife trade.24 However, while regional biodiversity is fast reaching a low not seen since the last great extinction,25 nature does also have a way of resisting such "containments." Modem Southeast Asian cities are prone to flooding from tropical stmms, even more so as tree roots that fmmally absorbed runoff are dug up and paved over. Ever more resilient stains of mosquitoes happily breed in clear water containers inside immaculate condominiums. If you leave a new tower block alone for six months, you may find a banyan or strangling fig sprouting from an upper story. And, in a particularly pervasive alliance between two realms of non-humans, banyan trees of a certain size-even in technocratic Singapore-require temple medium assistance to ensure their removal does not upset an uneasy relationship with the lives of spirits. There are undoubtedly a lot of things that modem humans have done to control and contain Southeast Asian nature. But in the case of Tan Tee Chie's frangipani as well as the various non-humans drawing me through this research, I am equally interested in things that nature (and by extension natural materials) persuade us to do and the stories they entice us to tell.

how-singapores-demand-cambodian-sand-threatens-ecosystems-and-undennines­ good!. Accessed 13 January 2015. 23 Jason W. Moore, 24 April 2014 "The Origins of Cheap Nature: From Use-Value to Abstract Social Nature." Jason W. Moore Blog. j asonwrnoore. wordpress. com120 14/04/07/the-origins-of-cheap-nature -from-use­ value-to-abstract-social-nature/. Accessed 14 February 2017. 24 TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, JlUle 7, 2016 "Illegal wildlife trade highlighted dming Conservation Asia 2016." "WWW.traffic.orgihomeI201 617/6/illegal-wildlife-trade­ highlighted-during-conservation-asia.htrnl. Accessed August 2017. 26 While there are different perspectives as to whether we have actually reached sixth extinction level or no, science is in agreement that things are not great. Peter Brannen, "Earth Is Not in the Midst ofa Sixth Mass Extinction," The Atlantic 13 (JlUl 2017). "WWW.theatlantic.comiscience/archive/20 17/06/the-ends-of-the-world!529545/. Accessed 9 August 2017.

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Migrant Ecologies

How might one work through stories of wood in such a way which does not ignore the environmental impacts of modem humans yet does not in the process, reproduce a narrative of singular human supremacy? When I began to work with woodprints, I discovered that the majority of timber available for printmaking in Singapore was jelutong, a rainforest timber,26 which led me to a search for alternative wood sources and inquiries into stories of objects discarded on Singapore streets. From 2006 to 2009, I lived in a quarter officially known as Little India, famous for its congregations of South Asian migrant workers. The quarter also plays host to a plethora of discarded "migrant objects," such as electrical items, cardboard, and tin cans. Each night, a "nocturnal economy" or "ecology" occurs where these objects are collected and trolleyed to a central recycling point, often by elderly Singaporeans and migrants. I noticed that discarded timber items had not yet been integrated into this ecology and began to venture out at night collecting wooden planks and bits of discarded or damaged furniture. I became interested in how and from where these pieces of wood had migrated to Little India, and these inqinries led to my first collaboration with a Singapore startup called DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies. 27 DoubleHelix initially assisted me by overseeing cell tests in order to identify timber and tree species and thereby possible forests and plantations of origin of the objects I had collected. I considered creating a forest of objects out of this collection, together with shadow landscapes of their prints. Mostly planks and random pieces of wood, they would all be inscribed with the routes of their migrations. However, a reminder of more disparate perspectives of my collection occurred early on when I observed my three adopted street cats

26 Jelutong is not on the CITES A-list of endangered species. However, the harvesting of jelutong for art supplies and pencils contributes to rainforest destruction. See for example: Rainforest Relief, 2004 "Jelutong (Dyera costulata)." \VWw.rainforestrelief.orglWhat_to_Avoid_and_AltemativeslRainforest_WoodlWh at_to_Avoid_\Vhat_to_ChooselBy_Tree_Species/Tropical_Woods/J/Jelutong.html . Accessed 1 1 November 2012. 27 DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies have pioneered the use of DNA profiling for various forest and agricultural products. They employ the "use of DNA, stable isotopes, wood anatomy . . . to independently verify product claims of species and origin." DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies. ''Build trust in yom timber products. Build trust in your supply chain. \VWw.doublehelixtracking.com. Accessed 1 3 March 2016.

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noses forwards, mouths open, interact with a four-legged stool I found on the comer of Kampong Kapor Road. Was some kind of wood-cat interpretive zone28 being constituted here, where the stool had absorbed stories that the feline nose and mouth were investigating?29 In my work as writer and artist, I have tried to emphasize non-human perspectives of local politics and histories.30 Domestic objects made of forest materials carry traces of story in their cells that have been acquired during journeys through industrial and intimate, human and non-human environments. Perhaps these feline investigators could sniff out that stray black dog that was sitting with his human by this stool when I discovered it on the comer of Kampong Kapor Road? Another related tum concerned a relationship between art practice and advocacy. I have been engaged and allied with various artist-civil society issues in Singapore and elsewhere, but in my practice I have tried to let activist concerns inform rather than detelTIline the process. Had I chosen to focus upon the many planks of wood collected from a nearby construction site, I might have discovered that the timber used was an illegal species and the project might have become, certainly more immediate, but possibly also more "black and white" and predictable, comprising evidence of supply chains and life cycles of materials. However, for me, choosing to work with domestic objects added other layers of familiarity and engagement, dreamwork and complicity. Another challenge involved how to develop a contemporary method that paid homage to the Malayan Modern Woodblock Movement. As mentioned above, I originally intended to make my collection of discarded timber into woodblocks in the spirit of the 1950s and 1960s, inscribing stories of actual and speculative migration into their grain. However, once these objects had spent time in my studio, I found I had begun a relationship with them. And with that relationship came an ethics.

28 The idea that there are meaning-making processes outside of the hmnan in which we may be part- or temporarily included, has become a key theme in Migrant Ecologies projects. It links to DOlllla Haraway's pioneering analyses of impermanent, inter-species "contact zones"; different species "becoming with" each other or "making each other up in the flesh . . . full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined sometimes-separate heritages" DOlllla J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: U of Millllesota P, 2008), 16-17 and 25. 29 Cats scent out stories both with their noses and by "tasting" the air with an olfactory organ on the roof of their mouths. 3 0 See, for example, Lucy Davis, ed., Regional Animalities: FOCAS Forum on Contemporary Art and Society 6 (Singapore/Kassel: The Substation/docmnenta #12 Magazines Project, 2007).

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• • • •

Fig. 5-4. Lucy Davis,

Bangku terentang,

2009, print of terentang stool with mixed

ink & paper, 105 cm x 75 cm. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum.

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Although the wood had already been cut into pieces by unknown carpenters, there was an integrity to these forms and I found I could not do further violence to by reducing them to my stories. My response, instead of cutting into the obj ects, was to make primitive prints of each part. (Fig. 5-4) On the one hand, I attempted to get as physically, positively close to the obj ect as possible to let the wood grain reveal its story. On the other hand, I arranged the fragment-like prints in the cold, dissected manner of natural history drawings in order to empirically display each constituent part to greatest effect.

Fig. 5 - 5 . Chua Mia Tee,

National Language Class.

1 95 9 Collection of National

Gallery Singapore.

At the same time, I asked writer friends Alfian bin Sa'at and Isrizal (who half-jokingly called themselves "native informants") to teach me Malay names of the obj ects I had collected. In doing this I was performatively channeling equally earnest attempts by colonial natural historians to learn local names of specimens as well as a practice whereby the Chinese migrant-artists of the mid-twentieth century aimed for greater

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"permanent residence" in the region via the learning of Malay. Although the centrality of the Malay language in Singapore has waned in the last half century, in the late 1950s Malay was considered the "National Language" both at the official level and in vernacular everyday practice. As illustrated in this iconic painting by Chua Mia Tee,}l migrants of all kinds, including Chinese artists and intellectuals such as Chua's contemporaries (members of a leftist arts organization called The Equator Society), took pains to naturalize their residential status in the region, both via language-learning and via depictions of Southeast Asian life." (Fig. 55) Once DoubleHelix identified the species of trees from which my collection of objects derived, a second search began: a pilgrimage to living Singapore specimens of the trees themselves, either in the Singapore Botanic Gardens or Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, the last remaining sites of primary forest on the island. This process was carried out with assistance from Dr. Shawn Lum, plant biologist and president of the Nature Society of Singapore. It involved an at once more laid-back and more technologically-mediated "initiation" compared Lim Yew Kuan's breathing-session (described above), when Shawn, who knows practically every inch of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve from memory, guided me to sites of specific species via my mobile telephone.}} Figure 5-6 depicts a Terentang (Campnosperma auriculatum) tree, the kind from which the four-legged stool we found at Karnpong Kapor Road originated. A second series of works involved a Humpty-Dumpty task of putting the tree back together again. This method involved my spending hours repetitively printing layer upon layer of all parts of each object in different gradations of ink in an attempt to rebuild, for example, a terentang tree, assembled exclusively from chopped-up pieces of paper, all of them separate impressions of the wood-grain of the one wooden stool. As I was working backwards in this process from a tangible object to an imagined tree, my "interpretive bias" became as much towards a "fourlegged-stool-ness" of the tree, the spirit-of-an-object-in-a-tree, as it was towards the spirit-of-a-tree-in-an-object. In these large-fOlmat, cut­ and-pasted collages, the fine grain of the wood is very apparent, as are the 3 1 Today Malay is still the National Language, but due to various political-cultural pressmes it has become less cornmon as a lingua franca, only somewhat tokenistically used in official and military ceremonies. 32 Only much later did I also notice the wooden stool in the far right of a painting I had been looking at and discussing in class for decades. 33 These were the days before either of us had GPS or Facetime apps on our cell phones, so Sha\Vll's instructions were entirely verbal.

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Fig. 5-6. Lucy Davis,

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Terentang Stool Tree ' TerentangiCampnosperma Auriculata, terentang stool with mixed ink and

2009, assembled print fragments of found

paper, 1 5 0 cm x 237 cm. Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum.

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specific characteristics of each object: the joins, the nuts and bolts, the scratches and incidental cuts from human impact. They do not posit a pristine, romantic source but rather something that was becoming out of layers of paper print and fragments of story that had migrated to a quarter of Singapore. A second play on the naming of names took place where I enlisted the assistance of friends to create a new Latin genealogy of this "Four-Legged-Stool Tree." Here, I was rehearsing a practice of naming newly discovered species and human cultivars alike, after lovers, royalty, politicians, movie stars and, in the case of the orchid collection in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, a trail of visiting dictators and their wives. A Latin text which ran alongside this "Terentang Stool Tree" read, for example: "This is the stool found on the corner of Kampong Kapor Road and given to us by the karang guni seller in the black hat with the black dog." Genetic Imprints

After a series of exhibitions exploring this woodprint collage method, a group of us with myself as Principal Investigator was awarded a Tier 1 Singapore Ministry of Education grant to extract DNA from one specific teak bed and to travel to wherever the DNA suggested the timber originated. This research collaboration also included the aforementioned DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies, photographer Shannon Lee Castleman, Dr. Shawn Lum, musicians, Zai Kuning and Zai Tang, and ten student and graduate assistants from Nanyang Technological University. Each individual tree has a unique DNA identity, termed with some anthropomorphic arrogance a "fingerprint." DoubleHelix Tracking has pioneered the use of DNA fingerprinting technology to certify the legal plantation origins of timber. 34 However, in this instance we were challenging DoubleHelix to move backwards through a supply chain, interpreting degraded wood from a mid-twentieth-century bed that was estimated to have been made during the lifetime of the members of the Malayan Modem Woodblock Movement. This was not an exact process, as complete genographic archives for teak do not exist. However, DoubleHelix Tracking collaborators were excited when preliminary tests suggested a connection between DNA from our bed and teak in southeast Sulawesi. One theory held that teak, imported to Indonesia for centuries, had "naturalized" in southeast Sulawesi and that this phenomenon might 34 See note 27.

