The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China [1st ed.] 9789811557941, 9789811557958

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The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China Mai Corlin

The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China

Mai Corlin

The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China

Mai Corlin Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, Hong Kong

ISBN 978-981-15-5794-1    ISBN 978-981-15-5795-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Jonas and Lulu

Acknowledgments

During the work with this book, I have accumulated a great deal of debts of gratitude toward the people of Bishan Village and to colleagues and friends located in many corners of the world. Little would have come out of my field research endeavors had it not been for the generosity and kindness of the villagers of Bishan. Teacher Wang took it upon himself to guide me through the history of Bishan Village and was willing to answer all my questions over and over again. This also includes Ou Ning and his family, who opened their home to me and let me come and go as I wish. Zuo Jing also opened his home to me and willingly answered my questions and queries and cleared up accumulated misunderstandings. I also want to extend my thanks to the university village officials of Yi County; had it not been for meeting these young and industrious people, I would not have understood the complexities of rural governance in the same manner. I owe substantial debts of gratitude toward Andreas Steen, Professor of China Studies at Aarhus University, for his patience with reading my drafts, his good humor and the many important discussions we have had. The input from Professor Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen has been invaluable and he has been a continuous source of inspiration—this book owes a lot to his guidance within the field of art history and beyond. I also want to extend my sincere gratitude to Professor Grant Kester and the editorial collective behind FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, especially Paloma Checa-Gismero and Noni Brynjolson, for patiently answering my questions and for generously inviting me in to become part of the journal and the discussions that were continuously taking place—and for keeping me good company during my research stay at University of California, San vii

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Acknowledgments

Diego. These discussions and exchanges have been invaluable for my entrance into the field of socially engaged art. Priceless colleagues and friends from around the world should also be mentioned, as they have read excerpts or entire chapters, taken time to discuss, given feedback or just been there for friendly support. I would like to thank Rasmus Graff for tirelessly reading my writings—always pointing out when my language was imprecise, urging me to do better. Furthermore, I particularly want to thank Frank Vigneron, Michael Leung, Hoyin Leung, Zhao Kunfang, Sipei Lu, Zheng Bo, Laura Dombernowsky, Daniel Haussmann, Lili Hoiting Li, Michael Ulfstjerne, Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, Lu Bin, Doro Shi, Xiaona Steen, Stig Thøgersen, Sun Yunfan, Leah Thompson, Mette Thunø, Gene Ray, Barbara Mittler, Peng Yanhan, Mathias Kokholm, Jørgen Delman and Lü Xinyu. My gratitude toward former Associate Professor Denise Gimpel is immense—for always urging me to read and for guiding me in the direction I have now chosen. For my friends and family and last but not least, to my husband Jonas—I could not have done this without you. Despite the inspiration and guidance from all these great people, any mistakes, misconceptions or fallacies this book might contain lie entirely on my shoulders. Lastly, I would like to thank the S. C. Van Foundation for generously supporting my work for this book and for support for fieldwork trips along the way. Thanks should also go to Ragna Rask-Nielsen’s Foundation for support for fieldwork trips to China and to Knud Højgaards Foundation, Oticon Foundation and Augustinus Foundation for funding my research stay at University of California, San Diego.

Notes on the Text

On names: throughout the book most of my interlocutors are referred to by their real names. This is due to the fact that many of the villagers and artists I have interviewed are already publicly known. However, there are cases in which I have chosen to conceal names. On transliteration: throughout the text I have chosen Chinese characters as opposed to the pinyin form (unless the pinyin form is needed). I have chosen to do so because I find characters to be more useful for further research by others. The translations into English from either Chinese or Danish are done by me unless otherwise stated. In many cases, titles of artworks, projects or festivals have been given an English title by the Chinese artist or group behind them. While these do not always display “correct” English or can be considered to be actual translations (sometimes the English title is very different from the Chinese one), I have maintained the original translations. Some of the articles that I quote come from Chinese magazines or websites, but are written in English; these also do not always feature “correct” English; however, I have chosen not to mark every mistake with [sic], because I did not want the quotes to be sprinkled with [sic]. On appendices: general information on venues, events, people and places in Bishan as well as a timeline for the Bishan Project can be found in the appendices.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Radical Rural Intellectuals  1 2 Fields of Socially Engaged Art 35 3 Imagining the Commune 65 4 The Great Leap into Utopia105 5 Trojan Horses or the Artist as Realtor135 6 Whose Village?169 7 Conclusion: The End of Utopia?189 8 Epilogue: Guanxi Aesthetics or the State as Artistic Director197 Appendices207 Index213

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List of Figures

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Central alley in Bishan Village xv Map and emblem of the Bishan Commune designed by Xiaoma and Chengzi xvii Fig. 3.1 From Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia66 Fig. 3.2 Pictures and notes from Ou Ning’s visit to Bishan in 2008 70 Fig. 3.3 Ou Ning’s drawing of NSK’s emblem 71 Fig. 3.4 The common law of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark72 Fig. 3.5 Draft of the Bishan Commune emblem by Xiaoma and Chengzi 74 Fig. 3.6 The final Bishan Commune emblem, designed by Xiaoma and Chengzi76 Fig. 3.7 Ray Lei’s drafts for the architecture of the Bishan Commune—here drive-in theatre for tractors and concert hall 77 Fig. 3.8 Le Corbusier, La Ville Radiuese, drafts for the Bishan Commune common spaces 78 Fig. 3.9 The Pantheon of the Bishan Commune, James Yen and Peter Kropotkin88 Fig. 3.10 Ou Ning’s mapping of the communities he has initiated and engaged in over time 92 Fig. 4.1 Ou Ning speaking at the opening of the first Bishan Harvestival in 2011, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune113 Fig. 4.2 Poster advertising Yixian International Photofestival 2012, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune 119 Fig. 5.1 Cars driving into Bishan Village 136 Fig. 5.2 Ou Ning’s house Buffalo Institute from the outside 143

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Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

A small cluster of old Hui houses just outside of Bishan Village147 From left: owner Qian Xiaohua and bookstore workers Wang Shouchang and Wang Ling at the Bishan Bookstore 151 Performance with the Danish art ensemble Bevægeligt Akkurat (Moveable Accurate) at the Bishan Bookstore October 2014 152 Xinghua behind the counter at the Bishan Bookstore 153 Yao Lilan reading a book at the Bishan Bookstore 154 The School of Tillers, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune158 The volunteers of the School of Tillers. Ou Ning and Pig’s Inn owner Han Yu in the background, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune 159 Mapping of the Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange Project by Elaine W. Ho, Michael Leung and Zhao Kunfang. Courtesy of the artists 162 The square across from the office of the village committee, redecorated after the departure of Ou Ning 198 Bishan Crafts Cooperative 199 Kunlun International Youth Hostel located in Bishan Village 203

Prologue: Bishan Village (碧山村)

Fig. 1  Central alley in Bishan Village

At first sight, Bishan doesn’t come across as a poor village; the traffic conditions are good with paved roads and easy access to the nearby county seat. The county seat is only ten  minutes away on electric scooter, the preferred vehicle of most villagers, and it can boast of a new hospital, a xv

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new school, rows of new townhouses and apartment blocks, construction sites and smaller factories. The capital of Yi County is a city in the process of developing its economy and architecture. There are similarly plenty of newly built houses in Bishan. Nevertheless, the wealth represented by these new houses in Bishan does not come from the local economy, but is almost entirely based on young people going to the city to work. Old people and small children constitute the actual population as most young people have left to work in the more developed urban areas, making the actual population in Bishan far smaller than the approximately 2900 stated by the records. It is estimated that only around 1000 people maintain a permanent residence in Bishan. Furthermore, until 2014, many families who had migrated to the city had no legal way of selling the land they no longer reside on, leaving the village dotted with empty houses. What worries the local villagers now are the quick depopulation and the lack of job opportunities for the young. Bishan, like so many other Chinese villages, thus experiences the fast climbing rate of urbanization and the increasing socio-economic gap between rural and urban areas. Yi County, where Bishan is located, is situated in a flat, oval basin surrounded by mountains and is full of houses and smaller and larger villages in close proximity. Yi County is a part of Huizhou, a historical region, with a distinct culture, language and architecture, and constituted by the geographical area of southern Anhui and a part of northeastern Jiangxi Province. The area is renowned for its well-preserved Hui-style villages, and the growing reliance on tourism over the past ten years has altered the economic foundation of these villages considerably. Bishan is, or was, however, not one of these tourist sites. Even though Hui-style remains the predominant architectural feature, the many newly built houses result in a lack of visual, rural authenticity so crucial to urban tourists. Nevertheless, Bishan has become attractive to investors, mainly within the hotel sector, who wish to take advantage of its proximity to famous tourist destinations and good traffic conditions. In this Hui village in the foothills of the Yellow Mountain range, artist, curator and editor Ou Ning and his colleague Zuo Jing initiated the Bishan Commune in 2011, a call for a return to the countryside and a renewed relationship between urban and rural areas. Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Mai Corlin

 

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Fig. 2  Map and emblem of the Bishan Commune designed by Xiaoma and Chengzi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Radical Rural Intellectuals

In 2010, Ou Ning exhibited the notebook Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia.1 The notebook presents basic ideas and structures for the Bishan Commune, a utopian ideal of an alternative way of life far away from Chinese society and authorities. The notebook displayed Ou Ning’s research into alternative communities, anarchism and the Chinese historical Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) of the 1930s. In 2011 Ou Ning and his colleague Zuo Jing began the work to establish the Bishan Commune in a village in rural China. The main questions of this book thus revolve around how an anarchist, utopian community unfolds to the backdrop of the political, social and historical landscape of rural China. Or more directly: How do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside? This book presents research into the lifecycle of the Bishan Commune as it was imagined and as it unfolded in Bishan Village; from the beginning of the project, with the creation of the notebook in 2010, to the establishment of the commune in Bishan Village in 2011, on to Ou Ning’s move to Bishan together with his family in 2013, to the closure of the Bishan Commune project by the Chinese authorities in early 2016 and again on to Bishan Village after the departure of Ou Ning, with Zuo Jing maintaining his commercial activities in the village.2 These periods of Bishan Commune reveal five different, but not strictly demarcated, phases of the project and offer ways in which to understand how urban artists engage in © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_1

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opposition to and negotiate and cooperate with the Chinese authorities as well as with the local villagers. The Bishan Project, the name by which it has primarily been known,3 had its headquarters in Ou Ning’s house, a large Hui-style compound he named Buffalo Institute (牛院). The Institute has served as a hub for arriving visitors, including artists, intellectuals and activists from near and far who came and stayed for varying periods of time. For the first couple of years, the primary activities unfolded around the Bishan Harvestival,4 a yearly large-scale art festival that invited artists and activists from all over the world and attracted large numbers of visitors of all kinds. Later, in 2013, when Ou Ning moved to the village together with his family, another kind of work began—work that focused on dialogue and collaboration with the villagers through activities such as reading groups, smaller exhibitions, researcher-in-residence programs, concerts, publication of magazines, preservation of local handicrafts traditions, a community supported agriculture (CSA) project and much more. Many of these activities took place at the Bishan Bookstore (碧山书局), opened by Ou Ning’s long-time friend Qian Xiaohua the spring of 2014,5 or later at the School of Tillers (理农馆), a gallery, library and education space opened by Ou Ning the spring of 2015 in the house adjacent to the Buffalo Institute.6 Early texts and interviews with Ou Ning reveal that the Bishan Commune was conceived by the initiator as an extra-governmental, extra-­ system activity, simply providing an alternative to the existing order (0086 Magazine 2015 [2010], 15), whereas later texts lay out a re-evaluation and restructuring of these views and focus more on the Bishan Project as interconnected with surrounding society and the need for the Bishan Project to respond to the necessity of economic development for the local residents and authorities (Ou 2012a, 104–105). It is, of course, not surprising that the project changes when utopian ideals meet the ever-so demanding reality, so what I am interested in is not that it changes, but how and why it changes, thus exploring the Bishan Commune as a practical example of what happens when urban artists and activists engage in practice in the face of power and people in rural China. This study provides an analysis of the six years that the Bishan Project existed (2010–2016) and its endeavors to transform Chinese society starting from a rural village; an unstable trajectory of cooperation, negotiation, misunderstandings, opposition, control, co-existence and (im)possibilities. Furthermore, this book examines how artists and intellectuals alike bring utopian imaginaries of the future developed in urban centers to the countryside. It traces the

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transformation of urban-based artists and intellectuals into socially engaged artists in rural China and unfolds what occurs when processes of art and social engagement are introduced into a specific village and how this affects local officials, villagers and artists in dissimilar ways.

Closing Down In February 2016, as I was preparing to leave for Bishan for a research trip, I received an e-mail from Ou Ning, telling me that the Bishan Project had been shut down, that he and his wife and children had had to leave the village with a few days’ notice, furthermore urging me not to visit Bishan in the near future until things had settled down a bit. The closure came as unexpectedly to me as to other observers,7 though Ou Ning mentioned in the e-mail that the relationship with the local authorities had been particularly strained the last couple of months. The project has in its relationship to the local authorities gone through phases of a better or worse relationship, but Ou Ning had managed to pull through despite this. While it is perhaps not surprising that the local authorities were not in favor of housing an anarchist community of artists, this book shows the willingness on behalf of Ou Ning and others engaged in the project to compromise their goals in order for the project to proceed altogether. Whether compromise is a viable route to take in the larger picture is of course another discussion. Despite the compromises, the authorities were not satisfied. The closure in itself inevitably casts a different light on the entire project as well as the findings of this book. What I thought was the story of compromise, dialogue and negotiations, instead became yet another addition to the long story of the oppressive censorship regime of an authoritarian government, whether or not the decision to close the project was spurred by ideological or economic concerns, or decided by the local or the central government. The closure added a layer of that indeterminable fabric called censorship and once again made the all-encompassing power of the CCP very visible. The Bishan Commune is history (for) now and remains as yet another contribution to the bulking literature on anarcho-­ communist rural utopias that flourished, died out and wandered into the imaginary of other worlds and ways to be.8 Despite the closure of the Bishan Project, its trajectory can reveal important insights into the workings of a socially engaged art project trying to manifest itself in rural China. This book spans a variety of methods and approaches in the venture to answer the questions to which this

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research has given rise. The basic questions have been: what is the Bishan Commune and how did it (manage to) unfold in the Chinese countryside? Of course, these questions spur a string of other questions such as: what constitutes the thinking of Ou Ning and his position in the project? What are the larger Chinese and international contexts of Ou Ning’s thinking? What does community mean within the boundaries of the utopian Bishan Commune, or how does its utopian propositions unfold in the reality of a Chinese village with the political landscape that entails? And once we enter the village, how do the villagers and local authorities perceive the project? How does this triangular (and dialectical) relationship affect the project? In short, how has the project evolved, changed and accommodated to claims and wishes from a variety of agents? And then, how can this be understood in the broader light of socially engaged art practices in rural China? Are socially engaged art projects, understood in the United States and Europe as political and critical projects aimed at social change, possible in in a place like rural China, which is constrained by party control? And if so, on what terms are they possible? In other words: how do artists practice in the face of power in rural China? And do they themselves become powerful? The description of the structure of the book towards the end of the introduction will add nuance and depth to these questions as each chapter deals with specific phases and aspects of the Bishan Project. For now, I will provide a bit more information to guide the reader along into the world of Bishan.

Extradisciplinary Investigations I will explain the concept of socially engaged art in detail in Chap. 2, but for the reader unfamiliar with the terminology of visual art and art history, socially engaged art refers to an unruly mass of art practices that make conscious claims to alter certain aspects of society often in relation to a perceived underprivileged population group, a specific place or environment or as platforms for proposing new social relations. As Grant Kester describes the field: “While otherwise quite diverse, it is driven by a common desire to establish new relationships between artistic practice and other fields of knowledge production, from urbanism to environmentalism, from experimental education to participatory design. In many cases it has been inspired by, or affiliated with, new movements for social and economic justice around the globe” (Kester 2013a). Socially engaged art is thus also characterized by producing, as the art critic and activist Brian

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Holmes suggests, “extradisciplinary investigations” that transgress most of the categories traditionally placed on the practice of art (Holmes 2007).9 Placing herself in the slipstream of Grant Kester, Meiqin Wang argues, of what she terms the Chinese “art professionals,” that they “with a more collaborative approach, … strive to carry out their own art activism in small-scale and local-specific projects to investigate social and cultural problems, to facilitate alternative place construction and community building, and to advocate the formation of new relationships and subjectivities among people of different social and professional backgrounds” (Wang 2019, 10). Chinese artists who engage in these matters are, for the most part, dealing with other sets of obstructions and different discursive patterns than their Western counterparts, even though there are obvious similarities in the practice of socially engaged art in China and elsewhere in the world. Meiqin Wang furthermore argues, that socially engaged art in China is either non-confrontational or directly collaborating with local governments across China (ibid., 5). I argue, that in terms of the projects in China it is more useful to see their collaboration with the state as a spectrum that is running from “directly criticizing” to “non-­ confrontational” to “directly collaborating.” Long-term projects will inevitably place themselves along different lines of the spectrum depending on situation and position within the locality in question. Projects that are “directly collaborating” with the authorities—of which there are quite a few—will however most likely not change into a situation where they are directly critical of the government. Western art histories often place the development of socially engaged art within the trajectory of the avant-garde, with artists hinting towards the construction of situations of the Situationist International and Guy Debord and his Society of the Spectacle (1967) as inspirational for the unfolding of their practice and for their critique of the spectacle that is society (Bishop 2012, 11). Claire Bishop argues that there is “a recurrent set of theoretical reference points [that] governs the current literature on participatory and collaborative art: Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, the Situationist International, Paulo Freire, Deleuze and Guattari, and Hakim Bey, to name just a few” (Bishop 2012, 11). While many Chinese artists make the same references as their North American or European counterparts, it is perhaps still necessary, as art historian Zhou Yanhua suggests, to situate their practice within a Chinese historical experience (Zhou 2019). Zhou proposes that the “Mass line” of the Maoist-era serves as the experiential backdrop to contemporary practices of socially engaged

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art in China (Zhou 2019). Art historian Meiqin Wang refers to the Modern Woodcut Movement of the 1930s and 1940s and art produced by cultural worker artists during the Maoist-era as historical precursors to socially engaged art practices (Wang 2019, 4). Similarly, artist and art historian Zheng Bo makes a convincing point, when he shows how “Comintern aesthetics” can be traced from the cultural practices of theatre troupes in China in the 1920s and 1930s and on to today’s socially engaged art (Zheng 2019). Though he is placing the historical legacy at the center of his argument, Zheng proposes a more nuanced understanding of the socially engaged art projects and their relations to the past: “I am less interested in celebrating the continuity of leftist cultures than revealing contemporary shortcomings—that is, the lessons that Comintern Aesthetics has to offer contemporary socially engaged art” (ibid.). In other words, it is not a matter of tying present day practices to a heavy historical legacy, but rather what this legacy can reveal and how we can put their lessons to use. However, while I—of course!—agree to the importance of situating these practices in a Chinese context, discursively and historically, I think we should remember to understand these rural art practices also as part of a global art world tendency concerned with the relationship between art and politics, the social and the aesthetic realms. We find rural socially engaged art practices all over the world, also in places without a Maoist legacy of going rural. Chinese Artists Going Rural Notwithstanding, the tendency of socially engaged art and Chinese artists going to the countryside has been growing in China since the 1990s. Recent years, through themes and profile articles, Chinese art magazines have recognized the movement from city to countryside as a recurrent topic in the praxis of contemporary Chinese artists, e.g. Art World 艺术世 界 with “Country Road” (还乡), November (2011), LEAP International Art Magazine on Contemporary China 艺术界 with “The Call of Home” (热土), October (2012) and ArtTime 艺术时代: “Art and Country” (艺 术与乡村), no. 38 (2014), thus mapping and discussing the various ongoing projects within the framework of contemporary art; but, as such, they do not provide a sustained argument of the tendency and the implications of such movements. Followingly, not until recent years has there been a proliferation of research into these matters (see Wang Chunchen 2009; Zheng 2012; Zhou 2018; Wang Meiqin 2019; Ren 2019; Wang Zhiliang

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2019 [2016]). However, only a few of them deal explicitly with socially engaged art in a rural setting and even fewer apply an ethnographical fieldwork-based approach, but rely solely on interviews with the artists and short-term fieldwork observations. As I will expound on later in the introduction, one of the central claims of this book, is that in order to research these long-­term socially engaged art practices and their attempts at establishing new social relations, we need to do long-term fieldwork and we need to include other voices than that of the initiating artist. Much of my work on the Bishan Project has been to understand the reality of a socially engaged art project and as such the dialectical relationship between actuality and utopia, between theory and practice, text and image. The Bishan Project looks so very different if you read the texts coming from Ou Ning’s hand, follow the spectacle on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Weixin and Weibo accounts, or if you actually venture into the place itself. But how are these discursive spaces of the Bishan Project interrelated? And how do they relate to the larger contexts of an international art scene and the local inhabitants? It seems that we, in order to encompass all of the different aspects, expressions and experiences of the Bishan Project, should understand the Bishan Project as a platform, in a sense invoking what I would term “platform aesthetics” (平台美术). Here I think of both the aesthetics the project evoked and engaged in as well as the triangular (and dialectical in its own sense) relationship between the villagers, the authorities and the artists. These three groups are, however, by no means strictly demarcated. A villager can also be village head, work for the county administration, be a member of the party or be an artist—and Ou Ning is also a villager, as the Bishan Bookstore keeper Teacher Wang reminded me. Perhaps the resources and connections attested to the various people in Bishan and other localities of rural socially engaged art are more useful in understanding these complex relationships than the categorization of villager, official and artist. The categorizations are however not easy to avoid altogether, and this book will not attempt to do so. The resources and connections, urban as well as rural, play an important part in the formation of not only the Bishan Commune, but socially engaged rural art projects all over China. I argue that these connections and resources are utilized as advantages in negotiations with the local government, as necessary in the spread of the ideas of the projects as well as significant in introducing an urban culture of aesthetics and practice into rural China, in

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some sense furthering the urban cultural domination over rural China,10 albeit with other intentions.

A Rural Intelligentsia? This book will show how in recent years an increasing number of Chinese artists, academics, intellectuals and activists have been turning towards the countryside, bringing with them a discourse more or less critical of the Chinese authorities and neoliberalism, as well as their desires for social and political change. Using the Bishan Commune as prism, this book is preoccupied with this group of people as the emergence of a new radical rural intelligentsia. The projects produced by this new rural intelligentsia embrace a variety of methods and expressions. They form critical responses and oppositional practices situated in ideas of going-to-the-people and propose other methods of engaging the rural areas and their population. The artists and intellectuals spend a considerable amount of time in the villages and work actively to produce and spread critical thinking, often as editors and initiators of magazines and symposia. Situated in the rural, they inevitably have to deal with urban cultural domination and the ways that rural-urban antagonism affects their village. As I will show in this book, many of the projects engaged in rural China, the Bishan Commune in particular, reject the Maoist-era and the Communist Party of China. However, some of the artists and activists still seem to adhere to or show sympathy for utopian socialist and/or anarchist ideals, such as alternative education, work-study groups, and last but not least a rejuvenated relationship between the urban and the rural. They promote smaller units, such as the commune, the autonomous youth space or the farm. They spell out a story of attempted reorganization. As anarchist and initiator of an autonomous youth house in the countryside on the outskirts of Wuhan, Mai Dian so precisely put it: Experience with traditional methods of reform and revolution have shown that a reliance on power and government will lead only to another program of idolatry; to a recasting of social relations into forms more rigid and deified. New movements of social resistance should not walk down old paths. Instead, we must focus attention on trying to establish open, responsible communities and social relationships. (Mai 2009)

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In other words, the efforts of groups within a new rural intelligentsia lie in attempting to build other social networks and relations than the ones offered by the state and the modernist capitalist system. The term “radical rural intellectuals” does not refer to urban intellectuals pondering rural issues nor to a firmly organized group of people situated in the rural. What I term “radical rural intellectuals” refers to a small number of groups or individuals scattered all over the Chinese countryside and other fringe areas, in other words to people who live, think and practice in rural settings and who in their own ways think critically about the present circumstances of rural China and try to formulate possible present or future trajectories and utopian imaginaries. The groups of people that I refer to are usually not “professional” intellectuals employed by a university, a think tank or a similar institution, and as such remain on the outskirts of the established knowledge industry, though they often maintain ties to establishment intellectuals. Rather they come forward as critical outsiders who “present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national identity,” as Edward Said argues of the public intellectual (Said 2002, 37).11 In Edward Said’s reading, intellectual interventions are not confined to the academic field, but can just as well be part of the field of art and music (ibid., 36). Concerning Chinese contemporary intellectuals, both He Baogang and Timothy Cheek, in somewhat critical accounts, argue that Chinese intellectuals should be understood through the lens of a Confucian legacy that places the intellectual in a central position within society (Cheek 2016; He 2004). The Chinese intellectuals, He Baogang argues, base their right to “represent the people” in a Confucian orthodoxy (He 2004, 266).12 He critiques this assumed right and argues that it reflects a lack of understanding and appreciation of democracy as the voice of the people: “One way to make the Chinese idea of the intellectual compatible with democracy is to eliminate their superior status and treat them as ordinary, equal individuals” (He 2004, 267). Perhaps, for our artists-­ intellectuals, it is in the desire to carve out a space for equality through their rural ventures that they go against the hierarchical Confucian legacy. They base their practice in an anarchist and/or socialist utopian thinking, in a sense turning their back on both the Maoist era and a supposed Confucian legacy. The rural projects, especially Our Home and the Bishan Project, can be understood as part of a loosely connected family, that includes urban counterparts such as Guangzhou’s SoengJoengToi (SJT) and Shanghai’s Dinghaiqiao (DHQ) Mutual Aid Society. Through

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“Banyan Travel Agency” (榕樹頭旅行社), members of the group behind SJT visited Our Home in Wuhan prior to establishing their place and they maintain ties with DHQ Mutual Aid Society in Shanghai.13 Part of SJT’s otherwise quite diverse and unruly practice is to connect with likeminded across the country and across East Asia, especially projects in Japan and Hong Kong.

The Rural Crisis Many of the socially engaged art projects analyzed in this book base their venture into the Chinese countryside discursively on the notion of rural China as being in crisis, a crisis they connect to the sweeping urbanization process China has gone through.14 As Ou Ning recounts: […] the fast-growing urbanization […] has left the countryside increasingly deprived and marginalized and has given rise to myriad problems, including agricultural decline, the loss of agrarian land, rural emigration, reliance on imported food, poor land-use planning (new homes are mostly built on the periphery of a village, leaving the center with abandoned, dilapidated houses), insufficient public resources, local gangs, rural-urban imbalance and social conflicts, especially the numerous mass protests staged against arbitrary land acquisitions by the government. (Ou 2014a [2012], 554)

Qu Yan, the leader of the Xucun International Art Commune (许村国际 艺术公社) in Shanxi Province, describes how “the reckless urbanization and the monolithic construction of a new type of village in some places are leading to the extinction of Chinese traditional culture and distinctive civilization” (Ding 2013). The experimental art collective behind the artistic travel agency Chaile Travel (拆了旅行社), on the other hand, describes how their project is “aiming to think over, from the perspective of art, problems and changes that rural tradition is facing in the process of modernization and urbanization” (Chaile Travels homepage).15 The space occupied by tradition, modernization, urbanization and so forth in these queries varies from project to project, but the idea of the rural as being in crisis remains fairly intact. The formulation of the rural crisis is, however, deeply enmeshed in political, economic and cultural power struggles—both historical and present-day—that continue to inform and transform the public debate and policies on rural issues. The increasing level of urbanization has in

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some cases left poor rural areas with dilapidated housing, skewed demographics, a fragile school system, and polluted farm land and drinking water, and, in other cases, it has turned the rural area into a playground for the urban population, complete with aestheticized villages restored according to the urban imaginary of the countryside (Oakes 2011). In recent years, the debate on the rural crisis has been based on a common notion of the Chinese villages as going through an atomization process ( 原子化) (Thøgersen 2012, 36), meaning that the rural communities are increasingly lacking social coherence, which is understood as posing a serious societal threat. Bishan Village is no exemption in this regard. The current Premier Li Keqiang has proposed further urbanization (城 镇化) of China’s rural areas combined with an agricultural modernization, as a means to transform the economy from a production based to a consumer based one (Li 2012). The intention here is that more rural residents will move to small and mid-sized urban centers and here become good consumers who can support domestic demand (ibid.). The Bishan Commune and other socially engaged art projects in rural areas thus counter the line of the government by proposing means to impede the movement towards the urban. This however does not imply that the Chinese Government on an overall scale is against rural reconstruction projects or cultural community building projects. The state is, as sinologist and rural expert Stig Thøgersen argues, also preoccupied with social coherence as a prerequisite for social stability (Thøgersen 2009, 15). There are furthermore several examples of the government initiated rural reconstruction projects and these are usually much larger in scale and thus potentially (though not necessarily) more effective in terms of rural economic development and improvement of living standards (ibid., 15–17). Nevertheless, the Chinese government’s focus on further urbanization shows where the main bulk of the resources are being directed—and local governments will adapt their development programs to the possibilities and limitations in their specific area. Since the opening of China in 1978 and the reform policies, millions of people have migrated from the rural to the urban areas, with the consequence that huge urban zones have emerged. An illustrative example is Shenzhen, a former small fishing village that after the appointment to Special Economic Zone in 1979 has exploded to over 15  million inhabitants. According to sinologist and expert on rural issues Alexander Day, the late 1990s featured an urban bias in the division of resources and political

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power due to an emphasis on urban industrial development as the economic locomotive, resulting in a lack of focus on rural issues and a stagnation of economic and social developments in the Chinese countryside (Day 2013, 3; Hung 2009, 13). It was not until the insertion of the new party leadership headed by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in 2002 and a reinforced intellectual focus gaining momentum in 2004 that the rural crisis reentered political and intellectual discourse as a dominant factor (Day 2013, 3). However, already during the course of the 1990s a New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM) headed by renowned scholar on rural issues Wen Tiejun had gained momentum building up for this political refocus on rural crisis. In a text from 2001, Wen Tiejun gave a diagnosis of the Chinese problem: China’s problem is the tension aroused by an agrarian society, characterized by overpopulation and limited resources, in the process of internal and primitive accumulation of capital for state industrialization. (Wen 2001, 288)

The ‘problem’, noteworthy articulated as China’s problem and not just a rural problem, can thus be understood as the antagonistic relationship between rural and urban areas and an imbalanced allocation of resources resulting in a continued exploitation of rural China (ibid., 293). As Day points out, Wen successfully managed to not “[…] separate a discussion of the peasant population from one on Chinese social and economic development, as many intellectual discussions on urbanization had done” (Day 2013, 10). The focus is on rebalancing the relationship, understanding the urban and the rural as interrelated and not the rural as a separate entity that can be fixed in isolation. Ou Ning similarly recounts that the “myriad problems” in the rural areas “stem from the upended relationship between city and countryside and the irrational distribution of resources between rural and urban areas” (Ou 2015a [2010], 43). The problems of the rural crisis and excessive urbanization are, in other words, viewed as two sides of the same coin. It is furthermore not about extinguishing the urban in favor of the rural, as in an anarcho-primitivist withdrawal, but about the quest of making these two interconnected entities become equal and balanced, very much in line with Paris Commune thinking as I will show in Chap. 2. The city as such is thus not a directly demonized object in the Bishan Project and neither is the countryside romanticized, even though there are times when romanticization of the rural areas sneak into the project. This romanticization is perhaps more linked to an idealization of

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the character of the intellectual and his (her) position in Chinese society— than with the rural per se. The discourse of the NRRM thus plays a role in framing the discourse for Bishan Commune and for a small portion of the other socially engaged rural art projects, thus giving name to a new strand of socially engaged art referred to as “rural reconstruction through art” (艺术乡建). An example could be curator and Bishan Commune co-initiator Zuo Jing, who after the closure of the Bishan Commune project became involved in several government sponsored projects in more or less remote villages across China, e.g. Jingmai Mountain Project (Yunnan), Xu’aodi Project (Zhejiang), and Maogong Project (Guizhou).16 The same applies to artist Qu Yan, known for the long-running project Xucun Art Commune and the new instalment, the partially government sponsored project the Qingtian Model in Shunde, in semi-rural Guangzhou. Bookstore owner Qian Xiaohua has similarly made it part of his eovre to set up branches of his trademarke bookstore Librairie Avant-Garde (先锋书店) in remote rural villages, usually through invitation from the local governments, e.g Bishan Bookstore, Anhui Province; Windsail Library (云夕图书馆) in Dajiashan Village, Zhejiang Province; Chenjiapu Populace Bookstore (陈 家铺平民书局) in Chenjiapu Village also Zhejiang Province; and Xiadi Paddy Field Bookstore (先锋厦地水田书店) in Xiadi Village, Fujian Province. Applying to all the projects is that they are invited in and supported financially and politically by the local governments and local businesspeople, who see the benefit art and cultural resources can have to the socio-economic development of their village. Referred to as “rural reconstruction through art,” these government supported projects, place themselves within the discourse of the NRRM. It remains to be seen how the close relationship to local officials affect the criticality of this new type of socially engaged art and how the state develops as “artistic director,” however more about that later. Returning to the NRRM, the discourse unfolding around the movement also, to some extent, plays a role in the views of leading New Left-­ intellectuals, of which some are also connected to the NRRM (Wang and Lu 2012; Day 2013). The NRRM understands the market and “market fundamentalism as the main causes of rural crisis” (Day 2013, 154), and as rural reconstruction advocate He Xuefeng describes, the core concerns of Wen Tiejun are for the peasants to “organize themselves to deal with market risks and external forces” (He 2007, 31).17 Organization of villagers seems to be the answer the NRRM puts forward.

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In the introduction to the anthology China and New Left Visions from 2012, Ban Wang and Jie Lu assert that the core concerns of the Chinese New Left relate to issues in which a neoliberal, capitalist world order and an unregulated market is seen as “worsening social inequality and injustice” (Wang and Lu 2012, xi).18 Wang and Lu elaborate: The New Leftist economic thinkers seek to eliminate social inequality by maintaining public ownership of the means of production and by advocating a greater role for the state in reining in the market and redistributing wealth […] To overcome the problems created by marketization and capitalism, the New Left advocates participatory democracy by calling for a repoliticization and mobilization of Chinese society, and sees hope for change in the emerging grassroots democratic activities in China. (ibid., xi)

The New Left critique of Chinese society as dominated by neoliberal market forces causing excessive urbanization, income disparities and atomization of the countryside is thus a key point in the framing of the problems, and the solutions are found in participatory democracy in combination with a “greater role for the state.” This idea of a stronger state and more state control of the market as part of the solution to China’s problems is what makes the ideas of the Chinese New Left divert substantially from the ideas of the Bishan Commune and several other smaller and larger projects in rural China. These projects do not see more state control as a solution to the problem, rather they seek to expose state control as part and parcel of the problem. This applies especially to the anarchist community center Our Home (我们家) in the outskirts of Wuhan initiated by the punk musician Mai Dian, as well as the filmmaker Mao Chenyu’s Paddy Film Farm (稻电影农场) in rural Hunan. Mao Chenyu in particular in very direct terms criticize the current Chinese government and the previous Maoist regime of assaults on Chinese peasants (Mao 2013, 1.37.54 min). The Chinese New Left is furthermore less prone to reject the political campaigns of the Maoist-era and Maoism as a political idea (Carter 2010), where Ou Ning, Mai Dian and Mao Chenyu in particular are very clear on their rejection of Maoist-era politics as Chap. 3 will show. In other words, while many concerns and discourses are overlapping with the Chinese New Left, there are significant points of disagreement. Nevertheless, at least Ou Ning and Mao Chenyu’s projects are followed closely by the New Left intellectuals such as Lü Xinyu, and Ou Ning is a close follower of the writings of the New Left-intellectuals working in and

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on the countryside. These projects are inspired by many factors, where Chinese New Leftism only constitutes a part share. An equally large role in the framing and unfolding of these projects is played by global art discourses and practices, actual problems faced by the artists in rural China, anti-globalization movements, the dominant political discourse within China as well as theoretical tendencies on a local and global scale. While the Chinese New Left might propose more state control, the experiences of many socially engaged art projects are that the state in general and the party in particular in many places in China serve as an effective hindrance for an alternative rural development and the organization of villagers in various kinds of cultural and economic cooperatives. I do not intend to suggest that the emerging rural intelligentsia forms a coherent entity—they are far too dispersed geographically and politically for them to form a common response and organization. They do, however, make similar claims of culturally reviving a rural China under-­ prioritized and exploited by the Chinese government, and they do gather to discuss and promote these ideas. They, in the same way as the Chinese New Left in all its diversity, represent a connected grouping concerned with rural matters on practical, political and theoretical levels. Though the Chinese New Left in some instances appears closer to the state apparatus, its critical discourse pertaining to social injustice and inequality poses a thorn in the flesh for the state. The Chinese New Left, as well as our radical rural intelligentsia, thus has to navigate these waters.

Guanxi Aesthetics and the Dance with the State The social movement organizations, art scenes and institutions in China certainly do not operate in an unproblematic, hassle-free territory. Rather censorship, corruption, harassment and unclear reasoning are daily obstructions that anyone operating in China will have to learn to navigate and tackle in order to make social change possible. Many Chinese artists and intellectuals are skilled in the art of analyzing the political climate and pushing it to the limit, but even so, many people each year get into trouble with the authorities, and probably many more than we know of, since these instances are not reported by the media and the implicated persons keep the details to themselves in order to avoid further repercussions. Nevertheless, we need to operate with a more nuanced understanding of local authorities and how they censor projects and people in China, if we want to understand how artists operate in the Chinese countryside.

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Authorities on different levels do not necessarily have the same opinion of how to react to movements and individuals advocating social change. Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann (2011) term this style of governance “guerilla policy style.” It describes a system where autocratic leaders are given prominence over bureaucratic institutions and accountability. Meaning also that there is room in the system, to act against the dominant currents, should a local party head choose to do so.19 Or put in other words, the inclusion of the Bishan Commune project in the Yi County portfolio was a guerilla style move (Chap. 4), just as the village administration’s decision to critique Ou Ning and Zuo Jing publicly was (Chap. 6). It often comes down to the person in charge and his or her relation to other levels of authority. One example is the very different and unclear approaches towards film festivals, music venues, art exhibitions, screenings and the like. In 2014, the famous and notoriously shut down Beijing Independent Film Festival was harshly closed by the authorities the day before the opening, whereas the equally influential China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing could continue its program without obvious obstructions.20 There are more often than not conflicting interpretations between local and provincial levels of government, or rural and urban areas, of how to implement and enforce central state guidelines, and very different patterns of reaction for when to ignore, suppress or shut down possibly “problematic” movements or tendencies. Another example is Zuo Jing’s “rural reconstruction through art” projects across China. While Zuo Jing’s current Bishan Village undertakings are hampered by continued conflicts with the local authorities, who still forbid organization of larger cultural events in the village, his projects in other Chinese villages are supported enthusiastically by local authorities.21 Thus, conflicts with the local governments can cover a range of issues that are not always connected to ideological conflicts stipulated by the central government, but can be connected to urban artists not complying with the unwritten rules of engagement in the countryside or connected to the crossing of a specific local powerholder. My research into the Bishan Project will give a picture of what happens when Chinese artists meet these boundaries in rural China. After the closure of the Bishan Project, Zuo Jing used the Project as springboard for a new type of socially engaged art project in the rural areas that is driven forward by the relationship to local authorities. I understand this type of art practice as what I would term “guanxi aesthetics.” Here guanxi (关系) refers to networks of social power and influential relationships that you can utilize proactively and that some would say you

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need to have if you wish to operate in rural China. In Chinese, to have good guanxi is to have good connections. In other words, guanxi aesthetics denotes art practices that work within the power matrix of the local government, in a way placing the local government in the position of “artistic director.” What this relationship actually means for the practice of socially engaged art has however yet to be uncovered.

On Methodology Within the framework of visual arts criticism, Grant Kester proposes a new way of researching socially engaged art projects, in which the art critic or art historian engages in long-term ethnographic fieldwork research on a given project. Kester’s project, which also includes the new journal FIELD,22 is to unfold a critique of the current socially engaged art criticism by arguing that the methods and theories they apply are unequipped for studying these durational projects. The logic is that the durational, dialogical and dynamic project should be met with a durational fieldwork model that can better disclose the development of intersubjective relationships. To meet these demands, Kester proposes a “field-based approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there” (Kester 2013a). In other words, in order to research the realities of a socially engaged art project, we are to move into the field, so to speak. While it is common to do fieldwork within the field of China studies—the field from where I come—it is less common within the academic field of art history and visual arts—especially if we only count those who do fieldwork amongst the participants and not only amongst the artists. Anthropologists have of course previously done research in artist communities, but have been focusing on exchanges, urban development, organization and other topics surrounding but not directly involving the art works or projects (e.g. Ulfstjerne 2011; Keane 2009; Xin 2013; Sheng 2015). The field of visual anthropology is what comes closest in combining the study of visual art and anthropological practices and theories (see Marcus 2010).23 This book is thus the result of the combination of several methods and fields, whose concoction I hope will make it easier to understand the very different strands within the Bishan Project. With Kester’s words in minds, this section thus presents the mismatch of methodologies applied in this book and how this relates to the fields of

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China Studies and Visual Art. Firstly, I present the textual body that has informed my research and that largely has provided the discursive frame of the Bishan Project, since a lot of the thinking concerning the Bishan Commune has taken place as written statements that show a progression in the formulation of the project. Then I go deeper into why Kester’s proposition of fieldwork is relevant in the case of Bishan Project. Thirdly, I enter into a discussion of language and the methods I used to approach the local villagers in particular. Through this mismatch of methodologies, this book seeks to combine the following three interconnected levels or spaces and understand the Bishan Project as a multilayered project with several different strategies. Reading the Bishan Project as a textual endeavor (1) is often different from the ideas that seem to seep through the visual aspect of the project, and the text and images can often times seem strangely detached from what is actually happening in Bishan Village. The Bishan Project in this regard comes forward as very layered, with multiple channels of communication, and thus multiple, sometimes inconsistent, expressions. The visual representations (2) in the notebook and other material come across as somewhat romanticizing of the intellectual,24 whereas the textual side presents an anarchist, rural reconstruction thought based on a critique of the current circumstances in rural China. Adding to the text and image of Bishan Project, is the fieldwork experience (3), that provide a completely different experience all together. These three different levels should not be understood as separate entities, but rather as the intermingling strategies of a complex project. The main bulk of my research data thus comes from the textual and visual body connected to the Bishan Commune Project. Ou Ning has written extensively on the matter on his own blog and for various books and media outlets,25 whereas Zuo Jing has primarily been contributing to the discussions as editor of Bishan Magazine and volumes on local handicrafts (see Zuo 2014). There is a constant flow of information from Ou Ning and Zuo Jing via their personal blogs, edited volumes, websites and Facebook, Weixin and Sina Weibo accounts,26 and in addition to the Bishan Magazine are the magazines edited by Ou Ning, namely the literary bimonthly Chutzpah! (天南) as well as V-ECO, concerned with alternative societies and eco-living.27 Ou Ning and Zuo Jing have been interviewed for many different kinds of media for various news reports, magazine and journal articles, both online and paper formats. These news reports, blogposts and art notices rarely go into a deeper critique and

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understanding of the Bishan Commune, but provide factual information, especially on some of the initial experiences and thoughts behind the project prior to my visits to Bishan. Following Kester’s argument, in order to understand these different strategies and aspects of the Bishan Commune it has been necessary to conduct fieldwork in Bishan. This approach allows the Bishan Commune to concurrently be conceived as an art project and as a small, loosely organized social movement organization, without needing to reduce it to one or the other. It leaves room to understand how new social relationships and new communal space have been built in the village over time—along with how this has changed the project and the village. Bishan has not stayed the same, that much is certain. Much of socially engaged art projects purport to forge new social relationships, but how are we to know if this happens, if we do not actually research the relationships? I do not mean to place lesser attention to the visual and textual experiences, these are equally important, as I hope will also show throughout the book. But I do think, that if you spent time in Bishan during the Bishan Commune Project, you would find relationships blossoming throughout the village. A portion of empirical data for this study therefore takes its vantage point in continued fieldwork visits to Bishan Village of longer and shorter duration from the fall of 2013 to the summer of 2019.28 Language Strategy Conducting fieldwork and conducting interviews with villagers in a small Chinese village require careful considerations when it comes to language and phrasing of questions. In his article “Beyond Official Chinese: Language Codes and Strategies,” historian and sinologist Stig Thøgersen introduces two terms, Baixingese and Ganbunese, to understand the different ways the Chinese interlocutors express themselves in the interview situation and the language you as a researcher use to question them (Thøgersen 2006). Baixingese refers to the language of common people ( 老百姓, laobaixing), while ganbunese refers to a language code connected to an official language that again connects it to the power structures of contemporary China (ganbu 干部 meaning official). As Thøgersen explains, it is important to understand that baixingese and ganbunese are not directly connected to dialect, as ganbunese and baixingese can be spoken in any dialect (ibid., 112). Rather the different language codes refer to the vocabulary, the phrasing and the socio-political context in which they

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are expressed and can be connected to. It is important to remember these two different codes when interviewing Chinese people, as my own experience in Bishan also revealed. My own strategy to overcome this, became one of learning some of the ways the villagers expressed themselves (though still in Putonghua) as well as spending enough time in the village for them to get used to me and get to know me better. Slowly, the villagers got used to my presence and I got better at using the words they used to explain and understand phenomena related to development (发展), future (未来), economy (经济) and so forth. This meant that, for instance, instead of talking about the future or development, we talked about renao (热闹), which can be translated as “lively.” If a place is renao, then there are lots of people, and that means that the economy is good and that your children will be able to stay in the village as well (which will have a positive influence on your future). I thus managed to reach a position where the interview situations became relaxed, loosely structured dialogues that provided me with a lot of information. I am not sure though, that the relaxed interview situations were only a result of me differentiating between ganbunese and baixingese. To me it also seems related to inside and outside, and whether the villagers considered me enough of an insider to address me as one. Inside–Outside The inside outside perspective, alongside baixingese and ganbunese, was important in Bishan, because the village had been flooded with journalists from China and abroad since the opening of the first Harvestival in 2011. The villagers have continuously been asked what they think about the Bishan Commune, how their relationship is with the Bishan Commune and how they view the development of Bishan. During my later visits, I several times experienced and overheard villagers say different things to the visiting tourists and journalists than they said to me. This is definitely connected to the distinction between baixingese/ganbunese, a distinction visiting journalists rarely have time to notice, but it also signifies that the villagers are aware that what they say to journalists can travel far. This was the case during the Bishan Commune Dispute (碧山计划争议), which erupted and spread nationwide during the summer of 2014 (see Chap. 6 for an in-depth discussion of the dispute). A villager felt that he was quoted out of context after a blogpost quoted him criticizing aspects of the Bishan Commune (see Zhou 2014). People working for the local county and

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village administration also got into trouble for having talked to journalists. This incident also signifies, however, that the villagers are very concerned with the view outsiders get of Bishan, and on some occasions strive to provide affirmation of the rosy picture. Though I do not purport to have become an insider of Bishan, I definitely got closer to some of them than many of the visiting journalists that were usually in Bishan for a short time. I would smoke cigarettes with the male villagers while we were chatting and gossiping about various issues, I would go on bike rides with the university village officials, eat dinners with the entrepreneurs, investors and local county and village heads, chat about gardening, flowers and grandchildren with the female villagers while I lived at Ou Ning’s house together with his family and potential visitors. After the Bishan Bookstore opened in the spring of 2014, I spent much of my time there, since the bookstore quickly became the hub of the village, and a good place to meet villagers of all kinds as well as tourists, artists, investors and so forth. I hung out with Teacher Wang,29 who works at the bookstore and is one of the fiercest critics and defenders of the Bishan Commune. In the bookstore I also met the elderly lady Xiaonai who spends most of her days reading books and chatting with the other ladies (and me), and the always cigarette smoking and chatting Fang Shu, who lives alone in an old compound right across from the bookstore, and came there most days since he, in his own words, did not have anything else to do. Almost everybody who travels to Bishan visits the bookstore. In order to meet villagers who did not go to the bookstore on a regular basis, I continued my walks around the village. Furthermore, through Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and Teacher Wang I identified some of the key persons in the village, often persons engaged in some sort of organizing either with the Elderly People’s Association (老年人协 会), the Peasant Library (农家书屋) or retired persons, who had in their earlier days held important positions. The bulk of my empirical data is based on these informal conversations I had with the villagers of Bishan on a day-to-day basis. I interviewed and had many informal conversations with young university village officials (大学村官) of Bishan and two nearby village districts in Yi County. These talks with lowest-level village officials were very important to gain insight in the daily administration of the villages, but also in order to understand how new ideas and practices were channeled into the village administrations through these young people, who were all full of initiative and ideas. One of the then university village officials, Zhang Yu, started a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

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project in Bishan and the neighboring village of Nanping. All the university village officials I talked to had close ties to Ou Ning, Zuo Jing, Tang Xue (Ou Ning’s wife) and the volunteers Zhao Kunfang and Feng Si’te and others connected to the Bishan Project and often visited the bookstore, Buffalo Institute or School of Tillers in their spare time. In this sense, it is difficult to talk about one relationship to the local authorities, as it differentiated between different levels and people. The members of the village committee are members of the village community and are affected by changes in the villages just as most other people.

