Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface 9789048532131

Citation preview

Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China

Publications The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a research and exchange platform based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote (inter)national cooperation. IIAS focuses on the humanities and social sciences and on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia Scholars. Its main research interests are reflected in the three book series published with Amsterdam University Press: Global Asia, Asian Heritages and Asian Cities. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing together various parties in Asia and other parts of the world. The Institute works as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, the construction and support of international networks and cooperative projects, and the organization of seminars and conferences. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Europe and Asia. IIAS Publications Officer: Paul van der Velde IIAS Assistant Publications Officer: Mary Lynn van Dijk

Asian Cities The Asian Cities Series explores urban cultures, societies and developments from the ancient to the contemporary city, from West Asia and the Near East to East Asia and the Pacifijic. The series focuses on three avenues of inquiry: evolving and competing ideas of the city across time and space; urban residents and their interactions in the production, shaping and contestation of the city; and urban challenges of the future as they relate to human well-being, the environment, heritage and public life. Series Editor Paul Rabé, Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) at International Institute for Asian Studies, The Netherlands Editorial Board Henco Bekkering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Charles Goldblum, University of Paris 8, France Xiaoxi Hui, Beijing University of Technology, China Stephen Lau, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Rita Padawangi, University of Social Sciences, Singapore Parthasarathy Rengarajan, Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Gujarat, India Neha Sami, Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, India

Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China Urbanized Interface

Edited by Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang

Amsterdam University Press

Publications asian cities 8

Cover illustration: Jin Feng, Wordless Petitions, 2006, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 223 9 e-isbn 978 90 4853 213 1 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462982239 nur 630 © Minna Valjakka & Meiqin Wang / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every efffort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents List of Figures Engagement with the Urban

Visual Arts as a Form of Cultural Activism in Contemporary China Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang

6 13

Part I  Representations 1 From Sidewalk Realism to Spectral Romance

35

2 Urban History from Below

61

3 The Transient City

87

Yang Lina’s Beijing and Beyond Zhen Zhang

The Artworks of Zhang Dali, Jin Feng and Dai Guangyu Maurizio Marinelli

Urban Transformation in Chinese Contemporary Photography Jiang Jiehong

4 Shadow of the Spectacular

115

5 China Dreaming

147

Photographing Social Control and Inequality in Urban China Meiqin Wang

Representing the Perfect Present, Anticipating the Rosy Future Stefan Landsberger

Part II  Urban Interventions 6 Urban Insertion as Artistic Strategy

The Big Tail Elephant Working Group in 1990s Guangzhou Nancy P. Lin

181

7 Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises’

209

8 Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

237

9 Out of Service

261

10 Translocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativity in Mainland China

285

Chris Berry

Unofficial Artists and Independent Film-makers in the Beijing Periphery Judith Pernin

Migrant Workers and Public Space in Beijing Elizabeth Parke

Minna Valjakka

Index 317

List of Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2

Yang Lina, Old Men, 1999. Courtesy of the artist. 43 Yang Lina filming in the park, ca. 2007. Courtesy of the artist. 46 Figure 1.3 Yang Lina, The Loves of Lao An, 2008. Courtesy of the artist. 47 Figure 1.4 Yang Lina, Longing for the Rain, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 51 Figure 1.5 Yang Lina, Longing for the Rain, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 53 Figure 2.1 Jin Feng, A History of China’s Modernisation Volumes 1 and 2, 2011, rubber, marble, rice paper installation. Courtesy of the artist. 64 Figure 2.2 Jin Feng, Wordless Petitions, 2006, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. 65 Figure 2.3 Zhang Dali, Demolition, no. 65B, 1999. Courtesy of the artist. 71

Figure 2.4 Dai Guangyu, Geomancy: Ink, Ice, 2004/05. Courtesy of the artist. 72 Figure 2.5 Dai Guangyu, The Kidnapped, 2011, ink acrylic on xuan paper. Courtesy of the artist. 74 Figure 2.6 Zhang Dali, Demolition, no. 25, 1998. Courtesy of the artist. 75 Figure 3.1 Rong Rong, Liulituan, no. 8, 2003. Courtesy of the artist. 96 Figure 3.2 Zhang Dali, Demolition, no. 125a, 1998. Courtesy of the artist. 98 Figure 3.3 Zhuang Hui and Dan’er, Yumen: Laojun Temple Oilfield, 2006-2009. Courtesy of the artists. 99 Figure 3.4 Wang Qingsong, Skyscraper, no. 2, 2008. Courtesy of the artist. 101 Figure 3.5 Miao Xiaochun, Surplus, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. 102 Figure 3.6 Jiang Pengyi, All Back to Dust, no. 2, 2006. Courtesy of the artist. 105 Figure 3.7 Chen Shaoxiong, Streetscape I, 1997-1998. Courtesy of the artist. 106 Figure 3.8 Zhang Peili, The Entryway of Hangzhou Parterre One Year Apart, 2000-2001. Courtesy of the artist. 109 Figure 4.1 Ni Weihua, Keywords – Chinese Dream: Shanghai Jiangdong Road, June 7, 2015, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. 119 Figure 4.2 Ni Weihua, Keywords – Development: Shanghai Zhongshan Road East No. 1, December 15, 1998, 1998. Courtesy of the artist. 121 Figure 4.3 Top: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Development: Shanghai Xin Kezhan, May 23, 1999, 1999; Bottom: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Development: Qingdao Shangdong Road, Shangdong, October 15, 2003, 2003. Courtesy of the artist. 122 Figure 4.4 Top: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Harmony: Shanghai Zhouzhugong Road, April 10, 2008, 2008; Bottom: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Harmony: Hangzhou Jiefang Road, 14 September 2008. Courtesy of the artist. 127 Figure 4.5 Selected pieces from Ni Weihua’s Keywords – Chinese Dream series, 2013-2015. Courtesy of the artist. 129 Figure 4.6 Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Puming Road, 11:46, September 4, 2013, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 132 Figure 4.7 Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Hengfeng Road, 15:00-15:30, April 18, 2009, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. 134

Figure 4.8 Top: Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Songhu Road, 10:45, April 4, 2013, 2013; Bottom: Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Langao Road, 16:00-16:30, November 26, 2009, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. 136 Figure 5.1 Designer unknown. Title: Tong yige shijie tong yige mengxiang (One world, one dream). Publisher: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Date of publication: July 2008, ISBN: 978-780716-715-0. Nr. of copies printed: 200,000. Available online: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/200807/18/content_8570590.htm 156 Figure 5.2 Designer unknown. Title: Tong yige shijie tong yige mengxiang (One world, one dream). Publisher: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Date of publication: July 2008, ISBN: 978-7-80716-715-0. Nr. of copies printed: 300,000. Available online: http://news.xinhuanet.com/ english/2008-07/18/content_8570590_1.htm. 157 Figure 5.3 Designer unknown. Title: Geng kuai geng gao geng qiang (Citius – Altius – Fortius). Publisher: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Date of publication: 2008. Print nr.: 780716.36. Available online: http://news.xinhuanet. com/english/2008- 07/18/content_8570590_2.htm 159 Figure 5.4 Designer: Public Service Advertising Art Committee; figurine designed by Lin Gang. Title: Zhongguo meng – wode meng (The Chinese Dream – my dream). Publisher: China Internet Television Station. Date of publication: 2013. No print number. Available on website of the Civilization Office under the CCP Central Committee: http://www.wenming.cn/jwmsxf_294/ zggygg/pml/zgmxl/201309/t20130930_1501267.shtml 167 Figure 5.5 Designer: Public Service Advertising Art Committee; image designed by Liu Zhigui. Title: Zhonghua meide – Xiao (Chinese virtue – filial piety). Publisher: China Internet Television Station. Date of publication: 2013. No print number. Available online on website of the Civilization Office under the CCP Central Committee http://www.wenming.cn/jwmsxf_294/zggygg/pml/ ctmdxl/201309/t20130929_1500525.shtml 169

Figure 5.6 Designer: Public Service Advertising Art Committee; image designed by Ren Mingzhao. Title: Ren jing lao ji de fu (The people honour the old for their own happiness). Publisher: China Internet Television Station. Date of publication: 2013. No print number. Available online on website of the Civilization Office under the CCP Central Committee http://www. wenming.cn/jwmsxf_294/zggygg/pml/tmdxl/201309/ t20130929_1500644.shtml 172 Figure 6.1 Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, performance, 90 min, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist. 182 Figure 6.2 A group meeting in 1993, Guangzhou. From left to right: Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Xu Tan and Lin Yilin. Courtesy of Lin Yilin. 185 Figure 6.3 Lin Yilin, Standard Series of Ideal Residence, 1991, installation, brick, iron, wood. Courtesy of the artist. 187 Figure 6.4 Xu Tan, The Alteration and Extension of Sanyu Road No. 14, 1994, installation, photographs, floor plan, video, text, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist. 189 Figure 6.5 Detail of Xu Tan, The Alteration and Extension of Sanyu Road No. 14, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. 189 Figure 6.6 Chen Shaoxiong, Streetscape I, 1997-1998, photograph, photo collage, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist. 193 Figure 6.7 Liang Juhui, One Hour Game, 1996, installation and performance, white cloth, chair, television, video game, Guangzhou. Courtesy of Liang Juhui Memorial of Libreria Borges Institut d’Art Contemporain. 197 Figure 6.8 From left to right: detail of Figure 6.4 showing Xu Tan; detail of Figure 6.7 showing Liang Juhui; and photograph of Chen Shaoxiong holding Streetscape II, 1997-1998. Courtesy of Luo Qingmin, spouse of Chen Shaoxiong. 202 Figure 7.1 Cao Fei, Hip Hop Guangzhou, 2003, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 215 Figure 7.2 Moonwalking in Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia, 2006, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 216 Figure 7.3 Cao Fei, RMB City, 2007 onwards, moving image. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 219

Figure 7.4 ‘My Future Is Not a Dream,’ Cao Fei, Whose Utopia, 2006, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 223 Figure 7.5 The zombies in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 226 Figure 7.6 Dancing in the factory in Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia, 2006, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 227 Figure 7.7 Bouncing watermelons in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 230 Figure 7.8 Encountering the peacock in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 230 Figure 7.9 Yoga in high heels in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015. 231 Figure 8.1 Candlelight vigil staged by Songzhuang artists to demand the release of the BIFF organizers. Wang Wo, A Filmless Festival, 2015, screenshot. Courtesy of the artist. 253 Figure 8.2 Online performance-protest for the closing ceremony of the BIFF. Screenshots from WeChat edited for Wang Wo’s A Filmless Festival. Courtesy of the artist. 255 Figure 9.1 The phone numbers function as ads for counterfeit documents like driver’s licences, diplomas or safety certifications. Note the accompanying characters banzheng. Beijing, 2011. Photograph by the author. 263 Figure 9.2 Hoarding in Dongcheng district, note the slogan ‘Be a civilized urbanite’ with the two characters wen and ming in the calligraphic font. Beijing, 2012. Photograph by the author. 266 Figure 9.3 Billboard in Chaoyang District, near 798 Art District with phone number defacements. Beijing, 2012. Photograph by the author. 270 Figure 9.4 Defacements of the defacement. Beijing, 2011. Photograph by the author. 272 Figure 9.5 Banzheng, Beijing, 2011. Photograph by the author. 276 Figure 10.1 Three of the eight Urban Carpets, 2009. Courtesy of Instant Hutong. 287 Figure 10.2 Urban creativity as an umbrella concept to include artistic and creative practices in urban public space. Copyright by the author. 289

Figure 10.3 Urban creativity as an organic process of translocal site-responsiveness: the multilayered interactions between the three main variables, namely, forms of agency; manifestations; and site, place, and space (as multilevel physical and conceptual contexts); and their varying features. Copyright by the author. 291 Figure 10.4 A local person defending Kaid Ashton’s right to put up a photograph in Guangzhou and the result of the negotiation. Courtesy of the artist. 301 Figure 10.5 Family choosing a photograph for their house in Beijing and the outcome. Courtesy of the artist. 302 Figure 10.6 Julien Malland’s partially demolished painting, Shanghai, September 2015. Photograph by the author. 304 Figure 10.7 Julien Malland’s painting in Xinyi village, September 2015. Photograph by the author. 307 Figure 10.8 Julien Malland and Cao Xiuwen, a sleeping girl in Xingta village, September 2015. Photograph by the author. 308



Engagement with the Urban Visual Arts as a Form of Cultural Activism in Contemporary China Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang Abstract The dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China bring forward unseen representations and urban interventions. We argue that innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces through the formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites. All of these facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups. Keywords: visual arts, urbanization, representations, urban interventions, cultural activism, artistic and creative practices

In 2008, a small retail shop on Xiaojing chang alley in Beijing was transformed into an open platform and artist residence entitled HomeShop (家作坊). The project was initiated by Elaine W. Ho (何穎雅, b. 1977) in collaboration with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga (b. 1979) and Ouyang Xiao (欧阳潇, b. 1983). The small space was the front part of Ho’s own home, which was converted into a semi-public place for the neighbourhood. Because of the growing interest in the activities and the need for more physical space, HomeShop relocated to Jiaodaokou Beiertiao alley two years later and gradually the number of core members expanded to eight. Until 2013 when the lease of the second space ended, HomeShop engaged with issues of urban space, the alternation between private and public domains, the

14 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

village-in-city dynamics, institutional ecology and the possibilities for autonomous living.1 The mutually resonating interests among members of HomeShop to bring together daily life, work and community, inspired diversified methods and projects such as performances, workshops, neighbourhood parties, installations, communal events, providing services, and facilitating interventions in public space. One of the most successful projects in terms of mass participation were the four WaoBao! exchange events, which explored the themes of waste, recycling, cyclicality, and alternative economies, through lectures, workshops and other activities. By broadening up the horizons for the neighbourhood residents, HomeShop investigated the interchangeability of private and public spaces, as well as the prevailing economic and artistic production models. In so doing, the artists (un)consciously unleashed the power of cultural activism by encouraging artistic and creative practices among various social groups who share the city as their home and wish to enhance its liveability. This edited volume examines the potential of innovative strategies in representations and urban interventions to engage with people, to form new relationships and subjectivities, and to provide new perceptions and imageries for envisioning one’s life in the contemporary Chinese city. Although focusing on new practices, we want to emphasize that the main aim is to provide multifaceted perspectives on the sociocultural significance of innovative visual art practice rather than sheer novelty.

Cultural Activism as a Possibility for Civil Society HomeShop is a complex but illuminating example of the rise in cultural activism among artists, art communities and ordinary citizens. They conceive artistic and creative practices that not only raise critical awareness on social injustices, but also actively reshape urban living spaces and expand the civic sphere. Here, we are talking about the interface between visual arts and urbanization in Mainland China.2 The process of urbanization and the consequent social transformation has provided a fertile ground for innovations 1 Elaine W. Ho, email communication to the authors, 16 March 2016; Michael Eddy and Twist Qu, video call interview with authors, 16 March 2016; see also the HomeShop website (2016), http://www.homeshop.org.cn/, accessed 20 February 2016. 2 In some chapters of this book, authors use China instead of Mainland China, but the two terms refer to the same geopolitical concept.

Engagement with the Urban

15

in visual arts and cultural production, contributing to the emergence of a new urban aesthetics. In turn, the novel forms of expression in these fields complicate and contest the mainstream representations of state-led urbanization and open up alternative readings and contingencies for participation in urban life. In Robin Visser’s (2010: 4, 28, 174) words, the rise of the new urban aesthetics functions as a new realm to envision and experience the city in Mainland China, and contributes to the growth of new forms of civic agency. In addition, we believe that the new urban aesthetics manifested in visual arts, and especially in films, photography, installations and interventionist projects, brings forward multiple views of urban life through innovative representations of people, urban space and their interconnections. Indeed, critical artistic and creative examinations of the interfaces between urbanization, society, culture, arts and people in Chinese cities have produced a great variety of new visual forms and agencies. The new artistic and creative practices addressed in this volume are not only timely responses to socio-political issues regarding Chinese urbanization, but they also actively reshape the urban environment through the formation of innovative collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites. All these facilitate various forms of cultural activism as they inevitably challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question established values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups. In their discussion on the politics of contemporary photography, Szeman and Whiteman (2009: 554) argue that photography renders the dominance of global capitalism visible and this visibility ‘generates knowledge of a kind that only an image can manage to do.’ They further relate the importance of contemporary photography to ‘its ability to both use and refuse older aesthetic categories and determinations’ and to ‘provide conceptual maps we would not otherwise have’ (ibid.). We argue that their conceptualization of the power of photography is equally meaningful when extended to the innovative visual art practices discussed in this volume. This understanding of the power of visual arts resonates with Yomi Braester’s (2010: 13) insight that films not only take inspiration from the tangible and intangible preconditions of the city but, because they interact with political decisions and architectural plans, films also ‘forge an urban contract and create the material city and its ideological constructs.’ Similar awareness of such an interdependence is also relevant to other forms of visual art practice. We believe that the dynamic interrelations between the visual arts and the

16 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

(re)making of urban space driven by urbanization and the accompanying socio-political implications deserve continuous scholarly attention. Furthermore, the ever-changing circumstances and the new manifestations and agencies of visual arts require more multiple-perspective research. This is the challenge to which this edited volume aims to respond. This anthology focuses on investigating visual arts of historical value and groundbreaking approaches in relation to urbanization. The full potential of these innovative forms to render visible humanistic concerns and to contribute to a more viable civil society in a habitually authoritative regime has not yet been fully acknowledged. Worldwide, new forms of artistic and creative practice have emerged to challenge the prevailing government-led policies that implement art and creativity in cities in the name of economic or ideological benefits. We believe that in-depth analysis of visual arts and especially their interconnectedness with urban transformations can provide deeper understanding on urbanization and its impact on social fabric, not only in Mainland China but also in other cities in Asia. The significance of the interrelations between visual arts and the city is already recognized in previous studies and art exhibitions, but calls for continuous critical analysis. For example, understanding the urban consciousness emerging among film-makers in the face of urbanization (Zhang 2007) will allow us to gain essential insights in the ‘urban contract’ between films and the city (Braester 2010). The ability of visual arts to provide new imaginative perspectives and break through the notion of the spectacle (De Kloet and Scheen 2013) complements Visser’s (2010) insights on new aspects of the city. A recent investigation of artists’ provocative responses to issues of urbanization (Wang 2016) proposes a fundamental shift in the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of Chinese art. As Wu Hung (2014: 11) aptly maintains, in contemporary Chinese art a ‘“pattern of rupture” caused by political intrusions’ results in ‘a series of gaps as a general historical and psychological condition for artistic and intellectual creativity.’ The unseen levels of urbanization in the twenty-first century have evidently brought about even more ruptures that constitute new historical and psychological conditions shaping the directions of visual arts. Given that urbanization has opened up new ways in the production, dissemination, evaluation, usage and marketing of visual arts (Braester 2010; Visser 2010; Wang 2016; Wang and Valjakka 2015), the focus on acknowledged forms of contemporary art is not sufficient to explain the variety of artistic and creative activities reshaping the perceptions of and participation with cities in Mainland China today. With this anthology, we therefore wish to extend scholarship into the realm of cultural activism in urban China to

Engagement with the Urban

17

the perspectives of representations and urban interventions, themes not yet touched upon or explored adequately in previous studies. Yet the cultural activism discussed here is not to be mistaken for the intellectual dissident movement with a strong sense of antagonism or an openly anti-authoritarian attitude. Instead, we designate cultural activism as different forms of artistic and creative practice that, through varied methods, such as specific aesthetics, social engagement, and intervention, aim to raise public awareness, foster alternative subjectivities, reclaim civil rights, and encourage collaboration at the grassroots level. It is therefore a kind of activism that functions to challenge the established perceptions of urban life and urban development (Rancière 2009: 82; Buser et al. 2013: 607). Cultural activism is certainly not a new phenomenon in China. We can trace back its precedents in the New Culture Movement since the 1910s (Schwarcz 1986; Yeh 1994; Weston 1998; Fung 2010: 27-58; Pickowicz 2016), the Modern Woodcut Movement from the 1920s onwards (Tang 2008), and street theatre in the 1930s (Tang 2016), among others. Yet, it is the contemporary manifestations that is our focus in this study. The cultural activism we attribute to the artistic and creative practices does not necessarily manifest itself in a manner similar to open political and reformist agendas. Meanwhile, it also assumes different forms from those developed and taking place today in Euro-American contexts since it responds to specific circumstances and given restrictions under a powerful and authoritative regime. Cultural activism in contemporary China might appear to have more subtle methods and strategies instead of directly confrontational tactics, such as occupying the public space, cultural jamming, and flash mobs that are popular in many other countries (see e.g. Fox and Starn 1997; Firat and Kuryel 2010; Buser et al. 2013). However, given China’s long intellectual tradition of inventing new artistic styles and themes to voice social protest and political discontent (see e.g. Murck 2000), subtlety should be understood as a meaningful and viable choice for contemporary artists to resist state-sanctioned urban ideology and images. Our perception of cultural activism in Mainland China today echoes with the idea of the ‘cultivation of shared aesthetics of protest’ (Buser et al. 2013: 606), but extends beyond on-site activism and shared perceptions of exclusion to also address more nuanced reflections in visual arts. A broader understanding of ‘a mutual enthusiasm for creative practice as a form of resistance’ (Buser et al. 2013: 607) allows us to explore the activist potential of various new forms of representation and urban intervention initiated by artists and social groups outside of the official system. In their study of China’s independent documentary culture, Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel (2010: 148) argue that independent film-makers’ contribution

18 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

should be examined not in their ‘direct critiques of political or economic power but rather [as] deeper critiques of the ideologies and values that subtend this power.’ This approach is of particular significance in Mainland China, where urban space is mainly dominated by the powerful state and wealthy corporations, or by what some refer to as ‘state capitalism’ (Wen 2004; Schweinberger 2014; Keith et al. 2014). Nonetheless, despite fluctuating levels of censorship and the official monitoring of art spaces, uneven urbanization has resulted in plenty of new methods, strategies, aesthetic forms, sites and agencies in the twenty-first century that lead to the gradual expansion of civil society in the country. The example of HomeShop that opened this introduction is a representative of these new possibilities, born at the nexus of urbanization, globalization and the cultural activism of artists, citizens, film-makers, designers and other creative workers in Mainland China. The artistic and creative practices discussed in this anthology in the contributions of the ten scholars reflect their various academic backgrounds, such as art history, cinema, literature, visual culture and Sinology. They will further illuminate how the unrivalled scale and speed of urbanization has actually propelled active responses in all spheres of visual arts, including the contribution of city officials responsible for authorizing visuality in the cities.

Global Urban Millennium and Visual Arts in Chinese Cities As predicted, the world has entered into the Urban Millennium (United Nations 2001) and by 2014, 53.4 per cent of the world’s total population was living in the cities (WDB 2016). Undoubtedly, Chinese urbanization has contributed significantly to this global tendency. The country has been urbanizing its rural population at a speed unparalleled in human history, with an annual increase of 18.2 million in the 1990s and 23 million since the 2000s (Zhang 2011: 592; Li 2012: 43). As a result, in 2011, China’s urban population (690.79 million) surpassed its rural counterpart (656.56 million) for the first time in history, and China announced its official entry into the urban era (Pan and Wei 2012: 2-3). Yet importantly, urbanization is not just about the increase of urban population. As argued by McGee and others (McGee et al. 2007: 4-5), Chinese urbanization is ‘an integral part of the general processes of development, political, social and economic change’ and as such it is actually the production of urban space and the process of reorganizing the nation. Indeed, urban development is identified as the major force of revolutionary social transformations in contemporary China (Hsing 2010; Wu 2007; Campanella 2008).

Engagement with the Urban

19

The ‘urban’ has assumed a paramount role in the socioeconomic and cultural developments in China since the 1990s because urbanization has been a conscious strategy and a method for nation-building and modernization. Chinese urbanization is characterized by the rise of the city and megacities as the paragons of social development. In the shadow of the rapidly growing cities, many critical visual artists have understandably adopted the city and the urban space as a major focus of their attention – whether as a physical location with tangible structures and forms as or a lived experience that involves all kinds of processes and interactions between people and their living environment. Their interest in examining how urban space is managed by officials but also modified, experienced, and reclaimed by its residents attests to the significant role the city has in determining the life quality and aspirations for the majority of citizens. The growth of Chinese cities and the rising importance of urban space in contemporary Chinese cultural production have unfolded in conjunction with globalization. Evidently, the forces of globalization have become a major drive for the production of urban space in China since the 1990s (McGee et al. 2007: 3). Globalization, however, does not simply result in ‘homogenization’ but rather in ‘global production of locality’ (Appadurai 1996: 188-199). Localized processes are taking place in city planning, cultural and creative industries (CCI), architecture, visual arts, and other related fields. As Fulong Wu (2007: 8) advocates, attention should be paid to ‘how globalization can be imagined, pursued and exploited’ in city-making practices in China. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of urban revolution, Wu maintains that the urban space has become a critical element for the reconceptualization of the city in a global context. We believe that visual arts, either as visual representations or in creating new forms of interventions in urban space, accentuate the growing interdependence between the arts and the city, which has become a defining characteristic of contemporary cities in the age of global urbanism. Another trend that has further connected visual arts to Chinese cities is the global rise of cultural and creative industries (CCI), identified by Richard Florida (2002) to be instrumental for improving the competitive edge of the cities. Although Florida’s perceptions have attracted criticism and the simple import of CCI policies from one context to another can be problematic (Pratt 2009: 19), the Chinese central government has enthusiastically embraced CCI and various local governments have invested generously in establishing ‘cultural creative clusters’ in their cities during the past decade (O’Connor and Gu 2006; Keane 2007, 2009; De Kloet 2013). The position and use of visual arts has been more or less instrumentalized by municipal governments,

20 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

often in collaboration with the private sector, establishing varied art spaces, events and institutions for artists to produce and distribute their works within CCI projects (Wang 2010). This has led to ‘artistic urbanization’ as a spatial strategy for local governments to control cultural production and benefit from redevelopment also in urban peripheries (Ren and Sun 2012). The keen interest of visual artists to explore the intricate interrelations between urbanization and living environments can be traced back to the 1990s when some pioneering artists explored a variety of themes and methods in order to renegotiate, interact with, and reclaim the urban space. Some adopted documentary as a new method in visual arts and addressed the poignant issue of (in)visibility of the socially underprivileged urbanites and their living environment amid the chaos of urban demolition and reconstruction. From the perspectives of different groups and individual urbanites, these artists illuminated dislocation and alienation in and from the city, caused by both physical and sociocultural fragmentations related to the process of endless urban renewal. Since the beginning of the twenty-f irst century, many more artists turned to investigate issues such as history, memory, and identity, fractured by rampant Chinese urbanization. Their artistic examination tended to oscillate between documenting and directly engaging with the physical site through photography, painting, cleaning, chiselling, rubbing, writing, performance and creating installations.3 Besides demolition sites, cities provide a multitude of spaces to work with: from nationally important sites such as Tiananmen Square to newly expanded boulevards, shopping malls, skyscrapers and the whole city itself with its unfathomed growth. How individual urbanites can survive and maintain their humanity in the midst of cities’ ever-intensive competition is a question that many of these artists are asking. Indeed, in the age of global urbanism, many forms of visual art have come to represent the voices of urbanites wanting to renegotiate the struggles of everyday life and to formulate a more viable living environment. Various artistic and creative practices serve as a testimony of social dis­ content towards the new urbanized circumstances, while the manner in which visual art is produced also engages with broader cultural conditions and values beyond the internal logic of art making as a profession in itself. Urban development in China has been carried out in an authoritative fashion that prioritizes the GDP growth over the improvement of human living conditions, and benefits the political and economic elites at the expense of the majority of the people. Hence, it is no coincidence that 3

For more detailed analysis on ruins in Chinese visual culture, see Wu (2012).

Engagement with the Urban

21

many visual artists and other practitioners have adopted a critical attitude towards urbanization and seek creative ways to challenge its disruptive byproducts. They aim to expose major defects of China’s urban and economic development, which breed corruption, injustice and obsession with material success. Although artists, practitioners and urbanites are not trained urban planners, able to design urban development, their intuitive responses to and critique of the (re)formation of urban landscapes says much about the living circumstances of these spaces. Accordingly, their critical representations and creative interventions in various urban situations are valuable forms of cultural activism and demand continuous study.

Representations and Urban Interventions The above-mentioned dynamic interrelation between visual arts and urbanization makes art historical research, analysis and documentation of the changes in visual arts essential, if we wish to understand the speed, scale and consequences of urban transformation in Mainland China. This understanding in turn enables us to acknowledge the active role of visual arts in urban life. The following chapters not only address their most recent manifestations, but also provide in-depth historical research on artistic and creative practices, such as the Big Tail Elephant Working Group (大尾象工作组) of the 1990s, so that we can better evaluate the innovative nature of the new possibilities opening up in the twenty-first century. More importantly, we aim to build up and accumulate knowledge of the new visual forms and their ephemerality through critical and contextual analyses. The various forms of representation and urban intervention discussed in the following chapters not only examine how the processes of globalization and urbanization are interrelated, but also participate in the reconstruction of socio-spatial relationships and the reconceptualization of urban space at local and national levels. They have acquired agency and power to reconstruct our understanding of Chinese cities, which have become loci of intensive negotiations and conflicts. The spectacular rise of worldclass Chinese cities, the striking presence of underprivileged social groups, such as the urban poor and migrant workers, and the alarming social and spatial stratifications, are prominent themes in visual arts in China. More importantly, these phenomena have also propelled a variety of people, including artists, film-makers, art students, graffiti writers, street artists and citizens, among others, to invent new artistic and creative practices to initiate social transformations.

22 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

Proceeding from these premises the following chapters provide indepth analyses of a wide range of artworks, documentary films, and other related projects and activities from recent years that represent a range of innovative approaches, critical reflections, and creative interventions with urban spaces. Many topics discussed in this anthology have remained underexplored, such as the DV turn in documentary f ilms and female agency of Yang Lina (杨荔纳, b. 1972), the early practices of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group, photography by Jin Feng (金锋, b. 1962) and by Ni Weihua (倪卫华, b. 1962), documentary films and film festivals as a form of resilience, migrant presence through banzheng, and the agency of foreign artists and practitioners. By bringing forward the forms of aesthetics, agencies, collaborations, and sites that have emerged only in recent years, it is our intention to stimulate wider scholarly interest in the significance of these artistic and creative investigations of the urban space. As mentioned earlier, instead of focusing only on what is new in visual arts, we endeavour to provide new perspectives on the importance of visual art practices and to emphasize the sociocultural significance of meaningful innovations in the field. Thus, although the emergence of independent documentary films already became a wider phenomenon in the 1990s, we still include two chapters exploring this topic from very different angles and cases, indicating the long-lasting value of this movement. Although some artists, such as Zhang Dali (张大力, b. 1963) and Cao Fei (曹斐, b. 1978), have been studied extensively, authors identify the continuous relevance of their artistic efforts for understanding the urban transformation of China from the perspectives of representations and urban interventions, respectively. Despite the distinctive approaches in different case studies, most contributors share the strong belief in empirical research and contextual visual analysis as an effective method for understanding the characteristics of visual arts production and its interactions with the socio-political context in the Chinese urban setting. Even though ethnographic methods have not yet gained prominent recognition in visual art studies, site observations and interviews with artists, participants and audience members provide novel and invaluable information, especially in the case of socially engaged (art) projects. For theoretical convenience, the anthology consists of two parts, although many of the questions and analyses in the chapters resonate with each other in multiple ways within and between the two sections. Part 1, Representations, mainly sheds light on questions addressing the ways in which visual arts have been inspired to respond to urban changes with new methods, strategies, styles, forms and subject matters. The five chapters included in this section explore how the transformations of the

Engagement with the Urban

23

urban spaces, the powerful presence of the state ideologies, and the (in) visibility of the socially underprivileged contribute to the discourse of visual representation and become the content of art making. They examine how individual artists contemplate and contest these phenomena through films, installation works, performance, photographs, and multimedia projects. These chapters also make clear that visual arts, or aesthetic products, have the power to make the invisible visible and to make previously silenced voices heard, either through the exercise of political power or the marginalization of certain social groups (Agamben 2000; Ten Bos 2005; Rancière 2009). In other words, visual representations created in response to China’s massive and more often than not uneven urban transformations provide a space for people to pause and reflect on the hectic speed of urbanization and the impact it has on the social fabric, nature and urban infrastructure, and human lives. Chapter 1 by Zhen Zhang delineates how the independent film-maker Yang Lina has employed DV to document the rapidly changing urban landscape and social fabric in Beijing, while developing distinctive artistic languages as she attends to her subjects with compassionate camera and gendered persona. Zhang argues that Yang’s work has contributed to the sudden DV turn in the New Documentary Movement in China. Analysing several film works, the author traces Yang’s career and examines how she re-embeds the sidewalk xianchang documentary aesthetic within a ‘spectral realism’ that anatomizes contemporary Chinese urban life through filming the daily routines of a group of old men, the social dance performed by retirees, and the spiritual loss and ‘paranormal’ erotic longing of the new middle class. In Chapter 2, Maurizio Marinelli continues the quest of exploring how artistic representations bring visibility to the marginalized by closely reading the works of Zhang Dali, Jin Feng and Dai Guangyu (戴光郁, b. 1955) that he believes to be producing ‘history from below’ and contrasting the official mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Following Jacques Rancière’s insights, Marinelli shows how the artists are enacting a total revolution of the senses by making ‘heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals’ (Rancière 2009: 25). In particular, he argues that Zhang Dali’s artwork both aestheticizes the ‘non-urban subjects’ and politicizes them, helping to construct and offer to the spectators a counter-narrative vis-à-vis a hegemonic discourse of exclusivity and invisibility. With Chapter 3, Jiang Jiehong leads us to the broad picture of new aesthetic strategies invented by artists with their photographic works in response to an increasingly transitory urban living environment. Jiang argues that the incessant changes have shaped a moving reality beyond the normal and tangible environment of daily life. In this context, photography becomes a unique

24 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

instrument for capturing, interpreting and imagining the overwhelming pace and extent of change in contemporary China. Analysing the works by eleven artists from different age groups and geographical origins, the author associates artistic reflections on China’s urban development with the distinctive role photography has played in this unprecedented era of social, ideological and cultural transformation. The possibilities of photography to call into question the spectacular urban transformation are further explored in Chapter 4, where Meiqin Wang focuses on Ni Weihua’s critical response to the saturation of officially sanctioned visual presentations for both political and commercial purposes in urban public spaces. Wang argues that advertisements have assumed a commanding role in urban China, a phenomenon captured in Ni’s conceptual photographic series of street billboards in Shanghai and other cities. Analysing Ni’s work in relation to the promulgation of official slogans, the penetration of the spectacle of consumerism in Chinese cities, and the rising social inequality, Wang contends that Ni advances a critical visualization that simultaneously documents and deconstructs China’s official portrayal of economic development and urbanism. Providing an essential counter-perspective to the bottom-up aesthetics discussed in the other chapters, Stefan Landsberger explores the official utilization of visual arts for moral education purposes in Chapter 5. Landsberger argues that as China has developed into a relatively well-off and increasingly urbanized nation, with a growing number of middle-class consumers, educating the people has become an increasingly urgent task for the state as well as to concerned intellectuals who see the moral education of the people as a major task of the society. Focusing on official posters, he illuminates that visual exhortations in public spaces are dominated by imagery of dreaming about a perfect present and the rosy future of China, and tend to follow commercial advertising campaign formula against the background of a society that has become increasingly urbanized and media literate. Part 2, Urban Interventions, explores the ways of which artistic and creative practices are reshaping the city and redefining the everyday experience of urban living. Especially since the 1990s, artistic engagement with everyday life and urban issues has become a prominent phenomenon worldwide. ‘Interventions’ as a broad concept of activities created mainly by artists to disrupt the physical public space and/or discources of it in the public sphere has gained growing attention both in academic and in popular literature on art (Chavoya 2000; Pinder 2008; Klanten and Hübner 2010). Aspiring to bridge art research and urban studies, we focus on the transformative power that ‘urban interventions’ as individual or collective activities have in and

Engagement with the Urban

25

for the city. We understand ‘urban interventions’ as artistic and creative practices emerging in urban public or semi-public space, with or without authorization, by varied forms of agencies, including artists, graffiti writers, urbanites, designers, film-makers, organizations, and other institutions. Despite their multifaceted approaches in tangible and intangible forms, what they have in common is the keen interest to investigate the current understanding of ‘urban’ and the aim of inverting representations, power relations and value structures underlying the urban space itself. From alternative art spaces to one-time, ephemeral experiments, the examples discussed in the five chapters reveal how varied practices provide innovative platforms and discursive sites for citizens from different social backgrounds to engage, exchange and share. In tandem with discursive sites, some alternative artistic and creative practices support the emergence of new subjectivities and new forms of civic participation. In a sense, they remind us of sociologist Manuel Castells’ (2008: 78) call that the growth of the global civil society depends on spaces ‘where people come together as citizens and articulate their autonomous views to influence the political institutions of society.’ Cases examined in this section demonstrate the rising awareness and multifaceted use of the civic sphere in China, however small at the moment, through various methods of urban intervention. We therefore posit that visual arts and especially the innovative practices engaging with the public in Chinese urban space are also reshaping the country’s social fabric and opening up possibilities for new subjectivities to emerge. In so doing, they contribute to cultural activism that potentially enables new forms of civic engagement to be cultivated despite the watchful eyes of the state. Chapter 6 by Nancy P. Lin brings forward the groundbreaking practices of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group, and its core members, Lin Yilin (林一林, b. 1964), Chen Shaoxiong (陈劭雄, 1962-2016), Liang Juhui (梁钜辉, 1959-2006), and Xu Tan (徐坦, b. 1957), in relation to the changing social, economic, and physical terrain. Lin posits that by choosing the city’s urban spaces as the subject, site, and raw material for their artwork, these artists operated through methods of ‘urban insertion.’ Rather than antagonism or confrontation, ‘urban insertion’ seeks to locate small gaps of opportunity within the existing order of the city. This method allows them to both blend into and add something new to the existing matrix. As a result, the artistic engagement with the city opened up new possibilities and sites for contemporary art, transforming the city into an important centre of experimental art activity. In Chapter 7, Chris Berry extends the analysis of new possibilities of art to the work of Cao Fei and to how her moving image works invite collaboration

26 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

and participation from urbanites. Through novel practices Cao Fei provides innovative envisionings of the city. By investigating urbanites’ everyday lives and dreams, she renders their voices to be heard in urban spaces that are no longer shaped by socialism but by globalization and neo-liberal capitalism. Berry examines the interactive negotiation processes of Cao Fei’s art in relation to urbanization through four hermeneutic frameworks, including heterotopic imagination, participatory and collaborative art, re-enchantment, and gesturality. He posits that through her works, Cao Fei has created ‘magical metropolises’ and given the audience opportunities to rehearse alternative urban possibilities. Chapter 8 by Judith Pernin deepens the examination of the interrelations between moving images and urbanization to an investigation of independent documentary films. She analyses how unofficial artists and independent film-makers create a symbiosis of performance and documentary expression in resisting relocation and claiming rights to spaces for themselves and arts. The specific and peripheral place within the Beijing cityscape that they occupy partly defines their identity, art, and work method. Through four independent documentaries, Pernin argues for a transformation in attitudes: while in the mid-1990s artists were likely to leave their studios, in the beginning of the twenty-first century they were seeking redress and using art as a form of protest to keep their chosen work place. The margins of the cities and their (in)visible habitants are elaborated further in Chapter 9 by Elizabeth Parke. Although contemporary artists have made visible the figure of the migrant worker in a various artworks, their art represents only one facet of the complex visual field of Beijing. The presence of migrant workers in urban environment is indicated by the scrawled advertisements to obtain fake certificates. Parke explores how this practice of advertising is derided by the city officials transforming it into a visual battlefield of the rights to urban space. To provide a more multifaceted reading of the advertisements, she argues that they can be interpreted as an act of defacement, as a public calligraphy performance, and as an inscription tracing the networks of migrant workers at play in the capital. The significance of urban space as a discursive site for new forms, agencies, needs and aims of visual self-expression is investigated further in terms of urban creativity by Minna Valjakka in the final chapter. Drawing from studies on interrelations between art and street art sites, and translocal flows of people, images and ideas, Valjakka suggests a new conceptual framework of ‘translocal site-responsiveness’ for examining the continuously transforming urban aesthetics and spatial politics. She proposes a more comprehensive analysis of inherent interdependences between agencies, manifestations

Engagement with the Urban

27

and the contextual levels of site, place and space to deconstruct local/global dichotomies. She argues that urban creativity, with its varying levels of translocality, can formulate relevant methods to engage with the urban environment. The research presented in this anthology continues to provide alternative readings on the relationship between visual arts and urbanization by focusing on the core elements of their mutual interdependence. Earlier versions of the chapters by Maurizio Marinelli, Meiqin Wang, Chris Berry, Elizabeth Parke, and Minna Valjakka were previously published in China Information in a special issue on ‘Visual Arts and Urbanization’ (2015) but were revised for this volume in order to enhance the dialogue with the new chapters commissioned for this publication. The case studies demonstrate that neither cities nor urban spaces are fixed entities in China. Instead, we understand them as sites of continuing artistic and creative experimentation, where multiple agencies and manifestations emerge and inspire new ways of negotiating the impacts of urbanization. While doing so, they inevitable open up novel discourses and terrains of problematization. We therefore wish to encourage a greater interest in investigating how visual arts in China could contribute, challenge, or redirect the ongoing urbanization processes. How are visual arts allowed to affirm or challenge the existing spatializations of power relations in urban public space? Will city officials, NPOs or art institutions engage with collaborative art projects that enable artistic and creative practices as a form of dialogue facilitating more profound social change? What novel agencies are emerging among and along with Chinese contemporary artists? Although these questions are already addressed to some extent in this anthology, they are worth further study. Similarly, more detailed research on the specificity of visual arts in different cities in Mainland China, besides Beijing and Shanghai, is needed. Ultimately, we call for future research that explores if and how visual arts – and also other forms of artistic and creative activities – could play a role in the development of a new public sphere despite the continuously oscillating levels of censorship at the time of writing. After all, it is the belief in the possibility of bottom-up, small-scale, and individual-based cultural activism that could contribute to a growing civil society, even in an authoritative regime like China, that motivates the compilation of this anthology.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (2000) Notes on Gesture. In Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Binetti, Vincenzo, and Casarino, Cesare. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 48-59.

28 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berry, Chris (2015) Images of Urban China in Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises.’ China Information 29(2): 202-225. Berry, Chris, and Rofel, Lisa (2010) Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture. In Berry, Chris, Lu, Xinyu, and Rofel, Lisa (eds) (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 135-154. Braester, Yomi (2010) Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham: Duke University Press. Buser, Michael, Bonura, Carlo, Fannin, Maria, and Boyer, Kate (2013) Cultural Activism and the Politics of Place-Making. City 17(5): 606-627. Campanella, Thomas J. (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Castells, Manuel (2008) The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616: 78-93. Chavoya, Ondine C. (2000) Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco. In Suderburg, Erika (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 189-208. De Kloet, Jeroen (2013) Imagining a Disappearing and Reappearing Chinese City. In De Kloet, Jeroen, and Scheen, Lena (eds) Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 77-96. De Kloet, Jeroen and Scheen, Lena (eds) (2013) Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Firat, Begum Ozden, and Kuryel, Aylin (eds) (2010) Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Florida, Richard (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Fox, Richard G., and Starn, Orin (eds) (1997) Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fung, Edmund S.K. (2010) The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hsing, You-tien (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. London: Oxford University Press. Keane, Michael (2007) Created in China: The Great Leap Forward. London: Routledge. Keane, Michael (2009) The Capital Complex: Beijing’s New Creative Clusters. In Kong, Lily, and O’Connor, Justin (eds) Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-Europe Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, 77-95. Keith, Michael, Lash, Scott, Arnoldi, Jakob, and Rooker, Tyler (eds) (2014) China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change. New York: Routledge.

Engagement with the Urban

29

Klanten, Robert, and Hübner, Matthias (eds) (2010) Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Spaces. Berlin: Gestalten. Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. Oxford: Blackwell. Li, Peilin (2012) Urbanization and China’s New Growth Phase: On the Developmental Strategies of China’s Urbanization. Jiangsu Social Sciences 5: 42-54. Marinelli, Maurizio (2015) Urban Revolution and Chinese Contemporary Art: A Total Revolution of the Senses. China Information 29(2): 154-175. McGee, Terry, Lin, George C.S., Wang, Mark, Marton, Andrew, and Wu, Jiaping (2007) China’s Urban Space: Development under Market Socialism. London: Routledge. Murck, Alfreda (2000) Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. O’Connor, Justin, and Gu, Xin (2006), A New Modernity? The Arrival of ‘Creative Industries’ in China. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(3): 271-283. Pan, Jiahua, and Wei, Houkai (eds) (2012) Chengshi lanpishu: Zhongguo chengshi fazhan baogao no. 5 – Maixiang chengshi shidai de lüse fanrong (Blue book of cities in China: Annual report on urban development of China no. 5 – Towards green prosperity in the urban era). Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Parke, Elizabeth (2015) Migrant Workers and the Imaging of Human Infrastructure in Chinese Contemporary Art. China Information 29(2): 226-252. Pickowicz, Paul G. (2016) A Hundred Years Later: Zou Xueping’s Documentaries and the Legacies of China’s New Culture Movement. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10(2): 187-201. Pinder, David (2008) Urban Interventions: Art, Politics and Pedagogy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 730-736. Pratt, Andy C. (2009) Policy Transfer and the Field of the Cultural and Creative Industries: What Can Be Learned from Europe? In Kong, Lily, and O’Connor, Justin (eds) Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-Europe Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, 10-23. Rancière, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Trans. Corcoran, Steven. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ren, Xuefei, and Sun, Meng (2012) Artistic Urbanization: Creative Industries and Creative Control in Beijing. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(3): 504-521. Schwarcz, Vera (1986) The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schweinberger, Albert (2014) State Capitalism, Entrepreneurship, and Networks: China’s Rise to a Superpower. Journal of Economic Issues 48(1): 169-180. Szeman, Imre, and Whiteman, Maria (2009) The Big Picture: On the Politics of Contemporary Photography. Third Text 23(5): 551-556.

30 

Minna Val jakk a and Meiqin Wang

Tang, Xiaobing (2008) Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tang, Xiaobing (2016) Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art. Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 5(1): 85-114. Ten Bos, René (2005) On the Possibility of Formless Life: Agamben’s Politics of the Gesture. Ephemera 5(1): 26-44. United Nations (2001) World Entering ‘Urban Millennium,’ Secretary-General Tells Opening Meeting of Habitat Special Session. http://www.un.org/News/Press/ docs/2001/GA9867.doc.htm, accessed 20 February 2016. Valjakka, Minna (2015) Negotiating Spatial Politics: Site-Responsive Urban Art Images in Mainland China. China Information 29(2): 253-281. Visser, Robin (2010) Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Wang, Meiqin (2010) Art, Culture Industry and the Transformation of Songzhuang Artist Village. International Journal of the Arts in Society 5(1): 187-205. Wang, Meiqin (2015) Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography. China Information 29(2): 176-201. Wang, Meiqin (2016) Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art. London: Routledge. Wang, Meiqin, and Valjakka, Minna (2015). Urbanized Interfaces: Chinese Visual Arts in the Age of Urbanization. China Information 29(2): 176-201. WDB (2016) Urban Population (% of Total). World Development Bank. http://data. worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS/countries/1W?display=graph, accessed 20 February 2016. Wen, Tiejun (2004) Chinese Strategic Transformation and Its Relationship to Industrialization and Capitalization. Chinese Economy 36(4): 43-53. Weston, Timothy B. (1998) The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community, 1913-1917. Modern China 24(3): 255-284. Wu, Fulong (2007) Beyond Gradualism: China’s Urban Revolution and Emerging Cities. In Wu, Fulong (ed.) China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 3-25. Wu, Hung (2012) A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Wu, Hung (2014) Contemporary Chinese Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Yeh, Wen-hsin (1994). Middle County Radicalism: The May Fourth Movement in Hangzhou. China Quarterly 140: 903-925. Zhang, Tingwei (2011) Chinese Cities in a Global Society. In LeGates, Richard T., and Stout, Frederic (eds) The City Reader. London: Routledge, 590-598.

Engagement with the Urban

31

Zhang, Zhen (2007) Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing). In Zhang, Zhen (ed.) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 1-45.

About the authors Minna Valjakka Adjunct Professor of Art History and Asian Studies, University of Helsinki; Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore [email protected] Minna Valjakka’s research on urban creativity in East and Southeast Asia is located at the nexus of art history and urban studies. Through a comparative approach she explores the discrepancies and contingencies of urban creativity in relation to civil society. Meiqin Wang Professor, Art Department, California State University, Northridge [email protected] Meiqin Wang researches on contemporary art from China in the context of commercialization and urbanization of the Chinese world and has published on topics such as artist villages and cultural industries, art and urbanization, and socially engaged art.

Part I Representations

1

From Sidewalk Realism to Spectral Romance Yang Lina’s Beijing and Beyond Zhen Zhang

Abstract Independent film-maker Yang Lina has employed DV to document the rapidly changing urban landscape and social fabric in Beijing while developing distinctive cinematic languages as she attends to her subjects with a compassionate camera and gendered persona. I argue that Yang’s work has contributed significantly to the DV turn in the New Documentary Movement in China in the 1990s. Analysing several film works including her recent narrative feature, I trace the career of Yang and how she reembeds the sidewalk xianchang documentary aesthetic within a spectral realism that anatomizes contemporary Chinese urban life through filming the daily routines of a group of old men, the social dance performed by retirees, and the spiritual loss and ‘paranormal’ erotic longing of the new middle-class women. Keywords: xianchang, DV documentary, feminist cinema, the compassionate camera, spectral temporality

In the mid-1990s, Yang Lina (杨荔纳, b. 1972), a young dancer in the China Central PLA Spoken Drama Troupe, moved from a military compound near Wanshousi (万寿寺), near today’s West Third Ring, to an ordinary residential area of Beijing called Qingta (青塔).1 Her move was motivated by many reasons – to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the compound, to seek space for growth, to move more freely. Yet that move inadvertently 1

Qingta is near Wu Ke Song (五棵松) further west outside today’s Fourth Ring Road.