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be evident in its genetic structure. So, a Migrant Ecologies team travelled to Muna, a Southeast Sulawesi island with a reputation for the best teak in Indonesia, in search of stories. Uncertainty at the beginning of investigations is in stark contrast with the figuring of DNA in popular imagination. 35 While a DNA sequence might lead a geneticist through rich and variegated encounters, the spirit of nineteenth-century positivism persists in mass-media projections of DNA: a "Journey to the Source," colonizing new frontiers with the value-added, economistic timbre of the "The Barcode. ,,36 I am grateful for the journeys our bed DNA has taken us on, and I am persuaded of the macroecological possibilities of (open-source) genographic archives. 37 But, there were also complications in our collaborations. 'Whereas the processes of DNA-extraction in an Adelaide laboratory were made completely transparent to US,38 the methods of matching our bed DNA to Sulawesi teak remained obscure. We were basically presented a gel printout and infolTIled this was a "confident match" with a sequence from our bed. We took this information in good faith even though we had been advised that most teak entering Malaya in the mid-twentieth century came from BUlTIla. 39 Another complication concerned our 0\Vll project premises, which aimed to appropriate neither investigative journalism, nor "lab aesthetics," nor illustrative science. Instead, at that moment in the project, I hoped to explore the way a dream in DNA code might seed itself, like teak across the archipelago, exposing what I envisaged would be grounded

35 And indeed in the marketing of Double Helix Tracking Technologies. See note 27. 3 6 Judith Roof argues in The Poetics ofDNA, "DNA .. .is not just another scientific fact. DNA's overt connection to processes of representation (the alphabet, the book, the map [one might add here, the imprint LD]) makes . . . representations of DNA particularly rich sites for understanding the interrelation of science, metaphor and narrative." Judith Roof, The Poetics of DNA (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 24. 37 Together with DoubleHelix Tracking Technology, we proposed a larger grant project to DNA-profile teak from the whole Asian region, in order to collate an open-soillce archive for use by NGOs, government timber boards and so forth. However, this proposal did not reach the final rounds. This outcome might possibly have been due to IP considerations by the funding agencies and because being open-source, it was not a venture that would bring in profits. 3 8 See Jardine DlUlcan, 'Wood Extraction: The Basics," in Yu-Mei Balasingarnchow, ed., Jalan Jati (TeakRoad) (Edinburgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic Garden/Migrant Ecologies Project, 2013), 185-187. 39 David Antiques, interview with author, 215 Rangoon Road, 1 7 October 2009.

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but mutable ecologies of power, economics, labor, gender and species. A later addition would be ecologies of spirits. Colonies of Teak

The creation myth for kulijawa or teak in Muna language40 recalls that teak seeds41 arrived on the island over five hundred years ago in the form of gifts by a royal Javan envoy to the Muna King. Teak enabled that envoy, a Javan nobleman, to implant himself and a timber economy into Muna and its aristocracy via marriage. For centuries, only royalty could cultivate teak, with capital penalties for smugglers. Later, the Dutch intensified production, taking over plantations on the pretext of rescuing islanders from Bugis slave-raids.42 After independence the Indonesian government took over, and, after Suharto opened plantations and forests for international logging and internal cronies in 1967, a major timber boom ensued. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, demand from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia exceeded supply; sawmills lined the Muna harbor; and "rivers were thick with logs . . . you could walk on wood all the way to the sea."43 Today, practically all commercially viable teak has been cut. No primary forest remains, and sawmills are overrun with creepers. At first it appeared that teak, had completely "monoculturalized" Muna life, demanding subsistence fanners transfOlTIl into plantation-workers and village headmen into labor supervisors for a logging economy. A saying heard repeatedly was politik MW1a adalah politik kayu, "Muna politics is a politics of wood." 44 Village buffalo, central to subsistence cultivation, 40 La Ode Sirad Imbo, MlUla oral historian and philologist, interview with author, October 2010. 4 1 How or when teak arrived in Java is not clear. Different studies posit Laos, Bunna and India as the genetic parent of Javanese teak. See Andrew Lowe and Hugo Volkaert, "The Evolutionary and Plantation Origin of Teak" in Yu-Mei Balasingamchow,ed., Jalan Jati (Teak Road), (Edinburgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013), 23-25. 42 This process was followed closely in the English-language press of the Straits Settlements. See, for example, "Om Neighboms: Slavery in Celebes," The Straits Times (10 January 1 907), 8; and "Situation in Celebes: Striking Advantages of the Argument of Force," The Straits Times (March 28, 1908), 7. 43 Village Head and Community Elders, Tampo District Muna, interview with author, trans. Laksana Pelawi, October 2010. 44 Anthropologist Jennifer Gaynor, who researched fisheries and maritime history in eastern Indonesia's rural littoral and did field work in MlUla in the late 1990s, remarked in email correspondence that this saying was also cornmon at the time she was there. Jellllifer Gaynor, email conversation with author, 9 November 201 1 .

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were initially loaned-out to drag logs to river-floats. Later, as the industry automated, the buffalo were sold-off. Although subsistence farm plots and fishing along the plastic-clogged, mangrove-depleted coasts still remain, the main preoccupation of the twentieth century appears to have been teak. Alongside macro-ecological perspectives, our project also aimed to trace everyday and micro-gestures. It was only in 2000 45 that smallholder teak plantations were finally permitted on Muna Island. For centuries before this, islanders could legally fell teak only for domestic purposes. But commercial teak takes thirty years to mature. Thus, according to the discourse of DNA-certification, villagers will continue practices considered "illegal," as they cut more quality teak than needed to build houses with double walls and keep extra stocks underneath their homes for "repairs" and savings.46 A week before we arrived in Muna, a forest police officer was attacked with parang knives while trying to apprehend woodcutters in a hutan konservasi, a plantation which had been awarded konservasi or "conservation" status, not for maintaining biodiversity but in order to protect the groundwater. Halfway through our fieldwork, we discovered what photographer Sharmon Lee Castleman calls "tree-wounds," a moment whereby microgestures of Muna islanders came together with my initial interest in recasting the modem woodcut. As Sharmon puts it, "We discovered these enOlTIlOUS tree-wounds on the edges of konservasi plantations. Mr. La Ode Sirad Imbo explained that villagers would make cuts in the trees over a period of time on the side not facing the road until the tree eventually died. The tree was then removed, as it is understood to have fallen on its 0'Wll. " This process also enables the tree to dry out and the wood to become ready for use while still standing.

45 After the fall of Suharto in 1997, a decentralisation process has taken place across Indonesia, the results of which are lUlcertain. For Muna islanders it has meant finally a possibility to establish independent, smallholder teak plantations. Elsewhere, decentralisation has meant more power to local gangsters, militias, and, ironically, former Suharto cronies who were awarded forest concessions dming the dictatorship. 46 For other examples of everyday resistances to plantation life see Kevin Chua, "The Neoliberalism of Teak" in Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, ed., Jalan Jati (Teak Road) (EdinbmghlSingapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013), 29-61.

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Figs. 5-7 and 5-8. Shannon Lee Castleman, 'Tree Wounds in a Konservasi Forest,'

Scenes/rom an Island After a Timber Boom,

2 0 1 0 (Fig. 5-7) and 20 1 1 (Fig. 5-8),

Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi.

The "tree-wound portraits", which Shannon shot outdoors with a black velvet backdrop, are quite literally "woodcuts," cut by the axe and then cropped by the camera in a space somewhere between life and death, between tree and wood. Hard not to anthropomorphize, they resemble wounded limbs. And yet a tremendous affective presence pervades. This was a presence that compelled Shannon to return six months later to photograph them again. Figure 5-7 shows a tree-wound that Shannon photographed in November 20 1 0 . Figure 5-8 is the stump of the same tree that she photographed again in April 20 1 1 . Once these photographs were enlarged, new micro-ecologies appeared. We found growing out of these monuments grasshoppers, spiders, termites and plants that Shannon had not originally noticed. Teak Zombies and Hutan Hantu

Once we noticed the first set of tree wounds, we began looking at the backs of all the teak trees we saw and realized that these still standing, "teak zombies" were in fact everywhere. Indeed, the only konservasi plantations left uncut were those considered to be haunted.

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Fig. 5-9. The Muna team around the largest teak tree in the hutan hantu (haunted forest) with a local youths who led us to the tree. Laksana Pelawi, Indonesia Country Project Officer for DoubleHelix (far left), and Adhya Yusof, our guide in Muna (far right) . In the top left corner, we can see banyan roots beginning to grow up a teak tree. Photograph by Shaunon Lee Castleman.

In this snapshot by Shannon, we are standing around the largest teak tree we found in Muna in a hutan-hantu, or haunted forest.

(Fig. 5-9)

It was estimated to be over a century old. Just visible in the top left is evidence of a strange "battle" that has been playing out in these hutan hantu between plantation teak and the indigenous banyan/beringen, or strangling-fig. The banyan starts as a seed, dispersed in the canopy by a bird or a bat. The banyan seedling puts out aerial roots which, when they reach the ground, enforce a complex, ribcage-like architecture. "Possessing" and suffocating their hosts,

strangling-figs are,

as mentioned in the

introduction to this chapter, thought to house potent spirits throughout Asia-even in ultra-modem Singapore. (Fig.

5 - 1 0)

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Fig. 5 - 1 0 . Lucy Davis,

Banyan and Teak,

1 87

Muna, Southeast Sulawesi, 2 0 1 0 .

Woodprint collage. Woodprints from a 1 93 0 ' s teak bed found i n Singapore on paper, 240 x 1 50 cm, 2 0 1 2 . Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

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While Shannon was photographing this tree at dawn, I looked around the still-rhythmic topography of the old plantation, observing how the light cast shadows of the large floppy leaves onto a comparatively clear, dry forest floor. These regular patterns were interrupted sporadically by dark braids of aerial roots and a deeper, knotted shade where a banyan had taken hold, the parasite becoming in tum a host for other migrant flora as animals arrived to eat figs and deposited more seeds. As the sun rose, I heard a familiar clatter-squawk in the canopy-perhaps a banyan was fruiting? The birds resembled the yellow-crested cockatoo, critically endangered in its native islands and yet escapee crackles thrive in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore. One noisy individual occasionally visits the pong pong tree 47 outside my window in an interspecies gang of correllas. It became all the clearer to me that the active agents of conservation on Muna were neither the forest police, nor the few island NGOs, but rather cockatoos, banyans, and spirits. The ability to divine which spirits have made a tree or piece of wood their home is the purview of dukun-dukun, or shamanic wood­ doctorS.48 A dukun conventionally advises whether a particular tree should be felled and which wood to use in house construction, providing incantations for each process. In Muna architecture,49 the root-end of a plank should point groundwards and the crown-end skywards. For overhead beams, the cro\Vll points towards Mecca. Over the centuries, Muna dukun-dukun have migrated their arboreal expertise to encompass teak plantations. Muna dukun-dukun claim to know cro\Vll or root ends of a plank by holding it in their hands. On the advice of a Muna oral historian,50 meetings were arranged with two dukun-dukun. Before we left Singapore, I had fashioned samples of our bed, leftovers from the DNA extraction into "team talismans" for us to wear during our fieldtrip. I presented one of these samples and a photo

47 As we learned in Singapore primary school, the pong pong, or cerbera odollam, has mango-sized fruits with a deadly seed containing the poison, cerberin. However, escapee cockatoos in Singapore seem to have found a niche food source with the pong pong, managing to pull off the meat of the fruit, without touching the seeds. 48 An ever-invasive array of dukun-dukun have transplanted themselves into modem life throughout the archipelago and are consulted on matters from healing, marriage, agriculture, and architecture to urban planning, finance, and politics. 49 See, for example, Roxana Waterson, The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990). 5 0 La Ode Sirad Irnbo interview. See note 40

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of our bed to each dukun and asked what they thought. 51 Neither appeared impressed. Smoking a clove cigarette, the male dukun sat in the front of his new, concrete-walled house surrounded by neighbors and children. He seemed relaxed . . . perhaps a little amused? He told us that our teak was jati-hitam [black teak1 of the lowest grade-used only for the lavatory and back-areas of houses. Laughing, he tossed our "talisman" to one of his children as we drove off. 52 The female dukun invited us into her older teak house with bright blue panels. We sat on a bench opposite her husband and niece (a dukun-in-training). It was dark inside, but strips of sunlight slid in through slits in the boards. She talked about her work, mostly with women's health and sometimes exorcisms. She explained that spirits were not of the trees themselves, but that they settled in various trees, sites, and timber. Her personal encounters included tree spirits with no heads but with eyes under their mmpits. After examining our sample, she declared our wood was not from anywhere in Sulawesi. By the end of our Muna trip we had quite a collection of spirit stories from various sources. Other village elders living next to the hutan hantu told us of domestic cats they found as road-kill beside the forest. When carried away, they morphed into were-tigers. Cats have a special sacred status in Muna and must be given Islamic burials when they die. While driving, if you run over a cat; you must stop, pick it up, and give it a ritual burial. The Muna PR Chief, who arranged most of our interviews and who accompanied us everywhere in his khaki unifOlm, appeared to thoroughly enjoy our discussions with the dukun-dukun. But our collaborators, the DoubleHelix Indonesia country-officer, originally from Sumatra and our "fixer," an engineer from Kendari on the mainland, were resistant. The country-officer dismissed our dukun-dukun expertise as "animist magic," declaring his Catholic and our fixer's Islamic faiths to be more "modem" and "scientific." 53 But one breakfast while showing on my laptop an 5 1 It was actually quite difficult for me to give my 0\Vll "talisman" away. I had become quite used to having it armmd my neck, that unmistakable teak fragrance wafting up from the wood. And, I had developed a habit of turning it around on its string while we talked to people. 52 I am not an anthropologist and I regret that Oill meetings with both MlUla dukun­ dukun were so fleeting. Instead of analysing these encounters, I have tried to describe them in as much not-completelY-lUlderstood detail as possible. 53 It is, of COillse, not only my Indonesian collaborators who have had a problem with animism. Bruno Latour among many others have argued how the rational self-perception of modernity is constituted via iconoclastic denigration of the animism of the Other, even as "the moderns" ascribe agency, emotion, and