Aims and Structure of the Book The book covers the timespan of the Bishan Commune Project (2010–2016) and explores several issues pertaining to the development and transformation of the project. The arguments that come to light through this book are both complex and simple, as these things tend to be. Complex in the sense that many arguments build on each other as necessary building blocks for a larger structure, and simple in the sense of the final analysis they built up to. My book is not the first that tries to unfold the diverse reality of a politically charged project in China, but it is the first to apply a field-based approach to the research of socially engaged art projects in the Chinese countryside.30 Besides the first chapters, the chapters of the book are structured in chronological order, addressing the different phases of the Bishan Commune and thus also the different themes they entail. From theories of socially engaged art in all its diversity on to the imaginary behind the project. From the beginning, when the project is only an imagined trope to follow and on to its establishment. From large-scale art festivals that have few exchanges with the regular villagers and on to a complete shift in method with Ou Ning’s move to Bishan. And in a circular motion, I end again with theories of socially engaged art and the critique of the Bishan Commune. The closure of the project thus ends my book. The durational aspect of the Bishan Commune and the changes over time have been the predominant shaping factor of the arguments, and in some sense, I have let the Bishan Commune trajectory shape the structure of my book. The opening chapter stands outside the chronology of the Bishan Project, and addresses the literature on socially engaged art as it has unfolded since the 1980s and 1990s. The vantage point of the chapter is an attempt to place these practices within the theoretical scope of socially

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engaged art, a field that has been developed in primarily the US and Europe. Another scope of the chapter is to combine the concept of dialogical aesthetics, as Grant Kester proposes, with Lucy Lippard’s idea of activist art as a subversive Trojan Horse (Lippard 1984). Grant Kester’s dialogical art describes socially engaged projects that work consciously with dialogue as medium for their projects (Kester 2013b [2004]). My proposition is to consider Grant Kester’s dialogical art and the context that surrounds it as a Lippardian Trojan Horse. All of this takes place in very real settings and this is where Herbert Marcuse enters the equation, as an inquiry into the dialectical relationship between the imagined and what is actually taking place. This book thus sees the incongruence between the imagined and the real as a condition of contemporary society. The latter part of the chapter is concerned with the Chinese context and Chinese research into socially engaged art, drawing a broadly stroked trajectory of art practices in rural China since the early 1980s and up to today. This chapters thus also tries to uncover a Chinese discourse of social engagement in the arts, thus situating the practices of socially engaged art in China within a Chinese historical experience, as Zhou Yanhua proposes (Zhou 2019). Furthermore, by way of Wang Zhiliang (2019 [2016]), I argue that many Chinese socially engaged art projects attach significant importance to forging mutual relationships. By mutual I mean that reciprocity in the engagements with community, be it composed of local villagers or like-minded political youth, is a central attribute in the unfolding of these projects, as what could be termed “reciprocal aesthetics” (相互美学). Taking Ou Ning’s notebook, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia as vantage point, Chap. 3 is preoccupied with the imaginaries and discourses that surround and undergird this rural practice. What kind of community was the Bishan Commune imagined as and what did it aspire to do in its most utopian form? In this chapter, I unfold how rural communal thinking is intertwined with anarchism, social utopianism and the Chinese historical and contemporary trajectory of the Paris Commune. The Bishan Commune is named so as a tribute to the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune and its ideas of the abolition of the division of labor as well as its understanding of the rural and urban as an interconnected relationship serve as the backdrop to the Bishan Commune. While the ideas of the Paris Commune ran as an undercurrent of Maoism, I argue that our rural artists are very clear in their rejection of the Maoist-­ era and the political campaigns of that time, and they furthermore reject

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the current Chinese state as a useful instrument to better the conditions of rural China. Chapter 4 does not leave the utopian imaginaries far behind, but rather enters into the matrix of the reality of the project as it unfolded in Bishan Village. The first couple of years of the Bishan Commune were focused on large art festivals, called Bishan Harvestivals, that aimed to bring artists, academics and activists to Bishan to discuss rural issues. In Chap. 4, I thus analyze the large-scale festival machine as it landed in Bishan Village and the obstacles and dialogues it created. The scope of this chapter is an inquiry into questions related to what happened as the urban artists landed in rural China. How did the dialogue with the local authorities and rural residents unfold? And how can we understand these interactions as the scope of the Bishan Project changed? During this period the Bishan Commune changed its attention from a utopian endeavor focused on art and cultural issues to an incorporation of economic concerns in the Bishan Commune scheme. The new aim of the Bishan Commune was first and foremost economic, Ou Ning explained in a text reflecting on the first years of the Bishan Project (Ou 2012a). I argue that this change can be understood two-fold: as a result of heavy pressure from the local and central authorities to abandon the more politically problematic aims of the project and focus on the more neutral aim of economic development as well as the direct result of engagement with a local community of villagers very much preoccupied with the lack of economic possibilities. As I will show in this chapter, Ou Ning’s proclamations after the shut-down of the second Bishan Harvestival in 2012 of economic development as the main concern of the Bishan Project should be read in a light of compliance and opposition at the same time. This two-fold performance of opposition and compliance can be seen, I argue, as a sign that the Bishan Project was entering into a “rural contract” with the local authorities, a “contract” that was necessary for the project’s continued existence. Due to the closure of the second Bishan Harvestival, the large-scale festival model was no longer an option for the Bishan Project, and Ou Ning had to reconfigure his efforts and thus enter into a phase more focused on a spatial approach to frame the dialogue. In Chap. 5, “Trojan Horses or the Artists as Realtor,” I explore the Bishan Project and the Bishan Bookstore in particular as Lippard’s Trojan Horses set within a socio-spatial strategy. Chapter 5 is preoccupied with the practice of the Bishan Project as it took place within the space of the traditional Hui-style houses and how this framing influenced the project

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and the way forward for the Bishan Project. How did the dialogue change and what could Ou Ning do? The increasing exchange-value of the houses slowly becomes a factor that changes the appearance and demography of Bishan Village, as these houses become a part of the elaborate tourist industry of Yi County, as well as the emerging tourist industry of Bishan Village. While this was perhaps not Ou Ning’s intention, the Bishan Project had created an effective infrastructure for this emerging tourist industry, speeding up a process that significantly changed many aspects of Bishan and the Bishan Project. I argue that artists and intellectuals in rural China serve as beachheads for urban connections and resources, and as such as Trojan Horses for an urban cultural dominance and the introduction of the practice of urban aesthetics. Chapter 6 focuses on the critique of the Bishan Commune set within the frame of discussions within the literature on socially engaged art. In the blogpost that ignited the Bishan Commune Dispute, blogger and academic Zhou Yun, asks “Whose countryside? Whose community?” Her questions mark the opening of a nationwide dispute regarding the pros and cons of the Bishan Project, a discussion primarily taking place on social media platforms and other media outlets (Zhou 2014). Zhou Yun´s questions and points of critique pertain to issues surrounding the position of the artist in the project, gentrification and the cultural divide between the artists and the villagers. In a circular motion, I return to the theoretical discussion of socially engaged art with which I began this book. What also concludes this book is the closure of the Bishan Project and the power struggles leading up to the closure. Power struggles that became increasingly clear when the Bishan Dispute erupted during the summer of 2014. The Bishan Project had since the closure of the second Bishan Harvestival slowly but surely lost its supporters with the local county and village administrations.31 As they lost support locally, they also lost access to people who could plead their case higher up in the system and that, I argue, was the beginning of the end for the Bishan Project. Though pressure or direct orders from the central government should never be underestimated, I think we often underestimate the power of local governments to decide what kind of projects should take place in their neighborhood. The relationship between the various government levels and agencies is far more complex than a unilateral understanding of censorship (and oppression) as solely controlled by the central government can support. As long as we are dealing with a rigid system with little or no space for political

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action, the result is, however, often the same, whether it is the local or the central government that calls the shots. This leads me to the last part of the book, the epilogue, which looks at some of the developments in Bishan after the departure of Ou Ning. Some of the questions asked along the way pertaining to the influence of tourism, the opening of the real estate market and an influx of urban culture and resources can be answered on some level, other questions pertaining to what would have happened in Bishan had Ou Ning been allowed to stay remain unanswered. Furthermore, the epilogue ends the book with a probe into a new kind of rural socially engaged art practice that has taken speed after the closure of the Bishan Commune. A practice that exhibits an even closer relationship to the authorities than the Bishan Project had as what could be understood as guanxi aesthetics—that is: the aesthetics of good connections.

Notes 1. In connection to Ou Ning’s three week artist-in-residence stay in Denmark, August–September 2014, I translated the notebook into Danish, and later also translated it into English. Both editions were published by OVO press and Antipyrine in collaboration. 2. See timeline of the Bishan Project in the appendix. 3. The full name is the Bishan Commune Project (碧山共同体计划). The project is however, by Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and many others, typically referred to as the Bishan Project thus leaving out the commune component. There are several reasons for this, one is that it is shorter and more convenient, and the other is that it eludes the somewhat problematic term of commune/community (共同体) and primarily refers to the process of action that the word project entails. 4. Harvestival is a contraction between the words harvest and festival. 5. Qian Xiaohua is also the owner of the renowned Nanjing-based bookstore chain Librairie Avant-Garde (先锋书店). 6. While there are two initiators of the Bishan Project, Ou Ning and Zuo Jing, in this book I primarily lay forward my research into Ou Ning’s part of the project. This is related to the fact that it was Ou Ning who formulated the utopian thinking, and as such Ou Ning who has retained the utopian imaginary. Furthermore, Ou Ning was the only one of the two, who moved to the village and was as such the one who developed a day-today relationship with his fellow villagers.

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7. Interview with documentary filmmaker Leah Thompson, May 2016. Leah Thompson has been working on a documentary on the Bishan Project since 2012, see Sun and Thompson 2013. 8. E.g. Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Liu Shifu’s agrarian commune, Thoreau’s Walden. 9. Holmes’ article is primarily aimed at projects relating to an institutional critique. Socially engaged art practices can however also be understood in this light, as most of them take place outside of the confined walls of the art institution and in some cases formulate some sort of institutional critique. 10. For more on urban cultural dominance, see Visser 2010 and Day 2013. 11. For the view of the intellectual as an outsider, Said draws on an array of examples from around the world and links his ideas to that of Adorno in regards to the role of the artist. 12. He Baogang critiques this perceived right and argues that it lacks an understanding and appreciation of democracy, as the voice of the people. “One way to make the Chinese idea of the intellectual compatible with democracy is to eliminate their superior status and treat them as ordinary, equal individuals” (He 2004, 267). 13. Interview with Li Xiaotian and Liang Jianhua from SoengJoengToi/ Huangbian Station, August 24–25, 2019. Interview with Sheryn Cao from Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society, November 25–26, 2019. 14. This applies to: The Bishan Commune, Chaile Travel, Baimiao Project, Xucun Art Commune, Shijiezi Art Museum. 15. Chaile (to demolish) Travel is “at once a non-profit travel agency, a piece of artwork, and an art project” established by Weng Fen, Liu Jun, Ma Jie, Lu Yunzhang and Huang Xuebin in Weng Fen’s native village of Taishang on the island of Hainan. 16. For more on Zuo Jing’s practices in Maogong and Jingmai Mountain see Wang 2019. 17. Matt Hale and Alexander Day have done an impressive job in translating a large amount of core texts from the New Rural Reconstruction Movement into English. See the issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 4, summer, 2007 edited by Hale and Day. 18. As Wang and Lu also discuss, the term “New Left” was initially coined by its critics. The Chinese New Left is furthermore not a homogenous, organized entity, but according to Wang and Lu, covers a diverse range of people who profess to “left-leaning sociopolitical and sociocultural interventions in the intellectual, cultural, and literary fields” (Wang and Lu 2012, xiii). 19. For two interesting new studies of censorship and political control in China, see Mattingly 2019 and Roberts 2018.

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20. As of 2019, China Independent Film Festival has also had to terminate their activities. 21. Interview with He Qiuping, manager of Bishan Crafts Cooperative’s store in Bishan Village, August 15, 2019. 22. FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. I became a member of the editorial collective of the journal in March 2015. 23. Ethnographer George Marcus is a good example within the practice of visual anthropology. See Marcus 2010. 24. This is vividly displayed in the imagery of the notebook connected to the emblem and the passport. Later on in the history of the Bishan Project, it is seen in the “commercial” for the clothing line designed to be sold in Bishan during the later years of the Bishan project, where beautiful models, a man, a woman and a small child, pose in the enchanting rural setting of Bishan seemingly enjoying farming the land, posing as intellectuals and farmers, though they seem oddly estranged from the farming tools they hold in their hands (see Ou 2015b). 25. Ou Ning’s blog on Alternative Archive, a site he ran together with artist Cao Fei, has been shut down, but the majority of the texts can be found on “Ou Ning’s blog,” a site under the blog provider 网易 www.163.com. See bibliography for details. Contrary to what one might expect, I have not found that there has been a substantial difference in the things Ou Ning has posted on Chinese and English language social media platforms, though with slightly more posts (and reposts) on Weixin. When parts of articles written for other media channels on some occasions were censored, Ou Ning would publish the original version on his own social media channel. E.g. the text on Freetown Christinia for The Paper (澎湃新闻) had pictures of nude Danish people, which was deemed inappropriate, the text itself was however not censored. See Ou 2014b. Ou Ning furthermore used his own blog to publish texts intended for publications in books and journals that did not go through censorship. This applies to Ou Ning’s text on the uprising in Wukan the Winter of 2011. The siege of Wukan refers to a situation in the South Chinese village of Wukan late 2011, where the villagers drove out the local officials and barricaded themselves inside the village, demanding that the expropriated land be returned to them. Unlike earlier conflicts, the Wukan incident ended peacefully with the villagers electing their own village representatives. On the basis of the euphoric setting surrounding the peaceful ending to the land grab dispute, Ou Ning lays out what happened in Wukan as a “micro-revolution” and describes how the protesting villagers require a depoliticized (去政治化) strategy quite commonly applied when trying to avoid being labeled “anti-party” or “wanting to overturn the regime” by the government. It was supposed

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to have appeared in issue 6 of Chutzpah!, the theme of which was revolutions (Ou 2012b). 26. Sina Weibo is the largest Chinese equivalent to Twitter. Ou Ning has 117,753 followers on Weibo and 4999 friends on Facebook. Bishan Commune’s Weibo page has 4694 followers and their Facebook page has 490 followers (the numbers were gathered May 26, 2016). 27. Since the spring of 2014, supposedly due to economic problems for the company behind the magazine, Ou Ning no longer edits Chutzpah!. 28. I usually stayed in Bishan from one to three weeks at a time. I did not want to stay longer than three weeks, as I did not want to attract too much attention to myself from the authorities. 29. Concerning anonymization, the majority of the names from Bishan are not anonymized. This is related to the fact that their names are already publicly known through the various media reports from the village. However, I have anonymized a few statements that I thought were necessary to conceal. The village community is furthermore so small, that people almost always know who said what, as was the case during the Bishan Project Dispute. During the dispute some villagers were not quoted by name, but the village committee nevertheless figured out who had said what and advised them not to speak out publicly. 30. Of research that does not apply a field-based approach three significant studies should be mentioned: Wang 2019, Zheng 2012 and Wang 2009. The work of curator and art critic Carol Yinghua Lu is furthermore of significant interest, see Lu 2016. 31. This information is based on observations in Bishan as well as an e-mail interview with Ou Ning concerning the closure of the project.

Literature Bao Dong, Sun Dongdong and Paula Tsai, eds. 2012. ON/OFF 中国当代艺术自 我组织 – Collective Practice in China 2002–2012. Beijing: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells  – Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Carter, Lance. 2010. “A Chinese Alternative? Interpreting the Chinese New Left Politically.” Insurgent Notes – Journal of Communist Theory and Practice, vol. 1. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://insurgentnotes. com/2010/06/chinese-new-left/ Cheek, Timothy. 2016. The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Day, Alexander. 2013. The Peasant in Postsocialist China – History, Politics, and Capitalism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Ding Yi. 2013. “Art Rejuvenates Ancient Chinese Village.” Sino-US.com, August 5. URL (No longer accessible): www.sino-us.com/10/Art-rejuvenatesancient-Chinese-village.html He Baogang. 2004. “Chinese Intellectuals Facing the Challenges of the New Century” in Chinese Intellectuals Between State and Market, edited by Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, 263–279. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. He Xuefeng. 2007. “New Rural Construction and the Chinese Path.” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 4, (Summer): 26–38. Holmes, Brian. 2007. “Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/en Hung Ho-Fung. 2009. “Americas Head Servant? The PRC’s Dilemma in the Global Crisis.” New Left Review, vol. 60, (November-December): 5–25. Jiao Xingtao (焦兴涛) and Wang Ziyun (王子云), eds. 2019. 参与的艺术:羊磴艺 术合作社 2012–2017 Socially Engaged Art in Southwest China: Yangdeng Art Cooperative 2012–2017. Bilingual publication. Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe. Keane, Michael. 2009. “Creative Industries in China – four perspectives on social transformation.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 15, no. 4: 431–443. Kester, Grant. 2013a. “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism.” E-flux Journal, vol. 50, no. 12. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ the-device-laid-bare-on-some-limitations-in-current-art-criticism/ Kester, Grant. 2013b [2004]. Conversation Pieces  – Community and Communication in Modern Art. Updated edition with new preface. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Li Keqiang. 2012. “城镇化是最大内需潜力所在” (The Largest Potential for Domestic Demand can be found in Urbanization). Hexun News 和讯新闻, September 19. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://news.hexun. com/2012-09-19/146035377.html Lippard, Lucy R. 1984. “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power.” In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis, 341–358. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Liu Ding, Lu Yinghua and Su Wei (刘鼎, 卢迎华and苏伟) eds. 2011. 小运动: 当 代艺术中的自我实践 (Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art). Guilin: OCAT and Guangxi Normal University Press. Lu, Carol Yinghua. 2016. “From the Anxiety of Participation to the Process of De-Internationalization.” E-flux Journal, no. 70, 02. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ from-the-anxiety-of-participation-to-the-process-of-de-internationalization/

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Mai Dian (Tang Shui’en). 2009. “The Alternative Education of a Chinese Punk” (一个小朋克的基础另类教育). The essay is available in two different translations into English: http://libcom.org/library/punk%E2%80%99s-basic-alternative-education and http://chinastudygroup.net/2010/12/ the-alternative-education-of-a-chinese-punk/ Mai Dian (麦巅). 2012 [2009]. “一个小朋克的基础另类教育” (The Basic Alternative Education of a Chinese Punk). Chutzpah! 天南, no. 6: 102–112. Mattingly, Daniel C. 2019. The Art of Political Control in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mao Chenyu (毛晨雨). 2013. “拥有, 新中国农民战争:修辞学的正义” (I Have What? Chinese Peasants War: Rhetoric to Justice). Paddy Films, 103 minutes. Marcus, George. 2010. “Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology.” Visual Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 4: 263–277. Oakes, Tim. 2011. “Laser Tag and Other Rural Diversions – The Village as China’s Urban Playground.” Developing Rural Asia, Harvard Asia Quarterly, vol. XIII, no. 3 (Fall). Ou Ning. 2015a [2010]. 碧山共同体如何创建自己的乌托邦The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Bilingual. Translation from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, Austin Woerner and Jeff Crossby, edited by Mai Corlin and Rasmus Graff. Sønderholm: Antipyrine and OVO Press. Ou Ning. 2015b. “Back to the Land: Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune.” Text for exhibition of Bishan Clothing at Florence National Library. Buffalo Institute Weixin, May 7. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://mp.weixin.qq. com/s?__biz=MjM5NjI0Mzc0OQ==&mid=205414408&idx=1&sn=44a4 ce894a52579e16224dda117cfc40&scene=5&srcid=1005jiNzpowwnNu 0nZtZiej5#rd Ou Ning. 2014a [2012]. “Rural Reconstruction in China.” In The South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale. Translated by ChinaFile, edited by Ou Ning, 550–559. Beijing: China Youth Press. Ou Ning. 2014b. “克里斯钦自由城的生与死” (The Life and Death of Freetown Christiania). Ou Ning’s Blog, November 5, 2014. URL: http://www.alternativearchive.com/ouning/article.asp?id=943. No longer available from this address, try https://www.thestandnews.com/culture/%E5%85%8B%E9%87% 8C%E6%96%AF%E6%AC%BD%E8%87%AA%E7%94%B1%E5%9F%8E%E7%9A %84%E7%94%9F%E8%88%87%E6%AD%BB/ Ou Ning. 2012a. “Obstacles to Rural Reconstruction.” LEAP Magazine, no. 17: 104–105. Ou Ning. 2012b. “What Wukan Means.” Translated by Sun Yunfan. ChinaFile, April 18. URL (Last accessed March 6, 2020): http://www.chinafile.com/ what-wukan-means Perry, Elizabeth J. and Sebastian Heilmann. 2011. “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China.” In Mao’s Invisible

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Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, edited by Elizabeth J.  Perry and Sebastian Heilmann, 1–29. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press. Ren Hai (任海). 2019. “当代艺术中的参与式艺术: 羊磴艺术合作社 Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary Art – The Yangdeng Art Collective.” In 参与的 艺术:羊磴艺术合作社 2012–2017 Socially Engaged Art in Southwest China: Yangdeng Art Cooperative 2012–2017, edited by Jiao Xingtao (焦兴涛) and Wang Ziyun (王子云), 20–29. Bilingual publication. Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe. Roberts, Margaret E. 2018. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside Chinas’s Great Firewall. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Said, Edward W. 2002. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” In The Public Intellectual, edited by Helen Small, 19–39. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Sheng Zhong. 2015. “Artists and Shanghai’s Culture-led Urban Regeneration.” Cities, vol. 56: 165–171. Sun Yunfan and Leah Thompson. 2013. Down to the Countryside: The Emerging Back-to-the-land Movement in Bishan Village. Documentary film on Bishan Commune, 30. min. A shorter version of the film is available from the ChinaFile website: https://www.chinafile.com/multimedia/video/down-countryside Thompson, Nato. 2012. “Living as Form.” In Living as Form – Socially Engaged Art From 1991–2011, edited by Nato Thompson, 16–33. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Thøgersen, Stig. 2012. “Organizing Rural China: Political and Academic Discourses.” In Organizing Rural China, Rural China Organizing, edited by Stig Thøgersen and Ane Bislev, 35–50. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Thøgersen, Stig. 2009. “Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle: The State, Villagers and Social Activists in Rural Reconstruction Projects.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 38, no. 4: 9–33. Thøgersen, Stig. 2006. “Beyond Official Chinese  – Language Codes and Strategies.” In Doing Fieldwork in China, edited by Maria Helmer and Stig Thøgersen, 110–126. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Ulfstjerne, Michael. 2011. “Originality and Imitation: The Production of Artistic Value in the Songzhuang Artist Community.” MA-dissertation, University of Copenhagen. Visser, Robin. 2010. Cities Surround the Countryside  – Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wang Meiqin. 2019. Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China. Voices From Below. New York: Routledge. Wang Zhiliang (王志亮). 2019 [2016]. “近年来中国当代艺术在乡村的共生实践 Practice of Symbiosis between Chinese Contemporary Art and Rural Areas in Recent Years.” In 参与的艺术:羊磴艺术合作社 2012–2017 Socially Engaged Art in Southwest China: Yangdeng Art Cooperative 2012–2017, edited by Jiao

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Xingtao (焦兴涛) and Wang Ziyun (王子云), 324–328. Bilingual publication. Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe. Wang Chunchen (王春晨). 2009. 艺术介入社会 –一种新艺术关系 Art Intervenes in Society – A New Artistic Relationship. Beijing: Timezone 8. Wang Ban and Jie Lu. 2012. “Introduction: China and New Left Critique.” In China and New Left Visions – Political and Cultural Interventions, edited by Ban Wang and Jiu Lu, ix-xvi. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Wen Tiejun. 2001. “Centenary Reflections on the ‘Three Dimensional Problem’ of Rural China”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 2: 287–295. Xin Gu. 2013. “Cultural Industries and Creative Clusters in Shanghai.” Cities, Culture and Society, vol. 5: 123–129. Zheng, Bo. 2019. “Workers of the World, Unite!” In Comintern Aesthetics, edited by Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Zheng, Bo. 2012. “The Pursuit of Publicness: A Study of Four Chinese Contemporary Art Projects.” PhD diss., University of Rochester. Zhou Yanhua (周彦华). 2019. ““群众路线” 作为艺术介入社会的中国经验” (“The Mass Line” constitutes the Chinese experience for art that involves in society). 贵大艺术版. July 28. URL (Last accessed March 19, 2020): https:// mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2f4CcLbqyxxZi3iocFWWBA Zhou Yanhua (周彦华). 2018. “Socially Enaged Art and the Affects of a Chinese Rural Community: A Case Study of “Someone Nearby.” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, no 5.2+3: 215–231. Zhou Yun (周韵). 2014. “谁的乡村, 谁的共同体?品味, 区隔与碧山计划” (Whose Countryside, Whose Community? Taste, Distinction and Bishan Project). Zhou Yun’s Douban Blog. August 8. URL (Last accessed February 6, 2020): www. cbda.cn/html/jd/20140708/42987.html Zuo Jing (左靖), ed. 2014. 黟县百工. (The Hundred Handicrafts of Yi County). Beijing: Gold Wall Press. 0086 Magazine. 2015 [2010]. “Interview about the notebook project Bishan Commune,” in Ou Ning: Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, 13–18. Translated from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, Austin Woerner and Jeff Crossby. Copenhagen and Aarhus: Ovo Press and Antipyrine.

CHAPTER 2

Fields of Socially Engaged Art

At the end of the 1960s, some artists abandoned the making of art in the form of painting, sculpture, etc, and turned to what they found in the rural earth and to intervene in and change it. This was historically a paradigm shift in the perception of art: it was a shift from representation or reflection to intervention in what one saw and experienced to change and transform it. —Rasheed Araeen in correspondence with Chen Kuan-hsing in Araeen and Chen 2014, 51

Art and artists as active forces in changing society is not a new proposition, in the above quote Rasheed Araeen ties the proposition to developments in the 1960s, explaining the paradigm shift as a “struggle against representation” (ibid., 50). Bolt Rasmussen similarly situates the vantage point of the genealogy of socially engaged art in the critique of representation of the 1980s (Rasmussen 2017, 61). The critique of representation was connected to a critique of art as simply providing representation rather than giving voice to the people in question. From one angle, socially engaged art is thus born out of a wish to provide social critique without representing. Socially engaged artists seek out a path away from representation that entails a move away from the established art institutions and out into society. Whether they have succeeded in turning their backs on representation is of course another matter. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_2

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Nevertheless, the question of the critical potential of art continues to preoccupy artists and art historians as questions of social critique, representation and revolution remain pivotal for the art practice of artists all over the world. Is it from a position of remove, from the autonomous free space that artists best create revolutionary change or is it through the complete amalgamation of art into life, art into politics, art into society? Is it perhaps the perpetual motion between imagining other worlds and seeing these imaginings becoming absorbed by surrounding capitalist society, as Herbert Marcuse suggests (Marcuse 1970)? Or is it when our imagination is liberated from “the spectacle of the visible” that we can contemplate ideas beyond what we can see, as Rasheed Araeen suggests (Araeen and Chen 2014, 50)? As the term implies, socially engaged art is preoccupied with these conundrums as the artists try to navigate the minefield of prefigurative politics, representation and the imagining of other possible ways of thinking politics, social relations and economy in contemporary society. But still: what is socially engaged art? What is meant by engagement with the social in the context of art? And how can we understand this scope of art practice in the larger context of a globalized art world—and the equally significant local, Chinese context? Chinese socially engaged artists and their relationship to local authorities and to economic development is something that in many ways sets the outer limits of the discourse and practice. Government policies and funding agency agendas influence the way these artists practice, which is probably no different than other places in the world, where specific local or national concerns or problems dictate at least part of the discourse and the way the practice can unfold. However, in China, engagement with local communities is strictly monitored by the authorities and this has far reaching consequences for the way that Chinese artists choose to practice and the way their thinking is formulated for a public audience, especially when operating within the field of the socially engaged. In this chapter, I map out the theoretical field on socially engaged art focusing on the work of feminist art critic Lucy Lippard and her notion of activist art as a Trojan Horse, art historian Grant Kester and his discussion of dialogical art, and Herbert Marcuse and his ideas of art as a dialectic between the affirmative and the negative. After mapping out the theoretical field I enter into a discussion of how the Bishan Commune and other socially engaged art projects in rural China relate to this framework in a national and international art context. I will broadly outline the practice of artists going rural in China since the late 1970s, when artists moved from

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a situation in the Maoist-era in which art was articulated as something that should serve the people and thereby the party, to the 1980s, a decade characterized by attempts to “carve out a space” for art, both within and outside of the established institutions (Dai in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 20). This chapter thus also tries to uncover a Chinese discourse of social engagement in the arts, thus situating the practices of socially engaged art in China within a Chinese historical experience (Zhou 2019). As for the situation today, groups of Chinese artists who are engaged in social matters propose neither to unilaterally “serve the people” nor to carve out a space and place for an autonomous art practice. Instead, engagement and active participation in attempting to change society by forming new social relationships are the prerogatives. By proposing to change society in a direction not dictated by the Chinese Communist Party, radical rural artists in China are entering troubled waters. However, before I turn the lens towards the practice of socially engaged art in China and the Chinese circumstances and discourses surrounding such an art practice, I will lay out the field of the socially engaged art practice in an international, theoretical context.

Dialogue, Participation and Relational Aesthetics North American-based art historians and critics have taken the lead (but are not the only ones) in researching the proliferation of socially engaged art practices over the past twenty to thirty years,1 although their site of research is not limited to North America. As Grant Kester shows in his book The One and the Many, socially engaged art is a global phenomenon “extending from the fashionable biennales of Europe to the villages of central India, […] from generously subsidized new media centers to struggling community arts programs” (Kester 2011, 1). Socially engaged art projects thus in all their particularity exist on a global scale, deal with an unlimited range of issues and stem from a very diverse range of political positions. To be clear, the Bishan Project has not called itself “a socially engaged art project,”2 but has on a few occasions referred to the project as “a political project involving artists” (Chan 2013, 96). The preoccupation with naming these socially engaged art projects as such is often an academic endeavor tied to the wish to understand how these practices unfold, and how we can refer to them in a manner that does not exclude the ever-changing variety of practices and methods they entail.

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Participatory art (Claire Bishop), relational aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud), new genre public art (Suzanne Lacy), dialogical aesthetics (Grant Kester), activist art (Lucy Lippard, Boris Groys) and social practice art (Harrell Fletcher) are some of the terms used to describe the underlying practices of socially engaged art. The terms are as varied and plentiful as the practices they describe. Socially engaged art is perhaps best understood as a somewhat inadequate umbrella-term, where we can pool all these diverse practices—the term does not in itself provide an analytical framework. Throughout this book, I thus use the term socially engaged art as a placeholder for these many diverse practices and theoretical positions, several of which I will describe below. Putting the name aside for a bit, what socially engaged art does connote is an intimate— but contested—relationship between art and society, politics and life— the intentions of the artists to change society through social engagement. The projects articulate this relationship in very diverse manners. Some reject art altogether (Bishop 2012, 19),3 while others reject the notion that their socially engaged art project should be anything else than art.4 There are, in other words, an abundance of ways to engage in, and articulate, this practice. Not all of them have revolutionary goals or set out to subvert capitalism, but many are somewhat critical of neoliberal and global developments and of an art world dominated by art auctions and art investors. However, as Grant Kester proposes, dialogue is often the central and articulated fulcrum of these projects, and as such an aesthetics of dialogue is an important vantage point in this context (see Kester 2013b [2004], 2011). For artist and political activist Suzanne Lacy, one of the early advocates of what she termed “new genre public art,” the main object of inquiry is not the artifact in itself: “what exists in the space between the words public and art is an unknown relationship between artists and audience, a relationship that may itself be the artwork” (Lacy 1994, 20). While Lacy in this quote from 1994 is still preoccupied with a more conventional model of the artist-audience relationship in one of the precursors to socially engaged art, contemporary socially engaged art practices seem to be blurring the boundaries between artist and audience to an even further extent. In a prolongation of Lacy’s “the relationship as the artwork,” the theoretical discussions surrounding socially engaged art often begin with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics from 2002 [1998], in which he describes the emerging “relational practices” within the art world. Bourriaud’s

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relational artists are artists who within an art institutional framework create passing social relationships by means of aesthetic objects. It is important to keep in mind that Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics took place mostly within the confined space of the gallery or the museum in the 1990s, and as such described a set of practices that contrast with socially engaged art projects that have by and large turned their backs to the institutionalized framework of the museum space. Furthermore, Bourriaud did not place relational aesthetics within a discourse of social critique and a departure from representation, but rather argued that “the new art was a response to a historical development characterised by the appearance of new forms of alienation and control” (Rasmussen 2017, 61). In another critique of Bourraud’s relational aesthetics, Claire Bishop has contested Bourriaud’s views of the object as open, arguing that it is the perception of the piece that is open to interpretation: “Such work seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux” (Bishop 2004, 52). Bishop continues to argue against the understanding of the artwork as in “perpetual flux,” by asserting that one of the problems with this approach is “the difficulty of discerning a work whose identity is willfully unstable” (ibid.). However, pertaining to the practice of the Bishan Commune and many other rural arts projects, in which the art-object is not placed at the center, it makes sense to argue that both the perception and the project in itself are in perpetual flux. Furthermore, as Kester points out, “we are dealing with projects in which the viewer or participant answers back and in which those responses have the potential to reshape and transform the work itself over time” (Kester 2013a). The dialogue is, so to speak, ongoing. As I will show in the following chapters, the projects are dynamic, durational endeavors that change over time, and their participants are equally fluctuating in the way they perceive the process. The Bishan Project as an artwork responds and changes on the basis of, amongst other things, the reactions of the villagers and the local authorities. In her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), Claire Bishop defines participatory art as creating situations “in which people constitute the central artistic medium and material” (Bishop 2012, 2). Within these participatory projects “the artist is,” as Bishop asserts, “conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art

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as finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing long-term project with an unclear beginning and end” (Bishop 2012, 2). Building on the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Grant Kester develops his analytical framework around the notion of the dialogical and the idea of the conversation as “locus of differing meanings, interpretations, and points of view” (Kester 2013b [2004], 10). The primary focus for Kester’s research has thus been the dialogical exchange of the projects and the intersubjective encounters that happen in the process of this ongoing long-term artwork: “In these ‘dialogical’ projects we encounter a willingness to engage practitioners in the domains of activism, environmental science, and urbanism as collaborators rather than competitors. We encounter as well a reciprocal openness to and dialogue with participants, whose unique knowledge and experience are essential to the work’s content and development” (ibid., XVII). In Kester’s understanding the artwork is created as a result of situations of dialogue set in motion by the artists and the community. Focusing solely on the dialogical and intersubjective aspects, will however, as Kester suggests, lead to neglect of other aspects, such as the “visual and sensory” experience (ibid., 12). Other aspects that are perhaps disregarded by a unilateral focus on dialogical exchange and intersubjective relationships are the textual aspects, institutional aspects and how power plays out in relation to these dialogues. For these reasons I do not only focus on the power of the artists in Bishan, but also the power structures in a small village where multiple agents are at work. Furthermore, when digging into these durational, dialogical projects, it becomes clear that while a project is perhaps insufficient, dysfunctional or restricted in its relation to the dialogue with local population or authorities, it can be highly effective in organizing artists, activists and academics on other levels, thus setting the discourse for discussing the matters in question in other realms. While the dialogical and its aesthetics are highly important, they can be limited in ways that perhaps, in the Chinese case, provide for an aesthetics of negotiation and insurmountable barriers. Conversation and dialogue are inherent parts of these negotiations and barriers—especially in relation to a local government, where conversations sometimes turn out more dictating than exchanging. However, Kester’s focus on dialogical exchange can provide an aesthetics that socially engaged art projects have often been accused of lacking. As the dialogical is an unavoidable aspect of the Bishan Commune Project, I will in the chapters of this book discuss how the unfolding of the Bishan

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Commune sets its dialogue with the local population and the authorities in motion. Kester sees the dialogical projects that he researches as placing themselves in between two positions: a renegotiation of the idea of the autonomy of art associated with the avant-garde position and a close proximity to the ideas of the British community arts tradition (Kester 2013b [2004], XVII). Seeing as the artists of today’s socially engaged art practices “build on this tradition through their interest in challenging fixed identities and perceptions of difference” (ibid., 84), it seems, according to Kester, that the avant-garde and the contemporary socially engaged art practitioners are negotiating within the same field. Though the references for avant-­ garde practices are often in place it seems that little of the revolutionary radicalism of the avant-garde has migrated into contemporary practice. Both Grant Kester and Claire Bishop point to connections with the artistic avant-gardes of the 1900s, but art historian Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen argues that this connection to the avant-garde is lost, as social practice artists move away from revolutionary aims and towards the social reparatory (in other words, a temporary tinkering of the social relations instead of permanent change) (Rasmussen 2009). The proposition of revolution and radical social change can be perceived as lost in both Kester’s and Bishop’s analyses of socially engaged art. With the dilution of the avant-garde shock, as Kester proposes, in favor of a durational, long-term practice that proves effective over time, the revolution or transformation that the shock was intended to bring about becomes equally diluted. Rasmussen, on the other hand, proposes that art operates in an autonomous space, but when it enters society in an effort to revolutionize or change society, it will inevitably affirm existing power structures. In other words, however long-term they may be, these projects provide temporary alleviation and in some cases become substitutes for the state, as “socially reparatory” activities (Rasmussen 2017, 71). Gene Ray similarly argues, that the art system under capitalist modernity is “simultaneously encouraging art’s autonomous impulses and politically neutralizing what those impulses produce” (Ray 2009, 80). This also points us in the direction of Marcuse’s notion of the dialectical character of art as both affirmative of a given culture and as provider of critical practices and imaginaries. However, even though Marcuse’s position can come across as belittling the transformative potential of socially engaged art, it is also here we find the strongest believe in the utopian imaginaries that it produces and in the ultimately critical potential of art.

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While the socially engaged art projects of rural China, including the Bishan Commune, might not represent the forefront of a revolutionary, avant-garde, transformative movement, they are, however, still at the forefront of an often unpredictable practice in rural China. Furthermore, as Zhou Yanhua argues, perhaps we need to give the Chinese socially engaged projects another historical backdrop than the experience of the European and North-American avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s (Zhou 2019). The connection to the historical (Western) avant-garde, in many but certainly not all cases, remains a point of reference, a discursive navigation tool to place your work within a relevant and meaningful framework that can give prominence to the project in question. References to various avant-garde art practices and activist art practices disclose a critical relationship to power and the exercise of power as well as a continued critical questioning of established and emerging practices. Trojan Horses and the Head of Medusa Another understanding of socially engaged art projects can be derived from the writing and practice of feminist art critic Lucy Lippard. In a text from 1984, Lippard described the proliferating activist art practices from the 1960s to the 1980s as “Trojan Horses,” pointing towards the weirdly many-folded nature of these projects, as disguised aggressors of change. In this sense, as Lucy Lippard argues, activist art is a subversive power: “The power of art is subversive rather than authoritarian. […] Potentially powerful art is almost by definition oppositional—that work which worms its way out of the prescribed channels and is seen in a fresh light” (Lippard 1984, 345). Within the framework of the Trojan Horse, activist art is perceived as a camouflaged attack on an established system. In the case of the Bishan Commune the Trojan Horse is entering the village by way of disguise, dressed as an artists’ project and less as a project of radical social change. Throughout this book, I apply the notion of the Trojan Horse to the practice of Ou Ning and the Bishan Project. In this context, I furthermore understand the situations the Trojan Horses create as applying an aesthetics of dialogue. In other words, seeing dialogue as a Trojan Horse in itself—albeit a dialogue that can in itself transform the Trojan Horse. While Lippard’s activist art and Kester’s dialogical aesthetics do not always overlap (not all activist art is dialogical and vice versa), in regards to the Bishan Commune, I argue that the two terms in all their ambiguity of

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practice provide a valuable theoretical terminology to understand the Bishan Project. In a recent revisiting of Lippard’s Trojan Horse, Simon Sheikh writes that: “Obviously, in (art) activist circles and beyond, the debate continues as to whether this subversion is merely a masquerade—a purely strategic universalism that pretends to be “art” in order to gain access—or whether we are dealing with a Janus-faced identity: at once activist and aesthetic” (Sheikh 2009). Perhaps socially engaged and activist art are Janus-faced Trojan Horses, and not only in the sense that they are both activist and aesthetic, but also, as I will show in Chap. 4, because the Trojan Horses can turn on the artists themselves. As a larger framework for the theories related to the field of socially engaged art, I use the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, arguing that dialogical aesthetics, Trojan Horses, “emphatic projects of reparation” and participatory art can all be understood within Marcuse’s dialectical span of the real, the wished for and the imagined. The ongoing clashes between the aesthetic and the activist, the imagined and the real, the utopian and the possible are returning conundrums, and a conflict Marcuse has returned to throughout his career (Kellner 2007, 7). “It seems to me,” Marcuse writes, “that the Head of Medusa is the eternal and adequate symbol of art: terror as beauty; terror caught in the gratifying form of the magnificent object” (Marcuse 2007 [1972], 120). In other words, it is not a matter of either-or, but a matter of the dual qualities being present in the artwork itself. It is a matter of being affirmative and negative, dialogical and revolutionary, participatory and subversive. In Marcuse’s understanding art is terror as beauty, it is transforming and maintaining status quo at the same time. Marcuse’s analysis of art, its relation to life, and the inconsistencies this relationship reveals, is closely related to the historical context in which they are situated.5 His views on the emancipatory powers of art are thus contingent with the specific historical and national context. Today art, for the first time in history, is confronted with the possibility of entirely new modes of realization. Or the place of art in the world is changing, and art today is becoming a potential factor in the construction of a new reality, a prospect which would mean the cancellation and the transcendence of art in the fulfillment of its own end. (Marcuse 2007 [1972], 116)

What the context of today’s socially engaged art practice would reveal for Marcuse is difficult to say, but the dialectical relationship between these

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positions of art as ameliorating and as revolutionary is a discussion that remains. Followingly, this book sees the incongruence between the imagined and the real as a condition of contemporary society. The Temporality of Socially Engaged Art One of the returning discussions pertaining to socially engaged art is the discussion of the artist’s relationship to local community. I go into depth with these matters in Chap. 6: Whose Village? Here I wish to touch upon how we can understand this relationship as developing over time and therefore how these projects and relationships affect each other. Based on a case study of the exhibition “Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago” from 1993, art historian Miwon Kwon problematizes the discrepancy between the imagined community and the community in which the socially engaged art project unfolds. Kwon argues that there is a clash between the envisioned community building and the actual community. According to Kwon, the imagining of the projects “most often precede the engagement with any such community” (Kwon 2004, 123). In other words, the collaborations are not organically born, but are imagined on beforehand from the outside. However, from the point of view of Marcuse, this discrepancy, exactly this conflict “between demands of the ideal and the real, and between art and life” (Kellner 2007, 7) is the key to critically understanding these practices. “As part of the established culture, Art is affirmative, sustaining this culture; as alienation from the established reality, Art is a negating force. The history of Art can be understood as the harmonization of this antagonism” (Marcuse 2007 [1972], 143). As Kester notes, the problem with the projects Kwon critiques are perhaps not their incongruence with formulated ideas of the ideal community-­ partner, but that they are short-term and that the artists are not beforehand acquainted with the specific community and community issues under investigation (Kester 2013b [2004], 175). Concerning the projects in the Chinese countryside, the cornerstones are precisely the duration of the projects, usually unfolding over a period of years and with no defined end, a long-term perspective that as such allows the projects to change with and because of the surrounding community groups. Other projects will last much less time, from a weekend to several months.6 Although Marcuse was talking about very different kinds of art and very different temporal

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transformations (a temporality that extends into timelessness), when he wrote of how “the magic staff of the artist” could bring about the “transformation of the fleeting moment into an enduring value” (Marcuse 2007 [1972], 120), the temporality disclosed nevertheless connects to attempts by socially engaged artists to exactly transform the fleeting moment of art into an enduring value, into something that remains over time. In the catalog to their research project and exhibition Little Movements (小运 动) at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen in 2011, curators Liu Ding, Lu Yinghua and Su Wei argue that the movement “little movements” refers to “is more like a ‘slow influence.’ It is a long-term working and thinking condition that entails endless self-examination, self-doubt and the construction of a strong self-awareness, one which disregards short-term gain” (Liu and Lu 2011, 23). The long-term slow-moving nature and the constant self-reflection the long-term process entails are aspects of these little movements, just as they are a critical part of the rural socially engaged art projects, I present in this book. Furthermore, the projects in the Chinese countryside (and other places) are characterized by being based in one single locality, and thus have several built-in temporalities. The presence of the initiating artists and the ongoing dialogue is long-term, while some of the events taking place are short-term and perhaps rely on resources from external artists paying a visit. However, the long-term presence of a given project platform allows for the shorter visits or shorter artists projects to become imbedded in the long-term project, in a sense extending the temporality of the short-term project. The long-term character of these projects gives them the possibility to become “organic” in some sense, since what happens when these projects situate themselves and remain in a local context is that they do not stay the same. As artist and activist Tania Bruguera states in relation to her project Immigrant Movement International: “All long-term projects inevitably change over time, they need readjustments in order to intervene in both the social sphere and the learned social behavior they confront as a means of arriving at their desired social or political goal. There is an ongoing negotiation between what is established and what you want to change” (Bruguera in Kershaw 2015). With this in mind, the following section is concerned with the Chinese discursive space for the practice of socially engaged art in contemporary China.

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Reciprocal Aesthetics: Defining Socially Engaged Art in China Socially engaged art is a relatively new term in China and it has been translated and described through various terms such as yishu jieru shehui (艺术 介入社会) translated as “art intervening in society” or “social involvement art” (Wang 2009; Zhou 2019), “socially engaged art” (社会参与式艺 术),7 “social interaction art” (社会交往式艺术 or 与社会交往的艺术),8 or social practice art (社会实践艺术) to name a few. On the basis of a WeChat discussion with the group behind Yangdeng Art Cooperative (YAC) in rural Guizhou, Ren Hai argues, that the best translation of the term socially engaged art is shehui canyushi yishu (社会参与式艺术), because it emphasizes the “deeply committed artistic involvement rather than intervention or interference” (Ren 2019, 24), in other words, it implies an art that participates in society. As YAC artist Li Zhu points out in the WeChat conversation: “‘canyu’ [participation] contains the meanings of ‘equal dialogue’ and implicit ‘negotiation,’ while ‘jieru’ [intervention] literally means ‘the subject’s intervention in the object’” (Li quoted in Ren 2019, 24). Adding to this list of terms that are also used in China and Chinese speaking territories are participatory art (参与式艺术), dialogical art (对话 艺术) and relational aesthetics (关系美学), these are however mostly used in connection to the specific art historian/theoretician who coined the term, in this case Claire Bishop, Grant Kester and Nicolas Bourriaud, respectively. In Hong Kong, the term community art (社区艺术, 社群艺 术) is particularly prevalent. One of the earlier predominant ways to describe practices that overlap with socially engaged art practices has been the term “public art” (公共艺 术), or through the lens of “publicness,” as artist and art historian Zheng Bo argues (Zheng 2012).9 Laying down a clear trajectory of Chinese artists’ pursuit of publicness, and echoing Suzanne Lacy and her “new genre public art,” Zheng Bo places the “public” aspect at the core of the socially engaged art projects that he examines (Zheng 2012, 20). Tracing the “pursuit of publicness” back to the 1979–1980 Stars Art Group and their attempts to enter and shape a new Chinese public sphere, he argues that the “pursuit of publicness” is central to contemporary Chinese art. Zheng argues that it entails quests to create and shape restrained and estranged Chinese public spheres, and as such attempts at providing different trajectories than the ones provided by the government.10 The pursuit of publicness is granted a part of the practice for groups of Chinese artists, the

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direct and indirect censorship is an unavoidable condition of Chinese art, but for the practices I present in this book there are also other matters at stake. They place particular focus on the development of mutual relationships and connections—in private as well as in public. Furthermore, the current situation of increased state control pushes these practices back into the sphere of the private causing events to get advertised in smaller, closed circles and take place in people’s living rooms.11 I argue, we need to look beyond the lens of what is public in order to understand the undertakings of socially engaged art projects in contemporary China. In reference to rural arts projects, art critic Wang Zhiliang argues that a central attribute of the socially engaged art practices of contemporary China is “gongsheng” (共生). Gongsheng can be translated as “living together,” as a kind of “mutualism” or “symbiosis” and refers to “efforts to re-plant art into social life” and to the mutual commitments and relationships the artists establishes as they “move their studio of artistic production to a concrete social context” (Wang 2019b [2016], 324).12 This we see articulated both in practice and in the written statements of many of these projects, also the ones taking place in urban areas. In his Bishan Commune project, Ou Ning attaches significant importance to “mutual aid 互助” and “co-living 共同生活” through his anarchist and utopian propositions; in Shanghai we have Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society that pays particular attention to the “mutual” and “common” aspects of their practice (Dinghaiqiao 2019; Chen 2018)13; a central feature of SoengJoengToi (SJT), an art platform and autonomous youth space in Guangzhou, is to do things “in common” (gongtong 共同) and to “bond” (lianhe 联合) with people (SoengJoengToi 2017).14 By focusing on the mutual and symbiotic aspects, Wang is stressing the commitments and responsibilities these artists undertake in their engagement with society. Reciprocity in the engagements with the community, be it composed of local villagers or like-minded political youth, seems without a doubt to be central attribute as dialogical aesthetics and daily life encounters color the unfolding of these projects. However, Wang also stresses that his “symbiosis art” refers to an artistic practice that takes outset in a particular region, as the “artists establish concrete relationships with the space, things and people of that region through different forms” (Wang 2019b [2016], 324). However, I would argue that rather than understanding the practice as “region specific” it is more useful to understand the practice as “community specific.” A community can be site-specific (e.g. the village community) and it can be a community of like-minded that reaches out beyond

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the physical borders of a particular region, as with SoengJoengToi. I think it beneficial to see this type of art as invoking a “reciprocal aesthetics”—a type of art practice that take vantage in mutual commitments and reciprocal relationships with a specific community of people. Another attribute of the socially engaged art projects treated in this book is the preoccupation with posing critical questions and addressing serious issues in the Chinese countryside in particular and Chinese society in general. Drawing on a conversation with the art critic Lü Peng’s notions of problems and questions as the historical foundation of art, artist Li Yifan from the Beijing-based “Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads-­project” term their own practice “problem art” (wenti yishu 问题 艺术) (Yang 2015). The “Between… -project” is based on invited artists conducting questionnaires and doing fieldwork investigations in the urban fringe areas of Beijing “between the fifth and the sixth ring roads.” Yishu means art, but wenti can both refer to question and issue, making it both a matter of dealing with issues in contemporary society and a matter of posing questions at the same time. Furthermore, “problem art” points toward an ethical responsibility on the side of the artist to pose questions and uncover serious issues, where they might occur (Yang 2015). On a similar note, art historian Meiqin Wang refers to art critic Wang Nanming and his development of a theory of Chinese socially engaged art referring to “Chinese Problem Situation Art” (Zhongguo wenti qingjing yishu 中国问题情境艺术). “Chinese Problem Situation Art” can be understood as art that “…discusses Chinese problems, which might involve memories or materials recognizable Chinese. However, its target is the problems happening in China right now” (Wang Nanming quoted in Wang Meiqin 2019a, 29–30). Both “problem art” and “Chinese Problem Situation art” involves a contemporaneity and a reaction to current circumstances in ways that places the criticality of art at the center of the practice. In other words, much of the socially engaged art practice taking place in contemporary China is art that deals with social problems and do so in ways, that focus on mutual and reciprocal relationships with the people in question. With the Chinese discourse in mind, the next section delves into a brief historical account of the Chinese state’s relationship to art. An art that—in many ways similar to our contemporary socially engaged art projects— proposes to serve the people.

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Art That Serves the People: The Mass Line In 1942, Mao Zedong firmly set the dominant tone for the relationship between art, politics and society throughout the Maoist-era, when he said: “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics” at the seminal Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (Mao 1942). During the Yan’an Rectification Movement in the mid-1940s, artists were routinely sent to the countryside “to learn from the peasants,” a praxis that intensified throughout the sent-down-youth movement (知识青年上山下 乡) during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).15 Art was to serve the people, legitimize the state and aid the politics of the Chinese Communist Party. This stand was, as curator Hans van Dijk argued, not so different during the Deng Xiaoping era, though the means for art to legitimize the nation-­state had changed (Dijk 1991–1992, 25). The stimulus for Chinese art opened up during Deng Xiaoping, to not only include the Russian socialist realism introduced in the 1950s, but also Western tendencies and traditions (ibid.). These views of art as legitimizing are stretching their tentacles into the present day through Xi Jinping’s somewhat similar calls for a renewed relationship between the arts and society. “Art and culture,” Xi Jinping expounded in a speech, “will emit the greatest positive energy when the Marxist view of art and culture is firmly established and the people are their focus. To focus on the people is to make meeting the people’s spiritual and cultural needs the starting and ending point of art and culture and the work in art and culture, to make the people the subject in artistic representations, to turn the people into the critics and judges of artistic aesthetics, and to make serving the people the bounded duty of artists” (Xi 2015). As during the Maoist years, serving the people and thereby the communist party is the primary duty of the artists. Art should no longer, according to Xi Jinping, be detached from society, but should engage actively in the progress of China. The political connotations of such actions are not put forward, but this idea reveals a reinstatement of Maoism as the ideological locomotive, albeit with new political goals (Yang 2014, 109). Xi Jinping’s ideological call has been followed by increasingly harsher crackdowns on diverging opinions of the Chinese public, which includes harassment of artists and musicians who have previously been relatively spared compared to human rights activists. This shows a change in the discursive and practical relationship of art and artist to dominant political structures, with one of the consequences being that

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funds are channeled in the direction of cultural work in the rural areas. Meaning that local governments actively tap into this pool of funding to redevelop their respective areas. Many of the articulated aims of Chinese socially engaged art projects seem to echo the propositions of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping by placing people at the core of their practice. Nevertheless, where some socially engaged art projects differ, is in their often dual goals of “serving the people” (in the sense that they actively listen to and engage their subjects) and in actively changing social relations (resisting established ways and power dynamics). Furthermore, Xi Jinping stipulates that people should be the subject of “artistic representation” (Xi 2015), meaning that Xi does not propose active engagement into society through a departure from representation, art is to remain where the party can still control it, but it should focus on the people for content. Though there are several rural reconstruction through art-projects that display intimate relationships with local authorities, socially engaged art projects in China should not in general be seen as parts of a larger push to promote the policies of the Chinese government. Rather they consistently resist existing power hegemonies and refashion ways of circumventing state pressure. Furthermore, some of the projects that I focus on in this book adjacent to the Bishan Project present a clear rejection of the Chinese Communist Party and its historical legacy and current practice. The projects do not necessarily, however, reject all of the utopian, political aspirations behind the party.