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch01

36 

Zhen Zhang

ushered her into the emerging arena of Chinese independent cinema as her curiosity in a group of old men sitting on the neighbourhood’s sidewalks led her to a project that would help precipitate the DV turn in the New Documentary Movement. This chapter highlights main threads in Yang’s career as an independent f ilm-maker that interweave the private and the public, the personal and the political, and documentary realism and cinematic spectrality, while exploring how these dichotomies are complexly articulated in Yang’s films about marginalized inhabitants of Beijing at a time when this ‘Third World’ socialist capital city was being transformed into a neo-liberal global city. Spanning more than two decades, the multiplyawarded Old Men (老头, 1999),2 The Loves of Lao An (老安, 2008, hereafter, Lao An), and her narrative debut Longing for the Rain (春梦, 2013, hereafter, Longing) are significant milestones in Yang’s career as well as Chinese independent cinema, and serve as a cinematic archive of the physical and psychic transformations of the capital city. Through these films, we will trace an evolving gendered aesthetic mediated by not only the portable digital camera but also a compassionate Buddhist lens. These moving images, which were created outside the state-sanctioned mainstream, are touching and provocative but also constitute a kind of talismanic object for those who believe in the magic power of an alternative cinema.

The DV Turn and a Gendered Xianchang Yang is among the first independent film-makers who adopted DV to document the rapidly changing urban landscape and social fabric of Beijing around the turn of the twenty-first century. Distinct from the pioneering independent documentary makers who still used professional equipment and a multi-person crew, Yang approached her subject with an immersive, embodied street-level documentary realism and a camera that alternated between dancing and pensive reflection. While Old Men retains indelible traces of a largely vanished post-socialist capital city, Yang’s two interlocking documentaries on retirees of mixed age groups and social backgrounds – Let’s Dance Together (一起跳舞, 2007) and The Loves of Lao An (2008) – capture the rhythms and dynamism of social dance as a conduit for self-expression, 2 These include the Asian New Current award at Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and Jury’s Award at Cinema du reél in France, both in 2000. It was also sold to Arte for 12,000 francs, an impressive price at the time. The critical acclaim and financial success were very unique for an independent documentary from China at the time.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

37

desire and mutual aid staged in the city’s public parks during the latesocialist neo-liberal era. In spring 2013, she completed her first narrative feature, Longing, which premiered at the Amsterdam International Film Festival.3 A clear departure from her previous documentaries, the film pivots around the spiritual loss and ‘paranormal’ erotic longing of a middle-class woman. Quitting the city for a Buddhist temple in the remote Northwest countryside, the traumatized woman finds her suffering only worsened as she realizes that the temple is hardly a refuge or sanctuary of healing and redemption. Based on close examination of Yang’s oeuvre, as well numerous formal and informal interviews with her in recent years, I posit that her films and her own personal story offer a unique point of entry into the labyrinth of post-reform Chinese society under rapid urbanization. Besides documenting ‘China’s most vulnerable’ (Feeley 2017), they elucidate the film-maker’s critical, creative engagement with the social consequences and traumatic effects of the accelerated urbanization sanctioned by state capitalism. As we travel with her work from public spaces like sidewalks and parks to the physical and psychic interiors of the new middle class, from post-socialist Beijing to the neo-liberal red capital and beyond, it becomes evident that the ‘gendered persona’ that Bérénice Reynaud observed in Yang’s early films (Reynaud 2015: 196) has become a more conscious and serious, though no less sensuous, feminist exploration. The concept of xianchang (现场, literally, ‘the present scene’) and an attendant documentary realism as a critical and creative strategy have become inexorably associated with the New Documentary Movement and Urban Generation cinema that emerged in the 1990s. However, existing scholarship tends to attribute its conception to male figureheads of these movements such as Wu Wenguang, Zhang Yuan and Jia Zhangke, partly due to their international visibility as avant-garde auteurs (Zhang 2007: 18-19). Retracing the genealogy of the independent documentary movement, Yang Lina undoubtedly takes her place among the most important practitioners of a recharged xianchang aesthetic by initiating the DV turn, with her camera tracking and navigating the drastic changes of the urban geography and social landscape over the past two decades. Regrettably, recent scholarship on Chinese independent cinema has not offered sustained treatment of Yang’s work as a whole other than fragmented discussions related to other film-makers or specific themes (Wang 2005; Braester 2010a; Yu 2014; 3 The film project received a grant from the Hubert Bals fund administered by the festival. Part of the condition is the premiere rights.

38 

Zhen Zhang

Zhang 2015). This chapter thus aims to address that gap, situating Yang as an emblematic transitional figure between Urban Generation cinema, DV documentary, and independent feminist film-making. The recent ebb and flow of the independent film culture, especially in the realm of alternative exhibitions, has seen new trends with explicit attention to women. The three women’s film festivals that have been held in Beijing since 2013, despite many obstacles and internal rifts, have helped increase the visibility of women film-makers and revitalize feminist discourse in China.4 Yang Lina re-emerged into this burgeoning scene of alternative film culture, somewhere between the radicalized indies represented by the Beijing Independent Film Festival in Songzhuang and the middlebrow art house cinemas that are gaining both official approval and mainstream popularity. Unfortunately, Longing, her newest work, with its direct treatment of religion and sex – two taboo subjects – could not be shown publicly, even at these alternative festivals. Instead, it went to several international festivals and won critical acclaim, while also triggering some speculation and misgivings about the director’s turn to fictional narrative. The author of an online review of the film’s premiere in Rotterdam, where it was nominated for the Tiger Award, wonders what Yang was trying to do in the last half-hour of the film, citing ‘too many priests, fortune tellers, other misty figures’ (IMDb 2013). The critical viewer laments that the suspenseful family melodrama of the first portion seems to lose its way, failing to deliver a ‘logical continuation and a gratifying finale’ (ibid.). Indeed, was it sensible for Yang to try her hand at a narrative feature without any formal training? Why did she take these risks instead of continuing with the sidewalk DV blend of direct cinema and cinema verité that she had intuitively perfected? Viewing Longing together with her earlier documentaries invites us to see how Yang re-embeds the previous sidewalk documentary realism within what I would like to call a certain spectral realism that anatomizes contemporary Chinese urban life with sharp precision. From the melancholy of late socialist Beijing to the fast and furiously commodified capital, Yang’s films constitute a living archive of the city as a lost home, first for the elderly and then for women of the new middle class, along with the child of a nuclear family born under the ‘single child’ policy and economic boom. 4 The three festivals are the Beijing International Women’s Film Festival (北京国际女性 电影节), the China’s Minjian Women’s Film Festival (中国民间女性电影节), and the China International Women’s Film Festival (中国国际女性电影节). The first of these ceased operation after only one gathering, and the last is now run by the only male member of the organizing team of the China’s Minjian Women’s Film Festival after a break-up.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

39

Her work not only echoes but also complements other films by contemporary female directors, notably Ning Ying, an important Urban Generation director whose work has focused on Beijing as well, though Yang takes important departures. Whereas Ning was professionally trained and works primarily with larger-scale feature productions aimed for commercial release, Yang, an amateur who inadvertently became the ‘godmother of DV documentary,’5 persistently treads the tightrope of ‘personal film’ both in terms of production mode and formal approach. Ning’s cinematic vision of Beijing illustrates well what Yomi Braester (2010b) calls the ‘urban contract,’ or the power relations between cinema, citizenry, and city planning. Yet, as Shuqin Cui observes, Ning’s protagonists are mostly male strollers, and Cui therefore calls for a ‘conscious female vision’ in Chinese urban cinema (Cui 2007: 262). Yang’s decidedly more personal films on Beijing, using portable digital cameras and created entirely outside of the studio, offer an intimate urban vision nurtured by an immersive xianchang aesthetic and a gendered, performative persona of a self-taught film-maker trained in dance and performance. Her innovative approach, resonating with the work of other visual artists discussed in this volume, ultimately extends beyond the arenas of sidewalk xianchang and social dance, probing the perceptual borders and spectral dimensions of stressful urban life under the relentless forces of state-sponsored global urbanism and consumerism.

Zhaogu 照顾/Looking After: Hanging out on the Sidewalk in Green Pagoda Community When Yang embarked on film-making in the mid-1990s, the New Documentary Movement and Urban Generation cinema had already given rise to several important works by veteran film-makers such as Jiang Yue (The Other Bank, 1995), Zhang Yuan (Sons, 1996) and Ning Ying (On the Beat, 1995) (Zhang 2007) – all of whom had some training and experience in film and television production. Their mode of production, even when the works had an independent status, involved institutional support of one kind or another and a relatively large crew along with standard studio equipment. Yang, who had practically no connection with the emerging film community and was unfamiliar with their work, was inspired to make a documentary after 5 In challenging the ‘godfather’ narrative prevalent in Chinese independent f ilm circles, which mimics conventional patrilineal film historiography, I began to call Yang by this label in several forums, including alternative festivals and social media in China, in 2012.

40 

Zhen Zhang

encountering a group of old men on the sidewalk. Intrigued by their persistent presence in this inconspicuous space, she felt as though they were an ancient species that ‘grew out of the soil’ (Yang 2001: 170). Their wrinkled faces and fragile bodies seemed incongruous with the post-socialist urban development so eager for a radical facelift, yet their appropriation of the sidewalk staged a daily performance of communal interaction and camaraderie that Yang found vital for a liveable and sociable city. Old Men is not one of the ‘special theme’ films (专题片) that were in vogue on Chinese TV6 but a personal film about her aging neighbours before the avalanche of real estate development and commodification of urban space relentlessly disposed of them. As I will elaborate later, the perspective of the film-maker is one of ‘looking after’ (照顾), which embeds the act of ‘photographing’ (照相) within the act of caring. In an interview conducted a few years later, Yang recalls, One day I was moving, I saw this string of old men sitting under the bridge, like on a thread. It was quite warm already, but they still wore thick winter jackets. I could hear their loud chatting even when I was just passing by at a distance. I had never seen so many old men together – it was a beautiful sight. My friend and I got some stools and sat down to look at them, at a distance. (Zhu and Wang 2005: 47)

Soon she rented a professional camera, bought cassettes, and hired a cameraman and soundman, but the arrangement failed. She was displeased with their overly formal shooting style, and they could not understand her affective, subjective (感性) approach. Getting hold of a much smaller and mobile Panasonic EZ-1 camera, Yang returned to the sidewalk and started the unprecedented one-woman DV production. Her extensive footage impressed Wu Wenguang, who was by then an established figurehead of the New Documentary Movement, but experiencing a creative impasse: I was surprised that a young woman should have directed her camera towards the elderly, for it was widely said that busy people were increasingly neglectful. […] I did not notice any special relation between the portable video camera and the footage she showed me until after watching for several hours. I discovered that the pictures were unique to a small 6 The ‘special theme’ documentary was a trend that came to dominate official television in the reform era. While a critical departure from previously explicit propaganda newsreels, this type of documentary, resembling BBC- or PBS-style documentary to some extent, often deployed a ‘godlike’ voiceover and exuded an official and righteous air.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

41

video camera and an individual point of view. […] As a veteran, I could not imagine such scenes being seen through the lens of a large intimidating camera. (Wu 2002: 133)

Two key elements of Wu’s observation stand out: the individual point of view of a small DV camera and the patient, even exhaustively long, duration of the shots. Yang spent about six months editing the 97-minute film out of sixteen hours of footage. What Wu did not note, however, was the unique style of the aesthetic approach: the low position of the camera and the predominance of sidewalk scenes, almost as though the camera was squatting on the other side of the street or alongside the old men. The first scene establishes the structure of the film as a whole: summer, under the trees of a residential area, a string of about ten old men chatting idly while fanning themselves, one of them chasing a fly, next to them a man was repairing a bike – a typical scene in Beijing at that time. Then the camera shifts to the old men leaving one by one, until only the bike repairman is left, and a woman with young children passes by. This outdoor set-up, alternating between quiet observation and close encounter, repeats dozens of times, interspersed with interior scenes where two old men (Lao Wu and Lao Song) struggle with daily tasks. Yang’s background in dance and theatre lends her filming and editing a palpable embodied presence, measured movement and grace, and a touch of theatricality. The sidewalk doubles as an outdoor stage on which the old men perform their daily rituals. The portable camera effortlessly became part of her body, welcomed by the group as a confidant and friend. After a lot of squatting and shooting, however, she paused. What was the film about? Where was it going? Then one morning, she had an epiphany: ‘I decided that I’ll just focus on these words: eat, drink, shit, pee, sleep (吃喝拉撒睡). Recording their daily routines such as cooking, brushing teeth, made me calmer and more confident about the shooting’ (Yang 2001: 172). Indeed, Old Men is a harbinger of the reorientation towards ‘filming the everyday’ that occurred in independent documentary. It inspired, among others, Wu Wenguang and the projects he and Wen Hui would later carry out with younger film-makers at Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing (Pickowicz and Zhang 2017). The finished film, of course, is not merely about everyday bodily functions observed from the perspective of ‘a fly on the wall’ – as Wu advised her to do after having just met American film-maker and documentarian Frederick Wiseman and learned about his method. Rather, the close attention to the difficulty with which the elderly performed the elementary daily gestures serves as a compassionate meditation on human suffering

42 

Zhen Zhang

and acceptance, while also serving as an elegy for a vanishing epoch and lifestyle. The idle chatter of the old men consisted mostly of greetings and goodbyes, comparisons of seniority, complaints about the rising costs of health care, and laments about aging and death. Yang deliberately left their grown-up children out of the frame, to highlight their loneliness. She and her camera would be the last to leave, seeing off the last of the men as he leaves with his folding stool and walking stick or old rattan stroller. A recurrent image is the back of whichever old man left last, in sunset, rain, dust, wind, snow. Daily, the old men stage their little dramas of chasing the sunshine while keeping each other company, punctuated by small incidents, holidays, sudden deaths. Left behind by a country that was gearing up to leap into the world, they cling to the sun-bathed walls of a late socialist community designed for the working class. Yang saw something both ancient and childlike in them – they talked about how Beijing used to be under the ocean and whether or not the airplanes above their heads had windows – and how anachronistic their existence seemed in the era of globalization (Yang 2001: 171-172). As the film extends into fall and winter, Yang’s camera also tracks their slow, strenuous movement through the strong winds, drifting dust and debris, as she follows them to the edge of the housing community where the waves of real estate development have encroached. It’s as though these old men are about to be swallowed by the sandstorm of the next aggressive urbanization. The pensive pace of long shots on the sidewalk and closer shots inside the homes are infused with a deep sense of trust and intimate rapport between the film-maker and the elderly. The old men call Yang Lina by the nickname ‘Yangzi,’ welcoming her. Yang admits that DV made her feel as though she was ‘intimately tied to the old men, unrestricted by time and other factors’ (Zhu and Wang 2005: 48). In fact, they would be disappointed if she failed to show up or did not have the camera on to ‘photograph’ (zhao 照) them. They urged her to ‘zhao’ them as much as possible while they were still alive, ‘when we are gone, you can then stop it.’ This was a revelation to Yang; zhao allowed her to feel calm while filming the elderly as if just holding a mirror for them, ‘more objectively’ than the more intrusive pai (shooting). Over time, ‘they became part of my life, and me on their daily thought. […] Together we became a scene in the community’ (Yang 2001: 172-173). The word and act of zhao derives from ‘looking at the mirror’ (照镜子) and ‘taking a picture’ (照像), and invokes other related words such as sunshine/sunbathing (日 照) and looking after (照顾). Instead of ‘a helpless, yet cruel, compulsion to stare at actual, uncouth situations’ on the part of the film-maker (Wang 2005: 20), the old men felt they were being photographed by someone whom

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

43

Figure 1.1 Yang Lina, Old Men, 1999. Courtesy of the artist.

they knew, perhaps like close kin, or the neighbourhood studio photographer whom they visited for ID photos. They loved that Yang shared her footage with them throughout the shooting process, and they often commented on how each appeared in Yang’s ‘photographing’ or ‘mirroring’ yet never bothered with the final product. Their need for a camera to be a trusted mirror, an old friend, is intertwined with their thirst for light or exposure to sustain the remainder of their lives. These urges leave palpable imprints on the film as a desire to leave traces for posterity. The sidewalk thus becomes an outdoor studio for the restaging of time-honoured pictorial realism, ‘approaching life-likeness’ (逼真), or ‘approaching reality’ in Victor Fan’s apt translation (Fan 2015), ingrained in Chinese vernacular life and art, as the old men approach the finish line of life. Hardly a ‘fly on the wall,’ Yang and her camera lent the old men (and one dying old woman) a companionate mirror and sounding board for their leisurely chats or anguished cries. They felt they were being ‘taken care [or picture] of’ in a special way and taken seriously, even well after their deaths, as their images and voices had been preserved by someone they trusted – a young member of the residential community who gave them extra attention and patiently saw them into the dark of the night. Yang’s filming was thus also an act of memorializing while they slowly took their leave of their beloved city.

44 

Zhen Zhang

Yang’s immersive approach on location and her subtly decisive editing paradoxically juxtaposed the natural disintegration of the elderly against the unnatural disintegration of the old capital. Bypassing the commentary and narrative allegory prevalent in ‘special theme’ documentaries, her haptic, embodied xianchang aesthetic – which organically connects sidewalk and domestic scenes – refreshes Bill Nichols’s notion about a certain type of documentary film’s insistence on the presence of the body and human agency. He writes, ‘The question of magnitude involves a different order of engagement. The terms remain emotional, experiential, visceral. At issue is vivification, rendering felt what representations only allude to’ (Nichols 1991: 234). Vivification – or the animation of life forms and experiences through time, narrative, and history – differs decidedly from (disinterested or disembodied) representation and sensation-rousing spectacle. Far from the spectacularized documentaries prevalent in Chinese state-owned television, and different from representative New Documentary works that focused on disenfranchised intellectuals or ethnic minorities, Yang’s film ‘circles around nascent structures of feeling, experiences as yet uncategorized within the economy of a logic or system,’ probing the ‘obtuse meaning’ of the social as it undergoes transition or disintegration (Nichols 1991: 234). The magnitude of these old men’s lives in their waning days is painstakingly given (back) its experiential proximity, texture, and dignity. Thus, the xianchang realism of Old Men stands at the crossroad of the private and public, offering an unwittingly pioneering gesture by a novice, which intimated a more marked shift towards a xianchang of ‘metonymy and contingency’ in independent documentary enabled by DV (Robinson 2010).

Zhaohun 招魂/Soul-Calling: Dancing from Heavenly Temple to Phoenix Hill While Old Men retains human traces of a largely vanished socialist capital city, Let’s Dance Together and The Loves of Lao An track retirees using social dance in public parks as a conduit for self-expression, desire and mutual aid at a time when Beijing was hurtling into a global mega-city of the new millennium. Here, to continue exploring Yang’s attention towards the affective social life of public space and the construction of an embodied ‘cinematic cartography’ (Hallam and Roberts 2013: 9) embedded in everyday spatial practices, we will focus on Lao An. A few years into the new century, Yang was married, had a child, and was living in the Golden Fish Pond residential community (金鱼池小区) near

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

45

Heavenly Temple (天坛) in southern Beijing. Curious as ever, she became mesmerized by the retirees who danced waltz, tango, and samba in the park that had been built on the ancient imperial ritual grounds. Like the old men who had claimed the sidewalk for their survival and social life, these social dance enthusiasts occupied the public space, turning it into a lived everyday space for pursuing private desires and fostering alternative social ties. As one professionally trained in ‘national dance’ (民族舞) and a military service woman, she had not learned the steps of social dance, as it had been associated with bourgeois culture. Having never thought to participate in this plebeian dance activity, Yang admitted that she had looked down on it until she observed it more closely and joined the retirees. After two months of dancing into her new participatory-observational fieldwork, as had happened with the making of Old Men, she brought her DV camera and began to shoot while dancing and chatting with her partners. This time, instead of sitting quietly on the sidewalk for days and weeks, she and her camera orbited around her subjects, or more precisely, her partners, at a faster tempo. Here, the xianchang becomes a revolving arena and open stage for performance and witnessing, where the film-maker’s dancing body and roving camera are constantly attuned to the rhythms of music and dance, and more importantly, to the feelings of fellow dancers within the circle, including those resting on the benches. Social dance, in the Cultural Revolution, was considered a form of decadent Western bourgeois culture. It reemerged as part of an underground urban culture, along with Western music and literature in the late 1970s, and mushroomed in the reform era, as a type of exercise and recreation for retirees and laid-off workers.7 Unlike the state-orchestrated street performances of the past or the rigorously choreographed ‘plaza dance’ organized and performed by mostly healthy working or newly retired women, social dance appeals to a broad range of age groups, both male and female. Most participants are in their late 50s to 70s, with some middle-aged people who have been laid-off early or are on extended sick leave. Lao An (a former KMT general) and Xiao Wei (a retired worker) are in their late 80s and late 60s, respectively, and begin to form a romantic attachment by dancing together. The participants enter the dance arena almost daily for pleasure and companionship, just like the old men seeking sunshine and company on the sidewalk. 7 Since the 1990s, a large-scale socio-economic restructuring, or zhuanxing (转型), resulted in massive layoffs of workers from state sectors, especially traditional industries. Many were let go before retirement age (55 for women and 60 for men), as factories went bankrupt or were merged into joint-ventures or private-owned enterprises.

46 

Zhen Zhang

Figure 1.2 Yang Lina filming in the park, ca. 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Anthropologist Angela Zito writes about social gatherings of retirees engaged in various hobbies such as water calligraphy in Beijing’s parks as a form of ‘recurring sociality,’ that is, ‘the ability of people to form assemblies that literally ‘come and go,’ while ‘forging communities of personal significance under the stressful pressures of rapid change’ (Zito 2014: 13). This resonates with Caroline Chen’s study of the Yange dancers’ ‘improvised’ – and socially contentious – uses of space in Beijing parks and streets (Chen 2010). Yet this social dance between men and women – usually between neighbours, acquaintances and strangers – engenders a more complex affective economy than the individual act of water calligraphy or the predominantly female and well-rehearsed collective Yange dancing inspired by the revolutionary legacy. Some would forge special partnerships and even romantic relationships as in the case of Lao An and Xiao Wei, who are married to other people. The initial chemistry between dance partners and trust between friends with benefits – e.g. Lao An needs Xiao Wei’s help with hospital visits – would gradually evolve into a quite serious love relationship, or ‘twilight love’ (黄昏恋). Though a quite common phenomenon, the outcome of Lao An and Xiao Wei’s partnership exceeded the expectations of themselves, their families and friends, and indeed the film-maker. The jovial ‘recurring sociality’ of the everyday hobby in this instance takes on a surprising melodramatic turn.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

47

Figure 1.3 Yang Lina, The Loves of Lao An, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

As in Old Men, the shadow of death is palpable from the start as we see Lao An, though spirited in his advanced age, showing great concern about the condition of his health. Yang’s camera takes us into the hospital ward where Lao An has been hospitalized and Xiao Wei assists him in matters that normally only a spouse or child would perform. She brings him his favourite dishes and cheers him up with humour and laughter. As he recovers and teaches the nurses how to dance, Xiao Wei suddenly falls ill and dies of a massive brain haemorrhage. The people around Lao An, including the film-maker, could not bear to break his heart with the sad news, out of concern for his health. In several post-screening discussions, Yang talked about her painful choice to continue filming at that juncture. The contingency of xianchang here reaches its dramatic limits and poses thorny ethical questions as well as practical challenges for the film-maker. Lao An’s son-in-law eventually tells him the truth over a formal meal at a restaurant in the presence of Yang and her camera. In one fleeting moment, we see the son-in-law knowingly wink at the camera, the viewers who would be in the know – one of the instances where the film breaks down the fourth wall and foregrounds the intersubjective relations. Such affective spatial practice is also aptly articulated in the most moving scene of ‘soul calling’ at the cemetery. At Lao An’s request, Yang, who often serves as driver, takes him to visit Xiao Wei’s grave in Phoenix Hill (凤凰 岭) in the western suburbs. Lao An lovingly touches the inscribed name on the tombstone and weeps profusely. As his frail body shakes and he bares

48 

Zhen Zhang

his heart to Xiao Wei’s spirit, we are struck by how the serene cemetery landscape, so removed from the urban bustle, intensifies the intimate nature of the moment. The spirit of Xiao Wei, invoked by Lao An’s soul-calling as the trembling camera looks on, appears re-vivified. The framing and point of view render it such that her invisible presence, through the camera’s eye, silently sees Lao An departing, recalling similar shots in Old Men. Yang has followed Xiao Wei with the camera from her previous stomping grounds in the park to the city’s ‘twilight zone’ or ‘symbolic dusk’ – to borrow Paola Voci’s (2010: 99) eloquent description of a number of independent videos on wasted youths in Beijing. A deep melancholy and unspeakable sense of loss pervade the sentient organs, corporeal or prosthetic (i.e. the camera), on and off the screen, connecting the souls of the two senior ‘twilight lovers’ who will not be allowed to rest side by side in the world beyond. Shocking and profoundly sad as it was, the scene exudes a strange mixture of pathos and enchantment. The former is generated by the temporality of ‘too lateness’ and the cognitive disparity that we often experience in melodrama; the latter can be seen in light of philosopher Jane Bennett’s remark: ‘Enchantment begins with the step-back immobilization of surprise but ends with a mobilizing rush as if an electric charge had coursed through space to you’ (quoted in Zito 2014: 14). Whereas Bennett finds that in enchantment ‘a new circuit of intensity forms between material bodies’ as an antidote to alienation (ibid.), I would suggest that the continued ‘dance’ between Lao An and Xiao Wei (he holds her tombstone tightly and addresses her passionately as if she were alive), and between Yang’s camera and the couple, ventures to bridge the corporeal and the spiritual, the present and the past. To apply Kirsten Andres’s (2008) idea about the ‘performative construction’ of the soul-calling ritual to the filmic context, the camera movement and editing at the cemetery mediated by the agency or intention of Yang’s DV obtains a powerful sense of ritual efficacy. The sidewalk xianchang has now extended not just beyond city limits but also the boundary of the visible world.

Mengyou 梦游/Dream-Walking: Out of Morning Sun Gate and the Spectral City Mortality and loneliness are indeed recurrent motifs in Yang’s work, as her subjects are mostly the neglected or abandoned. After witnessing several deaths in her documentaries, Yang began a soul-searching journey. She felt that in some ways she had ‘stolen’ something from the people she filmed that unwittingly ‘adorned’ her, and the sadness and stress from the unexpected

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

49

deaths during filming weighed on her heavily (Yang 2001: 175). The experience of marriage and motherhood, followed by a difficult divorce, also made her pause and reflect while searching for new directions. Examining her own inner demons and looking forward to experimenting with fictional or hybrid forms, she began to conceive an ambitious ‘Women’s Trilogy’ about three generations of women since the Cultural Revolution. Longing (the Chinese title literally means Spring Dream) is its first instalment. The scale of the project also thematically and physically extends far beyond Beijing. Because the film has only appeared limitedly at international festivals and was never shown in China, I will discuss it in considerable detail. Starting in a high-end middle-class condominium in the fashionable quarters of Beijing (near Chaoyang Gate 朝阳门, Second Ring Road), the film ends as Fang Lei, the sexually repressed housewife haunted by a spectral lover, departs for a Buddhist temple in the remote Northeast rural area (outside Changchun). The traumatized woman, abandoned by her unfeeling husband who hides their daughter from her, initially finds some solace in the temple but soon realizes that it is hardly a refuge from worldly desires and troubles. What confused the viewer who wrote the negative review mentioned earlier may have been Longing’s hard-to-categorize genre or form. A recent, more positive review on the same site sees this form as ‘a successful hybrid between erotic ghost story and social commentary,’ and praises the female director’s point of view as a perspective of the city ‘I have not otherwise seen portrayed’ (Pattinson 2013). The film opens with a series of interviews in a domestic service agency – shot frontally in the manner of a talking-head documentary – of prospective nannies by an interviewer, presumably a middle-class woman like Fang Lei. She remains invisible behind the camera, though the voice is unmistakably Yang’s own for those who recognize it – similar to how she momentarily ‘enters’ the intersubjective arena in her documentaries. When the last interviewee asks about the prospective employer’s profession, the latter replies, ‘no job, just staying at home.’ This quasi-ethnographic opening, offering a glimpse into a new socio-economically stratified society, is wedged into the fictional life of Fang (played by Zhao Siyuan, a professional actress), wife of a CEO whose income enables her to be a stay-at-home mom – a new class symbol among the Chinese affluent class. Ultimately, she decides to hire no one, unwilling to entrust her daughter to a stranger. We then abruptly cut to a huge supermarket where Fang Lei shops for household items, while overhearing dour news from a TV set on display about a young girl run over by a car and no one coming to her aid. After picking up her daughter

50 

Zhen Zhang

in their car, a haggard woman in a dirty military winter coat begs at the window with a child in tow. Fang tells her daughter that the child might have been kidnapped by a professional beggars’ ring – something commonly accepted as a social phenomenon in China today. Only a few minutes into the narrative, an air of everyday insecurity and class inequity pervades the streets and homes in this post-Olympic boomtown. The tranquillity and contentment of Fang’s middle-class life quickly unravels. With a husband addicted to gaming on his iPad and oblivious to her frustration and ennui, Fang drifts into pornography, masturbation, and spectral romance. Fang’s desperate yearning for a soulmate and sexual fulfilment ignites an amorous force, invisible but tangible, with which she becomes obsessed. The optical reflections from the giant windows, by which she masturbates, oblivious to the bustling city of power and wealth around her, become eerie mirrors or screens refracting desires and destinies from another time and place, superimposed upon the illusive present.8 Fang is convinced of the authenticity of her daytime trysts with the ghost lover, confirmed by the visible evidence of their exchange of bodily fluid and love bites. The elaborate shifts in mise en scène (lighting, colour, sound, clothing, acting, and cinematography) in these spectral scenes on the threshold of the visible/alienated and the haptic/orgasmic worlds weave a stylistic tapestry that seems light years away from the sidewalk xianchang aesthetic. Diverging from the ‘waiting for time to go by’ or ‘distended temporality’ of the xianchang aesthetic exemplified by Jia Zhangke’s narrative feature Xiao Wu (1997) (Berry 2008), Longing delves into the deep recesses of Beijing’s neo-liberal ‘twilight zone’ in ways more akin to the ‘contested realism’ in experimental films such as Night Scene (2004) by Cui Zi’en and video artworks by Zhao Liang with a surreal effect (Voci 2010: 106-112). Longing confronts a time when not just the old are rendered irrelevant and invisible from the streets but also newly affluent middle-class women, who fall prey to a combination of neo-bourgeois and neo-Confucian family ideology sanctioned by the state. Because of her age and social standing, she cannot hang out on the sidewalk like the old men or mingle with the retirees dancing in the park. Her only escape and comfort are her own body and erotic daydreams. By borrowing the title of Huang Wenhai’s 8 The ubiquitous use of window panes and shots of reflections/superimpositions in Longing are reminiscent of Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (1995), also about disconnection and alienation in a rapidly modernizing city. Liao Ching-song, a master editor who worked with many Taiwan New Cinema directors, including Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, helped complete the editing of Longing.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

51

Figure 1.4 Yang Lina, Longing for the Rain, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

2006 documentary Dream Walking, I have elsewhere discussed the motif of dream-walking in several DV documentaries, how it offers a critique of the everyday in the post-utopic ‘wasteland’ of urban ruins and disposable lives as well as images (Zhang 2012). In the wake of the ‘Chinese Dream,’ the mantra of the neo-liberal nationalist ideology, dream-walking is both a symptom and resistance, articulated in new ways, to which spectral erotic escapades in Longing give new meaning. While the imaginary soul of ancient civilization is recalled to validate hyperbolic statistics boosting economic growth, massive concrete jungles, and the new great wall of the high-speed trains, the present is haunted ever more persistently by spectres of the bygone past, collective as well as personal. Indeed, underneath or alongside the sleek, shining globalized cities, as Dudley Andrew (2010) has observed, mainly in reference to Japan, Korea and Hong Kong, many ‘ghost towns’ appeared in East Asian cinema around the new millennium. Longing breaks sensitive spectral ground in China where ghost film was banned until very recently, and graphic sexual or erotic content and candid representation of religion remain taboo. The film’s aesthetic and generic orientation shifts abruptly midway. Emerging from the claustrophobic apartments of downtown high-rises and the fantastical staging of desire performed by professional actors, we are suddenly taken on a series of road trips, back into the world of minjian (民 间, literally, folk’s realm) that independent documentary tends to frequent: demolished neighbourhoods, petitioners’ shantytowns, cluttered homes of blind fortune-tellers, and makeshift ritual sites of shamans, among others.

52 

Zhen Zhang

Hong, Fang’s close friend since childhood (played by non-professional actor Xue Hong9), worries about her health and takes her to see a Daoist priest. He condemns the ghost and her lust, performing a ritual of exorcism that seems to keep the ghost at bay. Nonetheless, Fang continues to indulge in masturbation and daydreams, neglecting her duties as a perfect stay-at-home mom (e.g. no longer making wonton dumplings for her husband’s breakfast). Hong, depressed after being quickly dumped by her gym trainer boyfriend, takes her to seek solace with male escorts at a KTV – a social scene rarely exposed in media. Fang fails to show interest in the ‘boy toys’ (or 小鲜肉, ‘young fresh meat’ in contemporary slang) eager to sell fake passion. The Daoist condemnation of the spectral liaison and its harm to the patrilineal family structure indicates that minjian and the world of popular religion is a complicated place that does not necessarily deliver relief or support to suffering women. In contrast, the film’s feminist tenor derives from the close rapport and mutual support between women. Hong takes Fang to see a female Buddhist medium who shows a more empathic understanding of Fang’s condition. We are led down a long alley, where an unlikely temple – really just a cramped room filled with Buddha statues, incense, candles and other ritual objects such as a portrait of the late popular prime minister Zhou Enlai – are tucked far away from the bright and boisterous city. The friendly medium affirms Fang Lei’s special ability to connect with spirits and determines that the ghost is her destined lover from a former life now seeking reincarnation through their reunion. Chanting the ‘Great Compassion Mantra,’ the medium relays the ghost’s feelings and comforts: ‘No matter what he wants from you, this is your karma’; ‘Our hearts are connected, no need to tell anyone else’; ‘We can’t see or touch him, but he still exists.’ This validation of the spectral lover as a legitimate existence in Buddhist terms brings great relief to Fang, who, moved and cleansed by the séance, happily dances on the rubble and debris outside the medium’s makeshift temple. Just when Fang feels emboldened to dream on, however, reality bites back. While she is immersed in spectral erotic bliss, her daughter almost dies from drowning. Her husband practically abandons her. Unable to find her daughter anywhere, Fang is devastated and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As if in answer to her despair, her aunt invites her to join a retreat at a temple in the frigid Northeast, where busloads of women arrive to seek council and healing. The resident abbot provides service as a healer. Fang is at first quite shaken by what she sees – the temple is more like a mental hospital and its 9

Xue was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Horse Film Festival for her role.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

53

Figure 1.5 Yang Lina, Longing for the Rain, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

‘inmates’ are exclusively female. Some speak a certain ‘cosmic language’ intelligible only to the abbot, others perform dances of disoriented leaps and contortions. The abbot also acknowledges the authenticity of Lei’s dream but highlights the risks of communion between ghost and human souls. Resigned, she settles into the women’s ward and joins a candlelight party of energetic dancing and chanting. Sweaty and dizzy, at one point she leans against a cold window pane and sees a handsome monk who resembles her spectral lover in the snow, as if praying and waiting for her at the same time. Lei’s fingers touch his image, her ‘longing for rain’ surges again.10 Is Longing a ghost film? Certain aspects of Longing recall Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987), in which a courtesan who died in a double suicide attempt in 1930s Hong Kong returns to track down her lover, who failed to carry out the pact. Bliss Lim (2009) discusses Rouge and other Asian ghost films as part of a fantastic mode of cinema, forging a temporal critique of modernity and its attendant universalizing (or national) code of homogeneity. ‘The fantastic unsettles the fantasy of a single calendrical present shared by all citizens through an occult splintering of the national meanwhile’ (ibid.: 39). A ghost film like Rouge – straddling the boundary of the living and the spectral, the fantastic and the banal – makes visible and palpable the heterogeneity of urban space ‘crosshatched with various temporal rhythms,’ re-enchanting forgotten or condemned temporalities, memories and fantasies (ibid.). Lim 10 ‘Rain’ (yu), as in ‘rain and cloud’ (云雨) in the English film title, has obvious reference to erotic longing and sexual union commonly used in traditional literary texts.

54 

Zhen Zhang

coins the term ‘immiscible temporality’ (ibid.: 32) – meaning ‘incapable of mixing or attaining homogeneity’ (e.g. oil and water) – to conceptualize anew the relationship between cinematic time, national time and cultural difference. The explicit Buddhist reference in Yang’s film also resonates with the ‘Buddhist sexual contemporaneity’ linked to alternative desires and representational practices that Arnika Fuhrmann observes in recent ‘ghostly’ Thai cinema (Fuhrmann 2016). While the ghost film and horror genres are also susceptible to industrial gentrification and commercial cannibalism (Hollywood remakes), alternative sourcing and creative appropriation of the uncanny and the fantastic could take us in refreshing and provocative directions. It makes sense then not to view Longing as a (conventional) ghost film. When asked about her interest in ghost film, Yang responds that she is not particularly taken by the few she has seen. She rather admires Pu Songling (1640-1715) and his classic Tales of the Strange from Liaozhai Studio, the orginal source for all too many Chineselangauge ghost films. Above all, though, it was her maternal grandmother who mesmerized her with many made-up magical stories that taught her ‘truth and beauty.’ ‘If I had spent more time with her, I might have become a female [Gabriel Garcia] Márquez,’ whose ‘magic realist’ fiction enchanted an entire generation in the 1980s and served as a key stimulant for a similar literary and artistic movement in China. Another source of her constant inspiration is Luis Buñuel.11 Here, we may glimpse some roots of Longing’s hybrid form that freely blend sidewalk xianchang aesthetic, fantastic tales, melodramatic realism, and surrealism, resulting in an unstable mixture that both gives shape to and critiques the mercurial, oppressive urban experience.

Conclusion: Digital Shadows as Talismanic Objects Longing’s unabashed mixing of the f ictional and documentary modes that string together a heterotopic cluster of xianchang locations updates Lim’s ‘immiscible temporality’ in a post-celluloid context. The film form is somewhat frayed at the seams and edges, unsettling viewers like the one cited earlier, especially the part in the temple (which is also the subject of Yang’s documentary in post-production). All the scenes in the temple were shot on location in a more or less documentary fashion with the characters playing themselves, including the abbot and young monk in whose visage Fang sees her ‘ancient’ lover. The lead actress Zhao Siyuan and the actress 11 Yang Lina, personal communication, summer 2015.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

55

who plays the aunt were the only professional actors among them, and by then Zhao’s acting and body language seemed to have drifted into the documentary realm. Maybe equally instructive is that Yang, again a total novice in narrative film production, had only an incomplete script before shooting started. She had two pages of outline and used improvisation as her chief method. A storyboard was eventually made for editing and re-editing, which resembled more the post-production of a documentary. This creative process illustrates what Bérénice Reynaud has noted as an intertwined desire and practice among the new Chinese digital indies for both a bodily archive and for cinema and montage. Reynaud writes on the aesthetic consequences of eradicating the boundaries between documentary and fiction – boundaries broken down through the fluid, easily accessible modes of production enabled by digital tools. She observes two tendencies in some recent Chinese independent films: In the first case, there is a tendency to ignore the formal properties of the new medium and shoot as one would on film – but more cheaply and without some of the censorship issues pertaining to film production. In the second case, the possibilities offered by the new toys are embraced with gusto, as producing better means of recording ‘reality.’ (Reynaud 2015: 189)

The ‘moments of rupture’ and ‘breaks in episteme’ articulated by DV filmmaking, argues Reynaud (ibid.), can be seen in many digital indie films. I would argue that no one has ventured to do so by re-embedding a DV xianchang sensibility within a provocative zone of spectral eroticism as Yang has done in Longing. While Longing insists on the ‘immiscibility’ of plural, asynchronous spatio-temporalities (mainstream and marginal, secular and religious, Beijing and China), it also freely, almost irrationally, utilizes the nonlinear nature of digital filming and editing. Though the phantom lover may be the illusive object of Fang’s longing, he also serves as a glue, or medium, that connects different modes of perception and representation. While on one level Longing offers a critique of the neo-liberal Beijing with its inherent insecurity and loss of moral compass, it is above all an indictment of the revived patrilineal nuclear family structure sanctioned by the status quo that has now caught up with the Chinese upper classes. Its search for alternative faiths in popular religion is daring but hardly idealistic. As someone who was raised in a devout Buddhist family, and who has spent substantial time learning and practicing it, Yang admits that her cinema is constantly filtered through a Buddhist lens, directly or indirectly.

56 

Zhen Zhang

This was perhaps not readily apparent in her earlier documentaries, but as I have tried to suggest, her compassionate camera along with her gendered persona, even when filming bodily suffering and death, is the constant companion of her subjects. The ‘photographing’ or ‘looking after’ that she offers the elderly is akin to the photographic ‘miraculous image’ (瑞像) that preserves Buddha’s shadows (佛影), used by Buddhists in modern times, as cultural historian Francesca Tarocco (2013) has compellingly shown. The DV images, with their portability and accessibility, further ‘intensify the underlying Buddhist assumptions about the magic and talismanic nature of certain objects’ and help those who believe in their power and efficacy to ‘confront a new and complex set of concepts about time, space, light and mortality’ (Tarocco 2013: 113). From documentary vivification of the departed souls and places to the spectral vivi-fiction of repressed desires, Yang’s cinema emits deep sorrow for the passing elders and suffering women who seem out of step with a time dictated by the ‘Chinese Dream.’ Her films address the double disenchantment brought by globalization and patriarchy to the street and the bourgeois interior, which acquire more uncanny apparitions in a ‘post-spatial’ Beijing (Braester 2010b) under a neo-liberal authoritarian regime. Yet the underlying belief in the talismanic power of ‘miraculous images’ enabled by independent digital cinema, even when it remains largely unseen in China, continues to nurture daydreams like those in Longing. Its female protagonist can conjure up her phantom love again and again, until it is reincarnated or reborn as a new baby, presented literally as an embodied miraculous image towards the end of the film.

Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Jason McGrath (University of Minnesota), E.K. Tan and his PhD students (Stony Brook University), and Xiaojue Wang (Rutgers University) for inviting me to present earlier versions of this article. Special thanks to the editors of this volume for their steadfast and constructive support.

Filmography Cui Zi’en (2004) Ye Jing 夜景 (Night scene) Jia Zhangke (1997) Xiao Wu 小武 (The Pickpocket) Jia Zhangke (2001) Zhantai 站台 (Platform)

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

57

Jiang Yue (1995) Bi’an 彼岸 (The other bank) Kwan Stanley (1987) Yanzhikou 胭脂扣 (Rouge) Ning Ying (1993) Zhao Le 找乐 (For fun) Ning Ying (1995) Minjian Gushi 民警故事 (On the beat) Wu Wenguang (1991) Liulang Beijing, zuihou de mengxiangzhe 流浪北京－最 后的梦想者 (Bumming in Beijing: The last dreamers) Yang Edward (1995) Qingmei Zhuma 青梅竹马 (Taipei story) Yang Lina (1999) Laotou 老头 (Old men) Yang Lina (2001) Jiating Luxiang 家庭录像 (Home video) Yang Lina (2007) Yiqi Tiaowu 一起跳舞 (Let’s dance together) Yang Lina (2008) Lao An 老安 (The loves of Lao An) Yang Lina (2009) Ye Cao 野草 (Wild grass) Yang Lina (2013) Chun Meng 春梦 (Longing for the rain) Zhang Yuan (1996) Erzi 儿子 (Sons)

Bibliography Andres, Kirsten W. (2008) Engaging the Spirits of the Dead: Soul-Calling Rituals and the Performative Construction of Efficacy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(4): 755-773. Andrew, Dudley (2010) Ghost Towns. In Braester, Yomi, and Tweedie, James (eds) Cinema at City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 37-47. Berry, Chris (2008) Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By. In Berry, Chris (ed.) Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 250-257. Braester, Yomi (2010a) ‘Excuse Me, Your Camera Is in My Face!’ In Berry, Chris, Lu, Xinyu, and Rofel, Lisa (eds) (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 195-218. Braester, Yomi (2010b) Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham: Duke University Press. Chen, Caroline (2010) Dancing in the Streets of Beijing: Improvised Uses within the Urban System. In Hou, Jeffrey (ed.) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary City. New York: Routledge, 21-35. Cui, Shuqin (2007) Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configurations of Age, Class and Sexuality. In Zhang, Zhen (ed.) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 241-263. Fan, Victor (2015) Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

58 

Zhen Zhang

Feeley, Jennifer (2017) The Art of Documenting China’s Most Vulnerable. In Michelle Vosper (ed.) Creating across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Hong Kong: East Slope Publishing, 153-171. Fuhrmann, Arnika (2016) Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Hallam, Julia, and Roberts, Les (2013) Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. IMDb (2013) Longing for the Rain, 1 May. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2664074/ reviews?ref_=tt_urv, accessed 21 July 2015. Lim, Bliss Cua (2009) Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham: Duke University Press. Nichols, Bill (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pattison, Michael (2013) Longing for the Rain [review]. Eye for Film, 11 June. http:// www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/longing-for-the-rain-2013-film-review-by-michaelpattison, accessed 18 March 2016. Pickowicz, Paul, and Zhang, Yingjin (2017) Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-first-Century China. Rowan & Littlefield. Reynaud, Bérénice (2015) Chinese Digital Shadows: Hybrid Forms, Bodily Archives, and Transnational Visions. In Zhang, Zhen, and Zito, Angela (eds) DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 187-214. Robinson, Luke (2010) From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’: Chinese Documentary and the Logic of Xianchang. In Berry, Chris et al. (eds) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 177-194. Robinson, Luke (2013) Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tarocco, Francesca (2013) The Wailing Arhats: Buddhism, Photography and Resistance in Modern China. In Park, David, and Wangmo, Kuenga (eds) The Art of Merit: Studies in Buddhist Art and Its Conservation. London: Archetype Publications, 113-123. Voci, Paola (2010) Blowing Up Beijing: The City as a Twilight Zone. In Berry, Chris et al. (eds) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 99-115. Wang, Yiman (2005) The Amateur’s Lightning Rod: DV Documentary in Postsocialist China. Film Quarterly 58(4): 16-26. Wu, Wenguang (2002) Just on the Road: A Description of Individual Way of Recording Images in the 1990s. In Wu, Hung et al. (eds) Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1900-2000. Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 132-138.

From Sidewalk Realism to Spec tr al Romance

59

Yang, Tianyi (2001) Wo pai Laotou [How I filmed Old Men]. In Wu, Weici, Jilu yu tansuo: Dalu jilupian de fazhan yu koushu jilu 1990-2000 [Recording and exploring: The development and oral history of documentary in the mainland]. Taipei: Taipei National Film Archive. Yu, Tianqi Kiki (2014). Toward a Communicative Practice: Female First-Person Documentary in Twenty-First Century. In Mathew Johnson, Keith Wagner, Kiki Tainqi, Luke Vulpiani (eds.), I Generation: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. Bloomsbury. Zhang, Zhen (2007) Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing). In Zhang, Zhen (ed.) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 1-45. Zhang, Zhen (2012) Dream-Walking in Digital Wasteland: Observations on the Uses of Black and White in Independent Documentary. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6(3): 299-319. Zhang, Zhen (2015) Toward a Digital Political Mimesis: Aesthetic of Affect and Activist Video. In Zhang, Zhen, and Zito, Angela (2015) DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 316-346. Zhu and Wang (2005) Dulijilu: Duihua Zhongguo xinrui daoyan (Independent Record: Dialogues with emerging Chinese f ilmmakers). Beijing: Zhongguo minzu shying yishu chubanshe. Zito, Angela (2014) Writing in Water, or, Evanescence, Enchantment and Ethnography in a Chinese Park. Visual Anthropology Review 30(1): 11-22.

About the author Zhen Zhang Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, New York University [email protected] Zhen Zhang teaches and directs the Asian Film and Media Initiative at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her publications include An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937 (2005), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007, editor), and DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (2015, co-editor). Zhang founded Reel China Biennial at NYU (2001-)

2

Urban History from Below The Artworks of Zhang Dali, Jin Feng and Dai Guangyu Maurizio Marinelli Abstract This chapter focuses on the artworks produced by Zhang Dali, Dai Guangyu and Jin Feng, whose subject matter involves common people, and it engages with three crucial discursive formations: violence, socioeconomic inequality, and utopian dreams. These artists are producing a ‘history from below’ (to borrow E.P. Thompson’s expression): rescuing the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity.’ They are making ordinary people assume the importance of the extraordinary. From the point of view of aesthetics, they are enacting a total revolution of the senses and in Rancière’s words, making ‘heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals.’ Keywords: urban transformation, urban aesthetics, Zhang Dali, Dai Guangyu, Jin Feng, Beijing

Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event because it represents the largest construction project in the planet’s history (Friedmann 2005; Wu 2007; Logan 2002).1 Various scholars have described it as an ‘urban revolution’ (Campanella 2008), since China would seem to have achieved ‘more success than failure’ in the ‘thirty years of urbanization’ (Xu 2013). Renowned Chinese writer Yu Hua, however, describes the transformation of the urban landscape and its inhabitants as a story of violence. Violent eviction has become the norm in China’s urban revolution (Hsing 2010). Yu Hua uses the allegory of warfare to tell the tragic story of forced eviction, and concludes, ‘Even in a war, you 1

This chapter is a slightly revised version of an earlier article (Marinelli 2015).

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch02

62 

Maurizio Marinelli

give your enemy some time to surrender.’ He further argues that ‘Behind the situation is a developmental model saturated with revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution type’ (Yu 2011: 127). Top-down regulatory urban development, often associated with deterministic policies of economic growth, property development, and planning control, has caused physical destruction and disruption of lifestyles and neighbourly ties, consequently resulting in dislocation, loss and precarity (Butler 2009: 25).2 The urban revolution (Lefebvre 2003), the persistent thread of violence, and, ultimately, the mechanisms of exclusion-inclusion derive from a reconfiguration of the meaning of living in a cityscape characterized by the juxtaposition of ruins, rubble, and warfare amid glittering and sleek high-rise buildings, echoing a master narrative of modernity, newness, forwardness, and progress. This reconfiguration of meaning has created new regimes of visibility and new hierarchies of representation. The search for meaning and for ways to rescue the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson 1966: 279-280; Sharpe 1991: 25-42) is the fundamental conceptual and psycho-emotive core of the art of Zhang Dali (张大力, b. 1963). This chapter will focus, in particular, on his artistic production in relation to the urban.3 It will also engage with the related works of fellow artists Dai Guangyu (戴光郁, b. 1955) and Jin Feng (金锋, b. 1962) who show complementary visual modes towards the urban. As this chapter will demonstrate, the artworks of Zhang Dali, Jin Feng and Dai Guangyu are particularly topical, groundbreaking, and essential to be researched on in relation to the aesthetics of urbanization. As Henri Lefebvre poignantly argues, ‘The future of art is not artistic, it is urban’ (Lefebvre 1996). In his conceptualization of ‘the urban,’ the urban holds together the contexts of embodied experiences of individuals living in the city, and allows us to explore both individual creativity and social relations. I argue that the selected artists’ orientation towards the cityscape involves first and foremost a search for and progressive evolution of an aesthetic language, which is not merely trying to give voice to the challenges that urbanization has brought to the fore, but also, offers a possibility to engage with the urban environment through three crucial discursive formations: violence, socio-economic inequality, and utopian dreams. These artists 2 Judith Butler conceptualizes ‘precarity’ as a politically induced condition, which is different from ‘precariousness,’ which is defined as an existential ‘feature of life.’ 3 For Lefebvre the ‘urban’ includes the urban spaces and landscapes, urban practices, and ultimately urban ideology. The urban indicates both ‘more than the city’ and the complexity of a field of inquiry.