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earlier animated film of mine, featuring Alfred Russel Wallace, I recounted the legend of how, while recovering from malaria in the Malay archipelago, Wallace formulated a theory of natural selection independently of Darwin. Although neither of our advisors were familiar with Wallace or his fever-dream, at the mention of Darwin both went quiet, then moved to the other end of the balcony to converse. Our fixer went to his room and the county-officer carne back smiling. They had discussed together and agreed that although they both believed in DNA, neither believed in Darwin's evolution. 54 The DoubleHelix officer also seemed quite exasperated by my repeating the same questions to villagers about the provenance of our bed, when we could get the results from DNA. His main objective was to collect samples: leaves and his O\Vll series of small wood-cuttings, chipped from the sides of older trees with a special chisel. This collection he meticulously arranged in airtight containers in the boot of the car. Besides confitming a match with our bed, DoubleHelix wanted to collect a range of older Muna teak samples. In the end, although samples from Muna did indeed match DNA from our bed, the results were nevertheless inconclusive, as tests of newer beds appeared equally close to profiles from BUlTIla.

personhood to things like cars, planes, bombs, microbes, markets, and genes. Bruno Latom, On the Modern Cult ofthe Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press 2010), 1-34. 54 One of my challenges in this project has been to take seriously the little I could fathom of dukun-dukun gestures without reproducing familiar dualistic frameworks. In this project, I hoped not to reduce om exchanges to (merely) rural-mban resistances, "With dukun-dukun summoning tree-spirits to fend off more international timber prospectors (us). Nor was I trying as artist to denigrateirelativize DNA­ tracking by revealing how we blindly accepted a Sulawesi match for om bed without understanding how this particular iconography of genetic certitude "spirited" itself onto the paper, or how we "believed in DNA" the same way Muna islanders "believed in tree spirits." Finally, as an offshoot, I hoped also not to reproduce another familiar dualistic dynamic, namely that of the romantic artist championing an encounter with the Other to "animate" her art or self-realization. I am not sure I am really off the hook with any of the above, but my lUlderstanding of these encolUlters has been both enabled and complicated by re-reading Donna Haraway on multiple ways we becomings-with, as well as Haraway's more recent "Wfitings on the many-tentacled experiences of what she prefers to calls the ChtluJlucene. See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16 17 and 25; and Donna J. Haraway, "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin," Environmental Humanities 6, (2015): 159-165.

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On my return to Singapore, I spent one year in a darkened studio, pressing paper against the black-inked boards of my teak bed and amassing variegated mounds of woodprints, which I tore into strips. In an attempt to work through our multiple Muna encounters, I shuffled these print fragments around the floor for months.

Fig. 5- 1 1 . Animated film still from Jalan Jati Teak Road 2012. Wood-print fragments from a teak bed and charcoal. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

Fig. 5-12. Animated film still from Jalan Jati Teak Road 2012. Wood-print fragments from a teak bed and charcoal. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

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Fig. 5- 1 3 . Animated film still from Jalan Jati Teak Road 2012. Wood-print fragments from a teak bed and charcoal. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

From this process, an animated film evolved slowly. And, a dark and dense aesthetic issued from these ever-metamorphosizing print­ fragments and charcoal. The main actors in the film were a bed, a cockatoo, and a banyan. In a series of instances, the cockatoo flies into the frame and settles on a bed, a boat, a teak stump, the remains of Moshe Saifdi's Marina Bay Sands, and then shits a banyan seed. (Figs. 5-11 through 5-13) Writing is, of course, another practice in which things emerge in the telling. It is only in writing this chapter that I realize how a final abstract scene of the animated film is part echo of the detritus of Lim Yew Kuan's After the Fire. In this scene, I placed together every single print fragment that I had cut over the year of shooting and that was lying on the floor of my studio. Remains of container ships, Japanese World War Two bombers, Singapore skyscrapers, housing development flats, City Hall, the bed, all were eventually sucked up into this monstrous, parasitical tree. These encounters animate a dance between plantation teak and the migratory ficus, Muna tree-lore and plant genetics that I only partially understand, but in which perspectives of country officers, woodcutters, artists, engineers, dukun-dukun, tree spirits, and DNA code tum together and break apart in an urgent struggle over cut wood in rising seas on two islands after a timber boom.

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Wood and Men

In the fourth major exhibition of this project at National University of Singapore Museum from 2014 to 2015, two woodprint­ collages were mounted side-by-side. One is a large-scale reconstruction of an undated photograph of the late Alex Bermuli, a Muna sawmill-owner, in a plantation with a group of men gathered around a tree upon which Bermuli has placed his hand. (Fig. 5-14) His son, Walter T. Bermuli a retired sawmill engineer, told us his father had migrated in the 1950s from Menado in the North of Sulawesi to Muna. Walter allowed us to re­ photograph his collection of photos dating from the timber boom years. For three generations, the men in Walter's family had worked with teak plantations. At the time, Walter's son was a forest policeman. One photograph of Alex Bermuli is a kind of foreshadowing of Shannon's snapshot of the Migrant Ecologies team as they stood around that one large teak tree. A teasing question arises: Could it be the same tree? Palilik Muna adalah palilik kayu, as in our snapshot from 2010, multiple politics of wood are suggested: politics of class, gender, age, ethnicity (the BemlUlis, as Christians, regard themselves as a separate ethnicity to Muna islanders). But there are arboreal influences at stake, too. Both photographs, for example, attest to that inescapable temptation for humans to place the pahns of their hands on the trunk of a tree. The second woodprint-collage reconstructs a photograph of Simon Oei of Nature Wood Pte. Ltd, Singapore, at around four or five years old. (Fig. 5-15) His father, timber merchant Allen Oei, had placed him on top of a huge meranti log in the Danish-run timber yard in which he worked in the 1970s. Like Walter Bermuli, Allen Oei, whose family migrated to Singapore from Surabaya before the war, gave us access to his photo album alongside a surprisingly frank series of interviews detailing his rags-to-riches journey from itinerant timber-grader to influential merchant. 55 Allen Oei had been to Muna and confirmed that Muna teak was superior to any other outside Burma. By Simon's reckoning, his father controlled a significant proportion of the (legal and illegal) teak trade passing through Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s. But Simon does not recall this childhood photograph being taken. As a young man, Simon found 55 Oei recOlUlted, for example, how in the 1970s when local authorities discovered his Indonesian colleague logging illegally in Riau forests for a French company, the colleague bmned the whole forest area to cover their tracks. Allen Oei, interview with authors. In Lucy Davis and Kee Ya Ting, I am Like A Karang Guni a/Teak (Singapore: National University of Singapore MuseU1lllMigrant Ecologies Project, 2014), 1 1 .

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Fig. 5 - 1 4 . Lucy Davis, Alex Bermuli

and colleagues.

Reproduction of a photograph

of the Muna Island teak industry from the collection of Mr W. T. Bermuli, in woodprints from a 1 93 0 ' s teak bed found in Singapore and charcoal on paper. 240 x 1 50 cm, 2 0 1 2 . Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

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Fig. 5 - 1 5 . Lucy Davis,

Simon Dei.

1 95

Reproduction of a photograph of timber

merchant Simon Oei as a child in the 1 97 0 ' s standing in the grounds of P. Bork A/S International Kranji where his father Allen Oei was employed. Reproduced in prints of one of the last logs from Burma to be imported to Singapore after a 3 1 March 20 1 3 log export ban. 220 x 1 50 cm, 20 1 4 . Collection of the National University of Singapore Museum.

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the sweaty, dirty gangster-like world of the sawmill repulsing. He studied computer science at university and worked for a series of multinationals before joining at age of 28 his father's business. When we interviewed Simon in 2014, he was poised under Allen's watchful eye to take over Nature Wood. Aware of the ecological complexities of his position, he tried to find ways to defend it: "Timber is of course an excellent way to contain carbon. ,,56 Singapore, like Muna, is now a post-timber boom island. 'Whereas Muna was devastated during the boom years, in Singapore fortunes were made and, as recently as the 1980s, "legal" timber was the island's fifth largest export. But, the Chinese middlemen who once dominated the trade are no longer required. International buyers can now go directly to Burma or Java. The Oei family has Burmese connections going back to the 1970s and maintains partnerships with BUlTIlese government timber concerns. At the time of our interviews, they received a shipment, claimed to be the last import of logs to Singapore after a ban imposed by the Burmese govermnent at the end of March 2014 on whole-log export. A European buyer (we were told he was Danish) was already on hand. Allen Oei donated two ends of these logs to the exhibition at NUS Museum, which were displayed as evidence together with their prints. The title of the NUS Museum exhibition, When you get closer to the heart you mayfind cracks, was taken from something Allen Oei said. He meant this quite literally to be about the cracks in the heartwood of a teak log, but the phrase migrated to our exhibit and took on another resonance to do with the productive­ futility of "journeys to the source." While reconstructing both woodprint-collages, the protagonists­ without my fully intending-began to seem like they were turning into wood. 57 The hand that Alex Bermuli placed on a sunspot on the tree became dark, bark-like. So did Simon Oei's features, when I began to layer them. These two works were installed at NUS Museum at a right angle with a third print-collage, a reconstruction of the thumbprint of David, the collector from Rangoon Road, who originally gave us the teak bed. David's thumbprint is the same size as both of the portraits. (Fig. 516) Together, all three perhaps suggest modem desires to make one's mark, via wood collecting, via timber-trading, via DNA-tracking, but the material does not submit so easily. Trees find ways to resist.

56 Simon Oei, interview with author and Lai Chee Kien. February 2014. 57 For a sensitive reading of these works, see Rui An Ro, "Photographies of Trees," ANTENNAE, Journal a/Nature in Visual Culture 36 (2016): 64-80

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jiiliTIil j

;

-

Fig.

5 - 1 6. Lucy Davis,

David 's Thumb. Woodprint

collage reproduction of

furniture dealer David' s thumbprint in prints of a 1 9 3 0 ' s teak bed found in Singapore, made on paper, 240 x 1 50 cm, 2 0 1 2 .

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Woodcut Shadows

Fig. 5-17. Lucy Davis, BUilding Nanyang University. Balau scaffolding and woodprint shadow installation inspired by the woodblock print Nanyang University by Lee Kee Boon, 1955. Photograph by Norman Ng, 2014. Collection of the National University of Singapore MuselUll .

A most recent series of works exhibited for the first time at NUS Museum attempted to translate that fragile exoskeleton of bakau scaffolding, depicted in the construction of Lee Kee Boon's Nanyang University woodblock into a room-size installation piece. (Fig. 5-17) Inside a recycled mangrove scaffold, constructed by one of the remaining scaffold-binder artisans in Singapore, "slept" wooden archival­ boxes, approximating windows of the original building. These boxes contained print-collage, shadow puppet-interpretations of modem woodcut works. (Fig. 5-18) Other boxes housed scenes from mid-1930s Singapore, where a belated discovery of the original advertisement for our bed in The Straits Times finally revealed its exact date. 58 The shadow puppets, like everything else, were made from woodprint-collage from the teak bed or from Allen Oei's teak logs.

5 8 "Diamond Bedsteads" advertisement The Straits Times January 10, 1937.

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Fig. 5-18. Lucy Davis, Together Again (Wood:Cut). Part IV Art History: Persuading Photograph by Norman Ng, 2014. Collection of the National University of Singapore.

Fig. 5-19. Lucy Davis, BUilding Nanyang University, 2014. Detail of shadows. Photograph by Norman Ng, 2014.

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Fig. 5-20. Lucy Davis, Malayan Timber Samples. Boxes of assorted timber samples with the Malay names of trees pilllcbed into each block, formerly belonged to the Botany department of the University of Malaya.