Socially Engaged Art in Rural China There are business activities and routine works, fine-art and spaghetti, personal skills and group discipline, creation joys and over-thinkings; there are straight-­ forward going and also stops at half way and even quit, and so on so forth. —Three Step Studio  (1993), exhibition catalogue of Countrylife Plan 1993 When such things happen, the whole village thanks “art” for making them possible. —Jin Le, Shijiezi Art Museum, about the villagers reactions, when a new road is build (in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 17)

Socially engaged art has been growing in China since the 1990s (Wang 2019a, 5), with the tendency of Chinese artists going to the countryside gaining speed in the 2010s. However, already during the 1980s Chinese artists were also involved in art practices in the countryside. In their

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organization of a panel discussion on art practices in rural China, Mia Yu and Orianna Cacchione (2015) are trying to excavate the history of rural art practices in the post-Maoist era. They show that even though the majority of artists sought urban environments or art-enclaves on the urban fringe during the 1980s and 1990s, or spaces to exhibit within the established urban art system, a few artists did attempt to bring art practices to rural China. One example was an unrealized art carnival in a small village by the Yellow River, organized by Song Yongping and friends in 1986. Though the art carnival did not reach fruition, Song Yongping continued his rural efforts and initiated a project called the Countrylife Plan 1993 (乡村计划), in which ten artists for fifty days moved into an old temple in a small village in Shanxi. When asked about the participation of the locals, Song answers: “To involve the local people was not the primary goal of this project. Actually, what we painted back then had nothing to do with the countryside. […] The intention of this project was to provide the artists with a secluded space where we could share ideas about art and, so to speak, encourage each other without being disturbed” (Song in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 12). While Song does not specify what might have disturbed them, it seems clear that the move to the countryside was more of an escape from something than it was an attempt to engage the local community. Though there are examples of the opposite, many of the early art projects in rural China had little to do with actively engaging surrounding community, and perhaps more to do with the search for a space where art could exist without being the tool for the bringing about of the utopian dream of a large political party, as a way to explore personal expression and search out new boundaries and definitions for art not permitted during the Maoist-era. As the curator Dai Zhuoqun expresses it: “It seems to me that one of the biggest catalysts behind the projects in the 1980s and the ’90s was the lack of social space and infrastructure for creating and exhibiting artworks. Unlike artists today, who have abundant resources, artists back then had to fight for their freedom to make art and carve out a space beyond the control of the official culture system” (Dai in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 20). As this early example of a rural art practice demonstrates, the artists of the 1980s were largely concerned with regaining institutional recognition and making a space for an autonomy of art that had been nearly obliterated during the Maoist-era. Despite the dominant narrative, some artists did venture into the countryside, with art projects that sought to engage the village population. One of the earliest post-Maoist precursors of socially engaged art in rural

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China is perhaps artist Chen Shaofeng’s project Conversational Painting (对画) taking place in Tiangongsi Village in Hebei Province, running from 1993 to 2007. Chen would paint portraits of the villagers and in the process have them paint a portrait of him as well. The portraits were then exhibited side-by-side as if in a dialogue and in an attempt to break away from dominant aesthetic expressions, placing the villagers of Tiangongsi at a central position in the production of aesthetics. The project has been re-­staged at other places several times since 1993 in China, Japan, Germany and Brazil (SEAChina.net).16 Another early socially engaged art project in rural China is the ongoing well-known Long March-project initiated in 1998/2002 with an elaborate plan to trace the footsteps of the Long March of the Communist of China (1934–1935) entitled “The Long March: A Walking Visual Display.” The plan included workshops, exhibitions, drip painting events, a survey of papercuttings, lectures and “reciprocal exchanges with those encountered along the road” (Lu 2003, 4) and took place at selected sites along the original Long March route. In his 2009 account of art that intervenes in society, Wang Chunchen places The Long March Project within the terminology of “project-based art” (项目 式艺术) and as such situates the project as an early project of socially engaged art. The Long March project was and is an impressive project spanning multiple localities and temporalities with many sub-projects being concerned with establishing social relationships. The overall curatorial statements are however still, like the early rural endeavors mentioned here, very concerned with redefining art and the place of art in Chinese society. In other words, art—and to a lesser degree the formation of social relations and a departure from representation—is the outset for the Long March project investigations. However, the continued push for a deeper understanding of the local context inherent in the project, represents a wish to understand the lives that have lived through quests for utopia and revolution. As the curatorial statement expounds: A deeper understanding of local context is necessary—especially its centuries-­ long encounter with modernity, the gain and loss of its quest for utopia, the completeness or incompleteness of its revolution, and the mutually constitutive relationship between nationalism and internationalism, and the contributions, errors, misreadings, rebirths, restructurings, and localizations of Western ideologies in the process of entering China have already deeply entered China’s social and individual consciousness. (Lu and Qiu 2003)

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In their quest to understand contemporary China to the backdrop of history and modernity, they represent a precursor to what has developed into socially engaged art practices. An another example showing how socially engaged practices and concerns of the local context have slowly developed throughout 2000s is Caochangdi Workstation (草场地工作站, CCD) and the now iconic documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang who opened the workstation together with his then-partner, the dance choreographer Wen Hui. CCD Workstation is a community of filmmakers and body performers doing a whole range of diverse projects that in recent years has focused on the Chinese village as the vantage point for their practice. In the late 1990s Wu Wenguang began by filming subjects on the margins, as in Bumming in Beijing (流浪北京, 1990) and Jianghu (江湖, 1999) following poor artists in Beijing and their aspirations and hope and thinking on art, to making and filming performances together with migrant workers, as in Dance with Farmworkers (和民工跳舞, 2002). However, in a bid to move away from representation, Wu decided to hand over the camera to the subjects themselves, teaching them to use the camera and how to cut the material into a film afterwards, as in the larger projects Village Documentary Film Project (村民影像计划), in which farmers from different parts of China documented the unfolding of the village self-governance system,17 and the Folk Memory Documentary Project (民间记忆影像计划), in which young aspiring filmmakers return to a village they are acquainted with to collect memories of the famine during the Great Leap Forward  (1958–1962) and start up various socially engaged projects in the villages (Corlin 2013).18 Speeding up around 2010, new projects of all kinds have been mushrooming around the Chinese countryside. The projects in rural China embrace a variety of methods and expressions and include an outdoor art museum in a remote village in Gansu Province, a documentary filmmaking and rice growing community in rural Hunan, the Bishan Commune and its efforts into rural reconstruction, an anarchist Youth House on the outskirts of Wuhan, village libraries where there was poor or no access to books, artist communes and residencies, art and film festivals, artistic research into the conditions of rural areas, workshops about local handicraft traditions, reading groups, poetry classes, development of a new rural architecture and many other longer- and shorter-term projects. The artists and intellectuals behind these socially engaged manifestations comprise a dispersed group of people as diverse as their projects. Some working

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collectively in larger groups, others depend on the resources and energy of a few passionate people. Some rely on government funding, some on private beneficiaries and other again on their own hard work. Though not all claim to be art as such, many of the projects maintain a connection to the art world and utilize this connection in diverse manners. Several of these projects tap into the discourse and the way of formulating the relationship between art and society that the Bishan Commune proposes. This applies especially to the Baimiao Project (白庙计划), which consisted of a largescale art festival taking place in a small village on the outskirts of Beijing in the vicinity of Songzhuang. The Baimiao Project references the Bishan Commune and Xucun International Art Commune and uses words such as mutual aid and intervention art. It criticizes the urbanization process, the commodification of art and the power of galleries, museums and art auctions (Xu 2013). Despite the socially engaged framing and the ideas of connection and mutual aid, the Baimiao Project however still operates with a conventional, concrete idea of art as something that by its mere presence ameliorates and thus betters the village, primarily through murals, public sculptures and so forth. Furthermore, according to initiator Xu Hongbin, what happens when art enters the village is that “through the artists the value system of contemporary art is transferred to the village.”19 By stating this, Xu seems to convey an understanding and formulation of the villagers as passive receivers of a superior value system, a position that is far from the way Ou Ning has formulated the relationship, as will be unfolded in Chap. 3. Another project that I have already mentioned, is the “Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads.” The project gathers a number of artists from all over China to do surveys (调查) in the areas between the fifth and the sixth ring roads of Beijing, an area that is largely populated by formerly poor peasants and currently poor migrant workers. Two of the initiators, Ge Lei and Li Yifan, have spent time in Bishan and are connected to Zuo Jing and Ou Ning; another group member, Ge Fei, in an interview refers directly to mutual aid (互助) (Ge Fei interviewed in Shi 2015).20 Contrary to the Baimiao Project, “Between…” adopts an approach in which the field research done by the artists involved in the project is viewed as the artwork in itself (Yang 2015), akin to the view of art as a matter of establishing relations rather than creating artifacts. The “Between…” project has received widespread attention on media platforms such as the Chinese edition of Artforum, the online journal Groundbreaking (破土),21 China Daily and other news sites and thus adds to the furthering of the discussion of the relationship between art and

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society in contemporary China (see Yang 2015; Groundbreaking 2015; Tang 2015). Though the Bishan Commune plays a significant role, it cannot be credited with the sole responsibility for changing the practice and discourse on socially engaged art practices in rural China and on the urban fringe. A broad range of Chinese artists have engaged in the discussions on rural issues since the 2000s (before the Bishan Commune), to name a few: Caochangdi Workstation’s Village Documentary Project, documenting democratic elections at the village level; Chaile Travel, concerned with demolition and construction in rural Hainan; Lantian Project, consisting of young artists and activists based in Guangzhou who do long-term community art projects, Paddy Film Farm, producing questionnaires and shooting documentaries in rural Hunan and many other projects dealing explicitly with the consequences of the developmental policies sweeping through rural China. Meiqin Wang rightly places socially engaged art practices on the margins of the established art scenes of China (Wang 2019a). However, while the practice of socially engaged art is granted not at the center of an object and capital oriented art system, the artists engaging in these matters are nevertheless often well-known agents of the Chinese art scenes. My research shows that the majority of the socially engaged art projects taking place in rural China have close connections with international art circuits and/or the dominant urban art scenes in China (Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing to name a few) and that they utilize these connections actively. Many of the artists venturing out into the rural are already established artists educated in urban centers, with well-­ established ties to national and international museums and galleries. They are thus aware of the tendencies coloring the art scenes of the world, of which socially engaged art has been a growing phenomenon. This applies to the Zuo Jing and Ou Ning of the Bishan Commune, that has been exhibited in galleries, museums, biennales and festivals around the world; Qu Yan of Xucun Art Commune and Qingtian Model, was already a well-­ established artist when he ventured into the rural; the socially engaged documentary film projects in rural China of Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Documentary Project have been displayed at film festivals and universities in numerous places; artist Li Mu’s participatory art project in Qiuzhuang in rural Jiangsu province made in collaboration with the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Yangdeng Art Cooperative in rural Guizhou sprung out of the Department of Sculpture at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute; artist Weng Fen was already an

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internationally renowned photographer when he initiated the Chaile Travel project in Hainan and Jin Le was an established artist when he returned to his home town to initiate Shijiezi open air art museum in rural Gansu province, just to name a few explicitly rural projects.22 The projects range from activist practices, such as documentation of the misconduct of rural authorities and the organization of rural cooperatives, to attempts at forming a discourse critical of China’s present development on social, political, economic and cultural levels to ideas and practices of prefigurative politics. Political Art? As for the relationship between politics and art or socially engaged art and the art world there are nevertheless a diverse set of positions being offered. Though a growing number of artists term their practice explicitly political, it is still a term most Chinese artists are careful in applying. In China, as well as other places, the term “political art” carries heavy historical connotations and associations. Chinese historical conditions and developments have discursively and actively limited the scope of how political action can be understood and practiced, which places the societal and personal discursive relationship to the term “political” in a controversial position. In the context of Europe and the United States, Claire Bishop shows how many of the participatory art projects she examines reject the notion of art altogether, because the art world’s affiliation, in the minds of the artists, provides a problematic framework for the societal change they seek to produce (Bishop 2012, 19). These artists, she argues, assert a critical stance towards the art world and view their projects as “[more] substantial, ‘real’ and important than artistic experiences” (ibid.). Engagement with the social is in other words perceived as the superior aim. This stance, however, is one of limited effect, because, as Bishop exclaims, “the point of comparison and reference for participatory projects always returns to contemporary art, despite the fact that they are perceived to be worthwhile precisely because they are non-artistic” (ibid.). In the case of the Chinese counterparts, I have found that the artists in their articulation of the projects are less prone to dismiss the art world relationship. What is evident is that they are more likely to use it explicitly as an asset in attracting media attention and public influence, but also that the articulated art world connection is used as a means to distance themselves from a political

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discourse that could be conceived of as a provocation by the government. As will be discussed in Chap. 4, when entering rural China and engaging with local authorities, the resources represented by the urban artists are important as assets in their negotiation with and acceptance by the local governments. Though this is not to suggest that these projects (or the local governments) agree on what art is and can do. Of projects that profess a clear art world affiliation, these rural experiments can be mentioned: Qiuzhuang Project, Xucun Art Commune, Baimiao Project, Yangdeng Art Cooperative and Chaile Travel. About his Qiuzhuang Project, in which he produces classical Western art pieces in collaboration with the villagers of the village in which he grew up, Li Mu states: “From the beginning of this project, I kept reminding myself that the intention of this project was neither for rural reconstruction nor for charity. This was an art project. I was so afraid that the project would get sidetracked into something narrow and pragmatic” (Li Mu quoted in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 24). In his analysis of the Yangdeng Art Cooperative (YAC) located in rural Guizhou Province, art critic Wang Zhiliang describes YAC in somewhat similar terms: “They [YAC] are not there to help the poor. They are not spreading culture in the countryside. They are not constructing a new village. […] To let art and rural areas coexist, they tried fitting in the environment first and then let art develop in rural areas naturally” (Wang Zhiliang 2019b [2016], 317). Though both taking art as their primary outset, more than Li Mu, the project in Yangdeng is preoocupied with the unfolding of regular, everyday lives in Yangdeng in a form of symbiosis between art and the village (ibid.). Covering some sort of middle ground is the previously mentioned project “Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads.” On the relationship between politics and art, one of the artists behind the project stated: “Actually I don’t think that what we are doing is politics, it is ethics (伦理 lunli). Well at least it is not power politics, but ‘political ethics’ and ‘political aesthetics’” (Yang 2015). In other words, to this group, it is a matter of ethics and aesthetics intersecting with politics. Someone like the artist Jin Le and his Shijiezi Art Museum in a small village in Ganzu Province to an even further extent blurs the boundaries between life, art and politics, by both heading the art project and being the village chief. Art is not perceived by Jin Le as the primary concern: “As for my project, whether or not it is art, I don’t really care. Whether or not I am taken seriously as an artist, I don’t care. Art, for me, is no longer about making a sculpture in a studio and selling it at an art fair. What matters is how art can concretely improve people’s lives and

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make real changes in this tiny village that I care about […]. My career as an artist and my career as the village chief are combined into one” (Jin Le in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 25). After being elected village head by his fellow villagers, the artist Jin Le professed that he realized “that I had no other resources than art and artists” (ibid., 15). Art in this sense, is understood as providing a network and thus also resources, an attitude and conscious reflection that is also echoed in the Bishan Project. Even if Ou Ning in the beginning characterizes the Bishan Commune as a political project, he at the same time stresses the art world connection (Ou 2015 [2013]). In other words, Chinese artists are more prone to openly recognize where their resources and networks are growing, instead of, as Claire Bishop suggests of her research objects, dismissing and downplaying the art world affiliation because of a superior aim. This perhaps has something to do with the relationship to the term “political art” and the specific authoritarian context, but also the fact that art in China has had a discursive relationship to society and politics as articulated by Mao Zedong and his successors. “Framing a sensitive project as an artwork,” as Zheng Bo argues, “would lower one’s political risk, though never provide complete immunity” (Zheng 2012, 80). It could seem as though, as Marcuse recounts, “What counts as utopia, phantasy, and rebellion in the world of fact is allowed in art” (Marcuse 2009 [1968], 84). While the Chinese artists I have described recognize the art connection and art as part of their projects—terming their practice political is something different altogether.

Notes 1. E.g. Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, Nato Thompson, Greg Sholette, Miwon Kwon, Lucy Lippard, to name a few. 2. This is changing. As of March 2016, Ou Ning has begun referring to the project as a socially engaged art project. See his Weibo and Instagram profiles, March 11, 2016. 3. The initiation of the platform SoengJoengToi (SJT) in Guangzhou came from a feeling that HB Station was too artsy (太艺术化), interview with curator and “project owner” (业主) at SJT, Liang Jianhua, August 24, 2019. 4. In reference to his Qiuzhuang Project in rural Jiangsu Province, artist Li Mu said: “I kept reminding myself that the intention of this project was neither for rural reconstruction nor for charity. This was an art project.” Li Mu quoted in Yu and Cacchione 2015, 24.

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5. Kellner writes: “I disagree with Katz, Lukes, Reitz, and others who claim that Marcuse has a transcendental ontology of art, since reflections on art and aesthetics for Marcuse from the time of his work with the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s are always bound up with a specific historical conjuncture and imbricated in critical social theory and radical politics” (Kellner 2007, 22). 6. Examples of time-limited projects (one day to a couple of months) include Wochenklausur’s Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument. 7. In a presentation on the Bishan Project given at Shantou University March 2016, Ou Ning translates the term socially engaged art as 社会参与艺术. 8. Phoebe Man, working with socially engaged art in Hong Kong, translates the term as 社会交往式艺术 (“social interaction art” or “art that interacts with society”). 9. Zheng defines his use of the word “publicness” as such: “I use ‘publicness’ instead of ‘publicity’ because nowadays ‘publicity’ is commonly used to refer to corporate advertising and media spectacle. In Chinese, ‘publicness’ is rendered as gong gong xing, a word that has gained popularity in cultural criticism since the mid-1990s. To date there is no formal translation for ‘publicity,’ because the industrial production of publicity is still relatively new” (Zheng 2012, 6n6). For other discussions on public art in China see Li 2007, 2011, Zha 2007. 10. Zheng draws on the work of Michael Warner and his Habermas-inspired notion of the counterpublic (Zheng 2012, 17). 11. In an interview with Li Xiaotian from the art platform/autonomous youth center SoengJoengToi in Guangzhou, she refers to the fact that they have had to make their activities less public, as they feared that their initial openness to outsiders could pose a serious vulnerability. Interview with Li Xiaotian, Guangzhou, August 25, 2019. Due to closure of music venues in Beijing and/or banning of specific concerts, experimental musician Yan Jun has moved many of Subjam’s activities into people’s living rooms. Furthermore, the concerts are primarily advertised via e-mail lists and you have to enquire about the address directly, if you wish to participate. See Miji Concert 62, subjam.org. Using the living room as space for exhibitions and concerts was also a prevalent practice from the 1970s to the 1990s, especially in the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. Gao Minglu refers to this type of practice as “apartment art,” though Gao also includes art produced in the artists own apartment and not only art that is exhibited in private apartments (Gao interviewed in Eschenburg 2017, 59). 12. In her PhD Dissertation Madeline Eschenburg translates gongsheng as “mutualism” (Eschenburg 2018, 31) in reference to a talk Wang Zhiliang gave at a conference at Sishang Art Museum in Beijing, July 2016.

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However, in a book on the Yangdeng Art Cooperative that republished Wang Zhiliang’s text in Chinese and English, the term gongsheng is translated as “symbiosis” (Wang 2019b [2016], 324). The problem with flatly translating gongsheng as symbiosis in this context is that one cannot participate in a symbiosis, you are either part of it or you are not. Furthermore, mutualism implies a reciprocal relationship, that I think is important to the understanding of this type of artist practice. However, it is possible to talk about the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between the artists and the villagers. Thus, the translation of the term is very tricky. 13. Interview and workshop with Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society November 25 and 26. The “mutual” and “common” aspect of their practice is also discussed in the publication “The Co-Governance Project” (my translation) (共治计划) (Dinghaiqiao 2019). 14. Interview with Liang Jianhua and Li Xiaotian of SoengJoengToi August 24 and 25, respectively. 15. See Bonnin (2013) for an extensive account of the sent-down-youth movement. The movement is also known as the rustification movement or the Down to the Countryside movement and refers to the placement of 17 million urban youth in China’s rural areas. 16. Information on Chen Shaofeng’s Conversational Painting primarily comes from artist and art historian Zheng Bo’s website SEAChina.net that archives socially engaged art projects in China. While the website does not include all projects, especially not current projects. It is an immensely important and well-conducted resource for the research on socially engaged art in China. 17. For an extensive analysis of the Village Documentary Film Project, see Zheng (2012). 18. For more on Wu Wenguang and his road towards socially engaged film projects, see Corlin (2013). 19. “通过艺术家向乡村传递当代艺术的价值观” Xu (2013). 20. During my stay at Zuo Jing’s house in the fall of 2013, Ge Lei was also present. 21. The Groundbreaking website is no longer accessible. 22. I have also come across an abundance of smaller projects, projects including lesser known artists, up-and-coming artists, younger artists, these projects and artists however also maintain strong ties with the Chinese art world. The villagers of Jin Le’s project in rural Gansu Province were also in Kassel in Germany as part of Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale Project for Documenta 12 in 2007.

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Marcuse, Herbert. 2007 [1972]. “Art in the One-Dimensional Society.” In Herbert Marcuse – Art and Liberation. Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 4, edited by Douglas Kellner, 113–122. London and New York: Routledge. Marcuse, Herbert. 1970. “The End of Utopia.” In Five Lectures. Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia. Translations by Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber, 62–82. Boston: Beacon Press. Ou Ning. 2015 [2013]. “Bishan Project: Restarting the Rural Reconstruction Movement.” In Post City  – Habitats for the 21st Century. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 42–45. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. 2017. “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism”. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no 53: 60–72. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. 2009. Avantgardens Selvmord (The Suicide of the Avant-­ Garde). Copenhagen: 28/6. Ray, Gene. 2009. “Toward a Critical Art Theory.” In Art and Contemporary Critical Practice – Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, 79–91. London: MayFlyBooks. Ren Hai (任海). 2019. “当代艺术中的参与式艺术: 羊磴艺术合作社 Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary Art – The Yangdeng Art Collective.” In 参与的 艺术: 羊磴艺术合作社 2012–2017 Socially Engaged Art in Southwest China: Yangdeng Art Cooperative 2012–2017, edited by Jiao Xingtao (焦兴涛) and Wang Ziyun (王子云), 20–29. Bilingual publication. Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe. Sheikh, Simon. 2009. “Positively Trojan Horses Revisited.” E-flux Journal, no. 9, 10. URL (Last accessed March 20, 2020): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ positively-trojan-horses-revisited/ Shi Yu (石玉). 2015. “‘六环比五环多一环,’ 这是北京人的日常” (Between the Fifth and the Sixth Ring Roads – This is the Life of the Beijingers). Q Daily 好 奇心日报, July 27. URL (Last accessed March 5, 2020): http://www.qdaily. com/articles/12594.html SoengJoengToi (上阳台). 2017. “你知道什么是上阳台吗?”(Do you know what SoengJoengToi is?). HB Station’s public wenxin channel, May 5th. Tang Yue. 2015. “Painting a picture of life on the edge.” China Daily, May 13. URL (Last accessed February 28, 2020): http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/ china/2015-05/13/content_20701312.htm Three Step Studio. 1993. “乡村计划 1993” (Countrylife Plan 1993). Exhibition catalogue. Wang, Meiqin. 2019a. Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China. Voices From Beslow. New York: Routledge. Wang Zhiliang (王志亮). 2019b [2016]. “近年来中国当代艺术在乡村的共生实 践 Practice of Symbiosis between Chinese Contemporary Art and Rural Areas in Recent Years.” In 参与的艺术:羊磴艺术合作社 2012–2017 Socially Engaged Art in Southwest China: Yangdeng Art Cooperative 2012–2017, edited by Jiao

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Xingtao (焦兴涛) and Wang Ziyun (王子云), 324–328. Bilingual publication. Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe. Wang Chunchen (王春晨). 2009. 艺术介入社会 –一种新艺术关系 Art Intervenes in Society – A New Artistic Relationship. Beijing: Timezone 8. Xi Jinping (习近平). 2015. “在文艺工作座谈会上的讲话” (Talk from the Work Forum on Literature and Art). The speech was given October 15, 2014, but first published a year later. Xinhua 新华网, October 14. URL (Last accessed February 20, 2020): http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2015-10/14/ c_1116825558.htm Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s speech is translated in Boehler and Piao 2015. Xu Hongbin (徐弘滨). 2013. “白庙计划 – 当代艺术介入乡村的实验” (Baimiao Project – Experiments of Contemporary Art of Engaging with the Countryside.” Baimai Project, Sina.com. September 25. No longer accessible. http://blog. sina.com.cn/s/blog_e2fd4a7e01019wkl.html Yang Beichen (杨北辰). 2015. “关于’六环比五环多一环’的一次对话” (A Conversation about ’Between the Fifth and the Sixth Ring Roads’). Artforum 艺术论坛, January 22. URL (Last accessed May 5): http://artforum.com.cn/ slant/7418# Yang Guobin. 2014. “The Return of Ideology and the Future of Chinese Internet Policy.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 31, no. 2: 109–113. Yu, Mia and Orianna Cacchione. 2015. “Going to the Country: Reconsidering Chinese Art Practices and Participation in the Rural Context. A Panel discussion with Song Yongping, Jin Le, Li Mu and Dai Zhuoqun, OCAT Xi’an, September 25, 2014.” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 14, no. 2 (March–April): 6–27. Zha Changping (查常平). 2007. “当代艺术的公共性与个人性”(The Publicness and Individuality of Contemporary Art). Artron.net 雅昌艺术网. September 12. URL (Last accessed March 7, 2020): http://comment.artron. net/20070912/n34280.html Zheng, Bo. 2012. “The Pursuit of Publicness: A Study of Four Chinese Contemporary Art Projects.” PhD diss., University of Rochester. Zhou Yanhua (周彦华). 2019. “群众路线” 作为艺术介入社会的中国经验” (“The Mass Line” constitutes the Chinese experience for art that involves in society). 贵大艺术版. July 28. URL (Last accessed September 19, 2019): https://mp. weixin.qq.com/s/2f4CcLbqyxxZi3iocFWWBA

CHAPTER 3

Imagining the Commune

What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind? —Marx 1970 [1871]

The dichotomy between city and countryside has been a defining dynamic for most developing societies around the world.1 Marxists, Maoists, anarchists and utopian socialists alike have been preoccupied with this dynamic and the power relationship between city and countryside, and how to dissolve the division between them, though from different outsets and with very different outcomes. Ou Ning is by no means the first to bring forward ideas and analyses of the rural and urban relationship and its importance to society at large. In order to understand Ou Ning’s and other radical rural intellectuals’ thinking on the topic, we first have to see their thoughts in the larger context of twentieth-century China. Parts of the chapter will thus outline the historical role of and development of anarchism, rural communal thinking, the Paris Commune and the position of the rural in relation to the urban in Chinese political thinking. But in so far as this chapter unfolds these various isms and their legacy in China, it is also very much a tale of the dream of the agrarian commune and the leap into utopia that the commune represents. In recent years, an increasing number of Chinese artists, academics, intellectuals and activists have been turning towards the countryside, © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_3

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bringing with them a discourse more or less critical of the Chinese authorities and neoliberalism and a desire for social and political change. The Bishan Commune utopia weaves itself into the trajectories of rural utopias and presents a contemporary response to a rural situation structured by the historical and contemporary rule of the Communist Party of China, both present and past, and by a rapid urbanization process that is having a profound impact on rural China. This chapter is preoccupied with the thinking and principles that undergird the practice of the Bishan Commune. What was the Bishan Commune, how was it imagined, and how can we understand it as a critique of and an intrinsic part of a complex Chinese reality? The pivot is the notebook Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Ou  2010), written by Chinese curator, editor, artist and filmmaker Ou Ning (Fig. 3.1). The notebook presents thinking on the establishment of an anarchist utopia in the Chinese countryside, based on the

Fig. 3.1  From Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia

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ideas of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) as well as the Chinese rural reconstruction activist from the 1930s, James Yen (Yan Yangchu, 1890–1990). Whereas Ou Ning’s ideal is the anarchist commune, he presents rural reconstruction practices as the means toward that end. The appropriation of these two male forefathers, Kropotkin and Yen, is, I argue, less about imitation and more about a search for legitimacy grounded in Chinese historical practices and a way to connect with rural practices not tied to a Maoist legacy of rural revolutionary bases and people’s communes. As to why China needs this utopia, Ou Ning cites the excessive urbanization process sweeping over China (0086 zazhi 2010). For Ou Ning, the problems of the rural areas “stem from the upended relationship between city and countryside and the irrational distribution of resources between rural and urban areas” (Ou 2015a [2010]: 43). Problems of the rural and urban areas are understood as interconnected, two sides of the same coin, and the notebook does not propose a withdrawal from the city into a secluded countryside and does not explicitly romanticize the rural areas (though Ou Ning sometimes indulges in glamorizing the rural). Rather, what the notebook proposes is a renewed and rebalanced relationship between the rural and the urban areas and a reorganization of life as it is lived in both. In other words, what needs mending, according to Ou Ning, are the relationships and connections between the rural and the urban, as well as a more equitable division of resources between them. To mend this broken connection, new social relationships have to be forged through communal, collective structures; social cohesion will be built on a new mode of being and on new rituals (e.g. Memorial day for James Yen) as well as a new visual system (e.g. community symbols such as flag, passport and paper money, 视觉系统) and an architectural system (建筑系 统) with adjustable houses that suit the shifting needs of the community members (Ou 2015a [2010]: 30). However, as much as the notebook is about a commune in a specific geographical location, it is just as much the imaginary of something larger and less tangible—in other words, the commune as a borderless, territory-less community of the likeminded that is a complex and fluid entity. In this chapter, I show how Ou Ning constructs his commune and how his ideas resonate with twentieth-century ideas of anarchism, the Paris Commune, the Chinese intellectual and political landscape, as well as how his imaginary connects with a larger vocabulary of autonomy (自治) and self-organizing in a contemporary art world discourse.2

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My analysis of the notebook is complemented by references to an array of texts produced by Ou Ning and friends on blogs, in magazines, books and journals. I also introduce two other artists from the rural scene: Hunan village filmmaker Mao Chenyu and his Paddy Film Farm (稻电影 农场) and anarchist and punk-musician Mai Dian’s discussions of the autonomous youth center Our Home (我们家) in semi-rural Wuhan. No single idea or method can describe the diversity of these projects, but a foundation in rural and semi-rural communities, a more or less overt critique of the government, and connections to the art world are the overarching characteristics that tie them together, even if these experiences and connections are utilized in diverse ways.

Imagining the Agrarian Utopia Although I am concerned in this section with utopias and their diverse propositions, I do not focus on the influential system utopias represented by the CCP or the holistic utopia of Kang Youwei’s interpretation of “great unity” (大同). Rather, my vantage is the smaller scale unit of the rural, utopian commune. In China, as elsewhere in the world, the dream of an agrarian communal utopia has a long tradition and comes in many variations. A famous example that also lends its name to one of the Chinese words for utopia is the “peach blossom spring” (桃花源), derived from the poet Tao Yuanming’s (365–427) “Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring” (桃 花源记).3 Much like Thomas More’s infamous utopian island of the “noplace” and the “good-place,” “Peach Blossom Spring” tells the tale of an old fisherman who stumbles on a wonderful place of abundance, but after leaving is never able to find his way back again. To go even further back in the history of China, another example might be the School of Tillers (农 家) that flourished around 300 BCE.  The School of Tillers worshipped the early sage king Shennong, known through literary sources to be “working in the fields, along with everyone else, and consulting with everyone else when any decision had to be reached” (Rosemont 2004: 183). Egalitarianism and rejection of the division of labor were core principles of this long-forgotten anarchist utopia. As for more modern attempts at reviving this rural communal practice, the so-called father of Chinese anarchism Liu Shifu and his Cock-Crow Society (晦鸣学社), set out in 1913 to establish an anarchist, agrarian commune in rural Guangdong Province that was inspired by Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898) (Krebs 1998: 117). Due to civil

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wars and other political problems of the time, the commune never materialized. As Edward S. Krebs so pointedly puts it, “Perhaps it was just as well that it did not work out, as the group’s efforts could easily have been wasted. Success could have been as counterproductive as failure in that it might have diverted them from a sense of immediacy about their mission: self-sufficiency might have led to self-containment” (117). Regardless of whether it would have been successful or not, this idea of an agrarian commune took hold in China and became an important legacy that others would follow. During this transformative period in China’s history, Russian Narodnism, the Japanese New Village Movement, and, of course, Marxism all entered China and were appropriated by intellectuals as responses to China’s social problems. The legacy can also be seen in Zhang Jingsheng’s The Organizational Method of an Aesthetic Society (美 的社会组织法, 1926), in which Zhang proposed a utopian version of Beijing that would be based on self-sufficiency, cooperatives and the “combination of town-country system” (城乡合一制) as an answer to the question of “how to ruralize a city and how to urbanize a village.”4 Other trajectories in the rural reform movement included the social engagement of intellectuals such as Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Liang Shuming (1893–1988), James Yen and many more who felt compelled to change Chinese society.5 They not only wrote critical essays advocating social change but actively went into society to try to effect that change. He Baogang (2004) and Timothy Cheek (2016) both argue that the social commitment of and central position bestowed on contemporary Chinese intellectuals should be seen as part of a Confucian legacy. Perhaps, for our artists-intellectuals, it is in the desire to carve out a space for equality through their rural ventures that they go against the hierarchical Confucian legacy. For the time being, however, we shall leave Confucius behind and delve into Ou Ning’s notebook and idea behind the Bishan Commune.

The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia Bishan Commune:  How to Start Your Own Utopia, the notebook that sketches Ou Ning’s utopian proposal, was created for an exhibition in Shanghai in 2010,6 when the notebook company Moleskine invited artists, opinion shapers and other thinkers to fill out and exhibit their version

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of the well-known black, moleskin notebook. The content of the notebook is thus carefully curated by Ou Ning for public exhibition purposes and is thus just as much an art object as it is a notebook. Nevertheless, the notebook format provides the utopia with the freedom to be unfinished and incomplete—it is notes and explorations of another world. The handwritten notes and the many clippings, quotes and drawings offer a kind of authenticity through their incoherent and contradictory references to the American Declaration of Independence, anarchism and traditional Chinese clothing. The notebook is a graphic, montage piece in which comments, thoughts and shorter accounts from Ou Ning’s travels to Bishan prior to establishing the commune are intertwined with drawings, clippings, color-­ coded text, handwritten notes, pictures, and quotes (Fig. 3.2). It presents his visions of a utopian community that aims at organizing a rural intelligentsia and changing the conditions for the people living in the rural areas of China. The imagined ancestors of this utopian community, depicted

Fig. 3.2  Pictures and notes from Ou Ning’s visit to Bishan in 2008

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side by side in an ancestral temple in the pages of the notebook, are anarchist Peter Kropotkin and advocate for mass education and rural reconstruction James Yen. Kropotkin’s anarchism and the idea of mutual aid are presented as the basis for the utopian community and its economy. Members will be recruited via the internet; there will be no leaders; and decisions will be taken at common meetings using consensus democracy. It is not a finalized utopia, but an explorative, inconsistent, reference-­ saturated draft showing artist’s communities such as NSK State (Neue Slowenishe Kunst State) (Fig.  3.3.), alternative communities such as Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen (Fig. 3.4),7 architectural movements of the twentieth century and anarchism, collectivity, rurality, and the relationship between city and countryside. The utopia was to unfold in the village of Bishan, a traditional Hui-style architecture village in the foothills of the Yellow Mountain range in southern Anhui Province.

Fig. 3.3  Ou Ning’s drawing of NSK’s emblem

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Fig. 3.4  The common law of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark

Before venturing further into Ou Ning’s utopian imaginary, I present a quote from the notebook that can be understood as the statement of purpose for the commune. It is somewhat surprising that the villagers of Bishan are not mentioned in the list of groups of people to be mobilized by the commune, but I return to this ambiguity at a later point. What is clear, though, is that Bishan Commune seeks to organize artists and intellectuals in rural China: The Bishan Commune, based in Anhui Province, Yi County, Bishan Village, invites artists, writers, architects, designers, intellectuals, and environmental and social activists to initiate experiments in co-living, bringing into focus the relationship between city and countryside and the oppressive reality of globalized capital, advocating the philosophies of ruralism and anarchism, and calling attention to the loss of farmland, the agricultural crisis, the disempowerment of the peasantry, the degradation of tradition, and other concrete problems. (Ou 2015a [2010]: 44)

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The notebook opens with a clipping of the cover of Erwin Strauss’ How to Start Your Own Country (1979) as a signifier of some of the intentions behind this utopian research. Ou Ning has in the title of the notebook replaced “country” with “utopia,” a choice that is connected to his disregard of institutions and actions associated with the nation: occupying a territory, proprietary rights, government, defense systems and so forth. Furthermore, the term utopia is connected to the seductive power of imagining another world. In an interview by 0086 Magazine following the exhibition of the notebook in 2010,8 Ou Ning states: “I don’t like that phrase—a ‘nation’ or ‘country’ is connected to a system of government. The Bishan Commune can recruit members, doesn’t have a territory, doesn’t have a system of government, doesn’t have a leader. It’s different from a country, it’s a utopia” (0086 zazhi 2015 [2010]: 14). Ou Ning uses the loanword wutuobang, which is derived from Thomas More’s word for the famous island of Utopia. He could have chosen one of the more traditional, Chinese variants/words for utopia, but instead he deliberately points toward utopia in Thomas More’s sense of the word, thus, to some extent, liberating his project from the Chinese utopian tradition. In adopting “utopia,” Ou is making a political statement just as much as he is critiquing the way the world is currently organized. In Herbert Marcuse’s understanding, the term utopia has been co-opted by the critics of utopia, and therefore the prefiguration of another world has been reduced to an unattainable illusion. And it is against these critics that Marcuse’s reference to “the end of utopia” as the place and time when utopia has been realized should be understood (Marcuse 1970). Marcuse is not dismissing the notion of utopia by referring to its end, but rather proposing another understanding of utopia and suggesting that it is within and through these utopian imaginaries that another world can become possible. I think it is more fruitful to understand Ou Ning’s Bishan Commune within Marcuse’s terms, than to reduce Ou Ning’s utopian visions to the impossible.

Communal Emblems In the notebook, the rural utopia is also visually represented by the commune emblem (社微) designed by Ou Ning’s friends and long-term collaborators Xiaoma  +  Chengzi (Fig.  3.5). Green, yellow and light red dominate the color spectrum of the drawing of the emblem in the notebook, with green symbolizing agriculture and light red symbolizing

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knowledge. Fields, mountains and agricultural produce are depicted around a book. Beneath the book is a banner on which is written “Bishan Commune” in both English and Chinese and then the letters “R+A” (ruralism + anarchism) referring to James Yen’s rural reconstruction movement (RRM) and Kropotkin’s anarchist idea of mutual aid.9 Taken together the book and the agricultural produce become symbols of the abolition of the division between mental and manual labor. In its shape and imagery, the emblem exudes a socialist aesthetic. Missing from the emblem are any urban characteristics, which do not seem to have a place in the notebook. The drawing version of the emblem has connotations of a far away, rural utopia, where individuals forming a close-knit community are the ideal. Several of the components that Xiaoma and Chengzi suggested as part of the emblem in some of the initial drafts, such as the wheel, the star and the lines emitted by the star, were rejected by Ou Ning. As Ou Ning

Fig. 3.5  Draft of the Bishan Commune emblem by Xiaoma and Chengzi

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comments in the notebook: “The sickle, hatchet, torch, and red flag are overused symbols, and I’m not particularly fond of many of their previous connotations” (Ou 2015a [2010]: 34). Though Ou Ning never says it directly, the underlying logic of the emblem is its rejection of the state socialist symbols of the near past. The actual Bishan Commune emblem (Fig. 3.6), which was used in the later promotion of the project, resembles the sketch in the notebook, but with a few important alterations: the light red has been taken over by bright yellow and green; the letters “R+A” have been deleted; Bishan village has been added in the background; and a water buffalo and a row of electricity transmission towers is placed on a field in the center. The introduction of these new elements also introduces new relationships and signifies new connections. The power towers seem to symbolize the connection to the world outside the village—the wired relationship between not only the rural and the urban, but also the local and the global. In this final version of the emblem, the surrounding society seems part of the project, in contrast to the rural isolation of the drawn version in the notebook. The new dominant colors of green and yellow, moreover, suggest an institution with an ecological orientation. The final emblem thus represents a rejection of the Maoist-era discursive legacy and socialist imagery and a connection to larger movements of ecology and sustainability.

Communal Architecture The architecture of the Bishan Commune points to another trajectory, though one no less connected to the surrounding world and to the history of utopian imaginaries. However, as Ou Ning writes, “these utopias all feature cities, and few people have imagined what the future of architecture of the rural areas might look like” (Ou 2015a [2010]: 39). For the notebook, Ou Ning asked the animator Ray Lei to draft sketches for the buildings that would make up the Bishan Commune. Through a variety of drawings, the architecture is depicted as organic, integrated with the surroundings and made of local materials such as bamboo or rattan. It is flexible, moveable and adjustable, able to respond to the surrounding landscape and changing family and community structures. There are sketches for common houses, concert halls, a drive-in-theatre for tractors, family homes and roof-covered market places (Fig. 3.7). In the notebook, the drawings of the Bishan Commune structures are juxtaposed to previous architectural utopias from which Ou Ning draws inspiration or reacts

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Fig. 3.6  The final Bishan Commune emblem, designed by Xiaoma and Chengzi

against. As an example of the latter, the notebook includes sketches from Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) which depict an urban scene that comes across as gray, standardized and machine-like not catering to the changing needs of individuals, families or communities (Fig.  3.8). Peter Cook’s Plug-in City (1964), by contrast, seems to have informed some of the drawings for the Bishan architecture in a more positive way through its ideas of the adjustable and flexible (Ou 2015a [2010]: 42). There are drawings of several different architectural styles, but neither Ou Ning nor Ray Lei attempt to explicitly favor one over the other. In his review of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land Project,10 Ou Ning critiques the use of the architecture present at the site outside of Chiang

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Fig. 3.7  Ray Lei’s drafts for the architecture of the Bishan Commune—here drive-in theatre for tractors and concert hall

Mai: “The point was not the style of the buildings or whether they were consistent with the rural scenery and local culture, the point was the artists never showed up unless there was some specific activity. Ordinarily the buildings remained unoccupied, which made them the same as Archigram’s designs: a kind of ‘fiction’” (Ou 2011). Instead of this empty “fiction,” Ou Ning proposes an aesthetic of use, locality and comfort through an integrated architecture that is related specifically to its use-value; houses are for people to live in and should be adjusted according to the ongoing changes in the ways they lead their lives. The architectural sketches for the Bishan Commune make reference to European and North American urban architectural utopias of the early and mid-twentieth century and maintain little connection to the renowned Ming and Qing dynasty Hui architecture already present in Bishan Village. Though it is not shown in the architectural drawings, written accounts in the notebook describe a

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Fig. 3.8  Le Corbusier, La Ville Radiuese, drafts for the Bishan Commune common spaces

growing practice in the village of preserving the Hui houses for tourism purposes (Ou 2015a [2010]: 31–32). In addition, since 2011 the practice of the Bishan Commune in Bishan Village has focused on how to preserve the existing architecture in a useful and artistic manner, rather than on creating architecture specifically for the Bishan Commune.

The Anarchist Proposition One of the predominant strains of the notebook is that of anarchism, especially as understood through Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid, in particular contemporary anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber’s interpretation of Kropotkin’s ideas. However, as I show in the following section, Kropotkin’s ideas had significant influence on the idea and imagining of the rural commune in twentieth-century China. As Scalapino and

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Yu (1961: 9) put it, “certainly no single work had greater influence upon the young Chinese anarchists than Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.” The Chinese anarchists in the 1910s were the first modern intellectuals in China to turn their attention to the countryside (Dirlik 1991: 237). In Arif Dirlik’s words, they “took the lead in carrying revolution to the countryside,” and it is possible that some of the first communist attempts to create rural communes—for example, Peng Pai’s Hailufeng Soviet in Guangdong (1927–1928)—were initiated “under anarchist inspiration” (Dirlik 1991: 238). During the early years of the twentieth century and before Marxism gained momentum in China, Kropotkin’s thinking, the Russian Narodnism (Populism or to-the-people-ism), and Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism (through the Japanese New Village Movement) were major influences on rural, communal thinking among Chinese radicals at the time (Dirlik 1991; Krebs 1998; Hayford 1990). The vocabulary of anarchism soon dominated the radical political discourse of the early days of the twentieth century, and Kropotkin’s concept of “mutual aid” (互助) was one of the buzzwords in intellectual and radical circles (Dirlik 1991: 26; Scalapino and Yu 1961: 9). As many other intellectuals of the time, rural reconstruction advocate Liang Shuming also engaged with anarchist ideas. In an early text, Liang Shuming praised Kropotkin as “a person of virtue and preeminence” and argued that his view of humankind was essentially moral, with the understanding that moral was not something “special” (特 别) or “mysterious” (神秘) obtained by the few, but a “basic instinctual faculty of humankind” (Liang 1999 [1921]: 88).11 Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid is based on his rejection of Darwinism and on the belief in “human solidarity” as the ultimate self-regulating tool of human co-existence. As such Kropotkin’s ideas of anarchist social organization and rural anarchist communes came to play a large part in the development of Chinese political thinking in the twentieth century. However, by the end of the 1920s, internal and external problems in China had eliminated much of the anarchist activism, and socialism seemed to gain sway as the dominant political ideology of the radicals of the time. The position of anarchism at the turn of the twentieth century and its influence on Chinese political thinking throughout the Maoist-era are, however, beyond dispute. The ideas of anarchism can also be understood to have migrated into the foundational thinking of the Mass Education Movement (MEM) and what became known as the Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) during the 1930s. Although explicit references to anarchism largely disappeared during the following decade, many of the

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ideas remained at an implicit level: the Paris Commune legacy in Maoist China, calls for going to the countryside, the idea of mutual aid and discussions of communal prospects (Yang 1999: 37). The inclusion of Kropotkin’s anarchism in Ou Ning’s utopia can be read as a continuation of these rural practices in China at the beginning of the twentieth century in an attempt to build on a radical politics disconnected from the visions of the CCP. Ou Ning, like many thinkers and researchers of anarchism before him, rejects the supposedly violent nature of anarchism: “As one of the most important human philosophical and political ideas of the past two centuries, anarchism has an extraordinarily diverse and complex spectrum, with the advocacy of violence accounting for only a small faction” (Ou 2015c [2012]: 7). “Such acts of violence committed by individuals,” he adds, “led society to reject anarchism and equate it with violence, chaos, nihilism, moral degeneracy and opposition to existing governments, rather than the separation from government and practice of autonomy that was advocated by original anarchism” (7). Violence as a means to overthrow a regime is not an idea to which Ou Ning subscribes. He does not want to replace a system, but to create a community outside of any previous or present systems. Ou Ning is distancing himself from any government, but at the same time claims that he does not view the present (Chinese) government as “an enemy” (0086 zazhi 2015 [2010]: 15). His understanding of anarchism should also be understood in light of the oppressive nature of the Chinese political system—it is simply not possible for him to argue for violent aggression or the abolition of the state. For Ou Ning, anarchism means diversity and the unhindered sharing of information and resources and less any vision of a revolutionized society. In Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, Jesse Cohn (2014: 4) examines various aesthetic expressions of anarchist politics “in the form of ‘culture of resistance”; he argues that separation from government and moderate stance of anarchism is characteristic of the anarchist position in a non-anarchist world. The German anarchist and pacifist Gustav Landauer in 1907 called this phenomenon “community through separation” (in Cohn 2014: 20), which can, in Cohn’ words, be understood in the following way: “Landauer’s conception of anarchism as exodus, striving toward ‘community’ precisely ‘through separation,’ illuminates the purpose of anarchist resistance culture: to enable us, while remaining within the world of domination and hierarchy, to escape from it” (20). In other words, it is the possible action or position to take in a non-anarchist

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world; a way of coping. Cohn continues: “Anarchist resistance culture is a way of living in transit through this desert…. Anarchist resistance is not mainly defended by its end; it is a middle, a means” (21). Through this prism, anarchism is primarily understood as action and is connected to the ways in which the anarchist practices her or his life. In Ou Ning’s case, this is perhaps not the whole story. Ou Ning is not talking about “separation” from the state, but rather co-existence: “Anarchism is not an enemy of the government; rather it provides an alternative to the present government…. My idea now leans toward a place far away from mainstream society, to create an ideal society myself. Providing an alternative to the existing society; that is not opposition, but co-existence” (0086 zazhi 2015 [2010]: 15). Nor is Ou Ning proposing a utopia of rural withdrawal; rather, he argues for a renewed relationship between urban and rural areas.

The Paris Commune and Other Communes An earlier inspiration for the dream of the agrarian commune and the renewed relationship between the rural and the urban areas is the Paris Commune of 1871 and the communards’ concern with dissolving the division of labor and, as such, the bourgeois division between the rural and the urban, the peasant and the city dweller, and between manual and mental labor (Ross 2015: 5). One of the things Ou Ning is quick to clarify is that the Bishan Commune name is not a reference to the Maoist-era People’s Communes (人民公社), but an homage to the anarchist-communist Paris Commune of 1871 (0086 zazhi 2015 [2010]: 14). The People’s Communes drastically reorganized village life from 1958 until they were dismantled and replaced by townships around 1983. To avoid the association with the People’s Communes, and perhaps forgetting that the Paris Commune was one of the initial sources of inspiration for the People’s Communes, the name for the Bishan Commune is not gongshe (commune), but gongtongti (共同体), which can be translated as community. It is through this transgressive notion of community that the Bishan Commune is best understood. As Maurice Meisner (1989), Arif Dirlik (1991), Wang Hui (2006), and others have shown (Jiang 2010), the Paris Commune has a long trajectory in China and has been a significant shaping factor in Chinese political thought throughout the twentieth century: in 1926 and 1927, there were major celebrations of the Commune in Guangzhou, Wuhan and other cities (Jiang 2010: 46); it was one of the initial inspirations of the People’s

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Commune movement (Meisner 1989: 96); it informed and inspired the Cultural Revolution (Zheng 2010; Wang 2006) and is manifested in, for example, the short-lived Shanghai People’s Commune that began in January 1967 (Jiang 2010). In the post-Maoist era, the Paris Commune thinking was revitalized during the Democracy Movement of 1978–1979 (Dirlik 1991: 293). Through the 1990s and 2000s, the Commune  has been commemorated yearly in essays on the Chinese internet forum Utopia (乌有之乡), known for their promotion of Maoist philosophy. As for how the Paris Commune as political idea and anarchism as a political theory reached China in the first place, Arif Dirlik describes how the idea of anarchism primarily appeared in China as “the principle underlying the Paris Commune of 1871” (Dirlik 1991: 292). This connection between anarchism and the Paris Commune continues to hold today. Meisner, by contrast, is no less direct in his assertion that the Paris Commune reached China through Marx’s writings on the matter, and was popularized through Mao Zedong’s continuous mention of Marx’ thinking on the Paris Commune and the abolishment of the division of labor as its main task (Meisner 1989: 96). “Nothing,” Meisner writes, “was more frequently reproduced in the Maoist literature of the Great Leap than the passage in The German Ideology where Marx condemned the despotism of occupational specialization in existing society” (96). While early anarchists perhaps brought the idea of the commune to China, it was Mao Zedong and his followers who popularized and realized the idea on a larger scale. We can conclude that the Paris Commune, as direct reference or foundational idea, reached China through many channels, each with its own purpose, and continues to roam the alternative, underground communities of China today. As Kristin Ross shows in her 2015 book, Communal Luxury, on the political imaginary of the Paris Commune, the Commune has had a significant place in the shaping of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century political thinking in Europe and beyond, especially through prominent thinkers such as Marx and the anarchist communists Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus (Ross 2015: 104–106). Inspired by Russian Narodnism through the advocacy of intellectual Nikolay Chernyshevsky as well as their direct experiences of the Paris Commune, Marx and Kropotkin not only turned toward the rural commune as a way of organizing a postrevolution society, but also as a means to reach that society. In a letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx wrote, as paraphrased by Kristin Ross (2015: 83) “that non-capitalist societies might indeed move directly to socialism on the basis of indigenous communal forms,” though it would depend on the

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historical context. The commune is thus not only the end, it is also (perhaps) the means to reach that end, though Marx would likely not have agreed with this course of development later in his career. In his 1897 text on the Paris Commune, the anarchist-communist Elisée Reclus described the commune in the following words: “Everywhere the word ‘commune’ was understood in the largest sense, as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other.”12 In this sense, the commune is a transgressive way of life, a “new humanity,” and by practicing this new humanity, it comes to be. It is conceived of as the freedom for the individual to form horizontal communities across any conceivable abstract and concrete boundaries. The communal aspect of the Bishan Commune should be understood in its broadest sense more as an equal and alternative way of being and living together and less as a reference to a specific practice, group of people, or place: “The Bishan Commune can recruit members, doesn’t have a territory, doesn’t have a system of government, doesn’t have a leader. It’s different from a country, it’s a utopia” (0086 zazhi 2015 [2010]: 14). Ou Ning’s statement echoes the words of Kropotkin: “For us, ‘Commune’ no longer means a territorial agglomeration, it is rather a generic name, a synonym for the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social Commune will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity” (Kropotkin 2006 [1879–1882]). This does not imply a disregard for local, lived experience, but rather that the communal utopia represented an attempt to dissolve the divisions between the local and the international, the urban and the rural, theory and practice, and studying and working (Ross 2015: 5). The local is important to the extent that it is the space where the practice is taking place, where it can connect freely to other communes, associations or groups around the world. The same outlook can be detected throughout the Bishan Commune notebook; Ou Ning imagines the reconnection between urban and rural, mental and physical labor, local and global, as well as proposes the free association of radical intellectuals around a set of common goals. In line with the Paris Commune, the trajectory of the Bishan Commune is thus not so much one concerned with a withdrawal into a secluded rural area as it is with a reorganization and recalibration of life as it is lived in urban as well as rural areas.