Urban History from Below

63

have lived through the ruin of their city, and have experienced the violent transformation of their city in pursuit of their art (Wu 2012; Marinelli 2012). Significantly, they bring attention to the common people and their everyday life, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. The metamorphosis of cityscape and art reifies the interrelation between art and politics; art renders ‘visible what had not been’ (Rancière 2009: 25), and can unveil the ruins of a civilization before they actually become ruins (Benjamin 1969: 214-218). In the last three decades, the claimed reality of a common social world has withered away, and an aesthetic and political revolution has taken place, producing not only a redistribution of the sensible, 4 but also a redistribution of the visible, the audible, the sayable, the tactile and the olfactory. This revolution of the senses is still unravelling and reconfiguring the meaning of the urban in China today.

Violence, Ruins, and Warfare I will begin with an analysis of A History of China’s Modernization (Figure 2.1), by the Shanghai artist Jin Feng, who is actively engaging with the impact that historical change has on ordinary people. The traditional seals, which are traditionally a metonym of power, have been appropriated and reinvented by Jin in his aesthetic synthesis of the ‘extremely cruel’ story of China, from the foundation of the Republic, which followed the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 and put an end to the Qing Empire (1644-1911), to its centenary in 2011. Jin used a total of 2,000 seals to visually rewrite this story: 1,000 with images ranging from kitsch statues of Mao Zedong and nationalist generals to Li Hongzhi, the founder of the Falun Gong cult; 850 seals with characters from Treasury bonds and state-owned enterprises to the Korean War and Yankees; while 150 were left blank, conveying a sense of pervasive hesitation and anxiety about the future, or maybe the present. The same seals have been used to stamp seemingly random sentences and images on 7,000 rice paper slips which cover the walls and lie alongside piles of rubber and marble seals; in reality, they condense key moments of modern Chinese history. This artwork was incredibly labour intensive, and its materiality also has a significant symbolic capital since the seals are carved either from a marble statue of Chairman Mao or from the tires of a Soviet-style T-34 tank. The 4 What Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible is summarized by Gabriel Rockhill (2009: 1) as ‘the system of divisions and boundaries that define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetic-political regime.’

64 

Maurizio Marinelli

Figure 2.1 Jin Feng, A History of China’s Modernisation Volumes 1 and 2, 2011, rubber, marble, rice paper installation. Courtesy of the artist.

choice of the materials echoes the efforts made by the Chinese people in building the ‘new’ China. Violence and cruelty associated with historical change are a constant element of Jin’s artwork. He became famous after his 2006 solo exhibition at Creative Garden 2577 in Shanghai for his 15-metre-long panoramic photograph Appeals without Words or Wordless Petitions (Figure 2.2). This powerful artwork depicts 89 rural villagers, in half-life size, queuing outside the provincial cadres’ offices to present to the government authorities their petitions (上访) regarding corruption and land seizures (O’Brien and Li 1995: 756-783; O’Brien and Li 2004: 75-96; Phan 2005: 607-657). Some are standing, others are crouching against a brick wall, all are covered in a mix of black and gold paint; their posture, clothes and colours convey their status, their ties to the land, and their extreme poverty. The staged nature of the photograph and their position against the wall make the villagers static, immobile, statuesque, as if their long and probably hopeless Godotesque experience of waiting had frozen them forever in that precise moment and space. The petitioners seem to have lost the possibility of becoming human again: they have also lost their language along with their land, and the petition letters of cardboard and paper that they carry are, in reality, empty. Wordless Petitions echoes socialist realism, and falls within a long

Urban History from Below

65

Figure 2.2 Jin Feng, Wordless Petitions, 2006, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

tradition – one of the major works is Rent Collection Courtyard, the famous 1965 work commissioned by CCP provincial officials, a socialist realist tableau of 114 life-size clay sculptures made by sculptors from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, depicting the ways in which a cruel landlord exploited his peasants in the pre-Liberation days.5 This grounds Jin’s artwork both historically and aesthetically, and endows the petitioners with a sense of dignity and resilience as semi-heroic characters in an unending war (indeed, the semi-golden colour makes their clothes appear like soldiers’ uniforms), making the private petition even more intensely political. On the one hand, Jin denounces their plight and sympathizes with their plea for justice, but on the other he seems to infer that their patience is meaningless, since the authorities are not willing to listen, especially to petitioners who have lost everything, including their own words. Jin Feng’s artwork shares a few common traits with the other two artists considered here, Zhang Dali and Dai Guanyu. They all use modularity 5 The work symbolized the epitome of the class struggle. During the Cultural Revolution, many fibreglass replicas were produced, revised (with the insertion of five more figures, and placards from Mao Zedong’s writings in the final section of the six-part display called Revolt) and toured in China and other communist countries (Anon 1968; Laing 1988: 62). See also Cai Guoqiang’s 1999 reinterpretation in Eckholm (2000: 5).

66 

Maurizio Marinelli

and repetition to convey their message, and they have all progressed from attention to the space in which they live to the living beings who occupy that space. This shift can be interpreted as a combination of self-awareness with an empathic mode: it reveals an ethical concern, especially towards the plight of a social group which has experienced dislocation, alienation, abandonment and loss. The lives of these common people are often obscured by the government-led narrative, which promotes the Chinese dream of ever-growing prosperity allegedly embodied by the ultra-modern global built environment of Chinese cities. Jin, Dai and Zhang are visual artists who contrast the official mechanisms of inclusion with those of exclusion. Thus, they contribute to an aesthetic revolution in the making, which can be defined as the redistribution of the visible, the audible, the sayable, and also the tactile and the olfactory. The wordless appeals of Jin are evidence of this: he recruited the models for the figures from the ‘petitioners’ village’ (上访村) in Beijing – an informal residential area for persons presenting petitions to the central government – which was pulled down in 2006. David Harvey argues that displacement and dispossession are crucial elements of capital accumulation through urbanization, and denounces such predatory urban practices in the United States as well as in China. In his analysis of the ‘urban roots of capitalist crises,’ Harvey emphasizes how ‘rising social inequality is accepted as a necessary cost of sustained economic growth and competitiveness’ in China (Harvey 2012: 65). Harvey concludes that the future of the ‘Chinese model’ is full of clouds due to burgeoning social inequalities, environmental degradation and innumerable ‘signs of overextension and overvaluation of assets in the built environment.’ The three artists discussed in this article are highly critical of the economic cost and the lack of social sustainability of urban transformation in China. In his analysis of the social construct of the urban, Zhang emphasized that his primary artistic interest was those he calls the ‘half-citizens’ (半城 市人): ‘This social group is so vast; it is the bulk of China’s population. Their problems are indeed China’s problems of today and tomorrow.’ These halfcitizens represent the dichotomy between city and countryside, between the image of the rural as ‘dirty, chaotic, and backward’ (脏, 乱, 差), as embodied by the migrants and the projected civilized image of the urbanized citizens, a point well articulated by Elizabeth Parke in Chapter 9. According to Zhang, the migrants are considered half-citizens, and they are the victims of social injustice: They work extremely hard but they are ignored and pushed aside. They are the craftsmen of the urban dream, but the city does not accept them.

Urban History from Below

67

They manually build the city and its fundamental infrastructure, but there is no way for them to enjoy these advantages. I believe that for the future direction of Chinese reforms, it is necessary to put an end to the binary hukou system (户口制度), which distinguishes between urban and rural areas, so that the rural land enters the market and rural residents obtain equality in education and healthcare.6

The internationally well-known artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未, b. 1957) also shares this concern for those he calls ‘Beijing slaves’: the millions who ‘come to Beijing to build bridges, roads, and houses.’ ‘Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949,’ but they are like slaves, since they are excluded from the ‘Beijing of power and money.’ They have no rights, they work but do not reside here as they can only ‘squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding’ (Ai 2011). Ai calls Beijing ‘a nightmare’: ‘This city [Beijing] is not about other people or buildings or streets, but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare’ (ibid.). But Zhang’s redefinition of the urban and his appeal for social justice go one step further, and seem to echo Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis that the current process of complete urbanization forces us to address the urban, looking beyond the ‘city’ per se and viewing the totality of society: ‘an entire way of being, thinking and acting […] a “global” phenomenon, shaping and influencing all of society’ (Lefebvre 2003: 46).

The Artist and the City Zhang argues that all his artwork is closely connected with his life experience: ‘My artwork originates from my life.’7 When he was asked which three words could best express art, Zhang immediately ranked life at the top, followed by imagination and dreams (IFA Gallery 2013b). When Dai was asked the same question, he listed freedom, truth and imagination (IFA Gallery 2013a). Dai believes that art is the expression of one’s thoughts, and therefore art should represent the artist’s inner truth. For Zhang, ‘life is a dynamic force,’ and his life is closely connected to the urban: ‘Obviously this has a lot to do with the city where I reside because the stories that inspire my artworks happen in this city’ (IFA Gallery 2013b). 6 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 10 January 2014. 7 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 15 January 2014.

68 

Maurizio Marinelli

The city where Zhang has lived for the longest time is Beijing, having moved there from Harbin in 1983. With one break of six years in Bologna, Italy, Zhang has lived for more than 20 years in Beijing, and he has witnessed the transformation of the city and the increase in population from four million to more than 20 million people. The Chinese capital’s appearance has changed dramatically: ‘From the long queues of hundreds of bicycles during rush hour [of the past] to today’s Great Steel Wall of cars holding up traffic; from the [city of] blue skies to the capital of pollution; from the slow-paced life of leisure and carefreeness to the Beijing of today where people die in their own cars because of excess speed and anxiety’ (ibid.). Zhang ponders the temporalities of urban imagery: the striking disconnection between psychological perception and experiential data leads him to compare living in Beijing today, in its complexity, to ‘living in a state of trance, since it [feels] more like one thousand years have gone by’ (ibid.). One constant theme which emerged in my ethnographic work was an awareness of the dystopian scenarios of the urban environment. We may ask how the artists being studied here have dealt, and in many ways are still dealing, with the speed, size and scale of urban transformation. This relates both to their subject positioning and to how they deal with what Rancière describes as ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2009). The urban revolution has created the historical conditions for making a subjective reconfiguration of meaning possible, and it has challenged the claim made by politics that it is acting according to the principle ‘we are all equal.’ The violent urban transformation has demystified the demise of the previous regime of representation, and determined the consequent transition to a regime of aesthetics which has opened new possibilities for negotiating and articulating the relationship between the visual artists, the cityscape, and the excluded. Zhang’s insights on the artist’s subjectivity are particularly poignant in this respect: ‘Most of the time, it is like we are defying death and chasing transformation (bianhua 变化). There is no time to stop and think about the reason why this is happening. Because for all of us, each single individual, regardless whether one is really willing to stop and think about it, there is no way one can stop this tremendous change ( jubian 巨变)’ (IFA Gallery 2013b). Zhang uses the term jubian, which is different from bianhua. Both terms indicate change, but the adjective-noun compound jubian emphasizes the massive scale of the change, and carries a social connotation: it highlights what the Chinese people have gone through and this is what these artists express in their work. It is not a search for a system of representation, but more, as Rancière points out, the search for an aesthetic of life, which is

Urban History from Below

69

inevitably intertwined with the politics of aesthetics, and, I would suggest, a new history of aesthetics such as artists like Zhang Dali are proposing. The massive transformation, which surpasses anything imaginable, is summarized by Zhang with evocative imagery: ‘Beijing, this ancient capital, has all been transformed, from the sky to the geomorphological features; there are times when the sky is clear, when you are on the top of the hill and looking down you can see the Forbidden City, that vast imperial palace, and the surrounding cement architecture looks like a miniature landscape’ (ibid.). Zhang rejects any Manichean tendency to label this transformation good or bad. There is no space for nostalgic emotions, although he acknowledges a profound sense of loss, since ‘after all the ancient capital of the old days has already vanished completely’ (ibid.). The aesthetics of disappearance are evoked by Zhang with the proverb yanxiao yunsan (烟消云散), which literally means ‘vanish like smoke and disperse like clouds.’ Disappearance makes nostalgia a helpless emotion. Life, imagination and dreams are instruments of both survival and resistance for Zhang, who immediately adds: ‘We still have to go on living, and to do this we have to continue to run fast ahead, following this violently fast stream of water’ (ibid.). There is no alternative, because otherwise one would be ‘elbowed off’ and excluded by the city, without any possibility of existing or settling down. An awareness of the power mechanism underlying inclusion and exclusion is one of the key motivations for Zhang’s work on those that he calls half-citizens.

The Influence of Urban Transformation on Artistic Creation An artist’s creative production has a profound relationship to the place where he lives. The urban context has always influenced Zhang’s creativity: independent of the actual exterior form, the content of his work has always been inspired by ‘the actual contradictions which emerge in my life’ (IFA Gallery 2013b). Zhang explains that this has to do with his way of thinking and his intuition. Zhang’s artistic pathway reveals an intrinsic coherence and a consistent message, from his earliest works, such as Dialogue (对话) and Pork Skin Jelly Migrants (肉皮冻民工), to AK-47, Chinese Offspring (种 族), Us (我们), and even A Second History (第二历史), which was based on archival research. In his own words: ‘I don’t identify with this idea of progress and modernity which is embodied by the wide roads, the high number of cars, and the accumulation of money. This is an illusion, a misconception’ (ibid.). The grand narrative of urbanization seems to have promoted and progressively institutionalized a commoditized imagery of ‘happiness’

70 

Maurizio Marinelli

based on material affluence. Against this image, Zhang juxtaposes the growing sense of anxiety, precarity, spiritual impoverishment and destitution, because ‘money cannot buy spiritual serenity and moral perfection’ (ibid.). He refers to a disconnection resulting from the transformation of the urban as the convex hull, the shell-like wrapping of something much more complex, hinting at the subjectivity of the individual, a sort of internal ‘revolution’ which, to paraphrase Michael Hardt, resides in the possibility of transforming human nature (Hardt 2009: 133-154). However, Zhang also draws upon traditional ethical interpretive parameters: he seems to echo Confucianism when he condemns greed and the search for material success: ‘[Money] cannot transform the common person into a gentleman’ ([金钱] 不能把人变成君子) (IFA Gallery 2013b). From the very beginning, Zhang’s artwork carried both this ethical concern and an iconoclastic undertone, while striving to dialogue with the violence of urban destruction. In the 1990s, in Dialogue, he used a war signifier for the first time, spraying the AK-47 tag on walls in Beijing marked for demolition (Figure 2.3). He used spray paint and a hammer instead of a real rifle, the AK-47, to represent the violence of a community being ripped apart: ‘If I use this name [AK-47], I make people think about the Third World, the violence of the cities, and the wild hooligan culture. That’s not what people want to think about in Beijing today!’ (Marinelli 2004: 436) AK-47 was a powerful way to draw attention to the destructive violence assaulting the city of Beijing and its inhabitants: thousands of old buildings in Beijing have been erased more rapidly than in wartime Berlin and London; hundreds of thousands of people have been relocated, while millions of migrant workers have entered the city. Zhang also exposed a dialectic war involving signifiers (the sound-image AK-47) and signifieds (the violence of the city and in the city), a war of style (the repeated slogans) and content. Dialogue was the first series of artworks which revealed the artist’s intention to actively engage in a critique of the urban environment where he lived. Dialogue was a painstaking, ten-year intellectual reflection on demolition, forced relocation, and violence. In the year 2000, Zhang began the first of the AK-47 painting series, covering human faces with the tag of the Soviet assault weapon AK-47. In 2007, this work developed into The Slogan (口号), in which he uses Chinese characters, derived from civic-political slogans (Marinelli 2012), to cover the same human faces. Zhang’s intention is to show that violence is embodied in the Chinese characters themselves, in a language that is omnipresent and charged with political authority, associated with a claimed reality and the construction a specific ‘ritual of truth.’

Urban History from Below

71

Figure 2.3 Zhang Dali, Demolition, no. 65B, 1999. Courtesy of the artist.

Similarly, Dai has emphasized how he is ‘particularly disgusted with the endless demolition of ancient architecture’: ‘Looking back at China at the beginning of the twentieth century, one might wonder where the traditional culture is! It has been so damaged at the hands of this mob of hooligans who govern the country. In today’s China, there is nothing left: the historical relics are all completely obliterated by barbaric demolition.’8 Dai seems to make a connection between domicide and memoricide when he states that ‘people do not have a sense of home and do not have a sense of history.’9 From the point of view of artistic creation, this destruction of ancient architecture has had a profound impact on the ‘spiritual direction’ of Dai’s visual language. His keen and critical awareness of place and setting is particularly evident in his 2004-2005 mise en scène entitled Geomancy (fengshui 风水, Figure 2.4), where he painted the two characters 风水 (literally meaning water and wind) in ink on the frozen surface of Beijing’s Houhai Lake. The choice of the characters was inspired both by their traditional inscription in ancient places and, more broadly, by the artist’s interest in 8 Dai Guangyu, in interview with the author, Beijing, 10-30 March 2014. 9 Ibid.; domicide is the ‘deliberate murder of home with physical and psychological implications’ (Porteous and Smith 2001: 10-23).

72 

Maurizio Marinelli

Figure 2.4 Dai Guangyu, Geomancy: Ink, Ice, 2004/05. Courtesy of the artist.

Urban History from Below

73

the effect of the four seasons on a scenery. Viewers are invited to read, to decipher and understand the deeper meaning of fengshui; meanwhile the ‘reality’ of the scene changes, since the ice on the surface of the lake begins to melt. Ultimately, the artist is interested in the subtle relationship between expectations arising from contemplating the artwork (and the two characters referring to geomancy) and the irregular but inevitable fluctuations of the scenery. In that relationship one could detect a sense of harmony, a feeling of being in tune with the scenery, but also apathy, and ultimately a sense of helplessness, since the two characters painted on ice will inevitably vanish. This reflects Dai’s interest in the visual production of a ‘reality’ whose appearance is intrinsically connected to its disappearance. Geomancy can be considered an allegory of the construction-destruction logic which dominates the urban context today. The artist also offers a warning: the ancient features of the city and the physiognomy of the city were constructed in harmony with the natural surroundings ( fengshui) and in such an ingenious way that the city should not be destroyed indiscriminately. Dai also emphasizes that the city where he was born and the city where he lives do not make much difference, ‘even though the emotional colouring which one feels toward the hometown might be even stronger.’ Dai stresses that ‘urban transformation and artistic creation have a very direct relationship’10 (Figure 2.5). This view is also shared by Zhang. With the Dialogue series Zhang was responding to the artistic necessity to explore and question the underlying logic of the vicious cycle of destruction, construction, remodelling, and reinventing, which ultimately annihilates the macro-history of the city’s neighbourhood, and the micro-history of one’s life. Dialogue was a subjective response to the emotional urban geography of destruction: ‘I felt so much anger and uneasiness, and I knew that I couldn’t change anything.’11 The subject-positioning of the artist heightens the awareness that even his artwork is subject to the same fate: the graffiti on buildings which are doomed to be torn down will also vanish and disappear, leaving no material trace except for the photographs and light-boxes created by the artist in his studio. Dialogue is an aesthetic statement on Beijing’s transformation, which also assumes a sociopolitical role. The walls doomed to be torn down and used as canvases (Figure 2.6) become public places of resistance and reveal personal structures of affect: the wounded walls are chosen by the artist as 10 Dai Guangyu, in interview with the author, Beijing, 10-30 March 2014. 11 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 15 January 2014.

74 

Maurizio Marinelli

Figure 2.5 Dai Guangyu, The Kidnapped, 2011, ink acrylic on xuan paper. Courtesy of the artist.

a visible stage to show the structural conditions of the metropolis as well as the affective reactions of its citizens. In this sense, Zhang’s artwork raises critical questions about the city’s regime of visibility, which increases the spatial sensitivity of urban citizens, externalizes their psycho-emotive manifestations, and creates possibilities for sharing the sensible (Rancière 2009). At the subjective level, the Dialogue series poses crucial questions which hark back to the ‘right to the city’: ‘What is a city? Whose city is this? Who is it built for? Who are the city-masters? As citizens in this era of tremendous change, are we stripped both of our property and our individual rights because of the city’s expansion and construction, or can we obtain some form of protection?’12 Zhang is aware that he is posing rhetorical questions, since those rights of ownership and other individual rights were not 12 Ibid.

Urban History from Below

75

Figure 2.6 Zhang Dali, Demolition, no. 25, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

protected even before the massive urban transformation of the post-Mao era began: ‘From 1949 onwards, urban construction has been the creation of government officials. Urbanization has been the work of the government, the work of some kind of mentally incapacitated cadre obsessed with ideological principles and GDP growth.’13 This echoes the argument put forward by Harvey, who re-interprets Lefebvre’s right to the city as a call for ‘a transformed and renewed access to urban life’ (Lefebvre 2003: 158) adding, ‘The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’ (Harvey 2012: 23). Harvey’s argument for the right to the city as a new and fundamental type of human right is based on his recognition of the fallacy of the political economic imperatives of global capitalism and, in the Chinese case, of ‘the hegemonic command of capital and the state’ (ibid.: 7).

13 Ibid.

76 

Maurizio Marinelli

Zhang gives the example of the mayor of Taiyuan, Geng Yanbo,14 who is well known for his radical infrastructure projects, which earned him the nickname Demolition Geng (耿拆拆). He was appointed as mayor because of his role in the urban regeneration of the city of Datong; ‘but then he left an awful mess. […] There are many officials who created ghost cities, like Changzhou in southern Jiangsu, or Ordos in the southern side of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.’15 Zhang is concerned with the aesthetics of urban politics and denounces the ‘ugliness of the black, oppressive, spiritless and lifeless constructions, the nauseating and dark tall residential buildings, many of which are empty because nobody wants to reside there.’16 Zhang asks who gave the officials the right to spend public money, earned with blood and sweat, to build a city that is so ugly. Opening a ‘dialogue’ with the city on the effects of urban transformation was essentially a ‘polite’ way for Zhang to protest. A turning point in Zhang’s artistic development occurred in the year 2000. From 2000 onwards he became more and more concerned with the way ‘non-citizens’ live in the city. His artworks Pork Skin Jelly Migrants and Chinese Offspring engage with the life of these citizen non-citizens. His concern stems from his attempt to explore the apparently rhetorical question: ‘Who is this city built for?’ In 1960 Kevin Lynch, in his groundbreaking work The Image of the City, argued: ‘We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself but the city as being perceived by its inhabitants.’ (Lynch 1960: 3). Lynch brought the attention of urban planners to a social approach to the use of urban space. He emphasized a fundamentally important difference, which is also useful for social scientists: the city should be studied not only in its physical form but also by examining individual psychological perceptions and the subjective sociospatial reactions of those who live in it. Coining words such as ‘imageability’ and ‘wayfinding,’ Lynch described the mental maps that we form by living, walking and consuming the city. Since every city breathes through its individual and collective memories, the added value of Lynch’s perspective is evident when we understand the interconnected history of the city as ‘home.’ Applying this perspective to Zhang’s work, one might conclude that after migrants have left their hometown and moved to the metropolis, they 14 He was also harshly criticized by the famous scholar Yuan Yisan, an expert in the preservation of old cities. For more on Geng Yanbo, see Sohu (2013) and Sina (2013). 15 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 15 January 2014. 16 Ibid.

Urban History from Below

77

become settlers; they struggle to develop a sense of belonging and to be assimilated into the foreign urban environment. It is significant that Zhang articulates this question in terms of ‘Who are the city-masters?.’ He argues that the increase in Beijing’s population from four million to 20 million residents ‘hides many secrets.’ These secrets refer to the complexities of the subjectivity of sixteen million human beings who struggle to become ‘real Beijing citizens’ (北京正式市民), or who remain ‘illegal residents’ or ‘ghost citizens’ (鬼民). Zhang thinks that the legal constraints imposed on migrants by the hukou system add to the psycho-emotive complexities of articulating one’s identity. His artwork 100 Human Beings (100个人) and Us engage with the complex condition of migrants, but the latter is also a conceptual expansion which ‘involves the existential value of humanity itself.’ In Us, Zhang questions ‘the meaning of human existence in relation to reality,’ but this is not necessarily a solipsistic and pessimistic negation of life with death as the only possible way out. There is another important element here. In post-Mao China, certain segments of the population have succeeded in the new sociopolitical and ultimately economic game, which has brought their entrepreneurial drive to the fore, seeking profit in legitimate or illegitimate ways. Other groups, however, have experienced marginalization and poverty. The gap between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ has widened and the ‘successful’ members of the middle and higher classes proudly display their newly acquired riches and their social status. As discussed by Meiqin Wang in Chapter 4, a new brand of celebrities has emerged in advertisements in public spaces while the media tend to hide images which embody anxieties regarding the ethics of the economic transformation. In this sense the artworks discussed in this article are morally charged and they raise critical questions about the centrality of the regime of visibility and the distorted lens that proposes alternative images. I argue that Zhang’s artworks render ‘visible that which had no reason to be seen’ (Rancière 2001: 4): the common people, who are often obscured by the government-led narrative which promotes the Chinese dream of prosperity, emerge here as something more than ‘noisy animals.’ Zhang’s artwork both aestheticizes and politicizes these non-citizens, helping to construct and offer a counter-narrative to spectators; a counter-narrative in reaction to a hegemonic discourse that excludes and makes invisible, and one which counters the reduction, by the sovereign power, of the ‘invisible’ to ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), and turns them into ‘wilful’ agents of urban resistance, a point also stressed by Minna Valjakka in Chapter 10.

78 

Maurizio Marinelli

‘Urban Revolution’: A Story of Success? Zhang does not agree with the scholars and observers who have hailed the success of the urban revolution: My generation is probably the last one to know the real meaning of revolution. Revolution is violence, it is destruction, it is the military thinking which involves pain and suffering. There is nothing romantic about it as one might imagine. The corrupt practices of revolution are greater than the slow process of reform (变革). Revolution has often given opportunities to individuals with ulterior motives. Only by living in the vortex of the revolution, can one realize the intense cruelty and tragedy of the revolution. When the revolution is dressed in the outer clothing of idealism, an aureole is put on the heads of certain revolutionaries, and these individuals stand in an elevated moral plane, claiming that they act in the name of the well-being of the multitude.17

Zhang discusses the example of Ji Jianye, who was originally promoted to the position of mayor of Nanjing (2010-2013) because he had rebuilt the ancient city of Yangzhou. However, after rebuilding the city of Nanjing, Ji ‘had to give up his position since he had violated the interests of too many individuals.’18 In October 2013 he was arrested and investigated for corruption by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Chinese Communist Party and, in January 2014, he was expelled from the CCP. Before this debacle, Ji explained himself in the self-celebratory report ‘Yangzhou in Eight Years’: During these eight years in Yangzhou, myself and all the others have walked side by side along the same path, jointly promoting the construction of the city of Yangzhou, the scale of the city, and the flavour of the city, so that the whole appearance of the city was completely transformed. In accordance with Jiang Zemin’s [who is originally from Yangzhou] demand to ‘Build Yangzhou to make it become a famous city, where ancient culture and modern civilization enhance each other’s beauty, each shining upon the other,’ and his appeal to support the ‘Creation of the new Yangzhou with even more wealth, civilization and elegance,’ we extended the comprehensive regulation for large-scale construction of 17 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 15 January 2014. 18 Ibid.

Urban History from Below

79

the city and the surrounding areas according to ‘three years one cycle, one year three nodal points.’ (Ji 2009: A02)

Zhang therefore concludes that ‘The “flavour” of the city coincided with the “taste” of its leaders, and the other people are deaf, blind and mute.’19 Coming back to Beijing’s urban revolution, both Zhang Dali and Dai Guangyu argue that this tremendous change has filled many people with deep hatred and resentment. Dai uses the example of the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi, who in his work ‘Remembering the South’ described his return to visit Hangzhou and remembered with heartfelt emotion ‘how he noticed that things had remained the same even though people had changed’ since ‘for a whole life or a short stay, he was forever intertwined with this place with a vague emotional entanglement, it was that “familiar scenery.” Reading it [‘Remembering the South’] is deeply moving.’20 However, Dai observes that today, when one resides in a city or travels for pleasure to a specific city, and ‘stands where one once felt moved by a certain urban scenery, which might have also influenced one’s artistic creation, it is very hard to find the historical miracle that had once given a sense of spiritual comfort.’21 Dai contends that the historical miracles have been demolished, one by one, and this ‘makes everybody feel depressed and outraged’: Today, China is deeply trapped in the emotional and rational appeals of ‘modernization’ and cannot extricate itself. For this reason, China denies its own tradition and shows a very serious spiritual anxiety. It has transformed into a destructive force, which recalls what Mao Zedong once emphasized, the thought that ‘without destruction there is no construction.’ This destruction seems to have become the conceptual foundation of contemporary China’s way of managing state affairs, and its guiding principle for action.22

Jin also remembers Mao Zedong’s syllogism of the necessity to destroy the ‘old’ in order to build the ‘new.’ Jin describes Mao’s idea as ‘very Chinese, very realist,’ but then he laments that the promised ‘new world’ did not materialize 19 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 15 January 2014. 20 Dai Guangyu, in interview with the author, Beijing, 10-30 March 2014; in his ‘interactive painting’ A Scenery I Once Knew So Well (Fengjing jiu ceng an), Dai Guangyu used a famous verse by Bai Juyi and asked the audience to repaint a ‘familiar scenery.’ Then he reconstructed Ink Games (Moxi) in random fashion to demonstrate the impossibility of preserving the original. 21 Dai Guangyu, in interview with the author, Beijing, 10-30 March 2014. 22 Ibid.

80 

Maurizio Marinelli

so that Chinese people today are left with ‘development and destruction, construction and demolition, revolution and martyrdom, life and death,’ and all the collateral damage of ‘post-developmentalism’ ‘which permeates every aspect of [our] life.’23 Historic time is not linear and, as art historian Terry Smith has poignantly argued, it is only ‘the exploration of multiple and processual modernities’ that allows us ‘to grasp the complexities of the present’ (Smith 2008: 11). Jin emphasizes how ‘development occurs under a particular institutionalized order,’ and in the same way destruction and the creation of ruins occur under a particular institutionalized order, but here the temporalities are as important as the spatialities: ‘What lies ahead has not arrived yet. What has happened before is already history. As artists, we have to think about today, we are immersed in these ruins and we have to grasp the proof, find a way to express it. This is what art does.’24 Here, Jin seems to express the crucial tenet of mindfulness meditation, which invites one to concentrate on the power of now. The vision of modernity advocated by Mao indicates a division of the world between the old and the new, the past and the present, while contemporaneity indicates the coexistence of conditions, the coexistence of spatialities in the past-presentness of the cityscape. On this point, Zhang seems to be more nostalgic: If we had listened from the very beginning to Liang Sicheng’s proposal, perhaps we would have a much better Beijing today: the ancient capital, the harbour of the soul, in a similar way to Rome, which is the cradle of European civilisation. However, revolution has destroyed everything, and from a cultural perspective the people in China today are like people without a homeland. We are all […] looking everywhere for a homeland that we cannot find.25

Between 1950 and 1956, the urban planning experts who were sent from the Soviet Union to China favoured the introduction of Soviet-style urban planning theory into China, and in particular the remodelling of the ancient city and establishment of an administrative centre. ‘Liang Sicheng and Cheng Zhanxiang put forward a proposal to protect the original appearance (原 貌) of the ancient city, to move the administrative centre to the western 23 Jin Feng, in interview with the author, Shanghai, 20 February 2014. 24 Ibid. 25 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 15 January 2014; for Liang Sicheng’s proposal, see Wang (2011: 91-172).

Urban History from Below

81

periphery of Beijing, and to build another new district.’26 ‘They strongly believed that this proposal would have allowed the preservation of the ancient capital’s historical features (历史风貌), while at the same time it would have had the benefit of dividing the population of the metropolitan area and rationalizing the urban planning of the functional district. However, the Soviet experts made a different proposal, with Tiananmen Square as the centre, which implied remodelling the old city and establishing the capital’s administrative centre here. They thought that this proposal would allow a full use of the land resources of the city area, while providing space for the establishment of government bureaus and the beautification of the urban space. At the Congress on Urban Planning held in February 1949, the Soviet experts criticized Liang’s proposal, arguing that preserving the ancient city of Beijing like a museum was a ‘small capitalist illusion not in accordance with reality.’27 This shows clearly that urban planning is ideological, and that the Soviet ideology had a grip on the ideas of the Chinese planners. In his AK-47 series, Zhang denounced the fact that urban planning is ideological: This was the case when the Soviet-style political ideology encroached on the minds of the Chinese people and made inroads into the urban planning of the Chinese capital. The next urbanization wave will destroy the small and medium cities even more, and villages in the countryside will not be lucky enough to escape. The rapid large-scale duplication of the same template is turning out rough and slipshod work without any originality. Chinese people now live in ‘Roman gardens,’ or in ‘Little Berlin,’ or ‘Dutch towns,’ or ‘Soho village.’ […] This is the real outcome of the ‘urban revolution.’28

Conclusion Contemporaneity consists precisely of the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities between them and among them. (Smith 2008: 8-9) 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

82 

Maurizio Marinelli

This chapter is the fruit of an intellectual conversation, mostly with Zhang Dali, but also with fellow artists Jin Feng and Dai Guangyu. From the beginning, I conceived my endeavour as an attempt to revive and develop the art of sustained intellectual conversation implicit in the traditional notion of ‘pure conversation’ (清谈).29 Such conversations took place between interlocutors with a common interest – in this case, a profound interest in exploring the possibilities and complexities of China’s urban transformation, and in what Zhang calls a ‘history of aesthetics.’ The traditional pure conversations concentrated on metaphysical and philosophical questions and advocated freedom of individual expression and ultimately an escape from the intricacies of court politics. Like the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (竹林七贤), the most prominent practitioners of pure conversation, the conversations with the three artists highlighted their engagement with ‘the urban’ through three crucial discursive formations: violence, socio-economic inequality, and utopian dreams. Their artworks demystify the demise of the claimed reality that the previous regime of representation had overemphasized. The ‘commons of a community,’ based on a ‘common social world,’ have withered away. However, the state continues to dominate and mould urban planning, using the same obsolete rhetoric while implementing top-down regulatory and technocratic solutions to eradicate the ‘dirty, chaotic, and backward’ of the rural, in the name of a ‘civilized’ regime of urbanized sociospatial configurations promoted as a model of progress. Through their work, Jin Feng, Dai Guangyu and Zhang Dali contrast the official mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. From the point of view of the aesthetics of urbanization, these artists, with their artworks, demonstrate an ability not only to discursively open but also to provocatively offer new possibilities for negotiating and articulating the relationship between the visual arts and the urban, with an emphasis on the excluded. In this sense, their artworks are not merely representing one of the major challenges of urbanization, but they are progressively and effectively producing a ‘history from below,’ saving the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson 1966: 280) and making their alleged inconspicuousness and ordinariness become extraordinary. To conclude, I contend that these artists’ long-term impact is their unique contribution to an aesthetic revolution in the making, which can be defined as the redistribution of the visible, the audible, the sayable, and also the tactile and the olfactory. Like 29 The tradition of ‘pure conversations’ harks back to the period of the Three Kingdoms (AD 220-265).

Urban History from Below

83

the significance of Cao Fei’s work as discussed by Chris Berry in Chapter 7, these artists are enacting a total revolution of the senses, rendering ‘visible what had not been, and [making] heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals’ (Rancière 2009: 25).

Bibliography Agamben, Georgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. HellerRoazen, Daniel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ai, Weiwei (2011) Ai Weiwei on Beijing’s Nightmare City. Newsweek, 28 August. http://www.newsweek.com/ai-weiwei-beijings-nightmare-city-67179, accessed 8 July 2014. Anon (1968) Rent Collection Courtyard: Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. Trans. Zohn, Harry. New York: Schocken Books. Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Campanella, Thomas J. (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Eckholm, Erik (2000) Cultural Revolution, Chapter 2: Expatriate Artist Updates Maoist Icon and Angers Old Guard. New York Times, 17 August, 5. Friedmann, John (2005) China’s Urban Transition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, Michael (2009) Revolution. In Taylor, Astra (ed.) Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers. New York: New Press, 133-154. Harvey, David (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Hsing, You-tien (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. London: Oxford University Press. IFA Gallery (2013a) Dai Guangyu’s interview about censorship. 24 April. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojN_5xCMppI, accessed on 14 July 2014. IFA Gallery (2013b) Zhang Dali’s interview about censorship. 23 April. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=oP7bqXBMApE, accessed 14 July 2014. Ji, Jianye (2009) Yangzhou banian [Yangzhou in eight years]. Yangzhou ribao [Yangzhou daily], 22 August, A02. Laing, Ellen Johnston (1988) The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1996) Writings on Cities. Ed. and trans. Kofman, Eleonore, and Lebas, Elizabeth. Oxford: Blackwell.

84 

Maurizio Marinelli

Lefebvre, Henri (2003) The Urban Revolution. Trans. Bononno, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Logan, John R. (ed.) (2002) The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform. Oxford: Blackwell. Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marinelli, Maurizio (2004) Walls of Dialogue in the Chinese Space. China Information 18(3): 429-462. Marinelli, Maurizio (2012) Civilising the Citizens: Political Slogans and the Right to the City. PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9(3). http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/2540, accessed 25 March 2014. Marinelli, Maurizio (2015) Urban Revolution and Chinese Contemporary Art: A Total Revolution of the Senses. China Information 29 (2): 1-22. O’Brien, Kevin J., and Li, Lianjiang (1995) The Politics of Lodging Complaints in Rural China. China Quarterly 143: 756-783. O’Brien, Kevin J., and Li, Lianjiang (2004) Suing the Local State: Administrative Litigation in Rural China. China Journal 51: 75-96. Phan, Pamela N. (2005) Enriching the Land or the Political Elite?: Lessons from China on Democratization of the Urban Renewal Process. Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 14(3): 607-657. Porteous, J. Douglas, and Smith, Sandra E. (2001) Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2001) Ten Theses on Politics. Trans. Panagia, Davide, and Bowlby, Rachel. Theory & Event 5(3). Rancière, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Trans. Corcoran, Steven. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rockhill, Gabriel (2009) Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Perception. In Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Rockhill, Gabriel. London: Continuum, 1-6. Sharpe, Jim (1991) History from Below. In Burke, Peter (ed.) New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Cambridge: Polity Press, 25-42. Sina (2013) Yuanshizhang Geng Yanbo wei Datong zaocheng bianjie: Dou shi liugei weilaide caifu [Former mayor Geng Yanbo justifies city-building in Datong: All this is wealth set aside for the future]. Sina, 23 September. http://finance.sina. com.cn/china/20130923/124916823363.shtml, accessed 10 August 2014. Smith, Terry (2008) Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question. In Smith, Terry, Enwezor, Okwui, and Condee, Nancy (eds) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1-19. Sohu (2013) Geng Yanbo: Guiliu shizhang beihoude minyi anliu [Geng Yanbo: The public opinion undercurrent stays behind the mayor]. Sohu.com. http://news. sohu.com/s2013/newsmaker157/, accessed 10 August 2014.

Urban History from Below

85

Thompson, E.P. (1966) History from Below. Times Literary Supplement, 7 April, 279-280. Wang, Jun (2011) Beijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning Modern Beijing. Singapore: World Scientific. Wu, Fulong (ed.) (2007) China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism. London: Routledge. Wu, Hung (2012) A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Xu, Nan (2013) Pan Jiahua on Three Decades of Urbanisation in China. Chinadialogue, 15 October. https://www.chinadialogue.net/blog/6417-Pan-Jiahua-on-threedecades-of-urbanisation-in-China/en, accessed 10 January 2014. Yu, Hua (2011) China in Ten Words. Trans. Barr, Allan H. New York: Pantheon Books.

About the author Maurizio Marinelli Senior Lecturer in East Asian History, University of Sussex [email protected] Maurizio Marinelli’s research crosses history, politics and society. Through this interdisciplinary lens, the exploration of China’s socio-spatial transformation becomes a means to engage with universally experienced themes, such as colonial-global cities, territoriality, identity formation, and citizenship construction.

3

The Transient City Urban Transformation in Chinese Contemporary Photography Jiang Jiehong Abstract In the recent decades, China has experienced a revolutionary urban development. The incessant changes have shaped a moving reality, almost illusive, beyond the normal and tangible environment of daily life. In order to capture, interpret and imagine such a reality, photography becomes a unique instrument. In particular, with all the various possibilities provided through digital process of photographic production, image often offers a quality of ambiguity as regards the real and the unreal. Through the works of a number of important artists, including Chen Shaoxiong, Zhang Peili and Zhuang Hui, this chapter discusses and extends the artistic reflections on China’s urban development, and re-examines the role of photography in this unprecedented era of social, ideological and cultural transformations. Keywords: Chinese contemporary art, photography, urban transformation, transience, destruction, construction

In the last 30 years, China has seen the most extraordinary economic growth, fuelled by a rapid urban development whose scale and speed are unprecedented in human history for both the increase of construction projects and urban population (Friedmann 2005; Wu 2007; Hsing 2010; Zhang 2011), a point also emphasized by Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang in the introduction to this anthology. Understandably, Chinese urbanization has become a heated topic of broad academic interest and scholars worldwide have produced works as they observe and discuss the urban transformation of this former socialist and largely rural country (see e.g. Wu 2007; Campanella 2008; Hsing

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch03

88 

Jiang Jiehong

2010). However, most existing scholarship on the topic concerns the tangible and quantifiable aspects of this transformation, such as policy changes, the physical expansion of the cities, the migration of massive populations, the construction boom, and the widening social inequality. While these are all very important aspects to research, I argue that more attention should be given to the intangible processes of the transformation, such as how individual urban residents experience and perceive their changing cities through cultural means for a more holistic and multifaceted understanding of China’s urban aspiration and its consequences. After all, as stressed by historian Yuval Noah Harari (2008, 2015), cultural expressions of human experiences and perceptions of the tangible reality in various forms such as literature, visual arts, and films are as important, if not more, for the evolution of humankind and the development of human society. Echoing Harari’s argument and also agreeing the point raised by Valjakka and Wang in their introduction about the potential of cultural activism through innovative visual art practices, in my view, contemporary photography from China provides a crucial space for studying how urban residents respond to and participate in the ongoing urban transformation while shaping its future despite numerous social constraints imposed by an authoritarian regime. This chapter, like other chapters of this book, probes into the exchanges between visual arts and urban transformation by looking into how the latter is experienced and perceived by a number of artists/urban residents through their photographic expressions. I not only aim to investigate what has just happened in the immediate past, but also to critically discuss what is happening now and in the foreseeable future, alongside with analysing individual artworks and their social implications in relation to urban development in China. When urbanization has become ‘the primary condition of art making’ in contemporary China (Wang 2016: 17), various processes of urban development and their impacts have been observed and reflected by artists in China since the 1990s in the context of contemporary art (e.g. H. Hou). Individuals whose works were chosen to be the subject of this chapter include Chen Shaoxiong (陈劭雄, 1962-2016), Dan’er (旦儿, b. 1983), Inri (映 里, b. 1973), Jiang Pengyi (蒋鹏奕, b. 1977), Miao Xiaochun (缪晓春, b. 1964), Rong Rong (荣荣, b. 1968), Wang Jinsong (王劲松, b. 1963), Wang Qingsong ( 王庆松, b. 1966), Zhang Dali (张大力, b. 1963), Zhang Peili (张培力, b. 1957), and Zhuang Hui (庄辉, b. 1963). Fieldwork as a primary qualitative method has been considered central to this research. It has been employed not only to observe and obtain first-hand materials, both visual and textual, but also to conduct in-depth interviews with the artists, to explore and understand their

The Tr ansient Cit y

89

personal reflections, and to develop generative discussions. Although not intending for an inclusive survey, collectively, the eleven artists, with their diverse age ranges, geographical origins, and personal perspectives, offer a solid and balanced coverage of the issue at stake. A key aspect I explore is how these artists come up with critical and innovative visual responses when dealing with an urban reality that has become transient in nature due to the constant movement of demolition and reconstruction which, as many scholars (Broudehoux 2007; Hsing 2010: 1-4; Zhang 2011; Wang 2016: 119-161) point out, characterizes China’s urbanization. In addition, I also highlight how their artworks attest to the important role that photography has assumed in dealing with the perpetual state of changes in urban China.

Urban Revolution, Transient Reality and Photography as a Strategy Many scholars have rightly referred to the recent urban transformation of China as an ‘urban revolution’ (e.g. Wu 2007; Campanella 2008). From a historical perspective, the force/spirit behind the almost surrealistic urban de/construction in contemporary China does not grow out of a vacuum. For example, during the early era of the People’s Republic of China, the cities were rapidly industrialized and countless examples of dynastic architecture were demolished under the Maoist regime for both practical and ideological reasons (e.g. Meyer 2008; Gu et al. 2015). During Mao’s Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, the Red Guards (红卫兵), who claimed themselves to be the ‘critics of the old world,’ were encouraged to smash the ‘Four Olds’ (四旧: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas), in a practical expression to establish a new world. In one instance that happened in August 1966, when some 300,000 teenagers rushed onto the streets to confiscate and eliminate all the ‘Olds’ across Beijing. Public properties and cultural relics were attacked and numerous historical treasures were destroyed over the course of a few weeks. Records indicate that, by the end of the Cultural Revolution, in Beijing alone, 4,922 of the 6,843 officially designated ‘places of cultural or historical interest’ had been demolished – by far the greatest number of them during August and September 1966, the darkest summer in the history of Chinese culture (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006: 118). After Deng Xiaoping initiated the Open Door policy in 1978, everything changed once again. The visual legacy of Mao’s era was itself swept away, a phenomenon also discussed by Stefan Landsberger in Chapter 5, to make space for the new image of a China making economic growth its new

90 

Jiang Jiehong

mandate and possibly also to remove people’s traumatic memory of the Cultural Revolution. Although the government ideologically distanced itself from the Maoist era and charged with a different agenda, its zest for breaking from the past is as momentous in its national effort to urbanize. According to a recent report: ‘China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years’ (Johnson 2013). As Chairman Mao proclaimed, ‘No construction without destruction’ (不破不立). The axiom of his Cultural Revolution half a century ago can also be seen as a prophecy for the dramatic urban developments of today. Construction in China does not merely constitute an effort towards improvement; it is a revolutionary action fundamentally to replace the ‘old’ with an entirely ‘new’ visual experience. During the process, people find themselves constantly surrounded by new construction projects while once familiar neighbourhoods are no longer visible, except in their memory. It is no wonder that memory as a subject matter has become increasingly important within urban studies worldwide in this age of global urbanism. For example, as Mark Crinson discusses: ‘We seem at times overwhelmed by the oceanic feeling of a limitless archive, of which the city is the most physical example and the “memory” of our computers is the most ethereal yet the most trusted, and at others afflicted by a fear that the material traces of the past might be swept away, taking memory with them’ (Crinson 2005: xi). Emphatically, with the rapidity of changes taking place in Chinese cities, the visual and bodily experience of urban residents is filled with excitement and anxiety. It is even unsure whether there is a place to store memories in contemporary cities where histories have been destroyed, and traditions and futures are being ceaselessly reinvented. We might argue that memories themselves actually have become transitory since cities themselves are in a constant mode of transitions (Gu et al. 2015). As suggested by Gu Zheng (2001), it is probably against this situation that photographs have become a natural choice for many as they attempt to capture what meet their eyes for future memories before they disappear. In the post-Mao era, when Western photographic practice was introduced through a host of magazines published after 1979, many new photo clubs emerged and numerous exhibitions appeared across the country. Since the 1980s, documentary photography became central to the development of Chinese photography in revealing the ‘truth’ in the social and political situation of the time. But for many artists, who were originally trained as painters or sculptors, it is not enough merely to experiment with photographic technologies or to break away from conventional political vocabularies for

The Tr ansient Cit y

91

capturing ‘real’ moments in life with alternative aesthetic perception. They initially found inspiration in performance and installation (Gu 2011), and Chinese photography in the context of contemporary art began to establish its independence as an art form since the 1990s. By the beginning of the new millennium, Chinese artists have explored a wide range of photographic practices in response to the dramatic social changes, as seen in a number of survey shows of Chinese contemporary photography in the West.1 It is important to point out that the eleven individuals featured in this chapter see themselves as ‘artists’ rather than ‘photographers,’ whilst the choice of photographic practice as an artistic language in relation to urbanization is strategic and allows them to better reflect what they experience and visually represent the notion of ‘transience.’ In contemporary China, buildings, complexes, streets, even entire cities have become transitory – removed, reconstructed or replaced – leaving little trace of what went before. In order to capture, interpret and imagine such a reality, many artists adopt photography as an instrument of expression, particularly taking advantage of all the possibilities provided by the digital technology. On the one hand, while other still images of any art productions, flat (paintings) or three-dimensional (sculpture or installation), would not have the agility to arrest such a fluid ‘reality,’ photography seems to be more capable to report the daily existence in a convenient and technically undemanding way. It wears the mask of ‘realness.’ On the other hand, according to Sontag (1979: 17-18), in comparison with moving images such as film or video work, perhaps photography is more memorable and re-accessible. It is ‘a neat slice of time, not a flow, […] a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again’ (ibid.). These are particularly important natures of photography that can help us to see, share and re-invent the transient through visual presentations in the frantic pace of urban development in China. Moreover, to artists, in particular, those who witness and have been living through the accelerated urban development with its devastating pace and extent of disturbance, photography is more than a convenient means of holding on to the present at the moment of its demise. It opens up a space and possibility for new artistic strategies and thus contributes significantly to the development of visual arts in contemporary China. As Claire Roberts writes: In China photography has played an extraordinary role in the transformation of visual culture. […] Unlike traditional forms of expression, such as 1

See examples in Chang and Nedoma (2003), Wu and Phillips (2004), and in Atkinson (2011).