Fig. 5-21. Lucy Davis, Malayan Timber Samples. Boxes of assorted timber samples with the Malay names of trees pilllcbed into each block, formerly belonged to the Botany department of the University of Malaya.

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This room of shadows, slowly animated by swinging light pendulums, aimed to conjure half-built, still-breathing dreams of wood which seep into each other: the shadow of the last tiger killed in 1937 in Choa Chu Kang Village, merging into the teak bed advertisement from Diamond Bedsteads of the same year. 59 (Fig. 5-19) Also inside the scaffolding and on the floor were six boxes of assorted wood samples with Malay names of trees punched into each block. (Figs. 5-20 and 5-21) They once belonged to the Botany Department of the University of Malaya during a time when the department retained connections to commercial forestry. These blocks are no longer used for teaching and were given to me during a storeroom clear out by the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, which opened in 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of Singapore's independence. Each sample is of a size that fits comfortably into the palm of one's hand. They are quite lovely to hold, with a remarkable range of colors, densities, scents, and sounds. The only sample in any of the boxes that sometimes had its name printed in English and not Malay was "teak." This is possibly because teak was originally an imported species, possibly also because at the time of these collections, teak was already one of the most internationally valuable

59 A second incarnation of this installation took place dming the Taiwan International Video Exhibition at Hong Kah Museum, Beitou Taiwan in 2016, cmated by Fang-Tze Hsu. The installation was entitled Wood: Cut Cinema. In the exhibition catalogue Hsu writes of the temporal ecologies moving though these woodprint shadows: "If time could be a form of language, what Lucy Davis has done is to make the moving time during the recording the life and migration of wood (in the biological and political senses) a bridge for a sort of language between the human world and the ecosystem. A reconfigmation of [the animated film] Jalan Jati (Teak Road) evolving from the Together Again (Wood.·Cut) projects, Wood: Cut Cinema not only reverberates with the cmatorial inquiry of "Negative Horizon" the violences of modernity in forms of mobility but also interrogates the anthropocentric apparatus of the moving image by rearticulating the formation of Singapore as a modern state from a wooden sense of time. The historical experiences of diasporic Chinese intellectuals interweave with the timbers used in their artworks and the teak that has been traded across the oceans since the 1 6th century. Davis deliberately sets up a constellation of times, including the time of wood, the time of developmentalism, and the time of the faded collective memories of Nanyang University from those woodblock print artists. Motivated by the global context of deforestation and illegal logging in the region and by the collective oblivion of the historical trajectory of art with socialist affiliations, Wood: Cut Cinema argues for the alternative epistemology of the aesthetics of moving images." Fang-Tze Hsu, Curators note: Negative Horizons, Taiwan International Video Art Festival, October 20 16-January 2017.

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of the timbers of the region. While the word "teak" is most likely of South Asian, Dravidian origin,60 in MalayJIndonesian the wood is called Jati. Jati­ diri and sejati are common words. Diri means "self'; jati-diri is often taken to mean "identity," "personality," Of, most accurately, "the essence of self'; and sejati is taken to mean "pure," "true," "authentic," "original," or "genuine."61 Such translations ofjati suggest an ironic, poetic layering of our quest, returning our project to the efforts of colonial natural historians and migrant Chinese artists alike to authenticate their presence in the archipelago via the adoption of languages, transcription of fOlTIlS, cuttings of wood and quests for origins,62 as well as my own efforts to follow a process led by teak wood, not in spite of, but more because of, the "cracks at the heart. "63 Bibliography

B arnard, Timothy P., ed. Nature Contained. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2014. Cormaroff, Joshua, "Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk." Harvard Design Magazine 39, (2014).

60 The English word teak is variously thought to have been derived from the Portuguese teca, which was in turn a likely interpretation of the Malayalam (Dravidian) tekka, cognate with Tamil tekku, Telugu teku, and Kanarese tegu "the teak tree." See for example, Etymology Online, "teak (n. )." "WWw.etymonline.com/index.php?tenn=teak. Accessed 13 January 2015. 6 1 Hera, Migrant Ecologies Designer and Laksmi PamlUltjak \Vfiter and translator, email correspondence with author. 2-6 November 2012. 62 Curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa reminded us how in South Asian and perhaps there is another South Asian etymological link here, "jati" has been used (and misused) as a reference to exclusionary, essentialist social categories. Hussain Mustafa Shabbir, email correspondence with author, 1 November 2012. See, for example, Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial andPostcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997),222. 63 Arguments found in this chapter have appeared in different fonns in: Lucy Davis, "In the Company of Trees," ANFENNAE, Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 17 (201 1): 43-62. www.antennae.org.ukJback-issues-201 114583475958, accessed 22 JlUle 201 1 ; Lucy Davis, "Together Again (Wood:Cut)," in Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, ed., Jolan Joti (FeokRood) (Edinburgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic Garden/Migrant Ecologies Project, 2013), 9 1 - 1 36; Lucy Davis, "Multiple Arborealities: Tracing Tales of Teak," Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 15 (2015): 15-34; Lucy Davis, "Ranjang Jati. The teak bed that caused fom humans from Singapore to travel to Muna Island Southeast Sulawesi (and Back again)," in Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, eds., Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago, vol. 3, Intercalations (Berlin: K-Verlag Press 2017), 84-105.

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Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Chua, Kevin "The Neoliberalism of Teak" in Jalon Jati (Teak Road), edited by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. (Edinburgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013, 29-61 . Davis, Lucy, "In the Company of Trees," ANTENNAE, Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 17 (201 1): 43-62, accessed June 22, 201 1 . http://www. antennae.org.uklback-issues-2011/4583475958 Davis, Lucy, "Together Again (Wood:Cut)," in Jolan Jati (Teak Road), edited by Balasingamchow, Yu-Mei. ISingapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013, 91-136 Davis, Lucy "Multiple Arborealities: Tracing Tales of Teak," Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 15 (2015): 15-34 Davis, Lucy "Ranjang Jati. The teak bed that got four humans from Singapore to travel to Muna Island Southeast Sulawesi (and Back again)," in Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago, ed. Arula­ Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, vol. 3 of Intercalations, Berlin: K­ Verlag Press 2017,84-105. Davis, Lucy ed. Regional Animalities. vol. 3 of FOCAS Forum on Contemporary Art and Society (Singapore/Kassel: The Substation! documenta # 12 Magazines Proj ect, 2007). Davis, Lucy and Kee, Ya Ting, I am Like A Karang Guni of Teak. Singapore: National University of Singapore Museum/Migrant Ecologies Project, 2014, 1 1 . Gill, Simryn, and Taussig, Michael, Becoming Palm. Edited by Bauer, Ute Meta and Rujoiu, Anca Sternberg Press NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2017. Haraway, Donna I. When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 16-17 and 25. Haraway, "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin," Environmental Humanities 6, (2015): 159-165. Rui An Ro, "Photographies of Trees," ANTENNAE, Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 36 (2016): 64-80. Duncan, Jardine, "Wood Extraction: The Basics" in Jalon Jati (Teak Road), edited by Balasingamchow, Yu-Mei. Edinburgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013, 185-187. Kangaslahti, Kate, "Wlio Put the Woodis in the Woodcut?: Visions of the Forest in the Woodwork of Die BrOcke and Jalan Jati," in Jalan Jati (Teak Road), edited by Balasingamchow, Yu-Mei. Edinburgh/ Singapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013, 61-80.

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Kee Pookong and Choi, A Pictorial History of Nantah, ed., Kwai Keong Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre, 2000. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press 2010), 1-34. Lim, Cheng Tju, "Fragments of the Past: Political Prints of Post-war Singapore," The Heritage Journal 2, no. 1 (2005): 22-47. Loh, Kah Seng, Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making ofModern Singapore Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Lowe, Andrew & Volkaer!, Hugo, 'The Evolutionary and Plantation Origin of Teak'. in Jalan Jati (Teak Road), edited by Balasingamchow, Yu-Mei. Edinburgh/Singapore: The Royal Botanic GardenlMigrant Ecologies Project, 2013, Pp 23-25. Roof, Judith, The Poetics of DNA, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Reid, Anthony, "A Saucer Model of Southeast Asian Identity," Southeast Asian Journal ofSocial Science 27 (1999), 1 1 . Yao, Souchou, 'All Quiet on Jurong Road: Nanyang University and Radical Vision in Singapore', in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Postwar Singapore, eds, Michael D. Barr and Carl A. Trocki Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008, pp. 170-87. Tang, Xiaobing, Origins of the Chinese Avant Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008,) 128. Waterson, Roxana, The Living House: An Anthropology ofArchitecture in South-East Asia, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER SIX AN ART HISTORICAL ECOLOGY OF THE NANKAN MOUNTAIN SCENIC AREA IN BAZHONG SONYA S. LEE

The Nankan Mountain Scenic Area, located near the city center of Bazhong in northern Sichuan province, China, boasts two clusters of attractions that are central to local identity yet radically different in character. At one end is Nankan Caves, a complex of Buddhist cliff-side carvings that were first created in the seventh century and that until the modem era had been maintained as a religious center. (Fig. 6-1) At the other end is the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base, which houses the largest collections of material objects related to the establishment of the second soviet in China and the ensuing aimed conflicts in the region from 1932 to 1935. (Fig. 6-2) Not long after the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China, the local government erected an earlier structure in the vicinity to commemorate this history, but not until 1981 was this structure purposefully paired with Nankan Caves, when the government constructed a public park to bring the two together.1 Since then, the clustering has remained a potent economic and political force, as the Bazhong government continued to add components to the park to enhance its appeal, notably the Red Army Monument and the Stele Forest Memorial of Generals from the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Area in

The author is grateful to Li Shengming, He Hui, Lin Jinyong, and Li Zhilan for offering generous assistance dming her visits to Bazhong over the years. De-nin Lee has made helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. 1 Sichuan sheng Bazhong xian diming bangongshi, ed., Siclumn sheng Bazhong xian diming /u, 326 27.

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Fig. 6-1 . Overview of Nankan Caves, Bazhong, China; begun in the sixth century. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 6-2. Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base, Bazhong; 1 982 at the current location. Photograph by the author.

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1993. In 201 1 , hoping to transform the city into a major regional tourist hub, the government launched an ambitious development initiative with the park as the centerpiece. There were also preliminary discussions about readying the entire scenic area for a UNESCO World Heritage nomination upon the project's completion. The recent changes at the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area are in many ways emblematic of how the Chinese government in the post-Mao era has mobilized heritage resources to generate economic growth and promote political agendas. Indeed, China's new culture industry is both the product of and a key, facilitating element in the momentous transition from socialism to capitalism under the Connnunist Party, which seeks to maintain control while embracing an inherently unpredictable open market system. In dealing with the effects of the transition, the Chinese state soon recognized the tremendous usefulness of cultural heritage in negotiating development and politics, consumer demands and party priorities. On the one hand, economic benefits are often key drivers behind decision-making in heritage management, especially when the domestic tourism industry is booming amid a general slowdO\vn in other sectors of the Chinese economy. On the other hand, to counter the perceived negative effects of a consumption-based economy, the Communist regime is keen to cultivate patriotism. It does so by combiinng forceful propagation of party ideologies and history with careful reinterpretations of China's rich cultural tradition in ways that support party-line narratives. The situation in Bazhong thus offers an illuminating case to examine how these seemingly irreconcilable goals have been pursued in preserving two distinct types of heritage, namely, a tradition of Buddhist religion and art in conjunction with the history of war and revolution in Chinese Connnunism. On a more conceptual level, the pairing of the two heritage clusters in the Nankan MOlUltain Scenic Area brings seemingly incongruous types of monuments into a single spatial environment where they share the same network of social relations and interpretative processes introduced by their users. This setting can thus be understood as an art historical ecology. Accordingly, the inherent structural disparities and inequities generated by the pairing can be explicated through a critical examination of the receptions of the respective monuments. Analyses of cultural and political ecologies are useful for pinpointing locations of disparities and inequities in human society in order to demonstrate how the use of natural resources both reflects and reinforces the social relations of power that fuel such imbalances. The method has been championed by scholars like Alf Homborg who builds on a long tradition of Marxist ecological economics to show how particular constellations of cultural demand have

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encouraged specific strategies of accumulation and production, which in tum have affected societies and environments through the unequal transfer of energy, land, and labor within a world system 2 When adopted for a study in art historical ecology, a similar focus on disparities and inequities within a given network system reveals how particular social practices contribute to the uneven use of heritage resources and which actions address the imbalance. Homborg's emphasis on pursuing a cultural perspective in analyzing the impact of economic policies and practices on the environment is crucial in his critique of other interpretative models. In the present case, I likewise pay close attention to academic scholarship which turns out to have played a critical role--{)fien unintended by the researchers when they began their studies-in amplifying the disparities inherent in the system. Equally important is the way tourism development plans by government officials at local, provincial, and national levels made use of the natural surroundings in their eventual co-optation of the two kinds of heritage at Nankan Mountain Scenic Area. 'When such plans are fully implemented, conflicts over resources, environmental degradation and marginalization of local residents might well be inevitable. Applying a political ecology perspective to tourism studies marks an emergent trend in that field in recent years,3 just as researchers of cultural heritage have become increasingly engaged with issues concerning environmental justice, biodiversity, and sustainable development. 4 In the fOlmer, whereas such critical scrutiny has so far been directed to tourism in developing countries, especially in sensitive ecological and cultural environments with indigenous populations nearby, there is a lack of scholarship of the kind centering on tangible heritage sites in urban areas. In the latter, likewise, various kinds of social inequities in land use and natural resource management are addressed chiefly in relation to intangible cultural heritage practices, but little has been done to understand these problems within the broader heritage management system that handles a range of heritage categories through different institutional structures, often in unequal telTIls. The present study thus aims to fill in some of these lacunae through an inquiry into the art-historical ecology of the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area in Bazhong. It first discusses the disparities in the treatment of the two types of heritage represented at that location. Although both the Nankan Caves and the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base were designated important cultural 2 Homborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange, 77 82. 3 See, for example, Nepal and Saarinen's Political Ecology and Tourism. 4 See essays by JellllY Chio, Tzu-kai Liu, William Nitzky, and Yongming Zhou in Blumenfield and Silverman, Cultural Heritage Politics in China.