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School of Tillers and the Well-field System A very early Chinese example of an egalitarian, anarchist utopian community working to abolish the division of labor is the School of Tillers (农家). The agriculturalists associated with the School of Tillers, who worshipped the early sage king Shennong, were portrayed in literary sources as “working in the fields, along with everyone else, and consulting with everyone else when any decision had to be reached” (Rosemont 2004). Of the very few extant written sources describing the School of Tillers is the discussion between an adherent of the school, Xu Xing, and the Chinese philosopher Mencius. In the text, the two explicitly discuss “division of labor.” For Mencius, division of labor is how societal order is upheld, whereas Xu Xing argues for the abolition of the division of labor and an egalitarian relationship in which the ruler shares the duties of farming with his subjects (Graham 1979: 66). Ou Ning was made aware of the School of Tillers through reading Debt: The First 5000 Years, in which David Graeber (2011: 237) describes the School of Tillers as “an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who set out to create egalitarian communities in the cracks and fissures between states.” The utopian and sometimes also egalitarian tradition of rural living is thus as firmly rooted in the Chinese literary and philosophical landscapes as it has been in its European and North American counterparts. While Ou Ning does not mention the School of Tillers in the notebook, it later became an important point of reference for the Bishan Commune, demonstrated in the opening of a gallery, library and research space he called “School of Tillers” in Bishan Village. Ou Ning also makes reference to the ancient Chinese well-field system (井田制度) that divided the land of a given village into eight private lots and one public lot. The public lot would be worked on by the private owners, with its produce going to the aristocracy (Ou 2014d). However, Ou Ning’s updated version depicts the well-field system as “similar to the notion of co-housing in some intentional communities in Western countries today. The jingtianzhi [well-field system] was a kind of practical utopia founded by our Chinese ancestors, and has influenced generations of Chinese dreamers, including practitioners in rural areas” (Ou 2014d). The point in referencing these rural traditions and systems seems not to be to serve as models of imitation, but to garner legitimacy from indigenous historical precedent, as if Ou Ning is searching for some kind of lost anarchist sentiments latent in Chinese rural culture, and with these in hand argue for a change in contemporary rural society.

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To understand how the past is used in Ou Ning’s thinking, I draw attention to a quote from William Morris, written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871: “To those that have the hearts to understand, this tale of the past is a parable of the days to come” (in Ross 2015: 75). To this Kristin Ross adds: “A parable is not about going backwards or reversing time but about opening it up—opening up the web of possibilities” (75). References to the past and to earlier communes are, thus, more explorations for future possibilities than blueprints of how the future should look. Ou Ning constructs his own Bishan Commune narrative around several significant historical reference points, but they do not provide any clear-cut blueprint for how to act or to put ideas into practice; as such, they function as signals of certain intellectual allegiances. The same applies to his use of references to historical and contemporary rural reconstruction movements. As discussed earlier, the ideas of anarchism and the Paris Commune constitute ideological basis for the Bishan Commune and shape it into a somewhat coherent idea, whereas the role of the historical RRM, treated in the following section, is perhaps more complex. If the Paris Commune is the utopian ideal Ou Ning is pointing toward, then rural reconstruction is presented as the means to get there, both for Ou and his like-minded collaborators and the Bishan villagers as well.

Rural Reconstruction and the Relationship to Local Community Ou Ning’s notebook primarily refers to James Yen as representative of the Rural Reconstruction Movement, giving Liang Shuming only a minor role. Similarly,  neither the Anhui-native Tao Xingzhi nor Bishan’s own Wang Dazhi have a place in the notebook. However, in a text from 2012 entitled “The Tillers: Rural Reconstruction in China,” Ou Ning (2014c: 557–558) gives a more comprehensive account of the historical and contemporary rural reconstruction movements and places the practice of the established Bishan Commune within this framework, though with certain reservations. Throughout the 1920s, initial steps were taken toward what during the 1930s became a nationwide, loosely organized movement focused on education, resulting in the emergence of schools, projects, experiments and formalized institutes aimed at changing the Chinese countryside from within (Hayford 1990: x). During the 1930s, some of the backward

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character ascribed to the Chinese countryside changed, and “the vast countryside became a resource, and the village no longer China’s shame but China’s hope” (111). This is a change that can be connected to the immediate success and spread of the RRM. The successes of the movement, however, ended somewhat abruptly with the Japanese invasion in the summer of 1937 and rural reconstruction projects largely disappeared, though some of the ideas associated with them, such as the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, survived in the hands of those about to gain power: The Chinese Communist Party. The historical RRM was headed by famous intellectuals of the time, such as Liang Shuming, James Yen, Anhui native Tao Xingzhi and his most famous student Wang Dazhi, who was born and raised in Bishan Village. Wang Dazhi became known for his Xin’an Traveling Group (新安 旅行团), which beginning in 1935, “travelled more than 2500 km through more than 22 provinces, cities and autonomous regions” (Hu 2011), where they screened films in remote villages, organized public rallies, held drama and dance performances, sang songs, and made artworks. The RRM, and Wang Dazhi’s presence in Bishan as a famous native son, extend their legitimacy to Bishan Commune, where artists enter the village in the name of rural reconstruction. James Yen and Liang Shuming are by far the most well-known members of the RRM. After graduating from Yale University, Yen went to France in 1918 to join the international YMCA and their War Work Council (Hayford 1990: 22). His involvement with Chinese workers in France thoroughly shaped his views and practices in the later Mass Education and Rural Reconstruction movements: My experience with my people proved to me that they were not only eager students but able students … What they lacked was not brains but opportunity. So for the first time in my ignorant intellectual life, I discovered the tremendous power of these simple … coolies…. I began to revolt against the … Chinese intellectuals who looked down upon these common people of our country. Instead of despising coolies, I began to despise those intellectuals who had the education, and the wealthy who had the money. Later I decided to go challenge them to share their education, their wealth, their life with these coolies. (in Hayford 1990: 30)

Yen was not only concerned with education as a means of transforming the peasants, but with giving them equal opportunities. His thinking was

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based on the notion of radical equality—in other words, he operated from the understanding that it was not lack of capability but lack of equal opportunity that created the misalignment of the peasant and the intellectual. Ou Ning elaborates on his views of the continued relevance of Yen’s practice: “this adds to my firm belief in the importance of James Yen’s idea of mass education. Eradicating the ‘four great maladies’ that afflict the Chinese masses, particularly peasants—‘poverty, ignorance, disease and misgovernment’— is still an important obligation, necessary for improving society” (Ou 2015a [2010]: 25). The historical RRM and its precursor, the mass education movement, were intended to “let the villagers transform the revolutionary intellectuals, and let the revolutionary intellectuals transform the villagers,” as Liang Shuming described his project (in Han 2005: 145). In the same manner, James Yen expected the intellectual to work together with the peasants. In Han Xiaorong’s words, Yen “pointed out that since the educated people do not labor and the laborers do not read, every Chinese is ‘half a man’” (145). The RRM very much began as a project of providing education to peasants who had not previously had opportunities for it. The RRM is famous in China not only as a historical movement from before the communist revolution, but also through the reinvigoration of the movement in the 1990s in the wake of economic reforms. As such it has had significant influence on contemporary rural development policies. The reinvigoration of the RRM can largely be ascribed to the academic Wen Tiejun, who raised “the three rural issues”: peasants (农民), villages (农村), and rural production (农业). Wen started several rural reconstruction projects in the Chinese countryside. His followers and students, such as He Huili and Qiu Jiansheng, have continued his practice along with other activists and academics inspired by Wen’s urgent call for action in the rural areas, in what he has termed The New Rural Reconstruction Movement (新乡村建设运动, or NRRM). The Chinese Government generally supports rural reconstruction projects or other community building projects, partly because it is preoccupied with social coherence as a prerequisite for social stability (Thøgersen 2009: 15). There are several examples of the state-­initiated rural reconstruction projects, though one can also draw attention to plenty of examples of rural reconstruction projects that have lost government support. Given the rather unpredictable Chinese political environment, it is possible that Ou Ning places the Bishan Commune in the slipstream of the NRRM as a way of adding official legitimacy to his project. By rooting the project in an era not associated

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with communist rule, Ou Ning provides a narrative of rural engagement that goes beyond the radical leftist politics of the Maoist-era. In Ou Ning’s notebook, Kropotkin and James Yen are placed together in an ancestral shrine, a “pantheon” (先贤祠), as representatives of anarchism and ruralism, respectively, and as forefathers of the Bishan Commune (Fig. 3.9). The ancestry sketches a possible future trajectory, provides a historical foundation and a legitimate way of approaching the past. Ancestral temples are very common in the Huizhou area,13 as they are in other parts of China, so framing these forefathers of anarchism and ruralism in this way adds to the legitimacy of the project and makes it easier for the locals to place them within their own cultural context. Ou Ning has chosen specific historical events and movements (anarchism and rural reconstruction) in order to construct a specific commune identity. “Because we want to recruit members, we need rituals…. Our

Fig. 3.9  The Pantheon of the Bishan Commune, James Yen and Peter Kropotkin

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rituals also include establishing special holidays [e.g. James Yen Memorial Day]. All of these rituals are needed to create a coherent identity” (Ou 2015a [2010]: 17). In this sense, Ou Ning is following the guidelines of how to construct community identity through a “foundational myth.” According to Ou Ning, the construction of the rituals tied to the founding fathers creates the basis for a community identity, which is needed in order to maintain social coherence. More than attesting to the creation of a coherent foundational myth and identity for the Bishan Commune, the use of recognizable markers such as forefathers, harvest festivals and rituals attests to Ou Ning’s attempt to legitimize his project by embracing customs traditionally present in the Chinese countryside. The historical rural reconstruction advocates were preoccupied with creating a new Chinese man, and doing so through education. Though Ou Ning refers intensively to the RRM and continues to do so throughout the lifespan of the Bishan project, his project is more focused on spatial reconfigurations and the organization of a rural intelligentsia than on educational initiatives.14 In the notebook, Ou Ning lays out James Yen’s nine teachings as the basic principles for practice in the Bishan Commune (Ou 2015a [2010]: 45): . Go to the people 1 2. Live among the people 3. Learn from the people 4. Plan with the people 5. Start with what they know 6. Build on what they have 7. Not to conform but to transform 8. Not a piecemeal but an integrated approach 9. Not relief but release According to Yen’s nine teachings, the people seem to be the rural populace and villagers are the subjects in need of transformation. Ou Ning begins with the assumption of the backward character of the peasant class and not how it could actively contribute in the process of rural reconstruction or how he himself or other intellectuals might need to transform themselves. What Ou Ning perhaps misses in his interpretation of James Yen’s thinking is Yen’s critique of the intelligentsia and beliefs that rural

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education and reconstruction can transform the intellectual as well (Hayford 1990: 30). In the Commune’s statement of purpose in the notebook, the local villagers are not included in the list of groups of people that should be mobilized by the commune: The Bishan Commune, based in Anhui Province, Yi County, Bishan Village, invites artists, writers, architects, designers, intellectuals, and environmental and social activists to initiate experiments in co-living, bringing into focus the relationship between city and countryside and the oppressive reality of globalized capital, advocating the philosophies of ruralism and anarchism, and calling attention to the loss of farmland, the agricultural crisis, the disempowerment of the peasantry, the degradation of tradition, and other concrete problems. (Ou 2015a [2010]: 44)

The villagers are clearly a gaping hole in the logic of the notebook. The people Ou Ning wants to organize seem to be a broad spectrum of intellectuals and artists engaged in rural issues, and the peasants are largely absent. The relationship between the villagers and the self-proclaimed intellectuals in rural China is potentially problematic, and Ou Ning’s ideas in theory (and perhaps also in practice) seem closer to ideas of rural retreat, as for example the New Village Movement,15 than they are to the RRM and the communist peasant uprisings. The latter relied heavily on local forces for the organization of armed rebellion and sustained development and education. It seems evident from the Bishan Commune statement of purpose that the problems of the countryside are to be solved by an urban intelligentsia turned rural. The notebook leaves unclear whether Ou Ning intended to build the utopian commune with mobilized artists and intellectuals or by working closely with the people of Bishan and build a utopia together with them. That said, the strongest and clearest voice in the notebook is the proposition for an agrarian utopia of the like-minded and a commune centered on the organization of a radical rural intelligentsia.

Regrouping Opposition With his ideas of forming anarchist, alternative communities and his critique of urbanization-led development in China, Ou Ning operates on the edge of what the Chinese government allows. Despite its history of informing the early communist movement, anarchism is a politically

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sensitive topic in China today. Like so many other Chinese artists, Ou Ning is aware of how to at once frame his words so that they do not directly counter the official government line and to push the limits from inside the system. The critique of the Chinese government in Ou Ning’s notebook is very subtle, and anarchism is presented as a peaceful, non-violent movement centered on the formation of communities. Readers of the notebook have to uncover his criticism of the government through Ou Ning’s use of quotes, references and allusions to the constant conflicts with state authorities. This is especially clear in the “List of Self-proclaimed Emperors in China after 1949,” compiled by the renowned dissident author Liao Yiwu and transcribed by Ou Ning’s into the pages of the notebook (Ou 2015a [2010]: 24–25). The list describes various more or less fruitful attempts by peasants around China at establishing their own countries and empires within China’s territory. E.g. the Sage Dynasty (圣朝国, 1980–1982) founded by Lin Wenyong in the Daba Mountains, The Great China Buddhist Kingdom (大中华佛国 1947–1953 and 1983) in Hunan founded by Shi Dingwu or Ten Thousand Followers Heavenly Kingdom (万顺天国, 1990–1992) in western Henan founded by Li Chengfu (ibid.) (Fig.  3.9). All these were suppressed by the government, some more quickly than others. As Ou Ning comments on Liao’s list: “In my view, these Chinese peasants pursuing imperial ambitions weren’t idiots; they were just reacting to a hopeless situation” (I25). In other words, he makes visible the suppression and harsh circumstances peasants lived under, but only alludes to people or forces that create these circumstances. Other allusions to clashes with the Chinese authorities are apparent in Ou Ning’s mapping in the notebook of the different communities he has previously been engaged with—communities related to filmmaking, poetry, sound, architecture and so forth (Fig. 3.10). His notes reveal that some of the communities—for example, the independent film and video organization U-théque (1999–2003) and the music and culture group New Masses (1994–1995)16—were banned by the authorities. In this way, Ou Ning makes clear that the government suppresses not only rural communities but also other organized communities, peasant kingdoms, and artistic communities. Without Ou Ning saying so explicitly, these suppressed communities serve to remind the reader of the Chinese government’s systematic oppression of unwanted communities, of the “new humanity” that resists the state, and of the challenges to come. In addition to a disheartening reminder of the exercise of state control, the mapping of Ou

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Fig. 3.10  Ou Ning’s mapping of the communities he has initiated and engaged in over time

Ning’s communities is also a testament to the continuous emergence of new communities. When one project is closed down or banned by the authorities, Ou Ning regroups, starts a new project and continues to organize, plan events and publish books and journals that propose different ways of being, thinking and building community in China. The mapping shows both a prolonged struggle with the state and how his ideas and networks have remained, despite state repression. Despite of its rural orientation, the Bishan Commune should be seen as a continuation of the many communities and organizations Ou Ning has established over the years with colleagues and friends. More than anything, Ou Ning’s larger project, as his history of forming societies of many kinds attests to, has been to organize and promote a creative, critically thinking intelligentsia. With the Bishan Commune, he extends this project into rural China, but this does not mean he has turned his back on the

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intellectual project, simply that he has tried to include the rural populace in his intellectual practice. In the notebook, Ou Ning expresses discomfort of visual references to a Maoist-era legacy, the Chinese activist and punk musician Mai Dian similarly explains how mention of terms associated with collectivism and the Maoist-era causes controversy. However, contrary to Ou Ning, Mai Dian chooses to reappropriate the vocabulary instead of abandoning it altogether. Of the establishment of an autonomous youth center on the outskirts of Wuhan, Mai Dian writes: The peculiar name “autonomous” caused controversy within a matter of seconds. So much so that it was almost abandoned from the start. Because names associated with “collectivism” have plagued our history with bad memories it is very easy to cause misunderstandings. And these can be quite destructive…. We have our own history you see. In particular, that one catastrophic utopia where our songs of imagination went wild. In any event, the moment we entered into an autonomous “dynamic” the meaning of our actions, our collective form, and various other social relations contained in our new unfettered imagination all had to go through serious introspection and redesign. Otherwise we would continue to be suspended in the memories of past totalitarianism and enslavement with no way forward. (Mai 2010)

As touched upon in this passage, the communist legacy poses something of a conundrum for Chinese artists who wish to participate in collective, socially engaged activism. But as the progression in the quote reveals, the group of people that Mai Dian mentions manages to co-opt the word “autonomous” and invest it with their own actions, actions not associated with the history of collectivism in China. While Mai Dian and his group choose to retain the word “autonomy,” Ou Ning replaces the word “commune” (gongshe) with the word “community” (gongtongti) in order to avoid Maoist-era associations. Ou Ning and Mai Dian thus represent different discursive tactics of distancing themselves from the Maoist-era legacy, one of avoidance and one of reappropriation. Mao Chenyu,17 a filmmaker based in a village in Hunan Province who runs Paddy Film Farm as a filmmaking and rice growing collective, is more direct in his complete rejection of both the Maoist-era and the current leadership of China. In his experimental documentary/feature film I Have What? Chinese Peasants War: Rhetoric to Justice (拥有—新中国农民战争: 修辞学 的争议, 2013), he poignantly and pointedly displays the wrongdoings of

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local Chinese authorities. The film is a genre-defying montage piece consisting of Mao Chenyu’s own philosophical statements, historical investigations of Mao Zedong’s report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan in March 1927, contemporary footage of forced evictions and demolitions, and people setting themselves on fire, juxtaposed with footage of local villagers answering questions about revolution, religion, the party, superstition, and more, all of which is accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of famous western pop songs and Chinese revolutionary classics. The film presents a harsh critique of the Maoist era, in particular the destruction of rural traditions and the People’s Communes as slave-like factories. Compared to the Bishan Commune, Paddy Film Farm presents a more radical response to government oppression, past and present. In the film, Mao Chenyu shows clips of what he deems to be the direct abuse of power on the side of the local government and then asks the peasants of his home village why they do not rebel against this abuse. Furthermore, he argues for the full implementation of a free market in China. For him, the market, free will and free association of people are the keys to a just society: “Free will is the basis for all common sense” (Mao 2013: 1.37.54 min). What ties these three projects together is their rejection of the Maoist era, their critique of contemporary society, a more or less subtle critique of the Chinese government, and a Trojan Horse strategy of changing rural China from within. As Mao Chenyu proclaims in the opening scene of his film I Have What?: “From tonight on, I have made up my mind to be a mole that doesn’t have to see the light. Dig up the ground, masticate roots. I want to gnaw down a giant tree” (Mao 2013: 00.50–01.02 min).

Connecting the Chinese Village For the Paris Commune as for the Bishan Commune, international connections play a considerable role, and not only as providers of resources for local areas, but also within an ideological framework. Ou Ning constructs the imagined Bishan Commune identity around a multiplicity of global references, thus connecting the project to a multiplicity of intellectual and art circuit discourses within China and around the world. Besides anarchism and rural reconstruction, Ou Ning connects with and researches a variety of historical and contemporary back-to-the-land movements (The Whole Earth Catalog, Walden by Thoreau, Walden II by B. F. Skinner, News From Nowhere by William Morris, and Robert Owen’s grand scale agrarian utopia New Harmony) (Ou 2015b); architectural

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movements (Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, Archigram) (Ou 2015a [2010]); alternative monetary circuits (Ithaca Hours, Hometown Money) (Ou 2014a); co-housing projects (Earthsong Eco-Neighborhood, Rainbow Valley Community)18; anarchist communities (Freetown Christiania, Tiqqun in Tarnac, Metelkova Autonomous Culture Center) (Ou 2014b, c); and rural art projects (Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land Project, Echigo-Tsumari Art Field) (Ou 2011). The Bishan Commune is primarily situated in China through the RRM and Ou Ning’s connections with Chinese art and film circles, but most of the other references would be recognizable within international art contexts as socially engaged art or activist projects in design, politics or architecture. The notebook adopts what might be called an internationalist mode thinking and connecting. These rural projects, the Bishan Commune in particular, maintain an international and urban outlook, in terms of thinking, in terms of the networks they evoke, and in terms of the places their rural art projects are exhibited. The history of going-to-the-land movements and their urban connections is centered on the relationship to the locals, as well as to the overarching political movements of the time. However, what many of these movements did was provide connections between sometimes backward rural areas and developing urban areas. The urbanites venturing into rural China, now as well as in the past, became the urban connection (as holders of certain resources), and this connection was in many cases utilized as such by parties on either side of the divide. The trajectory of these going-­ to-­ the-land movements thus tells the story of continued attempts to realign the city and the countryside even if their practice was not grounded in Marxist or anarchist thinking. Many of these urbanized youth, either during the 1920s and 1930s or during the later campaigns of sending educated youth to the countryside, became crucial resources for an otherwise underprivileged rural population. In the 1920s and 1930s most of the intellectuals behind these rural calls and communal dreams had themselves some sort of rural background or close rural connection, the more famous examples being Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Peng Pai, Liu Shifu, James Yen, and the brothers Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren (Han 2005: 121). Through these individuals the village, the commune and the countryside gained momentum and shaped the radical thinking of China during the beginning of the twentieth century. But besides shaping the thinking, their presence in the rural areas had more far reaching consequences. Stig Thøgersen discusses the urban

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intellectuals involved in the historical rural reconstruction movement of the 1930s and how they “brought with them ambitions of generating social change through the establishment of village schools, and they introduced new teaching methods, new technologies, and new lifestyles” (Thøgersen 2002: 3). As such they introduced urban, even international modes of thinking into Chinese villages all over the country. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 17 million urban youth were sent to live in the countryside, in a call for them to learn from the peasants as part of the sent-down-youth movement (知识青年上山下乡). Michel Bonnin argues that part of the reason to send such huge numbers of youth to the countryside was the need to remove young, rebellious surplus labor from urban areas in the aftermath of the mobilization of the People’s Liberation Army against the Red Guard youth in September 1967 (Bonnin 2013). In this sense the rural became a container of unwanted urban elements, but understood from the point of view of the rural, these unwanted urban elements also in some cases became the crucial connections to urban resources and networks, that a given village had previously been precluded from. Honig and Zhao’s (2015) study shows that the sent-down youth were instrumental in negotiating for goods and other necessary materials and sometimes used these goods to barter with local residents and thus earn some sort of side income. The young urban intellectuals venturing into rural China became the urban connections (as holders of certain resources) and these connections were in many cases utilized as such by parties on either side of the divide. The rural-urban relationship as a string of connections and resources is also something that characterizes the artists engaged in projects in contemporary rural China. The majority of the projects are initiated by people who are themselves born and raised in the countryside, but have after some time in the city returned to either their home village or to another rural area. These features apply to Ou Ning (Bishan Commune, Anhui), Li Mu (Qiuzhuang Project, Zhejiang), Mao Chenyu (Paddy Films Farm, Hunan), Weng Fen (Chaile Travel, Hainan) and Jin Le (Shijiezi Art Museum, Gansu). In other cases the agents are old enough to have experienced a period as “sent-down-youth” during the Cultural Revolution as is the case for Wu Wenguang (Folk Memory Documentary Project, Beijing), or they are born and raised in urban areas, such as Sun Jun (Green Cross, Haotang Village), although urban born rural activists and intellectuals seem to represent the exemption, at least thus far. In other words, the majority of these artists and intellectuals are so-called

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returnees. However, more than being returnees in some sense or other, they represent an urban connection and as such bring certain resources and networks with them to rural China. These socially engaged art projects in rural China become what we could call unstable Trojan Horses as they bring in urban resources and connections to introduce a socially engaged practice in the Chinese countryside, but, as Chap. 4 will show, these urban resources and connections are not always used in the way the artists had intended.

Leaping into Utopia The Bishan Commune was in its imaginary form intended to be a community based on principles of anarchism, rural reconstruction, consensus-­ based democracy and co-living. Ou Ning imagined a community of likeminded people populating the Chinese countryside and thereby rebalancing the relationship between rural and urban areas. As the examples mentioned in the notebook show, many of Ou Ning’s ideas took root in European and North-American traditions of collective and anarchist autonomous living and built on his own experiences of forming communities. While Ou Ning presents Kropotkin and James Yen as forefathers of the commune, I argue that it is more productive to expand the ancestral legacy of the commune to include the European and North-American traditions of architectural utopias, traditions of collective and autonomous ways of living, and the recurring fascination with Paris Commune thought. Furthermore, Ou Ning places his practice firmly within a global art discourse of social engagement. As discussed earlier, Ou Ning’s diagram of the various communities he helped initiate over the years mentions the state’s role in shutting some of them down, but it also shows how Ou Ning has continuously set up new constellations for sharing knowledge and critically discussing China’s present circumstances. Given the crackdown on dissent under Xi Jinping, the Bishan Commune may be the last such community Ou Ning is able to set up in China. On different levels throughout the lifecycle of the Bishan Commune—as notebook and as practice—Ou Ning managed to lay bare the power and control of the CCP: the diagram, in particular, displays the struggles with an authoritarian power, and the notebook, in general, offers a critique of the current circumstances in the Chinese countryside by presenting an alternative utopian vision. However, the struggle displayed in the notebook and articulated through Ou Ning’s anarchism is not framed

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as a violent one; rather, it is a struggle for the right to analyze and define the problems of Chinese society (and the world in general) and—not least—the right to imagine and propose other worlds. Though they all reject the political behavior and discourse of the Maoist era, Ou Ning, Mai Dian and Mao Chenyu represent different reactions to and strategies toward the Maoist legacy. Mai Dian argues for a position of renewed engagement with the discourses of collectivity and autonomy, infusing them with new meaning. Ou Ning, on the other hand, rejects any association with the Maoist legacy, as seen in his avoidance of the Chinese term for “commune.” Furthermore, Ou Ning looks beyond the Maoist era for his historic reference points, grounding his ideas instead in the anarchist tradition of rural engagement. Mao Chenyu goes a step further in his rejection of the Maoist legacy: he is not only more direct in his critique of CCP malfeasance during the both the Maoist era and more recent times, his solution is a free market beyond state control. Not surprisingly, putting the utopia into practice was very different from the utopia as sketched in the notebook. The Bishan Commune project changed substantially in the meeting with local villagers and officials of various levels and as it engaged in a dynamic process of figuring out how to develop Bishan together with the villagers. Despite the gap between its theory and the undertakings in the village, the notebook remains as an overarching utopian ideal, one that circulates in art and activist circles of China and the world and that continues to seek to change the relationship between rural and urban China.

Notes 1. This chapter is a slightly revised version of an article published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Journal, see Corlin (2019). 2. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “autonomy” (自治) in the sense of self-governance as it is used within the vocabulary of anarchism. Ou Ning refers to “autonomy” as a core principle of anarchism, citing a way of life not governed by leaders and where “everyone shares ‘horizontal power’ (all people participating together in shared decisions) and engaged in ‘direct action’ (spontaneous individual participation with no need for representation” (Ou 2015c [2012]: 7). 3. In his 2013 installation “Travelling to the Wonderland,” Chinese artist Xu Bing was inspired by the idea of 桃花源. But whereas Xu Bing in his installation points toward the obvious fictionality of the 桃花源, its powerful and mythical qualities, Ou Ning underscores the real possibility of setting

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up a utopia in rural China (0086 zazhi 2010). In other words, Ou Ning is not trying to mirror society’s flaws in the perfect picture of the utopia, but rather present an actual alternative to contemporary society. 4. Zhang Jingsheng, cited in Rocha (2017: 144). Rocha (2017) presents a thorough and interesting analysis of Zhang Jingsheng’s utopian propositions. 5. Liang Shuming was famous for his active engagement in the Rural Reconstruction Movement (Alitto 1986; Thøgersen 2002). Zhou Zuoren was well-known for his attempts to introduce the Japanese New Village Movement into China. Zhou visited the New Village in the southern part of Japan in 1920 and returned to China to promote its ideas and publish several articles on the movement encouraging similar experiments in China (Zhou 2001). Zhou was inspired by their practice of combining manual farm labor with a continuous education and development of the self, but, as Dirlik (1991: 193) writes: “unlike the other work-study groups, the major goal of ‘new villages’ as conceived by Zhou Zuoren was not study, but the promotion of labor (except for those with special talents). What makes the New Village idea most interesting, however, was an agrarian impulse that lay at its origins: ‘new villages’ were conceived as agrarian communes that would carry the anarchist message into the countryside.” Dirlik views the New Village Movement and Zhou Zuoren’s advocacy for it more as a bearer of the anarchist message, as a way to bring transformation to the rural areas, than as actually functioning work-study communities that would abolish the division of labor. 6. The exhibition, called Detour, included around 50 designers, artists and architects. 7. During Ou Ning’s three-week artist-in-residence stay in Denmark, August–September 2014, he also did a week-long researcher-in-residence stay at Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen. The stay resulted in an article on Christiania (Ou 2014b). 8. The 0086 Magazine interview was the first interview and text about Bishan Commune that did not come from Ou Ning. 9. Ruralism is described by Ou Ning as the opposite of urbanism and covers an awareness of rural issues such as the importance of rural society and agricultural industries in a sustainable society and as part of the public debate (0086 zazhi 2015 [2010]: 17). 10. Rirkrit Tiravanija is particularly well known for his “relational aesthetics,” a term first coined by art historian Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Initiated by Tiravanija in 1998, the Land Project occupies a piece of land in the countryside outside of Chiang Mai. Danish art collective SUPERFLEX has been involved in the Land Project, installing a biogas system intended to provide energy for the houses.

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11. Besides being involved in the Rural Reconstruction Movement, Liang Shuming was a well-known Confucian scholar. Nevertheless, Yang Feirong (1999) argues that anarchist thinking and Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid in particular influenced Liang Shuming’s thinking on rural issues. In his thesis on rural reconstruction, Liang “stressed the voluntary initiative, opposed the intervention of outside coming brute force, maintained a distance to the government and wanted to use etiquette and customs instead of law to maintain order,” and further added “this is no doubt related to Confucian thinking, but it seems that it is also related to his earlier acceptance of Kropotkin” (Yang 1999: 37). 12. Translated by and quoted in Ross (2015: 5) from La Revue blanche, 1871: Enquête sur la Commune. 13. These temples are often neglected and dilapidated. There are funds from the local governments to restore a smaller portion of these forefather temples, though these funds often do little more than keep the building afloat, since they do not provide funds for daily maintenance. 14. Sinologist Adele Kurek’s MA-thesis explores the spatial aspect of the Bishan Project, see Kurek (2015). 15. New Village Movement was influenced by the Japanese White Birch group and which Zhou Zuoren was actively advocating in China (see Zhou 2001). Li Dazhao dismissed the New Village movement as “too local and reclusive to form public opinion on the national scale needed to produce basic solutions. The village was not a source of power, but a recipient of uplift” (in Hayford 1990: 54). Zhou Zuoren himself ends up turning against the New Village Movement: “While I still respect my friends in the Japanese New Villages, I feel that aside from indulging in one’s personal tastes, this kind of life doesn’t have much effect in changing the world” (in Hayford 1990: 55). The specific New Village communal strategy was thus viewed as too secluded and withdrawn in its practice, because it did not fulfill the dreams of transforming society. 16. U-théque and New Masses were based in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. According to Ou Ning, U-théque had more than 800 members (Ou 2015a [2010]: 28). 17. Mao Chenyu’s projects include Paddy Films (稻电影), which produces and distributes a wide range of experimental films on rural China, and Paddy Films Farm (稻电影农场), a later offspring of Paddy Films initiated in 2012 that consists of equal parts farming and filmmaking, as well as several other projects such as 2nd Text Laboratory (第三文本实验室), The Elaphurus Davidianus Institute (麋鹿学社) and the magazine Film Auteur (电影作者) that he edits together with other renowned filmmakers such as Wu Wenguang, Zhang Xianmin, Qiu Jiongjiong and others. 18. See the magazine V-ECO, of which Ou Ning was editor-in-chief, and that includes a special issue on intentional communities in New Zealand.

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Literature 0086 zazhi. 2010. “0086杂志关于Moleskine項目“碧山共同体”的采访” (0086 Magazine Interview Concerning the Moleskine Project “Bishan Commune”). ULR (Last accessed December 19, 2018): https://site.douban.com/106528/ widget/notes/195202/note/100004889/ 0086 zazhi. 2015 [2010]. “Interview about the Notebook Project Bishan Commune.” In Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Trs. Mai Corlin, Austin Woerner, and Jeff Crossby. Aarhus: Ovo Press and Antipyrine, 13–18. Alitto, Guy S. 1986. The Last Confucian: Liang Shuming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonnin, Michel. 2013. The Lost Generation: The Rustification of China’s Educated Youth (1968–1980). Translated by Krystyna Horko. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel. Cheek, Timothy. 2016. The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, Jesse. 2014. Underground Passages—Anarchist Resistance Culture 1848–2011. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Corlin, Mai. 2019. “Imagining Utopia: Reading Ou Ning’s The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Journal, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 1–46. Dirlik, Arif. 1991. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House. Graham, A. C. 1979. “The ‘Nung-chia School of the Tillers’ and the Origins of Peasant Utopianism in China.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 42, no. 1: 66–100. Han, Xiaorong. 2005. Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900–1949. New York: State University of New York Press. Hayford, Charles W. 1990. To the People—James Yen and Village China. New York: Columbia University Press. He Baogang. 2004. “Chinese Intellectuals Facing the Challenges of the New Century.” In Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, eds., Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market. London: Routledge Curzon, 263–279. Honig, Emily and Xiaojian Zhao. 2015. “Sent-down Youth and Rural Economic Development in Maoist China.” The China Quarterly, vol. 222 (June): 499–521. Hu Shibin 胡时滨. 2011. “新安旅行团的创建者汪达之” (Wang Dazhi, the founder of the Xin’an Traveling Group). URL (accessed December 19, 2018): http://www.yxzuoxie.com/zx/zx/ShowInfo.asp?InfoID=104 Jiang Hongsheng. 2010. The Paris Commune in Shanghai: The Masses, the State, and Dynamics of “Continuous Revolution”. PhD diss. Durham, NC: Duke University.

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Krebs, Edward S. 1998. Shifu: Soul of Chinese Anarchism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kropotkin, Peter. 2006 [1879–1882]. “The Commune.” URL (accessed December 19, 2018): http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/words/wordso-farebeltoc.html Kurek, Adele. 2015. The Bishan Project: Cultural Production and Place Re-construction in Rural China. MA thesis. Toronto: University of Toronto. Liang Shuming 梁漱溟. 1999 [1921]. 东西文化及其哲学 (Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies). Beijing: Commercial Press. Mai Dian 麥巔. 2010. “The Alternative Education of a Chinese Punk.” The essay is available in English translation here: http://libcom.org/library/ punk%E2%80%99s-basic-alternative-education Mao Chenyu 毛晨雨. 2013. “拥有, 新中国农民战争: 修辞学的正义” (I have What? Chinese Peasant War: Rhetoric to Justice). Paddy Films, 103 minutes. Marcuse, Herbert. 1970. “The End of Utopia.” In Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia. Trs. J.  Shapiro and Shierry M.  Weber. Boston: Beacon Press, 62–82. Marx, Karl. 1970 [1871]. The Civil War in France. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Meisner, Maurice. 1989. “Marx, Mao and Deng on the Division of Labor in History.” In Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 79–116. Ou Ning 欧宁. 2010. “碧山共同体: 如何创建自己的乌托邦” (Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia). URL (Last accessed December 19, 2018): http://jccxt163.blog.163.com/blog/static/13847836120119934749844 Ou Ning. 2011. “Agrarian Utopia: An Artistic Experiment in Chiang Mai.” Translated by Shumei Roan. Chutzpah, no. 1: 3–13. Ou Ning. 2014a. “Questions and Answers between Ou Ning and the Sønderholm Collective.” Tr. Mai Corlin. In Mai Corlin, Rasmus Graff, and Mathias Kokholm, eds., Forespørgsler i Jord og Kunst Sønderholm (Inquiries in Earth and Art). Aarhus: Antipyrine and OVO Press. Ou Ning. 2014b. “克里斯钦自由城的生与死” (The Life and Death of Freetown Christiania). URL (Last accessed December 19, 2018): https://thestandnews. com/culture/%E5%85%8B%E9%87%8C%E6%96%AF%E6%AC%BD%E8%87% AA%E7%94%B1%E5%9F%8E%E7%9A%84%E7%94%9F%E8%8 8%87%E6%AD%BB/ Ou Ning. 2014c. “Rural Reconstruction in China.” In Ou Ning, ed., The South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale. Tr. ChinaFile. n.p.: China Youth Press, 550–559. Ou Ning. 2014d. “Crisis and Experiment of the Commons: The New Rural Reconstruction Movement in China.” In Timo Takatalo and Crisis Mirror, eds., Crisis Mirror. Copenhagen: n.p.

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Ou Ning. 2015a [2010]. Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Eds. Mai Corlin and Rasmus Graff. Trs. Mai Corlin and Austin Woerner. Aarhus: Antipyrine and OVO Press. Ou Ning. 2015b. “Back to the Land: Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune.” URL (Last accessed December 19, 2018): http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz =MjM5NjI0Mzc0OQ==&mid=205414408&idx=1&sn=44a4ce894a52579 e16224dda117cfc40 &scene=5&srcid=1005jiNzpowwnNu0nZtZiej5#rd Ou Ning. 2015c [2012]. “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik.” In Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Trs. Mai Corlin, Austin Woerner, and Jeff Crossby. Aarhus: OVO Press and Antipyrine, 7–11. Rocha, Leon Antonio. 2017. “A Utopian Garden City: Zhang Jingsheng’s ‘Beautiful Beijing’.” In Toby Lincoln and Xu Tao, eds., The Habitable City in China—Urban History in the Twentieth Century. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 143–167. Rosemont, Henry Jr. 2004. “Chinese Socio-Political Ideals.” In Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe, eds., A Companion to World Philosophies. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ross, Kristin. 2015. Communal Luxury—The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso. Scalapino, Robert A. and George T. Yu. 1961. The Chinese Anarchist Movement. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies. Thøgersen, Stig. 2002. A County of Culture—Twentieth-Century China Seen from the Village Schools of Zouping, Shandong. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thøgersen, Stig. 2009. “Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle: The State, Villagers and Social Activists in Rural Reconstruction Projects.” Journal of Current Chinese 38, no. 4: 9–33. Wang Hui. 2006. “Depoliticized Politics, Multiple Components of Hegemony, and the Eclipse of the Sixties.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 6: 683–700. Yang Feirong 杨菲容. 1999. “梁漱溟与社会主义” (Liang Shuming and Socialism). Shehuizhuyi yanjiu, no. 5: 37–39. Zhang Jingsheng 张竞生. 1926. 美的社会组织法 (The Organizational Method of an Aesthetic Society). Beijing: Zhongguo yinshu. Zheng Qian 郑谦. 2010. “文化的革命的巴黎公社情绪” (The Cultural Revolution and its Paris Commune Complex). URL (Last accessed December 19, 2018): http://dangshi.people.com.cn/GB/138903/138911/11026944.html Zhou Zuoren 周作人. 2001. 艺术与生活: 周作人自编文集 (Art and Life: A Collection of Zhou Zuoren’s Writings). Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu.

CHAPTER 4

The Great Leap into Utopia

It is one thing to be active in relation to a dead thing, the voiceless material that can be molded and formed as one wishes, and another thing to be active in relation to someone else’s living, autonomous consciousness. (Bakhtin 1984, 285)

The Bishan Commune began officially with the big bang of a large-scale art festival: the first Bishan Harvestival in 2011.1 Chinese artists from near and far were invited to participate along with filmmakers, rural activists, designers and intellectuals. The leap into the countryside thus took the form of an art event that intended to revive rural culture. This chapter looks at the first couple of years of the Bishan Project and what happened when busses full of urban artists arrived in Bishan Village. There are two intertwined tropes within this chapter: one is exploring the art festival model as it unfolded in Bishan, while the other delves into how the Bishan Project changed its vocabulary and practice to accommodate the wishes of local residents and authorities for a project more focused on economic development. Curator and art critic Carol Yinghua Lu asserts that “for the Chinese art community itself the government has proven to be a promising promoter, offering much-needed platforms and opportunities. […] What is not discussed, however, is how this relationship shapes the direction of artistic practice” (Lu 2016). In this chapter, I show how collaboration and negotiations with the local government had a significant influence on how the project developed and also how the local government was © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_4

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quick to use the Bishan Project name in its promotion of a local tourist industry. As I will show below, the intention of entering the village and transforming living conditions in the countryside was perhaps a more difficult venture than Ou Ning and Zuo Jing had foreseen. This chapter thus unfolds how the imagined community, as presented in Chap. 3, met the people of Bishan, and explores what happened to the relationship between the artists, the villagers and the local authorities as the big machine of an art festival landed in a rural village. In the introduction to this book, I argued that in order to research these types of socially engaged interventions you have to be present on a long term basis: the necessity of the field-based approach, as Grant Kester has termed it. I was, however, not present during the two Harvestivals, and can, in this light, say little about the actual intersubjective interactions going on in Bishan at that time. The reason I bring in this period of the Bishan Project is that it signifies a very different approach than the later years of the Bishan Project and because the texts coming from Ou Ning during that period reveal a significant shift in terminology towards a focus on economic development. This shift relates to both pressure from the local government and conversations with local villagers, as well as to the recognition of the fact that the economic funding for the project in Bishan is to be found within the art world system. Through interviews with participating artists and villagers, and documentary footage from the Harvestivals and media reports, I was able to at least get a sense of how the artists, activists and villagers understood the situation and piece together a trajectory of the first years of the Bishan Commune from the vantage point of the large-scale art festival.

The Art Festival as Rural Economic Development Large scale, site-specific art festivals in rural areas are not a new phenomenon, though they have been linked to a general tendency around the world to apply “creative people” in urban as well as rural development schemes. The discourse is often referred to in the terms of Richard Florida (2002) and his ideas of the creative class, ideas that were quickly overtaken by local governments across the world, using artists as front runners in redevelopment of certain areas. Rural art festivals and tourism development are in many cases used as engines of economic development in seemingly backwards areas. The idea of creative industries as locomotives for urban and peri-urban development came to China in late 2004 (Keane

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2009). Creative industries as models to drive the economy forward have come on the radar of Chinese local governments, as numerous examples of “creative zones” around the country attest to (Keane 2013).2 The support for creative minds in the countryside and on the urban fringe is noticeable in many places in China (Keane and Wen 2013). There are contemporary artists’ communities located on the fringes of almost all of the larger Chinese cities, including Songzhuang and Caochangdi on the outskirts of Beijing to name a few of the more famous ones. Some of these art communities are endorsed or were even launched by local governments for development purposes, while others emerged on the basis of a need for cheap studio space.3 Much of the writing concerning these creative industries and creative clusters has been focused on urban or peri-urban environments. However, I suggest that a perhaps belated version of the same cultural and economic agenda can be found in some areas of the Chinese countryside. As with the Bishan Project, we see the same tendency of local, rural power holders being aware of the potential economic benefits of the arrival of “creative people.” Meaning that projects like the Bishan Commune, to some extent, are sanctioned and supported financially by local authorities, since they understand them as opportunities to develop and attract capital and resources to a likely poor and underdeveloped area. The authorities in Yi County have been quick to use the Bishan Commune name in attracting developers and investors to the area (Yu Qiang in Sun and Thompson 2013, 5.26 min). However, it is also this very act that can cause tension between artists and local officials in Bishan, since a reorganization of society by consensus democracy and non-capitalist principles does not go well with many local officials’ and party members’ striving for economic prosperity and power in a non-democratic structure. This tension is an underlying current of the entire Bishan Project as I will demonstrate in this and subsequent chapters. The Bishan Harvestival and the Bishan Project in itself are arguably not large-scale industries. Yet, the Harvestival did, during the two years it ran, attract an overwhelming number of people,4 and attracted media coverage that have been important to spread the ideas of the Bishan Project. Located in the heart of Huizhou, Bishan Village is in close proximity to famous tourist destinations such as the Yellow Mountain and the UNESCO World Heritage villages Hongcun and Xidi. Tourism, along with tea production, are the main trades of the county, though Bishan with its many newly built houses and consequently lack of rural, architectural authenticity has not

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seen many of these tourists. There are in other words already a large amount of domestic and international tourists in the area, and the quest for the local village officials (and the artists) is to lure tourists away from the beaten path and into Bishan. The residual effects of the Harvestival also included more business to the few hotels and restaurants in Bishan. During a 2012 meeting with the villagers and Ou Ning that took place at the Buffalo Institute (Ou Ning’s home), local Biyang township party secretary Yu Qiang remarked: “If it weren’t for these kinds of cultural influences, Bishan would be no different than other villages. […] Five years ago, who could have imagined that Bishan would be as lively as it is today? It is their arrival, and the Bishan Project, that brought Bishan some subtle changes” (Sun and Thompson 2013, 5.26 min). Yu Qiang refers to the changes Bishan has undergone since the arrival of the artists and it is clear that Yu Qiang has a different conception of what these “cultural influences” and “subtle changes” are good for: “When people visit Yixian County, the top choice is Bishan. Only those with refined taste and cultivated interests choose to come to Bishan. They are here to experience authentic country life and enjoy our beautiful rural scenery. They don’t want to go to Xidi and Hongcun, why? Because it is too commercialized and too noisy there” (ibid., 9.19 min.). What Yu Qiang hints at is the fact that Bishan is perceived to be different because there are artists and intellectuals present, and they provide a high-end vibe that attracts tourists with larger wallets. In other words, while the local government displays support for the Bishan Project, it seems that they are not quite in tune in terms of the goals of the project. The establishment of the Bishan Bookstore and the associated café in 2014 also boosted the making of Bishan into a high-class tourist destination. Ou Ning’s original intention of the bookstore, however, had more to do with creating a communal space for the villagers and a place where books would occupy a central position, than with creating a base for a dawning tourist industry. I will not delve deeper into the workings of the Bishan Bookstore just yet, but a short anecdote will serve to illustrate how small-town officials are attracted to this kind of “cultural” industry: During the summer of 2014 an eager delegation of officials from a mountain minority district in Tonglu County in Zhejiang Province came to visit the bookstore and sign a deal with the Bishan Bookstore owner Qian Xiaohua (a good friend of Ou Ning from Nanjing).5 They wanted to copy the Bishan Bookstore model: authorities provided the traditional house and paid for the costs of restoration, and now it serves as a space for

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tourists to relax, drink tea/coffee and read books, but also, and more importantly, as a place that in itself will attract more tourists. As they had seen it work in Bishan, they hoped it would also work in their village.6 In other words, these officials could see the point in attracting precisely this type of “industry,” and were even willing to pay for it.7 The local officials from Bishan and Tonglu are aware that the presence of artists and intellectuals can promote economic development of a village, not only in the sense of providing direct businesses opportunities, but also because artists bring urban recourses and attract attention and capital from outside investors and wealthy tourists. Unlike Ou Ning’s initial visions for the Bishan Harvestival, for many rural arts festivals, the development of the local economy is not just a by-­ product of their concerns of community building and preservation of local traditions. Rather, tourism and economic development is presented as part of overall festival package. The internationally renowned large-scale art Triennial in rural Japan, Echigo-Tsumari Art Field is a good example in this regard. As Yeung and Char write in their analysis of the Triennial, two primary artistic goals are pursued, namely “attractiveness as a tourist destination, and local relations” (Yeung and Char 2018, 130). “Without visitors,” Yeung and Char write, “the effect of the Triennale will be greatly diminished” (ibid.). In a description of the Triennale, Echigo-Tsumari praises their own specific and unique model for community building: “This approach to community building through culture and art has drawn great attention as a type of ‘creative city,’ and Echigo-Tsumari has influenced other community building projects in Tokushima, Ibaraki, Niigata, Osaka, and Setouchi.”8 The idea of the art festival as community building and as bringing back “vitality” is thus proliferating in an era when biennials and triennials pop-up like mushrooms in every corner of the world. For Ou Ning, the Harvestivals were set up in an attempt to create an annual ritual, with which the villagers and artists could identify, and which would create a sense of coherence and revive village culture (0086 Magazine 2015 [2010], 16). The local government, however, also saw the economic benefits of such endeavors and thus allowed for the Bishan Project to establish itself in Bishan Village and carry out its art festivals. Another renowned example of a rural arts project is The Land Project, which is located on a field outside of Chiang Mai in Thailand. Ou Ning visited the project prior to establishing the Bishan Commune in real life as part of a research trip. The Land Project was initiated in 1998 by the artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert. On the website the

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project states that “the land […] was the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement.[…] The land was to be cultivated as an open space, though with certain intentions towards community, towards discussions and towards experimentation in other fields of thoughts” (The Land Foundation, n.d.). The project as such consists of various artists and architects typically building some kind of architectural structure on the site of The Land Foundation.9 The art critic (and director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing) Philip Tinari critiques the intention of the Land Project to learn from the farmers as an “all-too-familiar modality of young intellectuals in the fields. […] Really at stake here is nothing smaller, and nothing bigger, than the difference between a mobile intelligentsia and an agricultural proletariat, tradition and modernity, impact and response” (Tinari 2011). While the intentions of learning from the farmers are unnecessarily belittled, there is certainly a point to be made regarding the mobile intelligentsia (or artist) and the not so mobile rural farmer. The question of the mobile intelligentsia and its relationship to a presumably immobile rural farmer easily becomes one of inequality of temporality, of possibility and of power. In a review of the Land Project, Ou Ning notices the lack of locals participating in the project: Perhaps people would visit from the cities by cars or trains only when a new project was being put on. […] No one lived here, which came as a considerable surprise to me. I saw no local farmers in the audience either. I asked Kamin why that was, and he said that the next village was far away from here. Later I again went through all the information and photos he’d given me, and again caught no glimpse of any farmers in their past activities. (Ou 2011)

Ou Ning is in other words very concerned about the lack of engagement with the local community and several times mentions the temporality of the project, “the point was [that] the artists never showed up unless there was some specific activity.” There is no long-term, permanent engagement other than the left-behind structures that nobody maintains. To Ou Ning that makes the project seem like some sort of architectural fiction in a “closed and isolated ‘Utopia’”, furthermore adding that “its main body of action [is] limited to artists and art students, with only a weak connection to the communities around it” (ibid.). Tinari and Ou Ning seem concerned with the lack of engagement with surrounding community and the

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lack of a long-term commitment to staying at the place. Tinari and Ou Ning’s evaluations of the Land Project were based on a one-day reconnaissance trip. As I, with the aid of Grant Kester, argued in the introduction, long-term socially engaged art projects are best researched and critiqued on the basis of long-term field research. In the case of the Land Project, a field-based approach could have revealed the more subtle relations and dialogical exchanges between the local communities and someone like Lertchaiprasert or the art students, and what these relations mean to the people involved. While Lertchaiprasert spent time at the Land Project regularly and the artists producing the structures typically spent a few days or more on site (Birnbaum 2005), Tinari and Ou were only at the project for a short period of time. Ou Ning’s observations are, however, important since they reveal some of Ou Ning’s intentions prior to establishing his project in Bishan. Through his critique of the Land Project as an isolated enclave, Ou Ning reveals what he intends to pursue in Bishan. Perhaps his observations at The Land Project should have warned him of the pitfalls and difficulties of moving into an unknown community in rural China, something that became evident when the machinery of the art festival landed in Bishan Village.

Rural Reconstruction and Anarchism Besides the attractive resources and connections of the urban artists, another way to get past the gates of the village committee has been to tie the projects to the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM). The villagers and local cadres recognize the term rural reconstruction, both because of Wen Tiejun’s NRRM and because of the salience of the 1930s’ rural reconstruction leaders Y.  C. James Yen and Liang Shuming (and Bishan’s own Wang Dazhi).10 Rural reconstruction has since the beginning of the 1990s been part of the official discourse on development of the rural areas and the term thus provides an aura to the project as government sanctioned. Placing your rural art project within the NRRM can thus alleviate the project from being seen as potentially politically sensitive, to being seen as in compliance with the authorities. Rural reconstruction thus in this context carries much the same function as the art world connection, which I discussed in Chap. 2. That is, it appears to be politically neutral. The Trojan Horse of the Bishan Project thus also arrives in rural China packaged as a rural reconstruction project.

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In the case of the Bishan Project, the ideas associated with rural reconstruction are accompanied by Kropotkin’s anarchist ideas of mutual aid. The juxtaposition of the Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) in China and the anarchist ideas of Kropotkin provides an opportunity to address several spheres at once—the Chinese academic and political sphere as well as international art circuits where anarchism and revolutionary thinking have been stated components of many art or activist projects throughout the years (Kapur 2012, Raunig 2007, Bishop 2012). I do not wish to suggest that Ou Ning might be insincere in his pursuit of anarchism, I only wish to point towards the fact that the terminology in itself can serve as an entry ticket into a specific recognizable discourse—an art world exhibition system that is intrigued by self-organization, autonomy, collectivity and the socially engaged art project.11 The anarchist ideas are, however, reserved for the intellectuals and the art audience. Ou Ning has several times underscored that they refrain from discussing anarchism with the villagers and local authorities. “There is no point in mentioning it [anarchism] to rural cadres or villagers if the best educated people in the cities don’t even understand it” (Ou 2012). In other words, when the Bishan Commune advocates for the project in the vicinity of Bishan Village, they focus on rural reconstruction aspects, a concept much more digestible to local villagers and authorities.12 In a sense, the Bishan Project distills their messages to fit the audience they are addressing—out of necessity and convenience. As you will see as we enter the first Bishan Harvestival, the anarchist ideas of autonomy and mutual aid remain as overarching visions, but are placed in less prominent positions when it comes to practice during the first couple of years in Bishan Village.