92 

Jiang Jiehong

brush-and-ink painting, the new technology offered a powerfully modern, seemingly objective representation of reality mediated through the lens […] as an entrepreneurial, revolutionary and innovative medium, and as a means of ‘transmitting spirit’ (传神). […] It is as a result of these currents and creative energies that contemporary Chinese photography flourishes as one of the most vibrant art forms of our time. (Roberts 2013: 7-9)

The on-going urbanization does not only provide rich materials for an alternative artistic expression (Gu 2011: 8-9), but also critical perspectives for conceiving art making ‘as an approach to deconstruct the mainstream social and economic discourses promoted by Chinese policymakers’ (Wang 2015: 98). If the mission of an artist is to think, imagine and critique, then is it possible to keep up with such a society in flux? As daily changes are experienced as part of urban existence, what does China really look like, and what are the relationships between photographically recorded ‘facts’ and the instability of what has been seen; between artistic response, imagination and memory? In response to the incessant changes, artists have shaped a moving reality, an illusive one, beyond the normal and tangible environment of the everyday life with their photographic expressions of experiences and perceptions. The next sections will examine the works of the eleven artists in relation to two connected and overlapping phases of China’s urban development, destruction and construction, during which I also discuss the role of photography in the enduring urban changes.

Destruction Chaiqian (拆迁) – demolishing (residential buildings) and moving (residences) – appears to have become a popular word over the last few decades in China. Acts of chaiqian are initiated primarily based on governmental strategy, with or without consultation, and in many cases are executed forcibly. Sinologist Robin Visser (2004: 279) observes, ‘Forced relocation and demolition abounded in Beijing and other Chinese cities in the mid-1990s, as traditional houses and cultural artefacts were replaced by hotels and shopping malls funded by investments from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and the West.’ Indeed, in cities, traditional residential buildings have little chance of surviving, including the courtyard houses (四合院) and alley ways (胡同) of Beijing, the historical types of residence sometimes referred to as Chinese quadrangles, and the ‘stone gate’ (石库门) homes of Shanghai, a style of residential architecture from the semi-colonial period. While the

The Tr ansient Cit y

93

residents are relocated to newly built high-rise apartments on the urban outskirts, their original homes have largely been replaced by commercial centres. Although the urban renewal is intended to provide modern amenities, inevitably, because of all the disruptive changes, social relationships and experiences of China’s daily life become vulnerable. Harbin-born and Beijing-based artist Wang Jinsong’s One Hundred Chai (百拆图), completed in 1999, stands witness to the reconstruction of the city of Beijing. Taking reference from the traditional decorative image of ‘one hundred shou’ (百寿图) for festive occasions, in which the character shou (寿 longevity) is created in one hundred calligraphic variants, Wang, however, creates a distressing collection of destruction rather than celebration. From the 1990s, the Chinese character chai (拆 to demolish) began to appear all over the capital, either in bold white or spiky red. Marked on outer walls or on doors and windows of the numerous residential buildings to be removed, this character became the bulldozers’ target when low-rises had to make way for the grandeur of height. Wang spent over a month searching the city for the character in various forms, so that he could photograph it to mark the final scenes of disappearing homes. The way the chai is handwritten seems ‘despotic, truculent and even tyrannical in many cases,’ says the artist.2 ‘The impact is not from the literal meaning of the character, but from the visual format and execution of the writing.’3 In Chinese culture, the art of calligraphy is sacred. In public spaces, inscriptions appear centrally over city gates and arches, on beams or pillars of historic buildings, carved on wood or stone as commemorative introductions, poetic expressions or political endorsements. However, the people who made the marks of chai are not intellectually trained calligraphers and their writings demonstrate no traditional aesthetics, but instead a kind of arrogance of authority. The image is immediately reminiscent of the visual form of the big character posters (大字报) seen throughout the years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in particular, those large written words in black with red crosses to extend to criticism of factions and denunciation of individuals. In Wang’s work, each of the characters is usually highlighted aggressively with a determined circle, as if its author has assumed the visual power to sentence a construction to death, and at the same time to deprive people of their houses. Ubiquitous signs of demolition indicate the intensity of interruption to normal living condition, both physically and psychologically. Such a situation has propelled many artists to address the process of urban development 2 Wang Jinsong, in interview with the author, Beijing, 25 March 2006. 3 Ibid.

94 

Jiang Jiehong

with a critical lens. Rong Rong, from the Fujian countryside of southern China, first arrived in Beijing in 1992 to pursue an artist’s career at the city’s east fringe, between the Third and Fourth Ring Roads, an unnoticeable, dilapidated village called Dashanzhuang. The place had been made known as Beijing’s East Village (东村) by a group of artists who were striving their artistic lives during their stay in the 1990s, before it was completely demolished in 2002 (Wu 2003). For Rong Rong, it was breathtaking to experience the energy of the ever-expanding Chinese capital. Unlike his hometown, which enjoyed a relatively steady pace of life, construction and destruction in Beijing were everyday experiences. As Visser (2010, 146) describes it: While cities worldwide are fully acquainted with the disruption of construction projects, the enormity of the demolition China has experienced in recent years has had a profound psychological impact on city residents. In many Chinese cities radical demolition has continued for more than a decade, keeping metropolises like Beijing in a state of perpetual destruction and disruption.

This perpetual destruction has resulted in the omnipresence of demolished sites and even the spectacle of ruins. Rong was above all stuck by the conspicuous presence of ruins in the city and from 1996 he began focusing on demolished houses in the city. They were empty, except for the torn pictures of portraits still hanging on shattered walls. These portraits – mainly of women, either recognizable or unknown, some perhaps movie stars or fashion models – became the only evidence of the private lives once lived in the spaces as the centre of attention. ‘Like any representation of ruins, the subject of the photographs is the absence or disappearance of the subject. But Rong Rong fills the vacancy with images,’ notes Wu Hung (2012: 216-217). He continues (ibid.): Torn and even missing a large portion of the composition, these images still exercise their alluring power over the spectator – not only with their seductive figures but also with their seductive spatial illusionism. With an enhanced three-dimensionality and abundant mirrors and painting-within-paintings, they transform a plain wall into a space of fantasy, even though this wall is all that is left of the house.

These vulnerable fragments of pictures abandoned in empty houses do not serve to make the spaces appear fuller (though they certainly enrich the images); on the contrary, they highlight the emptiness by implying the

The Tr ansient Cit y

95

past lives that once filled the spaces. In fact, the spaces are now more than empty; they appear to have been turned violently inside out. They are naked. When artist Inri joined Rong Rong from Tokyo in 2000, their first home was a traditional courtyard house in Liulitun, a residential area on the east side of Beijing. They got married there and went through the most difficult time of their artistic lives, surviving on very little income. However, to the couple, ‘Liulitun is almost like a shiwai taoyuan’ (世外桃园 literally, ‘a land of peach blossoms beyond the world’: an earthly paradise, the concept first invented by Tao Yuanming (365-427) at the time of the Eastern Jin dynasty). ‘Although it was only for a short time, we enjoyed Liulitun. Up until today, it is always alluring and dreamlike in our memories.’4 Soon this place, too, faced its destiny of being demolished. After a three-month residency in Australia in 2001, the couple returned to find their ‘land of peach blossoms’ had collapsed. ‘In the taxi, all the way from Beijing airport back home,’ they recall, ‘the landscape was crumbling away, with many houses and streets disappearing, as if they had experienced an air raid. The minute we saw this had happened to our own home, our hearts sank and we collapsed, too.’5

Like other inhabitants, Rong Rong and Inri were forced to move. The couple lost their first home, together with all the associations they had cherished that had solely belonged to that house. They decided to make an artwork by revisiting the area before everything vanished during redevelopment. Liulitun is a series of images taken while the houses were in the process of being destroyed. Juxtaposing against broken windows and collapsed walls, the couple always appear in the photos, both dressed in black. The involvement of the figures was carefully managed so that they were presenting a documentary of witnessing the demolition rather than a simple documentary of the demolition. Without any possibility of resisting the brutal invasion of private space, the pair perch on top of a courtyard gate or sit amid the rubble, grieving over the loss of place and, more importantly, their personal relationship to their home. Or, with apparent helplessness, the couple hold onto one another in a demolished, roofless house that takes the shape of a large boat, as if fearlessly sailing on a sea of ruins, or more likely run aground at this moment of disaster. The future destination of 4 Rong Rong and Inri, artist statement, 2013, email communication to the author, 12 April 2014. 5 Ibid.

96 

Jiang Jiehong

Figure 3.1 Rong Rong, Liulituan, no. 8, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

the journey remains unknown while the ruins stand monumental in the photograph. They break boundaries between interior and exterior spaces, and connect past and future cities by representing the temporality of the urban appearance (Figure 3.1). Returning to Beijing in the early 1990s after a six-year stay in Bologna, artist Zhang Dali found a strange reality – a reality of transience. In his words: ‘This is the city I feel so familiar with, yet at the same time it’s unrecognizable.’6 With the power of urban development in mind, Zhang believed that art would only be meaningful if it went outside of the artist’s studio and back to the city. In 1995, he decided to pursue the graffiti practice he had first begun in Italy, seeing the whole city as his studio. ‘I used graffiti 6 Zhang Dali, unpublished artist statement, 2003.

The Tr ansient Cit y

97

as my weapon, to connive with the oppression in my soul,’ he noted. ‘I took the photos as artworks, or as a visual archive which records the process of the city being dismembered and the new life born through the ruins. Changes are taking shape under a sky full of dust and within a forest of reinforced concrete.’7 Zhang’s graffiti, a spray-painted silhouette of a large bald head, alone or in groups, appeared on walls, bridges and other public spaces. It was duplicated and gradually spread across the city, becoming a familiar image to many residents of Beijing. The profile quite clearly came from the artist’s own identity and, as Maurizio Marinelli writes in Chapter 2, with it Zhang made a loud aesthetic statement about Beijing’s transformation. In this work, later known as the Dialogue series, thousands were produced in free-hand, mostly on construction sites, to form part of the urban landscape, or as the title indicates, to initiate a ‘dialogue’ with the city and its transformation. For example, it was scrawled on a half-demolished building in a Shanghai residential area, above an advertisement for a removal company and with the vast Jin Mao Tower rising behind the wasteland. The sudden appearance of the artist interferes with the pace of the development, negotiates between the old and new landscapes, and witnesses all the acts of destruction and construction. In the series Demolition, an extension to the Dialogue, Zhang Dali chiselled out his painted heads with the assistance of some construction workers that he hired. His profile now seemed to open a window towards a surviving cultural legacy, such as a corner of the Forbidden City covered with gold tiles, which, in Roberts’s (2013: 167) words, was ‘drawing attention to the beauty and splendour of the World Heritage Site, and the violence of change.’ At other times, the resulting holes can provide a glimpse in the distance of a modern building in the process of construction, such as Beijing’s World Financial Centre. Zhang’s graffiti was one of the simplest forms of public art, or mass art, and yet he turned it into a performance through photographs. As Wu Hung (2012: 229-230) discusses his photographic works developed out of the series: On the one hand, they record site-specific art projects that have been carried out by the artist. On the other, these projects were designed largely to be photographed, resulting in two-dimensional images as independent works of art. Consequently, the role of Zhang Dali’s graffiti self-portraits also changed: no longer stimulating interactions on the street, it become a pictorial sign that heightened an urban visual drama. 7 Ibid.

98 

Jiang Jiehong

Figure 3.2 Zhang Dali, Demolition, no. 125a, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

In fact, when the head shape was carved into the wall, the graffiti became sculptural and architectural. It was no longer merely a visual testimony to the performance; it now became an artistic action determinedly applied to the architectural ruins to commit the artist himself as part of the destroyed cities (Figure 3.2). As many scholars (Wu 2004; Liu and Wu 2006; Wang 2016: 16) have pointed out, the unfolding of Chinese urbanization is highly uneven and has produced unequal opportunities for cities of different socio-political status. Major cities, notably Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have benefited tremendously from the central government’s focused investment in transforming them into global cities (e.g. Wu 2000; Xu and Yeh 2005; Wu and Zhang 2007). Many minor cities from inland, however, suffer strategic negligence and experience rapid decline or even vanish entirely due to ‘the unequal distribution of social resources and unjust restructuring of urban space’ (Wang 2016: 45). This is the case with Yumen (玉门), a city located northwest of Qilian Mountain in Gansu Province that once flourished as a production site of petroleum. In 1938, the very first oilfield in China was established in Yumen and from 1939 to 1949 it yielded more than 90 per cent of the total national petroleum production that brought China into the club of states with oil reserves. With little strategic planning and the exploitive development, however, the oilfield was quickly exhausted. In an ever competitive environment for urban development (Wu

The Tr ansient Cit y

99

Figure 3.3 Zhuang Hui and Dan’er, Yumen: Laojun Temple Oilfield, 2006-2009. Courtesy of the artists.

2004; Liu and Wu 2006) since the 1990s, serious problems relating to poor governmental and institutional decisions, combined with the deterioration of local natural resources, have brought a social crisis to this area. In 2006, Yumen-born and Beijing-based artist Zhuang Hui, in collaboration with Dan’er, a Shaanxi native who is also based in Beijing, began preparing for their work Yumen Project. According to their research, there had been at least 90 industrial enterprises in Yumen in 1996, but just four years later there were only eight left and they had survived through all kinds of difficulties. During its time of prosperity, Yumen had boasted a population of more than 120,000 residents, but by 2007 three-quarters of these had moved, leaving behind mostly elderly, retired or disabled people. The whole city was overshadowed by an atmosphere of insecurity and fear. Abandoned public facilities, deserted streets and demolished residential buildings could be seen everywhere (Figure 3.3). In 2008, the two set up a photography studio and hired a local photographer to capture Yumen’s ‘last expression’ over the course of a year before its final demise.8 The studio opened as an ordinary business so no one was told or realized that a contemporary art project was being produced. The 8

For the whole project, see http://seachina.net/yumen, accessed 9 April 2017.

100 

Jiang Jiehong

first-hand visual materials, as well as the entire process of setting up and running the studio, became part of the artwork, and consequently of course a series of collected photographs was produced in the studio. Make-up, costumes, props, backdrops and lighting were carefully arranged in order to provide a variety of the commercial services available in any other studio of its kind. Identification photographs, family and group portraits, and artistic photographs were collected with the aim of examining popular styles and aesthetic understandings within the region. The final presentation of Yumen Project contains an obvious contrast. On the one hand, the prosperity of the past oilfield boom has irreversibly vanished, while the rotten slogans of ‘Yumen Spirit’ and the propagandist paintings remaining on the abandoned sites is reminiscent of a tragic story of the recession; on the other hand, beauty, happiness and dreams can still be fabricated and even individually tailored in the photographic studio. According to the customer’s personal preference, they could choose to be proudly dressed in uniform or the most up-to-date style of jeans, as if the depletion of oil supplies and subsequent social problems in the area had never come about. Local residents, styled in outfits and make-up, were captured within their ideal environments, disregarding anything less bright or colourful outside the immediate frame, their collective gaze posing a confident promise of a better life beyond the depressed surroundings. Overall, this complex project, mixing photography, performance, and participatory art, presents a powerful case for the interrelation between art and urban transformation, or more appropriately, degradation.

Construction Next to ruins, we find construction sites where buildings are masked by scaffolding and streets suffused with energy and confusion, which might project a somewhat positive light. As indicated earlier, the style of Chinese urban construction very much continues the revolutionary spirit of the Maoist era: when the old is gone, the new must come, and must come fast. New buildings, complexes, residential or business districts, or even a new city can be established within a short period of time. Rem Koolhaas (1997: 562-563) has a vivid depiction of the way Chinese architects set record speed in their work in the 1990s: ‘5 designers x 1 night + 2 computers = 300-unit single family housing development; 1 architect x 3 nights = 7-story walk-up apartment; 1 architect x 7 days = 30-story concrete residential high-rise.’ He thus attributes the ‘Great Leap Forward’ to the astonishing speed of

The Tr ansient Cit y

101

Figure 3.4 Wang Qingsong, Skyscraper, no. 2, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

construction in China (Koolhaas et al. 2001). Of course, everybody who observes closely China’s urban development would know that the ‘Great Leap Forward’ construction continued well into the first decade of the twenty-first century in major Chinese cities and have now actually permeated into other cities and even the vast countryside as a result of the central government’s newly formulated urban-rural integration policies (see e.g. Ye 2009). Inevitably, construction as a theme has entered into the art of many urban-based artists. In response to the nationwide ‘socialist new countryside construction’ movement, an officially sponsored developmental programme advocated by the Chinese government since 2005, and the ensuing construction boom in rural regions, Wang Qingsong conceived and created Skyscraper (Figure 3.4) in 2008. The photograph illustrated here depicts the process of constructing the outdoor installation that he designed in the suburbs of Changping County, 30 miles north of Beijing. The finished structure is 35 metres high, with a diameter of 45 metres (115 x 148 ft), built solely by the manpower of more than 40 construction workers over the course of a month. The surrounding area still seems to be underdeveloped, or at least not yet urbanized. The outline of thousands of gold-painted iron scaffolding poles gradually and gloriously takes shape among the grouped rural bungalows, while in contrast the plain sandy land seems to be afflicted by the invasion of the skyscraper.

102  Figure 3.5 Miao Xiaochun, Surplus, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Jiang Jiehong

The Tr ansient Cit y

103

In its video version, Skyscraper shows the structure developing but any appearance of the scaffolders has been discreetly eradicated from the moving image. In order to achieve this, the installation had to be constructed little by little, a pole at a time, by scaffolders who must have had to clamber up and down to allow for the slow progress of the shooting. This is an interesting and purposeful contrast to what would be happening at actual construction sites. On the one hand, as the artist has noted, the omission of the builders points to the fact that although China’s urbanization is heavily reliant on the contribution of workers who are largely migrants from poor rural areas and who ironically are unable to afford to live in the buildings they themselves have constructed. On the other hand, the omission leads to the curious impression that makes the structure animated, as if it has grown all by itself in the middle of nowhere. The month-long labour is compressed into a one-minute clip within the video. The manpower remains unknown, until the photographic version of the work reveals the authors of the miracle. In the chosen scene, nearly 20 builders are on site, working collectively to manifest the scaffolding as a specimen of all high-rises. No matter how glossy and grand, it is still hollow, insubstantial, like a mirage in the desert, dissolving from our illusions once we blink away. In pursuing the status of global city, major municipal governments in China have also resorted to high-profile international architects in designing grand urban projects to boost their city image. In Beijing, for example, new landmarks sprang up rapidly at the time of the 2008 Olympics, including the Giant Egg (National Centre for the Performing Arts) designed by Paul Andreu and the Bird’s Nest (the National Stadium) by Herzog & de Meuron. Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television Headquarters had appeared earlier, in 2002, and Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport by Norman Foster in 2003. This new urban landscape has been recorded, discussed, and problematized by many contemporary artists, including Wuxi-born and Beijing-based Miao Xiaochun. In his wall-filling work, Celebration (2004), Miao features an enormous celebratory assembly at an opening ceremony for the SOHO real estate company; and in Theatre (2007), he explores the incongruity of the Giant Egg, abruptly landed, like a UFO, on the north-south axis of an ordinary alley in a traditional residential area. In 2009, Miao completed another photographic narrative, Surplus (Figure 3.5), in which two differently styled and functioned constructions are juxtaposed next to one another: on the left a disco club with a fashionably Westernized façade, and on the right a Chinese restaurant with a traditional appearance – an imitated modernity versus a fake tradition. In this instance, the location of the two buildings has not in fact been

104 

Jiang Jiehong

artistically or digitally manipulated: it is real, although it looks surreal. And, both of them are all newly built to suit the different needs of urban lives. To really immerse oneself in these almost theatrical settings, one could further explore and imagine the stories taking place inside each window and the ways people consume the ‘surplus’ energy and fervour of the day. Miao employed digital technology, which has made these gigantic photographic works possible to compete with any large paintings in major museums. In today’s world of photography, physical size has become one of the signal characteristics, where ‘a difference of form has migrated to a difference in scale, which simultaneously preserves and redefines their content’ (Szeman and Whiteman 2009: 553). More importantly, it seems to be crucial to view the images in the actual size, ‘in some way offering direct representations of our contemporary circumstances [since] […] a large part of their impact arises from the sense that we see in them the physical evidence and substance of our era’ (ibid.). By the f irst decades of the new century, high buildings covered with shining glass walls and bearing innovative appearances that more or less recalled of globalized (or Westernized) tastes have become omnipresent in Chinese cities. And yet these new favourites themselves can be replaced very quickly. This is a topic that Hunan-born and Beijing-based artist Jiang Pengyi has been addressing in a number of artworks. While working as a photographer for a real estate company in Beijing, Jiang began to focus on newly built highrises containing apartments, off ices and shopping malls for advertising purposes, and gradually amassed a collection of urban constructions. These became the key resource for his 2006 photographic series, All Back to Dust, which presents disturbing images of urban disintegration. Real-life residential blocks have clearly been turned into miniatures and destroyed in a wilderness of rocks and weeds. Some of the structures have fallen down, some are broken or distorted, and some are still on f ire, as if following a natural disaster. But no rescue is required: these buildings have already been abandoned. Even architectural landmarks have been discarded in the junk, including, recognizably, the towers of the China World Trade Centre or those more recent urban achievements, the Giant Egg and the Bird’s Nest (Figure 3.6). Notably, the Bird’s Nest, which opened in 2008, would still have been under construction at the time the work was produced. The artist could not wait to show us an imagined future – one that is singularly depressing, but importantly, one that overrides the imperative of rapid urbanization by explicitly illustrating the transience of our urban reality through powerful apocalyptic visions.

The Tr ansient Cit y

105

Figure 3.6 Jiang Pengyi, All Back to Dust, no. 2, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

A city is a site that sustains multiple spaces of relationships where people inhabit, work, and love. But, in China today, changes characterize such spaces amid the endless movement of demolition and construction. Even for those who have never been away for long – those who are living through and experiencing rapid urbanization – it can be difficult to recognize some of the once familiar places of their home cities from one day to the next. Their own urban environment can soon become alien, and the intimacy between the city and its inhabitants is replaced by a perpetual state of transition. The transitory nature of Chinese cities in contemporary times is a topic contemplated by Guangzhou-based artist Chen Shaoxiong, a member of the well-known Big Tail Elephant Working Group of the 1990s. The groundbreaking practices of the group as a whole is to be discussed in great length by Nancy P. Lin in Chapter 6, whilst the focus here is on Chen’s artistic interpretation of urban spaces undergoing constant transitions. In 1997, Chen started making a three-dimensional photo collage series, consisting of several levels of images he took from Guangzhou. Rather than utilizing advanced photographic instruments or digital technologies he made work that looks amateur and almost clumsy. Simply capturing whatever he saw on the street, including pedestrians, vehicles, passengers and traffic

106 

Jiang Jiehong

Figure 3.7 Chen Shaoxiong, Streetscape I, 1997-1998. Courtesy of the artist.

signs, he turned his images into three-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, according to the proportions of their sizes, and created rearranged urban street scenes. As indicated in each image by the deliberate inclusion of a pair of hands, the collages are perfectly portable, to be positioned against new backgrounds of specific urban landscapes (Figure 3.7). By relying on the happenstance of the camera’s shutter, Chen minimized his artistic involvement in the photographic practice, almost inadvertently arresting – or freeze-framing – the incessant changes in the cityscape. Each reconstructed photo narrative offers a miniature theatre, or a transient city, in which an ordinary street view can be restaged. It is excerpted and reassembled from everyday reality. Chen (2002: 94-96) has said, ‘although I am a resident of Guangzhou I still have a tourist mentality towards this city. Not just because this city will outlive me, but faced with the daily changes, I often have the feeling of being elsewhere.’ Chen’s relationship with the city is patently unclear; photography, for him, is the way to see the city. However, he continues: ‘I feel that the speed at which I photograph the streets of Guangzhou will never catch up with the speed at which the streets of Guangzhou are changing’ (ibid.). Naturally, there is no possible means (including video) of registering and manifesting every single detail of an urban transformation; as it is, the portability of Chen’s photographic installations, designed to

The Tr ansient Cit y

107

be re-photographed back in reality, suggests clearly the momentum of change as well as the transitory nature of what one sees. Arguably, as Hou Hanru discusses Chen’s position in relation to the changing nature of urban living: Assuming himself as a permanent tourist living in his home city reveals a very important aspect that decisively changes the nature of contemporary cities from mutually separated localities with fixed characteristics to more generic, mutually connected and influenced globalised urban sites with mobility, in both external and internal directions. (Hou 2009a)

Boris Groys (2008: 105) calls the times in which we live ‘an era of postromantic […] tourism, marking a new phase in the history of the relations between the urban ou-topos and the world’s topography.’ In his view, rather than individual tourists departing from their places of origin to undertake journeys around the world, it is ‘all manner of people, things, signs and images drawn from different kinds of local culture’ that are now on the move. Thus, ‘the rigid distinction between romantic world travellers and a locally based, sedentary population is rapidly being erased. Cities are no longer waiting for the arrival of the tourist – they too are […] starting to join global circulation, to reproduce themselves on a world scale and to expand in all directions.’ Chen’s mini-street installations highlight not only the dynamic movement of the cities, but also their rapid proliferation in resembling one another: the homogenization of urban appearance in China. Placed against real cities to create double scenes, they literally pose in front of the lens, a humorous expression divulged by the hands of the presenter. It is a truism that, at the end of the day, we are all tourists in this world, for a longer or shorter journey. Urban transformation in China is almost like a magic show: things can be changed, reformed, congregated, dispersed, or afforested at any minute; they can even disappear and reappear again in different fashion in the blink of eye. The ephemerality of the cities is most explicit in Hangzhou-born and -based artist Zhang Peili’s work, which had been developed, arguably, with no artistic effort. In 1999, the artist became interested in the newly revealed main entrance to the Hangzhou Parterre, located on the west bank of the well-known West Lake. He set up his tripod on the axis line immediately after the entrance to photograph a symmetrical view of the boulevard leading to the heart of the park (Figure 3.8). In the initial plan, the work was to be a series of critical reflections upon public sculptures in China, such as the Grecian-like statues standing on both sides of the

108 

Jiang Jiehong

avenue.9 The image provides no culturally related visual references: though the plants might seem to be arranged according to a particular gardening aesthetics, the picture could have been taken anywhere. Of course, Zhang Peili knew that this was the Hangzhou Parterre, although the landscape appeared afresh to him. For him, the Western style of the sculptures seemed an irrelevant misplacement in a Chinese park, providing an altogether hybrid environment. However, the real confusion was to occur a year later, when he revisited the Parterre. Of the view at the entrance, there remained not a single identical element. The original boulevard was no longer a boulevard, but instead had been transformed into a square, with a few stairs leading up towards a huge parterre in the centre. The Western-style statues had been removed and replaced by a pair of Chinese semi-nudes at the front, probably inspired by the flying apsaras from the Dunhuang murals. From exactly the same position and perspective, Zhang’s camera captured a completely different scene. His second visit to the site might not have been deliberately planned for any conceptual purpose, but the moment at which he saw the complete transformation of the landscape at the entrance was decisive. His original idea of discussing the hybridity of public art was no longer the priority, his new focus became changes in reality. During the production of the work, what was creative in a true sense: the artist’s photographic language, or the reconstruction of the Parterre’s entrance and its reappearance? The two photographs taken just one year apart are purely documentary, but their juxtaposition makes a remarkable statement. The two separate images – varying in all sorts of aspects, including the layout of the space, the arrangement of the plants, the style of the sculptures and the materials of the pavement – faithfully show a view of a single place. This is the urban reality of China today. The truth of this reality, indeed, cannot be presented by numerous erected skyscrapers, mega residential areas, extended metro lines with multiple connections, or elevated roads without any apparent beginning or end, but, instead, by the momentum of incessant changes. This is a dynamic reality that is always situated between destruction and construction, between old and new, and between remembered and imagined. It is like a fast-spinning coin that never stops. We seem to know vaguely what are on the two sides of the coin, we seem to understand both the past and the future of our cities – be able to reminisce and to expect, but the appearance of their images is never clearly visible – too transient to see. It results in an illusion, an everlasting image

9

Zhang Peili, in interview with the author, 13 November 2013, Hangzhou.

The Tr ansient Cit y

109

Figure 3.8 Zhang Peili, The Entryway of Hangzhou Parterre One Year Apart, 20002001. Courtesy of the artist.

110 

Jiang Jiehong

of the temporality, appearing as a globe – plump and energetic, and at the same time, hollow and vulnerable. In fact, what Zhang Peili produced can be easily achieved by any ordinary passers-by, any amateur photographers, any of us, particularly nowadays, when pictures can be taken instantly with high-resolution cameras on our smartphones, rendered at will, and can be saved effortlessly. The artist shows us nothing but a fixed sight, which unfolds an immense change within a year, a relatively short span of time according to a usual urban experience.

Conclusion Artists included in this chapter are not only practitioners to observe and critique but more importantly they are residents who witness and experience all the changes in their cities. They are not professional photographers as such, whilst photography is appropriate as a medium for effective artistic discussions and interpretations. With China’s vision of development in the globalized world, one must have believed that urban changes will surely continue, and yet, photography, to some extent, becomes the only means to capture our present and, at the same time, to possess our past, even though it is imaginary. The present life in China, which could rapidly turn into a ‘past,’ urges photographers and artists to arrest the ‘past’ in order to better understand the present. In the international arena of contemporary art, Chinese photography has become increasingly important in the last 20 years, whilst urban development appears to be one of the most significant topics. More important, I argue, it is the driving force of so much creative practice related with photographic art productions. In other words, in China today, creativity does not purely rely on any artistic involvement; instead, it is born through the everyday reality of urban transformations. The greatest energy of the photography in innovative presentations can only be obtained when it meets and engages with contemporary China, and then be released as a power in practice. Photography is not just an independent language for artists to use to reflect visually what they have perceived in China’s urban life; more importantly, it has become a manifestation of the ephemerality of the cities that we apparently live in.

The Tr ansient Cit y

111

Bibliography Atkinson, Alan (2011) No Heaven Awaits Us: Contemporary Chinese Photography at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. Chinese Literature Today 2(1): 32-49. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2007) Spectacular Beijing: The Conspicuous Construction of an Olympic Metropolis. Journal of Urban Affairs 29(4): 383-399. Campanella, Thomas J. (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Chang, Tsong-zung and Nedoma, Petr (eds) (2003) A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography. Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive. Chen, Shaoxiong (2002) Wo weishenme paishe guangzhou jiejing [Why I Take Street Photos of Guangzhou]. In Ai, Weiwei (ed.) Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998-2002. Hong Kong: Timezone 8. Crinson, Mark (2005) Urban Memory: An Introduction. In Crinson, Mark (ed.) Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. London: Routledge, xi-xxiii. Friedmann, John (2005) China’s Urban Transition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Groys, Boris (2008) Art in the Age of Touristic Reproduction. In Groys, Boris, Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 101-110. Gu, Chaolin, Yehua Dennis Wei, and Ian G. Cook (2015) Planning Beijing: Socialist City, Transitional City, and Global City. Urban Geography 36(6): 905-926. Gu, Zheng (2001) Zai xianshiyu jiyi zhijian: 20 shiji 90 niandaide Zhongguo jishi sheying [Between reality and memory: Chinese documentary photography of the 1990s]. Zhongguo shying [Chinese photography] 263: 40-44. Gu, Zheng (2011) Contemporary Chinese Photography. Beijing: China Youth Press International. Harari, Yuval Noah (2008) The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harari, Yuval Noah (2015) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: HarperCollins. Hou, Hanru (2002) On the Mid-Ground. Ed. Yu, Hsiao-hwei. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Hou, Hanru (2009a) Chen Shaoxiong: cong bianxieshi de jiejing dao siren waijiao [Chen Shaoxiong: From portable streets to private diplomacy]. ChenShaoXiong. net. http://www.chenshaoxiong.net/?p=838, accessed 1 February 2016. Hou, Hanru (2009b) Chen Shaoxiong: From Portable Streets to Private Diplomacy. In Peckham, Robert (ed.) Chen Shaoxiong. Beijing: Timezone 8 Ltd., 2-19. Hsing, You-tien (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. London: Oxford University Press.

112 

Jiang Jiehong

Jiang, Jiehong (2015) An Era without Memories: Chinese Contemporary Photography on Urban Transformation. London: Thames & Hudson. Johnson, Ian (2013) China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million into Cities. New York Times, 15 June. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinasgreat-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?pagewanted=all, accessed 1 February 2016. Koolhaas, Rem (1997) Pearl River Delta. In David, Catherine, and Chevreir, JeanFrançois (eds) Politics – Poetics: Documenta X: The Book. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 562-563. Koolhaas, Rem, Chung, Chuihua Judy, Inaba, Jeffrey, and Leong, Sze Tsung (2001) Great Leap Forward. Köln: Taschen. Liu, Yuting, and Wu, Fulong (2006) The State, Institutional Transition and the Creation of New Urban Poverty in China. Social Policy and Administration 40 (2): 121-137. Logan, John R. (ed.) (2002) The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform. Oxford: Blackwell. MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Schoenhals, Michael (2006) Mao’s Last Revolution. London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Meyer, Michael J (2008) The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. New York: Walker & Co. Roberts, Claire (2013) Photography and China. London: Reaktion Books. Sontag, Susan (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin. Szeman, Imre, and Whiteman, Maria (2009) The Big Picture: On the Politics of Contemporary Photography. Third Text 23(5): 551-556. Visser, Robin (2004) Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning. Journal of Contemporary China 13 (39): 277-310. Visser, Robin (2010) Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Wang, Meiqin (2015) Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography. China Information 29(2): 176-201. Wang, Meiqin (2016) Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art. London: Routledge. Wu, Fulong (2000) Place Promotion in Shanghai, PRC. Cities 17 (5): 349-361. Wu, Fulong (2004) Urban Poverty and Marginalization under Market Transition: The Case of Chinese Cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(2): 401-423. Wu, Fulong (2007) Beyond Gradualism: China’s Urban Revolution and Emerging Cities. In Wu, Fulong (ed.) China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 3-25.

The Tr ansient Cit y

113

Wu, Fulong, and Zhang, Jingxing (2007) Planning the Competitive City-Region: The Emergence of Strategic Development Plan in China. Urban Affairs Review 42 (5): 714-740. Wu, Hung (2003) Rong Rong’s East Village. New York: Chambers Fine Art. Wu, Hung (2012) A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Wu, Hung (2014a) Contemporary Chinese Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Wu, Hung (2014b) Rong Rong de Dongcun: Zhongguo shiyan yishu de shunjian [Rong Rong’s East Village: Moments of Chinese experimental arts]. Shanghai: Shanghai Shijichubanshe. Wu, Hung, and Phillips, Christopher (eds) (2004) Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China. Göttingen: Steidl. Xu, Jiang, and Yeh, Anthony G.O. (2005) City Repositioning and Competitiveness Building in Regional Development: New Development Strategies in Guangzhou, China. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(2): 283-308. Ye, Xingqing (2009) China’s Urban-Rural Integration Policies. Trans. Christiansen, Flemming. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38(4): 117-143. Zhang, Tingwei (2011) Chinese Cities in a Global Society. In LeGates, Richard T., and Stout, Frederic (eds) The City Reader. London: Routledge, 590-598.

About the author Jiang Jiehong Professor, School of Art, Birmingham City University [email protected] Jiang Jiehong is a curator, writer and research professor. His curatorial projects include Guangzhou Triennial (2012), Asia Triennial Manchester (2014) and Thailand Biennale (2018). Jiang has published extensively and is principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect).

4

Shadow of the Spectacular Photographing Social Control and Inequality in Urban China1 Meiqin Wang Abstract Focusing on Shanghai artist Ni Weihua’s conceptual photography, this chapter examines his critical response to the saturation of off icially sanctioned visual presentations for both political and commercial purposes in urban public spaces. It argues that advertisements have assumed a commanding role in urban China, a phenomenon captured in Ni’s photographic series Keywords and Landscape Wall that deal with street billboards in Shanghai and other cities. Analysing Ni’s work in relation to the promulgation of official slogans, the penetration of the spectacle of consumerism in Chinese cities, and rising social inequality, the author contends that Ni advances a critical visualization that simultaneously documents and deconstructs China’s official portrayal of economic development and urbanism. Keywords: Ni Weihua, official ideology, consumerism, billboards, social control, inequality

Introduction The government of the PRC recognizes the importance of disseminating political ideologies through visual means in public spaces. During the Communist era, the portrait and words of Mao, together with other communist 1 The current chapter is a revised version of an article titled ‘Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography,’ published in China Information 29(2) (2015): 176-201.

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch04

116 

Meiqin Wang

imageries, were hung on the walls throughout the nation to inform and reinforce state-sanctioned political thoughts – a legacy still visible in some minor cites and the remote countryside. With China’s reform and opening up, the steadfast communist imageries have largely been replaced by words and images that the government deemed more suitable for conveying its current political agendas. China’s rapid economic development and its reckless urbanization in the past two decades have changed much of the country’s outlook and the lifestyle of Chinese urban residents. Nonetheless, the ever bigger and more spectacular political billboards established in cities across the country demonstrate the government’s continuous efforts in using visual representations as a means to regulate a society under dramatic transformations and to pass on new political directives. If anything has changed, it is that the government used to have a monopoly on urban public spaces, but now it has to compete for urbanites’ attention with the ever-inventive billboards from both domestic and foreign commercial brands in the age of global consumerism. To do so, the government has largely adopted the advertising strategies of the commercial world. While continuing its tradition of disseminating political edicts through hierarchically institutionalized administrative strategies, the government has increasingly relied on less authoritative, more diffusive, and creative visual representations to advertise its new political agendas, a point also stressed by Stefan Landsberger in the next chapter. One may argue that under the condition of consumerist urbanization, advertisements have assumed a commanding role and are utilized by both official and private sectors to promote all kinds of urban consumption ranging from concrete commodities such as high-end homes, beautiful neighbourhoods, and luxurious goods to intangible ones such as lifestyle, ideology, and cosmopolitan identity. Among all visual methods that have been employed to mobilize the public or evoke their desire to consume, outdoor billboards are a distinctive urban cultural product and an advertising form that reflects much the political and economic transformations of Chinese society. The omnipresence of outdoor billboards has shaped the urban characteristics of Chinese cities. Appearing everywhere, such as rooftops, building fronts, streets, or subway paths, these flat and huge displays not only dwarf passers-by but also create new grounds of imaginative spaces, complicating the visual experience of urban living. They are also the site where Shanghai artist Ni Weihua (倪卫华, b. 1962) has developed his conceptual photography from both critical and artistic perspectives. As a veteran avant-garde artist witnessing Shanghai’s spectacular rise into a global metropolis, Ni

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

117

has focused on articulating the changing relationships between urban residents and the city since early 1990s through innovative means. He first experimented with installation and performance art and since late 1990s he has worked exclusively with conceptual photography. His decision to adopt photography reflects the rising importance of this medium in dealing with the constantly changing urban reality, a point well illuminated by Jiang Jiehong in the previous chapter. Content-wise, Ni has made various social conflicts and tensions brought about by China’s ever-intensive urban transformation the subject of his artistic observation and contestation. His alignment of the advertisement of political slogans with violence (albeit through visual spectacles) poses a unique critique of the dominant official visuality in urban China, while his preference of documentary aesthetic stands him apart from other conceptual artists who use photography as the medium. The trajectory of Ni’s artistic career exemplifies the dynamic interrelations between urbanization and visual art, making him a fitting case for this anthology. This chapter looks at how the advertisements of official urban ideologies in Chinese cities are renegotiated or challenged in Ni’s work through a close reading of his photographic representation of street billboards in Shanghai and other cities. Ni’s Keywords (关键词) addresses the promulgation of a successive state policy concepts and slogans including ‘Development is the most important principle’ (发展是硬道理), ‘Build a harmonious society’ (构建和谐社会), and ‘Chinese dream’ (中国梦) in urban public spaces and documents the increasingly spectacular visual presentations adopted by state agencies. His Landscape Wall (风景墙) captures the penetration of the spectacle of consumerism in Chinese cities through street billboards of the real estate industry and makes bluntly visible the rising social inequality along with the country’s remarkable GDP growth. Through analysing the cultural origins and social implications of these photographic series, the chapter argues that they represent Ni’s artistic effort to simultaneously document and deconstruct China’s official discourses of economic development and consumerist urbanization.

Branding Political Slogans Ni Weihua’s recent photographic work Keywords – Chinese Dream: Shanghai Jiangdong Road captures a typical street view of Shanghai in 2015 (Figure 4.1). A billboard of magnificent size appears prominently on one side of a street, screening a construction site behind it from view. Established

118 

Meiqin Wang

by the government propaganda bureau, the billboard is there to advertise the slogan ‘Chinese dream.’ Off centre to the top right are the two Chinese characters spelling out ‘China,’ followed by a massive character ‘dream,’ all in bright red popping out against the blank background. Below them is the well-known cultural symbol of China, the Great Wall, sitting on top of lush and misty mountains. Ni’s photo portrays, in a straightforward way, the self-imposing dominance of the ‘Chinese dream’ billboard on the street, which reduces people and their vehicles into a miniature presence. He also captures the obvious disharmony on the scene, since the pristine beauty of the Great Wall in its majestic natural environment is conspicuously out of place in an urban environment packed with moving vehicles and apartment complexes. The image also reveals a distinctive process of Chinese urban transformation that involves constant demolition and reconstruction. The unsightly rubbles partially visible on the left side of the billboard and the construction crane soaring high above from behind it all remind of numerous old buildings and neighbourhoods being torn down to clear up space for new urban structures as the government pursues its dream of an urbanized China. The billboard is but one of the thousands established by the government to advocate ‘Chinese dream,’ a slogan having rapidly spread throughout Chinese cities since its first appearance in Beijing in July 2013 (Yiqing 2013; Johnson 2013). ‘Chinese dream’ is the content and concept of an ideological drive initiated by the new state administration led by President Xi Jinping. Xi defined the Chinese dream as national rejuvenation and prosperity, and emphasized that the Chinese dream is every Chinese citizen’s dream and that only if Chinese individuals accept the common national goals designed by the government can they realize their own dreams (Quishi Journal 2012). In the billboard, the Great Wall is called upon to serve as a collective symbol to evoke national pride – regardless of its popular connotation with the futility and cruelty of an ancient emperor’s ambition in dynastic China as well as its association with the old and inferior past during the Mao era (Gao 2004: 773-774). The slogan ‘Chinese dream’ has been incorporated into many variations such as ‘Chinese dream, my dream,’ ‘China fulfils its dream and all families prosper,’ and ‘beautiful Chinese dream.’ As time goes by, the outdoor billboards for Chinese dream have developed into ever more spectacular and polished forms, appearing no less attractive than famous commercial brands that used to lead outdoor advertisements in Chinese cities. Advertising the political slogan in urban public spaces like a commercial brand, however, is not the invention of the Xi administration. The practice of

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

119

Figure 4.1 Ni Weihua, Keywords – Chinese Dream: Shanghai Jiangdong Road, June 7, 2015, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

employing the advertising strategies of the commercial world for ideological tooling purposes is a tradition that the Chinese government has become accustomed to since the 1990s with its rapid economic growth and recordbreaking scale of urbanization. The advertisement of Chinese dream actually follows suit of an earlier slogan campaign for ‘harmonious society,’ which was the most eye-catching official slogan that populated Chinese urban public spaces before 2013. ‘Harmonious society’ was a policy concept propagated by the previous state administration headed by President Hu Jintao between 2002 and 2012. Variations such as ‘Build a harmonious society’ and ‘Harmonious demolition’ were printed on independent billboards or banners attached to the surface of urban structures. The legacy, however, could be traced further back to the administration of President Jiang Zemin, who largely followed the economic reform policies laid out by the late Deng Xiaoping, the mastermind of China’s reform and opening up. During Jiang’s reign (1989-2002), the merging of commercial advertisement and political slogan began to take shape with billboards advertising Deng’s famous catchphrase ‘Development is the most important principle’ being established in major cities as well as some suburban areas that were designated as developmental zones. The popularity of this slogan is what propels Ni Weihua to launch his conceptual photography Keywords series in 1998.

120 

Meiqin Wang

‘Development Is the Most Important Principle’ In Keywords – Development, Ni documents street advertisements proclaiming ‘Development is the most important principle.’ In his view, the emergence of this phrase in prominent public spaces chronicles China’s dramatic transformation from a political society driven by revolutionary ideals to a materialist one that values economic development as the only principle (Ni 2008). What can be more revealing for a society that adopts consumerism as its primary ideology than the advertisement of political slogans as if they were commercial brands? Ni calls such slogans ‘advertising words’ and posits that through repeating, spreading and infiltrating, advertising words have become an indispensible part of the scenery in urban residents’ daily life (Wang and Wang 2008: 26). As a reader of Henri Lefebvre, Ni adopts his conception of social space as a complex product of concrete human practices and is keenly aware of Lefebvre’s (1991) insights of the power struggles taking place in the urban space and of visual representations that condition the thoughts and actions of people who live in that space. For Ni, the explosion of ‘development’ slogans is a manifestation of the state’s heightened efforts to homogenize and shape the public space and through which to carry out official discourses. His urge to problematize the slogans by turning them into the objects of his visualization, albeit in a very subtle way disguised by documentary aesthetics, therefore is a conscious attempt to escape the confining effect of the state propaganda through one ‘language event’ after another.2 Ni took photos of the ‘development’ slogan in various urban settings. In a piece titled Keywords – Development: Shanghai Zhongshan Road East No. 1 (Figure 4.2), the billboard in the photo is located at the side of a public square, projecting itself as a scenic spot for people to take photos. A group of older adults have arranged themselves in three rows in front of the ‘development’ billboard, behind which is the most famous street in Shanghai – the Zhongshan Road East of Shanghai Bund. Their group photo is centred on the billboard, which is a very telling illustration of the effect of off icial ideologies on the mindset of the general public in China. Under the logic of developmentalism, China has witnessed extraordinary economic growth and urban transformation. Shanghai owes much its current international status to the central government’s preferential policies, which has allowed the city to prioritize economic 2 Ni defines the replacement of an old public slogan with a new one when a new state administration comes into power as a ‘language event.’

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

121

Figure 4.2 Ni Weihua, Keywords – Development: Shanghai Zhongshan Road East No. 1, December 15, 1998, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

development above all else since 1991 and to transform itself in the short period to become a metropolis of global signif icance in the domains of f inance, trade, and commerce (Wu 1999: 207-216; Wei, Leung, and Luo 2006: 231-244). In another piece Keywords – Development: Shanghai Xin Kezhan, Ni captures the presence of the slogan on a busy street intersection populated by pedestrians, bike riders, and motor vehicles (Figure 4.3). Written in red on a white surface and accompanied by a telephone number, the slogan serves as the sole content of a standing billboard. During his research, Ni was intrigued to discover that the ‘development’ slogan was often put on empty advertisement boards waiting to be sold (Wang and Wang 2008: 27). Apparently the political correctness of the message has made the slogan a popular temporary substitute before corporations purchased the advertising slots and replaced them with their own specific advertisements, such as the Pepsi logo across the street. Some scholars have argued that since China’s reform, commercial advertisements appearing in newspapers have often appropriated official ideologies for the promotion of their products (Zhao and Belk 2008). It seems that the strategy also works on outdoor billboards, as shown in this photograph. Ni comments that ‘under the aura of development, everybody is happy and all conflicting economic, political,

122 

Meiqin Wang

Figure 4.3 Top: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Development: Shanghai Xin Kezhan, May 23, 1999, 1999; Bottom: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Development: Qingdao Shangdong Road, Shangdong, October 15, 2003, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

123

social and cultural problems no longer seem problematic because we are all “developing.”’3 Ni is being satirical here. China’s headlong plunge into economic development has caused acute social problems but these are overshadowed by the mandate of development and often considered a necessary sacrifice for China’s transformation into a modernized urban nation (Qin 1997; Wang 2014). In Keywords – Development: Qingdao Shangdong Road, Shangdong (Figure 4.3), Deng Xiaoping is portrayed on the right of a large billboard. The aging leader is smiling as if in approval of the success brought about by his reform policies. Behind him to his right is a magnificent waterfront view of a city with brand new skyscrapers standing in grandeur against the blue sky. At the top, written in large, red characters is the ‘development’ slogan. Obviously, by re-enacting Deng’s push for economic reform, it evokes the economic miracle and rapid development which China has experienced so far. According to Ni, the slogan had proliferated since the late 1990s in big cities such as Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, all of which benefited the most from Deng’s reform and opening-up policies. The billboard is a reminder of the dominant mode of social development since the 1990s, which is largely driven by pro-GDP growth policies. As Ni puts it, GDP brings growth to China’s cities and gives them an appearance of prosperity (Wang and Wang 2008: 30). Magnificent buildings and structures, symbolizing the ‘administrative feats’ of officials, are rapidly erected in cities across China – boasting the great achievement of ‘Chinese-style development.’ Since Chinese officials are appointed cadres in a top-down authoritarian fashion and are assessed for promotion on the basis of political loyalty and economic achievement, they naturally gravitate towards massive construction projects, such as city squares, flyovers, or development zones, that can be visible proof of their achievement. At the same time, a considerable number of the negative effects of urban development (such as the displacement of residents, the misuse of public resources and the destruction of cultural and historical heritage and of the environment) are often overlooked since these issues do not carry much weight in the assessment for promoting officials (Xu and Yeh 2005; Chan 2010). Ni argues, that bombarded by the mainstream discourse of developmentalism, the majority of Chinese people have generally overlooked the impact of ideology – made into ‘public speech’ through billboards – on their lives. They have also ignored the widening social and economic gap and the irreversible damage on the environment caused by overdevelopment (Wang and Wang 3

Ni Weihua, in interview with the author, Shanghai, 14 June 2013.