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properties by the provincial and local authorities at the beginning of the Communist rule, over time the difference in their status within China's heritage management system grew in the cave site's favor. This difference was driven in large part by the conscious adaptation of the postwar conservation paradigm in the West by the Chinese authorities on all levels (national, provincial, local), thus resulting in a heritage management system that tends to privilege monuments and sites of antiquity and of high historical, scientific, and artistic values. The situation has remained more or less unchanged until today, but the launch of a nationwide campaign by the central government to promote red tourism in 2004 did generate a renewal of revolutionary heritage throughout the country. The campaign marked a turning point in the development of the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area. Attracting more attention than ever before, the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base and the various monuments related to the legacy of the Red Army in the same park soon expanded their contents and displays in an effort to better preserve the area's material culture of the Communist Revolution while also preparing for an increase in visitors. Of particularly relevance to this study are the commercialization of revolutionary heritage and its broader implications for understanding the agency of the visitors at heritage sites. The pedagogical function of heritage to create a collective political identity for visitors through their experience at historic sites certainly echoes the perennial attraction of heritage as an effective tool for generating compelling narratives in support of nation-building processes. 5 But in the latest round of red tourism in post-Mao China, the state's usage of the appropriate heritage sites to stimulate tourism as a new engine of economic growth while trying at the same time to reinvigorate socialist ideology in an increasingly capitalist society dominated by an urban middle class is noteworthy 6 The adaptation of the market system to promote revolutionary heritage, which was inconceivable under Mao Zedong just a few decades earlier, has given the tourists/consumers a much greater role in detelTIlining the success or failure of any ideological program introduced by the state-controlled site management. The new dynamics thus raise many questions about the relationship between heritage, development, and politics under the Communist regime in the postsocialist present. Moreover, as red tourism now comes into direct competition with other kinds of heritage tourism in 5 The connection in the use of heritage for nation building was first recognized in the Hague Convention of 1 954. See also the discussion in Harrison, Heritage, 46 55. 6 Gao and Guo, "Consuming Revolution," 250.

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an open market, one wonders where ideological instruction and party politics stand in relation to other aspects of the Chinese tradition that the state also celebrates through the corresponding heritage sites. Early Attempts at Heritage Management in Bazhong

In the decade following the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Bazhong government took the first steps to preserve the county's cultural heritage. In 1951, following directives from the State Council, a committee was fOlmed to identify and collect historical artifacts as well as those related to the Communist Revolution in the local area.7 The work was part of a broader effort to compile a national registry of heritage units, which the Republican government initiated in 1928 8 Under the Communist regime, the work was resumed in a more systematic way, with the central government taking the lead in creating a comprehensive, hierarchical list to which all provinces would contribute. By 1956, the Sichuan provincial government issued its first ever List of Top-Priority Protected Property in Sichuan, among which were three major cave temple complexes in Bazhong, namely, Nankan, Beikan, and Xikan Caves.9 The List was meant to go hand-in-hand with newly passed legal measures for protecting designated properties against looting or intentional destruction, while educating the public about the importance of preserving cultural monuments in general. In addition to the registries and legislations, both the central and provincial authorities also established official spaces to store and display heritage objects. In Bazhong, for example, the Memorial Hall of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base was founded in 1958 to gather material artifacts from the soviet era and to educate the public about it through exhibitions.1o Despite the promise of these early attempts, heritage conservation in Bazhong came to a halt during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and then the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when the county became a hotbed of ideological activism and hysteria. Remarkably, notwithstanding the city's close association with the Red Anny and the Revolution, venerable monuments from premodern times such as Nankan Caves suffered relatively little vandalism during the Red Guards' VIC10US campmgn 7 Bazhong xian wenjiao ju, ed., Bazhong xian wenluJa zhi, 25. For a full text of the directive from the People's Central COlUlcil, see Guojia wen"WU shiye guanliju, Xin Zhongguo wenl-VUfagui xuanbian, 4 7. 8 Jiang Lin, Cong 'wenl-VU baoluJ ' dao 'wenhua baoluJ ', 1 05 109. 9 Bazhong xian wenluJa zhi, 26. 10 Bazhong xian wenluJa zhi, 28.

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against the Four Olds.ll At the same time, even though the Revolution was back in the limelight, little was done to protect or preserve the numerous stone engravings featuring large-sized propaganda slogans from Bazhong's soviet era, which had deteriorated rapidly in an urban setting. More serious efforts in conservation did not begin again until after Mao's death and the launching of the "Open Door" policy and economic reform under Deng Xiaoping. The first telltale signs of a turnaround came in 1979, when the Memorial Hall of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base was elevated to museum status and slated for a new location in a public park that would become the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area. In the same year, the Bazhong County Heritage Management Bureau was formally established-with its office at Nankan Caves-while the county and provincial governments funded the construction of a protective wall around the cave site.12 In hindsight, the resumption of conservation work in Bazhong in the late 70s indicated a deeper engagement with cultural heritage management to which the Chinese state would soon commit. The watershed moment of this new phase of development undoubtedly was the ratification of the UNESCO (Uinted Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Convention in December 1985, which would allow China to nominate its cultural and natural heritage sites for inclusion on the World Heritage List. Despite the late arrival, the Chinese state wasted no time in making use of the new platfOlTIl to assert its presence on the world's stage. By showcasing the country's culture and history, the state brought in much-needed expertise, attention, and funding from abroad to carry out conservation work at home. Making such efforts to preserve heritage, as Stevan Harrell has perceptively pointed out, is part of China's modernizing effort to fulfill its national destiny "as a proud nation among nations that lives up to international standards in every aspect of its existence, including cultural preservation."13 China's participation in the international heritage regime also coincided with the central government's effort to promote a new nationalism at home in the post-Mao era. Whereas previous ideological campaigns encouraged the destruction of relics as 1 1 He Hui, a researcher at the Bazhong County Heritage Management Bmeau, provided an interesting explanation for this llllusual development via an urban legend popular in the area: A red guard, while attempting to damage the great Vairocana Buddha at Nankan Caves by firing a gllll at the statue, was killed by the bullet that hit the Buddha's face but ricocheted back at the shooter. Apparently, the incident deterred any fmther attempt to damage the site. Personal interview with the author, Bazhong, July 2012. 12 Bazhong xian wen/nm zhi, 34 35. 1 3 Harrell, "China's Tangled Web ofHeritage," 287.

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during the Cultural Revolution, now the promulgation of the PRC's first ever Law on the Protection of Cultural Heritage in 1982 demanded their very preservation. The law, as Robert Shepherd and Larry Yu observe, functions as a tool by the Chinese state "to encourage a national consciousness, reflect socialist values and aid with material development in the present. ,,14 Aside from the lofty ideals and political goals noted above, the Chinese government's very active pursuit of heritage conservation on the global stage was also motivated by the enOlTIlOUS economic benefits that the prestige of a World Heritage Inscription could generate for communities near successful sites. All concerned parties-from the head of state to managers of the most remote sites-understood well the relationship between heritage sites and tourism. Securing nomination, however, is no easy task. A nominating site would dedicate years of preparation to meet UNESCO's high standard for documentation, research, planning, and conservation. The work in tum would require significant investment by local government to improve infrastructure as well as to relocate and compensate residents affected by the changes around the site. Notwithstanding all the challenges, the number of sites vying for places on the central government's tentative list ofpotential nominations has grO\vn exponentially. For each round, the State Party submits its official choices to the World Heritage Committee for evaluation by appropriate advisory bodies before nominated properties receive approval from the committee for final consideration at the General Assembly. 15 In short, the race for World Heritage Site branding is on in China, and there is no end in sight. When understood in this context, that Nankan Caves would inevitably be drawn into the cultural heritage preservation fever afflicting China in the post-Mao era comes as no surprise. To better understand the impact of the country's new conservation outlook on the reception of the site, it is useful to examine how Chinese scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s assessed Nankan in their academic research. Not only did state authorities adapt some of their key arguments to match the kind of evaluation criteria embraced in the World Heritage Convention, but also the increased participation by outside, mostly Beijing-based, scholars constituted a veritable sign of validation and prestige that heritage managers in Bazhong desired and actively sought. Significantly, this level of attention and support from scholars and state administrators was absent in managing the revolutionary heritage of the same area, which in tum 1 4 Shepherd and Yu, Heritage Management, Tourism, and Governance in China, 19. 1 5 For a detailed description of the nomination process, see UNESCO, Operational Guidelinesfor the Implementation ofthe World Heritage Convention, Part III.

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negatively affected the state o f conservation for related units. The disparity in treatment between the two sites in Nankan Mountain Scenic Area would persist until the middle of the first decade of the 21" century when the state began vigorously promoting red tourism. Scholarship on Sichuan Cave Temples

A full discussion of the historiography on Sichuan cave temples beyond the scope of this paper, but a short essay by the famed architecture historian Chen Mingda from 1955, the first publication on Bazhong sites after the founding of the PRC, suggests a number of important trends.16 First, much academic writing about Sichuan published during the 1950s and 60s was produced by Beijing-based intellectuals such as Chen. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) caused their evacuation to the southwestern region where they spent time exploring cultural sites. Chen, for example, accompanied architect and architectural historian Liang Sicheng to investigate premodern architecture in forty counties in Sichuan in 1939.17 Upon returning to Beijing after the war, Chen and others would train the next generation of researchers through their teaching and scholarship. Second, Chen's essay, "Introduction to cave temples in Bazhong and Tongjiang counties of Sichuan," introduced the cave sites that were presumably unfamiliar to most readers at the time. He focused especially on dating the sites, as evidenced by in-situ donor inscriptions, to the Tang dynasty, thereby demonstrating their historical value. In other words, a site's antiquity was effectively deemed the most important criterion for justifying its relevance in modem society. Third, the essay included six photographs as visual documentation of the sites, but Chen did not discuss any specific aspect illustrated in those photographs. The author seems to regard the visual material as nothing more than a fOlTIl of evidence, requiring no commentary and not treating it as a legitimate subject of inquiry. After a hiatus during the Cultural Revolution, a new wave of scholarship on cave temples in Sichuan appeared in the 1980s. By this time, quite a few changes had occurred. Perhaps most notable was the emergence of scholars native to the southwestern region. They assumed a key role in researching the local culture, and others were sent to work at heritage sites in Sichuan after university graduation. Together, SichuanIS

1 6 Chen Mingda, "Sichuan Bazhong, Tongjiang liangxian shiku jieshao," 102 and plates. 1 7 Fairbank, Liang andLin, 1 10.