2011: Bishan Harvestival The first Bishan Harvestival in 2011 consisted of a wide range of activities and exhibitions and served as the launch of the Bishan Commune. Mutual aid, historical investigations, rural reconstruction and local handicrafts were the themes of the Harvestival. For the Harvestival Ou Ning and Zuo Jing invited artists, academics, rural reconstruction activists and the like to Bishan to participate in seminars on rural reconstruction and mutual aid, screen films, participate in poetry workshops, conduct investigations of Anhui’s historical development, and develop products by designers inspired by local handicraft traditions and art exhibitions.13 The Bishan Harvestival attracted considerable attention and attendance, and was

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Fig. 4.1  Ou Ning speaking at the opening of the first Bishan Harvestival in 2011, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune

packed to the brim with people. Local villagers from nearby villages, domestic tourists as well as artists, activists and academics from China and abroad constituted the visiting crowds (Fig. 4.1). The exhibition catalog of the first Bishan Harvestival is a rather simple A5-sized paperback booklet with black and white photos, adorned by Xiaoma and Chengzi’s illustrations. They were also the ones to sketch the national emblem for the notebook, and the style of the emblem seeps into the rest of the material of the catalog. The text is light green on a light yellow background that resembles the cream color of the classic Moleskine notebook pages. In the catalog are references to and pictures from the notebook, and the catalog can in this sense be seen as a prolongation of the notebook presenting the basic ideas of the Bishan Commune utopia. In the catalog Ou Ning and Zuo Jing explain the project: “Our plan to build the “Bishan Community” in Bishan Village stems from a critical position of worries concerning agricultural traditions and excessive urbanization. It is about the intelligentsia leaving the city and returning to the rural areas (离城返乡) […] In light of the oppressive reality (迫人现实) of contemporary rural society, we are determined to put this plan into

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practice” (Ou and Zuo 2011, 5). The problems of the countryside are thus during the first Harvestival referred to in very broad terms and in very much the same manner as in the notebook. The solution is to revive the rural community through art and culture and for an urban intelligentsia to move to the countryside and mend the “oppressive reality” of the rural areas. Bishan Village is presented mostly in the light of its long and vivid history, retelling the history of the Wang-clan’s establishment of the village from around 600 AD. As for today, the catalog text explains, the Wang-­ clan still lives in the village and grows the fields and raises silkworms and leads a traditional life (Ou and Zuo 2011, 11). While the Wang-clan still dominates Bishan—the majority of the inhabitants are surnamed Wang ( 汪)—village life is under the surface of the romantic, traditional rural landscape very different from what it once was. Today, primarily elderly people and small children populate the village. Flipping through the catalog it is clear that there is a focus on redesigning and reusing traditional local furniture and materials. The artworks display attempts at combining the traditional with the modern, the rural with the urban, farming with study. Examples are Zhang Lei’s reinterpretation of a small Chinese stool (凳子), Hu Zhongquan’s new take on the iconographic charcoal barrel (火桶) for keeping you warm during the cold Huizhou winter or Xiaoma and Chengzi’s redesigning of the traditional Yi County Yuding-cake molds adorned with the characters for the Bishan Harvestival and ornamented with farm produce, mulberry leaves and unspecified books. Other examples from the Harvestival art works would be Qiu Anxiong’s bamboo chair inspired by the shape of a triquetra or Hsieh Ying-chun’s new village architecture that seems inspired by the flexibility and compactness of the container terminal (ibid., 47). The art pieces in this sense revolve around a reconfiguration of rural everyday life, symbolized by the new products the artists bring to the fore. Some of the artists, such as Liang Shaoji, Tang Guo or Hsieh Ying-chun, spent time in Bishan prior to the exhibition as a way to gather inspiration for their art pieces, while other artists arrived at the day of the exhibition opening. Besides all the artists featured in the program are people working intensely with rural issues such as writer Liang Hong, photographer Zhang Jianping, rural activists and activists from primarily China and Taiwan as well as local handicraft masters. Furthermore, the program featured photo exhibitions and film screenings with old and new films from the Chinese countryside as well as seminars, concerts, a farmers’ market and a poetry class. The

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program for the festival was in other words large and diverse and sought to span activism and art, the local and the urban and the rural and the international and featured conventional exhibitions as well as seminar discussions. The very composed nature of the program also reveals the diverse curatorial group behind the Harvestival consisting of Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and a group of assistants and volunteers. The texts in the catalog are very different from each other. Ou Ning writes about rural reconstruction, mutual aid, documentaries on the Chinese countryside and the intentions behind the poetry class, whereas Zuo Jing writes on traditional drama and music from Huizhou and the harvest ceremony (performed by local villagers), and other people have written texts on the notebook and about the history of Bishan Village. Zuo Jing is behind the investigations into the handicraft of the region and the preservation of traditional houses, whereas Ou Ning has provided the utopian framework that draws on his research for autonomous community building beyond the Chinese context. Zuo Jing is seemingly organizing the less politically problematic side of the project, by focusing on folk art and handicraft traditions.14 While the artworks were exhibited in Bishan, many of the activities, including the discussions on rural issues and the film screenings, did not take place in Bishan, but in Xiuli Film Village (秀里影视村).15 Xiuli Film Village is an open air museum with the appearance of a Hui village composed of primarily original Hui-style houses (but also a few Shanghai Shikumens) about twenty minutes’ drive from Bishan. Being a museum, it has no actual residents and furthermore charges an entrance fee, a fee the local villagers were not willing or able to pay. In other words, the actual discussions on how to address rural issues took place in an open-air museum far removed from the villagers they were intending to engage. Another mistake from the first Harvestival that Ou Ning often mentions is one in which two designers, Xiaoma and Chengzi, had designed new baking molds for the traditional Yuding-cakes to give them a new and improved look (Ou 2014b, 31). Unfortunately, the baking molds were too detailed, with the patterns being too refined and furthermore the edge of the mold curved the wrong way. This resulted in cakes that could not slip easily out of the mold and that had no clear pattern. The original molds are rather coarse, so that the pattern is easily imprinted on the cake. In other words, this small example reveals some of the fundamental problems of the initial collaboration with the local villagers. The outsiders attempted to improve and modernize a traditional product, but lacked the

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basic knowledge of local conditions that would allow this to happen in a fruitful manner. Another issue that they encountered was the name of the festival. In Chinese, the first Bishan Harvestival was called Bishan Fengnianji (碧山丰年祭), which means Bishan Harvest Ceremony, however, the last character ji, has in the local use a significant ring of funeral ceremony, in other words, something connected to commemorating the dead. To avoid the unfortunate connotation, the name was changed before the second Harvestival to Bishan Fengnianqing (碧山丰年庆), which can be translated as Bishan Harvest Celebration.

I Don’t Know Who They Are The exchanges with local villagers were also rather limited at first. In the beginning, the villagers were skeptical. They were not properly informed of the activities and aims of the Bishan Project; some thought it was government initiated, others thought it was a wealthy businessman trying to earn money (Villagers interviewed in Long 2011a). As one villager expressed during the first Bishan Harvestival: “I don’t know who they are, maybe they are government people or businessmen trying to make money” (ibid.). Ou Ning was referred to as Boss Ou (欧老板) and, as one observer described, the villagers were reluctant to help out during the Harvestival as they did not understand why they should help a wealthy business man for free. They even demanded 10 Yuan per day if the project wanted to borrow their chairs (Liu 2014). The villagers basically did not know what was going on in their own village. They furthermore did not have the possibility of engaging in the panel discussions on rural development during the Harvestival. Lack of communication with the local villagers and a top-­ down approach in which academics, artists and activists discussed the conditions in the countryside without including the subjects of these conditions, seems to be a misguided attempt to enter the rural scene. The first Bishan Harvestival was, during and afterwards, criticized by some of the participating artists, academics and activists. The artist Liu Qingyuan expressed disappointment with the fact that the participants were not accommodated in Bishan, but in a larger hotel complex about 15 minutes’ drive from Bishan.16 Besides the opening of the festival, and a harvest ceremony taking place in an old forefather temple in Bishan, most of the activities did not take place in Bishan proper. Consequently, the invited artists and activists spent very little time in Bishan, which limited their degree of engagement with local villagers. The activist and

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government official He Huili expressed “hope” (冀望) that the Bishan Commune would base their engagement with the locals on surveys and interviews and make a plan for reviving the community together with the locals, stating that the organization of community groups is crucial to obtaining rural self-governance (He 2011). More directly, the New Left academic Lü Xinyu stated that the local villagers had to get more involved if the Bishan Commune was going to succeed in its undertaking: “If the Project doesn’t have its own means of production, links with the local community, or mechanisms to train people on a long-term basis,” then it will be difficult for it to avoid becoming just another “contemporary art enclave” (Lü quoted in Zhao 2011). The critique of the Harvestival was thus primarily aimed at its lack of engagement with the surrounding community, as well as its lack of educational and organizational aspects, and not as such the ideas behind the project. To show how much Zuo Jing and Ou Ning still did not know about Bishan (or the rural areas in general), the rural education activist Liang Xiaoyan initiated her talk at the first Bishan Harvestival with a short anecdote: “When I arrived at Bishan, I saw Zuo Jing, and the first thing I said to him was: Do you know whether there is still a school in Bishan? And he said: I actually haven’t asked” (Long 2011b). What Zuo Jing and Ou Ning experienced during the first few years in Bishan is that there were still many questions to be asked pertaining to Bishan and its residents. These examples show that some of the dispositions during the first Harvestival were not sufficiently based in knowledge of the local circumstances and practice—which was in conflict with the proposed ideas of rural reconstruction as based in James Yen’s notions of going to the people. Many of these incidents are, however, mentioned by Ou Ning in reports from Bishan and as such show a continued reflection on behalf of the participating artists on what did not work (Ou 2014b, 31; Liu 2014). On the basis of different accounts from the Harvestival, it seems that the Bishan Project did not provide a framework for visiting artists, activists and intellectuals to engage substantially with local residents. In an unpublished account from the Harvestival, the participating artists Liu Qingyuan expressed the wish that next year more locals would be involved in the process, but ended his account with supportively stating that “This is only the beginning of the Bishan Utopia” (Liu 2011). This is perhaps the best way to understand this period of the project, as exactly that: the beginning. A flawed beginning perhaps, but nevertheless, since then, conversations have taken place that have prompted Ou Ning, Zuo

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Jing and the Bishan Project to revise their approach. As I will show below, the subsequent reflection on the matters and the change in terminology reveal a willingness to include these concerns in the continuation of the project. In other words, while there are many problematic aspects to raise regarding the first Bishan Harvestival, it did mark the beginning of a conversation. The first year of the Bishan Project did not as such present a clear strategy for dialogue with the local population, and from the festival program for the first Bishan Harvestival, the dialogical aesthetics seem more preoccupied with entering a dialogue with rural objects (e.g. furniture) than with rural inhabitants. If looking at the level of dialogue as the work of art in itself, as Grant Kester suggests, then it seems the artwork of the first year of the Bishan Commune and the Harvestival was constituted through carefully conducted communication with the local authorities, and attempts to convince them that the Bishan Commune was an asset—not a problem. Ou Ning later acknowledged that he was too busy having dinners and talking with local officials to engage in important communications with the local villagers.17 During the period of the first Harvestival the participants were not so much the villagers as they were the local authorities. The dialogues as such were of course not orchestrated and directly displayed in any way. Yet while the details of the negotiations have not been disclosed, they clearly played an essential role in allowing the Bishan Commune to practice in Bishan in the first place, as they do in all rural art and activist projects in China.

2012: Yixian International Photo Festival Bishan Harvestival 2011 was to be followed by Yixian International Photo Festival 2012 (Yixian Photofest), which was to run concurrently with Bishan Harvestival 2012. The Yixian Photofest is an annual event organized by Yi County since 2006, but for the 2012 edition the local government wanted a higher, more international profile (Zuo 2012, 23). Based on the success of the first Bishan Harvestival in terms of visitor numbers, the local authorities commissioned Ou Ning and Zuo Jing to curate Yixian Photofest 2012. Since it was an Yi County photography festival, the exhibition venues were scattered over the entire county in the villages of Xidi, Lu, Hong, Nanping and Bishan. The activities and exhibitions taking place in Bishan were referred to as the Bishan Harvestival. The overarching theme of both the Harvestival and Yixian Photofest was “the

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symphony between the rural and the urban” (城乡交响曲), the English translation however just gave “The Interactions” as the title. In the catalogue, Zuo Jing defines interactions as “mutual influence, mutual engagement, as well as cooperation” (ibid.). In other words, they are concerned with the reciprocal relationship between the rural and the urban, rather than how one can exploit the other (Fig. 4.2). The exhibition was divided into five sections curated independently by either Ou Ning or Zuo Jing: (1) The Enigma of Urbanization (Ou); (2) The Continuity of Rural Society (Ou); (3) Between Town and Country (Ou); (4) Realism and Surrealism (Zuo); (5) Intellectuals’ Vision (Zuo). In addition to the five main sections was the exhibition Coal&Ice produced by well-known sinologist Orville Schell and Asia Society. While the rural-urban interactions seemed to be the main focus, tradition and modernity was furthermore an important aspect of the exhibition. In the bilingual exhibition catalog, the Chinese characters are traditional Kangxi Dictionary letters designed by font designer Li Xiangchen and the section curated by Zuo Jing, Intellectuals’ Vision, plays on the traditional role of

Fig. 4.2  Poster advertising Yixian International Photofestival 2012, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune

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the Chinese intellectuals. The incongruence between the ideas of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing becomes more and more obvious through the catalog. It carries two distinct introductions (one by each of them) and the artworks displayed in some of their respective sections seem strangely incompatible. The “Intellectuals’ Vision” section celebrates traditional rural society and the role of the intellectual, and displays traditional Chinese motifs, such as bamboo leaves, shadows or misty mountains. Ou Ning’s sections, in contrast, display urban sprawl and demolition, the downside of human extraction of natural resources or rural life as it appears today in all its diversity. While both tradition and modernity are inextricable parts of rural life in the Chinese countryside, it is vividly displayed throughout the exhibition catalog that Ou Ning and Zuo Jing view tradition in two different lights and use the exhibition to promote different purposes. The program for the Yixian Photofest and the Bishan Harvestival was designed as a passport (护照) that came in different pastel colors. It contained numbered pages, practical information concerning the area, instructions on how to behave and detailed listings of the program events. When you visited the different exhibition venues you would get a stamp in the passport. It is stated clearly that the passport has no use as a document of identification—it is not a real passport (Ou and Zuo 2012b, 3). While in a European context this perhaps seems unimportant (or gimmicky), the passport can carry different connotations in the Chinese context. Not long ago the famous and infamous artist Ai Weiwei was deprived of his passport for an extended period of time and thus could not leave the country. Similarly, many Chinese people (especially in the rural areas) do not own a passport, as it is only used when traveling to another country. The passport thus contains a whole array of meanings and connotations of exclusion and inclusion, mobility versus immobility, the global and the local, and longings and dreams for other countries and worlds. In regard to the Bishan Project, the passport points toward the notebook idea of the Bishan Commune as an autonomous community of likeminded people. And as such, the passport appears as a marker of affiliation and likemindedness with the ideas of the Bishan Commune. It shows that Ou Ning, though complying with many of the requirements of the local government, still, as a Trojan Horse, manages to sneak in markers of his overarching utopian vision and a critique of the exclusivity associated with the passport. The passport statement could be viewed as a provocation had it not been for the very specific statement that it did not function as a “real” passport.

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Despite the political sensitivity attached to the passport, the most politically sensitive part of the exhibition was actually the Coal&Ice “special project” exhibition that showed photographs by photographers from China and around the world. The exhibition “visually narrates the hidden chain of actions triggered by mankind’s use of coal.” In other words, the exhibition displayed the not so pleasant human and environmental consequences of the extraction of natural resources—showing mineworkers, environmental pollution, factory sites and natural landscapes as a contrast (Ou and Zuo 2012a, 207–217). Furthermore, Schell, who produced the exhibition, and who is a known critic of the handling of the Tiananmen demonstrations, was invited to take part in the Harvestival. Contrary to the first Bishan Harvestival, many of the discussions and panel sections were to take place in Bishan proper. One of the first events to take place at the festival was thus a “discussion with the participation of villagers in Bishan on how to revive a rural public sphere” (Ou and Zuo 2012b, 8). Much more focus was thus put on direct and actual engagement with the local villagers as the conversations were staged as part of the exhibition. The Lantian Project’s intervention in Bishan Village was likewise part of this dialogical strategy. I will describe their project in detail later in this chapter. While conversations, interactions and dialogues were prioritized during this second large-scale art event, most of the scheduled conversations never got the chance to take place. The Yixian Photofest and the Bishan Harvestival were shut down the day before the opening, which was set to commence November 2, 2012. The reasons for the shutdown are not entirely clear with several factors evidently playing a part. Xi Jinping was to assume office by November 15, which created a sensitive environment in China in general, with local officials being highly aware of stories that could reflect badly on the Chinese Dream (中国梦) Xi Jinping was propagating. Several national and international artists critical of development in China were invited, along with Orville Schell, and this turned out to be a bad cocktail when mixed with a very sensitive political and social environment. In addition to these high-­ level political events, a young journalist accidently died as he was visiting Bishan to do a feature on the festival, which also raised serious concerns about bad publicity with the local officials. Furthermore, according to Zuo Jing, some villagers of Pingshan Village complained that the Coal&Ice exhibition taking place at an ancestral hall in Pingshan was inappropriate and that the exhibited art was “garbage” (垃圾) (Liu 2014).18 Following this, the festival was effectively shut down and the authorities barred the

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doors to the exhibition venues. These different facts concerning the shutdown show that it is difficult to assert whether it was local conflicts or higher-level political concerns that caused the closure of the festival. Nevertheless, the shutdown of these kinds of events show that even though artists and cultural entrepreneurs could bring economic prosperity to an area, both high-level ideological agendas and local politics and power dynamics can overrule immediate economic concerns.

Playing a Game of Cards in Bishan Lantian Project’s (蓝田计划) intervention as part of the Bishan Harvestival 2012 had begun prior to the closure and thus took place despite the shutdown of the other events. Lantian Project is a collective consisting of anthropologists, activists and artists mainly based in Guangzhou, which carries out long-term interventions in rural and suburban Guangdong Province.19 In Bishan Village, they did a questionnaire card game called The Way Poker (寻脉扑克). The game was intended to raise awareness amongst the villagers about certain communal and individual aspects of village life, and also act as a tool for finding out more about the village and the people living in it. It was made of a set of poker cards designed for these purposes, and on the cards were printed questions covering various subjects: “Do you often compare your village to other villages?” “How do you think this village should develop?” “What are the weaknesses and strengths of your village?” “Do you wish for this village to become a tourist destination? Why?” or “Which subjects have you recently discussed in your village?” “Does this place have any special customs?” “What kind of work do you wish for the next generation to do?” or simply “What are your hobbies?” and many more questions. The questions were intended to bring about a dialogue between the villagers and the artists from Lantian Project. According to Mo Ye, the daily leader of Lantian Project, they used various methods to enter Bishan Village; they did unannounced visits to villagers’ homes, arranged game activities and did other events at their exhibition space in Bishan proper (Mo 2013, 119–120). In terms of actual interaction and dialogue with the local villagers, the Lantian poker game project seems to be one of the more successful activities of the Harvestivals. The poker game in itself did not have specific issues to solve, but was intended to create self-awareness within the community and gather knowledge about it.

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After the Harvestival, upon receiving pictures from the exhibition, Lantian Project realized some of the questions had been taken out of the card deck and some of the answers had been meddled with. Especially the questions concerning the future development of the village was considered too sensitive.20 According to Lantian Project, the censorship was executed by an elderly villager, who had written new answers to some of the questions and signed them with the original names. It is very possible that this villager decided to do so entirely on his own, because he was concerned with the image presented of the village through the displayed answers, but it is also possible that others (such as the village committee or the Elderly People’s Association) were in on the decision. Maybe this elderly villager was given the task of keeping an eye on the exhibition. Notwithstanding, this censorship reveals important aspects of censorship in China in this particular village and of how villagers administer and react to censorship either coming from above or below. It shows that some villagers serve as the prolonged hands of the party, perhaps sometimes on their own initiative,21 but it also, more importantly, shows their concern with the face of the village in eyes of non-locals and international visitors. The incident with Lantian Project’s intervention reveals some of the problematics Ou Ning has been dealing with when entering village life. Artists and activists often enter the countryside with a completely different mindset than the villagers. This difference becomes an initial obstacle that develops into mutual understanding only when they slowly become tuned in on each other. Before Ou Ning moved permanently to Bishan, there was a lack of conscious communication between villagers and artists. The problem was perhaps that the villagers of Bishan did not see the Harvestival as something that had anything to do with them, making it more of an urban spectacle than something that created coherence. When I arrived in Bishan for the first time in 2013, I asked several villagers whether they had participated in the Bishan Harvestival and what they thought of it. Most said that they had not participated (参加), but went to have a look (去看 看). This of course reveals the very real difference between participating and viewing, but also that they did not think of the event as something that was relevant for them. The question as to what they thought of the Harvestivals was also tricky, because the Harvestival the year before in 2012 was shut down by the authorities, and thus constituted a somewhat sensitive topic. Most people I asked tried to dodge the question or simply shrugged their shoulders. This was my first time in Bishan, and the villagers were arguably not confident in talking freely with me, but the answers

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nevertheless reveal some distance between the villagers and the Bishan Commune. In Bishan these large-scale events did not at first provide the stage from which villagers and artists could meet and engage in fruitful dialogue. It is, however, also a matter of time. The same lack of participation was seen with the first Xucun International Art Festival, but later on the villagers began to volunteer and a new view of the festival started to emerge: “The art festival not only brings us economic benefits,” as a local inhabitant of Xucun said, “but also stimulates our desire to protect our traditional culture” (Zhang Jingyu quoted in Ding 2013). The Yixian Photofest became the last large-scale activity, but certainly not the last activity within the Bishan Project. In order to accommodate the needs of the local population and the restrictions from the local authorities, Ou Ning left the large-scale culture festival approach behind to become more focused on spatio-economic considerations and small-scale events.

Changing the Terminology The critique hitting the Bishan Project after these first two years of involvement in the village thoroughly reshaped the project. The relationship to some of the villagers has undergone a significant change and as Ou Ning states in a later text, echoing his own critique of the Land Project: “The equal participation of villagers in this process is very important. If everything comes from the outside, then this is more akin to occupation; it is imperative that we mobilize a portion of the villagers to contribute” (Ou 2012). One of the most obvious sources of the conflicting relationship between various actors in Bishan had been the attitudes towards economic development of the village; a stated priority of many villagers, but not something the Bishan Project had previously devoted much attention to. The solution was to further incorporate economic considerations in the Bishan Commune scheme. As discussed in Chap. 3, Bishan Commune was initially conceived as an anarchist, intellectual commune; a peaceful, alternative co-existence with surrounding society, but after spending some years in the village, the development of its economy became one of the primary goals of the agents of the Bishan Project, along with preservation of Hui architecture—the signature aesthetic of the area—and local agricultural and handicraft traditions. Ou Ning entered the countryside with the idea of the cultural as part of the solution to the rural crisis (without defining “the cultural” in clear terms), but a reading of the texts published after the establishment of the

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Bishan Project reveals a slow rapprochement between artists, villagers and local authorities. In the article “Rural Reconstruction in China” written in the months leading up to the second Bishan Harvestival in 2012 and Yixian Photofest, Ou Ning evaluates some of the difficulties he has encountered in the countryside so far: My own project in Bishan has given me a deeper understanding of the difficulties of rural reconstruction. […] we need to be cautious about engaging local authorities ourselves and avoid compromising the independence and sustainability of the Bishan Commune when seeking the government’s support. […] local communities’ understanding of rural reconstruction is sometimes at odds with the lofty ideals of intellectuals. (Ou 2014a [2012], 557–558)

This comment reflects recognition of some of the weaknesses of the first Bishan Harvestival, including the over-reliance on good relations with local authorities at the expense of good relations with villagers. It also points to conflicts and misunderstandings that took place between the villagers and the artists and activists, and how the local community did not understand “the lofty ideals of intellectuals.” The comment, however, also sharpens the terms and proposes a step away from engagement with the authorities to “avoid compromising the independence.” Ou Ning is here responding to the pronounced critique of the first Bishan Harvestival for being too removed from the subjects they sought to engage. However, the move away from engagement with local authorities proves difficult in practice, something the closure of Yixian Photofest also attests to. In a text published after the cancellation of Yixian Photofest, entitled “Obstacles to Rural Reconstruction,” Ou Ning seems to be withdrawing his proposition to step away from engagement with the authorities. He comes to the conclusion that he has to include the concerns of the villagers and the authorities if he wants to continue his practice in the village. In the text, Ou Ning further elaborates on the economic question and proposes quite different views on the issues the Bishan Commune had been dealing with during the large-scale Harvestivals. He places the basic problems of the countryside in a new frame: The key issues of the countryside are not cultural, but economic. In rural areas both the government and the people are equally realistic. If your actions bring no economic benefit to the area, they [residents and authori-

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ties] won’t see the point in them. Thus, although our work has set off on cultural terms, we’d still like to be able to implement it economically: we want to improve the economies of rural areas. We want to find more people willing to buy houses in Bishan. (Ou 2012)

This statement is strikingly different than the ones that appeared after the first Harvestival, as it does not focus on being cautious of engaging with local officials, or local villagers’ lack of recognition of the actions of the Bishan Project, but instead recognizes the need for the Bishan Project to change by incorporating economic considerations into its overall scheme. Ou Ning moves from an argumentation and terminology that focuses on culture, art and community to one focusing on a spatio-economic approach, in which traditional Hui houses and the establishment of small businesses can carry the Bishan Project forward. The statement also reveals that the Bishan Project is moving into a phase more focused on an economy driven forward by the mere presence of artists and activists (and tourists) in Bishan, by proposing that more people should buy houses there. The quote exemplifies the difference of opinion between the villagers, authorities and the artists and stands in sharp contrast to earlier statements regarding the lack of community and culture. In a later text, Ou Ning recognizes the need to create jobs and that their project can be an active driving force in the process: “We believe that reviving traditional folks arts is, at this stage, the only way to transform our cultural resources into job opportunities and tangible economic benefits for the farmers. […] We hope that the Bishan Commune will go beyond arts and culture and take on economic and social dimensions” (Ou 2014a [2012], 557). Economic development is a very dominant and influential discourse both on an official level and amongst the citizens of China, and by clearly tapping into this discourse, Ou Ning is complying with the authorities. However, after stating that they want to improve the rural economy, Ou Ning adds: First we have to change the government and the people’s view of us: if they want something done, then we do it. That way we’ll gradually win their approval, and once they start to believe that we really have the capabilities to improve the area economically, then we can start to focus on the things we want to do, including our more political, “anarchist” experiments. (ibid)

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In other words, Ou Ning argues against urbanization policies of the government through the dominant discourse of economic development, making it even more difficult for the central government in general and the local administrations in particular to dismiss the Bishan Project and similar initiatives as possible versions of rural development. Ou Ning, however also states that once the government trusts them, then they can talk about anarchism. The phrasing and changing of the objective can thus be understood as two-fold: Ou Ning includes the concerns of the villagers and the authorities on the basis of dialogues and exchanges and thus rephrases the project; at the same time, however, he has no other choice than to change the formulation of the project if he wants to stay in the village. The drastic reformulation can thus also be read as a strategic survival tactic similar to Lucy Lippard’s Trojan Horse. If Ou Ning complies with the requirements of the local government, then he can stay in the village and prepare the ground for future work in the name of anarchism. The aim is still to reinvigorate the rural areas, impede the population exodus away from the rural areas and think critically about rural issues, but the formulation has changed, thus including economic concerns and a proposition for more people to buy houses in Bishan. Certain aspects of the Bishan Project might have become subsumed and incorporated by surrounding society, but the utopian imagination is redeveloped and maintained. In his book, Painting the City Red, Yomi Braester (2010) argues that urban filmmakers enter an “urban contract,” in which they both accommodate the requirements of the authorities and at the same time manage to alleviate the fears of the population connected to urban transformation by addressing these fears and anxieties. Ou Ning is arguably entering a rural contract as the Bishan Project appears at the same time to be accepting the requirements of the local authorities and villagers and presenting an imaginary for a different kind of economic development than is often seen in the Chinese countryside, thus incorporating and addressing concerns of the villagers. In the terms of Marcuse, they are at once negating the propositions of the local government and affirming them.

Alternative Currencies As shown above, local economic development has manifested itself as an unavoidable aspect of the Bishan Project, but that does not mean that Ou Ning does not continue to imagine other ways to operate in Bishan

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Village. In a sort of counter response, Ou Ning proposed an alternative economic circuit in Bishan by way of time coupons. The initiative was to be called Bishan Hours (碧山是分卷), and was a system in which smaller tasks such as housekeeping at the local guesthouse Pig’s Inn or helping in the fields of Young Village Official’s Garden, could be exchanged for a meal at the local Hotel Tailai, books at the Bishan Bookstore, or second hand artifacts donated to the shop Ou Ning was planning to open at Buffalo Institute and so forth.22 All the partners of this circuit had already agreed to this system of exchange. The notes carried four different values: 10, 15, 30 and 60 minutes and were designed so that they resembled “real” money. They were adorned with the head of Wang Dazhi (the rural reconstruction advocate from Bishan), the Bishan Commune emblem or the Bishan trademark: the Cloud Gate Pagoda (云门塔).23 On the bottom of the notes is printed “In Bishan We Trust” as an appropriation of the American dollar that however takes the local (Bishan) as the primary outset, but also refers to Bishan as more than a place—it is a community we can trust in. In Chinese it says “Living Together in Bishan” (共同生活在 碧山), thus avoiding connotations of the American dollar and pointing towards aspects of community building associated with the alternative currency. The Bishan Hours thus visually display the triangular relationship between local history, appropriation and practical use value. The system was imagined as a way to establish an economy internal to Bishan independent of outside capital. It was intended to give a greater portion of lowincome villagers an opportunity to participate actively in a local community economy as well as give them access to products they would not otherwise have access to. Ou Ning drew his inspiration for this setup from various previous examples such as the Ithaca Hours and an experiment in Hong Kong called Community Oriented Mutual Economy (Ou 2014b, 27). Experiences with alternative monetary systems in neighborhoods or small towns all over the world show that they can have an effect on the proliferation of a local economy and in addition be an important marker of community affiliation (Tsivopoulos 2015, 73–75). While Ou Ning seemed quite positive about the possibility of setting up this alternative monetary circuit in Bishan, it never reached fruition. I discussed this matter with a local university village official, who, though he admired Ou Ning, was convinced that such a system could not be allowed and that it was in conflict with higher levels of the government (上级政府也有一定的冲突).24 To Ou Ning the system was a tool of community building and a way to include low-­income farmers in a monetary circuit they were otherwise

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excluded from. But as the comment from the university village official suggests, the local authorities saw it as a problematic advancement toward organizing the villagers in a network not controlled by the state. While the Bishan Hours never entered circulation in Bishan Village, they were in fact produced, but as part of an exhibition of the Bishan Project at Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan called “Cloud of Unknowing: A City of Seven Streets.” The alternative currency thus primarily remains as an art object circulating within an art world circuit—the idea of it, however, was spread in Bishan.

Fleeing the Difficulties of Collectivity It seems that in the initial phase of the Bishan Commune there was more focus on the utopian and intellectual endeavors than on understanding how locals viewed and understood the issues affecting their village. The great leap of the Bishan Harvestival was perhaps not such a big leap after all, but more like one small step towards the threshold of Bishan Village. The Harvestivals was not, as James Yen prescribed, based in “the people,” and it may be argued that the notebook is rather ambiguous when it comes to the people it intends to mobilize. If the first Bishan Harvestival did not manage to engage substantially with the local community, or only represented a slow beginning, what it did succeed in was the bringing together of artists, activists and intellectuals working with different aspects of rural governance, rural self-organization, rural architecture and rural culture, thus creating connections between people to support, critique and help these kinds of projects, both intellectually and practically. In his article “Extradisciplinary Investigations” art critic and activist Brian Holmes argues that while these kinds of projects are imagined to be collective “they also tend to flee the difficulties that collectivity involves, by operating as networks” (Holmes 2007). With the Bishan Project in particular there are many reasons as to why operating collectively was not an immediate option, and perhaps not so much as “fleeing” the difficulties, the Bishan Project did what Ou Ning has been doing in his practice throughout the years: created connections between people. It seems that the collectivity that was intended to grow in Bishan, more than anything became an extension and operation of those connections. Rather than showing that the Bishan project failed miserably, the first years of the Bishan Project demonstrate that socially engaged art projects take time. It could be argued that there were better ways to start off, and

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perhaps other projects will have something to learn from this experience. Ou Ning and Zuo Jing, however, decided to begin with a large-scale event inviting in the media and fellow artists and activists to follow the proceedings of the project. This strategy allowed for these people to be present during the upstart phase and thus also witness all the initial mistakes and misunderstandings—which in turn gave Ou Ning and Zuo Jing very quick responses in terms of what should be done differently and what the future of the project had in store.

Notes 1. The name Harvestival is a contraction between the words harvest and festival. 2. All larger cities have one or more of these “creative zones,” though they can be quite different from place to place. 3. While doing fieldwork in Nanjing, I visited one of these atelier space communities on the fringe of the city. The local government had provided the space for them cheaply in an attempt to develop the area (personal interview with artist Yu Xiaoyu). 4. Pictures from the event show the largest ancestral hall in Bishan packed to the brim with people. 5. Qian Xiaohua owns the bookstore chain Librairie Avant-Garde (先锋书 店), which originated in Nanjing. Ou Ning helped Qian choose the name for the bookstore. Qian has bookstores in several locations in East China, including tourist destinations such as the Nanjing Museum and the Presidential Palace in Nanjing. 6. Before the opening of the bookstore, there were no public houses in Bishan where tourists could hang out. As soon as the bookstore opened, the local tourist guides of Yi County quickly began to bring in tourist groups on their way to other Hui-villages in the area. 7. The bookstore has now been realized as E Mountain Librairie AvantGarde Windsail Library (莪山先锋云夕图书馆) with an adjacent cafe. Architect Zhang Lei, who also did the design for the restoration of Ou Ning’s School of Tillers, has redesigned the interior of the bookstore. 8. Echigo-Tsumari Art Field about page. 9. The communal kitchen, one of the earliest buildings, is powered by a small biogas plant installed by the Danish artist group Superflex, the Swedish sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff has built the Star House, Tobias Rehberger had his house assembled in Sweden and shipped to Thailand (the house is supposedly inspired by Rehberger’s favorite lentil pasta) (Tinari 2011).

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10. The party secretary of Yi County around the time when the Bishan Commune was established was himself a rural reconstruction advocate and had during his years in university been interested in Tao Xingzhi’s (an Anhui native) line of rural reconstruction. See Liu 2014. 11. E.g. The Guggenheim Museum has recently launched a “social practice art initiative.” Smaller and larger art institutions all over the world have long displayed an interest in these kinds of practices. See Kester 2016. 12. It is however clear from the website of the tourist committee of the Yi County Government, that they are aware of Bishan Commune’s anarchist component. Yi County Tourism Committee (黟县旅发委). "碧山计划”是 项什么样的工程?” (What kind of project is Bishan Project?). Yi County Government Discussion Forum, April 15, 2013. 13. Twenty-three artists exhibited during the festival, while there altogether were forty-nine participants invited to partake in the extensive program during the Harvestival. 14. Carol Yinghua Lu makes a similar argument in relation to the new department at the CAFA School of Experimental Arts that focuses on folk art traditions. Lu writes: “The choice of folk art subjects, concerned mostly with tradition, conveniently avoids contemporary social, political, and intellectual issues in China. This emphasis on folk art in a program intended to update rigid academic teaching rooted in Soviet models from the 1950s evinces the continued influence of Mao’s 1942 Yan’an speech demanding an art in the service of ‘workers, peasants, and soldiers.’ However, while in Mao’s era folk art was an important channel for communicating political messages, today it no longer expresses any distinctive political position. This is why it is the official art form of choice at the CAFA School of Experimental Art” (Lu 2016). It should be remembered, however, that the authorities in spite of Zuo Jing’s focus on traditional handicrafts closed down his project. 15. Xiuli Film Village is co-owned by Hu Zhongquan, who participated as an artist in the Bishan Harvestival. 16. Interview with Liu Qingyuan conducted in Guangzhou, November 2013. 17. Interview with Ou Ning, November 2013. 18. This exhibition was produced by Orville Schell and Asia Society. The exhibition “visually narrates the hidden chain of actions triggered by mankind’s use of coal.” In other words, the exhibition displayed the not so pleasant human and environmental consequences of the extraction of natural resources. Asia Society, “About the Exhibition.” 19. Some of the members of Lantian Project have afterwards become part of other socially engaged art projects, such as Chen Xiaoyang now involved in the Yuan Museum project in rural Guangzhou Province, see Chen 2019. 20. Interview with Mo Ye, Guangzhou, November 2013.

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21. For more on censorhip in rural China by informal institutions, see Mattingly 2019. 22. Ou Ning later opened a shop at the School of Tillers where local farmers could sell their agricultural produce. 23. Ou Ning’s Facebook page, May 7, 2014. 24. Interview with University Village Official, July 2014. The university village official was not really clear on why it couldn’t be allowed; the person only said that it could work well in the ideal world, but kept saying that it was not allowed (不允许).

Literature Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Birnbaum, Daniel. 2005. “The Lay of the Land.” ArtForum, (Summer): 270–276. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells—Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Braester, Yomi. 2010. Painting the City Red—Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Chen Xiaoyang (陈晓阳). 2019. “实践/实验—”他们” 与 ”我们”: 源美术馆的社 会参与式实践” (Practice/Experimentation—“Them” and “Us”: The Socially Engaged Practice of Yuan Museum).新美术馆学, September 9. Ding Yi. 2013. “Art Rejuvenates Ancient Chinese Village.” Sino-US.com, August 5. URL (no longer accesible) www.sino-us.com/10/Art-rejuvenates-ancientChinese-village.html Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: and How it is Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. He Huili (何慧丽). 2011. “当代的乡村复兴—兼谈安徽‘碧山丰年庆‘的启发” (Contemporary Rural Revival—And the inspiration of Bishan Harvestival). Utopia-website 乌有之乡, September 5. URL (Last accessed February 5, 2020): http://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/sannong/2011/09/251198.html Holmes, Brian. 2007. “Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/en Kapur, Geeta. 2012. “Curating Across Agonistic Worlds.” In InFlux— Contemporary Art in Asia, edited by Paul Dave Mukherji, Naman P. Ahuja and Kavita Singh. Sage Publications. Keane, Michael. 2009. “Creative Industries in China—four perspectives on social transformation.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 15, no. 4: 431–443. Keane, Michael. 2013. Creative Industries in China: Art, Design, Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Keane, Michael and Wen Wen. 2013. “Managing Creativity on the Margins: A Comparative Study of Beijing’s Songzhuang Art District and Hangzhou’s White Horse Lake Creativity Eco-City.” International Journal of Cultural and Creative Industries, vol. 1, no. 1: 16–29. Kester, Grant. 2016. “Editorial Issue 4.” FIELD—Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism issue 4 (Spring). URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://fieldjournal.com/editorial/field-editorial-4 Liu Qingyuan (刘庆元). 2011. “碧山乌托邦后记” (Epilogue to the Bishan Utopia), unpublished account. Sent to me via email November 22, 2013. Liu Xing (刘醒). 2014. “碧山没有乌托邦” (There is no Utopia in Bishan). 读览天 下 www.dooland.com. URL (Last accessed March 5, 2020): http://m.dooland. com/index.php?s=/article/id/409472/from/faxian.html Long, Andrew. 2011a. “碧山观礼 2011—01 到碧山去” (Bishan Witness 2011—01 Destination Bishan). Approx. 10 min. Youku—Storyfarm’s channel. October 7. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://v.youku.com/v_ show/id_XMzEwNTIwODc2.html?f=16171410&o=1 Long, Andrew. 2011b. “碧山观礼 2011—09 梁晓燕” (Bishan Witness 2011—09 Liang Xiaoyan). Approx. 25  min. Youku—Storyfarm’s channel, October 7. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_ XMzU5MjY2OTE2.html?f=16171410&o=1 Lu, Carol Yinghua. 2016. “From the Anxiety of Participation to the Process of De-Internationalization.” E-flux Journal, no. 70, 02. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/from-the-anxiety-ofparticipation-to-the-process-of-de-internationalization/ Mattingly, Daniel C. 2019. The Art of Political Control in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mo Ye (莫夜). 2013. “寻找文化保育之道” (Searching for the Road to Cultural Preservation). Bishan Magazine 碧山杂志书, no. 3: 110–121. Ou, Ning. 2011. “Agrarian Utopia: An Artistic Experiment in Chiang Mai.” Translated by Shumei Roan. Chutzpah no 1, 3–13. Ou, Ning. 2012. “Obstacles to Rural Reconstruction.” LEAP Magazine 17. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://www.leapleapleap.com/2012/11/ ou-ning-obstacles-to-rural-reconstruction/ Ou, Ning. 2014a [2012]. “Rural Reconstruction in China.” In South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale. Translated by ChinaFile, edited by Ou Ning, 550–559. Beijing: China Youth Press. Ou, Ning. 2014b. “Questions and answers between Ou Ning and the Sønderholm Collective.” In Forespørgsler i Jord og Kunst (Inquiries in Earth and Art). Translated from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, edited by Mai Corlin, Rasmus Graff and Mathias Kokholm. Sønderholm: Antipyrine and OVO Press. Ou, Ning and Zuo Jing. 2011. 碧山丰年祭 (Bishan Harvestival Exhibition Catalogue). Bishan: The Bishan Commune.

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Ou, Ning and Zuo Jing. 2012a. 黟县国际摄影节 –城乡交响曲 (Yixian International Photo Festival—The Interactions). Exhibition catalogue. Bishan: The Bishan Commune. Ou, Ning and Zuo Jing. 2012b. 黟县国际摄影节 –护照 (Yixian International Photo Festival—Passport). Exhibition program. Bishan: The Bishan Commune. Raunig, Gerald. 2007. Art and Revolution. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Sun, Yunfan and Leah Thompson. 2013. Down to the Countryside: The Emerging Back-to-the-land Movement in Bishan Village. Documentary film on Bishan Commune, 30. min. A shorter version of the film is available from the ChinaFile website. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): https://www.chinafile.com/ multimedia/video/down-countryside The Land Foundation. N.d. “About.” The Land Foundation. URL (Last accessed June 25, 2020): https://www.thelandfoundation.org/about Tinari, Philip. 2011. “Reluctantly Re-reading the Land.” LEAP Magazine, no. 8. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://leapleapleap.com/2011/04/ reluctantly-re-reading-the-land/ Tsivopoulos, Stefanos. 2015. “Alternativa valutor” (Alternative Currencies). Glänta, no. 3–4: 67–97. Yeung G. and Evelyn Char. 2018. Farmer’s Horizon—Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. Hong Kong: C.C. Wu Cultural and Education Foundation Fund. Zhao, Echo (赵茜). 2011. “碧山丰年祭” (Bishan Harvestival). LEAP, no. 11. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://leapleapleap.com/2011/12/碧 山丰年祭/?lang=zh-hans Zuo Jing (左靖). 2012. “Introduction 2,” in 黟县国际摄影节 –城乡交响曲 (Yixian International Photo Festival—The Interactions), edited by Ou Ning and Zuo Jing. Bishan: The Bishan Commune, n.p. 0086 Magazine. 2015 [2010]. “Interview about the notebook project Bishan Commune,” in Ou Ning: Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, 13–18. Translated from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, Austin Woerner and Jeff Crossby. Copenhagen and Aarhus: Ovo Press and Antipyrine.

CHAPTER 5

Trojan Horses or the Artist as Realtor

In her 1984 essay “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power” feminist activist and writer Lucy Lippard (1984, 341) famously ponders whether “the Trojan Horse was the first activist art work.” 1 In Lippard’s understanding the Trojan Horse does not only carry the negative connotations we might otherwise connect with it, but is more akin to an artistic strategy for changing society, however dual (negative and positive) these projects might be in effect. “Based in subversion on the one hand and empowerment on the other,” Lippard writes, “activist art operates both within and beyond the beleaguered fortress that is high culture of the ‘art world’” (Lippard 1984, 341). I draw attention to Lippard precisely because the dual connotations of the understanding of the Trojan Horse create a platform from which to understand the Bishan Project as a subversive power, that functions dialectically in the tension between gesture and aggression, the imaginary and the actual conversations taking place in the village (Fig. 5.1). The introduction of a Trojan Horse in a community is an unpredictable occurrence; neither those inside the horse nor those outside it know the outcomes of this gesture (or aggression). By being a physical presence, the Trojan Horse functions as a spatial representation of power and prestige, longing and dreams, and thus foregrounds the physical and social reconfiguration of the space into which it is introduced. To call socially engaged art projects Trojan Horses might, to some, be to take it too far. Are these projects providing social change or are they social reparatory projects © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_5

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Fig. 5.1  Cars driving into Bishan Village

extending the hands of the state, as Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen argues? Or do dialogical encounters with the local population provide for an aesthetics that can reduce some of the distance between the artists, the authorities and the local population? It is difficult to see the lasting effects of many of these projects, at least measured against the visions of the artists. In the case of the Bishan Commune there are highly discernible outcomes, but whether these outcomes are what were intended by the artists and anticipated by the villagers is another matter. Furthermore, in the case of China, these projects constantly have to battle the influences of other Trojan Horses, such as party discourses, global investors, local power dynamics, traditional clan structures as reintroduced after the Maoist era and a sweeping urbanization process, often referred to in the local (and national) context as development (发展). Capitalist-style development has been embraced as a source of change by the villagers and local authorities alike, however disruptive or ameliorating this specific system of social relations might be to a local, rural community. After the opening of the Bishan Bookstore in 2014, Bishan began to experience a steadier influx of tourists as the bookstore provided an entry

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point into the village. The architecture of the Huizhou area, of which the bookstore is an example, has come to play a significant part in the Bishan Project, both in terms of raising awareness of the value (and exchange-­ value) of these old structures but also as entrance gates into the village. The Hui houses are characterized by an exterior of whitewashed brick walls with black roof tiles known as “horse head walls,” and a wooden interior structured around a courtyard (a sky well, 天井), where the slanted roof sections allow for the rainwater to run down and gather in a well. The houses are usually two stories or more and often neatly decorated with eloquent woodcarvings or more contemporary: Mao Zedong posters. It is through acquisition of these houses as well as through the creation of alternative spaces that Ou Ning and Zuo Jing have gained access to the village. Since the opening in 2014, Bishan Bookstore has functioned as the main space for public activities of the Bishan Project, only superseded by Ou Ning’s School of Tillers (SOT) (理农馆), a learning center, museum, café, residency program and exhibition space that he opened in the house adjacent to Buffalo Institute in the spring of 2015. The creation of alternative, communal spaces such as the Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers (SOT) has had residual side effects, since the opening of the bookstore and the café of SOT also meant that tourists now had places to spend time in, while enjoying the traditional Huizhou architecture. Property and land are highly controlled and restricted in rural as well as urban China. This chapter is concerned with property as a commodity and architecture as an ideal for space-making as well as how changing laws and regulations in relation to property and land have changed the face of Bishan, in a manner representative of new power structures and demographics. This chapter will explore the Bishan Project as a Trojan Horse, as a spatio-economic strategy for place-making and transformation, and as a representation of interrupted, transforming spaces of power and reshuffled values attributed to rural traditions and society. As such the bookstore, along with other spaces and places in the village, comes to be the setting for a continuous dialogue. The party is not at first glance represented in the spaces of the bookstore, but nevertheless always looms somewhere in the background and as such sets the inner and outer limits for the dialogue. Ou Ning’s house, Buffalo Institute, as I will discuss later in this chapter, provides if not a public space, then a space where things that would not get discussed in the bookstore can be discussed. Among other communal spaces in Bishan, the meeting hall also deserves to be mentioned. The Village Committee and the Elderly People’s Association,

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however, control the space of the meeting hall and Ou Ning could not organize events there without prior permission.2 The description of the bookstore or the meeting hall as public spaces, in the sense of having a public sphere, would be a misunderstanding. But even so, the bookstore and the School of Tillers provided a space where multiple spaces, people and power structures meet and mirror each other. This chapter will show, how the Bishan Project in general and the Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers in particular enable a situation where multiple spaces intersect and as such create a platform for conversations and exchanges between people and power structures that would not otherwise meet.

Moving to Bishan With the closure of the second Bishan Harvestival in 2012 and the consequently very strained relationship with the authorities, Ou Ning had to reconfigure his efforts and rethink the approaches of the project, focusing more on economic development, as laid out in Chap. 4. Furthermore, in the spring of 2013, Ou Ning moved permanently to Bishan with his family.3 The move indicates a significant turning point for the Bishan Project. Being present in the village on a day-to-day basis gives other possibilities of interaction and exchange, and introduces a less formalized mode of interaction than the one laid out during the first couple of years of the Bishan Project. One of Ou Ning’s first actions after moving to Bishan was to invite a select group of villagers and local officials to a meeting to give a much-needed presentation on the Bishan Commune Project and to discuss this with the villagers.4 Yu Qiang, head of Biyang Town at that time (and under whose jurisdiction Bishan is placed), participated in the meeting and gave a speech to the villagers in attendance, around 10–15 people, on the benefits of having the Bishan Project in the area (Sun and Thompson 2013). Yu Qiang was very supportive of the efforts of the Bishan Project and encouraged the villagers to embrace the project. Teacher Wang, who had previously been skeptical of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing, now works full-­ time at the Bishan Bookstore, where he is in charge of the books, and he is the most vivid defender and critic of the Bishan Project. When I asked him about the villagers’ relationship to Ou Ning, Teacher Wang tellingly replied “Well, Ou Ning is also a villager, isn’t he?” I am not sure whether all the other villagers agree with Teacher Wang, and it most likely says more about the phrasing of my question than the actual feelings in the village towards the matter, but nevertheless Ou Ning lives in the village

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and can as such be considered a villager, albeit a very privileged one.5 The newfound dialogue with the local villagers thoroughly underscores the importance of being present for a sustained period of time at the given place of a socially engaged art project, and vividly displays how the combination of the short-term and the large-scale has little use in creating a sincere, useful connection between the various agents, at least if the aim is long-term social change. There have been quite a few things happening since the Bishan Project was recalibrated and Ou Ning started talking to the villagers. This continued practice still gives rise to plenty of questions. Talking to each other does not mean that you necessarily agree on how things should proceed. According to Ou Ning, at the meeting he held after moving to Bishan, the villagers expressed that “they were disappointed and thought the activities we [Ou Ning and Zuo Jing] organized were not practical, something they can feel but never touch, […] Local villagers expected us to develop Bishan into a renowned tourist attraction like Xidi and Hongcun” (Ou quoted in Qian 2014). My conversations with local villagers confirm that many still view Ou Ning and Zuo Jing as investors of some sort, who are in their village to develop the tourist industry. Now, most of the villagers close to the Bishan Project agree that they want something different than the tourist villages Xidi and Hongcun, but many villagers still pin their hopes on some form of tourism, as a framework for development they can recognize based on the experiences of neighboring villages. As the local villager Teacher Hu expressed it “I really wish our village could develop (发展起来), that it could become something like Xidi and Hongcun, though not as commercialized (商业 化) as them.”6 Although the Yellow Mountain Range is one of China’s major tourist destinations and attracts large crowds of national and international tourists, in further development of the local tourist industry of Yi County, the architecture of the Huizhou villages is the centerpiece. It is an almost inexhaustible resource, and the houses and rural living style, to the urban tourist, represent some kind of cradle of original Chinese life. The Hui houses have through centuries housed the families of the equally infamous Huizhou-merchants (徽商). Populating these houses were the wives and children of these merchants, who had gone to the city to run pawnshops or work in the silk, tea or other trade businesses. The wealth these houses are built upon does not come from the local area, but from the success of the Hui-merchants. In other words, the houses, the forefather temples and the academies (书院) represent a nostalgia—a connection back to

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other times, back to the golden age of Huizhou, a connection that was broken during the Maoist era, that the current inhabitants of the county are slowly trying to mend. In her text “Imagined Nostalgia,” the Chinese feminist cultural critic Dai Jinhua (1997) describes how nostalgic representations are predicated on the need of the consumer to be relieved in a time of fear triggered by the anxiety towards the intrusive wave of changes flooding China since the beginning of the 1980s and the unpredictability of these changes. Nostalgia thus represents a longing that responds to the anxiety that imbues the society and provides a temporary space, where the present is allocated to an imagined past—but it is a space that nevertheless is predicated on the dynamics and processes of the present. Our Huizhou village thus, at the same time that it appears as a representation of the backward and rural hinterland often left behind by residents, also appears as a nostalgic space of relief, where urbanites’ anxiety towards urban reality can be comforted.