124 

Meiqin Wang

2008: 28). As such the official ideology has achieved its intended purpose. With Ni’s conceptual photography, however, we are shown very clearly how dominant public speech is implemented to shape the awareness of urbanites who unconsciously or willingly internalize the messages of the slogans they see everywhere. According to scholars who studied the impact of advertisements and pictorial representation in popular culture, a visual image is itself a speech, and accordingly a billboard can be seen as a ‘demand picture,’ calling on the viewer to act (Barthes 1972; Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). In China’s context, billboards as demand pictures often function to urge the public to accept and support government policies. From a semiotic perspective, researchers propose that every advertising image is making a kind of ‘visual argumentation,’ calling for a belief change and followed by action (Batra and Ray 1985; Groarke 1996). The visual argumentation depicted by the billboard in Figure 4.3 is particularly relevant in areas deemed to be of low urban status with low-rise buildings. Such billboards, with their argument that a city populated with high rises symbolizes progress, serve as an ideological preparation and justification for the impending demolition and redevelopment. As an artist who is also interested in the semantics of texts and images, Ni aims to reveal a crucial process of visual mobilization at a time when direct political control is no longer popular. He does so through faithfully presenting what there is at a specific time and location without any personal touch, such as staging the setting. His preference for documentary aesthetic over staged photography (the latter has been employed by many conceptual photographers in China) is driven by his desire to realistically capture the condition and materiality of the given urban public space. 4 Here he shares the same interest in the aesthetic of documentary realism with many independent documentary makers who adopt a style that film critics termed ‘on-the-spot-realism’ (Berry, Lu and Rofel 2010: 5), a topic also discussed by Zhen Zhang in Chapter 1. The rise of this aesthetic in photography and its continuous relevance in Chinese art, as some have observed, was stimulated by urban visual spectacles, which had become plenty amid rapidly expanding Chinese cities and massive displacement and migration (Gao 2005; Wang 2008; Schaefer 2010). Literature scholar Ban Wang (2008: 497) argues that this realism is different from official realism because it requires ‘that experience be seen within its real environment.’ Ni was certainly interested in documenting the real experience of living amid visual spectacles created by political slogans, along with the silent violence of state ideology as it unfolds in the urban space. 4 Ibid.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

125

Ni’s aesthetic choice also comes from his understanding of photography as a popular medium in our contemporary times with the revolutionary advancement of digital technology and widely available personal cameras. Discussing his preference of documentary over art photography, which usually involves manipulating lighting and setting to achieve desirable visual effects, Ni explains that he wishes to align with the viewing habit of ordinary citizens rather than professional photographers: ‘the general public usually bypass visual details such as light and shade to read the content of the photo directly’ (Liu and Chen 2013). As a result, individual pieces in this series can be described as simple and plain in terms of their aesthetics since they do not show much evidence of a careful planned angle or special lighting effect. These images are just like the kind of snapshots everybody can take as long as he/she can hold a camera stable and press the shutter. However, it is through this simple aesthetic of ‘on-the-spot-realism’ that Ni advances his discourse of visualization to make visible the silent violence and domination imposed upon Chinese citizens. Consequently, in light of Szeman and Whiteman’s articulation of the power of contemporary photography (2009: 554), Ni’s photographic work bears a ‘critical necessity’ since it could function as a form to sustain and support thinking and actions different from those promoted by the mainstream ideology.

From ‘Build a Harmonious Society’ to ‘Chinese Dream’ Around 2006, during Ni’s continuous survey of Chinese cities, he noticed the disappearance of the ‘development’ slogan and the emergence of ‘Build a harmonious society’ and its variations. The new political mandate was initiated by the new government administration under the leadership of Hu Jintao that attempted to address severe social and environmental problems arising from more than two decades of pro-economic development (Li and Cary 2011).5 In order to stabilize a society torn by conflicts and problems, the new generation of political leaders began touting a new official rhetoric and policy concept expressed in the slogan ‘Build a harmonious society.’ While still focusing on the goal of rapid economic growth, the Chinese government began promoting a more balanced policy, arguing that ‘scientific development and social harmony are integral’ (Xinhua 2007). It is clear that the ideological campaign for a ‘harmonious society’ was a correct 5 A systematic and detailed elaboration of ‘build a harmonious socialist society’ can be found in CCP (2006).

126 

Meiqin Wang

assessment of the grim state that China was in, and it reflected the central government’s efforts to solve the country’s problems, at least at the level of policy concept. With the nationwide campaign for harmony, Chinese cities were ‘harmonized,’ with the word appearing in all kinds of forms and phrases taking over public spaces in a short span of time. Ni began his new documentary series Keywords – Harmony with the observation that Shanghai had been quick to embrace the new political rhetoric emphasizing harmony. Since 2006, he has taken more than 2,000 photos of street scenes where slogans espousing ‘harmony’ were displayed, most of them from different locations in Shanghai and a few from other cities. Keywords – Harmony: Shanghai Zhouzhugong Road (Figure 4.4) is dominated by a large billboard, displaying the message ‘harmonious coconstruction.’ Printed in red and with a white background, the large Chinese characters stand out against a background featuring a new apartment complex. On the street a heavily loaded truck is passing by, closely followed by a freight tricycle whose rider seems to be trying hard to manoeuvre his vehicle. Harmony slogans at construction sites became a common visual phenomenon in Chinese cities in the late 2000s, especially since these sites tended to be associated with violence. In the first place, Chinese urban expansion involves the large-scale demolition of old communities and often the forced eviction of residents who were inadequately compensated. Moreover, construction sites are also locations where most migrant workers end up working and experiencing exploitation. The slogan in Keywords – Harmony: Hangzhou Jiefang Road (Figure 4.4) indeed addresses the issue directly by advocating ‘harmonious demolition.’ This time the slogan in golden yellow is simply attached to a red banner hanging over a run-down wall. Over the wall through a thin slice against the picture frame we see a densely built environment, where dilapidated single-storey houses, multi-storey houses, and apartment buildings jostle against each other. The slogan on the wall indicates that this area is designated for demolition by the city authorities. The slogan ‘Harmonious demolition’ here can be read as a textual reassurance, albeit a false one, as a remedy for the impending violence that often accompanies demolition in China. The irony which Ni’s photograph quietly presents is that the new ideological campaign does not seem to address the source of the problem; it simply adopts a new rhetoric without slowing down the mandate of development or redressing the severe socio-economic disparity. In Shanghai, in particular, in the run-up to Expo 2010, the city was turned into a massive construction site and there were many such slogans plastered on billboards to cover up the chaotic construction scenes, and, one may add, social discontent arising from enforced demolition and

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

Figure 4.4 Top: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Harmony: Shanghai Zhouzhugong Road, April 10, 2008, 2008; Bottom: Ni Weihua, Keywords – Harmony: Hangzhou Jiefang Road, 14 September 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

127

128 

Meiqin Wang

displacement (Tian 2005). In her study of Beijing’s construction boom for the 2008 Olympics, Broudehoux (2007) argues that construction projects built for the Olympics helped concentrate economic and political power in the hands of government leaders and private investors, exacerbating the profound inequalities and social conflicts since ordinary residents were forced to pay the costs in the form of dislocation, inflation and tax increases. The same can be said about Shanghai’s preparation for Expo 2010, which involved massive demolition and frenetic construction throughout the city as Shanghai sought to impress visitors with world-class architecture and high-standard urban infrastructure. To mention just one such case, along the shores of Shanghai’s Huangpu River, hundreds of factories and tens of thousands of families were forcibly displaced for the construction of a multibillion-dollar Expo 2010 theme park (Barboza 2010).6 Indeed, many pieces of Ni’s Keywords – Harmony series were taken near Expo venues that were under construction after the forced eviction of residents.7 It only became too evident that, rather than creating a fairer and more ‘harmonious society,’ the rhetoric of harmony was often been used to justify the increasingly tight media and Internet controls in China and to crackdown on people of different political views (Nordin and Richaud 2014; Larmer 2011). China continues to employ urbanization as its main development strategy and the activities of demolition and construction continue to feature prominently in the everyday living environment of urbanites. People pass by without paying any special attention to slogans in the same manner depicted in Ni’s street photographs. ‘Harmonious demolition’ as a slogan had inserted itself as an accepted reality and an inseparable component of urban space. However, once captured by Ni’s camera, this reality becomes a visual text that urges us to examine the manifestation of political power and the constructed nature of space. Also through his tireless work, we see the coming dominance of ‘Chinese dream’ slogans since 2013, some of which have taken awe-inspiring scale and magnificent visual design that dwarf all their predecessors (Figure 4.5). Ni said he was expecting a new slogan campaign to follow the changing leadership but still was surprised by the speed and scale the ‘Chinese dream’ slogans had replaced the ‘harmony’ ones.8 ‘Apparently “harmony” has failed to solve China’s major problems or to mobilize the public,’ he joked, ‘so the government now asks everybody to 6 Also see UN Watch (2010). 7 Ni Weihua, email communication with the author, 8 January 2014. 8 Ni Weihua, in interview with the author, Shanghai, 12 July 2015.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

Figure 4.5 Selected pieces from Ni Weihua’s Keywords – Chinese Dream series, 2013-2015. Courtesy of the artist.

129

130 

Meiqin Wang

“dream” their way out.’9 This catchword, ‘dream,’ now populates the public spaces in Chinese cities and frames the consciousness and sub-consciousness of urban residents. It is the dream of a new state administration that wishes to control the mindset of the public and demand their unconditioned support through a nationwide visual campaign so as to continue the single-partied authoritarian regime.

The City of Gap and Disharmony It is worth noting that Ni is not a professional artist in the common sense, because he has been a fulltime employee of a Shanghai technology company since 1983 and art is an endeavour that he engages during his spare time. Against the conventional wisdom, he believes that having a stable job in another field gives him the freedom to keep a critical distance from the ebb and flow of the contemporary art world and, more importantly, an opportunity to engage with the real world from a different capacity.10 His past artworks range from expressive paintings in the 1980s that dealt with the psychological state of modern individuals to installation and performance in the early 1990s that investigated new social phenomena brought up by China’s transformation.11 Some of these early works were included in the ‘Second Modern Chinese Art Research Documents Exhibition,’ one of the few landmark exhibitions organized in China for contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s.12 He was the only artist from Shanghai to be included in the once underground but now famous Black Cover Book, released in 1994, that introduced the works of leading Chinese avant-garde artists of the time.13 Starting in 1997 he turned his attention exclusively to the city in his art, exploring the relationships between individuals and the city they inhabited. He explains: ‘the city, as the site of higher civilization, is the congregation zone of various discourses and therefore the central location of conflict between the individual and the collective’ (Liu and Chen 2013). Certainly, Shanghai, one of the most rapidly growing cities in China since 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 For illustrations and brief introduction of these works, see Ni Weihua’s off icial website: http://www.niweihua.com/?page_id=10, accessed 29 September 2015. 12 The exhibition was organized by Wang Lin, a renowned art critic in China, and took place in the library of Guangzhou Art Academy. 13 Black Cover Book was privately published by artists Zeng Xiaojun, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and art critic Feng Boyi in 1994.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

131

the 1990s, has produced plenty of social conflicts and tensions that caught his attention. While continuing his Key Words series that visualizes the advertisement of political slogans, Ni began another multiple-year conceptual work, Landscape Wall, in 2008. The work was inspired by an interesting tension that he observed between the static but purposeful presence of advertising words in the background and the accidental appearance of people and vehicles in the foreground. For him, the words have turned into a background that is both real and symbolic against which actual urban routines take place. This tension would become the core of Landscape Wall as he examines the disharmonies between a static advertising image and real-life passers-by. As it is widely acknowledged, along with China’s spectacular economic growth and urban expansion is the alarmingly widening gap between the rich and the poor. Ni’s Landscape Wall visualizes the ubiquitous evidences of a society increasingly divided by the striking contrast between a small group of political and economic elite who have amassed great wealth from China’s economic reform and urban transformation and a great number of people who have benefited disproportionately little from the same process. The former embrace an ultramodern lifestyle of leisure and consumption, entertaining themselves with upscale housing, transregional and transnational travels and other expensive recreational activities, and luxury commodities the global market has to offer. The latter, on the other hand, find themselves still living in the premodern temporality, bounded to specific locales and having to struggle on a daily basis in order to make ends meet, therefore largely excluded from the fruits of modernization and urbanization. This wealth-induced social and temporal inequality is illustrated in many works under the umbrella title Landscape Wall, which still focuses on billboards but this time relating to real estate development. In Landscape Wall – Shanghai Puming Road (Figure 4.6), we find this social gap. In the foreground, three construction workers, identifiable by the construction hats they are wearing, are walking by. Behind them is Shanghai’s brilliant nightscape, which seems to be separated from these figures only by the Huangpu River. However, in reality, the distance between the construction workers and the cosmopolitan lifestyle embodied by these buildings is far broader than the river. As it is discussed by Maurizio Marinelli in Chapter 2, China’s revolutionary urban transformation has produced sleek and glittering cities alongside numerous excluded and dispossessed people. Among them, migrant workers constitute a major disenfranchised social group. Every year millions of rural migrants flood into cities, but their presence is often rendered invisible even though it is their labour that

132 

Meiqin Wang

Figure 4.6 Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Puming Road, 11:46, September 4, 2013, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

makes the rise of Chinese metropolises possible. The lack of assurance and pride on the faces of these characters make it clear that they do not feel any sense of ownership of the city they helped to build. They certainly cannot in a society where they enjoy few rights in the city and are systematically stigmatized as inferior outsiders, not to mention that they are often forced to disappear from public sight when important political events take place (Hurst 2006; Broudehoux 2004: 148-207; Zhang 2001). As a conceptual artist, Ni’s intention goes deeper than simply revealing the exclusion and marginalization of this group of people. The city in the background is not real; it is a picture. Actually it is a billboard advertising the famous commercial street of Shanghai, the Zhongshan Road. The construction workers, on the contrary, are real persons who happened to walk by the billboard in real place and time, as indicated by the full title of the piece. Many photographs in this series could easily cause a cognitive misperception because viewers may think that both the foreground and the background are real. The confusion is not unintentional as Ni, in this Landscape Wall series, continues his interest in juxtaposing two different worlds, the actual one unfolding in front of his eyes and the virtual one represented by the advertisements. In his Keywords series, Ni was taking snapshots and making his audience aware of the context in which the

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

133

billboard was located. In this series, the context disappears and virtual reality expands and even becomes the very site where Ni observes and conceptualizes the unfolding of consumerism and its inherent problem in urban China.

‘To Consume Is Glorious,’ but Not for All With immense patience, Ni has captured many visually striking contrasts right on the street. Landscape Wall – Shanghai Hengfeng Road (Figure 4.7) presents a man carrying a huge package emerging from the left of a billboard advertising a gleaming waterfront featuring high-rise hotel buildings and yachts against a crisp blue sky and washed by azure blue water. The man is totally burdened by the weight of the contents in the plastic bag made of cheap, light, and durable tarpaulin with its distinct red and blue stripes, a material commonly associated with migrant workers in China. Here manual labour and leisure and consumption are juxtaposed. Migrant workers might have toiled day and night in building the magnificent waterfront of Shanghai, but there certainly is no place for them after the job is done. At the centre of this large and well-composed panorama, just where white clouds are forming, there appears to be remnants of a small advertisement, apparently placed by a different party than the one who designed this large billboard. Although the small advertisement is missing a portion, the remaining part reads that it seeks casual labour for inns, KTVs, and other entertainment industries, for which workers are paid on a daily basis. These kinds of cheap and instant advertisement for low-end and sometimes illegal professions or services are widespread in Chinese cities and are often posted on the walls of ordinary residential complexes, the tops of formal billboards, electronic posts, street overpasses, curbs and floors, and other public spaces. Such advertisements target mainly migrant workers and lower-class urban dwellers, such as the man in the photo, a point elaborated by Elizabeth Parke in Chapter 9. Their abundant presence, as Parke also suggests, calls attention to the ‘public secret’ of exclusion and discrimination in Chinese cities. Often hard to remove, the small advertisement has been seen as a stigma, blemishing a city’s efforts to maintain a clean and well-ordered urban image. In this case, the advertisement is posted right on top of the officially sanctioned advertisement. The presence of this coarse small advertisement is in obvious contrast to the formal and refined advertising language adopted by mainstream institutions. Here the ‘tiered logic of consumption’ in Chinese cities, as literary critic Jing Wang (2005) has discussed, offers

134 

Meiqin Wang

Figure 4.7 Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Hengfeng Road, 15:00-15:30, April 18, 2009, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

a useful analytical framework. Advertisements in urban space can also be understood as tiered logic, as they are usually designed for different potential audiences and appear in urban spaces of varying grades. A billboard promoting leisure and consumption, as represented by hotels and yachts in the depiction of a grand city, belongs to the first-tiered advertisement that targets newly affluent individuals who can actively participate in urban tourism, entertainment, and consumer culture, through which they construct and express their urban subjectivity. On the other hand, for those people who worry about how to make ends meet on a daily basis, the low-tiered small advertisement that spells out clearly how much they can earn per day is a very practical and relevant piece of information. A sense of discordance and irony occurs when the advertisement and the people belonging to entirely different tiers of consumption are juxtaposed together, as in Ni’s image here. Discussing how migrants construct their identity and social belonging in Chinese cities where discrimination against migrants is a firmly institutionalized national practice, anthropologist Li Zhang (2001) brings up the concept of ‘consumer citizenship.’ She suggests that, through purchasing luxurious commodities, affluent migrants are allowed to claim a certain level of legitimacy in a social setting that generally denies the urban citizenship of migrants in the city. The promise of consumer citizenship,

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

135

unfortunately, does not seem to work for the majority of migrant workers who usually do not have the wealth to consume high-end consumer goods. They become the doomed group in a society that, as sinologist Robin Visser (2010: 18) rightly asserts, is restructuring into a class system based on wealth. Another piece from the series, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Songhu Road (Figure 4.8), features a beautiful high-end residential compound consisted of multiple-storied and stone-dressed postmodern buildings, which are adorned by well-groomed trees, a sparkling pool, and other charming amenities. Four men appear in the foreground, with two of them looking into the buildings while the other two turning to look at the viewers. They seem to be walking next to the pool, while on a much smaller scale we see a woman approaching one entrance. Stepping confidently, her style of dressing matches well with the house that she is entering. The four men, however, seem to be quite out of place with their unkempt clothing. We soon realize that there are indeed two worlds. The high-end living environment is a virtual world depicted on a large billboard. The four ordinary men, on the other hand, are from the real world and, judging by their dress and gesture, they are probably manual labourers or construction workers. In reality they have no means to such high-end homes, which instantly makes them inferior in comparison with those who can afford such houses in contemporary China. Manual labourers were privileged in the Maoist era when the productivity of labour was essential to nation-building. However, the official ideology has shifted and the logic of consumer society now dominates. Those who can afford to consume are represented as more modern in comparison with their counterparts since modernization is now defined as the consumption of consumer goods rather than as contribution to the society (Zhao and Belk 2008: 241). Focusing on real estate billboards, Ni’s Landscape Wall probes into the issue of housing, a highly controversial topic in urban China where major social problems arising from China’s rapid economic transformation such as social injustice, inequality, and corruption are playing out. These problems were the theme of a popular Chinese TV drama titled Dwelling Narrowness, literally translated as ‘Snail house’), released in 2009, which astringently portrayed the struggle and sacrifice that a young married couple had to endure in order to buy an affordable home in a metropolis modelled upon Shanghai (Feng 2009). The TV drama closely engaged with the city’s changing urban spaces and generated widespread public discussions, particularly among young urbanites (Sina 2009). In China nowadays young people are expected to purchase an apartment of their own when they get married or soon after that, a practice resulting from the privatization of the housing system after

136 

Meiqin Wang

Figure 4.8 Top: Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Songhu Road, 10:45, April 4, 2013, 2013; Bottom: Ni Weihua, Landscape Wall – Shanghai Langao Road, 16:00-16:30, November 26, 2009, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

137

the government had abolished welfare housing and made commercial mortgages available. The raised expectation of private home ownership, however, cannot be fulfilled easily since it has become increasingly difficult to buy an affordable home in major Chinese cities where the housing price is forever on the rise. It has been observed that municipal governments across China have relied heavily on the rising value of local property to generate revenue and to improve the city’s image (Cartier 2001; Zhang 2002; Hsing 2010), and this is an approach widely adopted by government officials for personal career advancement as well. In addition, geographer You-tien Hsing (2010: 45) argues that the lack of affordable homes is also attributed to affluent urban residents who are simultaneously consumers and investors in the housing market. All these factors have contributed to a property development boom and real estate speculation, in which homes have gone from an item primarily appreciated for its use value to a pure commodity, sold and resold by many for its exchange value. In Landscape Wall, Ni treats a specific site and the advertisement there as an existing urban reality, but right upon this reality he deconstructs the consumerism-oriented mode of development that is promoted nationwide in the mainstream media. He freezes scenarios in which high-tiered advertisements encounter the potential audience of lower-tiered advertisements, resulting in awkwardness and disharmony. His work reveals that advertisements have dominated much urban public space and have actually formed a new type of urban space themselves, often serving to distinguish and stratify the population. Landscape Wall – Shanghai Langao Road (Figure 4.8) is a vivid portrayal of spaces of differences. The image opens into a big billboard portraying a well-equipped and well-lit kitchen of a well-to-do urbanite. Through the large window we see mid-sections and roofs of some skyscrapers outside, indicating that the apartment is located on an upper floor of a skyscraper, a desirable location for urban dwellers. An elegant housewife whose dress matches the fresh and clean lines of the kitchen stands relaxed and is about to drink from a cup she is holding. This carefully constructed space of prosperity and modernity, however, is abruptly intruded by an ordinarily dressed young girl who happens to pass by the billboard, holding a baby in her arms. This person, identified by the artist and some critics alike as a nanny, a job carried out mostly by rural migrants, appears dishevelled and tired.14 Her posture and her dark outfit are an obvious contrast to the elegant well-groomed woman in a light grey outfit, so too her numbed facial expression compared with the sweet and 14 For example, see Yang (2013).

138 

Meiqin Wang

contented smile of the latter. They belong to two totally different social groups that are simultaneously produced by China’s market-driven urban transformation. Many pieces from Ni’s Landscape Wall document such a pointed contrast, speaking to the increasingly available signs of social inequality and disharmony that multiply along with the country’s growing economy. For example, we see a middle-aged woman walking along a street with a huge black trash bag over her shoulder and gazing intensively on the floor, probably looking for more to pick up; an aged man carrying a largely empty trash bag with a bewildered and sad face turned to the viewer; a lonely pedlar in an advanced age pushing forward her heavily loaded stall; and a young man rushing by with an exhausted facial expression. Behind them are magnificent street views, brand new shopping malls, gated high-end apartment complexes, and lavishly decorated interior spaces or charming outdoor living spaces. These spaces of consumption, high fashion, leisure, prosperity, and wealth, of course, are not for everybody, as the complexion and attire of these protagonists all speak to the hardship of life. Their awkward presence makes a clear statement that the spaces of leisure and consumption behind only mean exclusion for people like them. The message of social disharmony is hard to miss when we look at these photos. Attracted by this obvious message, a cognitive misunderstanding may arise and we might take whatever is behind these disenfranchised Chinese individuals for real. Here, the artist’s wit gets its way again. In reality the only real space is where these people walk by; everything behind them is just gigantic flat billboards. Or maybe, the artist intends to pose a question here: Does it matter anymore whether one confuses the real with the virtual? The presence of striking social difference is certainly for real. It is also real that the global consumer culture, signified by the billboard, is firmly entrenched in Chinese society. The title of this series, Landscape Wall (provided in English by the artist himself), comprises two words, landscape and wall, and together they are a close translation of its Chinese title. Landscape, a term that usually evokes land and by extension nature – including natural creations such as mountains, rivers, forests, and so on, here refers to visuality associated with the city, such as skyscrapers, apartment buildings, villas, modern kitchens and model interior settings which are printed and displayed on billboards advocating a mainstream urban lifestyle. The substitution of manmade urban structures for natural creations as the very content of Ni’s landscape reflects the changing relationship between human beings and nature in China as a result of the country’s rapid modernization and urbanization. The traditional Chinese outlook, which views man as a part of nature and

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

139

as such the conduct of human activities in accordance with natural cycles has been replaced by an attitude that treats nature as the objectified other whose existence is to serve human needs. In practice, urbanization has become a policy priority of China’s modernization effort and has contributed significantly to the spectacular growth of its economy since the beginning of the twenty-first century (Zhang 2011: 592; Hsing 2010: 1-4).15 Cities across China are engaged in a competition to expand their urban territory by converting neighbouring rural counties into urban districts and bringing large areas of rural land under the municipal government’s direct jurisdiction.16 Shanghai, for example, has annexed several of its neighbouring rural counties into municipal districts since 1992 and greatly expanded the available land for urban development. This has resulted in a construction boom as commercialized high-rise apartment complexes, shopping malls, highways, and other urban structures have been erected to demonstrate the power and wealth of the growing city. Along the way, numerous billboards have been erected to promote the city and major real estate projects. They are the most eye-catching ‘scenic sights’ or spectacles that have caught Ni’s attention (Wang and Wang 2008: 26).17 Thus the missing land in Ni’s Landscape Wall can be read as a sign of the approaching dominance of urbanization and the omnipresence of urban advertisements. In China’s endeavour to become an urban nation, the social and cultural significance of land (or soil) that was cherished during its long history has been lost. Land, like many other natural resources, has been drawn into the process of commercialization and its use value is now overshadowed by its exchange value (Ho and Lin 2003). It has become a commodity, just like houses, and is brought into the urban marketplace as China undergoes a metamorphosis from an agricultural society into an urban one (Pan and Wei 2012: 2-3).18 The second word of the title, wall, refers to the location of real estate advertising. Such advertising images often adorn construction fences facing the street to shield the actual construction or renovation activities behind the fences. By offering urban residents visual representations of gleaming cities, high-end shopping malls, dream homes, charming interiors, and luxurious commodities, they appear to justify sacrifices such as dislocation, pollution, 15 Also see Liu, Li and Zhang (2003). 16 For a thorough discussion of the process of converting rural land, see Hsing (2010: 93-121). 17 Ni Weihua employs ‘scenic sights’ in his discussion of the Keywords series. He considers photographing official slogans in urban spaces in Shanghai as a way of ‘making a scenic documentary.’ 18 In 2011, for the first time in history, China’s urban population surpassed the rural population, and urban planning officials announced China’s entry into the urban age.

140 

Meiqin Wang

inconvenience and unchecked government spending. They block the view and ensure that chaos remains on the other side, and that the city looks clean and orderly. Simultaneously these images of prosperity, development and urbanity also detract attention from manual workers labouring strenuously behind the barriers provided by advertising billboards and construction fences which cordon construction sites across China. With the popularity of these attractive advertising walls, a dark and uncomfortable reality of Chinese urbanization is silently removed from public sight. The actual labour of migrant workers has become invisible, just like their precarious existence in the city. It is probably this perceptive conception of the problematic social reality, combined with a seemingly unsophisticated but thoughtful approach that makes Ni’s Landscape Wall a well-received artistic endeavour. His Keywords series have been exhibited in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Berlin, but it was Landscape Wall that brought him renewed critical attention from contemporary art and cultural circles. Quite a number of critics have published reviews or interviews with the artist on his work and his approach to photography in general, and many pieces from this series have been included in major exhibitions and featured in Chinese and overseas art publications and newspapers. As pointed out by several art critics, the most prominent feature of Ni’s Landscape Wall series is the obvious disharmony between the background imagery and the characters in the foreground (Yang 2013; Tang 2011). Furthermore, he orchestrates an interesting twist, reversing the position between what is promoted and what is neglected. By so doing, Ni tells a dark joke, making visible what has been rendered invisible. Construction workers, nannies, trash hunters, street cleaners, and ordinary city dwellers are brought to the forefront, while the grand vision and cosmopolitan lifestyle, which cities and real estate corporations have tried to sell to the new rich and which are central to the political rhetoric and public media, are pushed to the background.

Conclusion Advertisements in Ni Weihua’s Keywords series promulgate national ideologies that aim to mobilize all Chinese individuals, call upon their civic awareness as citizens, and inform and educate them about the latest political mandates. Billboards in Landscape Wall promote localized visions and specific commercial products in order to arouse and feed consumers’ desires – that is, the desires of those who can afford them. While containing different messages and goals, they present an interesting collusion

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

141

advocating urbanity and modernity. Becoming a modernized socialist country continues to be critical in the political rhetoric of the Chinese state, but what marks modern individuals now lies in their ability to acquire monetary power to consume (Davis 2000). Therefore, we can indeed label the Chinese consumer culture as a ‘politicized consumer culture’ (Zhao and Belk 2008: 241-242), the cultivation of which has been imperative for the state in its efforts to legitimize and strengthen its control in the new millennium. If there were still some fractures between the state ideology and the nascent consumer culture in the 1990s (Zhao and Belk 2008: 241242), they have now disappeared completely. Since the beginning of the 2000s, consumerism has become deeply rooted in China’s urbanization and modernization discourses and even uplifted to the level of patriotism by some official economists (Han and Dou 2009).19 To consume now fulfils multiple goals: to be urban, modern, and patriotic. Focusing on political and commercial billboards in urban public spaces, Ni explores the promises and failures of official discourses for social development. Each of Ni’s newer series is built upon the previous one and together they investigate how words and images are employed for implementing social control and advocating consumerism in Chinese cities. Through his work, we are introduced to major political directives in China and, more importantly, we are exposed to a paradox: the mass infiltration of advertising into urban public space that targets every citizen as a consumer and the distinctive virtual spaces of consumption being advertised that underline and reinforce the accelerating social inequality. This is indeed a shadow that follows closely behind all the spectacular urban transformation and economic development in China.

Bibliography Barboza, David (2010) Shanghai Expo Sets Record with 73 Million Visitors. New York Times, 2 November. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/world/asia/03shanghai. html, accessed 5 April 2018. Barthes, Roland (1972) Mythologies. Trans. Lavers, Annette. New York: Hill and Wang. Batra, Rajeev, and Ray, Michael L. (1985) How Advertising Works at Contact. In Alwitt, Linda F., and Mitchell, Andrew A. (eds) Psychological Processes and Advertising Effects: Theory, Research, and Applications. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 13-43. 19 Also see Yang (2009).

142 

Meiqin Wang

Berry, Chris, Lu, Xinyu, and Rofel, Lisa (eds) (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2004) The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. New York: Routledge. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2007) Spectacular Beijing: The Conspicuous Construction of an Olympic Metropolis. Journal of Urban Affairs 29(4): 383-399. Cartier, Carolyn (2001) ‘Zone Fever,’ the Arable Land Debate, and Real Estate Speculation: China’s Evolving Land Use Regime and Its Geographical Contradictions. Journal of Contemporary China 10(28): 445-469. CCP (2006) Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu goujian shehui zhuyi hexie shehui ruogan zhongda wenti de jueding [Decision made by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on important issues for building a socialist harmonious society]. Chinese Communist Party, 11 October. http://cpc.people. com.cn/GB/64162/64168/64569/72347/6347991.html, accessed 14 March 2014. Chan, Kam Wing (2010) Fundamentals of China’s Urbanization and Policy. China Review 10(1): 63-94. Davis, Deborah S. (2000) Introduction: A Revolution in Consumption. In Davis, Deborah S. (ed.) The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-22. Fei, Hsiao-tung (1980) China’s Gentry: Essays on Rural-Urban Relations. Ed. and rev. Redf ield, Margaret Park. First pub. 1953. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feng, Sue (2009) Hit TV Series Strikes Chord with China’s ‘House Slaves.’ Wall Street Journal China, 26 November. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2009/11/26/hittv-series-strikes-chord-with-chinas-house-slaves/, accessed 12 November 2013. Gao, Minglu (2004) The Great Wall in Contemporary Chinese Art. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 12(3): 773-786. Gao, Minglu (2005) Displacement and Transmutation: Reality and the Spectacle of Urban Life. In The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art. Beijing: China Millennium Art Museum; Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery & University at Buffalo Art Galleries, 211-233. Groarke, Leo (1996) Logic, Art and Argument. Informal Logic 18(2 & 3): 105-129. Han, Baojiang, and Dou, Yong (2009) Jiji xiaofei jiushi aiguo [Active consumption is patriotic]. Liaowang xinwen zhoukan [Outlook weekly], 12 January. Ho, Samuel P.S., and Lin, George C.S. (2003) Emerging Land Markets in Rural and Urban China: Policies and Practices. China Quarterly 175: 681-707. Hsing, You-tien (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. London: Oxford University Press. Hurst, William (2006) The City as the Focus: The Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Urban Politics. China Information 20(3): 457-479.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

143

Johnson, Ian (2013) Old Dreams for a New China. New York Review of Books, 15 October. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/oct/15/china-dream-posters/, accessed 6 November 2013. Kress, Gunther, and Van Leeuwen, Theo (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Larmer, Brook (2011) Where an Internet Joke Is Not Always Just a Joke. It’s a Form of Defiance – and the Government Is Not Amused. New York Times Magazine, 30 October, 34-49. Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. Oxford: Blackwell. Li, Cheng, and Cary, Eve (2011) The Last Year of Hu’s Leadership: Hu’s to Blame? China Brief 11(23): 7-10. Liu, Shenghe, Li, Xiubin, and Zhang, Ming (2003) Scenario Analysis on Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration in China. Interim Report IR-03-036. http:// webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Publications/Documents/IR-03-036.pdf, accessed 5 April 2012. Liu, Xuyang, and Chen, Juanjuan (2013) Ni Weihua: I Shot the Meeting Point of Reality and Vision. Waitan Huabao [Shanghai bund picture] 526. https://moodle. csun.edu/mod/choice/view.php?id=2804307, accessed 15 September 2014. Ni, Weihua (2008) Keywords: The Immediacy of ‘Historical Images.’ Unpublished essay. Nordin, Astrid, and Richaud, Lisa (2014) Subverting Official Language and Discourse in China? Type River Crab for Harmony. China Information 28(1): 47-67. Pan, Jiahua, and Wei, Houkai (eds) (2012) Chengshi lanpishu: Zhongguo chengshi fazhan baogao no. 5 – Maixiang chengshi shidai de lüse fanrong [Blue book of cities in China: Annual report on urban development of China no. 5 – Towards green prosperity in the urban era]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Qin, Hui (1997) Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin [Social justice and academic conscience]. Tianya [End of the world] 4: 4-9. Quishi Journal (2012) Zhongguo meng, women gongtong de meng [Chinese dream, our collaborative dream]. Quishi Journal, 11 December. http://www.qstheory.cn/ wz/shp/201212/t20121211_199427.htm, accessed 6 November 2013. Schaefer, William (2010) Poor and Blank: History’s Marks and the Photographies of Displacement. Representations 109(1): 1-34. Sina (2009) ‘Woju’ chuang shoushi xin gao yinfa bailing jieceng da taolun [Dwelling Narrowness sets a new viewing record and stimulates widespread discussions among the white-collar class]. Sina, 10 August. http://ent.sina.com. cn/v/m/2009-08-10/13342646466.shtml, accessed 29 September 2011. Szeman, Imre, and Whiteman, Maria (2009) The Big Picture: On the Politics of Contemporary Photography. Third Text 23(5): 551-556.

144 

Meiqin Wang

Tang, Lingjie (2011) Fengjing qiang: Tongwang wutuobang de chuangkou [Landscape Wall: A window into utopia]. Zhongguo sheying [Chinese photography] 2: 78-85. Tian, Xinjie (2005) Shibohui jinru shizhi yunzuo, Shanghai chengjian kuaipao [The World Expo enters substantive stage, Shanghai urban construction speeds up]. 21 Shiji jingji baodao [Twenty-first-century business herald)], 7 December. UN Watch (2010) Joint NGO Appeal for 18,000 Victims of Forced Eviction by 2010 Shanghai World Expo. UN Watch, 22 July. http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/ nlnet/content3.aspx?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1347173&ct=8538783¬oc=1, accessed 30 September 2013. Visser, Robin (2010) Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Wang, Ban (2008) In Search of Real-Life Images in China: Realism in the Age of Spectacle. Journal of Contemporary China 17(56): 497-512. Wang, Hui (2014) China Today: Misguided Socialism Plus Crony Capitalism. New Perspectives Quarterly 31(1): 84-86. Wang, Jing (2005) Bourgeois Bohemians in China? Neo-tribes and the Urban Imaginary. China Quarterly 183: 532-548. Wang, Meiqin (2015) Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography. China Information 29(2): 176-201. Wang, Nanming, and Wang, Xueyun (eds) (2008) Guanjianci: Ni Weihua de ‘fazhan’ yu ‘hexie’ [Keywords: ‘Development’ and ‘Harmony’ of Ni Weihua]. Exhibition catalogue. Beijing: The Wall Museum. Wei, Yehua Dennis, Leung, Chi Kin, and Luo, Jun (2006) Globalizing Shanghai: Foreign Investment and Urban Restructuring. Habitat International 30(2): 231-244. Wu, Weiping (1999) City Profile: Shanghai. Cities 16(3): 207-216. Xinhua (2007) Dang de Shiqi Da kaimushi shipin huifang [Replay video of the opening ceremony of the Seventeenth Congress of the Party]. Xinhuanet, 15 October. http://news.xinhuanet.com/video/2007-10/15/content_6884466.htm, accessed 15 November 2013. Xu, Jiang, and Yeh, Anthony G.O. (2005) City Repositioning and Competitiveness Building in Regional Development: New Development Strategies in Guangzhou, China. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(2): 283-308. Yang, Hengjun (2009) Xiaofei aiguo, rang lingdaomen xian shang! [Consumer patriotism, let the leaders go the first!], Yanghengjun.blog, 16 February. http:// yanghengjun.blog.ifeng.com/article/2197345.html, accessed 8 August 2013. Yang, Xiaoyan (2013) Zhangli yu duikang – Ping Ni Weihua de xilie sheying ‘Fengjing qiang’ [Tension and antagonism – Reviewing Ni Weihua’s photography series Landscape Wall]. Blog.Artintern.net, 11 June. http://blog.artintern.net/article/366517, accessed 9 November 2013.

Shadow of the Spec tacul ar

145

Yiqing (2013) Tiananmen guangchangde ‘Zhongguo meng’ huayishiqing [The poetic charm of Tiananmen’s ‘Chinese Dream’], Zhongguo wenming wang, 12 July. http://hxd.wenming.cn/blog/2013-07/12/content_184971.htm. accessed 6 November 2013. Zhang, Li (2001) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zhang, Tingwei (2002) Urban Development and a Socialist Pro-growth Coalition in Shanghai. Urban Affairs Review 37(4): 475-499. Zhang, Tingwei (2011) Chinese Cities in a Global Society. In LeGates, Richard T., and Stout, Frederic (eds) The City Reader. London: Routledge, 590-598. Zhao, Xin, and Belk, Russell W. (2008) Politicizing Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Appropriation of Political Ideology in China’s Social Transition. Journal of Consumer Research 35(2): 231-244.

About the author Meiqin Wang Professor, Art Department, California State University, Northridge [email protected] Meiqin Wang researches on contemporary art from China in the context of commercialization and urbanization of the Chinese world and has published on topics such as artist villages and cultural industries, art and urbanization, and socially engaged art.

5

China Dreaming Representing the Perfect Present, Anticipating the Rosy Future Stefan Landsberger Abstract As China has developed into a relatively well-off, increasingly urbanized nation, educating the people has become more urgent than ever. Raising (human) quality (素质) has become a major concern for educators and intellectuals who see moral education as a major task of the state. The visual exhortations in public spaces aimed at moral education are dominated by dreaming about a nation that has risen and needs to be taken seriously. The visualization of these dreams resembles commercial advertising, mixing elements like the Great Wall or the Tiananmen Gate building with modern or futuristic images. This chapter focuses on posters, looking at the changes in contents and representation of government visuals in an increasingly urbanized and media-literate society. Keywords: visual propaganda; governmentality; normative propaganda; Chinese Dream; Beijing Olympics 2008

Sometimes one still encounters hand-painted faded slogans in the countryside urging those working in agriculture to learn from Dazhai, or to energetically study Mao Zedong Thought. By and large, political messages and the images they use have disappeared from Chinese public spaces, in particular in urban areas. Yet, the production of these images, of what we would call propaganda, has not stopped; the government remains committed to educating the people, as it has over the millennia. Compared to the first three decades of the People’s Republic, the messages have shifted to moral and normative topics, and their visualization has become much more sophisticated than in the earlier periods. This is partly because they

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch05

148 

Stefan L andsberger

have to compete for the public’s attention with omnipresent commercial advertising, a point also emphasized by Meiqin Wang in the previous chapter. As Yomi Braester (2010: 270) has noted in his analysis of Chinese cinema, the distinction between state propaganda, art and commercial entertainment has become blurred; this also is the case with printed propaganda (posters). Many of the crude and blatantly revolutionary images have been commercially appropriated and successfully turned into ‘real’ art (vide Wang Guangyi and other less famous artists) (De Kloet, Chong, and Liu 2008: 24). Along with the appropriation in contemporary art, the increased media literacy of the population has forced those responsible within the government and party for moral and political education to reassess both the contents of and techniques implemented in their campaigns. Visual propaganda in public spaces in the past decade and a half has increasingly been dominated by dreaming about the perfect present and a rosy future where China has risen and needs to be taken seriously on the global scale. The visualization of these dreams, whether they are about a perfect city, about the Olympics, the Harmonious Society, or just about China, often follows the template of a well-designed commercial campaign. Mixing well-known visual elements like the Great Wall or the Tiananmen Gate building with modern or futuristic images like the Shanghai Expo 2010’s China Pavilion is considered the best method to convey China’s ever evolving dreams. However, these images often lack the impact that marks commercial advertising with which they are in competition; indeed, the government’s messages (propaganda) seem to have been touched less by globalization than by other cultural products (Braester 2010: 288). This chapter will look at the development in contents and representation of (printed) government posters in the urban environment, in particular in Beijing, over the past decade, aimed at a population that has become increasingly urbanized and media literate. Through formal analysis of the aesthetics, composition and themes of selected posters that exemplify the variety of most important themes present in urban public space, and with Foucault’s understanding of governmentality (1991: 95), I posit that the current official imagery is dominated by new approaches and ideas along with aesthetically appealing, positive, locally embedded messages for building the better future. As such, the imagery contributes to the reconstruction of society in China and its affirmative reception abroad. The government posters in the urban environment are a significant element of the spatial tactics of beautification of urban public space which has been an ongoing process, under both material and social rubrics, since the end of the 1990s (Broudehoux 2004). The study of official aesthetics dominating urban public

China Dreaming

149

space in China and how the socio-political transformations have altered its imagery, benefits the in-depth understanding of how representations of urbanization are negotiated in other forms of visual arts, as discussed in the previous chapters, as well as to the urban interventions negotiating its dominance, as will be examined in the next part of this edited volume.

Visual Propaganda When discussing propaganda, I follow the definition provided by Esarey et al. (2016: 2) as ‘Party-state communication designed to inform or educate citizens with the objective of guiding their thoughts and actions and increasing public support of the regime’s leadership, policies and ideology.’ As I elaborated in an analysis of Chinese educational propaganda, ‘The moral education of the people has been viewed historically as a function of good government in China’ (Landsberger 2001: 541). At its Gutian Conference of 1929, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided to develop a communication strategy to reach distinct social groups with different cultural backgrounds, occupations and levels of education. Each target group had to be addressed in terms of its own psychology and experience, linking political issues with everyday life, while all communication had to have time quality (时间性) and local quality (地方性); without these qualities, the message was irrelevant or unintelligible (Holm 1991: 1823; Zhonggong dangshi zhuyao shijian jianjie 1982: 187-191). Propaganda served as a conveyor belt to pass on off icially sanctioned information to the masses. Visual propaganda and posters, in particular, was given an important role in reaching a population that was to a large extent illiterate; it supported and amplified the messages presented in slogans, newspapers, radio broadcasts, movies, songs, literature and poems. As part of the concept of the mass line, first formulated by Mao Zedong in 1943, propaganda served to ‘take the ideas of the masses […] and concentrate them, […] then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own’ (Mao 1967: 119; see also Landsberger 1995: 33-36). An almost continuous stream of mass movements addressing national, international, political, moral and social topics marked the Maoist era (1949-1978), and these movements were accompanied by striking visual propaganda, often designed by the most talented, usually professionally trained artists and designers. This ‘flow of campaigns’ (Cell 1977: 46) unfolding at the national and the local levels, in rural and urban areas, had to

150 

Stefan L andsberger

strengthen the support for the CCP, to deepen the understanding of the new ideology that guided China, and to promote unity and economic production. The posters were ‘designed and produced to provide information, change attitudes or even behaviours – in short, […] to impose a regime of truth’ (Landsberger 2013: 379; Landsberger 1995: 36-61). The recent research has further elaborated the varied cultural forms of propaganda and people’s varying attitude to them, continuing to the post-Mao era (Mittler 2012). With Deng Xiaoping’s ascendancy to power in 1978 came an almost complete depoliticization of society. Government communication did not cease but decreased in occurrence and intensity. It now served to broadcast the unprecedented liberalization of society. To do so, its tone, style and contents changed completely (Landsberger 1995: 65-94, 99-202). In the 1980s, in particular, the often bewildering reforms and modernizations had to be publicized widely in order to acquaint the people with them and their implications. Socio-political transformations in the post-1989 period have altered the need and forms of propaganda and thought work which continue to be essential tools for legitimating the power of the CCP (Brady 2008). As China has developed over the past two to three decades into a relatively well off, increasingly urbanized nation, with a corresponding increase of what is considered a (middle) class of consumers, educating the people has remained a major concern of the government. The new forms, techniques and strategies in the age of globalization have complicated the common understanding of propaganda into the realms of diversified ‘soft power’ reaching across the borders (Edney 2014). As Xiaomei Chen (2017: 1) elaborates: in a postsocialist state with ‘capitalist characteristics’ such as the PRC, ‘propaganda’ can no longer be simply dismissed as a monolithic, top-down, and meaningless practice characterized solely by censorship and suppression of freedom of expression in a totalitarian regime. Instead, propaganda can be studied as a complex, dialogic, and dialectical process in which multiple voices and opposing views collide, negotiate, and compromise in forming what looks like a mainstream ideology – and indeed functions as such – to legitimize the power state and its right to rule.

However, under Xi Jinping, who became state and party leader in 2012, the educational function of the mass line has been taken up vigorously again (Xinhua 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). In practice, this has meant the return of propaganda messages in the media, and of propaganda posters in the streets. This use of omnipresent normative stimuli by the Chinese government is described in Foucault’s understanding of governmentality (1991: 95).

China Dreaming

151

Governmentality is produced, amongst others, by a comprehensive media strategy that aims to create a model citizenry, not by force and law but rather through a multifaceted set of strategies, tactics, and discourses produced by a whole variety of authorities and institutions that regulate, manage, and guide the minds and bodies of citizens to behave as desired by the ruling authority. Ane Bislev notes that when it comes to the Chinese Dream, due to the fact that it also has been adopted and adapted by commercial interests and popular culture, the concept has gained a life of its own that is not directly related to its original political content (Bislev 2015: 591). Josef Mahoney (2014: 30) considers the Chinese Dream as a framing discourse, an ‘open, positive framing narrative designed to draw others into line and/ or context.’ He sees similarities with and quotes Anne-Marie Brady who considers the propagation of concepts like the Chinese Dream as part of the party’s continuing attempts at ‘thought management.’ Presently, the government’s desires are focused on the need to raise the quality (suzhi, 素质) of the population, which has become a pre-eminent concern for officials, state educators and concerned intellectuals. As Gary Sigley (2009: 538) pointed out, ‘suzhi has become one of the most omnipresent categories for categorizing and valuing the human body and human conduct in contemporary China.’ The Chinese Dream incorporates this concern, as well as building further on the political campaigns that preceded this particular effort, such as the Three Represents, Harmonious Society and Scientific Development (Bislev 2015: 587). A very large part of the communication practice by the party-state now takes place through the medium of television; as opposed to earlier educational efforts, many of the messages are consumed in the relative privacy of one’s home (Landsberger 2009; Esarey et al. 2016). This makes this latest return of government-sponsored posters to the urban landscape particularly interesting. As opposed to the publicity promoting the Olympic Games – an event – these posters are put up with the intention to provide guidance for urbanites struggling to find meaning in present-day consumer society. Their messages are amplified by commercial posters and utterances reiterating elements of the Chinese Dream, by video clips in the subway system extolling the Chinese Dream and civilized behaviour, by slogans on banners gracing overpasses, among others. Despite the rising importance of new media and the Internet in terms of controlling and disseminating appropriate information flows for the education of the public, the need to reconstruct an alluring city image for global competition has become ever more important. ‘In contemporary China’ as Jacob Dreyer (2012: 50) maintains, ‘the most forceful language that the government can speak is the language of controlling the urban

152 

Stefan L andsberger

space itself.’ The premeditated control of urban aesthetics as a whole, and the positive messages introduced into the urban fabric are essential tools of socio-political and cultural reconstruction.

Olympic Dreaming Propaganda under Xi Jinping is dominated by the concept of the Chinese Dream. Although Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought remains constitutionally enshrined as the PRC’s guiding ideology, its hold on society has decreased in many respects. A discursive space has emerged in which dreaming can take place; this is not considered a metaphysical activity but instead ‘is meant to determine China’s new political direction, and to provide the correct formula that will generate a sense of national belonging in China, and will lead to China’s perfection as a nation and as a global civilisation’ (Callahan 2017: 255). The term ‘dream’ (梦想) itself already appeared in various visual propaganda themes and cultural products that appeared around the recent turn of the century, and presently even reality shows on television employ the ‘dream’ theme in their titles to amplify the concept (De Kloet and Landsberger 2012; Braester 2010: 284, 294). The ‘dream’ made its first appearance in conjunction with China’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The event served as proof that the country had become ‘an equal member of the global community’ (Davies 2009: 1058; Lee 2014). To analyse the imagery of the Chinese Dream, we thus have to start with the Olympic Dream. Olympics-related imagery appeared in public spaces as early as 2001, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected Beijing to host the 29th Games in 2008. The slight of losing the 1993 bid for the 2000 Games still smarted. Where had things gone wrong then? Why had China not been taken seriously at the time? With great enthusiasm, a new bid had been prepared and widely disseminated in the media. This included visual materials that aimed to sway the IOC delegates’ decision and to drum up support among the home audience, in particular the one in Beijing (Chinese Posters Foundation 2014a). In the meantime, the idea that China deserved the Games, and that organizing them was a destiny or even a human right in itself, circulated continuously in the media at home and abroad (Polumbaum 2003). The nation was made aware that the organization of the Games served as one big commercial message (Hou 2003: 324), intended to ‘attract the “eyeballs” of millions of media viewers […] to raise the national profile through successful delivery of the Games’ (Heslop, Nadeau, and O’Reilly 2010: 424).

China Dreaming

153

Both popular and official Chinese discourses increasingly and strongly referred to this Olympic ‘Dream,’ a concept that made its first appearance in a 1908 article entitled ‘On Sports Competition,’ published in Tianjin Youth magazine (Hwang and Chang 2008). It was clear that organizing the Games and economic development, then and now, meant being taken seriously on the world stage. The slogan ‘One World, One Dream’ (同一个世界同 一个梦想), the motto for the Beijing Games, alluded most openly to the ‘Olympic dream’; it was repeated almost like a mantra and was plastered in a dazzling array of reiterations all over urban and rural China. Even though originally intended for publicity directed at the rest of the world (Brady 2009), the sheer omnipresence of the ‘dream’ trope eventually made it part of the domestic discourse.

Finding Its Way into the Popular Imagination: National Propaganda The imagery associated with the Games was present in urban areas; its various manifestations depended on the organizations responsible for its production and display. Visual materials directly produced by or under the auspices of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) found their way to the glass-and-steel MUPIs (mobilier urbain pour l’information), outdoor information panels used for advertising or public information. Over the years, more of such locations have become available, in particular near and in subway stations and other transportation hubs. With the rapid expansion of the urban infrastructure, transport advertising (growing number of stations; bus and subway car surfaces; billboards at airports and in railway and subway stations; video screens in subways and trains, etc.) has become more widely available, offering more opportunities for state, municipal or commercial messages and/or images.1 The occasional use of this ‘street furniture’ for normative propaganda purposes started as early as the 1990s. The explosive growth of smartphone ownership and Internet use has produced even more sites for such communications; according to the most recent official data, by January 2015 there were 557 million mobile Internet users, making up more than 80 per cent of the total number of 649 million Internet users (China Internet Network Information Center 2015). 1 Zeng Jun (chairman), Zhang Yujing (audition and production department manager) and others, in interview with author, at JCDecaux/Beijing Top Result Metro, Beijing, 6 August 2012. See also JCDecaux (2014).