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based scholars were responsible for archaeological and site reports on major cave temples as well as interpretative studies. In Bazhong, Cheng Chongxun, head of the county's Heritage Management Bureau from 1979 to 1998, was the most prolific in publishing primary-source materials from the local cave sites, including descriptions and identifications of pictorial contents, basic condition assessment, new discoveries, and transcription of donor inscriptions.18 Scholars from outside Sichuan continued to come and conduct research there as before. But the focus now shifted to more methodical examination of the development and dissemination of cave temple architecture in the southwestern region as a whole and their relationship with sites in other parts of China. The leading figure in taking the field in these new directions was Ding Mingyi, Professor of Buddhist art and architecture at the Institute of World Religions in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Since 1981, Ding and his colleagues have carried out extensive investigations at numerous cave sites throughout the region, including those in Guangyuan, Bazhong, Dazu, Tongnan, Anyue, Zizhong, and Chengdu. In 1988 and 1990, Ding published in the premier archaeological journal Wenwu two articles articulating some of his key ideas based on the experience of these tripS.19 Among the fIrst to argue compellingly for the singular importance of Sichuan cave temples in the study of Chinese art and culture, Ding likened the subject to "a rich yet little explored treasure trove of art."20 Not unlike scholars from the earlier generation like Chen Mingda, Ding wrote for an audience still unfamiliar with China's southwest, but he wrote with more authority derived from his extensive travels in that region and his broad knowledge of Buddhism and Buddhist arts throughout China. Ding made his case by pointing to some basic facts. First, Sichuan Province contains more cave sites than any other province in the country. Although no single location in Sichuan can rival iconic sites such as Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in Gansu Province or Longmen Caves in Henan Province in terms of the number of units at each, neither Gansu nor Henan can match Sichuan in number of sites, or greatest concentration within a single province. Second, the caves in Sichuan exemplify the highest level of artistic quality, comparable to sites initiated under imperial patronage in the Chinese capitals. Driven by biases toward the most ancient and centrally located sites, past scholarship snubbed sites in Sichuan, which were built later in the Tang and Song dynasties and in more remote areas. 18 Cheng's most important work is his Bazhong shi leu, which synthesizes many of the site reports published earlier. 1 9 Ding Mingyi, "Sichuan shiku zashi," 41 53. 20 Ding, "Sichuan shiku zashi," 36.

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Rather than interpreting the later date as a sign o f derivativeness or lack of originality, Ding instead stressed the uniqueness of the Sichuan tradition, which gained momentum in the ninth to twelfth centuries, a period during which the cave-building tradition was in decline in central China. The resulting differences in the iconography and style of Sichuan carvings underscore not only the adaptation of Buddbism according to local artistic and religious traditions, but also intense interaction with other parts of China and Asia. The third and perhaps tbe most notable fact Ding highlighted was the complex development of local religions in Sichuan as embodied in the unusually diverse and distinct repertoire of iconographic motifs. In exploring many of the themes related to esoteric Buddhism, Ding led tbe way by identifying their scriptural sources as well as by explaining the routes and individuals responsible for bringing them to and from Sichuan. For Ding, cave sites in Bazhong provide crucial evidence to support his arguments, especially those concerning the transmission of Buddbist art in the High Tang style from central China to Sichuan. Ding often drew on examples from Nankan Caves, as the site boasts 176 niches of relief carvings of varying sizes in three major clusters, constituting one of the largest and the best preserved image groups in northern Sichuan. Rather than treating them as an isolated phenomenon, Ding instead contextualized them with other related specimens from the smaller Xikan and Beikan sites in Bazhong as well as sites in Guangyuan, another major area of activities in northern Sichuan. His discussion of the development of pictorial program in northern Sichuan caves, for example, reveals a methodology that relies fIrmly on stylistic comparison and in-situ donor inscriptions to make the connections.21 Ding deploys the same strategy to explain striking similarities in subject matter shared by cave sites in different regions that are hundreds of miles apart. At the outset, he stresses the locations of Bazhong and Guangyuan along tbe key transportation routes that connected central China and the northwest frontier.22 After providing a brief chronology of key developments in Buddbist iconography in Sichuan, he catalogs the motifs commonly found at well­ knO\vn sites from that region, in central China, and the northwest frontier. Ding's discussion of esoteric images such as Vairochana (Fig. 6-3), in particular, demonstrates his command of tbe history of this Buddbist tradition and its visual culture in a Pan-Asian context.23

21 Ding, "Chuanbei shiku zhaji." 22 Ding, "Chuanbei shiku zhaji," 42. 23 Ding, "Chuanbei shiku zhaji," 50 52.

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Fig. 6-3. Vairochana Buddha, Niche 103, Nankan Caves, Bazhong; 877. Photograph by the author.

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Politics o f World Heritage Nominations

Fig. 6-4. A stone stele commemorating the inscription of Dazu Rock Carvings on the World Heritage List, Baodingshan, Dazu; after 1 999. Photograph by the author.

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Ding's work laid the foundation for other scholars to continue the study of Sichuan cave temples. In Sichuan, his ideas were widely shared among his fellow scholars and became knO\vn among administrators of cultural heritage, too. They would use many of the ideas found in Ding's writings not merely to demonstrate the sites' significance, but more forcefully to build potential cases for future World Heritage nominations. Indeed, the active endeavors of these two groups in Sichuan resulted in two successful inscriptions onto the World Heritage List: Mt. Emei Scenic Area (including the Leshan Giant Buddha) in 1996 and Dazu Rock Carvings in 1999 (Fig. 6-4). The latter, in particular, is crucial for shedding light on the mutual impact of academic research and politics of World Heritage nominations involving Sichuan cave temples.24 Specific academic arguments, when strategically reworked by heritage professionals on both the national and local levels, served to increase the chance of obtaining the coveted international honor. In the opposite direction, the allure of the World Heritage Site label helped perpetuate particular directions in research concerning the site. Understanding the complex dynamics at work in the Dazu case is useful for making sense of how plans for Nankan Caves in Bazhong have unfolded since the year 2000. For each property on the World Heritage List, be it cultural, natural or a mix of both, its significance is concisely defined by the concept, "Outstanding Universal Value." According to the Operational Guidelines of the World Heritage Centre: Outstanding Universal Value means cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanities. As such, the permanent protection of this heritage is of the highest importance to the international community as a whole.25

In the case of Dazu Rock Carvings, its Outstanding Universal Value is articulated within the framework of the first three official assessment criteria for a cultural site.26 In response to Criterion (i), which considers the site "a masterpiece of human creative genius," the Dazu Carvings are

24 For a discussion of the World Heritage nomination's impact on the ecology of Dazu cave sites, see my book manuscript Cave Temples of Sichuan and Chongqing in Eco-Art History, Chapter Four. 25 UNESCO, Operational Guidelines, par. 49. 26 All ten criteria are defined in ibid, par. 77. The brief synthesis of the Dazu case is found at http://whc.unesco.orglenllistl9 12.

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said to "represent the pinnacle o f Chinese rock art in their high aesthetic quality and their diversity of style and subject matter." For Criterion (ii), which requires the site "to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time . . . on developments in architecture and monumental arts," Dazu is presented as a place where "Tantric Buddhism from India and Chinese Taoist and Confucian beliefs came together to create a highly original and influential manifestation of spiritual harmony." And to satisfy Criterion (iii), which deems a site bearing "a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition" an essential quality, Dazu rock carvings are said to have given material expression to the eclectic nature of religious belief in late Imperial China. Given the direction of research in the 1980s and early 1990s on Sichuan cave temples, it is not altogether unexpected that some of major scholarly arguments would be appropriated in the Dazu Rock Carvings World Heritage nomination dossier to explain the significance of the five sites included in the nomination. More surprising is the timing of the submission. Dazu's success in 1999 made it the country's second cave complex after Mogao Caves ofDunhuang (1987) to receive the international honor. Shortly afterward, two other cave sites-Longmen and Yungang­ also won approval at the World Heritage General Assembly respectively in 2000 and 2001. This series of successes not only underscores tbat Chinese heritage authorities recognized how well this unique architectural form fit the assessment criteria in the Convention, but also reveals excellent coordination on the part of state officials and their overall strategy to score as many successful "inscriptions" as possible. Within this context, the rationale for explaining the Outstanding Universal Value at each property was unique and tailored to maximize its appeal to the World Heritage Committee and tbe member state parties at tbe General Assembly. Such explanations were imperative, given precedent set by the site of incomparable Mogao Caves, which was nominated for all six criteria-the most for any cultural site-making it inconsequential for any subsequent nomination to repeat the same feat. Recognizing the challenge, the Dazu Rock Carvings Academy (formerly, Dazu Heritage Management Bureau from 1952 to 1990, and Art Museum of Dazu Rock Carvings from 1990 to 2011) opted for an approach that drew on both conventional and unconventional arguments to articulate the significance of Dazu Rock Carvings. On the one hand, justifying a site's significance in tenns of its originality and artistic achievements is a rather common tactic for World Heritage nominations, as the Convention itself was based on values and assumptions in the modern disciplines of architecture, archaeology, art history, and history.

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Fig. 6-5. Confucius and disciples, Cave 6, Shizhuanshan, Dazu; 1 088. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 6-6. Mother with child, relief carvings depicting the Sutra of Repaying Parents' Kindness, Baodingshan, Dazu; 12th_ 1 3th centuries. Photograph by the author.

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Similar values and assumptions infolTIled the history of Chinese cave temple art and architecture, which native scholars began to flesh out in greater detail beginning in the 1980s. They observed that a markedly high level of achievement characterized sites in Dazu when elsewhere in China the cave-building tradition declined from the innth to twelfth centuries. Thus, they deemed Dazu especially important. On the other hand, deliberately highlighting the Tantric or esoteric Buddhist tradition in Sichuan stressed the presence of some "interchange" element, as required in the World Heritage Centre's second criterion. In this regard, Ding Mingyi's pioneering work, which made esoteric Buddhism one ofthe most discussed topics in the scholarship of Sichuan caves, proved influential. Although later researcher called into question some of his interpretations about esoteric motifs and their dissemination, nevertheless such arguments maintained their appeal in the eyes of heritage administrators.27 Interestingly, the notable coexistence of Daoist and Confucian images alongside Buddhist ones earned mention as another feature in defining Dazu's Outstanding Universal Value. (Fig. 6-5) Such images " . . . provide[d] material proof that cave temple art has increasingly shed light on everyday life."28 This claim fits well the third criterion's call for evidence of a living tradition, which is not present at sites such as Longmen and Yungang where robust patronage from the imperial household and members of the ruling class had imbued the place with an air of elitism. The many visual vignettes of everyday life at Baodingshan-from a mother holding her child in bed to a young man playing a flute-are now regarded not as signs of banality, but as artistic virtues. (Fig. 6-6) The successful listing of Mogao, Dazu, Longmen, and Yungang as world heritage has established cave temples as a bona fide category of heritage in China and around the globe. At the same time, such successes have presented further challenges to Chinese heritage authorities wishing to propose additional sites of similar type for future nominations. This state of affairs has had an enormous impact on how officials in Bazhong position properties under their management for consideration on both national and international stages. For example, for Nankan Caves, because the site was closely related to Longmen in telTIlS of date, sculptural style, layout fOlTIlat, and iconography, any justification of its Outstanding Universal Value would need to build on yet be distinct from that of Longmen. One possible strategy would combine it with other cave sites in Guangyuan in northern Sichuan together in a single nomination. Making

27 See, for example, Hou Chong, "Lilll Dazu Baoding wei fojiao shuilu daochang." 28 From the site's brief synthesis, http://whc.unesco.orglenllistf9 12.

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this case seems logical, given the locations of Bazhong and Guangyuan along two major transportation routes that connected the Chinese capitals to the southwestern region. Indeed, recent scholarship has clarified the extent to which the sites in these two counties were related to each other in telTIlS of patronage, sculptural style, and cave fOlmat during the Tang dynasty. 29 Yet intense local pride in Guangyuan and Bazhong has prevented partisans at the two sites from joining forces in a single nomination. Another possible strategy would seek in the same vicinity other heritage units that could combine well with Nankan Caves to articulate a local tradition deserving of national and international recognition. These calculations generated the pairing ofNankan Caves and the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base as a viable solution. Reviving the Revolution for the Market

As mentioned above, the Bazhong government established the Memorial Hall of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base in 1958. Locating the Memorial Hall at Nankan Hill was prompted largely by its connection to the Red Army during the 1930s. There, the Communists confronted local warlords and the Nationalists in aimed conflicts. At one such battle, it was believed that Commander Xu Xiangqian tied his war horse to a large tree near Nankan Caves.30 A more intriguing connection with the Buddhist materials is suggested by the Red Army's heavy reliance on large-scale slogans displayed in public areas to propagate its messages to the masses throughout northern Sichuan. Purportedly, this communication method facilitated the swift conversion of large numbers of people to the Communist cause. Within a short period of time, a soviet comprised of four million residents in twenty-seven cities in Shaanxi and Sichuan was established.31 The use of stone as the preferred medium was prompted by the high cost and paucity of paper in the area as well as the fear of immediate destruction of any communication on paper by the Nationalists. Another important factor was the availability of stone carvers in Bazhong at that time, of which members of the political propaganda unit in the Red Army readily took advantage in the production of the

29 Notably, Lei Yuhua, Bazhong shiku yanjiu and Yao Chongxin, Ba Shu fojiao shiku zaoxiang chubu yanjiu. 3 0 Sichuan sheng Bazhong xian diming /u, 326. 3 1 Zhang Weibo, "Jin shi nian Chuan Shan gerning genjudi yanjiu xin jinzhan," 7 1 72.