The Spatial Approach The art practices in the Chinese countryside are often preoccupied with spatial and cultural matters. The artists bring urban aesthetic practices and tendencies with them to the countryside and embed them in projects of rural architectural preservation. In relation to the Bishan Project, the spatial approach can be understood as the preservation of and experimentation with rural architecture, and the creation of alternative communal spaces. While architecture and spatial transformations have continuously been part of Ou Ning’s repertoire, the departure from the large-scale festival model nevertheless reveals a change in the Bishan Project more focused on the production of spaces and the conversation that can take place within these spaces. Architecture and spatial transformations have consistently been placed in a central position in Ou Ning’s practice. Before embarking on the Bishan Project in 2010, Ou Ning was, amongst other projects, chief curator of the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (09SZHKB), and before that he was engaged in the Dazhalan Project, which was initiated by him and his then partner, the artist Cao Fei. The project was an elaborate artistic research project into a central area of Beijing and the spatial and social transformations it underwent as part of the preparations for the 2008 Olympics. In addition, a

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wide range of books and magazines on architecture and spatial transformations have been produced by Ou Ning. As described in Chap. 3, architecture also occupied a central position in Ou Ning’s notebook utopia. The Bishan Commune architecture is imagined as organic, made of local materials such as bamboo, is flexible, and adjusts to the surrounding landscape and changes in the family and community structures (Ou 2015a [2010], 39–43). However, the practice in Bishan Village has shown that focus has been put on how to preserve the existing architecture in a useful and artistic manner, rather than on creating an architecture specifically for the Bishan Commune. The updating of the houses in this sense comes to represent a negotiated response to the anxieties of contemporary society imbued with nostalgia. The historical Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) was to be primarily driven forward by educational concerns, whereas the contemporary rural reconstruction movement has broadened its scope and has been connected to attempts at organizing rural cooperatives and rural culture troupes as well as modernizing and preserving rural architecture (Day 2013, 174). Sinologist Adele Kurek argues that the Bishan Project “represents a departure from the objectives of the Republican-era RRM. Both Liang Shuming and James Yen’s Republican-era reconstruction experiments were organized largely around educational initiatives. […] Ou Ning’s sensitivity to geospatial production of urban and rural relations differentiates him from those former RRM leaders who wanted to modernize the rural population through education” (Kurek 2015, 3–5). The historical RRM and the mass education movement were, at least initially, about teaching the rural population to read. Though it does not occupy a central part of the discourse of the Bishan Project, educational concerns are an intended part of the School of Tillers Project (理农馆, SOT), which incorporates a learning center (学习中心), that organizes weekly learning and sharing sessions, where the participants take turns providing content. As Ou Ning writes: “This is to boost a new way of interacting and socializing with each other in the village and enhance communal learning” (Ou Forthcoming [2015]). Educational initiatives were also foregrounded at the first Bishan Harvestival through poetry classes for local school children, and through the reading groups first taking place at the Bishan Bookstore and then at the SOT.7 Furthermore, conversations and exchanges of knowledge on agriculture and the preservation of the old houses take place on a regular basis.8 In the notebook, Ou Ning writes that education should not only be understood as “classroom education” (

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学校教育), but community education (社会教育) as well” (Ou 2015a [2010], 25). Education is thus perceived less as an organized act in a school setting, than something that takes place through conversation and exchange within a community. Rather than arguing that educational features are not a part of the Bishan Project, education in this specific context should be understood as ongoing conversations in the Bishan community. The spatial approach is however, as Kurek suggests, placed in a central position and has significantly framed the project throughout the years. The educational efforts are closely tied to handicraft traditions used when building and restoring the Hui houses, and education and the spatial approach can in this light seem to be the two sides of the same coin. This strand of rural development, in which the spatial redevelopment of a given area is prioritized, is not unique, but something incorporated in many rural reconstruction projects. In a call for “striving to make rural areas more rural,” the rural expert Li Changping and the former artist Sun Jun’s project in Haotang Village in Henan is similarly preoccupied with restoring, maintaining and redeveloping the architectural features of the village, but on the basis of a rural loan association for senior citizens (Li Changping quoted in Cao and Si 2014).9 While many rural reconstruction projects combine organization, education, architectural development and village cooperatives, the Bishan Commune is less far reaching in its practice with organizational efforts mostly taking place in relation to academic, artistic and intellectual spheres outside of the village and little or no attempts at organizing the villagers.

Creating a Space for Bishan Commune An old compound in traditional Hui-style in the center of Bishan Village constitutes the headquarters of the Bishan Commune. Ou Ning bought the house in 2010 and called it Buffalo Institute (Fig. 5.2), and from this location the organization and execution of most of the activities of Bishan Commune take place. The house of Buffalo Institute used to be the dormitory of the sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a cultural moment that seemed to repeat itself, albeit under very different circumstances. A constant flow of visitors, foreign and Chinese, urbanites and local villagers, pass through the house and stay for longer or shorter periods. Some work and converse with Ou Ning, some work on smaller projects like investigations of local folk music or handicrafts, or fieldwork studies of the countryside, others seek to experience

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Fig. 5.2  Ou Ning’s house Buffalo Institute from the outside

the traditional Hui-style houses in their restored condition. Part of the reason for choosing Bishan as the setting for the Bishan Project was the presence of two old friends of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing, the poets Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang, who run a chain of bed and breakfasts called Pig’s Inn in Xidi and Bishan. Two of the inns are located in restored Hui compounds; they used local labor and materials to restore the houses and employ local villagers. In 2008, they opened Pig’s Inn no. 2 on the outskirts of Bishan Village and in 2014 they opened Pig’s Inn no. 3 after several years of renovation of an old worn-down factory building also in Bishan. Ou Ning has several times underscored the importance of the presence of Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang in Bishan, both in regards to the establishment of the Bishan Commune, since they provided important introductions to local officials, which made the project possible, but also in regards to creating an environment of people in Bishan who wish to direct the economic development of Bishan in a more sustainable direction. Ou Ning is not alone in Bishan: a growing base of locals and like-­ minded new-comers populates the village. In 2015 Ou Ning and a group of artists, designers and volunteers opened The School of Tillers (SOT), a

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gallery for local handicrafts that has a library, a researcher in residency program, a café, a learning center and an exhibition space. Besides SOT, two other galleries have been established, one called The Seedtank opened by Ou Ning and a colleague of his and another gallery called WOW, opened by Jin Ming, a young student studying art in Hangzhou that did an internship in Bishan and somehow didn’t leave again after the internship had ended (Zhao 2015, 21). Among other people present in Bishan, the young university village official Zhang Yu, who served in nearby Nanping within the university graduate village official program, deserves to be mentioned. During her stay in Nanping, Zhang Yu set up the Young Village Official’s Garden, a community supported agriculture project (CSA) which helps harvest, pack and sell farmers’ products through a Taobao-shop.10 Local officials were so impressed by her contributions to the village that they leased her a large piece of land just in front of Pig’s Inn no. 3, where she can enlarge her production of “green” dried vegetables and employ some of the local villagers. Ou Ning helped Zhang Yu with connections to people working with CSA in Beijing and Shanghai and they maintained a close relationship. Furthermore, Zhang Yu became close friends with the volunteers of SOT and can often be found in Mu Er’s bar after work, chatting with the others. This previously nothing-special, sleepy village suddenly saw an influx of people and ideas, momentarily creating new conditions through the juxtaposition of new spaces brought on by new people and the overarching utopian narrative connected to the commune. As the young volunteers settled in Bishan, they created their own connections within the village. The development drastically changed the spatial and economic premises of the village—in close collaboration with local authorities and national decision-­making processes.

The Old Becomes the New Before the arrival of Pig’s Inn and the Bishan Project, owning an old traditional Hui-style house was nothing to boast about. It was more of a burden than an asset, since they are expensive and difficult to maintain. It is also commonly believed that people living in old houses have a more difficult time finding spouses than others (Berliner 2005, 219). To live in an old house was considered a symbol of failure (Ou 2014, 9). Building a new house with all the modern necessities and comforts, on the other hand, was something most villagers and future spouses could appreciate.

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But over the span of a very few years this dynamic was turned completely upside down in Bishan. The local Biyang Town party secretary Yu Qiang has explained: “Several years ago, before Pig’s Inn opened in Bishan, we all know a house would sell for 50.000 RMB. But how much is the Pig’s Inn worth now? It is difficult to estimate. People’s awareness have risen. Why? Because the value of these houses has increased. Now a random house can cost several hundred thousand RMB. Thanks to them we now appreciate these historic houses. For this alone, everyone in Bishan should be grateful” (Sun and Thompson 2013, 8.51 min). Though Yu Qiang in this quote specifically names Pig’s Inn as the starting point for the transformation of the value of these old houses, he concurrently recognizes the Bishan Project as an important factor in the further development of these tendencies: “It is their arrival, and the Bishan Project, that brought Bishan some subtle changes” (ibid., 5.26 min). The old worn-down houses became imbued with cultural and capital value and transformed into commodities you could sell or restore for tourism purposes. The Pig’s Inn chain displays examples of restored and preserved Hui style compounds, but as the premises of the Pig’s Inns are off-limits for the local village population who are not employed there, the luxurious style and expensive rooms of the inns seem to function more as amplifiers for class-division than as examples of how the villagers could preserve and appreciate their own culture and houses. I had just praised her newly built three-story house, when the shop owner Li Jin regretfully said to me: “But you all prefer old houses,” putting me in the same category as Ou Ning and Zuo Jing. When Li Jin began the construction of her house, a new house was still a symbol of wealth, signifying either a healthy business or a son or daughter earning money in the city, but as the house was finished it had, in Li Jin’s mind, become a symbol of something that appeared inauthentic and thus unworthy of my attention. While the township secretary, Yu Qiang, perhaps saw the arrival of Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu and their Pig’s Inn hotels as the source of the rise in housing prices, it can be argued, that it was not until the arrival of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing that the villagers understood that an old house could also benefit them—that it is not only available as investments to the wealthy investor, but something they could themselves utilize. The emphasis on the old and the traditional employed by Ou Ning and Zuo Jing works against the newly built houses, even if neither Ou Ning nor Zuo Jing articulate such a rigid structure or support the more conservative preservationists. Rather, Ou Ning and Zuo Jing propose a

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mode of preservation that can concurrently accommodate the modern needs of a household. None of the traditional Hui houses have fire stoves, even though it can be very cold in wintertime,11 so Ou Ning had a stove built in his house. Also, all of the small bedrooms in Ou Ning’s house have bathrooms, an uncommon feature of the traditional Hui house (or the Chinese countryside in general). Li Jin and many other villagers’ change in perception foregrounds a spatial reconfiguration of the village, as the value attributed to the houses shifted in favor of the old (linked to capital), thus representing a shift in power structures. Ou Ning and Zuo Jing might not bring huge financial recourses with them to the village, but they represent a new type of development from which a certain group of villagers can benefit independently.

The Artist as Realtor The idea of preserving old dwellings in rural China is not an entirely new concept. The nearby UNESCO World Heritage villages Hongcun and Xidi slowly started preserving their architecture in relation to a developing tourist industry in the 1990s and Ou Ning and Zuo Jing have tapped into an evolving discourse on the preservation of old ways and traditions in rural as well as urban China. In Anhui in 1998 it became illegal to trade building parts from Hui houses in an effort to impede the rampant dismantling of the houses. Even though the policy did bring about a renewed interest and created the foundation for starting to preserve these old dwellings in some parts of Anhui, local problems and lack of funding made it difficult for the new law to go into full effect (Berliner 2005, 209–212). The law did not change the mindset or economic foundation of villagers who could still not afford to maintain their old house, and in the larger picture, the rural background that an old house connoted was not something the young people from the countryside wanted to associate themselves with. Building a new house became a sign of one’s urban connections and keeping up with development and modernization (Fig. 5.3). Another more recent change in national policy has, on the other hand, most definitely served to amplify changes of mindset concerning these old dwellings. Ou Ning was not legally allowed to buy the house for Buffalo Institute in 2010, so the proof of ownership still carried the name of the previous owner. In the countryside there are roughly three categories of land: farmland (collectively owned by the villagers), residential land (the land your house is built on) and state owned land.12 Farmland can be

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Fig. 5.3  A small cluster of old Hui houses just outside of Bishan Village

expropriated and converted into state owned land and then sold or leased to developers and the like, but residential land can so far not be traded within the law. However, circumvention of state regulations unofficially sanctioned by local officials has created an informal residential land market in Bishan and Yi County making it possible for Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and others to purchase houses in Bishan and other villages. Houses have thus been traded without legal protection—without owners’ names being placed on the deeds. The legal restrictions nevertheless still prevented large-scale trading of residential land in China in general and the practice was in many ways confined to people with the necessary connections within a given village. Due to the unofficial character of this residential land market and the resulting lack of real estate agents, good connections with the villagers are necessary in order to purchase a house, since one must introduce oneself to villagers who are willing to or can be persuaded to sell. Moreover, not many people dare to undertake the costs of buying a house without the necessary legal protection in case of expropriation or something similar, further limiting the scope of this informal residential land market. The market mostly applies to the old Hui-style houses, which

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are no longer allowed to be torn down, and thus in many cases are left empty, either because their inhabitants have built a new house next to it or because they have moved to the city to work. The protection against decay and preservation of these old houses is thus an important factor of the informal residential land market, making it count as a measure to ensure cultural survival of Hui-style architecture outside of the state system. Saving these old houses is not only about preserving the rural cultural landscape, but also a means to develop the economy and attract tourists and people of wealth to the area. The more preserved and authentic the area appears, the more tourist revenues can be generated for the local government. The preservation of these old houses has become one of the central tropes within the Bishan Project, since the preservation in itself entails investigations into old handicraft traditions as well as updated solutions to problems of comfort. Since the beginning of 2014, Anhui Province has been piloting an official market for residential land in a select number of counties (Chiang 2013), including Yi County, under whose jurisdiction Bishan is placed. This pilot residential land market makes it possible for external actors to purchase or lease houses and land within Bishan village legally, something that can potentially transform the appearance and demography of Bishan. As Sheldon Lu wrote in relation to the opening of the housing market in Beijing at the beginning of the 1990s, the house is transformed from being a “space in which to dwell into a fetish object among the populace” (Lu 2007, 139). Many of the traditional houses in Bishan had for a long time not had any dwellers, since either new houses had been built next to them or their inhabitants had moved elsewhere, yet the fetish component still remains. The exchange-value of the houses can now be realized on a whole new scale and the houses enter the realm of economic and nostalgic desire. By now most of the old Hui-style dwellings that can be traded have been traded, a process that gained speed already beginning in the fall of 2013 and perhaps even earlier, in other words, before the new policy experiment was announced publicly. Zuo Jing helped several of his acquaintances purchase houses in Bishan, functioning as an informal realtor by providing contact information of villagers who were willing to sell their houses.13 It remains to be seen how these houses will be used and whether they will be included as resources in the work of Bishan Project or remain as investment objects or holiday residences. If urbanites, as Ou Ning argues, “only purchase the house for the occasional holiday […] then the rural areas will become the backyard of the urbanites and nothing

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more, and that will be of little help to the revival of economy and culture of the rural areas” (Ou 2014, 10). Zuo Jing often remarks that the only way to preserve the old handicrafts related to the construction of Hui-­ style dwellings such as wood and stone carvings is by using them. By in some way “controlling” who acquires the houses of the village, the Bishan Project is perhaps able to control, at least partially, the direction in which the economy, the preservation and the demographic composition of the village develops—ensuring that the people buying the houses actually intend to restore them and so forth. It is, however, not clear whether this is what was actually happening. As suggested in the beginning of the chapter, the artists, or here Zuo Jing as curator, play dual roles by preserving old Chinese traditions and dwellings while at the same time serving as real estate agents (see Chap. 6 for an in-depth discussion of rural gentrification in Bishan). This problematic and dual function is also recognized in the instance of the development of the art village Songzhuang on the outskirts of Beijing. As Xu Hongbin from the Baimiao Project states: “The real estate method has quickly developed Songzhuang’s cultural situation, but it has also given rise to an unsustainable situation where artists fall into the comforting realm (温柔乡) of real estate economy” (Xu 2013). While neither Zuo Jing nor Ou Ning benefit directly from selling houses in Bishan to outsiders, it is an ambiguous situation. The houses purchased prior to the policy change made a sudden jump in exchange-value as the prices quickly increased, meaning that the villagers who sold their houses prior to the policy change could have turned a higher profit had they waited. It is only in a few cases that Yi County residents have purchased the houses, which hints at the fact that few locals and their offspring can afford them, reserving this specific development for a certain, often urban, population group. The Trojan Horse of the Bishan Project—here disguised as realtor—morphs into a Trojan Horse that is more likely to undermine the Bishan Commune Project in its utopian form than subvert state power. For the villagers who decided not to sell their Hui-style house, Ou Ning and the School of Tillers have set up a general profile on Airbnb, and through this profile they help villagers offer their houses to visiting tourists. SOT and the Buffalo Institute are similarly listed as places available for renting. If you do a quick search in Airbnb you will find several accommodations available for tourists in the vicinity of Bishan Village of which the majority are linked to the SOT profile.14 The Airbnb approach as a method to attract participants in the researcher-in-residence program at the SOT is mentioned in the second edition of the notebook (Ou 2015b,

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image 90), which Ou Ning published in July 2015. Airbnb is seen as a tool that gives villagers direct control over their own property and a ready source of income, and less so as limiting available living space and displacing original inhabitants of the city in favor of consuming tourists (as with many American or European cities).15 Airbnb is viewed as liberating, in the sense that it can connect villagers with international customers, while the villagers do not need to make large-scale financial investments, besides installing a shower and a toilet. It is a method to speed up the development of more villagers opening small businesses. Ou Ning argues that it is often urban people of wealth who are able to buy the old houses and undertake the high costs of restoring them,16 but “as more move in,” Ou Ning claims, “after a while bookshops and restaurants will appear, and a local economy will slowly and organically form” (Ou 2012). Early on in the short history of Airbnb, it was perhaps viewed in the flattering light of sharing and alternative economic relations, but as it has grown to span the world, this picture has quickly faded. It is possible that it can serve other functions in rural areas otherwise haunted by depopulation. As for Bishan, the success of Airbnb in Bishan dwindled with the departure of Ou Ning. Furthermore, the Chinese government has made it increasingly difficult for foreigners to use Airbnb in China. The many villages lying in close proximity to Bishan can also boast of well-preserved Hui houses and equally beautiful surroundings, but the investors I encountered, mostly by coincidence, were not interested in buying houses outside of Bishan Village. Due to the lack of Hui houses in Bishan and the rising prices many resorted to buying other kinds of houses, such as the Maoist era concrete remnants scattered all over the village. This implies that it was not just the houses in themselves that made Bishan interesting, other factors were equally, if not more, important. The presence of the artists, the bookstore that already attracted a large number of tourists, and a growing awareness in the village of the importance of preserving old customs and culture all contribute to a growing tourist industry, and are important factors that investors take into account when choosing one place over another.

The Bishan Bookstore Another important factor in this transformation was the opening of the Bishan Bookstore in the spring of 2014 as a project within the Bishan Commune framework, and, perhaps more importantly, as a branch of the

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renowned Nanjing bookstore Librairie Avant-Garde owned by Ou Ning’s old friend Qian Xiaohua (Fig. 5.4). Ou Ning is not involved economically in the bookstore, but uses the space for public events such as concerts, various workshops, reading groups and other activities (Fig. 5.5).17 After the opening of the Bishan Bookstore in 2014, Bishan began to experience a steadier influx of tourists as the bookstore provided an entry point into the village. The architecture of the Huizhou area, of which the bookstore is an example, came to play a significant part in the Bishan Project, both in terms of raising awareness of the value (and exchange-value) of these old structures but also as entry points into the village. Situated in an old, restored forefather temple of the Wang-clan (汪氏), the Bishan Bookstore is a monumental building located near one of the main alleys in the village. On the first floor of the bookstore is the large book collection, including novels, poetry, Huizhou history and a big section with books on the Rural Reconstruction Movement and research on rural China. It is also here that you find the main commodities of the Bishan Bookstore: the notebooks, bags and postcards that constitute the core economy of the Librairie

Fig. 5.4  From left: owner Qian Xiaohua and bookstore workers Wang Shouchang and Wang Ling at the Bishan Bookstore

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Fig. 5.5  Performance with the Danish art ensemble Bevægeligt Akkurat (Moveable Accurate) at the Bishan Bookstore October 2014

Avant-garde chain of bookstores. On the second floor is a café serving coffee and tea and offering a view over the rooftops of Bishan Village and the nearby rice paddies, mulberry fields and old silkworm breeding houses.18 The daily management of the bookstore is taken care of by the local village historian Teacher Wang, who is in charge of the books, and Tang Xue, Ou Ning’s wife, who is in charge of the café. Teacher Wang quickly became one of my key informants, as he was both influential within the village hierarchy and invested a considerable amount of time in discussing the matters of the Bishan Project with Ou Ning (Fig. 5.4). Besides Teacher Wang and Tang Xue, several others have helped or worked shorter periods at the bookstore, and Ou Ning continuously arranged various activities there. Not everyone in Bishan quite understood why the Bishan Project was setting up a bookstore there. The local small shop owner, Hu Yongfeng, expressed before the opening of the bookstore: "In rural areas, it is hopeless to try to sell books. The books are not going to sell. How many people actually buy books here? People here like to go to places like next door

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[the Elderly People’s Association] to play Mahjong. People here love to play Mahjong” (Sun and Thompson 2013). Mrs. Hu points towards one of the more obvious divides in the village: the people who play Mahjong versus the people who don’t. As it turns out, the villagers frequenting the bookstore on a regular basis are villagers who do not spend their days playing Mahjong. The bookstore provided a different kind of communal space than the one provided by the Elderly People’s Association. Mrs. Hu’s comments reveal a very common view of rural China as a place that is lacking in culture. However, not all voices in the village viewed the bookstore as a “hopeless” venture. As another small shop owner, Li Jin, expresses: "The bookstore will most definitely benefit Bishan, it is a good thing.”19 More people visiting the village will inevitably bring more business to the small mom-and-pop grocery stores that adorn every alley, and it is understandable why a shop owner would find the promise of more business advantageous. On another note, Xinghua, a local from Yi County who worked at the bookstore, explains how it grew with the local villagers (Fig. 5.6): “At first, the villagers came to the bookstore just to have a look. They would walk around with their hands on their backs, not touching

Fig. 5.6  Xinghua behind the counter at the Bishan Bookstore

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anything or sitting down anywhere, but after two months they have slowly started coming here more often, being more relaxed, coming here to read books, access the internet or just to hang out.” The bookstore had to settle in with the villagers in order for them to begin to use the space. In other words, a variety of opinions of and experiences with the bookstore were present in the village. It is also clear that some villagers gained a much closer connection to the bookstore space than others. By being the first renovated Hui house that was readily accessible to the villagers and by quickly demonstrating that it could attract visitors, the Bishan Bookstore was the first part of the Bishan Project that proved tangible to the villagers. As Teacher Wang, the local bookstore manager, explained it: “It is not easy to make locals understand what they [Bishan Project] want to accomplish. In their eyes, the only tangible thing Ou and Zuo have done so far is the Bishan Bookstore” (Sun and Thompson 2013). During the days I spent at the bookstore, I met many different villagers. Some would bring their grandchildren to the space and chat with the people working there, others would just sit and relax on the couches, read books and discuss all sorts of different things as people usually do in their

Fig. 5.7  Yao Lilan reading a book at the Bishan Bookstore

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local environment (Fig.  5.7). The bookstore had become a space and meeting place for a group of elderly villagers, as well as the entry point into the village for tourists from near and far. The bookstore became the space where villagers met and had exchanges with Chinese and foreign tourists or artists, and it housed concerts and reading groups put on by visiting artists. In the bookstore, the villagers were routinely asked what they thought of the Bishan Project and the development their village was going through by artists, tourists, journalists and visiting researchers, especially after the Bishan Commune Dispute caused people from all corners of China to visit Bishan. During an interview I did with Teacher Wang at the Bishan Bookstore, we were interrupted by a man from Beijing visiting Bishan because he had heard of Ou Ning and the Bishan Project. The conversation below, which I happened to record, vividly displays an urbanite’s prejudice regarding villagers in rural China and Teacher Wang’s attempts to show that villagers are more diverse than this man seems to have decided upon: Beijinger: […] it seems that the people buying books are mainly people from the outside. Wang: Some are from the village, but the majority are from the outside. Beijinger: […] obviously the locals are not really interested in these books. Wang: There are also locals who read books. Beijinger: To read a book and buy a book is not the same. Wang: There are also some who buy books, for instance this morning… Beijinger: Then what kind of books do the locals buy? Wang: They buy the books of their profession, books they are interested in. Some are interested in farmers and the land or books on rural reconstruction. There is an elderly lady called Old Nainai who comes every day, she read the book Why Farmers Leave Their Land from beginning to end.20 Beijinger: Ah ok, so it is like I said, this bookstore functions more like a library. People come here and read the books, because there are many different books here. Wang: There are also some old people or retired teachers, they all come here to look for books.

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Wang tries to explain to this outsider that not all villagers are the same; some actually read and buy books. There seems to be some sort of progression, from the man thinking that the books are of no interest to the villagers to asserting that the bookstore is a library to them and a bookstore to the visiting tourists. The conversation on the other hand also displays Teacher Wang’s pride in the bookstore and the fact that he can say with certainty that people in the countryside read books too. The dialogue is an example of the many conversations that took place in the bookstore. It demonstrates that Bishan still looks very different from the inside than from the outside and that meeting and talking about these things can perhaps decrease this distance. It shows that the bookstore provides a space for exchange and dialogue as well as a place that gives access to other demographics and geographies of society as tourists visiting the bookstore sought to interact and engage with local villagers. From the bookstore, I could observe some of the ongoing power dynamics and changing value systems in the village, as the villagers negotiated their way through a transforming power nexus due to the arrival of urban artists and tourists. From my first visit to Bishan in the fall of 2013 to my visit during the summer of 2014 after the opening of the bookstore, I sensed a clear change in opinion from the villagers I was in contact with. During my first stay, there was a sense that tourism development as represented by Xidi and Hongcun was the preferred way to go forward. Xidi and Hongcun were described as renao, which can be translated as lively, a word that has very positive connotations. It refers to an abundance of people, signifying that depopulation has been stopped in Xidi and Hongcun and that families could stay together and run small family businesses—a situation most villagers who cannot or will not leave Bishan are striving towards. The county secretary Yu Qiang similarly mentions how the arrival of the Bishan Project has made Bishan more renao (Sun and Thompson 2013). During my last visit however, Xidi and Hongcun were again and again presented as “too commercialized” (商业化太浓). Bishan was to be something different from Xidi and Hongcun and this signified a change in thinking about the terms on which the tourism industry should be developed. Another conversation I overheard at the bookstore was between a visiting photographer and Teacher Wang, on the matter of tourism development: Photographer: … I think that Bishan is very different (区别很大) from Xidi and Hongcun now Wang: The distance (距离很大) was already big

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No no, I mean difference (区别), not disparity (差别) You can’t say it like that, in my mind there is still a great distance. If Bishan stagnates, if we continue like this for ten or twenty more years, then the distance will be even greater. For now it is only the Bishan Project that shortens this distance, but the direction of the two villages is different. Yes, of course, this is my point. I just mean that Bishan has started getting its own characteristics, it already has something that Xidi and Hongcun doesn’t have Yes, this is the issue now

As they try to find common ground while also talking past each other, this conversation reveals the different matters at stake in the purported development of Bishan into that something else. Teacher Wang speaks from the position of wishing for economic development for the village broadly, whereas the photographer seems to think that Bishan is already much better off than Xidi and Hongcun. The distance perhaps lies in the gaze, so to speak. Where Teacher Wang sees an economically troubled village lacking in basic welfare provision, the photographer sees a picturesque place of nostalgic longing adorned by the presence of intellectuals and artists. Though Teacher Wang towards the end recognizes the Bishan Project as a driving force for the economy, he seems also to point out that this is only the very beginning of what should be a longer process towards prosperity for the village at large. During the next couple of visits during the summer of 2014, I was presented with various development ideas that were often related to tourism and to the preservation of old customs and places and that often had an educational element. By coincidence I was present when a Taiwanese investor visited the bookstore and I spent the day with him, his assistant and several villagers running around and looking at houses he could purchase and rebuild into a school for handicrafts and art students.21 The villagers that showed them around expressed clear opinions on the fact that it would bring more sustainable and lively development to the village, as opposed to just another hotel. In other words, the attitude had changed from the sense that any investor or any development was good, to the sense that development could be directed in a different direction—a sense that educational facilities rooted in the local handicraft traditions were more sustainable solutions than large-scale investment groups that would

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build luxury hotel reserves and employ workers from other parts of China—but also, and not insignificantly, the sense that they had a say in it. In other words, a more nuanced understanding of the future of the village was growing among a small number of the Bishan villagers.

School of Tillers and the New Comrades of Bishan During the last year of the Bishan Project with the help of a group of volunteers (Fig. 5.9), the School of Tillers (理农馆, SOT) was up and running, opening the spring of 2015 in the compound adjacent to the Buffalo Institute. The School of Tillers was a gallery, had a library with a curated selection of books, hosted a learning center and a lattice shop,22 operated a cafe and a researcher-in-residence program. A series of larger and smaller events took place at SOT, such as daily evening film screenings, different performances, exhibitions on agriculture, local culture and traditional handicrafts, farmers’ markets and many more formal and informal exchanges. Especially the young volunteers, who came to live with Ou

Fig. 5.8  The School of Tillers, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune

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Fig. 5.9  The volunteers of the School of Tillers. Ou Ning and Pig’s Inn owner Han Yu in the background, courtesy of Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune

Ning at Buffalo Institute and who took active part in the preparation of SOT are important to mention. Ou Ning explained how they had weekly study meetings, where “everyone shared a topic of new knowledge from their personal study,” and he would share his network, knowledge and experiences of living and working in the countryside.23 The discussions covered a wide range of subjects, such as “new insights from a book, new discovery about a special drink or a new IT tool, or it can also be personal travel stories and etc. This is to boost a new way of interacting and socializing with each other in the village and enhancing mutual learning in our communal life” (Ou Forthcoming [2015]). In an interview with Hong Kong-based artist Michael Leung, who spent time in the village, he referred to the volunteers as “commune members.”24 I do not know whether all the volunteers actually saw themselves as “commune members.” I asked SOT volunteer Zhao Kunfang about this during my interview of her in Shanghai, November 25, 2019. Thinking about this in

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retrospect, she was not entirely dismissive, but not entirely in favor of the term “commune member” either. Perhaps she would have answered differently had I asked her back then. However, it is relevant to the understanding of their significance to the development of the project. As “commune members” they were crucial to the spread of the ideas of the project in the village and beyond. The following is a description by Ou Ning of all the different volunteers connected to the project February 2015: Feng Si’te, an architecture major, was the first volunteer at the School of Tillers to arrive in Bishan. He organized and measured the space, and participated in the design and construction of it. The executive ability of this scientific and engineering man was obvious. Gao Nan, who has a masters degree in linguistics and who likes writing non-fiction, spent a massive amount of time implementing the suppliers who produced the various products developed and designed by the School of Tillers, and also contributed the idea of the “lattice shop” for villagers. Gu Xuechen, a former editor at a Shanghai fashion magazine, transferred the local enthusiasm of Chongming Island to Bishan, which has become her second hometown, and worked with Li Xuemei of Eaton Kidd to make my long-standing concept of “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune” come true—and also acted as the heroine in the fictional photo story Back to the Land. Chen Yicheng, a graduate of King’s College, London, used her strong command of photography and text to manage the Chinese and English social media for the School of Tillers, recording our preparation along with Bishan’s daily life, and increasing the number of fans of the School of Tillers in a short period of time. Zhao Kunfang, who travelled around Europe and the United States as a student, has resisted the harassment of Bishan’s various insects, with years of experience in Ming Dynasty furniture and a strong ability in research, arranged nearly all the decorations and objects for the School of Tillers. In the meantime she was also taking care of exhibition affairs and taking care of overseas communication. There is also Zhang Xiaoguang, who also studied in the UK, and is the leader of the volunteer team. He’s called big brother by everyone, and has many years of experience in managing large companies and serving as an investigator for international media. He’s mainly responsible for team building at the School of Tillers. He also serves as the Airbnb affairs manager of the School of Tillers and has the job of drinking with people at village banquets. Jiang Du, who has just joined the volunteer team, is a Japanese archery enthusiast. In addition to various projects at the School of Tillers, his unique contribution is to set up a Bishan archery study group. Every day, he either manages daily business at the School of Tillers or practices archery at the Bishan Culture Square. The last

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volunteer, Zhang Liaoran, a Cooper Union’s architecture student, surveyed the terrain and drew beautiful design plans for the “Happiness Pavilion” project that School of Tillers cooperated with the villager Qian Shi’an. Although he has to return to school and could not participate in the construction process, he provided valuable design suggestions for the project. (Ou Forthcoming [2015])

In an almost fictional manner, Ou Ning lays out the different traits and areas of expertise of the volunteers, almost presenting them as characters in a novel. We hear a little bit about their background and how they put their interests and skills to good use. The text comes forward as a tribute to the people it is describing, giving a sense of a compassionate community of a diverse group of people with diverse backgrounds playing different roles within the community. It is clear from the text that these people were important to the project and to Ou Ning. The text also gives glimpses of how the volunteers also did their own projects in the village and formed their own relationships with people in the village,25 such as Jiang Du’s Bishan archery study group or Gao Nan’s lattice shop, that gathered agricultural produce from local farmers and helped package and sell it at the SOT store for free. In her bilingual publication called Beyond Bishan 碧山 新志 (translates as New Comrades of Bishan), volunteer of the Bishan Project, Zhao Kunfang describes SOT as the new “living room” of Bishan, where villagers and visitors of all kinds come “during the day for chit-chat and in the evening to watch films” (Zhao 2015, 15). Another volunteer, the architecture graduate Feng Si’te, organized screenings of Chinese films requested by the villagers in the evenings as part of SOT’s program. Feng Si’te was the only one of the SOT volunteers that stayed in the village after SOT had opened (ibid.). He collaborated on various projects with the young local carpenter, Little Gang, living next door to Ou Ning and who had also been involved in the preparations for SOT. Together Little Gang and Feng Si’te set up Hun.Studio, that designed and produced furniture out of wood. With the arrival of the volunteers and the School of Tillers project, the Bishan Commune seemed to grow and was taken over by this diverse group of people who were involved in it and the interest and wishes they had for the development of the Bishan Commune.

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Fig. 5.10  Mapping of the Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange Project by Elaine W. Ho, Michael Leung and Zhao Kunfang. Courtesy of the artists

Planting Seeds in Bishan Together with Hong Kong artists Michael Leung and Elaine W. Ho, in May 2015 School of Tillers volunteer Zhao Kunfang did the Hong Kong-­ Bishan Seed Exchange Project (Fig. 5.10). For the project, they “made door-to-door visits with Bishan farmers to learn about their growing customs, and in exchange for a tour of their gardens we brought these gifts [various seeds], hand wrapped in our own seed pockets with instructions for planting” (Ho et al. 2015). The hand drawn map that documents the project has small descriptions of the encounters with each farmer along with drawings of the produce they grow in their small private vegetable gardens (ibid.). Ho, Leung and Zhao understand the project as an engagement into “cross-fertilization,” referring to both the sowing of foreign seeds in Bishan and to how the artists also bring something back with them, it is a mutual, reciprocal engagement. Using the discourse of growing the land, Ho Leung and Zhao thus wish to plant seeds of exchange, and as they write: “some may consider this form of pollination a

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dangerous implantation of foreign matter into the pristine landscape of Bishan. But we consider it a minor gesture with the possibility of a future new recipe to be shared together” (ibid.). In other words, to change Bishan in the way they propose (through new crops), is a matter of creating new possibilities, new ways of combining people and things to create new recipes. The seeds are like Trojan Horses—both dangerous and full of gesture and new futures at the same time. While the seed exchange in itself, perhaps did not bring about new social relationships and new futures, it should still be seen as one project of many small projects taking place in Bishan serving as the basis for the spread of the ideas of the Bishan Commune project.26 Furthermore, the seed exchange project also shows how people made connections and forged friendships in the village, using the Bishan Commune as platform for engagement independent of Ou Ning. In the conversation with Michael Leung, he furthermore talked about how some of the ideas of sharing that Ou Ning had introduced in the village lingered on also after Ou Ning’s departure.27 I think Leung is right in the sense that Bishan and a group of villagers have most definitely been marked by Ou Ning’s and the volunteer’s presence in the village. They forged friendships and partnerships and worked and discussed together on a daily basis, especially in the months leading up to the opening of School of Tillers. Though Bishan Village has taken a sharp turn in the direction of tourist attraction here a couple of years after Ou Ning left the village, the material and immaterial marks these people left on the village should not be disregarded. Zhao Kunfang called her publication about the Bishan Commune: Beyond Bishan, referring also to the fact that the ideas and friendships forged in Bishan travelled further beyond Bishan. Furthermore, the volunteers of Bishan keep in touch and meet once in a while, though they are scattered across the country after they left Bishan.28 Bishan has come to mean an awful lot to a small group of people who invested their time and energy in this small place in the Chinese countryside.

The Trojan Turn I would now like to return to Lucy Lippard’s idea of activist art as a Trojan Horse and its unfolding in Bishan Village. The two-fold (or perhaps more correctly manifold) experience of the Bishan Project confirms the dialectical double sidedness of the Trojan Horse. In many ways the village committee itself invited in the Trojan Horse of the Bishan Project, or were at

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least persuaded to do so by the resourcefulness of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing. The village committee allowed an old forefather temple to be used as a bookstore free of charge and they allowed for houses to be sold to Ou Ning and Zuo Jing prior to the policy change. For some time, the bookstore was the main communal space readily available to villagers and tourists alike and through the bookstore space visitors were directed further into the village. The bookstore became a symbol of a successfully renovated Hui house that had significant use-value and as such also represented the increased exchange-value of the Hui-style houses in general. Through these spaces Ou Ning introduced new thinking on the preservation and value attributed to the Hui houses in an attempt to connect Bishan to a past not connected with the Maoist-era. With Ou Ning’s move to Bishan he managed to connect with larger groups of local villagers and together they discussed the various ways in which Bishan could develop for the benefit of the local population. A portion of the villagers and a growing group of volunteers eagerly supported the Bishan Project and had begun to see the project as a benefit to them. The villagers turned from the sense that any development was good, to the sense that there was a choice to be made in terms of the kinds of investors the village let in. In other words, an opening towards a different kind of awareness based on a different kind of economic development had begun to open up. The School of Tillers, Bishan Bookstore and Ou Ning’s Buffalo Institute did somehow function as Trojan Horses full of willing soldiers. The Trojan Horse had its effect on the local villagers in the sense of a new idea of the way the village could develop economically, though the Bishan Bookstore, along with other refurbished Hui houses, at the same time became a marker of nostalgic, economic desire. The Bishan Project was in this iteration the subversive power Lippard describes, as Ou Ning managed to get some groups of villagers over on his side—at least in terms of economic development and to a lesser degree in terms of an anarchist utopia. However, as the housing prices rose, the Trojan Horse also brought with it a transformation of the economic foundation of the Hui houses, turning them into desired objects that could be purchased for investment purposes. In other words, the Trojan Horse turned on the Bishan Project and became the Trojan Horse of capitalist-style development, and the artists became pioneers of an elaborate and complex rural gentrification project. In a sense, they became frontrunners of the urbanization of rural China as they brought in urban resources and capital that altered the face and pace of Bishan. The Trojan Horse is in this sense indeed a subversive

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power, though it is subverting the artist project itself and not the community it was trying to alter. The Trojan Horse of the Bishan Project has turned into something Ou Ning and Zuo Jing can no longer control unilaterally. As the next chapter will unfold, this rising exchange-value also gave rise to more conflicts with key persons within the local county and village administrations. The increasing support base in the village as well as opinions on how to run the village, as one might imagine, worried the local leadership. The Bishan Project entered a period of increased levels of conflict and a battle over the resources of the village.

Notes 1. Parts of this article and the arguments in it can also be found in Corlin 2018. 2. Every night at 7 pm the ladies of the village meet at the meeting hall to dance the popular “square dance” (广场舞). 3. Ou Ning’s mother, younger brother and nephew moved with him to Bishan when the project began. Later on, his wife and her son also moved there. In late 2015, Ou Ning’s son was born in Bishan. 4. The local authorities did not allow Ou Ning to freely invite villagers. The people present at the meeting were primarily members of the local village committee and the Elderly People’s Association. 5. Ou Ning had residence permit to Bishan, but hukou in Shenzhen. 6. Interview with Teacher Wang conducted in July 2014. 7. During the reading groups they primarily read and discussed Chinese classics and traditional ceremonies like drinking ceremonies and village archery competitions (Ou 2014, 24). 8. One example out of many could be how Ou Ning together with four villagers built a traditional teahouse out of bamboo only using traditional methods and other involvement in the restoration of the Hui-houses. 9. Sun Jun and Li Changping are a part of Green Cross, which is an environmental organization working with rural reconstruction and has introduced the Wushan Model (五山模式). See Thøgersen 2009, 20–21. 10. Taobao resembles amazon.com, but is different in the sense that anyone can set up their own online shop. It is very popular in China and you can buy almost anything on it. 11. The traditional way of keeping warm in winter has been by using “coal barrels” (火筒), a kind of wooden tub with hot coals that you can sit in all day. The Hui houses have these semi-open courtyards called “sky wells” (天井) and are thus not particularly warm in winter. 12. The way this set of laws is enforced is what makes the categories less stable across China. In actuality even though you own the land your house is

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built on, this does not exclude local governments from evicting you and your family if they deem it necessary. 13. Several of the friends visiting Zuo Jing while I stayed at his house prior to the policy change were there to purchases houses in Bishan. 14. It is no longer possible to use Airbnb to book a stay in Bishan. 15. One example could be the city of Berlin’s decision to ban the short-term rental of apartments and as such hinder the further expansion of Airbnb there. 16. Interview with Ou Ning, Bishan, November 2013. 17. Examples would be the reading session arranged by visitors to Buffalo Institute, thinker and art critic Wang Jiyu or the concert of the Danish artists group Bevægeligt Akkurat (Moveable Accurate), the latter had the bookstore packed to the brim with people, primarily local villagers and visiting art school students from Shanghai. 18. The café was later on moved to a small building next to the bookstore entrance. 19. Interview with Li Jin conducted October 2014 while the bookstore building was being restored for use, and had not yet opened its doors to the public. 20. The book Nainai  reads, contains interviews with farmers from all over China who moved to the city, see Zhu and Zhao 2011. 21. The investor was an acquaintance of some of Zuo Jing’s friends, who were also visiting the village at that time. 22. In a text about the School of Tillers, Ou Ning explains the concept of lattice shop thusly: “The ‘lattice shop’ (guriddo shoppu) originated from Japan. It is a standard-sized ‘lattice cabinet’ placed in shops in prosperous areas of the city. Anyone can rent a lattice to consign his own goods for sale with a small monthly fee. The ‘lattice shop’ is characterized by a wide range of applicable groups and low cost of opening a shop. The lattice shop in School of Tillers is free for the villagers. We provide designed packaging for their products to sell, without any intermediate fee, and settle with them once every month” (Ou Forthcoming [2015]). 23. Email correspondence with Ou Ning, March 18, 2020. 24. Interview with Michael Leung, Hong Kong September 10, 2019. 25. Interview with Zhao Kunfang in Shanghai November 25, 2019 and interview with Ou Ning in Hong Kong November 24, 2019. 26. Michael Leung did follow-up trips to Bishan after the project in May 2015. When I visited Bishan the summer of 2016, some six months after the closure, I met Leung and accompanied him on visits to villagers with whom they had exchanged seeds. 27. Interview with Michael Leung, Hong Kong, September 10, 2019. 28. Interview with Zhao Kunfang, Shanghai, November 25, 2019.

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Literature Berliner, Nancy. 2005. “Sheltering the Past  – The Preservation of China’s Old Dwellings.” In House, Home, Family  – Living and Being Chinese, edited by Ronald G.  Knapp and Kai-Yin Lo, 205-222. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Cao, Xiaolong and Si Lei. 2014. “Haotang Village: Don’t Sell the Farm.” China Pictorial, September 2. URL (Last accessed February 6, 2020): http://www. chinapictorial.com.cn/en/features/txt/2014-09/02/content_638132.htm Chiang, Langi. 2013. “Anhui tests land reform in wake of plenum vow on rural property rights.” South China Morning Post, November 13. URL (Last accessed February 5, 2020) http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1355434/ anhui-tests-land-reform-wake-plenum-vow-rural-property-rights Corlin, Mai. 2018. “Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice” FIELD  – A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, issue 9 (Winter). URL (Last accessed March 12, 2020): http://field-journal.com/issue-9/trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ouning-and-the-bishan-commune-in-dialogue-and-practice Dai, Jinhua. 1997. “Imagined Nostalgia.” Boundary 2, Vol 24, no. 3, (Autumn): 143–161. Day, Alexander. 2013. The Peasant in Postsocialist China – History, Politics, and Capitalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ho, Elaine W., Michael Leung and Zhao Kunfang. 2015. 碧山新志 Beyond Bishan. Map of Bishan mapping the Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange Project. Additional illustrations by Natalie Lo Lailai, with seed pocket illustrations by Michael, Elaine, Kunfang, Sun Yunfan, Leah Thompson, Wang Fang Hong, and Wang Ning. Kurek, Adele. 2015. “The Bishan Project: Cultural Production and Place Reconstruction in Rural China.” MA thesis., University of Toronto. Lippard, Lucy R. 1984. “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power.” In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis, 341-358. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Lu, Sheldon H. 2007. “Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art.” In The Urban Generation – Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Edited by Zhang Zhen, 137-160. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ou Ning. Forthcoming [2015]. “Song of the Earth.” In Utopia in Practice – The Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction (Preliminary title). Shanghai: Palgrave Macmillan. Ou Ning. 2015a [2010]. 碧山共同体如何创建自己的乌托邦The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Bilingual. Translation from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, Austin Woerner and Jeff Crossby, edited by Mai Corlin and Rasmus Graff. Sønderholm: Antipyrine and OVO Press.

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Ou Ning. 2015b. “你羞于谈论乌托邦太久了” (You Have Been Ashamed to Talk About Utopia for Too Long). 今日头条 Toutiao, July 17. URL (No longer accesible): http://toutiao.com/a4736615292/ Ou Ning. 2014. “Questions and answers between Ou Ning and the Sønderholm Collective.” In Forespørgsler i Jord og Kunst (Inquiries in Earth and Art). Translated from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, edited by Mai Corlin, Rasmus Graff and Mathias Kokholm. Sønderholm: Antipyrine and OVO Press. Ou Ning. 2012. “Obstacles to Rural Reconstruction.” LEAP Magazine 17. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://www.leapleapleap.com/2012/11/ ou-ning-obstacles-to-rural-reconstruction/ Qian Mengni. 2014. “The Floundering Bishan Project.” China Pictorial, September 2. URL (Last accessed February 5, 2020): http://www.chinapictorial.com.cn/en/features/txt/2014-09/02/content_638107.htm Sun, Yunfan and Leah Thompson. 2013. Down to the Countryside: The Emerging Back-to-the-land Movement in Bishan Village. Documentary film on Bishan Commune, 30. min. A shorter version of the film is available from the ChinaFile website. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): https://www.chinafile.com/ multimedia/video/down-countryside Thøgersen, Stig. 2009. “Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle: The State, Villagers and Social Activists in Rural Reconstruction Projects.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 38, no. 4: 9-33. Xu Hongbin (徐弘滨). 2013. “白庙计划 -当代艺术介入乡村的实验” (Baimiao Project – Experiments of Contemporary Art of Engaging with the Countryside.” Baimai Project, Sina.com. September 25. URL (No longer accesible): http:// blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_e2fd4a7e01019wkl.html Zhao, Kunfang (赵坤方). 2015. Beyond Bishan—碧山新志. Hong Kong: Mimi Brown and Spring Workshop. Zhu, Qizhen and Zhao Chenming (朱启臻, 赵晨鸣). 2011. 农民为什么离开土地 (Why Farmers Leave Their Land). Beijing: People’s Daily Press.

CHAPTER 6

Whose Village? The Bishan Project Dispute

The farmers should raise their heads and the intellectuals should lower their heads, so that they are face to face and the distance between them is smaller. The farmers have an inferiority complex; they feel they don’t have any money, they lead a hard life to support their families. The intellectuals, on the other hand, feel superior: “I have money, diplomas and knowledge.” Their heads are raised high on their shoulders. But in the countryside, your intelligentsia must lower their heads a bit so they can see the farmers; and the farmers should raise their heads to see the big brothers and sisters of the intelligentsia, and study how they use their knowledge in this place. Only in this way can the distance between them become smaller.1 (Teacher Wang, July 2014)

Teacher Wang, who works at the Bishan Bookstore, said this to me during an interview, implying that both the villagers and the artists had a job to do in obtaining the best conditions for communication and that there were unresolved power dynamics at stake.2 A similar dichotomy was raised by a migrant worker participating in a seminar held by the organizers of a socially engaged art project that unfolded on the outskirts of Beijing called “Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads:” “I’ve heard people mention equality quite a few times today. I dearly harbor the wish that the day will come when an artist talks to a migrant worker and doesn’t adopt a superior approach, and the migrant worker won’t feel inferior. I hope that all of you, and your work, can help to bring that day a little closer” (Tang © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_6

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2015).3 This skewed and complicated relationship between artists and subjects conveys some of the often discussed problematics of socially engaged art as an idealized project of equality and collaboration unfolds in real life. The arrival of Ou Ning in Bishan gave rise to a wave of critique that culminated with the Bishan Project Dispute (碧山计划争议) in the summer of 2014. Much of the critique was centered on how the actors of the Bishan Project had problematic, idealized assumptions of community in their engagement with the local villagers and that Ou Ning in particular used “status symbols” that enlarged the “cultural divide” (文化的区隔) between the artists and the villagers (Zhou 2014a). Some of the points of critique relating to villager engagement in the project have been raised before, as shown in Chap. 4, although they were never so directly critical of Ou Ning’s person and practice. The discussion primarily took place on Weibo and Douban, where the blogpost that ignited the dispute had been posted. All kinds of people from all over the country participated in the discussion and so did some local villagers. The discussion on Weibo furthermore made Chinese journalists and other curious observers flock to Bishan to see what this dispute was all about. Most of the exchanges that took place in the social media sphere relating to the Bishan Dispute are not worth mentioning here—some of the posts seem more like personal fights between the supporters of Ou Ning and the supporters of Zhou Yun than thoroughly reflected comments. However, in the sections below, I will try to give an account of what the Bishan Project Dispute was all about and how it was viewed internally in the village. This chapter is preoccupied with the critique of the Bishan Project both in specific and general terms. What constituted the critique and how does it relate to the criticism of socially engaged art projects in general? The dispute can in itself seem “culturally divided” from the village as most of it took place far away from the locality at issue. However, for the local village committee, at that time headed by Zhu Xiandong, the dispute became a vessel to bring forward their own critique of the Bishan Project. The main points of their critique related to a conflict that had long been simmering between Ou Ning and Zhu Xiandong and that perhaps was more related to issues of power and money in the village than to Ou Ning’s estrangement from the community or his politically deviant views. The Dispute thus had its own life and purpose in Bishan Village. This chapter is as much about power, distribution of wealth, rural gentrification and a growing sympathy with the villagers for Ou Ning’s cause as it is about a

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general critique of socially engaged art projects. Funding agencies, here represented by Deborah Fischer from A Blade of Grass express a need for ways to assess these projects (A Blade of Grass 2013)—a need that corresponds poorly to the transformative nature of these projects. What parameters should we use to assess these projects? Does a project fail if it does not succeed in bringing about an anarchist utopia? Or put differently, how can we understand the complexities of socially engaged art projects in the light of the possible and the impossible?