154 

Stefan L andsberger

The MUPIs and other designated locations carried Olympics-themed posters, while the various constituent campaigns that were organized to turn the Games into a success produced hoards of visual materials that found their way to other display opportunities. The most important sub-campaigns were those devoted to the ‘Green Olympics, High-tech Olympics, and Humanistic Olympics’ (绿色奥运科技奥运人文奥运), addressing different aspects to make the Games stand out in both Western and Chinese eyes. The posters dealing with the high-tech and green aspects of the Olympics focused on the various grand construction projects, such as the Water Cube (Natatorium), the Bird’s Nest (the National Stadium) and the various infrastructural projects, which included subway lines and a new departure hall at Beijing International Airport. The ones dedicated to the humanistic or ‘people’s’ angle easily meshed with earlier campaigns devoted to spiritual civilization that former leader Jiang Zemin had advocated and had been running since the late 1990s. In particular the ones that focused on promoting civilization and raising the quality (suzhi) of the population resonated with these efforts and included citizen guidelines and community compacts (Brady 2009; Dynon 2014: 32). Raising the quality of the population was seen as one of the preconditions to host the Olympics successfully (Zhou, Ap, and Bauer 2012: 196). By ensuring nationwide support for the event; by promoting hygienic behaviour; by stressing good manners, even table manners; and by promoting the widespread use of English to facilitate communications with foreign visitors, in short, by establishing ‘winning manners,’ winning the Games would be accomplished (Shi 2006; De Kloet, Chong, and Landsberger 2011: 121-123).

The Official BOCOG Posters The BOCOG-designed posters for the 2008 Olympics show that most of them were designed with an eye on established visualization practices, with global commercial advertising standards in mind. They were published in three series: ‘Theme Posters (Sophisticated Beijing for a Harmonious Olympic Games, three posters),’ ‘People’s Posters (Smiling Beijing and Inclusive Olympic Games, three posters),’ and ‘Sports Posters (Robust Beijing to Exceed the Dreams, ten posters).’ All have the official Beijing 2008 logo in the top-left corner. They are slick, non-confrontational, cross-culturally recognizable and with high production values, judging by the amazing quality of the prints and the paper used. This was not without reason. According to Zhao Yanxia, deputy director of the BOCOG Culture and Ceremonies Department,

China Dreaming

155

speaking at the official public presentation of the campaign materials on 18 July 2008, the posters had to act as ‘a visual representation of commerce and culture’ (Xinhua 2008). Discussing the three ‘Theme Posters’ at the same presentation, Zhao Meng, the art director of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, added that the designers had kept close to the ideas of a ‘Green Olympics, High-tech Olympics and People’s Olympics.’ While the posters embodied the philosophy of ‘One World, One Dream,’ the artists also wanted to bring out elements of Chinese culture. Indeed, according to Zhao Meng, to this end, the style of traditional Chinese painting was used in order to highlight the significance of the Beijing Games, juxtaposing images of the highly publicized newly constructed Olympic venues (Water Cube, Bird’s Nest) that would become visual icons in themselves, with the classic landmarks (Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven) that for many both at home and abroad were synonymous with China (ibid.). In the case of Figure 5.1, it is difficult to make out how traditional Chinese painting has been used in the juxtaposition of the Forbidden City’s Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Bird’s Nest. The balloons wafting upwards may be reminiscent of the mists in landscape painting, as is the striking emptiness of the image. The three ‘People’s Posters’ can be considered visual representations of culture, although one can argue that the images have been chosen with a non-Chinese audience in mind. Nonetheless, when asked, many Chinese liked them as well.2 The first poster shows a young girl in a silk, fur-lined traditional vest, holding two red paper lanterns emblazoned with the Games’ logo, with the Forbidden City’s Gate of Supreme Harmony in the background (Figure 5.2). The colour red predominates, indicating that the Olympics are (going to be) a joyful occasion. The fireworks in the sky amplify this. The other two posters of the series feature a young male Beijing Opera player in full costume with the Great Wall in the background; and an elderly lady presenting a red paper cut with the words ‘Beijing 2008,’ with the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests in the Temple of Heaven complex and doves of peace in the background. According to Zhao Meng at the same occasion, ‘The smiling faces of the kids, the young people and the elderly, highlight the passion and fraternity of Chinese people to demonstrate that Beijing reaches out to the whole world. This is the classic edition of the philosophy of “One World One Dream”’ (ibid.). These posters arguably ‘touch all the right buttons’ in the sense of positioning them as unmistakably Chinese. One can critique them 2

Information based on fieldwork in Beijing during summer 2007 and spring 2008.

156 

Stefan L andsberger

Figure 5.1 Designer unknown. Title: Tong yige shijie tong yige mengxiang (One world, one dream). Publisher: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Date of publication: July 2008, ISBN: 9787-80716-715-0. Nr. of copies printed: 200,000. Available online: http:// news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008- 07/18/content_8570590.htm

China Dreaming

157

Figure 5.2 Designer unknown. Title: Tong yige shijie tong yige mengxiang (One world, one dream). Publisher: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Date of publication: July 2008, ISBN: 9787-80716-715-0. Nr. of copies printed: 300,000. Available online: http:// news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/18/content_8570590_1.htm.

158 

Stefan L andsberger

as examples of self-Orientalization and dismiss them as illustrations of ‘a changeless, nostalgic, mythical and feminized China that speaks to a Western Orientalistic imagination’ (Yan and Santos 2009: 296), but that would miss the point of their sophistication. As Huang Songshan writes, these elements are part of a ‘“touristic China” or “staged China” rather than a “self-Orientalized China”’ (2011: 1191). The ten ‘sports posters’ are grouped together under the Olympic motto of ‘Citius – Altius – Fortius’ (Faster – higher – stronger). They almost all feature Asian athletes and could have been produced for any other sports or Olympian event taking place anywhere on Earth. Exceptions are two posters that focus on basketball, each showing a basketball player who might be black (African-American?). The precise reasons behind this choice of focus are unclear; they were not explained by representatives from the All-China Sports Federation and the Chinese Olympic Committee.3 However, the Olympic discipline of basketball probably was intentionally linked to the US National Basketball Association competition, wildly popular in China, with its large number of black star players (Figure 5.3). The athlete’s pose and the swirls suggest the great speed associated with basketball. Even though these Games were intended to show that China had arrived on the global stage, and the appreciation and respect from foreign countries and visitors were much sought after, foreigners seldom appear in the Olympic posters. It had to be clear that China organized these Games without outside help, further demonstrating that the nation had attained the international status it craved.

Finding Its Way into the Popular Imagination: Local Propaganda Lower levels of city government (for example, the Beijing Chaoyang and the Beijing Dongcheng District Committees) used materials much less sophisticated to mobilize support for the Olympics in their respective areas: a variety of posters, banners and billboards was prepared by local, or lowerlevel governments for the event. These posters and other materials clearly do not have production values as high as the BOCOG posters, as the local governments’ budgets were not as bottomless. Content wise, the posters differ in many respects as well. The Chaoyang posters, for example, represent the Olympics as a social rather than an international sports event, showing 3 Representatives of the All-China Sports Federation and the Chinese Olympic Committee, in interview with the author, in summer 2007 and in spring 2008.

China Dreaming

159

Figure 5.3 Designer unknown. Title: Geng kuai geng gao geng qiang (Citius – Altius – Fortius). Publisher: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Date of publication: 2008. Print nr.: 780716.36. Available online: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008- 07/18/ content_8570590_2.htm

160 

Stefan L andsberger

camaraderie among the (ordinary) people, including a very explicit word of welcome for foreigners. The texts on the hoardings around construction sites and banners attached to viaducts crossing the five ring roads or spanning smaller side streets and allies, generally did not differ much from the official slogans and expressions of support for the Olympics, ranging from ‘Seize the opportunity of the century to realize the dream of the century’ (拥有百年机遇实现百 年梦想), ‘Welcome the Olympics, be civilized and follow the new trend’ (迎奥运讲文明树新风) to ‘I participate, I contribute and I am happy’ (我参 与我奉献我快乐). 4 The banners and posters consistently praised the level of civilization and quality of the districts and their inhabitants, although one official, when interviewed, stated that the more frequent the praise, the more lacking this suzhi actually seemed to be.5

Finding Its Way into the Popular Imagination: Commercial Propaganda Messages produced by commercial entities, ranging from national industry and services leaders to global corporations paralleled the saturation of public spaces and media with Olympic imagery and slogans. Most of the large commercial entities – even those from the same economic sector, relinquishing exclusive sponsor rights for an opportunity to show patriotic commitment – acted as sponsors of the event, ranging from Lenovo, Haier, Li Ning, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Tsingdao Beer, Yanjing Beer, Mengniu, Yili and Wahaha to various banking establishments. Global corporations like Volkswagen, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Panasonic, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Pepsi and many others joined in. These commercial entities put up commercial advertising that, aside from its commercial intentions, often seemed indistinguishable from the BOCOGproduced messages, both in sentiment and in form and content (Brady 2009). A major difference was that the commercial messages made more abundant use of the same Chinese sports celebrities they had already contracted for endorsements. Liu Xiang, the athlete who had astounded sports fans worldwide at the 2004 Athens Olympics with his Olympic record on the 110-metre hurdles, becoming the incarnation, or at least the face of Chinese 4 Information based on fieldwork in Beijing during summer 2007 and spring 2008. 5 Cheng Baogui (Chaoyang District Nanmofang Area official) in interview with author, Beijing, 3 August 2012.

China Dreaming

161

Olympic success (Davies 2009: 1040-1042); Yao Ming, the basketball player who had attained global fame when playing for the Houston Rockets; the diver Guo Jingjing; and many others drummed up support for the event while pitching goods and services. The official publicity/propaganda institutions on the other hand could count on the participation of (popular) cultural, entertainment and arts celebrities like the actor Jackie Chan (Cheng Long), the singer Liu Huan, and father-and-daughter painting team Liu Yuyi and Liu Haomei (Braester 2010: 282).

Harmonious Society The Olympic propaganda coexisted with other normative (propaganda) messages. The most important one was the concept of the ‘Harmonious Society’ (和谐社会) that Hu Jintao had launched in 2004 and that became national policy in 2006. Coinciding with the propaganda preparations for the Games and playing a significant role in their background, the ‘harmonious society’ spelled out China’s domestic ambitions and gave an impression of its international intentions (Hubbert 2013: 424). Over the years, it had been difficult to define what the ‘harmonious society’ entailed, although initially it included references to democracy, the rule of law, justice, amity, and vitality (ibid.: 430). Many Chinese and foreign observers saw the term as a throwback to Confucian times or as an attempt to bridge the gap between those who had benefitted from the reform policies and those who had not. Despite the opacity of the term harmonious (ibid.: 425), many people were quite adamant to point out what was not harmonious in society, thus opening up a discursive space for debate between potentially opposing and contesting views and practices while at the same time mediating these oppositions and contestations. The ‘harmonious society’ took raising the people’s quality as point of departure. Thomas Boutonnet (2010: 123) succinctly summarized the harmony project as follows: The ‘Harmonious society’ depicts a society where everyone is dedicated to a larger whole – the Chinese nation – regardless of his/her own social or economic situation. […] Social inequalities are presented as natural consequences of the differences that make all individuals unique and different from one another other in nature. This ‘Harmonious society’ specifies and defines a ‘new man’ who is able to abide by this new order and who is characterized by a set of moral virtues such as self-sacrifice,

162 

Stefan L andsberger

law observance or disregard for luxury and leisure. This ‘new man’ is a civilized citizen, disciplined by the state’s ‘socialist’ values, and is called to dedicate him/herself to the development of his/her country.

The presentation of China as a ‘harmonious society’ added to the concepts used in materials that set out to spread and support the Olympic dream. More problematic than the Olympics-focused campaigns, however, was the question what the ‘harmonious society’ should look like or how it could be visualized; one could not point to plans for grand structures like the Bird’s Nest, nor was there a clear date scheduled for its completion. To put it differently, it is easier to show what that ‘harmonious society’ is not, than what it is. With stability as one of the main constituent factors of harmony, its visualization had to fall back on the well-known and well-tested elements, or propagemes (Mittler 2008: 470), that had come to symbolize post-Maoist, reform-era China over the years. These propagemes included the Great Wall; the Tiananmen Gate building; doves of peace; flower arrangements; urban renewal (in the sense of discarding old buildings and replacing them with ambitious high-rises), and happy people enjoying prosperity. The official ‘harmonious society’ images sometimes combined these highly symbolic elements with an image of Hu Jintao, dressed either in business suit or in a Sun Yat-sen jacket. Generally speaking however, in the decade of the Hu administration, party and state leaders were conspicuously absent from propaganda materials.

Dreaming of China: Anticipating the Rosy Future Since Xi Jinping has come to power in 2012, the main topic of government communications and propaganda has been the concept of the Chinese Dream (中国梦). Xi introduced his vision of the Dream shortly after he was elected into office. The Dream initially sounded just as elusive as Hu Jintao’s Harmonious Society and nobody seemed to know what it entailed beyond ‘realizing a prosperous and strong country, the rejuvenation of the nation and the well-being of the people’ (Lim 2013). Since then, it has been fully embraced in political and popular culture and gradually, more concrete definitions have emerged. Under the shorthand of the ‘rejuvenation of the nation’ or ‘great renewal,’ the Chinese Dream has been presented as a comprehensive concept that consists of four parts: a Strong China (economically, politically, diplomatically, scientifically, and militarily); a Civilized

China Dreaming

163

China (equity and fairness, rich culture, high morals); a Harmonious China (amity among social classes); and a Beautiful China (healthy environment, low pollution) (Kuhn 2013). According to Jin Yuanpu, writing on the Civilization Magazine page of CNTV, It embraces Chinese politics, Chinese philosophy, Chinese culture, the concerns of modern Chinese society; it includes Chinese history and the collective memory of the Chinese people, especially the memories of both the difficult times and Liberation experienced in the modern era. It is a vivid representation of the immediate experience and the real lives of the people, of development and social transformation. It embodies China’s development goals, national consensus, future prospects and plans for the way ahead. It is a condensation of Chinese thought, spirit and wisdom. It embraces the economic, political, cultural, social and ecological aspects of China’s modern civilization.

The Chinese Dream, however, is not only rooted in the past: A thousand people may have a thousand different Chinese dreams. What, then, does the Chinese Dream boil down to? The Chinese Dream is one of liberation, reviving the nation, modernization; it is a dream of wealth and strength, democracy, civilization; of justice, prosperity, success; a people’s dream. It is a dream of peace across the Taiwan straits, of national unity; a dream of reform, of decent living standards for all, of a stronger China. (Jin 2013)

The state institutions and departments responsible for publicity and propaganda immediately organized study meetings and seminars and to produce articles, visual materials, television programmes, public service advertisements, popular songs, events and activities aimed at educating the population (Callahan 2017: 255; Lee 2014; China Civilization Off ice 2013). Chinese Internet and Weibo (microblog) users (netizens) on the other hand jumped at the opportunity to hijack the term for their own uses (Carlson 2013). Who, after all, can deny that a Chinese (netizen) is Chinese and that s/he has the right to define her/his own Dream? This has unleashed an enormous amount of creativity and tongue-in-cheek critiques in popular culture and on the Internet, where the Dream has come to include clean air, political rights, and reproductive rights, among others (Henochowicz 2015).

164 

Stefan L andsberger

Chinese Dream Imagery With the adoption of the Chinese Dream as the guiding ideology of the Xi era, government-sponsored images returned in the public domain. These images, published as posters, can be divided roughly in two groups: posters produced for official spaces, that is, party, government and army offices at all levels, meeting rooms, etc.; and materials created for use in public spaces, that is, for MUPIs and similar street furniture, billboards, rotating electronic or gigantic LED screens, hoardings and scaffolding erected around construction sites, and so forth (Lee 2014). The imagery and the messages of these two groups are significantly and strikingly different from each other. They are also a world apart from the images that were produced for the Olympics. The official materials, those produced and distributed for use in official spaces, are modelled on, amplify as well as echo the well-known themes of previous campaigns. These posters tend to be large-sized and glossy, replete with the propagemes of the Great Wall; the Tiananmen Gate building; doves of peace; flower arrangements; modern cityscapes, etc., but also the China Pavilion at the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Some of them show China’s developing military might, including the first aircraft carrier Liaoning, and its desire to reclaim territories currently not under its administration, such as the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Many carry images of the aerospace industry and the successful space programme, which serve as apt metaphors. As a matter of course, Xi himself features prominently on these posters, both in Western-style suit and Sun Yat-sen jacket, prompting some observers that Xi has become almost as prominent as Mao had in the past.6 This stands in opposition to the lukewarm endorsement Hu Jintao seemed to give to his Harmonious Society. On some posters, Xi is shown together with prime minister, Li Keqiang, on others he is accompanied by all members of the Politburo, showing a firm commitment to the Dream concept by the nation’s governing body. The posters generally carry slogans closely associated with the Dream, such as ‘The Chinese Dream: A strong nation – A national revival – A prosperous population’ (中国梦国家富强民族振兴人民幸福). The lofty elements mentioned by Jin, such as ‘democracy, […] justice, prosperity, success’ (Jin 2013), find their way only very occasionally into the representations; instead, the posters deal with other aspects of Xi’s political programme such as the fight against corruption, extravagance and ‘empty talk.’ Despite the posters’ 6 Intellectuals, government workers and entrepreneurs in interviews with the author, Beijing, 8 April and 7 May 2015.

China Dreaming

165

overall sophisticated impression, they do not stand close scrutiny from a technical point of view: on some posters, identical photographs of Xi have been flipped, with the result that the parting in his hair appears sometimes on the right side, sometimes on the left, etc. The stunning public service posters for the Chinese Dream that were exhibited in Beijing in July 2014 by the Chinese Photographers Association, on the other hand, illustrate that shortcomings of this kind are not necessary and that such materials can also be produced with the highest design standards in mind (Gao and Yao 2014).

The Chinese Dream in Public What, then, of the posters published for use on the streets in major cities across China that were first presented in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in July 2013 (Johnson 2013; Li 2013)? These posters have become so omnipresent that one can argue that propaganda has returned into the lives of the people with full force, as Meiqin Wang shows in her chapter on photographer Ni Weihua, who chronicles its upsurge in the urban environment in his photography. The China Civilization Office under the CCP Central Propaganda Department (中共中央宣传部 中央文明办主办) has made Chinese Dream materials available online as high-resolution downloads for reprinting or for use on various media. They range from posters to banners and desktop images for personal computers and smartphones, thus ensuring a unity of contents that has been seen seldomly in Chinese propaganda campaigns and that leaves no room for alternative interpretations. Since the inception of the campaign, many more posters have been published, which points to a dynamic approach to the unfolding campaign and suggests opportunities for campaign flexibility. Unfortunately, not all of the later additions encountered in the streets can be found on the Civilization Office’s website, which seems not to have been updated since its inception in 2013. Aside from materials stressing the Dream in myriad forms, other poster sets address sub-campaigns such as patriotism and love for the party; the environment; normative models and traditional culture. These subcampaigns are presented as part and parcel of the broader Dream initiative and their visualizations follow the same template. The propaganda sections of many if not most of the gated communities in urban China have put up their own versions of Chinese Dream campaigns, using the images they have downloaded in various forms and formats on the grounds of their communities. Despite differences in appearance, the contents provided by the China Civilization Office ensure uniformity. Moreover, banners

166 

Stefan L andsberger

with Dream-related slogans again grace overpasses and entrances. Even the Beijing subway has put up its own Chinese Dream poster (中国梦-地 铁梦) and many other organizations and economic entities have produced various media products supporting the Dream.7 The posters encountered on the streets ‘typically feature a stark white background, a QR code, a red stamp seal adding a flourished imprimatur, and a subtle frame of red text designating the folk art style and the government body responsible for their design’ (Lee 2014); none of them show Xi Jinping, as opposed to the ones produced for use in official environments. Their contents, according to Joyce Lee, are a post-Mao bricolage of Confucian morality, traditional Chinese ideals, socio-economic adaptations, historical grievances, and everyday social activities. Captions […] are couched in non-ideological terms designed to amass wider appeal and mark a move away from hardline propaganda. Figures and tableaus […] emphasize rural livelihoods over urban lifestyles. Epithets and images extoll Confucian values […]; other themes include thrift, economic prosperity, springtime renewal, and a Chinese way of life centered in honesty and sincerity. (Lee 2014)

To convey these themes and sentiments, the posters make widespread use of ‘traditional Chinese paper cuttings […] Yangliuqing woodblock prints […] Taohuawu wood carvings […] [and] [r]ed-cheeked figures such as the one in the campaign’s primary image are made by the Nirenzhang clay sculpture workshop in Tianjin’ (Lee 2014). In short, posters showing reassuring and comforting images drawing on traditional symbols crowd the urban gaze. Nirenzhang (Clay Man Zhang) clay sculpture has been produced in Tianjin for more than 200 years and is considered traditional folk art. According to Ian Johnson (2015), ‘for many Chinese, they evoke a sentimental vision of their country in much the way of Norman Rockwell’s depictions of America.’ The figurine designed by Lin Gang shown in Figure 5.4 has become popularly known as Meng Wawa, Baby Meng (Dream). With the accompanying slogan ‘Zhongguo meng – wode meng’ (The Chinese Dream – my dream), she has come to serve as the mascot of the campaign. One encounters her poster most often; she also serves as something of a presenter in the televised public service announcements devoted to the Chinese Dream that are broadcast in prime time (Yi 2013: 6-7, 179, 200, 202).8 7 Information based on fieldwork in Beijing during spring 2015. 8 Ibid.

China Dreaming

Figure 5.4 Designer: Public Service Advertising Art Committee; figurine designed by Lin Gang. Title: Zhongguo meng – wode meng (The Chinese Dream – my dream). Publisher: China Internet Television Station. Date of publication: 2013. No print number. Available on website of the Civilization Office under the CCP Central Committee: http://www.wenming.cn/jwmsxf_294/zggygg/pml/zgmxl/201309/ t20130930_1501267.shtml

167

168 

Stefan L andsberger

A number of the posters makes use of the paintings and cartoons by the late Feng Zikai (丰子恺, 1898-1975), who was prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution but posthumously rehabilitated in 1978 (Barmé 2002). Many feature peasant paintings from a variety of regions noted for such artistic expressions, such as Wuyang, Henan Province; Longmen, Guangdong Province; Kunming, Yunnan Province; and Jinzhou, Liaoning Province. One specific group of peasant painter designers that was called upon to contribute to the Dream effort hails from Huxian, Shaanxi Province. The Huxian peasant painters played an important role in propaganda poster production in the first half of the 1970s (Chinese Posters Foundation 2014b), and one of the Chinese Dream posters is designed by none other than Liu Zhigui (刘知贵, b. 1945) (Chinese Posters Foundation 2015), who was a famous member of the earlier Huxian design team (Figure 5.5) (Yi 2013: 31). Liu’s design, showing a son washing his father’s feet while being observed by his own son, resembles his earlier poster art that was characterized by revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism. Now it promotes filial piety (xiao 孝), but it lacks the high level of workmanship that characterized his earlier work. The works of the younger generation of Huxian artists which one encounters on the streets, on the other hand, is more reminiscent of naïve art. All posters have accompanying texts that strengthen the message. The inclusion of (often large) bodies of text on posters in general testifies to the successful eradication of illiteracy. Many of these texts consist of aphorisms or quotes, but the majority is adorned by short poems expanding on the theme of the image, some 150 in all; many of these have been written by Xie Shaoqing, who goes by the pen name Yi Qing. Aside from writing progovernment blogs, Xie has also published a number of books devoted to Mao Zedong (Yi 2013; Lee 2014). When I discussed the posters and their contents as encountered in the streets of Beijing in spring 2015 with people passing by, many indicated that they found the sentiments expressed in the poems either irrelevant or naïve, while others found them apt and comforting and largely agreed with their intentions.9 Critical evaluations of the Chinese Dream materials are not easy to find, but some Chinese writers see them as nothing but a vehicle to spread Xi Jinping’s words; to praise and extol Chinese civilization; to spread the basic values of socialism; to utter true words instead of empty phrases; and to create a harmonious, beneficial social orientation. In other words, the posters do little to raise the people’s quality in a concrete sense. Some critics identify more concrete shortcomings: the materials are too much oriented on 9 Ibid.

China Dreaming

169

Figure 5.5 Designer: Public Service Advertising Art Committee; image designed by Liu Zhigui. Title: Zhonghua meide – Xiao (Chinese virtue – filial piety). Publisher: China Internet Television Station. Date of publication: 2013. No print number. Available online on website of the Civilization Office under the CCP Central Committee http://www.wenming.cn/ jwmsxf_294/zggygg/pml/ctmdxl/201309/t20130929_1500525.shtml

170 

Stefan L andsberger

the past; and there is a gap between what is propagated and daily reality. In short, they lack time quality and local quality. A more fundamental problem pointed out by the critics is that while the majority of the materials can be seen in urban areas, they almost solely deal with an idealized, rural reality, and as such do not engage with what the intended audience is concerned about (Li and Deng 2014: 124, 125). When I questioned my own respondents about what types of materials could be observed in the countryside or even smaller cities, many of them made it clear that the propaganda utterances there were different, more educational, and focused more on providing information and knowledge that benefitted the people.10

Concluding Remarks The urban landscape again is festooned with official imagery in a way that has not been seen for a long time. The imagery is devoted to the Chinese Dream, and more specifically the rejuvenation of the nation. From the viewpoint of Foucault’s ideas on governmentality, it sets out to make sure that the people understand that achieving their private dreams is predicated on realizing the national dream, yet at the same time that by achieving their private dreams the national dream will come true as well (Bislev 2015: 591). Yet, as outlined above, it is not easy to define the exact focus of the Chinese Dream. What steps need to be taken to realize this Dream, other than following the promptings by the government? The images produced for the Dream campaign do not attempt to mobilize into action. They consciously hark back to an often idealized past, but clear indications of the Dream are not forthcoming. Many people find the visual components of the posters in public spaces quite pleasing, relatively unobtrusive, familiar and nonconfrontational as they are.11 Although the posters clearly lack the time quality and local quality that were considered essential in earlier times, they are easily taken for granted; given that their slogans and poems are generally appreciated, there is no reason to assume that their messages are not passed on. Moreover, in many instances, the images hide the less desirable aspects of urbanization, as when and where they obstruct the view on less favourable cityscapes, such as building sites or inhabited, but run-down housing stock occupied by migrant workers or slated for 10 Propaganda off icer, Peking University Communist Youth League, in interview with the author, Beijing, 5 May 2015. 11 Information based on fieldwork in Beijing during spring 2015.

China Dreaming

171

demolition. Given their official nature, they moreover seem to be largely, but not completely, protected from graffiti, thus contributing to the more colourful, more orderly impression that the streets make. Seen from these divergent perspectives, the campaign as a whole seems to work quite well. Yet there are also considerable numbers of urban people from all walks of life who resent this visual bombardment, stating that it is just ‘garbage,’ indicating that they do not like the images, that the funds involved in rolling out the campaign could be put to better uses benefitting the ordinary people, that they find the poems sappy and that the more frequent the exhortations, the falser the sentiments expressed.12 An even more explicit focus on themes directly touching on the lives of urbanites could appeal to more people and generate a more positive response across the board. Some Chinese Dream posters pay attention to environmental issues but appear less frequently. Paying greater attention to urgent problems such as air pollution would certainly pay off and generate a positive feedback. On the other hand, in the rapidly changing urban environment, a more concentrated focus on reviving traditional behavioural patterns such as respect and care for the elderly very much resonates with popular concerns. Figure 5.6, designed by Ren Mingzhao from Wuyang County, Henan Province, shows a boy and a girl helping an elderly, bow-legged lady with a cane cross the street while protecting her from the rain with an umbrella. The slogan ‘People who respect the elderly obtain happiness’ is clearly intended to re-establish a basic value in society, or at least among its youngest members, like Liu Zhigui’s feet-washing scene also attempted. The strategy of addressing issues that concern the people rather than what politics demand means a structural change in the way in which the audience is approached, with public service advertising of whatever kind no longer serving as propaganda but as an actual channel for communication. If the Xi administration were serious about reviving the mass line mechanism, such a change in strategy would not only acknowledge popular concerns, the increased knowledge of the audience and its media literacy, but would also improve its messages, as some of the Chinese Dream campaign critics assert (Li and Deng 2014: 126, 127). While the Dream itself may not materialize in all its complexity, its campaign materials thus could play a major role in raising the quality of the people. But one thing is clear: the Chinese Dream in all its opacity has found resonance with the target audience. 12 A worker, in interview with the author, Beijing, 16 May 2015.

172 

Stefan L andsberger

Figure 5.6 Designer: Public Service Advertising Art Committee; image designed by Ren Mingzhao. Title: Ren jing lao ji de fu (The people honour the old for their own happiness). Publisher: China Internet Television Station. Date of publication: 2013. No print number. Available online on website of the Civilization Office under the CCP Central Committee http://www.wenming.cn/jwmsxf_294/zggygg/pml/tmdxl/201309/ t20130929_1500644.shtml

China Dreaming

173

Bibliography Barmé, Geremie (2002) An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975). Oakland: University of California Press. Bislev, Ane (2015) The Chinese Dream: Imagining China. Fudan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 8: 585-595. Boutonnet, Thomas (2010) ‘Harmonious’ Consumer Society Exposed: Visual Cacophony and Schizophrenia on Beijing’s Street Billboards in 2006. Journal of Chinese Studies/Revista de Estudos Chineses 6: 117-134. Brady, Anne-Marie (2008) Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Brady, Anne-Marie (2009) The Beijing Olympics as a Campaign of Mass Distraction. China Quarterly 197: 1-24. Braester, Yomi (2010) Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham: Duke University Press. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2004) The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. New York: Routledge. Callahan, William A. (2017) Dreaming as a Critical Discourse of National Belonging: China Dream, American Dream and World Dream. Nations and Nationalism 23(2): 248-270. Carlson, Benjamin (2013) How the Communist Party Sells Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream.’ Global Post, 18 August. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/ regions/asia-pacific/china/130815/communist-party-xi-jinping-chinese-dream, accessed 23 June 2014. Cell, Charles P. (1977) Revolution at Work: Mobilization Campaigns in China. New York: Academic Press. Chen, Xiaomei (2017) Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda. New York: Columbia University Press. China Civilization Off ice (2013) Jiang wenming shu xinfeng gongyi guanggao [Practice culture, establish a new practice public service advertisements]. CCP Central Propaganda Department. http://www.wenming.cn/jwmsxf_294/ zggygg/, accessed 22 August 2014. China Internet Network Information Center (2015) The 35th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China (January). https://cnnic.com.cn/IDR/ReportDownloads/201507/P020150720486421654597.pdf, accessed 5 July 2015. Chinese Posters Foundation (2013) Beijing Olympics 2008 – The official posters. http://chineseposters.net/themes/beijing-olympics-official.php, accessed 5 July 2015. Chinese Posters Foundation (2014a) Beijing Olympics 2008. http://chineseposters. net/themes/beijing-olympics.php, accessed 5 July 2015.

174 

Stefan L andsberger

Chinese Posters Foundation (2014b) Huxian Peasant Painters. http://chineseposters. net/themes/huxian-peasant-painters.php accessed 5 July 2015. Chinese Posters Foundation (2015) Liu Zhigui. http://chineseposters.net/artists/ liuzhigui.php accessed 5 July 2015. Davies, David J. (2009) ‘Go China! Go!’: Running Fan and Debating Success during China’s Olympic Summer. International Journal of the History of Sport (26)8: 1040-1064. De Kloet, Jeroen, Chong, Gladys Pak Lei, and Landsberger, Stefan (2011) National Image Management Begins at Home: Imagining the New Olympic Citizen. In Wang, Jian (ed.), Soft Power in China: Public Diplomacy through Communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 117-133. De Kloet, Jeroen, Chong, Gladys Pak Lei, and Liu, Wei (2008) The Beijing Olympics and the Art of Nation-State Maintenance. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs – China aktuell, 37(2): 5-35. De Kloet, Jeroen, and Landsberger, Stefan (2012) Fandom, Politics and the Super Girl Contest in a Globalized China. In Zwaan, Koos, and De Bruin, Joost (eds) Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity and Performance in a Global Television Format. Farnham: Ashgate, 135-147. Dreyer, Jacob (2012) Shanghai and the 2010 Expo: Staging the City. In Bracken, Gregory (ed.) Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 47-58. Dynon, Nicholas (2014) Civilisation-State: Modernising the Past to Civilise the Future in Jiang Zemin’s China. China: An International Journal 12(1): 22-42. Edney, Kingsley (2014) The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Esarey, Ashley, Stockmann, Daniela, and Zhang, Jie (2016), Support for Propaganda: Chinese Perceptions of Public Service Advertising. Journal of Contemporary China 103: 101-117. Foucault, Michel (1991) Governmentality. In Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 87-104. Gao, Yinan, and Yao, Chun (eds) (2014) Collection of ‘China Dream’ Public-Spirited Ads I, II, III, IV, People’s Daily Online, 11 July. http://english.peopledaily.com. cn/n/2014/0711/c98649-8754057.html; http://english.people.com.cn/n/2014/0714/ c98649-8754909.html; http://english.people.com.cn/n/2014/0712/c98649-8754561. html; http://english.people.com.cn/n/2014/0713/c98649-8754719.html, accessed 8 August 2014. Henochowicz, Anne (2015) I Love the Chinese Dream; A Coffee, Please, and Cream. China Digital Times, 6 February. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/02/lovechinese-dream-coffee-please-cream/, accessed 7 February 2015.

China Dreaming

175

Heslop, Louise A., Nadeau, John, and O’Reilly, Norm (2010) China and the Olympics: Views of Insiders and Outsiders. International Marketing Review 27(4): 404-433. Holm, David (1991) Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hou, Jianmei (2003) Renwen Aoyun yu rende sizhi fanzhan zhanlüe [People’s Olympics and the Strategy to Develop the People’s Quality]. In Peng, Yongjie, Zhang, Zhiwei, and Han, Donghui (eds) Renwen Aoyun [People’s Olympics]. Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 301-341. Huang, Songshan (2011) ‘China, Forever’: Orientalism Revisited. Annals of Tourism Research 38(3): 1188-1192. Hubbert, Jennifer (2013) Of Menace and Mimicry: The 2008 Beijing Olympics. Modern China 39(4): 408-437. Hwang, Dong-Jhy, and Chang, Li-Ke (2008) Sport, Maoism and the Beijing Olympics: One Century, One Ideology. China Perspectives 73: 4-17. JCDecaux (2014) 2013 Reference Document. http://www.jcdecaux.com/sites/default/ files/assets/document/2016/09/jcdecaux2013referencedocument.pdf, accessed 15 January 2016. Jin, Yuanpu (2013) The Chinese Dream: the Chinese Spirit and the Chinese Way. Civilization Magazine. http://english.cntv.cn/special/newleadership/chinesedream05.html, accessed 31 January 2014. Johnson, Ian (2013) Old Dreams for a New China. New York Review of Books, 15 October. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/oct/15/china-dream-posters/, accessed 6 November 2013. Johnson, Ian (2015) A Chinese Folk Artist’s Descendants Are Split by the Government’s Use of Their Family Legacy. New York Times, 5 December. https://www. nytimes.com/2015/12/06/world/asia/a-chinese-folk-artists-descendants-are-splitby-the-governments-use-of-their-family-legacy.html?_r=0, accessed 18 August 2016. Kuhn, Robert Lawrence (2013) Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream. International Herald Tribune, 4 June. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/opinion/global/xi-jinpingschinese-dream.html, accessed 29 January 2014. Landsberger, Stefan (1995) Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Reform. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Landsberger, Stefan (2001) Learning by What Example? Educational Propaganda in Twenty-first-Century China. Critical Asian Studies 33(4): 541-571. Landsberger, Stefan (2009) Harmony, Olympic Manners and Morals – Chinese Television and the ‘New Propaganda’ of Public Service Advertising. European Journal of East Asian Studies 8(2): 331-355. Landsberger, Stefan (2013) Contextualizing (Propaganda) Posters. In Henriot, Christian, and Yeh, Wen-hsin (eds), Visualising China, 1845-1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 379-405.

176 

Stefan L andsberger

Lee, Joyce (2014) Expressing the Chinese Dream. The Diplomat, 28 March. http:// thediplomat.com/2014/03/expressing-the-chinese-dream, accessed 12 May 2014. Li, Wei, and Deng, Jiaohua (2014) Dangdai gongyi guanggao chuangzuo zhong de chuangtong wenhua yuansu jueze yanjiu – dui Zhongguo meng gongyi guanggao chuangzuo de fansi [Research on the selection of traditional cultural elements in creating present-day public service advertising – Reviewing the creation of Chinese Dream public service advertising]. Wenxue shenghuo – Yishu Zhongguo [Literature life – art in China] 968, 124-127. Li, Xiang (2013) Tiananmen guangchangde ‘Zhongguo meng’ huayi shiqing [The poetic charm of Tiananmen’s Chinese Dream]. Zhongguo wenming wang, 12 July. http://hxd.wenming.cn/blog/2013-07/12/content_184971.htm, accessed 31 January 2014. Lim, Louisa (2013) Chasing The Chinese Dream – If You Can Define It, NPR, 29 April. http://www.npr.org/2013/04/29/179838801/chasing-the-chinese-dream-if-youcan-define-it, accessed 29 January 2014. Mahoney, Josef Gregory (2014) Interpreting the Chinese Dream: An Exercise of Political Hermeneutics. Journal of Chinese Political Science 19: 15-34. Mao, Zedong (1967) Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership. In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. III. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 117-122. Mittler, Barbara (2008) Popular Propaganda? Art and Culture in Revolutionary China. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152(4): 466-489. Mittler, Barbara (2012) A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Polumbaum, Judy (2003) Capturing the Flame: Aspirations and Representations of Beijing’s 2008 Olympics. In Lee, Chin-Chuan (ed.), Chinese Media, Global Contexts. London: Routledge Curzon, 57-75. Shi, Yongqi (2006) Aoyun liyi [Win manners, win games]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Sigley, Gary (2009) Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning in Contemporary China. positions 17(3): 537-566. Xinhua (2008) Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Posters Available July 20. Xinhuanet, 18 July. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/18/content_8570590.htm, 18 July, accessed 31 January 2014. Xinhua (2013a) CPC’s ‘Mass Line’ Campaign Not a Short-term Movement. News of the Communist Party of China, http://english.cpc.people.com. cn/206972/206976/8325279.html, 15 July, accessed 5 January 2015. Xinhua (2013b) People’s Daily Editorial Stresses Stronger Ties with Masses. News of the Communist Party of China, 1 July. http://english.cpc.people.com. cn/206972/206974/8305468.html, accessed 5 January 2015.

China Dreaming

177

Xinhua (2013c) Xi Demands Implementation of ‘Mass Line’ Campaign. People’s Daily Online, 10 December. http://en.people.cn/90785/8479207.html, accessed 5 January 2015. Xinhua (2014) Chinese Dream. Xinhuanet. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/ special/chinesedream/, accessed 31 January 2014. Yan, Grace, and Santos, Carla Alameida (2009) ‘China, Forever’: Tourism Discourse and Self-Orientalism. Annals of Tourism Research 36(2): 295-315. Yi, Qing (2013) Shi hua Zhongguo meng [The Chinese Dream in poems and images]. Beijing: Hongqi chubanshe. Zhonggong dangshi zhuyao shijian jianjie [Short introduction to important events in the history of the CCP] (1982). Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe. Zhou, Yong, Ap, John, and Bauer, Thomas (2012) Government Motivations for Hosting the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 10(2): 185-201.

About the author Stefan Landsberger Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese History and Social Developments at the School of Asian Studies, Leiden University Institute of Area Studies [email protected] http://chineseposters.net Stefan R. Landsberger has one of the largest private collections of Chinese propaganda posters in the world. He has published widely on topics related to Chinese propaganda, and maintains an extensive website exclusively devoted to this genre of political communications.

Part II Urban Interventions

6

Urban Insertion as Artistic Strategy The Big Tail Elephant Working Group in 1990s Guangzhou Nancy P. Lin Abstract The Guangzhou-based urban artworks of Big Tail Elephant Working Group (大尾象工作组), comprised of the artists Lin Yilin, Chen Shao­ xiong, Liang Juhui, and Xu Tan, represents one of the earliest sustained site-specific art practices in China in the 1990s. Examining their works in relation to the changing socio-economic and physical terrain of Guangzhou, this chapter develops the term ‘urban insertion’ to describe their unique engagement with the urban environment. A method of working that appropriates rather than intervenes confrontationally in the structures of the city, their ‘urban insertions’ embedded themselves within the city to critically probe its material conditions. This distinct site-based urban practice opened up new possibilities for Chinese contemporary art and revises our current understanding of site-specif ic urban interventions. Keywords: The Big Tail Elephant Working Group, Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Xu Tan, site-oriented urban practice, Guangzhou.

In 1995, on a widened street alongside the construction site of Guangzhou’s soon-to-be tallest skyscraper, a nondescript man moves a wall of stacked breezeblocks across the street, methodically stacking and unstacking each one by one amidst oncoming vehicular traffic. This performance, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, by the artist Lin Yilin (林一林, b. 1964), a member of the Guangzhou-based Big Tail Elephant Working Group (大 尾象工作组), would later be noted in various art historical accounts as illustrative of Chinese contemporary artists’ new interest in the country’s

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch06

182 

Nanc y P. Lin

Figure 6.1 Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, performance, 90 min, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist.

rapid urbanization during the 1990s.1 Indeed the piece engages with the urban environment in highly specific ways. The artist chose to locate the work on the street abutting the CITIC Plaza construction site in the rapidly developing new district of Tianhe (Heavenly River) in Guangzhou, China. The breezeblocks Lin used are taken from the site and therefore intimately connected to the material realities of the destruction and reconstruction of the city. Lin’s performance, a form of bodily engagement with the physical environment, registers an exchange between the artist’s body and the urban site that can be understood in literal terms as an art work. This piece is representative of the thematic concerns and strategies of Big Tail Elephant, comprised of artists Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong (陈劭雄, 1962-2016), Liang Juhui (梁钜辉, 1959-2006), and Xu Tan (徐坦, b. 1957). Between 1991 and 1998, the group’s Guangzhou-based art practice was rooted in the specific socio-economic conditions of the city, often quite literally on its streets. While many artists moved from the provinces to the burgeoning 1 Select publications that discuss Big Tail Elephant include, Wu (2014: 170-172); Gladston (2014: 178-179); Obrist (2009); Hou (2002b); Ai, Xu, and Zeng (1994). Select exhibition catalogues include Hou (2003); Wu et al. (2002); Fibicher (1998); Driessen and Van Mierlo (1997); Guo, Song, and Pang (1997); Hou and Obrist (1997).

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

183

art scene in Beijing in the 1990s, they were unique in their commitment to the city of Guangzhou, choosing its urban spaces as the site and subject of their work. Inspired by the city’s urbanization, consumerism, and its new migrant population, Big Tail Elephant’s artistic engagements with Guangzhou transformed the city into an important centre of experimental art activity in the early 1990s. Big Tail Elephant’s artistic practice throughout the 1990s might be thought of as one of the earliest instances of a sustained ‘site-specific’ (Kwon 2004; Kaye 2000) practice in China – a more complete history of which has yet to be written.2 While some artists may have sited works in specific public locations in China in the late 1980s (Gao 2008), a more self-conscious expression of a site-based urban artistic practice did not emerge until the 1990s (Gao 2005).3 Using the term ‘site’ to refer to both physical locations as well as what art historian James Meyer (2000: 25) has called a ‘functional site,’ or the artistic operations that conceptually link different sites together, this chapter posits Big Tail Elephant at the beginning of a shift towards site-based art practice in China. Highlighting key works between 1991 and 1998, I trace the group’s trajectory as a case study for exploring the unique context, forms, and concerns of urban site-based art as it emerged in China during this period. In demonstrating the ways in which the group’s artistic practices were informed by changes taking place in Guangzhou and the larger Pearl River Delta region, the first section of this chapter argues that the group innovatively used the city’s sites, raw materials, and socio-economic structures as both the physical context and artistic language for experimentation. Based on a close analysis of three key works, the second section of the chapter proposes the term ‘urban insertion’ to understand their artistic strategies. 2 My use of the term ‘site-specific’ draws from art historian Miwon Kwon’s work on site-specific art practice in post-war North America. Kwon has argued for the ways in which advanced practices in site-specific art since the 1960s and 1970s have shifted from locational to relational specificity, which she sees as the negotiation between the two poles of a nostalgic place-bound ontology versus a nomadic and fluid one. Performance studies scholar Nick Kaye has also related site-specific performance work to Michel De Certeau’s notions of spatial practices to characterize it as problematizing the presumed stabilities of ‘site’ and ‘place.’ As I show, it is precisely the instability of the drastically changing city that is the focus of the group’s site-specific practice. 3 See Gao (2008) for an account of the Pond Society’s public site-based works, Work No. 1: Yang-Style Taiji Series, June 1986 and Work No. 2: Walkers in a Green Space, November 1986, two notable precursors in the 1980s. See also the chapter by Chris Berry in this volume for an account of urban artworks by artists in the 1990s such as Big Tail Elephant, Zhan Wang (展望, b. 1962), Zhang Dali (张大力, b. 1963), Wang Jin (王晋, b. 1962), and Zhu Fadong (朱發東, b. 1960), among others.

184 

Nanc y P. Lin

‘Urban insertion’ can be defined as a tactic that seeks to locate small gaps of opportunity within the city in order to stealthily slip in, at once mimicking and embracing the processes of the city, at the same time as it seeks to critically investigate their material conditions. I argue that by inserting their site-based works within the physical and socio-economic processes of the city, Big Tail Elephant’s activities, which were distinct from Chinese performance art of the period, articulated an entirely new approach to site-based engagements with the urban environment. As a new framework for understanding artistic practices in urban space, ‘urban insertion’ builds upon art historian Rosalyn Deutsche’s seminal writings on this topic (1988, 1996) by suggesting a more oblique model of engagement with the urban milieu. Advocating for avant-garde artistic practices that challenged urban redevelopment in New York in the 1980s, Deutsche argued, ‘a genuinely responsible public art must, in [Henri] Lefebvre’s words, “appropriate” space from its domination by capitalist and state power. In the tradition of radical site-specific art, public art must disrupt, rather than secure, the apparent coherence of its new urban sites’ (1996: xvi). Since Deutsche, scholars have assumed to various degrees that the relationship between public site-based art and urban sites is one of antagonistic confrontation, disruption, interruption, or intervention. For example, art historian Miwon Kwon’s (2004) account of ‘site-specificity’ as a discursive issue has demonstrated the ways in which site-specific art disrupted consensual discourse on what constitutes community, public, and site. In the context of Chinese contemporary performance art, art historian Thomas Berghuis (2006) has shown how performance art in public spaces directly confronted and challenged commonly accepted social and moral codes. Similar issues are discussed in the next chapter by Chris Berry. More specifically, with respect to scholarship on Big Tail Elephant, curator Hou Hanru (1998: 56) has characterized the group’s urban practice as ‘temporal barricades in the “global city”’ and as a ‘guerrilla war.’ Departing from this confrontational paradigm, I provide a more nuanced reading of the artists’ engagements with the urban environment as not necessarily an oppositional intervention of prevailing socio-economic conditions, but one characterized by the subtler form of urban insertion.

Establishing the Big Tail Elephant Working Group The Big Tail Elephant Working Group emerged at the beginning of the 1990s during a moment of uncertainty in the Chinese contemporary art

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

185

Figure 6.2 A group meeting in 1993, Guangzhou. From left to right: Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Xu Tan and Lin Yilin. Courtesy of Lin Yilin.

world. Following the closure of the exhibition ‘China Avant-Garde’ at the National Art Gallery and subsequent events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, art activities in the country experienced a drastic contraction as state aff iliated institutions – the primary platform for the arts – effectively banned avant-garde exhibitions and journals. As a result, many notable avant-garde artists began to work and privately exhibit their art within the spaces of their own homes. Though censorship continued into the 1990s, conditions for art production and exhibition already showed signs of cautious normalization by 1991 with important public exhibitions such as the ‘New Generation’ show at Beijing’s Museum of History. Between 1990 and 1991, the group’s three initial members, Chen Shaoxiong, Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui, founded the ‘Big Tail Elephant Working Group,’ a name inspired by the European avant-garde group CoBrA. Influenced by Western conceptual art of the 1960s, the group’s works often combined appropriated objects and materials, performance, video, and photography. The use of the term ‘working group’ (工作组) rather than ‘collective body’ (群体), which had commonly been used by Chinese artists in the 1980s, indicated the group’s departure from the kinds of leader oriented, ideologically driven group activities characteristic of that period. While repudiating such groupthink mentalities, however, it is likely that the members continued with the

186 

Nanc y P. Lin

group format for practical reasons such as pooling financial resources and combined exhibition opportunities during a period when the possibility for exhibiting works other than painting and sculpture was scarce. The term ‘working group’ highlighted this shift from ideology to pragmatism at the same time as it emphasized the thematic importance of ‘labour’ in their practice. Though each artist took different approaches and experimented with an array of materials and medium, it was above all, the shared reality of Guangzhou and the drastic transformation of the city during this period that continued to tie the members together.

The City as Material and Medium With the inauguration of China’s Open Door policy in 1978 and the creation of Special Economic Zones in Guangdong Province in 1980, the Pearl River Delta region became, as Hou Hanru described it, ‘the main laboratory of economic, cultural, social and even political openness’ in China (Hou 2009: 2). By the early 1990s, urban transformation in the Pearl River Delta region had reached a breakneck pace, further bolstered by the popularity of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai in early 1992 (Zhou 2005; Koolhaas et al. 2001; Yeung and Chu 1998; MacPherson and Zheng 1996). Since the opening up of capital markets, the creation of private enterprises, and greater municipal autonomy, Guangzhou has been dramatically transformed through the influx of capital, migrant workers, reconstruction, and expansion. These changes had an indelible influence on Big Tail Elephant’s artistic practice. As Liang Juhui later remarked, ‘Our working methods changed in accord with the changes in the city. What’s most important is that we’ve always been concerned with the development of the city, and this is the site around which we’ve positioned ourselves’ (Obrist 2009: 41). In addition to treating the city as representational subject matter, strategies that Jiang Jiehong and Meiqin Wang have explored in Part 1 of this edited volume, the group also incorporated the material realities of Guangzhou into their work in more literal ways. By appropriating commonly found materials and physically engaging with the city’s urban processes, their works reflect a reciprocal relationship between the city and art praxis: the physical, economic, and political changes taking place in Guangzhou compelled a change in the group’s use of materials, media, and processes, and in turn, this expanded field of art practice had a veritable impact on the city by uncovering and probing its very material conditions.