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slogans. 32 Indeed, the tradition of engraving writings on stone slabs or directly onto mountain cliffs in monumental form has a longstanding association with Buddhist devotional practices in premodern times.33 At Nankan Caves, for example, hundreds of engraved writings cover the main cliff face. These writings range from donor inscriptions to collections of poems and short phrases in large characters for grand display. The latter are represented by several examples in the upper reaches of the cliff face near Niche No. 12. (Fig. 6-7) Although there are no known Communist slogans at Nankan Caves, the monumental format of these earlier inscriptions parallels specimens by Red Army propaganda units that are now preserved as in the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base. (Fig. 6-8)

Fig. 6-7. Inscriptions on the cliff face near Cave 1 2 at Nankan Caves, Bazhong; undated. Photograph by the author.

32

Interview with Li Zhilan, director of the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi

Revolutionary Base, June 28, 20 1 8 .

33 Lee, "The Buddha' s Words at Cave Temples."

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Fig. 6-8. "Ten Thousand Years to the Communist Party! " ; 1 930s. Photograph by the author; courtesy of the Museum of Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base.

In the early decades of the Communist regime, the connections between Nankan Caves and the Museum may or may not have been well understood, nevertheless the Bazhong government endorsed both sites for preservation at the time. Subsequently, the state heritage management system oversaw both sites, but by the 1 980s, a noticeable disparity in their treatment became apparent. Such disparity may be traced to the state ' s efforts to validate Chinese sites through the global heritage institutional framework, as discussed above. In effect, resources and attention by authorities at various levels were concentrated on preparing sites deemed to have the potential of securing World Heritage nominations. Managers whose sites did not readily fit the profile faced difficulty in obtaining funding for maintenance, repair, and expansion. Hence, their sites suffered neglect and showed poor states of preservation. In Bazhong, the imbalance favored the Nankan Caves. It enjoyed a higher standing within the state heritage management system in the post-Mao period, indicated tellingly by its designation as a National Top-Priority Protected Property when the State Council announced its third list of sites in 1 9 88?4 By contrast, the Museum-despite the completion and opening of a new building to the public with much fanfare in 1 984-lacked the level of visibility among 34 The list was published in Wenwu, no.

3 (1 988): 43-5 3 .

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academic researchers, conservators, and museum professionals that the Buddhist cave site enjoyed outside Bazhong and Sichuan. One reason for the Museum's lower profile lies in the delayed development of more objective scholarship on the history of Chinese Communism in China, which began only in the 1980s, when a more methodical approach to the preservation and management of revolutionary heritage was launched at around the same time.35 Another lies in the negative associations of Zhang Guotao (1897-1979), General oftbe Red Army in Sichuan and Shaanxi. A rival of Mao Zedong, Zhang defected to tbe Nationalists in 1938, and since then the shadow he cast on tbe whole history of tbe Revolutionary Base in Sichuan and Shaanxi has meant that only many years after Mao's death could historians properly assess Zhang's place in Chinese Communism and integrate him into the mainstream narrative. Within the context of heritage conservation, monuments related to the Communist Revolution in Bazhong have tended to be ranked lower tban other sites of revolutionary heritage in China. FurthemlOre, not until 1988 was a site from northern Sichuan included on the Lists of National Top-Priority Protected Properties. The former headquarters of the Red Army in Tongjiang earned that distinction.36 In hindsight, tbe inberent disparities in China's heritage management system affecting tbe preservation of revolutionary heritage at Nankan Hill were emblematic of a significant shift in heritage conservation in China. Increasingly, at heritage sites across the country tourism was adopted as the primary mode of sustainability.37 Spurred by economic refmms, the rapid transformation of China's society made apparent that the model of state O\vnership and management, which operated in China since the system's inception at the tum of the twentieth century, was ultimately inadequate in providing equal resources and attention to all sites within its jurisdiction. The transition to market socialism exacerbated the situation, as the central government moved toward decentralization by slashing funding to provincial and local governments, both of which responded by shrinking their own budgets in kind. With considerably less state funding than before, managers of heritage sites everywhere had to look for other charmels of income. Thus, it comes as no surprise that in post-Mao China tourism development would become one viable path for survival.

35 Zhang Zhuo, "Iianshu Chuan Shan suqu hongjun shike wen"WU baohu lichen,"

272 74.

3 6 See note 34. 37 See my book manuscript Cave Temples of Siclumn and Chongqing in Eco-Art History, Chapter FOlli.

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In 2004, the central government issued a directive intended to increase tourist activities at sites across the country that celebrated the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in war and revolution throughout the twentieth century.38 Since then, it has become official policy to promote red tourism at both the national and local levels. 'Whereas the first stated goal-to enhance patriotic education for the masses-echoes the typical, top-down approach favored by the Communist regime to advance its ideological agendas, the other goals reveal the policy's underlying, largely economic motivation. Specifically, the third and fourth reasons for developing red tourism are to "promote development of economy and society in the old region of revolution" and "add new elements to the development of tourism. "39 Both reasons can be understood in telTIlS of the growing recognition of the need to pursue sustainable practices in heritage management and tourism, as indicated by explicit references to this concept in Principles/or the Conservation a/Heritage Sites in China, first issued in 2002. 40 Accordingly, government officials increasingly turned their attention to less developed parts of the country as potential growth areas for the booming tourism industry, which until then had concentrated in large cities as well as at the best knO\vn heritage sites. The red tourism initiative in fact coincided with the state's ambitious plan for rural development, which aimed to better integrate rural communities into China's rapid modemization.41 In response to the new national priorities, the China National Tourism Administration designated 2006 the year of China rural tourism, following the launch of red tourism the year before. Within this context, it is no coincidence that the state also stressed the preservation of revolutionary heritage as a key reason for developing red tourism, as heritage in general had by then been construed as a valuable resource that is vulnerable to over-consumption. In order to achieve long­ term sustainability of heritage resources, it was the official policy to allow use while implementing meaningful preservation at the same time.

3 8 "2004-2010 nian quanguo hongse luyou fazhan guihua gangyao" 2004-2010 1f­ :'i>: 00 H 1S mUlif ;jt jl !iii! �iJ WI � (Outline of 2004-2010 national red tourism development plan). Full text can be accessed at http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/fzgggzlfzgb/gbwb/gjjgb/200709/P020 1 5063 05141 1 3 1 297 76.pdf. 39 "2004-201 0 nian quanguo hongse luyou fazhan guihua gangyao." 40 ICOMOS China, Principles for the Conservation of Heritage Sites in China (First Edition), 59. 4 1 See the special report ''Rillal Development: Building a New Socialist COlUltryside," http://english.gov.cnlspeciallrd_index.htrn. Accessed January 3 1 , 2018.

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Given the unabashed mix of ideological promotion of party loyalty and economic development strategies in the most recent round of red tourism in China, the dynamics in the power relations of the various actors involved is necessarily more complex than in similar campaigns during the Mao era and the early years of the post-socialist period. 42 Indeed, one significant difference between past and present lies in the considerably larger role that visitors now play in detelTIlining the success or failure of a particular site as a destination of red tourism. In consumer­ based market economies, visitors demand choices and exercise power by making choices in accordance with their personal preferences. When transposing such an economy into China from 2005 onward, it is no surprise that domestic tourists, comprised mainly of the country's middle class, do have many choices in destination type. To increase their competitive edge, promoters of revolutionary heritage often present their sites not only exemplary in educational and cultural values but also full of scenic beauty, too. This coupling of red tourism with green tourism, as Kirk Denton has observed, helps add leisure to the visit while deepening the visitor's understanding of the revolution by linking it to different parts of China's vast national territory.43 The strategy also makes revolutionary heritage, with its conventional messages of self-sacrifice, heroism, and class struggle, more palatable for an audience living in a new economic and social climate that extols rather different sorts of values such as self­ reliance, self-fulfillment, and creativity.44 From the visitors' perspectives, Zhihong Gao and Xiaoling Guo argue, members of the middle class bring their 0\Vll fresh concepts of consumer sovereignty to their red-tourist experiences, despite their relative weak political agency.45 Of course, the level of freedom that today's red tourists have in making choices and voicing their critiques with respect to their travels does not amount to the kind of resistance that can bring about any significant political change. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that many visitors still choose to exercise what little freedom they do have in relation to sites that are emblematic of the Communist Party's ideology and culture. Such a situation would have been implausible during the Mao era when confolTIlity to the dominant political and social norms was paramount.

42 For the earlier traditions of Red Tomism, see Wagner, "Reading the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Peking." 43 Denton, Exhibiting the Past, 220. 44 Denton, 76. 45 Gao and Guo, "ConslUlling Revolution," 250 5 1 .

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Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park

In Bazhong, the nationwide promotion of red tourism has had considerable impact on the city's economy. Since 2010-the year the city's Statistics Bureau began including numbers related to tourism in its annual economic and social development report-the tourist industry has posted impressive growth. The number of domestic tourists visiting Bazhong, for example, has increased five-fold, from 4.76 million visits in 2010 to 21.7 million in 2016. Even more impressive, direct revenues from tourism skyrocketed from 2.28 billion yuan in 2010 to 16.7 billion yuan in 2016, an 800% increase.46 Tourists are drawn to Bazhong in large part due to the many natural sites along the Daba Mountain Range such as Guangwushan which is known for its spectacular fall foliage. However, red tourism is on a steady rise too. In 2010, of the domestic tourists coming to Bazhong, nearly 36% (i.e., over 822,000) reportedly came for that purpose.47 Even though the number in Bazhong pales in comparison to other places with well-knO\vn revolutionary heritage such as Yan'an, which boasts 12.66 million tourists in the same year (2010), it nonetheless constituted a nearly 70% increase from 2009 48 Since 2010, the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base reports to have about one million visitors each year.49 Such a dramatic rise was due in part to the site's designation as one of twelve key red tourism areas promoted in a nationwide campaign. The upsurge emboldened city officials to launch more ambitious plans pushing further development, with the aim of attracting 10 million red tourists by 2020.50 With its rich heritage resources, the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area has been regarded as a key component in Bazhong's tourism development plans. Reaffirming the Nankan's critical role, the 2011 proposal for the Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park (Nankan wenhua chanyeyuan) aimed to tranSfOlTIl the entire site into a major tourist destination capable

46 www.tjcn.org/tjgb/23sc/3 5 1 1 6.htrnl (2016) and www.tjcn.org/23scI19322.htrnl (2010). 47 Lin Li, "Bazhong shi hongse hiyouji zhuti xingxiang dingwei zai tansuo," 325. 48 Lin Li. 49 The statistics was provided by the musemn director Li Zhilan during an interview with the author on JlUle 28, 2018. 5 0 City officials annolUlced the projection in November, 2017; www.bzxhw.com/2017-1 11221 1 5 1 1 3 1487497597.htrn.

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of attracting 2.6 million visitors amlUally.51 This goal was to be achieved by reconfiguring the existing the heritage attractions at the site and complementing them with additional areas for educational, creative, commercial and leisurely activities. Upon completion, the park would occupy 9.42 square kilometers around Nankan Hill and feature two main areas therein (Fig. 6-9). The Buddhist cliff-side carvings would offer historical culture; the Museum of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base at the foothill as well as the Stele Forest Memorial of Generals from tlie Sichuan and Shaanxi Soviet Area (Fig. 6-10) and the Red Army Monument (Fig. 6-11) at tlie hilltop presented revolutionary culture. Built mainly in the 1990s, the various monuments at the hilltop feature over 4,200 stone slabs inscribed with the biographies of men and women who served in tlie Red Army during the 1930s, some 10,000 trees planted in their honor, and a display of weapons, warplanes and tanks from the period. Providing a crucial alternative space to the museum, these features enliven the history of the second soviet by means of large-scale displays in the outdoors. FurthemlOre, such displays complement the Buddhist cave site, which lies below and shares the same natural setting. Although tlie proposed park would be jointly managed by five government units currently stationed at Nankan Hill, tlie city intended to partner with private developers to improve existing structures and build new amenities such as shopping malls, dining complexes, hotels, entertainment facilities and community centers through a profit-sharing scheme. Less than a year after the proposal was armounced, the first phase of tlie Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park began. Taking tlie financial lead, a company called Nine-Colored Cloud Butterfly Technology of Yunnan (Jiucai yundie keji) pledged 2 billion yuan in investment. As soon as ground was broken, however, troubles arose. Construction costs mounted and relocated residents waited for compensation, as Nine-Colored Cloud Butterfly Technology could not raise the necessary fimds quickly enough. In 2014, tlie company went bankiupt, and the entire project came to a halt. 52 Not long afterward, the park's executive committee put forth another call for investment, but whether and when developers to realize the project could be found remains unclear.