The Cultural Divide The spark that set off a nationwide discussion was a blogpost by Harvard PhD student of sociology Zhou Yun titled “Whose Countryside, Whose Community? Taste, Distinction and the Bishan Project” published at the beginning of July 2014.4 Zhou Yun visited Bishan as part of a short research trip organized by the Social Sciences faculty at Nanjing University and attended a talk by Ou Ning on that occasion. In the blogpost Zhou Yun heavily criticized the methods of Ou Ning and the Bishan Project, arguing that it was an elitist project that generated a sense of “othering” of the rural residents (Zhou 2014a). I am calling the Bishan Project into question because its founder wants to create the “Bishan Commune,” and speaks of “villagers’ autonomy and self-­ governance;” however, the PowerPoint presentation he uses to introduce his ideas is completely in English, and full of big words such as civil society, social engineering and party politics, with constant allusions to Western works such as Walden, Skinner, and The Last Whole Earth Catalog; he also deliberately emphasizes that the notebook used to record his vision was a Moleskine. In this discussion, all of the details and Status Symbol[s] continuously produce a cultural divide, placing real villagers on the outside. In fact, it is not just villagers who are excluded, urban residents who lack cultural capital are excluded as well. Therefore, with regard to the “Commune,” whose “Commune” is it? (ibid.)5

While the use of English in Ou Ning’s PowerPoint was less of a problem in relation to the particular audience, which consisted of university students from China and abroad,6 there are still issues in relation to the “cultural divide” that are not easily dismissed in the case of the Bishan Project. Zhou Yun, in this line, questions Ou Ning’s idea of an autonomous commune consisting of villagers and artists, when the voice of the villagers is

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not included and argues that the villagers as such are excluded from the project. In the framing of her critique, Zhou Yun references Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of “cultural divide” and “status symbols” (Zhou 2014a). While I do not intend to completely dismiss these notions—status symbols are without a doubt an issue with the Bishan Project—I will argue that solely focusing on these aspects is an oversimplification of the reality in Bishan Village. It is, however, the case that Ou Ning and Zuo Jing brought with them a certain kind of power, the power of resources one might say, and the fact that they actively used this power in the village is no secret. In this light, it is also relevant to ask whether Zhou Yun’s focus on the “cultural divide” between the villagers and artists is not also a problematic vantage point. This assumption takes for granted that the villagers are one homogenous unit all placed on the other side of an insurmountable cultural divide. But is this actually the case? Aren’t the villagers an equally unruly mass of people with their own opinions on Ou Ning, the Bishan Project and the development of the economy? Don’t the villagers have different cultural resources and utilize these in diverse manners? As I showed in Chap. 5, the bookstore and the School of Tillers (SOT) served as spaces of mediation between artists, tourists, villagers and others. It was spaces that offered a more diverse picture of rural China than what is often portrayed in the media, in which there tends to be less of a focus on the differences between rural residents and more of a focus on generalized concerns. Either way, my aim here is not to suggest that there is no cultural divide between rural and urban residents, or that status symbols and power do not affect how relationships develop, but rather to suggest that besides these factors of constraint, other processes of dialogue take place.

Streetlights Versus Stars Though Zhou Yun raised a wide range of concerns related to Ou Ning’s Bishan Project, what became the main driving force of the dispute was the question of streetlights. Ou Ning had during the talk that Zhou Yun attended mentioned that there was a conflict between the villagers and the visiting artists and urbanites. As an example of the rural-urban cultural divide, Ou Ning claimed that visiting tourists did not want streetlights since they would prevent them from seeing the stars. The villagers on the other hand, wanted streetlights since it was unsafe to walk around the village when it was dark (Ou quoted in Zhou 2014a).7 Zhou Yun, however,

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twisted Ou Ning’s comments, so that in the rest of the blogpost it sounds like Ou Ning was part of the “elitist intelligentsia” that did not want streetlights, which better supported her statements that portrayed Ou Ning as instigating a cultural divide. While it might seem like Zhou Yun was making a larger claim against urban artists and their colonization of rural China, she continues to tie the problem to Ou Ning and the issue of streetlights. The streetlights discussion thus came to overshadow some of Zhou Yun’s other points of critique, and it even got its own tag on Weibo: #路灯vs看星星 (streetlights vs stars). Another student who had attended the same talk in Bishan corrected Zhou Yun in a comment on her blogpost on Weibo and gave his account of the situation.8 In addition, the owner of the local Bishan Hotel Tailai (泰来农庄) commented on Weibo and wrote: “I am a villager from Bishan. To be frank, you have really misunderstood Ou Ning and the Bishan Project. They are doing good things.”9 Furthermore, the topic of streetlights had already been addressed by Ou Ning at a prior occasion as a matter of concern. During the second Bishan Harvestival in 2012, Ou Ning commissioned an artist to install streetlights in Bishan, though only temporarily during the Harvestival and only in the eastern part of the village (碧东), which upset the villagers in the western part of the village (碧西).10 There is, in other words, little evidence that Ou Ning supports a “ban” on streetlights in Bishan. Nevertheless, in the eyes of Zhou Yun, the lack of streetlights became the symbol of urban artists and intellectuals’ hostile takeover of rural China. But as a commenter on the Bishan Project Dispute asked: is it really the case that the villagers don’t appreciate the stars? (村民无感) (Song 2014). More than questioning streetlights in Bishan, the commenter questions the divide Zhou Yun posits between Ou Ning and the villagers. There is more to the issue of streetlights than the fact that they represent a cultural divide between urban and rural residents. Streetlights in Yi County are status symbols in and of themselves, which demonstrate that the village community is wealthy enough to provide light when it is dark.11 As it turned out, Bishan was one of the last villages in the neighborhood not to have streetlights and some villagers saw this as a “loss of face” (没 有面子). Mentioning all the different costs and requirements related to the installment of streetlights, one commenter on the Bishan Project Dispute in a lengthy blogpost on Weixin wrote: the installment of one lamp “reflects a microcosm of how basic state power operates” (Song 2014). By this, the commenter related the question of streetlights directly to the administration of rural China. In other words, whose responsibility

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are streetlights really? As the next section will show, the Bishan Project Dispute also became the battlefield for a conflict Ou Ning had long had with the local village committee. A conflict related to who should pay for these kinds of services in the village.

Outside Bosses One testament to the shifting dynamic within the village was the subtle power struggle taking place, which was displayed through the Bishan Project Dispute. The party secretary of Bishan Village at the time, Zhu Xiandong, saw his chance to take advantage of the less fortunate press coverage of Bishan Commune and Ou Ning and stated “These outside bosses enjoy our resources. Our village has such a beautiful green landscape and old local-style dwelling houses, they should contribute something to our village” (Zhu Xiandong quoted in Xing 2014). The “outside bosses” (外地来的老板) refers to Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and other outsiders operating in the village. By referring to the old houses as local resources, Zhu Xiandong is pointing not only toward the shift in cultural value concerning these houses, but also to the capital value Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and their friends came to possess through acquisitions of property in the village—property that could not have been purchased prior to the policy change without local, political support. From Zhu Xiandong’s quote, it is not clear exactly what or how they should contribute in return for using these local resources, but it is established practice in Yi County that investors pay for new concrete roads, welfare installations and dinners.12 Ou Ning had, prior to the dispute, been in conflict with Zhu Xiandong, who wanted Ou Ning to pay for various more or less reasonable services. By refusing to pay for these things, Ou Ning had not complied with the “rules of engagement” in the countryside and had thus confronted local power holders, who treated Ou Ning and Zuo Jing as just two more wealthy investors. By using the phrase “outside bosses” the village party secretary reinforced a distance between the villagers and these outsiders, while also repeating a critique from the first years of the Bishan Project, when a high number of the villagers did indeed perceive Ou Ning and Zuo Jing as “outside bosses.” In addition to revealing the local power struggles of a given village, this issue demonstrates the problematic financial situation of villages in rural China. The abolition of agricultural taxes in the mid-2000s meant in effect that village administrations lost their redistributive and administrative

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power (Chen 2014, 716), as there were no longer any taxes to collect and redistribute. Though the circumstances vary throughout China, many villages have been left in a situation where they are financially dependent on the township and county administrations. Since Bishan did not have a strong collective economy,13 the village has been lacking resources and ways to maintain a certain service level. As a consequence, the village committee asked the outside investors to pay for certain types of services. By calling them outside bosses, Zhu Xiandong is equating Ou Ning and Zuo Jing with wealthy businesspeople, who are expected to contribute, thus using the Bishan Commune Dispute as a vessel for his and the village committee’s own agenda. Even if the media interpreted it otherwise, the village party secretary’s open statement in the press revealed the internal power struggles going on in Bishan Village after the arrival of the urban artists.

Entrance Fees and the Redistribution of Tourist Revenues Another issue of concern is the matter of entrance tickets—an issue that is also central to the practice of the Bishan Commune as it relates to its ability to redistribute the wealth generated by the emerging tourist industry. This again connects to the lack of funds in the village to support public services and allow less resourceful villagers to gain financially from development. The nearby UNESCO World Heritage villages Xidi and Hongcun have continuously been mentioned as both positive (lively, 热闹) and negative (too commercialized, 商业化太浓) local examples of the development of the tourism industry. There are, however, very different ownership models in Xidi and Hongcun. While the tourism rights of Hongcun are owned by a corporation that answers to the county leadership, the tourism rights of Xidi are owned by the village community itself. And while Xidi and Hongcun on the outside look very similar, the model in Xidi has, according to Zhou and Ying, been effective in redistributing tourism revenues back to the community in the form of further investments in developing Xidi as a tourist destination, building an elementary school, setting up phone and antenna systems and other general welfare projects, and as cash payments to all villagers (Ying and Zhou 2007, 100). The Hongcun model, on the other hand, has excluded villagers from the

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decision-making processes (ibid., 103), demonstrated little in the way of reinvestment in the village from the corporation and shown little to no channeling of tourism revenues back to the village.14 General tourism revenues are primarily generated through entrance tickets, and in addition, many villagers (and outsiders) have chosen to open independent businesses in both villages. Entrance tickets can, in other words, be a powerful way to redistribute wealth generated by the tourism industry for the benefit of the whole community, if controlled by the local community itself. Ying and Zhou, however, also point toward the fact that neither Xidi nor Hongcun tried to control the type of businesses that opened in the respective villages (ibid., 100), which has likely contributed to the fact that both are now conceived to be too commercialized and as such “ruined” examples of the traditional Huizhou village. But whether this can be blamed on entrance fees is another question. It is worth noting that none of my interview subjects in Bishan village mentioned the differences in ownership between the two villages. Xidi, Hongcun and the existence of a flourishing tourism industry in Yi County have limited the possible paths of economic development for Bishan, as tourism is generally understood by villagers and local authorities as the best (and only) means to develop a village on a socio-economic level. The villagers of Bishan also wanted to introduce entrance tickets, but when Ou Ning and Zuo Jing arrived in the village they convinced the village leadership to abandon the idea of entrance tickets altogether.15 In her blogpost, Zhou Yun critiques Ou Ning’s opposition to entrance tickets as yet another example of Ou Ning being out of step with the villagers (Zhou 2014a). In Zhou Yun’s words “the elitist intelligentsia did not approve of, even disdained (不屑)” entrance tickets, while this was something the villagers wanted (ibid.). While the logic behind abandoning entrance tickets seems to be a way to prevent Bishan from developing into an overcommercialized tourism village like Xidi and Hongcun, this was perhaps not what actually happened in Bishan. The Pig’s Inn, the Bishan Bookstore, School of Tillers and other projects—commercial and non-­ commercial—that came in their wake became the basis of such an industry even if this was not the initial intended aim of Ou Ning. From the point of view of the village committee, Ou Ning and Zuo Jing appeared to be instrumental in bringing about the tourism industry and thus also appeared to benefit most from this new development. The lack of revenues going directly to the local village administration thus posed a serious issue. The drawback was that the lack of entrance fees that could be recovered by the

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local community created a situation in Bishan in which there was no organized system to redistribute the revenues generated by the emerging tourism industry, which left less resourceful villagers (and the village administration) at a loss. Along with Zhu Xiandong, many villagers expressed in interviews and conversations that these new actors and businesses involved in the local tourism industry ought to financially support the local community, by paying for streetlights and other necessary services. However, some villagers also mentioned to me that they thought the county had “forgotten” Bishan. In other words, they blamed the county and not Ou Ning for the lack of investment in village infrastructure, streetlights and social services. The scope of this research is not to unravel the entire network of economic foundations and relations in Bishan and Yi County, I only wish to point toward the fact that the rejection of entrance fees perhaps had consequences that were not intended by Ou Ning—especially as this rejection was not followed by an attempt to organize the villagers into a cooperative that could have served to distribute some of the financial income. While the requests from Zhu Xiandong and the village committee might seem unfair, they are related to the fact that there is very little funding available to the regular village leadership in rural China, unless, as with some villages in Yi County, a model for redistribution of tourist revenues is introduced. An elderly villager I interviewed, Teacher Hu, mentioned that it would be problematic to organize the villagers in an economic cooperative aimed at developing the local tourist industry.16 He explained that the villagers do not have access to the funds necessary to install bathrooms, internet and other installments required by urban tourists (这些设施还跟不上). Teacher Hu suggested that the better solution to the problem would be to invite in an investor and devise a contract to share the profits. Adding that he “had heard the village party secretary talk about this, he [the secretary] has this intention.”17 That is, not to organize a cooperative, but to invite in a company. The experience from Xidi and Hongcun shows that the village cooperative is the more viable solution, but perhaps it seemed less of a risk to have a company take responsibility than to do things themselves. From the point of view of Ou Ning’s anarchic and utopian thinking, it is not so strange that he did not wish to organize the villagers into an economic cooperative with the aim of tourism—as it was not his intention to develop Bishan into a tourist destination. However, as New Left academic Lü Xinyu suggested in her critique of the Bishan Project after the first Harvestival: “If the Project doesn’t have its own means of production, links with the local

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community, or mechanisms to train people on a long-term basis,” then it will be difficult for it to avoid becoming just another “contemporary art enclave” (Lü quoted in Zhao 2011). While the problem has been less one of the Bishan Commune becoming a “contemporary art enclave,” the reference to the lack of a means of production becomes relevant in this context of redistribution—a village cooperative aimed at tourism development could have served this purpose. Ou Ning’s intentions of introducing the alternative currency of Bishan Hours can be read as an attempt to address the lack of redistribution, but as the local government felt threatened by such a system, it quickly fell to the ground. In another attempt, Ou Ning began selling local farmers’ produce at the School of Tillers through the lattice shop, as a way of encouraging some of the local villagers to profit from the increasing number of tourists. Ou Ning and School of Tillers would provide free packaging and give all revenue back to the villagers.18 But when the central and the local government initiated moves to close down the project, it was exactly the goods of the farmers they cracked down on—causing worry with Ou Ning and aggravation with the local villagers.19 As the examples above reveal, there are several layers of power and interpretation at stake in rural China. Zhou Yun’s short visit in Bishan could not disclose the entire reality of what is going on in Bishan and the extent of the relationship to the local villagers and local authorities. Zhou Yun did not take into account the temporality of the project nor the actual space for political action in a small Chinese village. This returns us again to Grant Kester’s proposition for a new field-based approach to address and assess these projects, if we want to understand how and on what premises they unfold. As shown in Chap. 3, Ou Ning has operated with the idea of a utopian, intellectual community of diversity and equality, as well as a preconceived idea that the primary issues facing Bishan Village are its lack of community and culture. What happened in the village was perhaps not so much a problem of divergent ideas of community and utopia between Ou Ning and the villagers, but that Ou Ning in his utopian thinking treated rural China as a place where he could carve out a space for a practice of co-existence. The focus was put on what rural China lacked, and not on what was already there—a matrix of power struggles and a continuous battle of resources.

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Representing the Community Leaving the local power dynamics aside for a bit and returning to Zhou Yun and her points of critique, I want to discuss the issues, Zhou Yun is echoing—issues hinged on a range of concerns related to power, representation and the pronounced concern for the community under scrutiny and the possible misrepresentation and mistreatment of this community. While Ou Ning in most cases has refrained from representing the villagers as the romantic other of an original Chinese semi-anarchic time, Ou Ning has however remained as the main driving force within the project as well as the indisputable spokesman for the project in various types of media. It is Ou Ning’s name that is associated with almost all media reports, art world notices and texts concerning the Bishan Project; it is Ou Ning who represents the project and the voice of the villagers is as such rarely heard. As Grant Kester argues, it happens that “In many community-based public art projects it is precisely the community whose voice is never heard. The institutional authority of the artist, their privileged relationship to channels of ‘legitimate’ discourse about the project (through media coverage, their alliance with sponsoring and funding agencies, etc.), conspire to create the appearance of a harmony of interests even where none may actually exist” (Kester 1995, 8). While Ou Ning definitely was the voice of the project, however with the opening of School of Tillers more people became involved in the Bishan Commune, and they began to write, and draw and map the project. For example, SOT volunteer Zhao Kunfang (2015) and her Beyond Bishan account of life in Bishan; artist Michael Leung (2016) who wrote the first piece of “Bishan Commune fiction,” a short love story unfolding between two members of the commune; and artist Elaine W. Ho, who together with Michael Leung and Zhao Kunfang did the Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange Project May 2015, that also featured a hand painted mapping of their seed exchanges with different villagers (Ho et al. 2015).20 From the very beginning, Teacher Wang has made several hand painted maps displaying the main Bishan Commune venues. The maps are reproduced and can be purchased at the bookstore. Slowly more voices are giving their account of what it entails to be part of Bishan Commune, and what Bishan looks and feels like to them. Furthermore, Ou Ning has in several texts, both criticized his own methods and approaches as well as displayed the not so harmonious relations to the local authorities and villagers.

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When villagers are interviewed by journalists, they are primarily referred to as villagers or farmers (村民,农民) and usually not by their name. The veiling of the specific identity of villager interview subjects by the media is possibly a tactic to protect the individual villager and avoid scrutiny from the authorities. But it results in the village community being represented in media reports as one homogenous unit, which seemingly all have the same claims and wishes. From the outside, the Bishan Project was to be carried forward by Ou Ning, but in the village, the dialogical setting is what drives the project forward. The dialogue has moved from the level of the county leadership to the level of the Bishan Villagers. This continued dialogue through reading groups, events at the School of Tillers and the Bishan Bookstore is invisible in Zhou Yun’s reading of the project.

Assessment of Socially Engaged Art Claire Bishop and her Ranciere-inspired theory of participatory art as well as Grant Kester’s Bakhtin-inspired dialogical art serve as two of the predominant contemporary positions within the research of socially engaged art. Kester and Bishop have had several “clashes” in art journals and magazines such as e-flux and Artforum and their basic disagreements stem from different understandings of art’s engagement with the political, as well as different understandings of how these socially engaged art projects should be evaluated and studied and the role of ethics in these evaluations (Bishop 2006; Kester 2006, 2012). One of Bishop’s central claims is the questioning of why socially engaged and participatory art are assessed not as art but through their efficacy in providing social change, which implies a higher ethical purpose.21 Bishop argues that socially engaged art practices should be viewed critically as art, and she criticizes political, socially engaged art projects for being “self-sacrificing” and implying a withdrawal from the “domain of the aesthetic” (Bishop 2006, 183). Bishop, in other words, rejects an ethical evaluation of the socially engaged art project. Bishop’s participatory art thus remains firmly within an art world discourse. Contrary to Bishop, Kester stresses the ethical aspects, and furthermore emphasizes the importance of the artist reflecting critically on her own position within a given project, and adopting an empathic identification with the local community (Kester 2013 [2004], 151). In other words, while both Kester and Bishop place “people” at the center of the socially engaged art project, they however disagree as to how and upon which background these projects should be assessed.

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The assessment of a socially engaged art project is thus a difficult endeavor, that can be hinged on a diverse set of concerns and objectives. In response to a text by Ben Davis (Blouin Artinfo) that criticized socially engaged art, various stakeholders such as Nato Thompson (Creative Time), Rick Lowe (Project Row Houses) and Deborah Fisher (A Blade of Grass) engage in a lengthy Facebook discussion on how and why to evaluate these projects (A Blade of Grass 2013). The funding agencies, here represented by Deborah Fisher, ask for tools and ways to evaluate the projects that they themselves fund. Fisher suggests evaluating a given project by “building a set of case studies, and defining efficacy first in terms of the artists’ goals.” However, the problems in measuring the effectiveness of a project up against the goals of the artists are manifold, as we are dealing with often collaborative projects, in which the participants are in effect cocreators. The projects are often dynamic and transformative, meaning that the goals are not always static, especially if we measure them over time. Furthermore, the goals of the artists and the goals of the given community might differ greatly. If we measure the effectiveness of the Bishan Project in relation to the utopia painted in the notebook, then we do not have to stay very long in Bishan to see that this is not an anarchist, egalitarian community. If we measure the effectiveness of the Bishan project in halting the urbanization of China, then some young people from the urban areas have perhaps changed their mindsets, but how does this count in the larger picture of the capital’s quick engulfment of rural land? If we measure the Bishan Project through its effectiveness at bringing economic development to Bishan, then we are still at a loss, since only a small portion of the villagers benefit from the economic development of Bishan into a tourist destination. Or in other words, most of the ways to evaluate and assess the Bishan Project in terms of “artist goals” give a discouraging picture of this socially engaged art project in rural China. But if we decide that the example of the Bishan Project is discouraging no matter what we measure it up against, then who (or what) is to blame? In an answer to Zhou Yun’s question of whose countryside, Ou Ning said in an interview: “Whose village really is this? It’s not my village, it’s not the villagers’ village; it’s the Party’s village” (Ou quoted in Kurek 2015, 60). In other words, to Ou Ning, the village leadership and the Party effectively limited the possible ways the Bishan Project and Bishan Village could develop into something beneficial to all villagers in Bishan. The actual perpetrators are, I think, probably to be found somewhere entangled in the mishmash of local power struggles, party discourses, capital interests, utopian visions and higher-level government policies governing rural life. Furthermore, there still is the possibility

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that new relationships were created in Bishan with the arrival of the artists and that at least some people in Bishan were inspired by the Bishan Commune and changed their ways, as discussed in Chap. 5.

The Question of Gentrification The matter of gentrification is yet another discussion that continuously haunts the critique of socially engaged art.22 Do these artist-led projects “serve as beachheads for gentrification,” as art critic Ben Davis suggests (Davis 2013), or are they bettering the conditions for marginalized population groups? Or is gentrification, as geographer Neil Smith (1996) argues, a result of far larger politico-economic shifts and developments? The general form of gentrification that Smith describes is characterized by being global and by being built on market premises and controlled by capital interests.23 The short definition of gentrification would be that it describes a situation in which a working-class population of a given area is pushed away by an incoming middle-class population (Philips 1993, 123). The word takes its roots in the term “gentry” that refers to persons of high social class. In other words, gentrification signifies the replacement of one population group with a “gentry.” However, as Smith suggests, there are larger processes behind this transformation than the influx of an urban middle-class (the gentry). It is not just about the changing social composition of a given area, but also relates to “a physical change in the housing stock and an economic change in the land and housing markets” (Smith 1987, 463), and as such the global and local processes that foreground such developments. The term gentrification has primarily been used in the context of urban renewal and redevelopment processes (Smith 1996, 163). It can, however, have different connotations when used in the context of the rural (Philips 1993, 123). Geographer Martin Philips suggests that the processes of social recomposition in the rural areas, “although revolving around the colonization of an area by particular class groups, do not necessarily involve a simple replacement of working-class residents by middle-­ class ones” (ibid., 124). In line with Smith, Philips thus argues for an understanding of gentrification that goes beyond that of only referring to a changing social composition, but places gentrification within a larger set of processes—although this specific kind of gentrification still implies the “colonization” of a rural area. The gentrification of some areas of rural China is better understood within these larger structures of capital

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investment processes and colonization, than solely as the displacement of rural working-class residents and the influx of an urban creative class. The issue of gentrification is thus a tricky one in relation to Bishan village. Bishan is already depopulated as it is, the remaining population is aging and the village is (was) dotted with empty, dilapidated houses. But no matter how you look at it, the socio-economic composition of the people in Bishan is changing. However, even more than a change in the social composition, the dominant feature of Bishan is a physical change in the “housing stock” through the renovation of Hui-style houses and an accompanying rise in property values in the village. The rising prices can to some extent be related to the arrival of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing, but should perhaps even more be seen as a consequence of the changing policies in the area. That the houses were easier to sell in Bishan than in other neighboring villages is however related to the presence of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing. With the introduction of a market for the houses, as described in Chap. 5, the scene was set for an explosion in the acquisition of Hui-­ style houses—and an urban colonization of rural China. In the case of the Bishan Project Dispute, Zhou Yun and Ou Ning also enter the discussion of gentrification. The translation of gentrification that Zhou Yun uses is gaodanghua (高档化), which means to make something better, superior. Gaodanghua does not connote the displacement of an area’s original population group, but primarily conveys the positive side of gentrification, to ameliorate and improve a given area. Zhou Yun in this line unilaterally equates gentrification with positive economic development, and according to her, the villagers of Bishan want gentrification (Zhou 2014a).24 There are however several other less positive ways to render gentrification, such as shishenhua (士绅化) or jinshenhua (晋绅化), which mean gentry-fication, or the term zhongchan jiejihua (中产阶级化), which means middle class-ification (or bourgeois-ification). All significantly less positive than gaodanghua. Gaodanghua, however, seems to be the most used term for gentrification in China. While Ou Ning began by using the term gaodanghua, he later on switches to jinshenhua (晋绅化, gentry-fication).25 Jinshenhua is closer to the meaning of the English word for gentrification as it refers directly to a “gentry.” By switching the word, Ou Ning specifically points toward the specific meaning of displacing unwanted community groups and to a particular academic and artistic discourse on the matter. To specify that they are talking about gentrification, however, Zhou Yun and Ou Ning both put the English word in brackets behind their chosen Chinese equivalent. For Ou Ning, the

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gentrification of Bishan is a problem if the new urbanites purchasing houses in Bishan only use them for the occasional holiday (Ou 2014, 10). If they, on the other hand, devote themselves to work in the village, then it is another matter (ibid.). So far, this development does not mean that the local farmer is forced to move elsewhere or that an urban middle-class population is replacing the rural inhabitants. But it can make it more difficult for young people to return to Bishan as housing prices would exceed their price range by far and it is changing the face of Bishan. In the longer run, however, it seems fair to suggest that farming will not be the primary occupation in the village. This, however, is the reality for villages all over the world. Whether or not the Bishan Project was ever going to be able to impede the larger movements of capital in its quest for new underdeveloped land to absorb surplus capital, is, of course, another question. So far, it seems the Bishan Project had little or no leeway to be anything else then the beachhead for the development of the village into a successful high-class tourist destination. Instead of impeding the movement away from the rural areas, as was one of the original goals, it seems that the Bishan Project facilitated an urban move toward Bishan.

Notes 1. Interview with Teacher Wang, July 2014. 2. Parts of this chapter and a shortened discussion of the Bishan Commune Dispute can also be found in Corlin 2018. 3. “Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads” gathers a number of artists from all over China to do surveys (调查) in the areas between the fifth and the sixth ring roads of Beijing, an area that is largely populated by formerly poor peasants and currently poor migrant workers, see also Chap. 2. 4. The blogpost was subsequently altered several times, meaning that there are several versions in circulation. 5. The quote was translated to English by Adele Kurek in Kurek (2015, 57–58). The italicized words were originally written in English. 6. Ou Ning explained the use of English with the fact that he had not made a new PowerPoint for this particular talk, and the PowerPoint was thus a reuse from another occasion. 7. Ou Ning said: “碧山村没有路灯, 村民十分想要——但是从外面来碧山的 游客却认为, 没有路灯, 可以看星星” (There are no streetlights in Bishan, the villagers would really like that, but tourists coming from the outside think that if there are no streetlights, then you can see the stars).

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8. The Weibo user is called Li Sipan (李思磐). July 4, 2014, 00.44, Li Sipan wrote that Ou Ning’s point in mentioning the streetlights had been to underline the importance of streetlights. Li Sipan also writes that Ou Ning apologized for not having the funds to install streetlights in the village. “作 为在场参访者的一员, 我确定欧宁说到’看星星’时, 恰恰是强调了村民需 求的紧迫性和重要性, 他说的是: 文人可能觉得没有路灯正好可以看星星, 但村民们没有路灯十分不便, 并且很没有面子. 欧很抱歉自己只有能力在 有文化节庆时解决了短期照明, 而没有资金解决路灯问题. 不知道为何会 出现这么严重误会,” Weibo, July 4, 2014, 00.44. 9. Hotel Tailai (泰来农庄), comment to discussion on Weibo, July 5, 2014, 18.26. 10. Throughout the duration of the Bishan Project there was a conflict between the eastern and western parts of the village. Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and the Bookstore were all located in the eastern part and the villagers of the western part viewed their part of the village as under prioritized in relation to the project. 11. Informal conversation with villagers. The commenter Li Sipan on Weibo also mentions that the villagers think that it is “a loss of face” (很没有面子) to not have streetlights. Li Sipan (李思磐), Weibo, July 4, 2014, 00.44. 12. Ou Ning paid for a road and I met investors bragging about paying for the roads of the village. I also participated in dinners between investors and local township and county level officials. 13. Chen argues that a “robust collective economy” can enable the village government to maintain some of the redistributive power (Chen 2014, 716). 14. The original agreement made in 1999 gave 95% of the revenues to the company, 4% to the township and only 1% to the community (Ying and Zhou 2007, 101–102). 15. Interview with Ou Ning, November 2013. 16. Interview with Teacher Hu, July 2014. 17. Ibid. The village party secretary to whom Teacher Hu refers is not Zhu Xiandong, who did not get re-elected, but his successor Wang Xiaofeng. 18. Interview with Ou Ning, Hong Kong, November 24, 2019. 19. The local government confiscated the farmers’ goods on the grounds that they did not have expiration dates. 20. The Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange project was a project of “cross-­ fertilization” where the artists “made door-to-door visits with Bishan farmers to learn about their growing customs, and in exchange for a tour of their gardens we brought these gifts [various seeds], hand wrapped in our own seed pockets with instructions for planting” (Ho et al. 2015). The map also features small written accounts of the seed exchanges and a bit of information on their background and daily lives.

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21. Bishop actually opposes the term socially engaged art, because, as she argues, “what artist isn’t socially engaged?” (Bishop 2012, 2). 22. The matter of gentrification has been a recurring issue pertaining to Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. E-flux Journal, vol. 12, no. 21 (2010) took vantage point in gentrification and the discussion of contemporary art’s complicity with these processes. 23. Smith describes three phases of gentrification processes from sporadic to systemic to general set within a historical context. We are now in the third phase, which is general gentrification. 24. “农民自己想要高档化, 因为形成旅游产业后可以搞创收” (The farmers want gentrification, because after the creation of a tourist industry they can earn an income (Zhou 2014a). 25. Unpublished Chinese version of Ou Ning (2014, 10).

Literature A Blade of Grass. 2013. “What is the Effectiveness of Socially Engaged Art? With Responses by Ben Davis, Tom Finkelpearl, Deborah Fisher, Rick Lowe, Louisa McCall, and Nato Thompson.” A Blade of Grass. URL (Last accessed February 6, 2020): http://www.abladeofgrass.org/growing-dialogue/growingdialogue-what-is-the-effectiveness-of-socially-engaged-art/ Bishop, Claire. 2006. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” ArtForum, (February): 178–183. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells – Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Chen An. 2014. “How has the Abolition of Agricultural Taxes Transformed Village Governance in China? Evidence from Agricultural Regions.” The China Quarterly, vol. 219 (September): 715–735. Corlin, Mai. 2018. “Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice.” FIELD – A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, issue 9 (Winter). URL: http://fieldjournal.com/ issue-9/trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ou-ning-and-the-bishancommune-in-dialogue-and-practice Davis, Ben. 2013. “A Critique of Social Practice Art—What does It Mean to be a Political Artist?” International Socialist Review, 90, (July). URL (Last accessed March 12, 2020): http://isreview.org/issue/90/critique-social-practice-art Ho, Elaine W., Michael Leung and Zhao Kunfang. 2015. 碧山新志 Beyond Bishan. Map of Bishan Mapping the Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange Project. Additional Illustrations by Natalie Lo Lailai, with Seed Pocket Illustrations by Michael, Elaine, Kunfang, Sun Yunfan, Leah Thompson, Wang Fang Hong, and Wang Ning.

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Kester, Grant. 1995. “Aesthetic Evangelists.” Afterimage, no. 22, (January). Kester, Grant. 2006. “Another Turn.” Artforum, (May). Kester, Grant. 2012. “The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent.” E-flux Journal, vol. 31, no. 1. URL (Last accessed March 12, 2020): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-device-laid-bare-on-somelimitations-in-current-art-criticism/ Kester, Grant. 2013 [2004]. Conversation Pieces—Community and Communication in Modern Art. Updated edition with new preface. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kurek, Adele. 2015. “The Bishan Project: Cultural Production and Place Reconstruction in Rural China.” MA thesis. University of Toronto. Leung, Michael. 2016. 芳芳商店 Fang Fang Shang Dian—A Fictional Story by Michael Leung. Bilingual Publication. Hong Kong, Yau Ma Tei: Shanghai Street Studios. Ou Ning. 2014. “Questions and Answers between Ou Ning and the Sønderholm Collective.” In Forespørgsler i Jord og Kunst (Inquiries in Earth and Art). Translated from the Chinese by Mai Corlin, edited by Mai Corlin, Rasmus Graff and Mathias Kokholm. Sønderholm: Antipyrine and OVO Press. Philips, Martin. 1993. “Rural Gentrification and the Processes of Class Colonisation.” Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 9, no. 2: 123–140. Smith, Neal. 1987. “Gentrification and the Rent Gap.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 77, no. 3: 462–465. Smith, Neal. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London and New York: Routledge. Song Zhibiao (宋志标). 2014. “有路灯的碧山一定好吗?” (Is a Bishan with Streetlights with Certainty a Good Thing?). 旧闻评论 Jiuwen Pinglun’s Weixin, July 9. URL (Last accessed February 5, 2020): http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__ biz=MjM5MDU4OTYyMQ==&mid=203289502&idx=1&sn=2062c91b814 ee6bd19b715c0015f9f21&scene=2&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0&key=4 7e44c9144a8c83394b3d593310b6b8f98eac720c0b843595f2c6601884fe70 f44507a2d9c260fbb3526a1edd5cc6945&ascene=2&uin=MjIwMjEwMTkxN w%3D%3D&pass_ticket=udrwZQTfkeizNEsRHtYz19%2FJNzSzJm6lQTNO yD7UtmTF7jip6y3IVGLfxMlw9%2Btr Tang Yue. 2015. “Painting a Picture of Life on the Edge.” China Daily, May 13. URL: (Last accessed February 28, 2020): http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/ china/2015-05/13/content_20701312.htm Xing Xiaowen (邢晓雯). 2014. “争议‘碧山乌托邦’- 艺术家主导乡建, 陷入‘脱离群 众‘纷争” (The “Bishan Utopia” Controversy—Artist Led Rural Reconstruction, Sink Into Dispute on ‘Separation from the Masses’) Southern Metropolis, July 16. URL (Last accessed February 6, 2020): http://epaper. oeeee.com/epaper/A/html/2014-07/16/content_3279002.htm

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Ying, Tianyu and Yongguang Zhou. 2007. “Community, Governments and External Capitals in China’s Rural Cultural Tourism: A Comparative Study of Two Adjacent Villages.” Tourism Management, vol. 28, no. 1, (February): 96–107. Zhao, Echo (赵茜). 2011. “碧山丰年祭” (Bishan Harvestival). LEAP, no. 11. URL (Last accessed March 11, 2020): http://leapleapleap.com/2011/12/碧 山丰年祭/?lang=zh-hans Zhao Kunfang (赵坤方). 2015. Beyond Bishan—碧山新志. Hong Kong: Mimi Brown and Spring Workshop. Zhou Yun (周韵). 2014a. “谁的乡村, 谁的共同体?品味, 区隔与碧山计划” (Whose Countryside, Whose Community? Taste, Distinction and Bishan Project). Zhou Yun’s Douban Blog, August 8. The post is no longer accessible via Zhou Yun’s blog, but can be found here URL: (Last accessed February 6, 2020) www.cbda.cn/html/jd/20140708/42987.html

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: The End of Utopia?

How the Commune failed to realize its true aim and yet set that aim before the world. —Kropotkin 1895 [1880] (The original English version appeared as Freedom Pamphlets, no. 2 (London: W. Reeves, 1895), based on the original French version published in Le Révolté, March 20, 1880.) Whose village really is this? It’s not my village, it’s not the villagers’ village; it’s the Party’s village. —Ou Ning quoted in Kurek 2015, 60

By referring once again to the Paris Commune and Kropotkin’s writings on the matter, I am not suggesting that the Bishan Commune carries the same possibility of setting an “aim before the world” as the Paris Commune did. And perhaps not even for China in general. But on a smaller scale, the Bishan Commune has been influential and has contributed actively to the feeling of a loosely organized network of artists, intellectuals and villagers that has a significant affiliation to the rural areas. I have described this loosely organized network as consisting of “radical rural intellectuals,” as we are dealing with people who think critically about the development of the Chinese countryside in particular and China in general—and as a result move into the rural to engage this critical thinking with the people living there. Some of the projects express clear rejection of the political thinking © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_7

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and practice of the Maoist-era and the Chinese Communist Party, though they still work with socialist-utopian and/or anarchist ideas of community and experiment with other ways of creating learning environments and providing space for continuous dialogue. The Bishan Commune was in its imaginary form intended to be a community based on principles of anarchism, rural reconstruction, consensus-­ based democracy and co-living. Ou Ning imagined a community of likeminded people populating the Chinese countryside and thereby rebalancing the relationship between rural and urban areas. As the examples mentioned in the notebook show, many of Ou Ning’s ideas took root in European and North-American traditions of collective and anarchist autonomous living, and built on his own experiences of forming communities. Ou Ning’s mapping of the communities he has been part of initiating over the years reveals that these communities are repeatedly shut down by the authorities. The mapping, however, also shows how Ou Ning has continuously set up new constellations to create a basis for sharing knowledge and critically discussing China’s present circumstances. The Bishan Commune perhaps became the last such community that Ou Ning will be able to set up in China, at least for the next couple of years. On different levels throughout the lifecycle of the Bishan Commune, he managed to make the power of the Communist Party of China visible. The mapping displays the struggles with an authoritarian power and the notebook in general presented a critique of the current circumstances in the Chinese countryside by presenting a utopian vision of how it could be. The struggle displayed in the notebook and articulated through Ou Ning’s anarchism is not a violent struggle. Rather it is a struggle for the right to analyze and define the problems of Chinese society (and the world in general) and—not least—the right to imagine and propose other worlds. The Bishan Project was part of a larger move toward the Chinese countryside, a move that was initiated by New Rural Reconstruction Projects during the course of the 1990s, which has intensified since the mid-2000s with the involvement of urban artists. These urban artists create their own versions of the rural reconstruction project, in which the vantage points are, small-scale units such as a commune, a farm or a youth house, and they focus on building mutual, reciprocal relationships. Chinese artists working in rural areas are less prone to reject the art world connection, as the veiling of a project as “art” can alleviate some of the potential conflicts that may come in the wake of its claiming to be explicitly political. In the

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case of the Bishan Project, rural art festivals (and art world connections) served as amplifiers for the messages Ou Ning was trying to send, and as spaces for facilitating connections between various people working actively in rural areas. The Harvestival model was, however, halted after the second edition, and Ou Ning had to thoroughly rethink his practice in Bishan, thus incorporating “economic development” as part of the Bishan Commune terminology and moving to Bishan on a permanent basis. Had the Bishan Harvestival been allowed to continue it might have taken on a different position with the local villagers, but as things unfolded that never became an option for the Bishan Project. While the Harvestival never got the chance to manifest itself as a tool of community building, the day-to-­ day dialogues in the village, however, proved to be a viable way to approach a rural community in the longer run. As such, the dialogical aesthetics that Kester has identified as a key element of socially engaged art, in the case of the Bishan Project, grew out of its long-term engagement and its space-­ making practices. I have argued that the dialogical exchanges it hosted functioned as Lippardian Trojan Horses—they disguised themselves as a rural reconstruction project in order to gain access to a Chinese village, which then paved the way for an introduction of another kind of aesthetics and other possible modes of development. The Bishan Project did manage to create substantial relations with groups of the local villagers, attracted young volunteers to participate and thus created a platform where discussion of the future of Bishan could take place. In February 2016 the authorities closed the Bishan Project, supposedly on verdict from the central government.1 Already in the months leading up to the closure, local authorities had been visiting Ou Ning and the School of Tillers (SOT) regularly. They had confiscated the translation and facsimile of Ou Ning’s notebook and confiscated goods sold by local farmers at the School of Tillers. Before the closure the local authorities held a meeting with local villagers aimed at defusing any potential anger. At the meeting the local authorities claimed that the Bishan Project was “politically incorrect” (政治不正确的) and that the “leadership of the party should be strengthened” (加强党的领导) in the village. However, what actually brought about the closure is difficult to tell. The Bishan Project was in the end deemed “politically incorrect,” but prior to this occasion it had existed five years and its anarchist sentiments had been known by the local authorities all along. If it was politically incorrect, why was it not shut down (or prevented) from the beginning? I argue that the increasingly

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strained relationship with the local authorities, that began already with the closure of the second Yixian International Photo Festival in 2012 and worsened during the Bishan Project Dispute the summer of 2014, was instrumental in bringing about the end of the Bishan Project  (Corlin 2018). My argument is that it was not unilaterally the “incorrect” ideological sentiments that closed down the project, but also that the project failed, in the eyes of the local authorities, to redistribute tourist revenues back to the village and county leaderships and therefore lost local government support. The central government agencies have to be made aware of a project before initiating moves to shut it down. The current leadership in Yi County perhaps found that the power of Ou Ning and Zuo Jing within the village had become too influential, and that growing support from groups of regular villagers could be read as a threat if the local government preferred other more profitable projects to enter the village. On other levels, Ou Ning definitely crossed the line by proposing the idea of radical consensus democracy into an evidently non-democratic system. Ou Ning and Zuo Jing engaged the villagers by proposing other ways for their village to develop, by treasuring the handicraft traditions of the area and by urging villagers to do the same. The experiences of the Bishan Project in Yi County are difficult to generalize, however, as the circumstances in rural China vary from each county and with each person in charge. In other words, it is possible that the experience of the Bishan Project would have been entirely different had it been based in another village in another county. However, the fact that socially engaged artists and intellectuals practicing in rural China have to collaborate with the local authorities is indisputable. Ou Ning quickly learned that there is little space to maneuver in rural China, perhaps even less than in urban areas. What can seem to be a rather straightforward, collaborative, dialogue-based socially engaged art project, became problematic, political and dangerous for the parties involved. It is, however, not surprising for projects operating in rural areas to be shut down. There are plenty of examples of rural reconstruction projects that did not make it in the long run (Ou 2014 [2012]; Liang 2011). Nevertheless, the Chinese government on a general scale should by no means be understood as against rural reconstruction development projects focused on community building and economic development, but how these projects unfold in each specific locality is another matter. However, the larger picture in China these days of harsh government crackdowns on unwanted behavior and organizations shows that it is increasingly difficult

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to engage in practices that employ a critical perspective. Recent years have shown several examples of oppression and imprisonment of artists and intellectuals, which is a clear exacerbation compared to the conditions under the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabao administration. As more artists and other urbanites moved into the village, Bishan went through a rural gentrification process, or what could also be understood as the urbanization of rural China. In this sense, the Bishan Commune functioned as a frontrunner of urban aesthetics practices in a rural area of China unfamiliar with most contemporary art. More broadly, the artists engaged in the Chinese countryside bring with them urban resources and practices and introduce these into a rural village. As for Bishan, the artists did not succeed in transforming the village to an anarchist utopia, but they paved the way for an emerging tourist industry to change Bishan altogether. As Bolt Rasmussen argues of the avant-garde, the Bishan Commune in the same manner “fought against the destruction of experience, but ended with a naturalization of the estrangement and the programming of man for a new type of behavior” (Rasmussen 2009). Ou Ning and Zuo Jing introduced an urban aesthetics backed by urban resources and as such the Bishan Commune prepared the village for an urban, capitalist reality, both in terms of introducing another kind of aesthetics that favored the Hui houses over the new houses, and in terms of introducing other modes of development. Their work in Bishan can be readily overtaken by the local government, and the previously sleepy, forgotten village is ready for the world. Here, again, remembering the words of Gene Ray when he is arguing that the art system under capitalist modernity is “simultaneously encouraging art’s autonomous impulses and politically neutralizing what those impulses produce” (Ray 2009, 80). While this might seem as a strange statement in relations to communist China, it is nevertheless what took place in the case of the Bishan Commune. Building on Marcuse, Rasmussen argues that “the ability of the system to recuperate critical statements is gaining strength and threatens to paralyze the art and deprive art its revolutionary dimension” (Rasmussen 2009). The closure of the Bishan Commune can be seen as a (hostile) takeover by the state of the infrastructure for the development of a thriving tourist industry that Ou Ning and Zuo Jing perhaps unintentionally created. The critical statements made by (primarily) Ou Ning were recuperated by the state, in the sense that it accepted the terms of the critique (rural China as in a state of crisis, the need for cultural revival), but rejected the various methods proposed by Ou Ning to change the situation. While the Bishan Project

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existed, Ou Ning, on the one hand, succumbed to the pressure of the local authorities and agreed to include considerations of economic development in the Bishan Project scheme. On the other hand, he kept publishing articles and magazines that reinforced his anarchist views and general critiques of the circumstances in rural China, and he continued his conversations with the local villagers of Bishan. As a Trojan Horse, the Bishan Project continued to introduce alternative ways of thinking about the future of Bishan, though an actual organization of the villagers was never proposed. After the closure of the Bishan Project, the authorities did not shut down the commercial industries in Bishan: the Bishan Bookstore and other commercial initiatives not directly under Zuo Jing or Ou Ning’s control were allowed to remain open. The authorities are only eliminating the critical thinking and practices that Ou Ning brought with him. Now Bishan can develop into a thriving tourist destination without the critical distance, and perhaps annoying interference, of urban artists. The Bishan Project in this sense continues, but now as a government-initiated program with private partners—invoking what could be read as “guanxi aesthetics,” a somewhat ironic take on Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, as I will expound on in the epilogue to this book. The development of Bishan Village into a tourist destination could point toward Bishan becoming a museological display case, much more focused on preserving ancient buildings for the purpose of profit and urban nostalgia than preserving rural culture (Oakes 2011, 29). If the further development of a local tourist industry implies an invasion of unscrupulous capital with no consideration for and appreciation of the existing rural cultural landscapes, practices and people, then Bishan might be on the path of the kind of development that will turn the village into what Tim Oakes describes as the-village-as-urban-playground—designed to fulfill the ever-expanding needs of urban residents and tourists (ibid., 28). When not properly integrating the rural residents in the decision-­ making process, this kind of development tends to neglect the needs of the rural population by not creating any real job opportunities for often uneducated farmers, causing a fluctuation in housing prices and general living costs and by lacking investments in social welfare projects (Ying and Zhou 2007; Thøgersen 2009, 17).2 The Trojan Horse of Ou Ning in some ways turned on him and became a Trojan Horse introducing Bishan Village into the Yi County tourism circuit. In his 1967 essay, “The End of Utopia”, Marcuse argues that the social conditions for the world to create utopia are present, in the sense that “All

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the material and intellectual forces which could be put to work for the realization of a free society are at hand” (Marcuse 1970 [1967], 65). In other words, what limits the bringing about of utopia (utopia understood as the abolition of alienation and “surplus repression”), is not the impossibility of its propositions, but rather that the “existing organization of the forces of production” prevents this from happening. The end of utopia is thus the condition in which we have arrived at another state of being and living together, a place we need not call “utopia,” because it exists. Utopia is thus, in Marcuse’s optic, a very possible place, that should not be veiled as impossible. The bringing about of utopia in Bishan Village was possible, at least in Marcuse’s theoretical sense, but as the many examples throughout this book show, there was little or no space to maneuver in Bishan to execute a lasting transformation of society. The people living in Bishan, as well as in all other places in China, are subject to organizational forces of production controlled by the Party and by the interests of investors. The Bishan Commune has indeed not arrived at the end of utopia, as Marcuse understands it—within this logic it was the end for the Bishan Commune, but not the end of utopia.

Notes 1. All information on the closure of the Bishan Project comes from an e-mail interview with Ou Ning conducted May 2016. 2. Thøgersen discusses the participatory approach prevalent with many rural reconstruction projects and the view that the participatory model is the most beneficial model for the local community (Thøgersen 2009, 17).

Literature Corlin, Mai. 2018. “Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice.” FIELD  – A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, issue 9 (Winter). URL: http://field-journal.com/ issue-9/trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ou-ning-and-the-bishancommune-in-dialogue-and-practice Kropotkin, Peter. 1895 [1880]. “The Paris Commune.” The original English version appeared as Freedom Pamphlets, no. 2, London: W. Reeves, based on the original French version published in Le Révolté, March 20, 1880. URL (Last accessed March 16, 2020): https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ kropotkin-peter/1880/paris-commune.htm

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Kurek, Adele. 2015. “The Bishan Project: Cultural Production and Place Reconstruction in Rural China.” MA thesis., University of Toronto. Liang Hong (梁鸿). 2011. “行动在大地” (Action on the Land). Chutzpah! 天南, no. 1, (April): 62–86. Marcuse, Herbert. 1970 [1967]. “The End of Utopia.” In Five Lectures. Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia. Translations by Jeremy J.  Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber, 62–82. Boston: Beacon Press. Oakes, Tim. 2011. “Laser Tag and Other Rural Diversions – The Village as China’s Urban Playground.” Developing Rural Asia, Harvard Asia Quarterly, Fall, Vol. XIII, no. 3. Ou Ning. 2014 [2012]. “Rural Reconstruction in China.” In South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale. Translated by ChinaFile, edited by Ou Ning, 550–559. Beijing: China Youth Press. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. 2009. Avantgardens Selvmord (The Suicide of the Avant-­ Garde). Copenhagen: 28/6, 2009. Ray, Gene. 2009. “Toward a Critical Art Theory.” In Art and Contemporary Critical Practice – Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, 79–91. London: MayFlyBooks. Thøgersen, Stig. 2009. “Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle: The State, Villagers and Social Activists in Rural Reconstruction Projects.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 38, no. 4: 9–33. Ying Tianyu and Zhou Yongguang. 2007. “Community, Governments and External Capitals in China’s Rural Cultural Tourism: A Comparative Study of Two Adjacent Villages.” Tourism Management, vol. 28, issue 1, (February): 96–107.

CHAPTER 8

Epilogue: Guanxi Aesthetics or the State as Artistic Director

Looking at the entrance of Bishan Village in August 2019, it is clear that the village does not look the same. Adorning the village entrance to the right are wooden placards displaying names and contact details of the more than forty homestays, inns, hostels and guesthouses that have opened in the village along with a map designating their location. The entire village has been beautified, with flowers along the main roads, an improved garbage collecting system, new and improved paved village roads and alley names (Fig. 8.1). Many villagers with old Huizhou-style houses have taken advantage of the situation and refurbished their homes to function as guesthouses and homestays. The village committee supports this development by providing a pleasant village environment and assisting with the infrastructural issues of the village. Furthermore, to help keep the village free of garbage, they have set up a recycling system at the office of the village committee. At the Eco Beauty Supermarket, as it is called, you can exchange different kinds of garbage into something useful according to a carefully calculated system, for example 10 old batteries will get you a tooth brush, 120 used plastic bags for 2.5 bottles of dishwashing liquid or 60 empty cigarette packages for 1.5 bags of salt. Many villagers express satisfaction as the development has brought more job opportunities and people in general to Bishan. It has been three and a half years since Ou Ning was forced by the authorities to leave Bishan Village. His houses, the Buffalo Institute and © The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8_8

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Fig. 8.1  The square across from the office of the village committee, redecorated after the departure of Ou Ning

the adjacent School of Tillers (SOT) have mostly been left empty. Weeds grow in the courtyards as nobody tends to the houses anymore. Most of the artists associated with Ou Ning have left Bishan, it is difficult to get permission to do any public, cultural events. According to several villagers, both the county administration and the village committee are still weary of allowing public events to take place—especially if they have any connection to the Bishan Commune Project. However, the village seems to prosper and continue its fast paced development—just like the rest of China. Besides Bishan Bookstore, Zuo Jing’s Bishan Crafts Cooperative (BCC) (碧山工销社) is the only part of the Bishan Project that was allowed to continue after the closure in early 2016, provided that they only continued their commercial activities and avoided any public, cultural events (Fig. 8.2).1 Though it has been more than three years since the closure of the Bishan Project, even mentioning the Bishan Project name is still considered politically sensitive.2

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Nevertheless, Bishan Crafts Cooperative opened in Bishan Village in late 2016 in the old refurbished “supply and marketing co-op” (供销社) from the Maoist-era. It sprung out of Zuo Jing’s research project “Hundred Crafts of Yi County” (黟县百工) beginning in 2011, where he along with a group of his students from Anhui University researched traditional handicrafts in Yi County such as wood carvings, food production, bamboo weaving and so forth (Zuo Jing 2014).3 The idea was to take these old handicrafts and artifacts produced by the villagers of Yi County and revitalize them by renewing their design and placing them within a contemporary context and use. The project has not been so successful in terms of production of artifacts in collaboration with local villagers; this is an aspect of the project that Zuo Jing is still working on. For now, BCC collaborates with the Japanese design company D&Department and sells luxury design goods in the village.4 BCC also has space to accommodate an artist-in-­residency program and a ceramics workshop, though none of these programs or workshops are up and running just yet, and it is

Fig. 8.2  Bishan Crafts Cooperative

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uncertain when that will be possible. Nevertheless, in Bishan, the presence of Bishan Crafts Cooperative as well as the Bishan Bookstore provide the village with entry points for tourists and other visitors to further explore aspects of life in Bishan.