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

187

Figure 6.3 Lin Yilin, Standard Series of Ideal Residence, 1991, installation, brick, iron, wood. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1991 Lin Yilin began to use traditional brick, concrete breezeblocks, iron, wood, and wall-like structures in many of his projects around the city. When asked why he chose to use bricks, Lin once stated, ‘First, I am very interested in architecture, and in conceptual and minimalist art, and bricks are able to convey this. Second, when I first started to use bricks, I discovered that they are everywhere, because so many old houses have been torn down. The entire city is a construction site, full of bricks. For very little money, I could buy a truckload of bricks and use them to carry out these major projects’ (Sans 2009: 37). For Lin, the use of brick was not only practical, but through its very material qualities could provide a means to reframe Western conceptual or minimalist aesthetic within the daily realities of demolition and reconstruction in Guangzhou. Seeing the entire city as one large construction site, Lin regarded it as the subject, site, and medium of his art. In his installation project Standard Series of Ideal Residence (理想住宅 标准系列, 1991), Lin used iron armatures and stacked bricks to construct a series of structures halfway between a sculpture and the incomplete

188 

Nanc y P. Lin

shell of a house. The Chinese title appropriated the cliché verbiage of new building advertisements in the city, pointing to the haphazard breakneck construction speed and the booming real estate market during this period. Yet the ‘walls’ of Lin’s units jut out in strange angles and do not entirely delineate enclosed residential units. These evidently un-ideal units parallel the ways in which developers in the 1990s sought to maximize profits through new building standardizations for maximum efficiency. Diagrams of various unit configurations from the Pictorial Guide to Speedy Architectural Design and ‘Planning and Design of Superstructural Housing’ from Jianzhu Xue Bao, exemplify these strategies and indicate the ways in which the towering new constructions and rigorously structured units delineated both interior domestic space and exterior urban landscapes (Reproduced in Koolhaas et al. 2001: 186-187). Lin’s labour-intensive art work mimics the construction work of rebuilding the city into a modern metropolis. By using the materials of ‘standard’ and ‘ideal’ residences to create pseudo-standard, pseudo-ideal residences, Lin appropriated the very materials of the city to re-examine them anew. His continued engagement with bricks and walls throughout the 1990s, speaks to the flexibility and enduring interest that the city-as-subject and raw material held for the artist as well as the other members of the group. Whereas Lin used the city’s physical materials of brick and iron to create his works, Xu Tan’s project, The Alteration and Extension of Sanyu Road No. 14 (1994) appropriated the city’s economic exchange processes as its own type of medium. Taking place at No. 14 Sanyu Road, a large old house in the inner neighbourhood of Guangzhou, the work featured a provocative renovation plan for the building itself. In a derelict room on the second floor, Xu conveyed his business plan for the space, which included a hair salon and a separate area for ‘other hair salon’ services (Fibicher 1998: 98). According to the artist, in Guangdong, ‘hair salon’ commonly also implied ‘brothel.’ The installation included a worn-looking mattress, pinned up black-and-white photos of the building, architectural plans, and drawings for how the individual rooms would be partitioned. Interspersed among these mock-ups are numerous large photographs of Xu himself with a prostitute, demonstrating the sexual services his salon would offer by literally performing them in the role of the client. Drawn into this performance, the viewer is led to assume that the bed installed in the room is the same one Liang and the prostitute used in the photos. Curiously, in one of these scenes, Xu looks directly into the camera as if breaking the fourth wall of his conceptual-performance-installation project to challenge the viewer to unpack these many layers.

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

Figure 6.4 Xu Tan, The Alteration and Extension of Sanyu Road No. 14, 1994, installation, photographs, floor plan, video, text, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.5 Detail of Xu Tan, The Alteration and Extension of Sanyu Road No. 14, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

189

190 

Nanc y P. Lin

Indeed, Xu’s work was at the intersection of multiple mediums: first, it was a conceptual proposal for converting the building into a lucrative multi-use commercial enterprise that was to be part bookstore, part hair salon, and part brothel; second, it featured an installation project that visualized the concept through the orchestration of photography, video, architectural drawings, text, and props; and finally, it was a documented performance that featured the artist himself as both industrious urban entrepreneur and lascivious brothel client. The artist’s performance is, therefore, both fictional in his acting out of a role and real in his very act of manifesting his conceptual proposal to rent the space and use it for the commercial purpose of prostitution. According to Xu’s explanation, the work reflected on the building’s turbulent history – it was built shortly after the Japanese retreat from China in the 1940s – and proposed new plans for its future (Fibicher 1998: 98). During the Cultural Revolution, the house would have belonged to the communist government. However, beginning in the 1980s these properties were returned to private owners, setting off real estate speculation and the growth in the housing rental market. Enterprising property owners would often sub-divide and rent out their buildings, aiding in the proliferation of small businesses, among which, was a new market for prostitution (Li 1998: 209).4 The owner of No. 14 Sanyu Road similarly sought to rent out his space for which Xu, among others, submitted a proposal. Yet ironically, a rental scheme that would likely have been overlooked by the municipal government as just a ‘hair salon,’ was sharply criticized by several newspapers due to the sexual content of Xu’s artwork. The artist’s proposal was rejected, but not the actual rental process. As Xu notes matter-of-factly, ‘The rental rights of No. 14 Sanyu Rd. have been won by another company. […] No. 14 Sanyu Rd. will be altered and renovated according to different plans. The construction has already begun’ (Fibicher 1998: 98). The city’s rental market stops for no one. Whereas previously Lin used the city’s physical materials of brick and iron to reflect on the changing urban environment, Xu’s project appropriated the city’s complex exchange of land, money, and services by mimicking it through performance. In attempting to adopt the economic workings of the city, Xu’s artwork seemed almost indistinguishable from the everyday reality of Guangzhou’s rental market system in the early 1990s. But by conceiving of his project as a creative act that plays into the actual processes of property commercialization, illegal enterprises, and even sexual exploitation, Xu 4 Eva Li (1998) has shown that the economic development of Guangdong in the early 1990s has also resulted in the re-emergence of prostitution.

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

191

incisively bracketed out these burgeoning urban processes at the same time as he probed the limits of what they would allow. If, as art historian Wu Hung (2014: 172) has noted, ‘Xu Tan erased the boundary between representation and reality, and seamlessly merged contemporary art with contemporary life,’ he was able to do so precisely through the doubled significance of performance: the artist is both actor in his fictional scenario and real-life actor in the socio-economic processes of the city to which he refers. Xu Tan was not the only member of Big Tail Elephant to move towards performance art around this time. In fact, while the group focused primarily on installation art from 1991 to 1992, the years 1993 and 1994 marked a significant shift in the group’s practice towards performance and public interaction. In taking their work to the streets, their efforts from 1993 onwards was at the vanguard of a national trend towards performance art, most notably exemplified by the works of Beijing’s East Village artists around 1994 and 1995. Big Tail Elephant was well aware of these activities in Beijing as each of their performance works from their 1993 group exhibition was featured alongside later works from artists such as Ma Liuming (馬六明, b. 1969), Song Dong (宋冬, b. 1966), and Zhang Huan (張洹, b. 1965), among others, in Ai Weiwei’s Black Cover Book (1994). Even so, the group’s works posited a different notion of performance than the ‘behaviour art’ (行为艺术) of the East Village artists, which as Thomas Berghuis (2006: 102-111) explained, was characterized by spectacles of extreme bodily harm that confronted and shocked audiences in order to declare their subversive status vis-à-vis conventional public behaviour and ‘acceptable’ art. One important distinction is that, while ‘behaviour artists’ such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Zhu Ming (朱冥, b. 1972), and Cang Xin (蒼鑫, b. 1967) engaged in a personal introspective exploration of their bodies through acts of endurance, gender-, and identity-blurring, Big Tail Elephant’s works reflected an outward interest in the societal relationship between individuals and the cultural and economic realities of the urban environment. Second, while the East Village artists conducted performances for their artist colleagues and insider art audiences far from Beijing’s city centre, Big Tail Elephant increasingly began to stage their performance works in centrally located public sites. Finally, rather than declaring their difference from the norm, the group’s performances actually functioned through mimicry of it. Indeed, their performance art had a particularly unique conceptual basis in the realities of everyday labour and work processes taking place in the streets of Guangzhou. For example, the earliest performance piece, Seven Days of Silence (1991) by Chen Shaoxiong featured the artist’s Zen-like repetitive labour of painting multiple sheets of plastic with black paint.

192 

Nanc y P. Lin

In Chen’s subsequent work, 72.5 Hours of Electricity Consumption (1992), anthropomorphic fluorescent tube stick figures literalized a bodily consumption of electricity. Along with Lin’s Standard Series of Ideal Residence and Xu’s Alteration and Extension of No. 14 Sanyu Road, these works figure the artwork as the manual labour of the artist on a particular installation site or the workings of a particular urban process such as electricity usage or the rental market. Bridging the material and immaterial dimensions of Guangzhou’s urbanization, performance allowed Big Tail Elephant to engage with the socio-economic realities of the city by performing the things that make the city run – electricity, construction, and commercial markets. Their performance works from 1993 onward appropriated these systems as their art, inserting themselves into the city’s daily working processes. If the years 1994 to 1995 can be thought of as a historic nationwide turn towards performance art, Big Tail Elephant’s works are significant not only for being at the vanguard of this shift, but also for developing a unique trajectory for performance art that was contingent upon the particularities of Guangzhou’s urban context.

Urban Insertions: 1995-1998 From 1995 onwards, Big Tail Elephant continued to push farther outward into the public spaces of the city. Their performance works in public streets and various construction sites engaged the physical spaces and changes of the city at a moment when Guangzhou’s aspirations to rebuild itself as an international city were being systematically implemented (Cheung 1996).5 It was during this period that some of their most important public performances were created, including Lin Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995), Liang Juhui’s One Hour Game (1996), and Chen Shaoxiong’s, Streetscape series (1997-1998). Many did not take place in the context of an exhibition, as did some of their earlier performance works. In fact, these performances in the city proper seemed to have collapsed the moment of the artwork’s creation with the moment of its exhibition – its display to a public audience. Their works during this period thus eschewed conventional exhibition sites and formats. Though they would have one last annual group exhibition at 5 Peter Cheung (1996) has argued that the technocratic mayor Li Ziliu catalysed major urban infrastructural changes during this period. By 1993, the municipal government had drafted Guangzhou’s ‘Development Proposal to Achieve Basic Modernization in Fifteen Years,’ which included plans for market and urban core expansion.

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

193

Figure 6.6 Chen Shaoxiong, Streetscape I, 1997-1998, photograph, photo collage, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist.

one specific location in 1996, the same format that had worked for them between 1991 and 1996 seemed no longer viable. Instead, they found in the rapidly developing Tianhe district of Guangzhou, a site full of possibilities for staging various performance activities. Lin’s 1995 performance was done on the street immediately facing the new construction site of CITIC Plaza, the soon-to-be architectural anchor of the district. The following year, Liang would install himself a few minutes down the street in the construction elevators of another skyscraper-in-progress, Sinopec Towers, for his performance. In 1997, Chen began to create streetscapes around the city, one of which featured views of the two aforementioned skyscrapers – the former fully sheathed and the latter still halfway in progress. Indeed, this work, Streetscape I (1997-1998), can be understood as a self-reflexive index of Big Tail Elephant’s activities in and around Tianhe, precisely as a function of the speed of urban development and the visually dramatic spatial changes that were occurring. The spatial rhyming in the artists’ choice of sites around the district, the temporal unfolding of their practice alongside the changes of the city, and the visual similarities of their performance photographs featuring the same urban motifs – CITIC Plaza skyscraper, Sinopec Towers, the signature golden sheathing of Metro Plaza tower – attest to the confluence of Big Tail

194 

Nanc y P. Lin

Elephant’s works during this period and their inter-textual legibility as a cohesive art work. Using art historian James Meyer’s (2000: 25) understanding of the ‘functional site’ as not a static place-site but an ‘operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist’s above all),’ I trace the group’s peregrinations in the Tianhe area between 1995 and 1998 as such a spatial practice. Their artworks and activities during this period echo each other across sites and times, sharing a common interest in the functional site of Tianhe, or rather the urban changes of the city as it was happening in real time. I argue that what ties Big Tail Elephant’s works together in this period is the common artistic strategy of what I call ‘urban insertion.’ This is a term I use to denote a spatial practice that is similar to but different from the terms ‘disruption’ or ‘intervention,’ which have become fundamental to current discourse on site-specific urban performance art since it was first articulated by art historian Rosalyn Deutsche. Along these lines, whereas prevailing interpretations of Big Tail Elephant’s works often follow art critic and curator Hou Hanru’s (1998: 56) characterization of their practice as ‘physically interrupting traffic and construction in the city,’ I demonstrate that the artists actually operated more subtly in the manner of urban insertion into existing spaces and flows. Rather than interruption, which implies blockage and confrontation, such an artistic position of insertion, is one that actually slips into and seemingly blends into or embraces the socio-economic patterns of the city. In keeping with their longstanding interest in appropriating urban materials and performing the processes of the city, the group’s activities during this period articulated an entirely new approach to site-specific engagements with the urban environment. Returning again to the opening example of Lin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995), I re-examine in closer detail the particular ways in which this performance piece engaged with its site. According to the artist, the location was highly significant: ‘When I was looking for a site, I saw that Guangzhou was building its tallest building yet, they even claimed at the time it was the tallest in Asia, and so I thought it was meaningful to realize the performance on that street, because this site bore an interesting connection to the city as a whole’ (Sans 2009: 35). The CITIC Plaza skyscraper, which was under construction from 1993 to 1996, indeed came to hold the title of tallest building in Asia, symbolically representing the ambitions as well as the speed at which they were carried out by the municipal government during the 1990s. Such massive construction efforts in Guangzhou and greater China have resulted in a dramatic increase in the country’s

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

195

production and consumption of cement (Wilson 2014) – the very material Lin chose to highlight through his salvage of concrete breezeblocks as opposed to his earlier use of bricks. As previously discussed, Lin staged his work in a large street in Tianhe district despite oncoming traffic. In Hou Hanru’s analysis of this work (1998: 56) and most other subsequent commentary, there is a common misconception that Lin’s actions interrupted traffic. Taking a closer look at the video clip of the 90-minute performance, we can see that most incredibly, it did not (Lin 2011). The artist’s slow and steady movements across the street ensured that the cars could easily avoid him and drive right by. In one film still (Driessen and Van Mierlo 1997: 75), Lin is shown so absorbed in his work that he doesn’t even turn around to heed the large double-decker bus that drove by just steps away from him. Lin inserted himself and the wall into the traffic as if attempting to disrupt it, yet the pace of traffic marched ever onward, sans interruption. Throughout the video the continuous movement of each urban element produces a unified sense of visual rhythm: the cars, buses, and bikes drive speedily by along the horizontal axis, the two elevators move people and construction equipment up and down along the vertical axis, the construction workers bumble about in the background, the occasional pedestrian slows down briefly to take note of the scene, and then the artist, the slowest of all, moves his blocks across the street – each going about its own business. Punctuated by the regular tempo of honking horns, the scene attests to the vitality of the city, which during this period was expanding rapidly eastward from the old urban core of Dongshan-Yuexiu district into the developing Central Business District of Tianhe (Cheung 1996: 133).6 Yet through Lin’s insertion into the scene and his intense concentration, he has added a different tempo to the city with its own personal sense of speed and time – the artist moves with the moving city, yet is also slightly removed from it. The work managed to neither interrupt the existing flow nor escape people’s notice. By mimicking the process of construction through the performance of building, un-building, and rebuilding the wall, the artist has subtly changed the milieu, bracketing out the unquestioned labour activities that were occurring at the CITIC Plaza construction site and elsewhere all over the city. Indeed, as cinema scholar Jia Tan (2012: 144) has already noted, Lin’s attire of green pants and grey shirt is the same as those worn by the city’s 6 Under the new municipal leadership of Mayor Li Ziliu, who took office in 1990, Guangzhou undertook several major urban projects including construction of the long-deferred subway system and expansion of the urban core eastward.

196 

Nanc y P. Lin

working-class construction workers – migrant labourers upon whose backs the city was being turned into an economic powerhouse. Yet the economic unproductiveness of Lin’s labour contrasts sharply with the vast redevelopment efforts happening at the site, in the city, and nationwide. His work thus opened up for investigation the rapid yet cyclical nature of urban destruction and construction, the issue of migrant labourers, and even the very value of labour itself. Indeed, manual labour had always been a central element of Lin’s work. Like his previous use of bricks to construct un-ideal structures in Standard Series of Ideal Residence (1991), the wall here is divested of its functional value as an architectural element and its economic value as a real estate investment. By imbuing the found object with the force of the artist’s own animus, however, Lin has invested it with new value as an instrument of artistic investigation into the socio-economic material realities of the city. He explained, ‘When I made this work, I was thinking about how in a performance I could make a wall behave like a person, make it cross the street […] to see the movement of this wall like an animal, moving and not static, owing to my labour, to the life I was giving it’ (Sans 2009: 35). The artist’s labour on the object caused a mutation to the once-solid mass: the wall is now a responsive, tactical object that is no longer rooted to a specific building or site but actually moves along with the changes of the city, mimicking its eastward expansion, its trail of rubble, as well as the migrant labourers that follow it. This interest in a highly concentrated yet ‘unproductive’ labour is made most apparent in Liang Juhui’s One Hour Game (1996) the following year. Sited just several hundred metres down the street from Lin’s work, Liang’s performance of playing a video game for one hour was done inside the moving construction elevator of Sinopec Towers, which began construction in 1992. A photograph of the performance shows the set-up of a small television on top of a stand draped with white cloth and Liang wearing a blue construction hat, jean shirt, and blue jeans, playing the video game Battle City (1985) (Moby Games 1985). Similar to Lin’s strategy, Liang’s One Hour Game paralleled the daily work rhythm of urban construction. The performance, which highlighted the ceaseless movements of construction elevators, did not appear to interrupt the flow of construction as purported by some scholars, but instead seemed to sync the artist’s body and frenzied video-game activity with the high speed pace of construction activity.7 By 7 There are some discrepancies in accounts of the work; however, my arguments focus on what the formal language of the performance itself seems to suggest. The account given by Tan that ‘Liang invited the workers to play the video games wearing the safety helmets, thus interrupted

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

197

Figure 6.7 Liang Juhui, One Hour Game, 1996, installation and performance, white cloth, chair, television, video game, Guangzhou. Courtesy of Liang Juhui Memorial of Libreria Borges Institut d’Art Contemporain.

inserting his private entertainment into a construction elevator that offers unobstructed views of the city through its metal grates, Liang blurred the boundaries between intimate private space and expansive public space. Indeed photo documentation of the performance offers the viewer two vantage points: the first, a close-up taken from outside the elevator, shows Liang behind the grates in a narrow caged space with his eyes focused on the television set and hands positioned on the video game controller and the second, a wide-angle shot that crops out the building edge, showing Liang in the elevator suspended dozens of stories above the wide panoramic expanse behind him.8 Liang’s face is half-turned back to look at the camera, as if acknowledging the precariousness of his vertical situation. This contrast seems to point to another set of vantage points: the view from the elevator low on the ground versus high above the city. Liang’s changing regular construction flow,’ departs from the artist’s own 1997 description of the work as a solo endeavour. Compare Tan (2015: 147) and Liang (2010: 208). In my recent conversations with Lin Yilin, he suggested that construction may have already halted by this time as the building’s investors ran into financial troubles and lawsuits. Interview with the author, 10 August 2016. 8 I thank Pao-Chen Tang, who first suggested I consider the varying vantage points in the work’s photo documentation.

198 

Nanc y P. Lin

position between the two, signalled two different experiences of the city: one cacophonous and experiential like the sights and sounds heard from the video recording of Lin’s on-the-ground performance, the other calm and abstract, not unlike the gaze of the city’s architects or urban planners. It should not be overlooked that the game the artist chose, Battle City, is one in which the player operates a tank that blasts its way through brick obstacles in a city maze seen from above. Yet like the elevator moving up and down the skyscraper, Liang could only move along two-dimensions in the game. His destructive movements in the virtual city thus contrasted sharply with his passive physical body as it was being moved by the elevator in the real city. The artist’s search ‘for a means to reconcile passive and active conditions’ (Liang 2010: 208) speaks to the sense of helplessness as the individual is carried forth by the massive urban changes happening around him. It also hints at the strange spatio-temporal contradiction between frantic activity and the uncanny fear that one is actually not going anywhere: like Lin’s work, playing the video game for an hour achieved no end goal in the real world and the movements up and down on the elevator only move in place, never actually going anywhere. As Sinopec Towers’ projected completion remained far from assured, Liang sat playing his game in its construction elevator, moving up and down with it towards an unrealized future. By inserting himself into the rhythm of Guangzhou’s urban construction, One Hour Game brought a dimension of the absurd to the city’s breakneck pace of construction. Like the other members of Big Tail Elephant, Chen Shaoxiong was also interested in issues of movement, speed, and the changing temporalities and demographics of the city. As part of Wildlife, a series of nationwide art activities between 1997 and 1998 (Guo, Song, and Pang 1997), Chen created the photographic series Streetscape I-IV (1997-1998). Inspired by the dynamism of Guangzhou’s everyday urban street life, Chen meticulously photo documented the urban landscape of pedestrians, vehicles, and signage at four busy traffic intersections around the city. He then cut out the individual motifs he wanted and reconstructed them into a three-dimensional photo narrative landscape.9 These ‘streetscapes’ (街景), as he called them, were then re-inserted into the existing urban environment and re-photographed featuring the artist’s own hand holding up the collaged piece. Chen’s work was no doubt inspired by the changing social terrain of Guangzhou in the 1990s. Between 1982 and 1990, the city’s population had doubled from 3.2 to 6 million due to the influx of migrant workers, which grew from 200,000 to more than 1.2 million between 1979 and 1990 (Koolhaas et al. 2001: 455). 9

Described by the artist in Chen (2002: 95-96).

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

199

Featuring an assortment of these new urban denizens, the collages captured the vibrant heterogeneity of the city, presenting not only disparate visual motifs recombined into an imagined scene, but also separate temporal moments spliced into a fictional present. Each streetscape is therefore a site out of site and a time out of time, made all the more apparent through its re-insertion into the real time and space of the urban background. The scenes embody an uncanny coupling of perceptual contradictions: they are familiar in that they contain recognizable elements of Guangzhou’s urban life, yet entirely fictional and rearranged; they represent urban scenes of commotion and movement, yet they are resolutely still freeze-frame images; finally, the figures – even ones caught in mid-motion – are pasted into place on the piece of cardboard, yet the whole board itself is entirely portable and can be inserted into a variety of urban contexts. Such contradictions negotiate between the perceptual experience of the city and its static visual re-presentation. Inspired by the visual flux of the urban environment, Chen sought an artistic method that was cognitively commensurate with the spatio-temporal reality of Guangzhou. As he explained, ‘The physical presence of the individual experiencing such fast-changing urban scenery is entirely different from the passive observer of art’ (Yao 2009: 41). The works play with vision, inducing a disoriented simultaneous vision, or double vision: the viewer must focus her eyes alternatively back and forth between the several planes of imagery, assessing the relationship between the photo collage, the city backdrop, and the larger photo that documented the one inserted into the other. In some cases, the picture-within-a-picture almost seems to melt back into the real scene; others seem more obviously superimposed. Upon closer inspection, however, these photo collages only gesture to their relationship with the site, since unlike a true mise en abyme, the two streetscapes don’t quite match up. Through Chen’s wilful re-insertion of the streetscape back into the urban background, these isolated elements of people, cars, and signage – all ephemeral and transitory in nature – not only become signs divorced from their referent, but through their juxtaposition with the background they question the very notion of a stable referent within the city’s shifting urban terrain. By re-inserting these streetscapes back into the city, Chen also called attention to the miniature’s unmoored and rootless quality. Indeed, from his earliest experimentation with the photo collage format, Chen was particularly interested in the notion of portability and transit. His first photo collage, The Street Dropped from the Sky (1997), was a portable box with three stacked levels of scenes like a transportable dollhouse or a travelling suitcase. By 2001, Chen would emphasize the streetscape’s portability by

200 

Nanc y P. Lin

transporting them out of the Chinese context entirely and inserting them into the streets of Berlin, Zurich, Paris, or whichever foreign country he next exhibited. As Hou Hanru (2009) has pointed out, Chen’s interest in portability is connected to his fascination with tourism, international exhibitions, and globalization. The artist himself also remarked half tongue-in-cheek, ‘We want to join the WTO and we want everything that this world can offer. I would like my works of street images in China to be associated with Bangkok, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, New York and other big cities alike. If so, I can provide a better dream for such a globalization’ (Chen 2001). In fact, Chen’s later development of the Streetscape series into souvenir-like props seemed to parallel the new position of contemporary Chinese artists as cosmopolitan elites who travelled from place to place, inspired by other cultures, but also presenting notions of ‘Chineseness’ (Chiu 2011) abroad.10 Yet Hou’s (2009: 6) reading of the project as a celebration of ‘the politics of travel, migration, and nomadic life,’ fails to account for the uncanny disconnectedness between the elements of the photo collage. Indeed, the presence of Chen’s own hand holding up each of the streetscapes like a prop or plaything prompts the question: Who is doing the inserting? These isolated figures cut out from their context, wilfully rearranged by the artist, and juxtaposed with various sites, call to mind transit’s specific relationship to socio-economic power. For example, while the creation of new markets in Guangzhou has drawn thousands to the region in search of new opportunities, in response to the overwhelming floating population, the government has had to introduce new strategies in 1994 to re-channel migrants to areas where labour is more in demand or to repatriate those unable to find a job in Guangzhou (Chan and Gu 1996: 299; Koolhaas et al. 2001: 249-257). As an urban inhabitant of the city, Chen would have been acutely aware of these politics. In this light, his portable works can also be understood as drawing attention to the paradox of transit’s double-edgedness: For those who have the option to travel, transit is a form of leisure and liberation; yet for those who have become uprooted in search of work in China’s growing urban centres, transit becomes the forced condition of migratory labour in an increasingly capitalist country. Chen’s insertion of his own body into these works as indexed by the presence of the artist’s hand, also suggests a performative dimension to 10 Melissa Chiu (2011: 327-345) has discussed ‘Chineseness’ as a unique strategy of cultural intervention used by Chinese diaspora artists to reinterpret Chinese culture from a distance. Yet these artists have also been criticized by domestic audiences for their representation of Chinese culture through clichéd concepts and visual motifs. This trend of the international itinerant artist has also been discussed by Kwon (2004: 46) in relation to changing notions of site-specificity when artists are commissioned to produce site-specific works in various locales.

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

201

the work that echoes earlier instances when members of the group have explored the slippage between performance art and reality. As the artist has remarked, ‘The city is really a lot like a stage. […] When you walk down the street you’re both an actor and the audience’ (Yao 2009: 45). The nature of the artist’s relationship with the city moves fluidly between the positions of director, actor, and audience, and the varying degrees of being an active participant in it and a passive observer of it. As an artist, Chen can be slightly removed from the city, observing it from afar, even acting as a creative director as he has done with his streetscapes. However, the artist is also an inhabitant of the city, who, like the photographed people in his collage, is inevitably subject to the dictates of its socio-economic changes and flows. Chen’s enigmatic expression in this photograph therefore belongs to a series of cryptic gazes – Liang Juhui’s and Xu Tan’s – through which the documented presence of the artist in his own artwork signals his position as both self-consciously aware performance artist and complicit participant in the socio-economic processes of the city. The simultaneous fascination with and estrangement from the city as well as the dual role as participant and observer to the city’s urban changes is a disposition at the heart of Big Tail Elephant’s strategies of urban insertion. To ‘insert’ means to introduce something new into something existing (OED 2017). Yet the word is flexible as to the degree to which what is inserted is ontologically separate or thereby becomes indistinguishable from what it is inserted into. It is precisely this slippage between maintaining the separateness of what is introduced and becoming part of the existing condition that the group has been interested in exploring. Big Tail Elephant’s urban insertions demonstrate a desire to immerse oneself in the various processes of the city through performative fiction, mimicry, and appropriation, while still maintaining a sense of critical distance. From constructing tectonic structures to playing video games, or recreating urban street scenes, the artists insert themselves into urban spaces in the guise of a role they’ve taken up, at times becoming almost indistinguishable from the subject matter their artwork seeks to describe. Yet in each of the performances the artist maintained a certain kind of contemplative space that was entirely his own: Lin was untouched by the traffic on Linhe Road, Liang was absorbed in his single-player game, and Chen was the invisible-visible hand behind his streetscapes. Far from being disengaged from the site, however, their art work – in the sense of actively working on, over, around, and between sites – managed to be presently there and ‘in it’ in their everyday practice of urban life. Big Tail Elephant’s active and sustained engagement with various locations in Tianhe and greater Guangzhou therefore speaks to a

Figure 6.8 From left to right: detail of Figure 6.4 showing Xu Tan; detail of Figure 6.7 showing Liang Juhui; and photograph of Chen Shaoxiong holding Streetscape II, 1997-1998. Courtesy of Luo Qingmin, spouse of Chen Shaoxiong.

202  Nanc y P. Lin

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

203

cumulative urban practice that crossed and re-crossed the city streets many times over, across different sites and times. Through their urban insertions the artists pivot back and forth between the domains of art and life, opening up small pockets of space for creative interrogations of the city’s social and material realities, replete with its many ambiguities, contradictions, and also possibilities for experimentation.

Conclusion China’s socio-economic changes have profoundly impacted the interests, sensibilities, and practices of a new generation of artists in the 1990s. In response to these changes, the members of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group directly engaged the physical and materials aspects of Guangzhou as a means to both participate in and critically examine the phenomena of urbanization. Their works in the early 1990s sensitively reflected upon a variety of issues concerning architecture and urbanization, capitalism, commercialization, labour, globalization, and a whole host of themes that artists continue to deal with today. At the same time, their strategies were at the forefront of various shifts towards urban, site-based, performance art practices, and new methods of exhibition that did not become prevalent in China until the late 1990s. While Big Tail Elephant incorporated urban sites, materials, and processes into their practice, they also figured their bodies as prominent elements of their work. As Hou Hanru (2002a: 187) has aptly noted, artists engaged with urban practice ‘often make their own bodies into a unique medium of expression within urban settings.’ The group’s interactions with sites around the city were always contingent on the body of the artist doing work on a particular site, thus linking their urban spatial practices to the maturation of performance art in China during this same period. As I have shown, however, their particular strain of performance art was also quite different from those of their better known ‘behaviour art’ colleagues in Beijing. Characterized by a meditative-like concentration through repetitive work, Big Tail Elephant’s performances explored the artists’ vacillations between the two positions of contiguity to and critical distance from their urban social and material realities. It is therefore through performance that what can be called the ‘functional site’ of the artwork is materialized by the discursive and physical shuttling back and forth of the body of the artist between these positions. These works demonstrate the emergence of an urban site-based performance art practice in the 1990s and prompt the

204 

Nanc y P. Lin

need for new analyses on the relationship between body, materials, and urban space in Chinese contemporary art. Big Tail Elephant’s activities were not only at the forefront of urban artistic practice in China, but their unique approach also challenges longheld assumptions of artistic vanguardism. While most scholarship in the Euro-American tradition attribute the critical force of an urban site-based work to its ability to intervene or disrupt the urban environment, thereby activating viewers as politicized participants, I contend that this framework should be expanded to attend to the unique urban strategies of Chinese contemporary artists such as Big Tail Elephant. Rather than following the paradigms of antagonism or confrontation, I have suggested ‘urban insertion’ as a new framework for thinking about urban spatial practice. As this chapter has shown through a careful analysis of the group’s art practice, ‘urban insertion’ can be defined as a tactic that seeks to locate small gaps of opportunity within the existing order of the city in order to stealthily slip in, at once mimicking and blending into the existing conditions at the same time as it opens these conditions up for artistic investigation. This is not to invalidate existing terms for a more confrontational position, but rather to suggest an alternative term to account for other forms and means by which art takes place in urban space. Likewise, this framework does not disavow Deutsche’s argument that avant-garde urban art should ultimately restructure and make evident the inherent conflicts and indeterminacy of their sites – for that is indeed what these works do; yet it contends that overtly antagonistic strategies – as the terms ‘disruption,’ ‘interruption,’ or ‘intervention’ would seem to suggest – is not the only manner in which site-based artists can and do operate critically. Instead, I suggest ‘urban insertion’ as one way to hold onto the critical potential of site-specific urban art, while still leaving room to explore what interpretive insights a more subtly oblique position in relation to the urban milieu might open up. Along these same lines, my analysis has also eschewed assumptions of the artists’ socio-political agenda so as to explore the polysemy of the works as a function of the artists’ own equivocal attitudes towards urban change. Indeed, within the unique context of China’s new economic shift towards capitalism and its concomitant physical and social changes, at least at the outset of the 1990s, these artists’ attitudes can be more appropriately described as curious, interrogative, testing, probing, vacillating, and at most, ambiguous in its ‘criticality’ rather than having a fully formulated ‘critique.’ This distinction is important to note as much of the foundational scholarship on urban site-based practices was written about and indeed was itself a part of cultural practices within a specifically Euro-American tradition of politics. The difference

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

205

between ‘criticality’ and ‘critique,’ between ‘insertion’ and ‘intervention’ is a subtle one of degree. Yet it is an important distinction because it describes an artistic position that has not hardened into a full-fledged political position (which often can become its own form of ideology), but rather, precisely through its equivocality, opens up the possibility for new ways of seeing and experiencing art and urban life. As Chris Berry also suggests in the following chapter, such a position is not only the result of a socio-political context wherein outright opposition is foreclosed, but also an insistence on the possibility for alternative rather than oppositional spaces of criticality. In his well-known assessment of artistic practice in the 1990s, Wu Hung defined Chinese experimental artists as those who are characterized by ‘his/her determination to place him/herself at the border of contemporary Chinese society and the art world’ (Wu et al. 2002: 12). He continued: ‘This determination is often sustained by a sense of mission to enlarge frontiers and open new territories in Chinese art. By taking up this mission, however, an artist must also constantly renew his/her own marginality and must constantly re-position him/herself on the border in order to be continuously “experimental”’ (ibid.). While members of Big Tail Elephant might be characterized as experimental, their works were not so much about borders in the sense of positioning themselves on the outside of an inside-outside dichotomy or in the sense of pushing boundaries by being explicitly provocative or ‘avant-garde.’ Indeed, their practices were almost always more stealthy than they were confrontational. Yet by uncovering latent opportunities and re-inserting themselves within the existing spaces of the city, they nonetheless managed to slip across borders, open up alternative spaces, and chart new trajectories for contemporary Chinese art and its forms of exhibition.

Bibliography Ai, Weiwei, Xu, Bing, and Zeng, Xiaojun (eds) (1994) Hei Pi Shu [The black cover book]. Hong Kong: Tai Tei Publishing. Berghuis, Thomas (2006) Performance Art in China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Campanella, Thomas J. (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Chan, Roger C.K., and Gu, Chaolin (1996) Forms of Metropolitan Development in Guangzhou Municipal City. In MacPherson, Stewart, and Zheng, Yushuo (eds) Economic and Social Development in South China. Brookfield: E. Elgar, 281-305. Chen, Shaoxiong (2001) Streetscape Artist Statement. http://www.chenshaoxiong. net/?p=1291, accessed 17 January 2016.

206 

Nanc y P. Lin

Chen, Shaoxiong (2002) Wo weishenme paishe Guangzhou jiejing [Why I Take Street Photos of Guangzhou]. In Ai, Weiwei (ed.) Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998-2002. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd., 95-96. Cheung, Peter (1996) Guangzhou’s Municipal Leadership and Development Strategy in the 1990s. In MacPherson, Stewart, and Zheng, Yushuo (eds) Economic and Social Development in South China. Brookfield: E. Elgar, 122-139 Chiu, Melissa (2011) Theories of Being Outside: Diaspora and Chinese Artists. In Genocchio, Benjamin, and Chiu, Melissa (eds) Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 327-345. Crimp, Douglas (1993) Redefining Site-Specificity. In Crimp, Douglas, and Lawler, Louise (eds) On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 150-186. Davis, Deborah S. (2000) Introduction: A Revolution in Consumption. In Davis, Deborah S. (ed.) The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-22. Deutsche, Rosalyn (1988) Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City. October 47: 3-52. Deutsche, Rosalyn (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Chicago: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Driessen, Chris, and Van Mierlo, Heidi (1997) Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual and Installation Art in the Nineties. Breda: Fundament Foundation. Fibicher, Bernard (ed.) (1998) Großschwanzelefant [Big tail elephant]. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern. Gao, Minglu (2005) The Wall – Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art/Qiang: Zhongguo dangdai yishu de lishi yu bianjie. Buffalo: Albright Knox Art Gallery. Gao, Minglu (2008) ’85 meishu yundong [’85 art movement]. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe. Gladston, Paul (2014) Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History. London: Reaktion Books. Guo, Shirui, Song, Dong, and Pang, Lei (eds) (1997) Yesheng: 1997 nian jingzhe shi (Wildlife: Starting from 1997 Jingzhe Day). Beijing: Contemporary Art Center. Guo, Xiangmin, and Liu, Changtao (2012) Guangzhou’s Special Path to Global City Status. In Bracken, Gregory (ed.) Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 59-75. Hou, Hanru (1998) Barricades, Big Tail Elephants Working Group. In Fibicher, Bernard (ed.) Großschwanzelefant [Big tail elephant]. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 45-59. Hou, Hanru (2002a) Filling the Urban Void: Urban Explosion and Art Intervention in Chinese Cities. In Hou, Hanru, On the Mid-Ground. Ed. Yu, Hsiao-hwei. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd., 176-191.

Urban Insertion as Artistic Str ategy

207

Hou, Hanru (2002b) On the Mid-Ground. Ed. Yu, Hsiao-hwei. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Hou, Hanru (2003) Guangdong kuaiche [Canton express]. Exhibition catalogue. Changsha: Hunan Arts Publishing House. Hou, Hanru (2009) Chen Shaoxiong: From Portable Streets to Private Diplomacy. In Peckham, Robert (ed.) Chen Shaoxiong. Beijing: Timezone 8 Ltd., 2-19. Hou, Hanru, and Obrist, Hans-Ulrich (eds) (1997) Cities on the Move. Exhibition catalogue. Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje. Kaye, Nick (2000) Site Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. London: Routledge. Koolhaas, Rem, Chung, Chuihua Judy, Inaba, Jeffrey, and Leong, Sze Tsung (2001) Great Leap Forward. Köln: Taschen. Kwon, Miwon (2004) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Li, Eva B.C. (1998) Welfare Provisions. In Yeung, Yue-man, and Chu, David K.Y. (eds) Guangdong: Survey of a Province Undergoing Rapid Change. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 285-302. Liang, Juhui (2010) Youxi yi xiaoshi (One-hour game). In Wu, Hung, and Wang, Peggy (eds) Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 208 Lin, Yilin (2011) Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road. http://linyilin.com/index. php/art/detail/?lang=e&id=2, accessed 31 January, 2016. MacPherson, Stewart, and Zheng, Yushuo (eds) (1996) Economic and Social Development in South China. Brookfield: E. Elgar. Meyer, James (2000) The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity. In Suderburg, Erika (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 23-37. Moby Games (1985) Battle City (NES). http://www.mobygames.com/game/nes/ battle-city, accessed 15 March 2015. Obrist, Hans-Ulrich (2009) Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews. Hong Kong: Office for Discourse Engineering. OED (2017) The Oxford English Dictionary. Insert, n. 1. https://en.oxforddictionaries. com/definition/insert, accessed 26 September 2017. Sans, Jerome (2009) Lin Yilin: Altering the Walls. In Yun, Chen, and Woo, Michelle (eds) China Talks: Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Tan, Jia (2012) Special Cultural Zones: Provincializing Global Media in Neoliberal China. PhD diss., University of Southern California. http://digitallibrary.usc. edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll3/id/92997, accessed 5 April 2018. Wilson, Robert (2014) Building China: The Role of Cement in China’s Rapid Development. The Energy Collective, 5 March. http://www.theenergycollective.com/

208 

Nanc y P. Lin

robertwilson190/347591/building-china-role-cement-chinas-rapid-development, accessed 16 January 2016. Wu, Hung (2014) Contemporary Chinese Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Wu, Hung et al. (2002) Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990-2000. Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art. Yao, Pauline J. (2009) Time beyond Time: A Dialogue between Chen Shaoxiong and Pauline J. Yao. In Peckham, Robert (ed.) Chen Shaoxiong. Beijing: Timezone 8 Ltd., 20-27. Yeung, Yue-man, and Chu, David K.Y. (eds) (1998) Guangdong: Survey of a Province Undergoing Rapid Change. 2nd ed. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Zheng, Yushuo (1998) The Guangdong Development Model and Its Challenges. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. Zhou, Daming (2005) Guangzhou City: Ever-changing Urban Planning. In Nas, Peter J.M. (ed.) Directors of Urban Change in Asia. London: Routledge, 32-47.

About the author Nancy P. Lin Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Chicago [email protected] Nancy P. Lin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She received the 2015 Schiff Foundation Writing Fellowship and is a 2017 fellow of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection between urbanization and site-based artistic practice in China in the 1990s.

7

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises’ Chris Berry Abstract This chapter examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China’s rapid urbanization and the transformation of its existing urban spaces, which are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this chapter considers as China’s engagement with neo-liberalism, including and facilitated by globalization. In works like RMB City, Haze and Fog, Whose Utopia and Hip Hop Guangzhou, Cao Fei creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises.’ This chapter asks what kind of responses Cao’s ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanization. As part of the answer to that question, it applies four hermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao’s work not only reflects the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways. Keywords: gallery f ilms, urbanization, re-enchantment, heterotopia, the gestural

Chinese visual artists have responded to urbanization in China in different ways. By now, the fact of its ultra-rapid urbanization is well known.1 Thomas Campanella (2008: 14) wrote that, ‘There were fewer than 200 cities in China in the late 1970s; today, there are nearly 700. […] Forty-six Chinese 1 Thank you to Cao Fei for the on- and off-stage conversations I have had with her in recent years, which have helped me to understand her work, and also for assisting with access to the work itself. Thank you to Lu Jia and Zoie Yung of Vitamin Space for providing the images that illustrate this chapter, and for permission to reproduce them here. Thank you also to Marko Daniel and George Clarke of the Tate Modern and Sarah Fisher of the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester for inviting me to take part in on-stage conversations with Cao Fei. The current chapter is a revised version of an earlier article (Berry 2015).

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch07

210 

Chris Berry

cities passed the one-million mark since 1992, making for a national total of 102 cities with more than a million residents. In the United States, we have all of nine such cities.’ This process is ongoing. Indeed, a 2014 plan foresees 100 million farmers moving into cities by 2020 (Johnson 2014). Although Campanella’s focus is on architecture, he cannot avoid noting huge upheaval, pointing out that ‘[i]n Shanghai alone, redevelopment projects in the 1990s displaced more people than thirty years of urban renewal in the United States’ (2008: 15). Qin Shao (2013) even calls the frequent process of compulsory demolition against the will of the householder as part of urban development ‘domicide.’ The social, economic, material, and especially emotional and psychological impact of urbanization on almost every Chinese person’s life has made it a frequent feature of cultural production, including in the visual arts. Soon after Tiananmen and the intensification of marketization in the early 1990s, a new wave of independent film-making shifted away from the epic history and exotic borderlands favoured by many so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ films to focus on rapidly changing contemporary city life (Zhang 2007; Berry, Lu, and Rofel 2010). As Alice Schmatzberger (2012) has shown, and Jiang Jiehong’s and Meiqin Wang’s chapters in this edited volume elucidate, Chinese photographers have been equally responsive to urban change. The same is true of numerous artists with versatile strategies, as this edited volume shows. For instance, Maurizio Marinelli (2004, 2015, and his chapter in this book) has examined the work of Zhang Dali (张大力, b. 1963), famous for his graffiti silhouettes of human heads on walls all over Beijing, especially those marked for demolition, as a form of engagement with urban change. This chapter is about Cao Fei (曹斐), another artist, and her technically pioneering and versatile response to urbanization through moving image works. Born in Guangzhou in 1978 and educated at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts (Cao 2017a), Cao joined the no longer extant U-thèque independent art collective (Edwards 2011), which was active in Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the early 2000s. Among various U-thèque outputs was a documentary called San Yuan Li (三元里), co-directed by Cao and Ou Ning (欧宁, b. 1969). As announced in the opening credits, the film was produced for the 2003 Venice Biennale as part of a multifaceted installation, which also included a website and a book (Ou and Cao 2003). It is a montage-based work in the manner of city symphony films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a metropolis, 1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Человек с к и ноаппаратом (Man with a movie camera, 1929) (Ou and Cao 2003: 43). As discussed in the book and the film, Sanyuanli was the village reputed to have resisted the British during the

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

211

Opium War, but when the film was made it had become both an example of the ‘village in the city’ phenomenon whereby China’s expanding cities have enveloped surrounding villages (Al 2014) and an often-cited inner-city crime neighbourhood in Guangzhou. In my earlier essay on the film (Berry 2010), I contrasted U-thèque’s insistence on the local specificity of Sanyuanli and its struggles with Rem Koolhaas’s celebration of the Pearl River Delta’s urban sprawl as the ‘generic city’ freed from the pretensions of modernism. I argued that these different interpretations might be the result of differences in perspective – the view from business class or the back of the limo as opposed to the on-the-ground and in-the-alleyways experience rendered by U-thèque’s documentary. Although San Yuan Li does get into the alleyways, the montage format means interviews and other interactions with the local residents are not part of the film. In her own comments on the experience of making the film, Cao (2003: 49-50) noted: ‘the thought dawns on us that the subjects before us are beyond our control. Innumerable pedestrians and tricycles simply keep darting about, whipping up trails of dust and smoke in their wake. It is too easy to pan them in and out of the viewfinder. People look back at the camera lens with mistrust in their eyes. We keep a critical distance behind our monitor screen.’ Perhaps the sense of dissatisfaction this statement communicates about keeping a distance lies behind some changes in Cao’s more recent practice, especially in the works she has made since U-thèque. It is this more recent work that this chapter examines further. In particular, I focus on four of Cao’s many moving image works: Hip Hop Guangzhou (嘻哈：广州, 2003, video, 3 min, 27 secs); Whose Utopia (谁的乌托 邦, 2006, video, 20 min); RMB City (人民城寨, 2007 onwards); and Haze and Fog (霾, 2013, video, 46 min, 30 secs). Further details about them are given in the following section. I argue that, taken together, her works attempt to not simply depict but also intervene, transform, and even – insofar as it is possible for art to do it – redeem the new city. This shift to a much more engaged type of work is apparent even in the production mode and circumstances of the work. Where San Yuan Li was purely observational, Hip Hop Guangzhou and Haze and Fog are performances on the streets of Guangzhou and in a Beijing residential neighbourhood, respectively. The Whose Utopia project, of which the video is only one part, goes into a factory in Foshan and involves the workers. RMB City creates an online urban space that members of the public enter and explore in a manner that mimics modes of more conventional urban activity from flânerie to participation in public gatherings. In taking her art production out into the city, Cao Fei is not alone. Her work joins a much larger and more widespread upswing in the socially engaged

212 

Chris Berry

art that has moved out from the gallery into urban public spaces. Zhang Dali’s graffiti art was a very early example of this trend along with the Big Tail Elephant Working Group’s urban insertion as analysed by Nancy P. Lin. As the next chapter by Judith Pernin points out so eloquently, the artists working in urban studios are, like ordinary citizens, affected by urbanization in their lives when the bulldozers come to tear their workspaces down. This, in turn, inspires the artists to respond by art revealing another layer of reciprocal relationship between urbanization and visual arts. My effort here is focused on understanding Cao’s works themselves, including the documentation of their production. Not only with Cao but with most contemporary artists, this documentation appears in the gallery space and online, and arguably has become part of the artwork itself. To some extent, this documentation includes testimony from participants about the effect on them of their engagement with Cao’s works. The larger cultural impact of her work and that of other contemporary Chinese artists showing on the burgeoning contemporary art scene in China (Gladston 2014) as well as around the world is beyond the boundaries of this project. Similarly, to closely examine the particular context of production and circulation of all Cao’s artworks in China would require a separate audience research project in its own right. The multifarious and often ephemeral affect of artworks also sets challenges for executing an audience research project in any meaningful manner. Despite a lack of such study and the fact that any precise ‘impact’ of the work may be hard to pinpoint it can be argued that the effect of Cao’s work goes beyond the gallery, because of the dispersed production and exhibition throughout and beyond the city. Exactly because Cao’s works aim to have an effect on their audiences and those who participate in making them, her art constitutes an ethical as well as aesthetic practice. To understand how this ethical and aesthetic practice is manifested in the artworks themselves, this chapter applies four hermeneutic frameworks. First, Cao’s works often function not simply as documents that hold up a mirror to the city and its transformations, but also as heterotopias that challenge our taken-for-granted understandings of the city. In this way they demand that their audiences think about new possibilities. Although all four of the works are discussed in each section, this section focuses on her Second Life online project, RMB City. Second, many of Cao’s works are also participatory art. Above, it was suggested that Cao was dissatisfied with the lack of communication with the people filmed in San Yuan Li. Since then, her work has gone beyond only observing the inhabitants of the city to involving them in the artistic process, making it part of their lives. Here,

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

213

Hip Hop Guangzhou and Whose Utopia will be the key examples. Third, Cao has been quoted as saying her recent work, Haze and Fog, is about ‘magical metropolises’ (Marsden 2013: 1). This magical quality can be understood as an attempt at re-enchantment and redemption. However, in Cao’s case this carries no religious implications. Instead, it is the use of music, rhythm and dance in her work that makes it ‘magical.’ In this section, all the works are discussed, but the focus is on Haze and Fog, in particular. Finally, the chapter employs contemporary re-engagement with theories of gesture to argue that this dance-generated magic is part of a gestural practice of cinema for the gallery, in which the gestural can be understood as Cao’s ethical and aesthetic effort to help the citizens of the Chinese city find the magic in their metropolises through their participation in and witnessing of art.