51 See the document "Introduction to the Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park in Bazhong," http://www.bzsngw.cnlI/20 1511 2/29/cc6073 324[61 bb 1 c9923 ee8b8ef9d825 .htrnl. 52 Reported by Cui JlUunin of China Real Estate Post on December 3, 2017. Cj .sina.com.cn/artic1e/detai1l62241267 57/50953 1 .

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if.j� L1J � I& � � lm

Guide Map of Nankan Mountain Scenic Area

��L1JfmJltt�l2:���1la

Ict�t! ?!l � J�O\£

Fig. 6-9. Plan of the Nankan Mountain Scenic Area. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 6 - 1 0 . Stele Forest Memorial of Generals from the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Area, Nankan Mountain Scenic Area, Bazhong; 1 9 9 3 . Photograph by the author.

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Fig. 6- 1 1 , Red Army Memorial, Nankan Scenic Area, Bazhong; 1 997. Photograph by the author.

The fiasco of the Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park Project offers a cautionary tale for many aspiring cities about the need to undertake proper research, planning, and vetting before rushing to development. As a case study in art historical ecology, the episode reveals a great deal about the different values associated with the two clusters-Buddhist cliff-side carvings and revolutionary culture features-of heritage at the site, and how those values operated in tourism development. Notably, because tourists were free to determine their travel plans, the sites' economic viability hinged on their respective attractiveness as tourist destinations. In the official pronouncements concerning the proj ect, city officials invariably stressed "red culture" as the park's primary theme. 53 Presumably, the emphasis derives from their desire to demonstrate patriotism and party loyalty, but it also reflects their calculation to leverage the nationwide red­ tourism campaign to attract more tourists. This strategy is clearly critical, considering that the Buddhist cave site has never been a popular tourist attraction, unlike the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, which annually attracts over a million visitors. By contrast, in 2017 Nankan Caves counted only 53

See, for example, the speech given by the Deputy Mayor Wu Zonglin at the

ground-breaking ceremony on February 29, 2 0 1 2 . Reported by Sichuan Newsnet on March 1 , 2012, http ://bz.newssc.org/systeml20l 203 1 /001 469689.html.

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about 70,000 visitor receipts; the total number of visitors could well be higher, considering researchers and students are typically exempt from admission fees. 54 Despite the low perennial tourist turnout, Nankan Caves still remain the main source of pride and prestige for Bazhong. It was the first cultural site in the county to be designated a National Top-Priority Protected Property, and such recognition became a major selling point for the park's developers. That the proposed park retained "Nankan" in its name clearly underscores the importance of name recognition for branding purposes. Although official documents related to the proposed park did not make explicit reference to the World Heritage category, the cave site's potential for a future nomination was not lost on those involved in its management, especially in the central government. In 2009, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage approved and funded a major restoration, which was intended to hatmonize the site's overall appearance with its natural setting by delineating the protective zone bOlUldaries, improving signage, lowering the ground in front of the main cliff face by three meters, repaving walking paths, and clearing vegetation throughout the site.55 Based on prior research by experts from the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage and Tsinghua University and evaluations by officials at different stages, the project took over a year to complete and cost over 8 million yuan. The caution with which the restoration was carried out contrasts sharply with the haste in pushing through the Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park Project by the Bazhong city officials. The continued efforts by China's top heritage officials to preserve Nankan Caves through major restorations reveals again how different categories of heritage are prioritized and the inherent disparities within the overall management system. By generating revenues for the city through tourism development, the proposed park promised to narrow somewhat the gap between the revolutionary heritage and the more traditional kind represented by the centuries-old Buddhist caves. Yet there is no guarantee that any future profits would lead to better care for the Red Army stone inscriptions stored inside the Museum ofthe Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base. In fact, heritage preservation, research, and education were not listed as priorities or objectives in the proposal at all. With the sudden collapse

54 The information was provided to me by the staff of the Bazhong Cultural Heritage Management Bureau. 55 Reported by Wang Xinlong, Chinese Cave Temples E-Newsletter, No. 3 (2010). http://www.cavetemples.com/CompVisualizeBig.asp?id=65&smallfenlei=%B5%D A%C8%FD%C6%DA&fenlei=%B5%E7%D7%D3%BB%El %BF%AF&yd=l .

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of Nine-Colored Cloud Butterfly Technology, the disparities in treatment would likely continue in the foreseeable future. Conclusion: Visitors at Nankan

As the domestic tourism industry continues to boom in China, the number oftourists and development initiatives will inevitably rise at heritage sites across the country. Concerned about environmental degradation and rising levels of poverty and social inequity, the central government understandably has begun to push for sustainability measures by encouraging tourism in rural areas and underperfOlming cities like Bazhong, which in 2016 generated a rather meager annual GDP of 54 million yuan for its population of nearly four million.56 Local officials are often too eager, as !lie fiasco of Narikan Cultural Enterprise Park Project has demonstrated, to cash in on the nationwide trend as they rush development projects through without proper planning or oversight. It remains to be seen whether the city will succeed in realizing the perceived economic and social potential of its heritage assets while adhering to the state's sustainability goals. The case of Nankan Mountain Scenic Area exemplifies some of the central problems in preserving heritage sites in China at a time when their use is inextricably tied to tourism development. As an interpretive strategy, analyzing tourism development as part of some political, social, and economic narratives on modernization has attracted researchers pursuing a political ecology perspective. 57 Developing this line of inquiry while also departing from it, I have cast !lie failed park proposal as !lie latest episode in a longer history of the evolving conservation practices at the Narikan Mountain Scenic Area. Thus, this study illuminates broader cultural trends shaping the directions of heritage management in China in the postsocialist period. Many of !liese trends have contributed directly to the uneven use of heritage resources in Bazhong, which in tum stimulated actions for redressing the imbalance. In this light, tourism development drawing on Bazhong's rich revolutionary heritage marks a notable, recent change in the context of a management system that favors properties that can garner international attention and prestige through the World Heritage regime on the global stage. This system, not coincidentally, relied to a large extent on scholarship produced in art history and archaeology-two

56 Statistics provided by Bazhong government in their annual economic and social development report, posted on -www.1jcn.org/tjgbI23sc/351 16.htrnl. 57 Nepal and Saarinen, Political Ecology and Tourism, 9.

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academic disciplines that have developed in tandem with heritage conservation in China-to flesh out the rationale of its mission and outlook. By analyzing the Buddhist caves and Red Army monuments at Nankan Hill within the same ecology as well as the social structures of power and interpretative discourses that infolTIled it, the present study sheds light on the intensely local-centric nature of domestic tourism in China today and its impact on the reception of disparate kinds of heritage artifacts and monuments. Whereas the Nankan Cultural Enterprise Park had previously attracted mostly developers from the southwest region, its visitorship remains mostly local and regional. The dynamics in the producer-consumer relationship thus differs from those in other countries where large number of international actors drive tourism involving both tangible and intangible heritage. As these outside parties bring in their own paradigms of development agendas and implement them at the expense of local concerns, their involvement has drawn criticisms from scholars as a neo-colonial fOlTIl of imperialism. By contrast, chiefly local forces have shaped the situation in Bazhong over the years; thus rather than looking elsewhere for contemporary comparisons, it makes sense to assess the latest development broadly within the site's long history. To this end, I will conclude with a reflection on the changing visitorship at Nankan and the implications for the site's sustainability. The cave site, as noted above, has been a frequent destination for visitors since its establishment in the sixth century. From extant donor inscriptions, we know that visitors came for religious worship as well as for recreation, self-education, and past remembrances. They actively participated in maintaining the site for use in the present and future by paying local artisans to repaint the surfaces of the existing Buddha images, create new commissions, and make records of their activities at the site. A particularly notable instance of restoration was carried out by a local official named Li Sihong, who sponsored the repainting of over two hundred images in 887-88. (Fig. 6-12) The underlying purpose for such undertakings was to renew the magical potency of the religious icons, which donors perceived to be key to realizing their wishes.58 Like so many religious sites in China, however, the transformation of Nankan Caves into a protected heritage property after the founding of the People's Republic of China put an end to this paradigm of operation, as the new policy imposed by the state would fundamentally change the visitors' behavior and their perception of the

5 8 See a longer discussion in my book manuscript Cave Temples of Siclumn and Chongqing in Eco-Art History, Chapter Five.

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site ' s function and meaning. Visitors today are no longer allowed to commission new images or restore existing ones. While many still come to the site for devotional worship, their action is limited to personal, ephemeral gestures such as prostrating in homage or burning incenses at designated spots. By law, any alteration of the cliff sculptures' physical appearances is strictly prohibited.59

t Fig. 6 - 1 2 . Niche 77, Nankan Caves, Bazhong: begun in 8 h century and restored in 877. Photograph by the author.

Significantly, banning visitors from altering the pictorial contents does not prevent substantial changes to the site. To the contrary, since its designation as a protected heritage property, Nankan Caves has undergone several rounds of large-scale modification, the most recent one in 2009. As discussed earlier, this proj ect was intended to harmonize the site' s overall appearance with its natural setting, a goal that was realized through the reconfiguration of the surrounding area along with major structural changes such as lowering the ground in front of the main cliff face by three meters. Although all these measures were planned and carried out in accordance with standards of modem conservation, they also underscored

59

See Articles 1 7 - 1 9 in the

China

(Revised in 201 5).

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the motivation to make the site more attractive and accessible for visitors. The desire to increase the tourist flow at the cave site does not come as a surprise. After all, the failed park proposal was in many ways designed to exploit the site's two kinds of heritage to enhance the overall visitorship. Tourism has become the chief mode of sustainability at heritage sites in China, and site managers are now the ones to initiate major changes at heritage sites. They do so, often on a grand, comprehensive scale not seen in premodern times and in anticipation of what visitors might want to see in telTIlS of leisure, education, and/or religious devotion. Across the country today, serious tourism development plans at heritage sites try to anticipate the range of visitor expectations as a critical factor in repair, reconfiguration, or conservation projects. 60 But because of the nature of the open market system, it is ultimately up to the visitors to decide whether or not the changes facilitate a satisfactory experience at the site. Their freedom as consumers to choose which sites to visit and how to spend their money can make or break a heritage site's ability to survive in a society of market socialism. The deep historical lens reveals how visitorship at Nankan has evolved through time, especially in the second half of the twentieth century after the site became a protected heritage property. The changes in many ways can be understood in telTIlS of the relationship between visitors and site managers, a relationship that has grown increasingly interdependent. In premodern times, although there was a strong monastic presence at the site as indicated by a score of images of relic pagodas at the southern end of the main cliff face, site managers did not, so far as extant donor inscriptions have revealed, play as active a role compared to the lay visitors in spearheading new commissions and restoration. The apparent absence of an assertive management at Nankan, however, was by no means the nOlTIl; at other sites in the same region, such as Baodingshan in Dazu, monastic overseers and government officials had long been active in shaping the site through image-making. What differentiated the two, in short, was the use of the property for agricultural production, which provided the site's monastic community with some independence from the support of lay visitors for its livelihood. There was indeed a long history of such practices in Dazu, whereas it was less evident in Bazhong. Regardless, the model of self-sufficiency at Buddhist cave temples was by and large abandoned following the establishment of heritage management system in modem China. After taking control of historic monuments 60 On the relationship of tourism and heritage conservation, see Demas, Agnew, and Fan, Strategies for Sustainable Tourism at the Mogao Grottoes ofDunhuang, China.

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across the country and refashioning them as sites of cultural heritage, the state sought to protect and preserve these places. It outlawed those activities such as food production and image-making, which it deemed potentially hatmful to a site's material contents. The eventual shift toward tourism as the new mode of sustainability at heritage sites in the post­ socialist era has prompted site managers to reconsider the place of the visitors in the current paradigm of operation. Site managers remain dominant in their relationship with the visitors, but the latter's demands and concerns have gained in relevance, even becoming critical to the success of any heritage site as a tourist destination. Whether and when visitors ever regain some of the agency that their predecessors of pre­ modern times once exercised at sites like Nankan, only time will tell. Bibliography

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