Rural Reconstruction Through Art While the Bishan Commune was not allowed to continue its endeavors in the Chinese countryside, from the ashes of the project a new type of artistic practice has grown. Zuo Jing and other agents on the scene have taken the Bishan project model, refined it and implemented it in villages around China, in what is called “rural reconstruction through art” (艺术乡建). The local authorities in Yi County and Bishan Village will not allow for public, cultural events taking place in their villages, but other rural county governments across China will gladly hire Zuo Jing and his team to do exactly that. October 2016—the fall of the same year the Bishan Commune was closed down—Zuo Jing was commissioned by the Ancient Tea Forest Protection Bureau of Jingmai Mountain (景迈山) in Yunnan Province to come and work with local culture preservation (Zuo Jing 2019). In June 2018, the local government of Taishun County, Zhenjiang Province invited Zuo Jing and his team to come and do “countryside culture excavation work” (乡土文化挖掘工作) in the remote mountain village of Xu’aodi (Hsüaoti, 徐岙底) (Zuo Jing interviewed in The Paper 2019). Since 2015, Zuo Jing has been running the Maogong (茅贡) Project in Guizhou Province in collaboration with Ren Hexin, the director of Dimen Dong Cultural Eco-Museum.5 In other words, there seems to be plenty of work to do for the rural local governments of China for Zuo Jing and his team. For the Maogong project, Zuo Jing and Ren Hexin chose another method for rural reconstruction, one that focused on their presence in the local county seat in a bid to minimize the possible negative influence of a large art project on a small village (ibid., 128). According to Zuo, “towns in China have a long history of functioning as marketplaces and trading centers for their surrounding villages, and therefore have a better capacity to negotiate with the forces of commercialism and capitalism” (Zuo paraphrased by Wang 2019, 128). Taking the county seat as outset is an interesting development and experience that can be valuable to future work with rural reconstruction through art, as Zuo expounds: “In a sense, the Maogong Project is an upgraded version of the Bishan Project, a solution or a more practical choice compromised with reality” (Zuo quoted in Wang 2019, 134). According to art historian Wang Meiqin, the

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compromise Zuo is referring to, is exactly how Zuo Jing has changed his method to one that actively caters to the wishes of local governments of an economic growth carried forward by the development of a rural tourism industry (Wang 2019, 134). Though not as plentiful in terms of projects as Zuo Jing, Qu Yan has similarly started up a new project that collaborates closely with local authorities and local business people. The Qingtian Model (青田范式) is located in the village of Qingtian in Shunde District outside of Guangzhou. It is not a remote or poor village, neither are the houses there old or in any other way worthy of preservation in a historical sense. But located in the middle of lakes and streams used for fish farming and under the shadows of the old banyan trees, the village definitely has its own charm. The local government and wealthy business people of the area have set up a fund to support the project, thus providing ample funding for several employees, restoration of houses and plenty of activities all year round.6 Qingtian Project secretary Chen Biyun explained, that the system behind the set-up functioned in a way, where Qu Yan and his team would propose a given sub-project and the local government and the foundation would then be consulted for approval of the project. Of course, as she explained, sometimes the artists would suggest a project that could not really take place, but then they would either tone down publicity or not do the project.7 Chen Biyun had previously worked for the local government of Shunde City, but had now changed her carrier path and instead functioned as Qu Yan’s connection and leverage into that same local government. In fact, most people employed within the program are Shunde District locals, which I think is an important aspect as it serves to embed the project in the locality in question. Talking about the failure of the Bishan Project, Qu Yan argued that the Bishan Commune had lacked the proper connections in Bishan Village and with the local Yi County government and therefore had not been able to continue.8 Qu Yan might very well be right. With his Qingtian Project and his long-running Xucun Art Commune in rural Shanxi, he has definitely shown what close relations to the local government can mean.

Guanxi Aesthetics What characterizes “rural reconstruction through art” and most other larger-scale art projects in rural China is their close association with the local authorities. As also laid out in the introduction, I propose to refer to

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this type of artistic practice as guanxi aesthetics as a somewhat ironic take on Nicolas Bourriaud’s term designating a type of art practice prevalent in the 1990s: relational aesthetics (关系美学) (Bourriaud 2002). In Chinese, relational is translated as guanxi (关系) and aesthetics as meixue (美学). Guanxi refers to the relationship between people and to networks of social power and influential relationships that you can utilize proactively and that some would say you need to have if you wish to operate in rural China. “Broadly, guanxi means interpersonal linkages with the implication of continued exchange of favors. Guanxi is therefore more than a friendship or simple interpersonal relationship; it includes reciprocal obligations to respond to requests for assistance,” as Luo Yadong (2007) succinctly puts it. To have good connections is to have good guanxi. In an interview with Qu Yan, the leader of several rural reconstruction through art-projects such as Xucun Art Commune in rural Shanxi and Qingtian Project in rural Guangdong, he argued that if you want to succeed in rural China, you need establish close ties with what he calls the village gentry (乡绅), referring to retired party officials with significant connections and persuading power in the village.9 During our conversation, Qu kept referring to Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2002) notion of “relational aesthetics,” when talking about the importance of having good relations with the local authorities in the village and in reference to his practice in the village. But in this sense, he wasn’t quite talking about the relational aesthetics of the 1990s, but rather a different kind focused on the relationship with the government and local bosses and on being able to practice in the village in the first place. The relationships designated in Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics have more to do with a departure from an object-based art and a focus on creating relations within the space of the gallery or museum, than with nurturing beneficial connections with local government officials in a Chinese village. In other words, my (or Qu Yan’s) guanxi aesthetics, is thus a take on Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics that places them directly within a core issue of Chinese socially engaged art practices—that is the never-ending dance with the state. However, rather than proposing that this type of art should be perceived of as “official,” as opposed to unofficial, it seems more descriptive for the actual situation to understand these practices as enjoying different privileges within the same system, as John Clark suggests (2002, 20).10 Meaning that projects such as Zuo Jing’s and Qu Yan’s are privileged within the political system in terms of resources and funding. Furthermore, the nature of the collaboration with the authorities should be seen as a spectrum—most rural projects will have

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some degree of collaboration with local authorities—running from fully government initiated to government funded and on again to artist initiated and privately funded. Nevertheless, the high degree of collaboration with local authorities as displayed by Zuo Jing’s and Qu Yan’s projects needs to be researched further in order to understand what this type of relationship means for the practice of socially engaged art in rural China.11 Long-term fieldwork is necessary in order to understand what actually happens in these localities. Zuo Jing and Qu Yan’s projects are intimately connected with the local authorities as they are actively invited in and funded by them. This relationship of course raises questions in terms of their ability to put forward social critique—what is their space to maneuver when they are that dependent on government resources and goodwill? I would like to underscore, that the relationship to the local government does not make these projects less interesting, but I argue that when we research these projects, we have to take the government relationship into account, as this relationship is

Fig. 8.3  Kunlun International Youth Hostel located in Bishan Village

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vital to the existence of the project in the first place. Furthermore, for the long-term projects we see engagement with different levels of government. Perhaps these projects are better understood as a new type of art, where the government functions as the “artistic director” of the art of guanxi aesthetics.12 As for Bishan Village, the Bishan Crafts Cooperative laments the development in the village with all the new guesthouses and hotels that have opened (Fig. 8.3).13 A few of the villagers expressed regret that Ou Ning was no longer in the village, but most don’t really mention him. While Ou Ning is not likely to return to Bishan to stay again, it might be that sometime in the distant future, other artists can come and do things in Bishan again. For now, it is a small, village tourist destination, much like many other villages of the area—less commercialized than Xidi and Hongcun but more commercialized than before.

Notes 1. Interview with He Qiuping, manager of Bishan Crafts Cooperative, August 2019. 2. Ibid. 3. Zuo Published an elaborate account of the research done in Yi County showing the great variety of handicrafts present in Yi County, see Zuo Jing 2014. 4. Zuo Jing is aware that the price level of the goods of Bishan Crafts Collective is too high for most villagers. 5. See Wang 2019, 127–133 for an in-depth description of the Maogong Project. 6. Interview with Qu Yan, Qingtian Village, August 28–29, 2019. 7. Interview with Chen Biyun, Qingtian Village, August 28–29, 2019. 8. Interview with Qu Yan, Qingtian Village, August 28–29, 2019. 9. Interview with Qu Yan, Qingtian Village, August 28–29, 2019. 10. Referring to the discussion within the Chinese art world of the 1990s concerning official and unofficial art, Clark argues that “the difference might not be between the outside and inside of an art system or between an establishment and an avant-garde, but rather between different elements that are privileged differently within the same system” (Clark 2002, 20). 11. Meiqin Wang has written extensively on Zuo Jing and Qu Yan’s practice and recognizes their close relationship to local authorities, but she does not explore what that actually means for the projects in question.

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12. I did not come up with this idea of the Chinese state as artistic director myself. It came up in a Skype conversation with a female North American PhD student. However, I simply cannot remember her name and have not been able to find any details of the conversations in my emails. 13. Interview with He Qiuping, manager of Bishan Crafts Cooperative, August 2019.

Literature Clark, John. 2002. “System and Style in the Practice of Chinese Contemporary Art: the Disappearing Exterior?” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 1, no. 2 (August): 13–33. The Paper (澎湃新闻). 2019. “艺术与乡建 – 徐岙底: 禳神节, 红粬展, 米饭颜色如 天边光影” (Art and Rural Reconstrucion – Hsüaoti: Greeting the Gods Festival and Red Yeast Rice Exhibition, the Color of Rice is like Light and Shadow in the Horizon). Interview with Zuo Jing. The Paper 澎湃新闻 December 7. URL (Last accessed March 5, 2020): http://m.thepaper.cn/kuaibao_detail.jsp?cont id=3892109&from=kuaibao Wang, Meiqin. 2019. Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China. Voices From Below. New York: Routledge. Zuo Jing (左靖). 2019. 谁的艺术乡建? (Whose Rural Recontruction through Art?). Meishu Guancha, February 1st. URL (Last accessed March 5, 2020): http://news.99ys.com/news/2019/0201/9_214543_1.shtml Zuo Jing (左靖), ed. 2014. 黟县百工 (The Hundred Handicrafts of Yi County). Beijing: Gold Wall Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel. Luo, Yadong. 2007. Guanxi and Business. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Asia-Pacific Business Ser. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.



Appendices

Appendix I: Timeline of the Bishan Project 2007 Ou Ning’s first visit to Bishan Village 2010 Exhibit of Ou Ning’s notebook: Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia in Shanghai 2011 Establishment of the Bishan Project. Ou Ning purchases a house in Bishan Village and names it Buffalo Institute. The first Bishan Harvestival takes place. Zuo Jing begins the project “The Hundred Crafts of Yi County” 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival and the second Bishan Harvestival almost took place, but both were shut down the day before the opening 2013 Ou Ning moves to Bishan Village with his family: his mother, brother, nephew, wife and her son 2014 The Bishan Bookstore opens 2015 The School of Tillers opens 2016 The Bishan Project is closed by the authorities by verdict from the central government

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Appendix II: Events, Venues and Journals of the Bishan Project Buffalo Institute 牛院 Ou Ning’s residence in Bishan. Ou Ning purchased the large Hui-style compound in 2011, but did not move permanently to Bishan before 2013. The Institute was the headquarters of the Bishan Project. The large house could house many visitors at the same time. Artists, intellectuals, rural activists and researchers from China and abroad stayed there for longer or shorter periods of time. Bishan Bookstore 碧山书局 Opened by Ou Ning’s long-time friend, the Christian entrepreneur Qian Xiaohua. The bookstore is situated in an old, restored forefather temple of the Wang-clan (汪氏), the smallest of the forefather temples in the village. Ou Ning uses the bookstore space for various activities such as reading groups, concerts, discussions and other events. Groups of villagers spend time at the bookstore and chat with the tourists, who have come to visit Bishan. Bishan Harvestival 碧山丰年祭/碧山丰年庆 The Bishan Harvestival took place in 2011 and 2012 and was intended as a yearly large-scale art festival. Harvestival is a contraction of the words harvest and festival. The first Bishan Harvestival in 2011 consisted of a wide range of activities and exhibitions and served as the launch of the Bishan Commune. The second Bishan Harvestival was held concurrently with the Yixian International Photo Festival and had an equally diverse exhibition and seminar program. Yixian International Photo Festival 黟县国际摄影节 Yixian Photofest is an annual event organized by Yi County since 2006, but for the 2012 edition the local government invited Ou Ning and Zuo Jing to curate the entire photo festival. The festival was shut down by the authorities the day before the opening. School of Tillers 理农馆 The School of Tillers (SOT) contains a gallery, library, learning center, café and a researcher-in-residence program. It was opened by Ou Ning and a group of Chinese artists and architects the spring of 2015. SOT is located in a large, restored Hui-style compound adjacent to Ou Ning’s house the Buffalo Institute. Several exhibitions, concerts and smaller seminars were held at the SOT, groups of students from Chinese universities came to visit and the villagers sold farmers’ produce at the lattice shop.

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Bishan Academy 碧山书院 Zuo Jing’s house in Bishan. A large Hui-style compound connected to several courtyards. Also used as an artist residency and as headquarters of the editorial group of Bishan Magazine (碧山杂志书). Pig’s Inn 猪栏酒吧乡村客栈 The Pig’s Inn chain is owned by Ou Ning and Zuo Jing’s old friends Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang. The inns are located in restored Hui compounds in Bishan and Xidi respectively; they used local labor and materials to restore the houses and employ local villagers. In 2006 they opened the first Pig’s Inn in Xidi. In 2008, they opened Pig’s Inn no. 2 on the outskirts of Bishan Village and in 2014 they opened Pig’s Inn no. 3 after several years of renovation of an old worn-down factory building also in Bishan. The Pig’s Inns are creatively restored and have maintained both traditional characteristics and some of the “scars” the buildings acquired during the Cultural Revolution. Village Library 农家书屋 The village library is part of a nationwide initiative to make books available to a larger portion of the population. The library in Bishan is run by volunteers—typically elderly retired teachers from the village. It is located in a small, new building centrally located in the village and consists of a small classroom with wooden benches and an office. Ou Ning, Zuo Jing and Qian Xiaohua donate books to the library regularly and all the magazines published by Ou and Zuo are available at the library. The library is less a place where the local villagers hang out than is the case with the bookstore. During vacation times the library conducts events and summer courses for the children of the village. Teacher Wang also volunteers at the library. WOW Space蛙舍 A small exhibition space located in a small farm structure by the fields not too far from Pig’s Inn 3. The space was set up by Pig’s Inn Volunteer Jin Ming. The first exhibition featured the photographs of villager Yao Lilan. The Hundred Crafts of Yi County 黟县百工 Research project concerning the local handicraft traditions in Yi County initiated by Zuo Jing in 2011. Bishan Crafts Cooperative 碧山工销社 Bishan Crafts Cooperative (BCC) is located in an old Maoist-era “supply and trade” store and is devoted to the sale and development of design products based on traditional handicrafts. BCC collaborates with the

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APPENDICES

Japanese design company D&Department. There is a branch of BCC in Xi’an. BCC has been exhibited on exhibitions all over China. Chutzpah! 天南 A literary bi-monthly journal that Ou Ning was chief editor of from 2011 to 2014. Chutzpah had a print run of 32,000 copies, was distributed by Modern Media Group and was available in select bookstores and airports all around China. Ou Ning stopped as chief editor February 2014 supposedly due to financial reasons, both with the magazine itself but also with its mother company Modern Media. The magazine consists of a Chinese section containing literature, poetry, essays and theory from China and abroad and an English language insert containing translations of contemporary Chinese literature. The themes covered by the magazine have been revolution, sci-fi literature, feminism, diaspora, minority literature and much more. Bishan Magazine 碧山杂志书 A journal edited by Zuo Jing. The journal has featured articles from many of the participants of the Bishan Harvestivals such as filmmaker Wu Wenguang, rural activist Liang Hong, Lantian Project leader Mo Ye, artist Qiu Zhijie and many more. Compared to Chutzpah!, Bishan Magazine has a more traditional focus and has covered themes such as the revival of folk art, traditional architecture, intellectuals in the countryside and forefather temples.

Appendix III: People in Bishan Ou Ning 欧宁 Born in 1969  in southern Guangdong Province. Ou Ning’s practice covers a wide range of disciplines and methods. He has founded U-théque (1999–2004), an independent film and video organization. He has edited the seminal book New Sound of Beijing (1997) and the magazine Chutzpah! (2011–2014). As a curator he has initiated the biennale exhibition “Get It Louder” in Beijing (2005, 2007, 2009) and has been the chief curator of the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 2011 Chengdu Biennale titled “Solutions: Design and Social Engineering.” As an artist and filmmaker Ou Ning has been known for the urban research projects San Yuan Li (三元里, 2003, commissioned by the 50th Venice Biennale) and Meishi Street (煤市街, 2006, commissioned by Kulturstiftung des Bundes).

 APPENDICES 

211

Zuo Jing 左靖 Anhui-native born in 1970. Zuo Jing has previously been art director of the renowned Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art District. He has curated several larger art and film festivals such as China Independent Film Festival (2006) and the art festival Community of Tastes (2008). He has set up several organizations such as China Independent Film Archive (2009) and Indie Screening Alliance of Art Space (2010). He is based in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, where he teaches classes on independent documentary film and contemporary art at Anhui University. Teacher Wang 汪老师 Wang Shouchang. Village historian and manager of the books at the Bishan Bookstore. Local to Bishan Village. Was in his younger days head of the village committee. Zhang Yu 张昱 University Village Official at the nearby village of Nanping. Initiator of the Community Supported Agriculture project Young Village Official’s Garden (村官菜园) in Bishan. Zhao Kunfang 赵坤房 Volunteer during the preparations for the opening of School of Tillers. Zhao has published a bilingual booklet about the Bishan Project and her experiences and friends in Bishan called Beyond Bishan—碧山新志 (Zhao 2015). Feng Si’te 冯斯特 Volunteer during the preparations for the opening of School of Tillers. Stayed in Bishan after the opening of SOT and set up HUN.Studio 混工 作室 together with local carpenter Little Gang 小纲. Jin Ming 金铭 Jin Ming was a volunteer at Pig’s Inn and set up the small, independent gallery WOW Space, that exhibited local, village artists. The first exhibition of WOW Space featured the photographs of villager Yao Lilan. Yao Lilan 姚立兰 Elderly villager who has taken up the profession of photography. Together with Teacher Wang he accompanied Ou Ning to the Chengdu Biennale in 2011. The photographs of Yao Lilan composed the first exhibition at Jin Ming’s WOW Space. Wang Xiaonai 汪小奶 Elderly lady from Bishan who spends her days at the bookstore reading. Tang Xue 唐雪 Ou Ning’s wife and manager of the cafe at the Bishan Bookstore.

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APPENDICES

Qian Xiaohua 钱小华 Owner of the Bishan Bookstore and the Nanjing bookstore chain Librairie Avant-Garde (先锋书店). Ou Ning originally helped Qian choose the name for the Nanjing bookstore. Qian has bookstores in several locations in East China, including tourist destinations such as the Nanjing Museum and the Presidential Palace in Nanjing. Han Yu 寒玉 Owner of the Pig’s Inn chain. Anhui-native. Moved to Yi County in 2004, when she and her husband, Zheng Xiaoguang purchased a Hui-­ style house in Xidi and converted it into a guesthouse. In 2006 they purchased their first property in Bishan. Zheng Xiaoguang 郑小光 Owner of Pig’s Inn together with his wife Han Yu.

Appendix IV: Bishan Village and Yi County Yi County 黟县 Yi County is located in Anhui Province under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Huangshan. The county has a population of around 100,000 people. It is located in a lush, oval basin surrounded by the Yellow Mountain Range. Yi County is a part of Huizhou; a historical region, with a distinct culture, language and architecture, and is constituted by the geographical area of southern Anhui and a part of northeastern Jiangxi Province. The main economic trades are tea and tourism, with the tourism centered on the Yellow Mountains and well-preserved Hui villages. It takes around six to seven hours to drive by car straight east from Yi County Village to Shanghai. However, with the opening of the new high-speed railway the summer of 2016, it will only take around one hour to get to the larger cities of Nanjing and Hangzhou and four hours to get to Shanghai from the largest city in the area: Tunxi (Huangshan). Bishan Village 碧山村 According to the Hukou statistic there are around 2900 registered inhabitants of Bishan, it is however likely that only around 1000 populate Bishan on a regular basis. Bishan is located in the foothills of the Yellow Mountain range to the north and overlooks the flat, oval basin of Yi County to the south. It stretches along the mountain range from east to west. Compared to other villages in the area Bishan is long and narrow and contains many newly built houses. The development came faster to Bishan than to other more secluded villages. The history of Bishan can be traced back to 592 AD. It has been dominated by the Wang-clan (汪氏) to which many of the forefather temples of the village have been built.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 0086 Magazine, 2, 67, 73, 80, 81, 83, 99n8, 99n9, 109, 194 A Activist art, 23, 36, 38, 42, 43, 135, 163 Activists, 2, 8, 24, 40, 49, 55, 65, 72, 87, 90, 96, 105, 106, 112, 114, 116, 122, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130 Affirmative, 36, 41, 43, 44 Agrarian, 10, 12, 27n8, 65, 68, 69, 81, 90, 94, 99n5 Agrarian commune, 27n8, 65, 68, 69, 81 Agricultural proletariat, 110 Ai Weiwei, 60n22, 120 Airbnb, 160, 166n14, 166n15 Alternative communities, 18

Alternative currency, 128, 178 Alternative education, 8 American Declaration of Independence, 70 Anarchism, 1, 3, 8, 9, 14, 18, 23, 47, 53, 65–68, 70–72, 74, 78–85, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 98n2, 99n5, 100n11, 112, 124, 126, 127, 131n12, 164, 171, 181, 190, 191, 193 Anarcho-communist, 3 Anarcho-primitivist, 12 Ancestors, 70, 84 Ancestral legacy, 97 Ancient Tea Forest Protection Bureau of Jingmai Mountain, 200 Anhui Province, 13, 71, 72, 90, 148, 211, 212 Araeen, Rasheed, 35, 36 Archigram, 77, 95 Architectural system, 67

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Corlin, The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5795-8

213

214 

INDEX

Art circuit, 94 Art festival, 2, 22, 24, 54, 105, 106, 109, 111, 124, 208, 211 Artforum, 54, 180 Artistic director, 13, 17, 204, 205n12 Artists-intellectuals, 9, 69 ArtTime, 6 Artwork, 27n15, 38–40, 43, 58, 118 Art world, 6, 36, 38, 54, 56, 57, 60n22, 67, 68, 106, 111, 112, 129, 135, 179, 180, 190, 204n10 Art World, 6 Asia Society, 119, 131n18 Atomization, 11, 14 Audience, 36, 38, 110, 112, 171 Autonomous art, 36 Autonomous youth space, 8, 47 Autonomy, 41, 51, 67, 80, 93, 98, 98n2, 112, 171 B Baimiao Project, 27n14, 54, 57, 149 Baixingese, 19, 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 40, 105, 180 Ban Wang, 14 Beachheads, 25, 182 Beijing, 16, 48, 53–55, 59n11, 59n12, 69, 96, 107, 110, 140, 144, 148, 155, 169, 184n3, 210, 211 Beijing Independent Film Festival, 16 Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads, 48, 54, 57, 169, 184n3 Beyond Bishan, 161, 163, 179, 211 Bishan Academy, 209 Bishan Bookstore, 2, 7, 13, 21, 22, 24, 26n5, 108, 128, 130n5, 130n6, 130n7, 136–138, 141, 150–158, 164, 166n17, 166n19, 169, 172, 176, 179, 180, 194, 198, 200, 207–209, 211, 212

Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, 1, 18, 23, 26n1, 28n24, 66–78, 83–85, 88–91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 113–115, 120, 129, 141, 149, 171, 181, 190, 191, 207 Bishan Crafts Cooperative, 28n21, 198, 199, 204, 204n1, 205n13, 209 Bishan Fengnianji, 116 Bishan Fengnianqing, 116 Bishan Harvestival, 2, 24, 25, 105–107, 109, 112–116, 118, 120–123, 125, 129, 131n15, 138, 141, 173, 191, 207, 208, 210 Bishan Hours, 128, 178 Bishan Magazine, 18, 209 Bishan Project Dispute, 20, 25, 29n29, 155, 169, 170, 173–175, 183, 184n2, 192 Bishop, Claire, 5, 38–41, 46, 56, 58, 58n1, 112, 180, 186n21 Bonnin, Michel, 96 Borderless, 67 Bourdieu, Pierre, 172 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 38, 39, 46, 202 Braester, Yomi, 127 Bruguera, Tania, 45 Buffalo Institute, 2, 22, 108, 128, 137, 142, 146, 149, 158, 164, 166n17, 197, 207, 208 Bumming in Beijing, 53 C Cacchione, Orianna, 51 Caochangdi Art District, 107 Caochangdi Workstation, 53, 55 Cao Fei, 28n25, 140 Capitalism, 14, 38, 200 Capitalist society, 36

 INDEX 

Capital value, 145, 174 Carve out a space, 9, 37, 51, 69, 178 Censorship, 3, 15, 16, 25, 28n25, 47, 123 Central government, 3, 16, 25, 127, 191, 207 Chaile Travel, 10, 27n14, 55–57, 96 Charcoal barrel, 114 Cheek, Timothy, 9, 69 Chen Shaofeng, 52, 60n16 Chen Yicheng, 160 Chengdu, 55, 210, 211 Chengzi, 73, 74, 113–115 Chenjiapu Populace Bookstore, 13 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, 82 Chiang Mai, 76–77, 99n10, 109 China Independent Film Archive, 211 China Independent Film Festival, 16, 28n20, 211 China studies, vii, 18 Chinese Communist Party, 3, 7, 8, 15, 37, 49, 50, 66, 68, 80, 86, 94, 97, 98, 123, 190, 191 Chinese Dream, 121 Chinese historical experience, 5, 23, 37 Chinese Problem Situation Art, 48 Chongqing, 55 Chutzpah!, 18, 29n25, 29n27, 210 Classroom education, 141 Cloud Gate Pagoda, 128 Coal&Ice, 119, 121 Cock-Crow Society, 68 Cohn, Jesse, 80 Co-housing, 84, 95 Co-living, 47, 72, 90, 97, 190 Collectivity, 71, 98, 112, 129 Colonization, 173, 182, 183 Comintern aesthetics, 6 Communal learning, 141 Communal Luxury, 82 Communal space, 19, 108, 137, 140, 153, 164

215

Commune emblem, 28n24, 73–75, 113, 128 Commune member, 67, 160 Community, 1–5, 11, 14, 22–25, 26n3, 29n29, 37, 40, 41, 44, 46, 47, 51, 53, 67, 70, 74, 75, 80, 81, 84, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97, 105, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 120, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129, 135, 141, 161, 165, 170, 173, 175, 177–181, 183, 185n14, 190–192, 195n2 Community building, 5, 11, 44, 87, 109, 115, 128, 191, 192 Community education, 142 Community members, see Commune member Community Oriented Mutual Economy, 128 Community Supported Agriculture, 2, 21, 144, 211 Community through separation, 80 Confucian legacy, 6, 9, 69 Confucian orthodoxy, 9 Consensus-based democracy, 97, 190 Consensus democracy, 71, 107, 192 Contemporary art enclave, 117, 178 Conversational Painting, 52, 60n16 Cook, Peter, 76 Countrylife Plan 1993, 50, 51 Creative industries, 106, 107 Creative zones, 107, 130n2 Criticality, 13, 48 Critical potential of art, 36, 41 Cross-fertilization, 162, 185n20 Cultural capital, 171 Cultural divide, 25, 170–173 Cultural revival, 193 Cultural Revolution, 49, 82, 96, 142, 209 Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago, 44

216 

INDEX

D Dai Jinhua, 140 Dai Zhuoqun, 51 Dance with Farmworkers, 53 D&Department, 199, 210 Darwinism, 79 Day, Alexander, 11–13, 27n10, 27n17, 141 Dazhalan Project, 140 Debord, Guy, 5 Democracy Movement of 1978–1979, 82 Demography, 11, 25, 137, 148, 156 Deng Xiaoping, 49 Dialectical relationship, 7, 23, 43 Dialogical aesthetics, 23, 36, 38, 42, 43, 46, 47, 118, 180, 191 Dialogue, 2, 3, 23–25, 38–42, 45, 46, 52, 118, 122, 124, 137, 139, 156, 172, 180, 190, 192 Dichotomy, 65, 169 Dijk, Hans van, 49 Dimen Dong Cultural Eco-­ Museum, 200 Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society, 9, 10, 47 Dirlik, Arif, 79, 81, 82 Division of labor, 23, 68, 81, 82, 84, 99n5 Durational, 17, 22, 39–41 E Earthsong Eco-Neighborhood, 95 East Asia, 10 Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, 95, 109, 130n8 Eco Beauty Supermarket, 197 Economic development, 2, 11–13, 24, 36, 105, 106, 109, 124, 126, 127, 138, 143, 157, 164, 176, 181, 183, 191, 192, 194

E-flux, 180 Egalitarianism, 68 Elderly People’s Association, 21, 123, 137, 153, 165n4 Elitist intelligentsia, 173, 176 Emblem, see Commune emblem The End of Utopia, 189–195 Ethics, 57, 180 Europe, 4, 23, 37, 56, 82, 160 European, 5, 42, 77, 97, 120, 150, 190 Exchange value, 25, 149 F Fang Shu, 21 Farmland, 146 Feng Si’te, 22, 160, 161, 211 Field-based approach, 17, 22, 29n30, 106, 111, 178 FIELD - Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, vii, 17, 28n22 Fields, Factories and Workshops, 68 Fieldwork, 7, 17–19, 48, 130n3, 142, 203 Fletcher, Harrell, 38 Florida, Richard, 106 Folk Memory Documentary Project, 53, 55, 96 Forefather temple, 116, 151, 164, 208 Foundational myth, 89 Four great maladies, 87 Freetown Christiania, 71, 95, 99n7 Freire, Paulo, 5 Fuller, Buckminster, 95 G Ganbunese, 19, 20 Gao Nan, 160, 161 Gaodanghua, 183 Ge Lei, 54, 60n20

 INDEX 

Gentrification, 25, 149, 164, 170, 182, 183, 186n22–24, 193 Get It Louder, 210 Going rural, 6, 36 Going-to-the-land, 95 Going-to-the-people, 8 Gongshe (commune), 81 Gongsheng (mutualism), 47, 59n12 Gongtongti (community), 81 Graeber, David, 78, 84 The Great China Buddhist Kingdom, 91 Great Leap Forward, 53 Great unity, 68 Green Cross, 96, 165n9 Groundbreaking, 54, 60n21 Groys, Boris, 38 Gu Xuechen, 160 Guangzhou, 9, 13, 47, 55, 58n3, 59n11, 81, 100n16, 122, 131n16, 131n19, 131n20, 201 Guanxi, 16, 26, 202, 204 Guanxi Aesthetics, 15–17, 26, 197–204 Guerilla policy style governance, 16 H Hailufeng Soviet, 79 Han Xiaorong, 87 Han Yu, 143, 145, 209, 212 Haotang Village, 96, 142 Harvestival, 20, 24, 26n4, 107, 112, 114–118, 121, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130n1, 131n13, 173, 177, 191, 208 Hayford, Charles W., 79, 85, 86, 90, 100n15 He Baogang, 9, 27n12, 69 He Huili, 87, 117 He Xuefeng, 13 Head of Medusa, 42–44

217

Heilmann, Sebastian, 16 Historical legacy, 6, 50 History of Bishan, 212 Ho, Elaine W., 162, 179 Holmes, Brian, 4–5, 27n9, 129 Hometown Money, 95 Hong Kong, 10, 46, 59n8, 128, 140, 159, 162, 166n25, 179, 185n18, 185n20, 210 Hong Kong-Bishan Seed Exchange, 162, 179, 185n20 Hongcun, 107, 139, 146, 156, 157, 175, 176, 204 Horse head walls, 137 Hotel Tailai, 128, 173, 185n9 How to Start Your Own Country, 73 Hsieh Ying-chun, 114 Hu Jintao, 12, 193 Hu Yongfeng, 152 Hu Zhongquan, 114, 131n15 Huizhou, xvi, 88, 107, 114, 115, 137, 139, 140, 151, 176, 197, 212 Hui-architecture, 77, 124 Hui-houses, 78, 126, 137, 139, 142, 146, 150, 164, 165n11, 193 Hui-style, xvi, 2, 24, 71, 115, 142–144, 147–149, 164, 208, 209, 212 Hui-style villages, xvi Huizhou merchants, 139 Hundred Crafts of Yi County, 199, 207 Hun.Studio, 161 I Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, 211 Imaginaries, 2, 9, 23, 24, 41, 73, 75 Imagined community, 44, 106 Independent documentary film, 211

218 

INDEX

Independent film, 91, 210 Informal residential land market, 147 Infrastructure, 25, 51, 177, 193 Inside and outside, 20 Intellectuals, 2, 3, 8, 9, 13–15, 25, 28n24, 53, 65, 69, 72, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 95, 96, 105, 108–110, 112, 117, 120, 125, 129, 157, 169, 173, 189, 192, 193, 208, 210 establishment intellectuals, 9 radical rural intellectuals, 8, 15, 90, 189 Intelligentsia, 89, 92, 110, 113, 169 International, 4, 7, 36, 37, 55, 83, 86, 94, 96, 108, 112, 115, 118, 121, 123, 139, 150, 160 Intervention art, 54 Ithaca Hours, 95, 128 J Japan, 10, 52, 99n5, 109, 166n22 Jiang Du, 160, 161 Jianghu, 53 Jie Lu, 14 Jin Le, 50, 56, 57, 60n22, 96 Jin Ming, 144, 209, 211 Jingmai Mountain Project, 13, 200 Jingtianzhi (well-field system), 84 Jinshenhua (gentrification), 183 K Kang Youwei, 68 Kapur, Geeta, 112 Keane, Michael, 17, 107 Kellner, Douglas, 43, 44, 59n5 Kester, Grant, vii, 4, 5, 17–19, 23, 36–42, 44, 46, 58n1, 106, 111, 118, 131n11, 178–180, 191 Krebs, Edward S., 68, 69, 79

Kropotkin, Peter, 67, 68, 71, 74, 78–80, 82, 83, 88, 97, 100n11, 112, 189 Kwon, Miwon, 44, 58n1 L Lacy, Suzanne, 38, 46 Landauer, Gustav, 80 The Land Project, 76, 95, 109, 111 Land-use planning, 10 Lantian Project, 55, 121–123, 131n19, 210 Laobaixing (common people), 19 The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 171 Lattice shop, 158, 160, 161, 166n22, 178, 208 Le Corbusier, 76, 95 LEAP International Art Magazine on Contemporary China, 6 Leap into utopia, 65 Learning center, 137, 141, 144, 158, 208 Leftist cultures, 6 Lei, Ray, 75, 76 Lertchaiprasert, Kamin, 109 Leung, Michael, viii, 159, 162, 163, 166n26, 179 Li Changping, 142, 165n9 Li Chengfu, 91 Li Dazhao, 95, 100n15 Li Jin, 145, 153, 166n19 Li Keqiang, 11 Li Mu, 55, 57, 58n4, 96 Li Xuemei, 160 Li Yifan, 48, 54 Li Zhu, 46 Liang Hong, 114, 210 Liang Shaoji, 114 Liang Shuming, 69, 79, 85–87, 99n5, 100n11, 111, 141 Liang Xiaoyan, 117

 INDEX 

Liao Yiwu, 91 Librairie Avant-Garde, 13, 26n5, 130n5, 130n7, 151, 212 Lin Wenyong, 91 Lippard, Lucy, 23, 24, 36, 38, 42, 43, 58n1, 127, 135, 163, 164, 191 List of Self-proclaimed Emperors in China after 1949, 91 Little Gang, 161, 211 Liu Ding, 45 Liu Qingyuan, 116, 117, 131n16 Liu Shifu, 27n8, 68, 95 Living room, 59n11, 161 Local authorities, 3, 4, 15, 22, 24, 36, 39, 50, 57, 106, 107, 112, 118, 124, 125, 127, 129, 136, 144, 165n4, 176, 178, 179, 191, 194, 200, 201, 203, 204n11 Local handicrafts, 2, 18, 112, 144 Long March-project, 52 Long-term, 7, 17, 40, 41, 44, 45, 55, 73, 110, 117, 122, 139, 178, 191, 204 Lu, Carol Yinghua, 29n30, 45, 105, 131n14 Lu, Sheldon, 148 Lü Peng, 48 Lü Xinyu, viii, 14, 117, 177 Lu Xun, 95 M Mahjong, 153 Mai Dian, 8, 14, 68, 93, 98 Mao Chenyu, 14, 68, 93, 94, 96, 98, 100n17 Mao Zedong, 49, 50, 58, 82, 94, 95, 137 Maogong Project, 13, 200, 204n5 Maoism, 14, 23, 49 Maoist legacy, 67, 98 Mapping, 6, 36, 91, 179, 190

219

Marcus, George, 17, 28n23 Marcuse, Herbert, 23, 36, 41, 43–45, 58, 59n5, 73, 127, 193–195 Marxism, 69, 79 Marxist, 49, 95 Mass Education Movement, 71, 79, 86, 87, 141 Mass line, 5, 49–50 Mass protests, 10 Means of production, 14, 117, 177 Meishi Street, 210 Meisner, Maurice, 81, 82 Mencius, 84 Metelkova Autonomous Culture Center, 95 Mo Ye, 122, 131n20, 210 Modern Woodcut Movement, 6 Mole, 94 Moleskine, 69, 113, 171 Monetary circuit, 128 More, Thomas, 68, 73 Morris, William, 85, 94 Mu Er, 144 Mutual aid, 47, 54, 71, 74, 78, 79, 100n11, 112, 115 Mutual engagement, 119 Mutualism, 47, 59n12 Mutual relationships, 23, 47 N Nanping, 22, 118, 144, 211 Narodnism, 69, 79, 82 Neolibralism, 14 New Comrades of Bishan, 158–161 New genre public art, 38, 46 New Harmony, 27n8, 94 New humanity, 83, 91 New Left, 13–15, 27n18, 117, 177 New Masses, 91, 100n16 New Rural Reconstruction Movement, 12, 27n17, 87, 111, 112, 190

220 

INDEX

New social relationships, 19, 37, 67, 163 New Sound of Beijing, 210 New Village Movement, 69, 79, 90, 99n5, 100n15 News From Nowhere, 94 Non-confrontational, 5 Non-violent anarchism, 91, 98 North-American, 42, 97, 190 Nostalgia, 139–141, 148, 157, 164, 194 NSK State, 71 O The One and the Many, 37 The Organizational Method of an Aesthetic Society, 69 Other worlds, 3, 36, 98, 190 Our Home, 9, 14, 68 Outside bosses, 174, 175 Owen, Robert, 27n8, 94 P Paddy Film Farm, 14, 55, 68, 93 Painting the City Red, 127 Pantheon, 88 Paris Commune, 12, 23, 65, 67, 80–83, 85, 94, 97, 189 Participatory art, 38, 43, 46, 55, 56, 180 Passport, 28n24, 67, 120, 121 Peach blossom spring, 68 Peasant Library, 21 Peasant Movement in Hunan, 94 Peng Pai, 79, 95 People’s Communes, 81, 94 People’s Liberation Army, 96 Perry, Elizabeth, 16 Pig’s Inn, 128, 143–145, 176, 209, 211, 212 Pingshan Village, 121

Place-making, 137 Platform aesthetics, 7 Playground, 11, 194 Plug-in City, 76 Poetry classes, 53, 141 Political action, 25–26, 56, 178 Political aesthetics, 57 Political art, 56, 58 Political campaigns, 14, 23 Political ethics, 57 Political youth, 23, 47 Pollination, 162 Position of the artist, 25 Power struggles, 10, 25, 174, 178, 181 Preservation, 2, 109, 115, 124, 140, 141, 146, 148, 149, 157, 164, 200, 201 Problem art, 48 Producer of situations, 39 Project-based art, 52 Publicness, 46, 59n9 Public sphere, 46, 121, 138 Pursuit of publicness, 46 Q Qian Xiaohua, 2, 13, 26n5, 108, 130n5, 151, 208, 209, 212 Qingtian Model, 13, 55, 201, 202 Qiu Anxiong, 114 Qiu Jiansheng, 87 Qiuzhuang Project, 55, 57, 58n4, 96 Qu Yan, 10, 13, 55, 201–203, 204n6, 204n8, 204n9, 204n11 R Radiant City, 76 Radical rural artists, 37 Radical rural intelligentsia, see Intellectuals, radical rural intellectuals

 INDEX 

Rainbow Valley Community, 95 Ranciere, Jacques, 180 Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, vii, 35, 39, 41, 136, 193 Raunig, Gerald, 112 Ray, Gene, 193 Reading groups, 2, 53, 141, 151, 155, 165n7, 180, 208 Real estate agents, 147, 149 Real estate economy, 149 Realtor, 24, 135–165 Reappropriation, 93 Reciprocal aesthetics, 23, 48 Reciprocity, 23, 47 reciprocal, 40, 48, 52, 60n12, 119, 162 Reclus, Elisée, 82, 83 Red Guards, 96 Relational aesthetics, 38, 39, 46, 99n10, 202 Ren Hai, 6, 46 Ren Hexin, 200 Renao, 20, 156 Reorganization, 8, 67, 83, 107 Representation, 18, 35, 36, 39, 49, 50, 52, 53, 98n2, 135, 137, 140, 179 Republican-era, 141 Residential land, 146, 148 Resources, 7, 10–13, 25, 26, 45, 51, 57, 58, 67, 80, 94–97, 107, 111, 120, 126, 131n18, 148, 165, 172, 174, 175, 178, 193, 202, 203 Returnees, 97 Revolution, 8, 28n25, 36, 38, 41–44, 52, 67, 79, 86, 87, 94, 112, 193, 210 Romanticization of the rural, 12 Ross, Kristin, 81–83, 85 Rural activists, 208 Rural architecture, 53, 129, 140, 141

221

Rural China, 1–4, 7–10, 12, 14–18, 23–25, 36, 42, 51–53, 55, 57, 66, 72, 90, 92, 94–97, 99n3, 100n17, 111, 146, 151, 153, 155, 164, 172–174, 177, 178, 181–183, 192–194, 201–203 Rural communal thinking, 23, 65 Rural contract, 24, 127 Rural crisis, 10–15, 124 Rural culture, 84, 105, 129, 141, 194 Rural governance, vii, 129 Rural intelligentsia, 8, 9, 15, 70, 89 Ruralism, 72, 74, 88, 90 Rural reconstruction, 11, 13, 18, 50, 53, 57, 58n4, 67, 71, 74, 79, 85–89, 94, 96, 97, 100n11, 111, 112, 115, 117, 125, 128, 131n10, 155, 165n9, 190, 192, 195n2, 200, 201 through art, 13, 16, 50, 200–202 Rural Reconstruction Movement, 1, 12, 27n17, 79, 85–87, 89, 90, 95, 99n5, 100n11, 111, 112, 141, 142, 151 New, 12, 13, 87, 111 Rural utopia, 3, 66 S Sage Dynasty, 91 Said, Edward, 9 San Yuan Li, 210 Schell, Orville, 119, 121, 131n18 School of Tillers, 2, 22, 68, 84–85, 130n7, 132n22, 137, 138, 141, 143, 144, 149, 158–164, 166n22, 172, 176, 180, 191, 198, 207, 208, 211 Seed exchange, 163 The Seedtank, 144 Self-organization, 67, 112, 129 Sent-down-youth movement, 49, 60n15, 96, 142

222 

INDEX

Serve the people, 37, 48–50 Shanghai, 9, 47, 55, 69, 82, 115, 144, 159, 160, 166n17, 166n25, 166n28, 207, 212 Shehui canyushi yishu, 46 Sheikh, Simon, 43 Shennong, 68, 84 Shenzhen, 11, 45, 100n16, 140, 165n5, 210 Shi Dingwu, 91 Shijiezi Art Museum, 27n14, 50, 56, 57, 96 Shishenhua, 183 Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, 55 Sickle, 75 Situationist International, 5 Skinner, B. F., 94 Sky well, 137 Social change, 4, 15, 16, 41, 42, 69, 96, 135, 180 Social coherence, 11, 87, 89 Social critique, 35, 36, 39, 203 Social interaction art, 46, 59n8 Socialist aesthetic, 74 Socialist realism, 49 Socially Engaged Art, viii, 3–7, 10, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, 22–23, 25, 26, 27n9, 35–48, 50–53, 55, 56, 58n2, 59n7, 59n8, 60n16, 95, 97, 111, 112, 129, 131n19, 135, 139, 169–171, 180–182, 186n21, 191, 192, 202, 203 socially engaged artist, 3, 36, 45, 192 Social movement organization, 19 Social practice art, 38, 46, 131n11 Social utopianism, 23 Society of the Spectacle, 5 Socio-spatial strategy, 24 SoengJoengToi, 9, 27n13, 47, 58n3, 59n11, 60n14 Song Yongping, 51

Songzhuang, 54, 107, 149 Spatial approach, 24, 140, 142 Special Economic Zone, 11 Spectacle, 5, 7, 36, 59n9, 123 Spectrum, 5, 73, 80, 90, 202 Stars Art Group, 46 State control, 14, 47, 91, 98 Status symbols, 170, 172, 173 Strauss, Erwin, 73 Streetlights vs stars, 173 Su Wei, 45 Sun Jun, 96, 142, 165n9 Symbiosis, 47, 57, 60n12 Symbiosis art, 47 T Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 129 Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring, 68 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, 49 Tang Guo, 114 Tang Xue, 22, 152, 211 Tao Xingzhi, 85, 86, 131n10 Tao Yuanming, 68 Teacher Hu, 139, 177, 185n16, 185n17 Teacher Wang, see Wang Shouchang Temporality, 45, 110, 178 Ten Thousand Followers Heavenly Kingdom, 91 Theatre troupes, 6 Thøgersen, Stig, viii, 11, 19, 87, 95, 165n9, 194, 195n2 Thoreau, Henri David, 27n8, 94 Three rural issues, 87 Three Step Studio, 50 Tinari, Philip, 110 Tiqqun, 95 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 76, 95, 99n10, 109 Tolstoy, Lev, 79 Tonglu County, 108

 INDEX 

Totalitarianism, 93 Tourism, xvi, 26, 78, 106, 109, 139, 145, 156, 157, 175–178, 194, 201, 212 Tourist attraction, 139, 163 Tourist destination, xvi, 107–109, 122, 130n5, 139, 175, 177, 181, 184, 194, 204, 212 Tourist groups, 130n6 Tourist industry, 25, 106, 108, 139, 146, 150, 175, 177, 186n24, 193, 194 Tourist revenues, 148, 177, 192 Tourist site, xvi Town-country system, 69 Tradition, 10, 41, 68, 72, 73, 84, 90, 98, 110, 119, 131n14 Trojan Horse, 23–25, 36, 42–44, 94, 97, 111, 120, 127, 135–165, 191, 194 U Ulfstjerne, Michael, 17 Ullens Center of Contemporary Art, 110 Umbrella-term, 38 UNESCO World Heritage, 107, 146, 175 University village officials, vii, 21, 128, 132n24, 144 Urban aesthetics, 25, 140, 193 Urban architectural utopias, 77 Urban areas, xvi, 11, 12, 16, 47, 67, 81, 95–97, 181, 190, 192 Urban artists, 1–3, 16, 24, 57, 105, 111, 156, 173, 175, 190, 194 Urban bias, 11 Urban centers, 2, 11, 55 Urban characteristics, 74 Urban colonization, 183 Urban connections, 25, 95–97, 146

223

Urban contract, 127 Urban creative class, 183 Urban cultural dominance, 8, 25, 27n10 Urban culture, 7, 26 Urban fringe, 48, 51, 55, 107 Urban imaginary, 11 Urban intellectuals, 9, 95–96 Urban intelligentsia, 90, 114 Urbanism, 4, 40, 99n9 Urbanization, xvi, 10–12, 14, 54, 66, 67, 90, 113, 127, 136, 164, 181, 193 Urban middle-class, 182, 184 Urban nostalgia, 194 Urban population, 11 Urban residents, 171, 172, 194 Urban resources, 96, 97, 109, 164, 193 Urban sprawl, 120 Urban tourists, xvi, 139, 177 Urban youth, 60n15, 96 USA, 4, 23, 56, 160 U-théque, 91, 100n16, 210 Utopia, 1, 2, 4, 7–9, 23, 24, 26n6, 41, 43, 47, 50–52, 58, 65–75, 80, 81, 83–85, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99n3, 99n4, 113, 115, 120, 127, 129, 141, 144, 149, 164, 171, 177, 178, 181, 190, 193–195 V Van Abbe Museum, 55 V-ECO, 18, 100n18 Vessel, 170, 175 Village administration, 16, 21, 25, 165, 174, 176 Village committee, 22, 29n29, 111, 123, 137, 163, 165n4, 170, 174–176, 197, 198, 211 Village community, 47

224 

INDEX

Village Documentary Film Project, 60n17 Village Documentary Project, 53, 55 Village gentry, 202 Village head, 7, 58 Village self-governance, 53 Ville Radieuse, 76 Visual anthropology, 17, 28n23 Visual art, 18 Visual system, 67 Volunteers, 22, 115, 143, 144, 158, 161, 163, 164, 191, 209 W Walden, 27n8, 94, 171 Walden II, 94 Wang Chunchen, 6, 29n30, 46, 52 Wang Dazhi, 85, 86, 111, 128 Wang Hui, 81 Wang Nanming, 48 Wang Shouchang, vii, 7, 21, 138, 152, 154–157, 165n6, 169, 179, 184n1, 209, 211 Wang Xiaonai, 21, 211 Wang Zhiliang, 7, 23, 47, 57, 60n12 Wang, Meiqin, 5, 6, 27n16, 29n30, 48, 50, 55, 60n12, 200, 201, 204n5, 204n11 Wang-clan, 114, 151, 208, 212 The Way Poker, 122 Well-field system, 84 Wen Hui, 53 Wen Jiabao, 12, 193 Wen Tiejun, 12, 13, 87, 111 Weng Fen, 27n15, 55 The Whole Earth Catalog, 94 Windsail Library, 13, 130n7 Work-study groups, 8, 99n5 WOW gallery, 144, 209, 211 Wu Wenguang, 53, 60n18, 96, 100n17, 210 Wutuobang, 73

X Xi Jinping, 49, 50, 97, 121 Xiadi Paddy Field Bookstore, 13 Xiaoma, 73, 74, 113–115 Xiaonai, see Wang Xiaonai Xidi, 107, 118, 139, 143, 146, 156, 157, 175, 176, 204, 209, 212 Xin’an Traveling Group, 86 Xinghua, 153 Xiuli Film Village, 115, 131n15 Xu Hongbin, 54, 149 Xu Xing, 84 Xu’aodi Project, 13, 200 Xucun International Art Commune, 10, 13, 27n14, 54, 55, 57, 201, 202 Xucun International Art Festival, 124 Y Yan’an Rectification Movement, 49 Yang Guobin, 49 Yangdeng Art Cooperative, 46, 55, 57, 60n12 Yao Lilan, 209, 211 Yellow Mountain, xvi, 71, 107, 139, 212 Yen, James (Yan Yangchu), 67, 69, 71, 74, 85–89, 95, 97, 111, 117, 129, 141 Yi County, vii, xvi, 16, 21, 25, 72, 90, 107, 114, 118, 130n6, 131n10, 131n12, 139, 147, 148, 153, 173, 174, 176, 192, 194, 200, 201, 204n3, 208, 209, 212 Yishu, 48 Yishu jieru shehui, 46 Yixian International Photo Festival, 118–122, 124, 125, 192, 207, 208 YMCA, 86 Young Village Official’s Garden, 128, 144, 211

 INDEX 

Yu, Mia, 51 Yu Qiang, 107, 108, 138, 145, 156 Yuding-cake, 114, 115 Z Zasulich, Vera, 82 Zhang Jianping, 114 Zhang Jingsheng, 69, 99n4 Zhang Lei, 114, 130n7 Zhang Liaoran, 161 Zhang Xiaoguang, 160 Zhang Yu, 21, 144, 211 Zhao Kunfang, viii, 22, 159–163, 166n25, 166n28, 179 Zheng Bo, viii, 6, 29n30, 46, 58, 59n9, 59n10, 60n16 Zheng Xiaoguang, 143, 145, 209, 212

225

Zhongchan jiejihua (gentrification), 183 Zhongguo wenti qingjing yishu, 48 Zhou Yanhua, 5, 6, 23, 37, 42, 46 Zhou Yun, 20, 25, 170–172, 176, 178–181, 183, 186n24 Zhou Zuoren, 69, 95, 99n5, 100n15 Zhu Xiandong, 170, 174, 175, 177, 185n17 Zuo Jing, vii, xvi, 1, 13, 16, 18, 21, 26n3, 26n6, 27n16, 54, 55, 60n20, 106, 112, 113, 115, 117–119, 121, 130, 131n14, 137, 138, 143, 145–148, 164, 165, 166n13, 166n21, 172, 174–176, 183, 185n10, 192, 193, 198–203, 204n11, 207–211