Cao Fei’s Heterotopic Mirrors In his writing on space, Michel Foucault (1997: 331) tries to draw a line between utopias and heterotopias. Utopias are ‘fundamentally unreal’ spaces that ‘represent society itself brought to perfection, or its reverse.’ In contrast, heterotopias do exist in the real world, but they are apart from it. They are places where the spatial arrangements of the rest of society are ‘represented, challenged, and overturned,’ in this way reflecting back upon the ordinary world much as a kaleidoscope provides a differently ordered vision of the world. But almost immediately after, he proposes ‘a sort of mixed experience which partakes of the qualities of both locations,’ which he terms ‘the mirror.’ Furthermore, within a paragraph, he is leaning away from the idea of the mirror as an in-between space and emphasizing its function as a heterotopia because of the way what appears in the mirror is not only determined by the real space outside it but also has an effect on that space by reflecting back on it. Perhaps all art production stands in a mirror heterotopic relation to everyday life; it is in the real world, refers to the world outside itself, and aspires to the transformation of that world. Certainly, Cao’s works under consideration here function in this way. None are completely abstract and imagined spaces with no relationship to contemporary reality. Indeed, as will be discussed in the next section of this chapter, much of her work is made in cooperation with the people whose world it depicts, and they enter into the world of the artwork. Nor are the depictions absolutely perfect or imperfect in the manner of the utopia. Nor are they direct mirror-like representations of the world in the documentary or realist manner. Rather,

214 

Chris Berry

their aesthetic depictions ‘represent, challenge and overturn’ in various ways, as Foucault puts it. Therefore, perhaps the idea of the heterotopic mirror best characterizes the relationship of Cao’s work to representation. For example, the title of Hip Hop Guangzhou makes it clear that this three-and-a-half-minute music video-style piece refers to a specific Chinese city. But rather than the kind of young people who might plausibly be captured doing hip-hop moves, Cao’s video has grandpas, security guards, construction workers, and other less likely people dancing. The fact that they are all people without evident work or whose work is not well-paid and involves working outdoors and exposed to the elements suggests a contrast between the fun they seem to be having in the video and the more gruelling nature of their labour (see Figure 7.1). Although the works I am focusing on in this chapter all reflect specifically on the Chinese city, Cao is an internationally known artist, and so other pieces extend beyond China to cities overseas. For example, the popularity of Hip Hop Guangzhou, led to follow-up commissions that took her to Japan (Hip Hop Fukuoka (嘻哈： 福冈), 2005, video, 8 min) and the United States (Hip Hop New York (嘻哈： 纽约), 2006, video, 5 min). According to Christine Hildebrandt (2007), principal of the Siemens Art Foundation, Whose Utopia resulted from another commission by Osram China Lighting and the Siemens Art Project. Cao was invited to work with the staff of Osram at their Foshan plant. Just as Hip Hop Guangzhou does not reflect Guangzhou street scenes directly, so too Whose Utopia is a project where Osram’s regular practices are ‘challenged and overturned,’ at least temporarily. Cao’s question guiding the entire project is ‘What are you doing here?’ This question is, she explains, directed at the ‘common workers’ to ‘place them at the centre of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value,’ which is ‘often neglected during the process of creating huge business value’ (Cao 2007b). Heterotopic mirroring occurs both in the video and the larger art project of Whose Utopia, which the video was part of and which I will examine further in the next section. The first half of the video is a montage of the machines. There are no humans, and the sequence is edited rhythmically, so that light bulbs whirl and slide about assembly lines, turning on and off in a balletic routine reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley movie. In the second half, we are in the factory with the workers, but there are dancers amongst them. A middle-aged man in overalls does a sort of moonwalk, and a ballet dancer in a tutu does a Swan Lake routine. As in Hip Hop Guangzhou, the out-of-place figures are thought provoking. Do the dying swan ballet moves question what happens to young women who spend their youth working on

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

215

Figure 7.1 Cao Fei, Hip Hop Guangzhou, 2003, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

an assembly line? Does the moonwalk suggest that older workers have been doing the same thing so long they are almost sleepwalking? (see Figure 7.2). And does the ballet of the light bulbs in a world without people suggest the entire factory is an inhuman place? These are some of the thoughts that occur to me watching the video. But a different viewer might understand

216 

Chris Berry

Figure 7.2 Moonwalking in Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia, 2006, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

these elements in different ways. What makes them heterotopic is not the particular interpretation but how they reflect the space that they refer to back differently, surprising any viewer and demanding interpretation. Like San Yuan Li, both Hip Hop Guangzhou and Whose Utopia are also about real places in the Pearl River Delta conurbation, the area that inspired Rem Koolhaas’s concept of the generic city, but they also emphasize local specificity. The characters hip hop dancing on the streets of Guangzhou are different from those dancing on the streets in Cao’s videos of Fukuoka and New York. The Osram factory’s products and workers are specific and have their own qualities, too, making this factory distinct from others that it might superficially resemble. Haze and Fog is Cao’s first piece after moving to Beijing, and the opening titles tell us it is set there. Of course, Beijing is notorious for ‘haze and fog’ – or, more simply put, smog. But there are no Beijing landmarks in the way that any Hollywood film set in Paris always has the Eiffel Tower visible through an apartment or office window. Instead, Haze and Fog takes place in an upscale housing development, where real estate agents are still busy trying to sell apartments. This is where Cao lives in Beijing, as I discovered by accident in the course of London screenings of the video in 2013. So, once again, this is a specific and actual space presented back to itself in

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

217

unfamiliar and changed form through Cao’s art. Various figures in the sparsely populated estate appear and perform a variety of choreographed routines and movements, again rendering the housing estate heterotopic and challenging us to interpret. We might wonder if the artwork is about Beijing specifically or, given the national symbolism attached to the capital city, about China as a whole, and whether the ‘haze and fog’ alludes simply to pollution or more abstract problems of vision. Indeed, the figures seem self-involved and closed off in their private spaces, and in this way the video is very different from the street scenes of Hip Hop Guangzhou. But perhaps the most heterotopic work and also the most intriguing is RMB City, which was built in the online world Second Life. Established by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life allows users to build their own online world, as its slogan, ‘Your World. Your Imagination’ suggests (Linden Lab n.d.). Users select an avatar for themselves, then dress it, build houses for it, and so on. Cao took the name ‘China Tracy’ for her avatar, who is credited as the builder of RMB City. At the beginning of this section, Foucault’s effort to draw a clear line between utopia as a space that does not really exist and heterotopia as a real space that is separate and ordered differently was noted to blur rapidly in his writing. Similarly, we might ask if Second Life is a utopia, a space that does not really exist? Or is it another space, in this world – a heterotopia? This uncertainty echoes larger debates about the Internet. Terms like ‘virtual’ suggested that the online world was not real. Early discourse on the Internet and the web such as William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1995) spoke of it as way of leaving ‘the meat’ of body behind and escaping the real world. For example, Allucquere Rosa Stone wrote that ‘[t]he body in question sits at a computer terminal somewhere, but the locus of sociality that would in an older dispensation be associated with this body goes on in a space which is quite irrelevant to it’ (1996: 43). But that escapist approach has been criticized and replaced with one that understands that computer users are fully embodied and located. As Lisa Nakamura illustrated in her incisive investigation of the persistence of racial stereotypes (2002) and many others have argued since, we do not leave our offline selves behind when we go online: we go online from somewhere and as someone specific in the real world and we are simultaneously those things as well as whatever else we make ourselves on line. With this understanding, it seems the Internet is indeed best approached precisely as a separate but real space with rules and conventions of its own – a heterotopia. In the case of RMB City, the online-offline linkage was developed to maximize awareness of the project and give it a presence in the offline

218 

Chris Berry

art world. For example, the Serpentine Gallery in London presented an exhibition in its lobby during the process of constructing the online world in 2008. This exhibition included various pictures of the online world and also, as I witnessed during a visit, a maquette model of the kind real estate agents and property developers use when they are selling apartments or offices before the project is finished (RMB City Blog 2008). Indeed, the idea that RMB City might be understood as a heterotopic and kaleidoscopic depiction that attempts to provoke reflection on China’s urban transformation was made explicitly in the introduction to the project by Cao Fei, or ‘Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy),’ as her byline appears. She describes RMB City as a ‘condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities’ and notes that its construction in Second Life extends ‘China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity,’ going on to describe the overall view of RMB City seen as we enter Second Life as follows: [W]e will be able to cruise the digital ocean, witness a Ferris wheel rotating on top of the Monument to the People’s Heroes; look down from the sky on the water of the Three Gorges reservoir gushing out of the Tiananmen rostrum; pass the giant new totem symbolizing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai; hop over the Feilai Temple marooned in a raging torrent; walk across a vast, desolate state-owned factory area in Northeast China; and finally hover over the Grand National Theatre in Beijing. Also in our view will be gigantic planes gliding over terraces in the crevices of the central business district, and aerial supermalls. We will see water flowing into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta area before traveling through the sewage system into an ocean with floating statues of Mao Zedong. The rusted steel structure of the Olympic Stadium aka ‘Bird’s Nest’ will be washed in splashes of ocean spray, while an aerial band on a floating sheet of the national flag filled with five-pointed stars makes a deafening noise that shakes Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV building, causing it to collapse. (Cao 2007a)

This rhetoric replicates Cao’s description of RMB City as ‘condensed,’ creating a distilled People’s Republic of China (see Figure 7.3). Beijing’s Tiananmen, Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl television tower, and the Yangtze River Three Gorges, site of the controversial dam project, are side by side, along with the abandoned factories of the Northeast. They are also connected: the waters from the Three Gorges dam pour out of the Tiananmen gate. This condensed PRC emphasizes contemporary construction, with the Three Gorges Dam and the Oriental Pearl tower as well as other iconic sites such as

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

219

Figure 7.3 Cao Fei, RMB City, 2007 onwards, moving image. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing. But although these are elements often celebrated in contemporary triumphal discourses and video coverage using the soaring perspective Cao replicates on her site, at the same time she includes anxieties with the collapse of the CCTV building, and absurd parodies with the giant toilets, not to mention the panda floating above it all. Taken together, this disjunctive mixture is an exemplar of the artwork as heterotopic mirror, designed not simply to reflect but to provoke.

Practices of Participation RMB City not only encourages but actually requires audiences to become actively involved. You have to join Second Life and set up your own avatar to enter RMB City and navigate it. Cao has also arranged RMB City events visitors could participate in. These have then become new artworks in their own right. For example, on 14 June 2010, China Tracy held a ‘Naked Idol’ contest in RMB City. Contestants were asked to display their naked (or barely clothed) avatars and answer judges’ questions (Cao 2017b; RMB City

220 

Chris Berry

Blog 2010). The video of this event then appeared as a separate artwork, for example in the ‘Ten Million Rooms of Yearning: Sex in Hong Kong’ exhibition at the Para Site gallery in 2014 (Para Site 2014). Participation of this kind is the second characteristic of Cao’s urban artwork that marks it as an effort to intervene and have an effect. It does not just reflect the transformation of contemporary China through massive urban construction, but also elicits participation in the artwork as a type of response to that phenomenon. Perhaps this can be seen as Cao’s particular response to the debates around participatory art. Why would a member of the public participate in an artwork in the PRC, or an artist seek their participation? Advocates such as Grant Kester see participatory art as an attack on the modern Western cultural trajectory that has turned art making into a professional and specialized practice, rather than a communal and social activity that is ‘process-based’ instead of textual, and therefore concerned with ‘collective action and civic engagement’ (2011: 7-8). More recently, others have criticized participatory art. While appreciating its intentions, they have questioned its abuse by ‘neo-liberal governments’ that ‘instrumentalise art for social ends, privileging participatory art as a way to provide homeopathic solutions to problems that are systemic,’ as Claire Bishop puts it incisively (Barok 2009). In her recent book on the topic, Bishop (2012) also argues that it is not enough to judge participatory art purely on ethical grounds, and that aesthetic standards must also be developed. These debates mostly take for granted a Western liberal cultural and political environment. In circumstances where, in theory at least, there are protections of both artistic freedom and freedom of speech, participatory art might mobilize spectators as a result of their active participation to achieve heightened consciousness and act in ways that translate into political and social participation outside the gallery, as suggested by Kester and other advocates. However, one of the strengths of Bishop’s work is her awareness of social and historical specificities of the conditions under which participatory art is produced. Her chapter, ‘The Social under Socialism’ attends to conditions prevailing in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. She argues that when the political is all-pervasive, participatory art sometimes became not a site for political engagement, but instead one for political disengagement so that other realms could be explored and opened up (Bishop 2012: 129-162). What about the socialist world that Cao operates in today? The Chinese government may also have produced its own version of neo-liberalism in which the state transfers responsibility for housing, education, and health to the consuming individual, as Lisa Rofel argues (2007). But, unlike the situation in the United Kingdom that Bishop is responding to, Chinese

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

221

neo-liberalism combines relative rolling back of the state in the economic sphere with the maintenance of strict control in the ideological and political spheres. On one hand, the days where politics saturated all public activities and as many private ones as it could reach are over. The impetus to use participatory arts for reclaiming the non-political in the manner described by Bishop for Eastern Europe during the Cold War era is not there in China today. But, on the other hand, the official dictum of the ‘harmonious society’ forecloses upon any official recognition of a contested political sphere of debate or corresponding political process. This does not mean that there are not protests and even ‘uprisings.’ Indeed, their frequency has been increasing. But they are not part of any officially recognized process (O’Brien 2008). Therefore, any art practice that could be seen as explicitly advocating political mobilization aimed at ‘collective action and civic engagement’ is inconceivable, except on the margins of society and at some risk to the artist. The example of Ai Weiwei comes to mind. Conditions in the PRC are unlikely to encourage participatory art as an incitement to something else or a stand-in for political activity, but instead as something in its own right. Indeed, the appeal may not be that it leads the participant out onto the street, but that it constructs a space where other possibilities open up, which are neither the hell-bent pursuit of personal advancement in the system with all its attendant pressures nor the dangerous commitment to political opposition. When Cao invites us to events in RMB City as a mirror heterotopia of rapidly urbanized and highly industrialized China, she opens up an alternative rather than oppositional space for thinking, feeling, and doing that is parallel to the world of Chinese culture and society beyond the artwork itself (Berry and Rofel 2010). However, RMB City is its own space in the virtual world, removed from everyday life. Haze and Fog features professional actors, I believe, and so it does not follow the participatory characteristic of her work. But Hip Hop Guangzhou and Whose Utopia are both participatory and different from RMB City, because in these cases she does not set up a parallel world but makes her art directly in the world that it refers to. Through participation, she and the participants make that world part of the work, and vice versa. In Hip Hop Guangzhou workers whose jobs are outdoors on the streets of Guangzhou break into dance moves at what we understand to be their work sites. As already mentioned, they seem to be selected precisely because they are implausible as breakdance enthusiasts: some are too old, others are wearing gumboots, and so on. The piece mimics a music video and is short. But what we see is work set aside temporarily for pleasure and recreation, but not consumption. For the viewer, this encourages reflection, perhaps, as

222 

Chris Berry

for me, on the nature of work or how the market economy and the pursuit of profit structures urban space and the activities in it so that they are normally all harnessed either to production or consumption. Because Hip Hop Guangzhou is a relatively short work, we do not see the dancers long enough to be sure if they are real workers from the streets of Guangzhou or actors. Whose Utopia is different. First, it mixes dancers who can go en pointe for ballet sequences with workers on the assembly line, leading us to read this work as one that mixes professional performers with Osram staff. Second, the video is part of a larger multipart participatory work, the documentation of which is available, giving us more information about the nature of the participation for those involved and what they felt about it. This documentation suggests that we should approach Cao’s artworks as producing an autonomous and alternative space that is a temporary zone outside the rhythms of everyday life, and one whose future impact upon everyday life is open. Whose Utopia is not intended as an escape from the world beyond the project – after all, it takes place right in the middle of that world – but rather its future impact is, we might say, in suspension. The slogan of the entire project, ‘What are you doing here?’ (or, in Chinese, 他们在这儿做什么？) appears in big letters imposed over the image of a Swan Lake ballet dancer on the front cover of the Utopia Daily broadsheet newspaper, demanding reflection. Whether in Chinese or English, it carries both the immediate meaning of physical activities and the larger question about aims, ambitions, ethical and political implications of one’s work, its impact on family, and whatever else might occur to someone asked the question. This extends to the audience outside the Osram factory, who might perceive it as a question about the meaning of life. Inside the factory, the question was complemented by the activities involving the staff in the art project. Cao appropriated and transformed Osram’s work model, called TPM, which stands for Total Productive Maintenance, and is accompanied by the slogan ‘More success with TPM.’ In the Whose Utopia project, Cao and her team drew suggestions from workers to redefine the acronym as ‘Team People Motivation,’ and changed the slogan to ‘More fun with TPM.’ This redefined TPM then accompanied the art project through its various stages. For example, it guided teams of workers in the design of their performances corresponding to various themes like ‘Hometown’ and ‘Dream,’ each of which is subtitled ‘TPM stream-line 01,’ ‘TPM stream-line 02’ and so on (Utopia Daily 2007: 3-7). In regard to the first section of this chapter, this transformation can be understood as an evident way in which Whose Utopia follows Foucault’s ‘represent, challenge and overturn’ heterotopic formula.

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

223

Figure 7.4 ‘My Future Is Not a Dream,’ Cao Fei, Whose Utopia, 2006, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

These Whose Utopia projects share the aim of much other participatory art to demystify art, removing the idea of the individual genius and reclaiming it as a social process shared by all. Each group worked with materials readily available in their workplace to create performances, which were then presented at ‘The 1st Utopia Festival’ (Utopia Daily 2007: 8). For example, ‘TPM stream-line 03’ worked on the ‘Dream’ theme. They built a mosquito-net covered and elevated rest space, covered with lights and hung with toys that symbolize material aspirations, such as a model car and a house. When the music begins, they get up and breakdance, the performance ending with a telephone conversation concluding a multi-million yuan deal (Utopia Daily 2007: 5). Perhaps more provocatively, ‘TPM steam-line 04’ responded to their ‘Future’ theme with a rock song and their own slogan, ‘My Future Is Not a Dream’ (我的未来不是 梦), printed on their T-shirts (see Figure 7.4). Cao goes so far as to say she can ‘call the Osram project “mass art” or “plebianized art”’ and that it lets ‘the real players (workers) take back the stage’ (Modern Weekly 2006). All the participants were given questionnaires at the end of the project, in which they are asked about the old and new TPM, as well as the project

224 

Chris Berry

in general. An example of each questionnaire is printed in the mock newspaper alongside the documentation of each performance project. For example, Wang Guang’en of the ‘Future’ team said Cao ‘is a bit like a director. Some of the things I did I don’t really understand, so I only follow her instruction,’ which does not sound too promising. But then Wang adds, ‘After the project, I realized every person, including my colleagues, is talented in some aspect. It is all about being given a chance to express themselves,’ and concludes, ‘I became more confident’ (Utopia Daily 2007: 6). Most of the participants seem to have enjoyed the activity and they express similar beneficial effects. In addition to the feedback questionnaires, the participants were given other questionnaires about their lives in general, hopes, fears, feelings about the workplace, and so on; 58 per cent reported that they did not like their uniform, and 26 per cent agreed when asked, ‘Do you imagine crying out towards the machine? Or do you want to take some unreasonable behaviour?’ When asked to specify what kind of behaviour, some mentioned singing, others smashing the machine. Some stated clearly articulated visions of their lives in five years’ time, such as opening a shop, whereas others said things like, ‘Hard to imagine, might getting fatter and aged.’ Perhaps most touching are their dreams, like ‘I dream of being a boss whom everybody loves’ and ‘a boss who cares about the environment’ (Utopia Daily 2007: 11). All these answers show the project is designed to maximize open-ended reflection. Cao sums up as follows: ‘By having them drifting away from reality, we have provided them with an opportunity to look at their situation. […] I firmly believe that it will have a long-term influence on them. One of the workers said to me, “now I know what is art, art is life itself.” Another one said, “[W]e are all artists”’ (Modern Weekly 2006). Cao herself is a participant in the project, and participation has an effect on her, too. She explained that ‘this is the first time that I have a close encounter with the working class,’ and goes on to talk about her admiration for their hard work and ambition. She also states, ‘I’ve discovered a kind of raw emotion from them, which has long been lost among urban residents’ (Modern Weekly 2006).

Re-Enchanting the Chinese City If Cao’s urban art intervenes in and aims to have an effect on the people who participate in its production, and also perhaps those who see it, does it also have an effect on the city itself, or at least our perception of it? As well as being heterotopic sites that invite participation, Cao’s artworks strive to

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

225

re-enchant the cities depicted in them. This is how we can understand her comment about ‘magical metropolises.’ If urban space is the quintessentially modern space, modernity is associated with disenchantment through the work of Max Weber, who held that the acceptance of science and rationality meant the disappearance of mystery in all its forms, ranging from religion to magic (Weber 1988). The Chinese experience of modernity has also been one of disenchantment. Both the KMT nationalists and the communists have been committed to a vision of modernization that pits itself against feudalism, including ‘feudal superstition.’ For example, as soon as the KMT nationalist government established film censorship mechanisms in the late 1920s, they banned films they saw as promoting religious belief, along with ghost films and martial arts films that featured characters with supernatural abilities (Xiao 1999: 190-192). The People’s Republic of China continues most of these bans. For example, a 1990 directive prohibited ‘contradicting the principle of modern sciences and promoting superstition’ (Xiao 2013: 124). There are many differences and disagreements amongst those writing on disenchantment and modernity. For some, disenchantment meant the liberation of humanity. For others, including Weber, disenchantment robbed the world of meaning and was a profoundly alienating experience. The idea of art as something that compensates for alienation and perhaps even redeems urban life is a commonplace. This idea has also been controversial, especially among those who fear that, along with consumerism and other seductions, it will distract from the task of real political intervention or lead back towards the mystifications of religion. However, as the extended discussion of how participation in Whose Utopia is guided towards reflection on the world outside the artwork itself indicates, even in the People’s Republic of China and its ‘harmonious society,’ art is not necessarily escapist. Nor does re-enchantment necessarily mean a return to mystification. As Michael Saler (2006) points out, the enchanting in everyday life is no longer necessarily opposed to modernity either as a remnant from the premodern or as a perversion within modernity. For some, this changed attitude towards enchantment can mean trying to work out a space for religion and the supernatural within modernity, or accounting for ‘modern religion.’ For others, it means engaging with what Saler calls ‘disenchanted enchantment.’ Cao’s work shows no interest in religion or superstition, despite populating the housing estate with comical zombies in Haze and Fog (see Figure 7.5). But, in her art, she does re-enchant otherwise alienated urban spaces. This section focuses on Cao’s use of dance, with its rhythmic movement and music, as an aesthetic tool that re-enchants urban space. This embodied

226 

Chris Berry

Figure 7.5 The zombies in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

practice that interrupts disenchanted everydayness incarnates the hopefulness that Cao seeks in urban space and through her artistic practice. Concerning the workers in the Whose Utopia project, Cao says that ‘We place them at the centre of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value which are often neglected during the process of creating huge business value’ (2007b: 2). She goes on to claim that it is the process of arranging and then taking part in a performance that leads to the rediscovery of ‘their personal value.’ However, we do not see the actual performances from ‘The 1st Utopia Festival’ in the video, Whose Utopia. Instead, performances specially organized for the video are edited into a highly rhythmic audio-visual piece. In a manner that parallels the aims of participation for the workers, the video uses what Miriam Hansen (2000: 10) has termed the ‘sensory-reflexive’ qualities of the audio-visual to draw the viewer into an experience that engenders both thought and hope. The two-part structure, moving from the ballet of the light bulbs to the human dance amongst the workbenches, has been described in the section on heterotopia, along with some of the ways that these elements might be interpreted. In this section, I want to emphasize how the affective dimensions of the video make the depicted factory magical for audiences. The first half of the video, given over to the light bulbs, is a montage cut to music. In the absence of visible human

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

227

Figure 7.6 Dancing in the factory in Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia, 2006, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

intervention, we see a world of inanimate objects that have magically become almost alive. In the second half of the film, the dancers amongst the workers introduce a foreign element that has no apparent connection to the work process. How did they get there, and what are they doing? In addition to the re-enchantment produced by this apparently irrational presence, the dance itself, with its coordination and rhythms is also a magical coming together where we could say the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. Fun, beauty, amusement, and other feelings normally absent from the visible activities of the factory infuse it in the process (see Figure 7.6), and the surprise of all these elements may combine to promote reflection. Similarly, the already magical quality of dancing in Hip Hop Guangzhou is enhanced by its appearance in unexpected places and its performance by unexpected dancers. In RMB City, animation itself is the magical element, as well as the ability to experience soaring around Second Life in a super-human fashion. But it is perhaps the most recent work covered by this chapter, Haze and Fog that presents both the most alienated space and the strongest energy pulse of re-enchantment. The first two-fifths is all about alienation.

228 

Chris Berry

Repeated scenes of individual loneliness or mutual neglect between people sharing spaces succeed each other in the semi-deserted estate, where real estate salespeople are still showing apartments to potential buyers. We see a rich couple in their fancy apartment. He putts a golf ball around and ignores his pregnant wife, while she screams. A window washer swings past, ignoring the scene inside. An old man – played by Wu Wenguang (b. 1956), father of Chinese independent documentary – staggers about using a walking frame, and almost falls into the ponds in the grounds of the estate. A cleaner tries on a pair of high heels on a shoe rack outside the front door of an apartment and is worried when the owner comes out, but the woman ignores her completely. The real estate salespeople are standing with their signs by the road, trying to attract customers, when a driver runs down a cyclist. Possibly convinced it is a scam, the driver gets out as people gather round. They watch like Lu Xun’s famous ‘cruel and senseless crowd’ (Lee 1987: 10) as he kicks the cyclist and drives off. The salespeople ignore the cyclist, who gets up and staggers towards the camera covered in blood. As more such figures appear in the video, it becomes clear in retrospect that this was the first zombie. The complete absence of empathy and human engagement makes the living little different from the living dead. At almost 19 minutes into Haze and Fog, the cleaner is mopping the floor in a yoga class when the first magical moment occurs. A boulder suddenly falls from above and crashes into the floor. Immediately, tango music starts up and the next sequence cuts between cleaners at work in the corridor and the old man sitting on a sofa, his walking frame by his side. He is holding a woman’s dress. Perhaps it is his dead wife’s? Without standing, he ‘dances’ with the dress to the tango music, eventually draping it over his head, breathing in the wearer’s lingering scent in a moment at once poignant and erotic. The combination of an unexplained and rationally impossible event (the boulder) with rhythmic music and dance is a combination of the irrational and the beautiful that is aesthetic and magical. In this moment, however sad and strange, the desolate housing state becomes re-enchanted. Over the next two-fifths of Haze and Fog, re-enchantment builds. The old man’s erotic moment with his wife’s dress is a kind of transgression, and a variety of other such transgressions suggest how much self-control and repression is part of alienation and the efficient functioning of modernity. The man in the rich couple hires a call girl; a security guard keys a car in the underground car park; and another security guard sneaks around at night, masturbating outside a woman’s apartment. Some of these moments have the surreal quality of eroticism and irrationality. Having dropped a watermelon intended for a young woman resident, the delivery man comes back with

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

229

a huge box of blow-up watermelons which he drops all over the corridor before knocking on the door (Figure 7.7). We cut to the woman in the bath tub, surrounded by the watermelon balls. The cleaner drags a bin into the grounds of the estate to find herself facing a peacock, its tail spread open; the peacock appears again later, perched on a ledge of the apartment block (see Figure 7.8). A peacock on a Beijing housing estate is as incongruous but enchanting as the Swan Lake dancer in the Osram factory in Whose Utopia. Three kinds of music accompany these mounting disruptions to the smooth and cool rationality of the f irst part of the video. There is the tango music, which pops up again when the pregnant wife appears in the supermarket and dances with her shopping trolley in the aisles. There is also a high note and tinkling piano music that is eerie. This appears at the very beginning, but also over such magical moments as a scene in which the cleaner, in appropriated high heels, positions herself on a ping pong table in some basement area and does a mysterious dance modelled on the movements she has seen in the yoga studio (Figure 7.9). Finally, slightly ominous and deeper cello music is played, for the first time when people in uniform remove the signs the real estate people have been putting up by the roadside, and then again when the cleaner finds herself facing the peacock. Tango music also ushers in the f inal scenes. Here, highly affective forms combine with the heterotopic to encourage both reflection and the re-enchantment that marks a shift away from alienation. First, there is a sequence in which zombies – some of them characters we have seen before in human form – take over the apartment complex, eating their victims as they go. Not quite comic and not quite horrific, this is nonetheless disturbing. The zombies stagger across a wasteland, in which a concrete frame stands abandoned, in the process of being taken over by nature. The zombie scenes are followed by a simple folk song protesting lack of emotion and coldness in society, followed by a cut to a montage of ‘eyes’ in tree bark, formed where branches have been cut off and healed. These eyes suggest that nature has witnessed the alienation that the video has shown characterizing urban development in Beijing. These eyes are of course magical in their uncanny quality, suggesting that, despite all appearances, nature itself can always take over the concrete, re-enchanting the space with its own protean power.

Conclusion: An Ethical and Aesthetic Practice? By way of conclusion, this final section argues that Cao Fei’s work is gestural, and the cinematic deployment of dance and music in Haze and Fog is one way

230 

Chris Berry

Figure 7.7 Bouncing watermelons in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

Figure 7.8 Encountering the peacock in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

231

Figure 7.9 Yoga in high heels in Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog, 2013, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, 2015.

in which this gestural quality is manifested. If we survey all four works under consideration here, spoken language is less important than performance, dance, montage, and other embodied and experiential forms. This conclusion further argues that Cao Fei’s cinema of gesture is at once, an aesthetic and ethical response to China’s rapid urbanization. Gesture has been seen as both quintessentially cinematic and also a redemptive process in the face of alienating modernity. Ian Aitken points to a long tradition of German Romantic thought that associated modernity with alienation and instrumentalism, with cinema imagined as a way for audiences to get back in touch with themselves. In the period Aitken discusses, cinema was silent, and it is here that the idea of gesture as an alternative and purer language originated. If verbal language was part of the process of alienation, gesture can be seen as ‘a kind of primeval language, capable of transcending national, class, power and gender barriers’ (Aitken 2001: 7). The primary exponent of this approach is Béla Balázs, who in 1924 wrote: ‘The culture of words is dematerialized, abstract and over-intellectualized; it degrades the human body to the status of a biological organism. But the new language of gestures that is emerging at present arises from our painful yearning to be human beings with our entire bodies’ (2010: 11). More recently, Giorgio Agamben opens his ‘Notes on Gesture’ (2000) with a discussion of

232 

Chris Berry

Gilles de la Tourette’s observations on the crisis and loss of gesture under modernity, and argues that the importance of cinema lies in its ability to restore gesture and movement. Agamben speaks of the gesture as being ethical. He offers little explanation, but René ten Bos portrays gesture in Agamben’s work as a politics. He argues that Agamben ‘introduces this concept as an alternative to Aristotelian conceptions of human activity that are, in his view, related to means-end schemes’ (Ten Bos 2005: 27). Whereas the latter are disciplinary or violent, gesture is not teleological (or a ‘means-end scheme’). In Ten Bos’s account, gesture’s formless quality opens up a space for what Agamben calls the ‘less-than-human,’ because, for Agamben, the ethical is precisely what opens out teleological schemes and gives voice to the voiceless. In this sense, the gestural is a politics for Agamben, because it contests the processes of modernity that produce and naturalize the distinctions between human and less-than-human. In the Chinese context, foreclosure on opposition means a participatory art that directly mobilizes political engagement is impossible. However, Cao Fei combines magical moments that re-enchant the metropolises she depicts with the reordering of the mirror heterotopia to promote reflection, with both of these qualities produced through embodied participation. The result is her contribution to what could be called her new gestural cinema in which dialogue is rare but dance, movement, facial expression, music, and striking visual compositions dominate and open out the taken-for-granted rationality of the modern city. This gesturality is at once aesthetic and ethical. Whether this would meet Claire Bishop’s worries about participatory art that is neither ethically effective nor aesthetic is difficult to say. But it is what makes Cao’s work a significant and sustained response to contemporary Chinese urbanization and its vicissitudes.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (2000) Notes on Gesture. In Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Binetti, Vincenzo, and Casarino, Cesare. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 48-59. Aitken, Ian (2001) European Film Theory: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Al, Stefan (ed.) (2014) Villages in the City: A Guide to South China’s Informal Settlements. Contributing editors: Chu, Paul Hoi Shan, Juhre, Claudia, Valin, Ivan, and Wang, Casey. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

233

Balázs, Béla (2010) Visible Man. In Carter, Erica (ed.) Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Trans. Livingstone, Rodney. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 9-16. Barok, Dušan (2009) On Participatory Art: Interview with Claire Bishop. Multiplace Theory mailing list. https://multiplace.sk/pipermail/mtp-teoria/2009July/000165.html, accessed 24 October 2014. Berry, Chris (2010) Imaging the Globalized City: Rem Koolhaas, U-thèque, and the Pearl River Delta. In Braester, Yomi, and Tweedie, James (eds) Cinema at the City’s Edge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 155-170. Berry, Chris (2015) Images of Urban China in Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises.’ China Information 29(2): 202-225. Berry, Chris, and Rofel, Lisa (2010) Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture. In Berry, Chris, Lu, Xinyu, and Rofel, Lisa (eds) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 135-154. Berry, Chris, Lu, Xinyu, and Rofel, Lisa (eds) (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Bishop, Claire (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Campanella, Thomas J. (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Cao, Fei (2003) A Wild Side of Guangzhou. In Ou Ning and Cao Fei in association with U-thèque members (eds) The San Yuan Li Project, 49-55. Cao, Fei (2007a) RMB City: Online urbanization. http://www.caofei.com/works. aspx?id=17&year=2007&wtid=3, accessed 4 May 2015. Cao, Fei (2007b) What Are You Doing Here? Introduction. Utopia Daily, 1 January, 2. Cao, Fei (2017a) About. http://www.caofei.com/about_us.aspx, accessed 2 April 2017. Cao, Fei (2017b) CV. http://www.caofei.com/about_cv.aspx, accessed 21 April 2017. Edwards, Dan (2011) Cinema Talk: A Conversation with Ou Ning. dGenerate Films website, 1 March. http://dgeneratefilms.com/dgenerate-titles/cinematalk-aconversation-with-ou-ning, accessed 3 August 2014. Foucault, Michel (1997) Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. In Leach, Neil (ed.) Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 330-6. Gibson, William (1995) Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins. Gladston, Paul (2014) Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History. London: Reaktion Books. Hansen, Miriam Bratu (2000) Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism. Film Quarterly 54(1): 10-20. Hildebrandt, Christine (2007) untitled statement. Utopia Daily, 1 January, 2.

234 

Chris Berry

Johnson, Ian (2014) China Releases Plan to Incorporate Farmers into Cities. New York Times, 17 March. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/chinareleases-plan-to-integrate-farmers-in-cities.html?_r=0, accessed 1 August 2014. Kester, Grant H. (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham: Duke University Press. Lee, Leo Ou-fan (1987) Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Linden Lab (n.d.) Second Life. http://secondlife.com/. Marinelli, Maurizio (2004) Walls of Dialogue in the Chinese Space. China Information 18(3): 429-462. Marinelli, Maurizio (2015) Urban Revolution and Chinese Contemporary Art: A Total Revolution of the Senses. China Information 29(2): 154-175. Marsden, Rachel (ed.) (2013) Cao Fei. Manchester: Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art. Modern Weekly (2006) Interview with Cao Fei. Zhoumo huabao (Modern weekly) 385, 6 May. Reprinted in Utopia Daily (2007), 14. Nakamura, Lisa (2002) Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge. O’Brien, Kevin J. (ed.) (2008) Popular Protest in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ou, Ning, and Cao, Fei, in association with U-thèque members (eds) (2003) The San Yuan Li Project. Guangzhou: U-thèque Organization. Para Site (2014) Ten Million Rooms of Yearning: Sex in Hong Kong. Para Site. http:// www.para-site.org.hk/en/exhibitions/ten-million-rooms-of-yearning-sex-inhong-kong, accessed 21 October 2014. RMB City Blog (2008) RMB City at the Serpentine Gallery (London, UK). RMB City website, 26 July. http://rmbcity.com/2008/07/rmb-city-at-the-serpentine-gallery/, accessed 29 August 2014. RMB City Blog (2010) ‘Reality in Pixels’ – Naked Idol Winner’s Views on Nudity. RMB City website, 20 July. http://rmbcity.com/2010/07/reality-in-pixels-nakedidol-winners-views-on-nudity/, accessed 21 October 2014. Rofel, Lisa (2007) Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Saler, Michael (2006) Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review. American Historical Review 111(3): 692-716. Schmatzberger, Alice (2012) Pictorial City: Chinese Urbanism and Contemporary Photography. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 10(6): 38-58. Shao, Qin (2013) Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Stone, Allucquere Rosa (1996) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Me tropolises’

235

Ten Bos, René (2005) On the Possibility of Formless Life: Agamben’s Politics of the Gesture. Ephemera 5(1): 26-44. Utopia Daily (2007) Utopia Daily (a broadsheet newspaper published in relation to the artwork, no editor, no press mentioned). Weber, Max (1988) Science as a Vocation. Trans. John, Michael. In Lassman, Peter, and Velody, Irving, with Martins, Herminio (eds) Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation.’ London: Routledge, 3-31. Xiao, Zhiwei (1999) Constructing a New National Culture: Film Censorship and the Issues of Cantonese Dialect, Superstition, and Sex in the Nanjing Decade. In Zhang, Yingjin (ed.), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 183-199. Xiao, Zhiwei (2013) Prohibition, Politics, and Nation-Building: A History of Film Censorship in China. In Bittereyst, Daniel, and Vande Vinkel, Roel (eds) Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 109-130. Zhang, Zhen (ed.) (2007) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press.

About the author Chris Berry Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London [email protected] Chris Berry’s (PhD, UCLA) research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-based media, as well as neighbouring countries. His primary publications include (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China on Screen and The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record.

8

Relocating Further or Standing Ground? Unofficial Artists and Independent Film-makers in the Beijing Periphery 1 Judith Pernin

Abstract Since the 1980s, Chinese independent film-makers and contemporary artists have sought to distance themselves from national institutions. Many of them chose to live and work in art districts or artist villages at the outskirt of Chinese cities. However, peripheral art spaces are routinely threatened by urban development projects and have disappeared over the years. While urban and rural dwellers resisting forced relocation have been extensively studied, unofficial artists are rarely discussed when they try to stand their ground. This chapter looks at four independent documentaries recording various responses of art district residents facing relocation from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s in Beijing. These films highlight the symbiosis of performance and documentary in resisting, claiming rights, and shaping protest actions. Keywords: art districts, documentary f ilm, urban space, protest, performance

Since the 1980s, many Chinese artists have sought to distance themselves from the national art institutions and official structures. Around 1984, a group of ‘unofficial artists’ moved to the Beijing northwestern periphery 1 My gratitude goes to all the persons cited in this chapter for granting me an access to their works and for agreeing to be interviewed, as well as to the editors and peer reviewers of this volume for their insightful remarks.

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch08

238 

Judith Pernin

and rented out cheap rural courtyard houses from local villagers, making Yuanmingyuan the first of a series of ‘artist villages.’ Without a Beijing household registration (户口), most of the new residents were not allowed to live in the capital. The clearance of the village in 1995 prompted many to migrate towards other more welcoming suburban areas (Wang 2012; Ren and Sun 2012). By then, some Chinese artists were gaining recognition on the international art scene, and landlords or village committees on the Beijing periphery gradually realized the opportunity of ‘hosting’ such communities. Authorizing the construction of galleries, artist studios and apartments, they engaged in ‘artistic urbanization’ (Ren and Sun 2012: 510) in areas considered as industrial or rural wastelands. Such were the former military factory 798 near the capital airport’s road, and Xiaopu village in Songzhuang town, Tongzhou district. In 2006, the two sites were officially endorsed as art districts, becoming tourist attractions quickly ‘absorbed into the mainstream official system’ (Wang 2010: 195). The official backing of art spaces, as well as the artists’ recognition on the international market seem to indicate that ‘the terms “unofficial” and “underground” which were used [to refer to art outside of the official political system in China] during the 1980s and 1990s, have lost their historical relevance’ (Wang 2013: 65). However, it does not mean that art communities have all developed in a steady and linear way. For varying legal, commercial, or political reasons, many of them are routinely affected by spatial conflicts and over the past 30 years, some art districts have entirely vanished, their residents having to relocate to even more remote parts of the city. As a result, while the ‘urban periphery has become the centre of artistic production’ (Ren and Sun 2012: 509), it is at the same time persistently moving further away from the city centre, as the ‘periphery [is] constantly redefined with the urban sprawl of Beijing’ (Ren and Sun 2012: 509). When artists are facing evictions, do they comply with relocation or do they try to protest and stand their ground? Interestingly, a few independent documentaries reflect on the phenomenon, giving us rare images of artists protesting evictions. Compared to the scope of the problem in China, spatial conflicts in art villages or districts may seem anecdotal. But even though they only impact a small demographic group, these films are important because they target an intellectual group often politicized and thus reveal the intersection of art, resistance and modes of protest. They also offer a unique window on how rapid urbanization transforms the lives and works of artists and film-makers in Beijing particularly. At the crossroad of studies on independent film, Beijing urbanism, unofficial art communities, resistance and protest movements, this chapter aims at filling the void in current research by examining four independent

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

239

documentaries on art communities facing spatial conflicts in the Chinese capital. Hu Jie’s (胡杰, b. 1958) Artists of Yuanmingyuan (圆明园的艺术家们, 1995, 33 min), and Zhao Liang’s (赵亮, b. 1971) Farewell Yuanmingyuan (告別 圆明园, 2006, 104 min) were filmed in the Yuanmingyuan artist village in 1995 before its clearing, giving us a glimpse of the last days of this important community. In The Cold Winter (暖冬, 2010, 103 min), Zheng Kuo (郑阔, b. 1974) films a large-scale eviction case affecting several art districts and provides an insight into various resistance strategies adopted by artists. More recently, Wang Wo’s (王我, b. 1967) A Filmless Festival (沒有电影的 电影节, 2015, 79 min) reports on the forced cancellation of one of China’s major independent film festivals and artists’ reactions in Songzhuang artist village. As Chinese artists’ status has dramatically changed in these past decades with their success on the art market, a historical perspective on this subject is necessary to reflect on the elaboration of resistance strategies and use of artistic means to protest evictions. Produced between the mid-1990s to 2014, and focusing on Beijing’s main art communities, the four films reveal the evolution of this group in the urban space. While spatial conflicts remain understudied in the art village context, many groups of urban or rural dwellers resisting forced relocation have been examined (Sargeson 2013; Laurans 2005; Ong 2014). The ephemeral geography of unofficial art zones in Beijing has also attracted scholarly attention, with studies on the historical, urban and social aspects of this phenomenon (Wang 2010; Ren and Sun 2012; Currier 2008; Zhou and Breitung 2007). Dubbed as the ‘urban generation,’ independent film-makers have been discussed in their relation to the city in various publications (Zhang 2007; Braester 2010), and artworks on China’s fast-paced urbanization have also been the object of scholarly scrutiny (Hou 2002; Broudehoux 2004). In this volume, performance art in Guangzhou, translocal ‘urban creativity,’ and ‘guerrilla advertising’ in Beijing are respectively analysed by Nancy P. Lin, Minna Valjakka and Elizabeth Parke, while Chris Berry discusses Cao Fei’s moving image works where urban landscapes are transformed by a ‘gesturality […] at once aesthetic and ethical.’ Although these topics are closely interconnected, Chinese unofficial artists and independent film-makers are rarely discussed when they have to defend their ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1967). Does the geographical and social ‘marginality’ of unofficial artists and film-makers provide them with a specific mode or ‘site of resistance’ (hooks 1990)? Given their profession, recognition, and social status, it is worthwhile to examine whether they oppose a specific type of resistance when they are confronted with the necessity of abandoning their work and living spaces. In this context, the

240 

Judith Pernin

film protagonists are not merely interested in creating art in an urban environment, but in creatively challenging measures and people opposed to their free use of Beijing peripheral space. Thus, the artists’ creative modes of resistance depicted in these films stand in stark contrast to other artistic manifestations in the city. Official interferences in artist-led projects have unfortunately become more topical in the past decade.2 The level of autonomy of certain unofficial artists and film-makers has steadily regressed and local or central authorities seem to monitor more closely sensitive art activities. However, these problems remain understudied due to their disciplinary elusiveness and the difficulty to follow micro-events largely carried out under the radar. In some cases, the press was discouraged to report despite the artists’ ambitions to publicize their issues. Other times, independent artists and film-makers themselves elaborated tactics to eschew unwanted scrutiny by circulating cancellation notices of events, by voluntarily relocating to other more peripheral venues or by retreating to the private sphere. The management of the public dimension of the conflict by the authorities or the protagonists and film-makers indicates therefore a strategic choice from both parts, reflected by the documentary mise en scène. This chapter not only raises questions on the resilience and resistance strategies of art communities facing evictions, but it also contributes to a lively global debate on the evolution of art forms and protest practices in film, performance and social media (Werbner, Webb and Spellman-Poots 2014; Weibel 2015). In order to grasp the main elements of the debate in the Chinese context, a detour to consider the emergence of independent documentaries and the relationship between performance art and modes of protest in China is necessary.

Space, Performance and Engagement in Chinese Independent Documentaries Independent f ilm-makers and unoff icial artists share a similar situation as both groups operate largely outside of official institutions. Many 2 For art spaces, see our analysis of Cold Winter in the second section. Activities around independent film-making went under fire nationwide at the turn of the 2010s, with the cancellation of many independent festivals, such as the Kunming-based independent documentary film festival Yunfest. After trying in 2013 to relocate its activities in a private setting in the smaller city of Dali as it had done successfully in 2007, the festival had to close operations.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

241

independent film-makers hold a dual identity of film and art practitioners and have opted to live side by side with artists in various Beijing art districts. The two milieus overlap instead of being clear-cut, and as artists and film-makers’ presence in the urban space is often contested or challenged, they have developed solidarity in times of conflicts. The close relationship was already manifested in one of the first independent documentaries ever made in China, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (流浪北京 最后的梦想者, 1991, 150 min). The film describes the psychological and geographical malaise of five young unofficial artists in Beijing (Reynaud 2003; Robinson 2013: 1-2). It bears the raw signs of an emerging aesthetics elaborated from the rejection of the conventional TV formats in use in 1980s China. Bumming in Beijing consists in observational sequences in direct-cinema style and in interviews in which the protagonists express the anguish of individuals seldom represented in such a subjective way in official media. The film’s influence on later independent documentaries can be felt formally and thematically. Bumming in Beijing gives voice to individuals who cannot seem to find a place for themselves in the capital, and this feeling of thwarted belonging even leads them to plan to leave the country. Many independent documentaries similarly focus on people’s relation to space. China’s large-scale urbanization process, and its complex history of landownership bring forward pressing issues for rural and urban residents (Pernin 2010). The predominance of these problems prompted many film-makers to focus on spatial subject matters, with a great number of documentaries on communities facing relocation or protesting forced evictions.3 To film those issues, independent film-makers adopted a distinctive filming and editing style favouring long takes and the unity of sound with image, which, in turn, results in the representation of filmic space as a continuous entity shaped by various external constraints received during the shooting. Independent documentaries therefore present both a recording of the specificities of the profilmic space and of the film-maker and filmed protagonists’ subjective experiences (Pernin 2010, 2015: 141-186). These formal and thematic characteristics broadly define a body of independent documentaries that now count over 500 titles on various topics and styles. Bypassing altogether the constraints of the film and television censorship system, independent documentaries are not distributed in official film 3 For instance, Li Yifan (李一凡, b. 1965) and Yan Yu (鄢雨, b. 1971), Before the Flood (淹没, 2005, 150 min); Cao Fei (曹斐, b. 1978), Ou Ning (欧宁, b. 1969), and Zhang Jinli (张金利, b. 1970), Meishi Street (煤市街, 2006, 85 min).

242 

Judith Pernin

theatres or TV channels, but are shown in unofficial film screenings across the country, and sporadically online. 4 The emergence of this documentary movement occurred simultaneously with the development of performance art. As an ephemeral site-specific intervention, the new medium also had a wide influence on other art forms. The theory of independent documentary in China was shaped from the outset by a terminology used for performance art, notably with the notion of ‘xianchang’ (现场) or ‘scene,’ that roughly translates the idea of operating ‘on-site’ for performers, and recording ‘in direct’ for film-makers (Berghuis 2006: 161; Robinson 2013: 29-32; Pernin 2015: 93). Performance art allows an appropriation of space through actions – or, more accurately in the Chinese terminology, behaviours (行为) (Berghuis 2006: 38). As such, it can bring visibility to public issues and become a mode of protest (Kim 2001: 21; Gao 2001: 98). Interestingly, the 1 October 1979 demonstration by the Star group whose members were denied access to an exhibition space was considered by Thomas Berghuis as ‘the first move in the direction of performance art’ (2006: 44). From the outset, Chinese performance art seems to provide tools to protest against limitations placed upon artists’ use of urban space. In Beijing, performance art largely emerged in villages around the capital, where artists faced less control. In the 1990s, photographers and film-makers were recording everyday life and artists’ performances in Yuanmingyuan or Beijing East Village (Berghuis 2006; Wu 2014). This practice led to discussions on the status of the original ‘live’ performance artwork towards its photographic or video documentation (Wu 2014).5 Today, and beyond the Chinese context, the relation between performance, document and the archive constitutes a growing area of debates (Phelan 2006; Borggreen and Gade 2013) that these independent documentaries on the Beijing art scene contribute to further expand. Indeed, in this context, the documentary film does not only provide a recording tool for various performances expressing territorial claims. It also brings into play a specific documentary theatricality that film scholars have identified as the ‘performative mode’ – a personal engagement of the film-maker with the profilmic environment and the protagonists – while ‘virtual performances’ suggest that the filmed subjects are ‘acting’ in front of the camera as a cinematic version of themselves (Nichols 1994: 72; Nichols 2010: 131). 4 Some of these films are also screened abroad, mostly in specialized film festivals, and, on rare occasions, they are broadcast or distributed in foreign countries, or in Hong Kong. 5 Years later, controversies on the ownership of these images arose among performance artists and photographers, as confirmed by film-maker Zhao Liang. Zhao Liang, in interview with the author, Beijing, 9 July 2011.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

243

Since independent documentaries operate in the xianchang aesthetical framework (see also Zhen Zhang’s chapter in this volume), the depiction of space and architecture is significant formally, but also discursively as the protagonists’ conflict relates to their use of peripheral spaces, and more abstractly to their use of the public sphere during protests. In this chapter’s films analysis, the representation of the private or public spaces where the protagonists’ actions of resistance are taking place is of primary importance. Keeping in mind that many protest actions and their documentation are defined by a high degree of performativity or by the resort to performance art itself, I will attempt to disambiguate art performances from documentary performativity and protest actions and evaluate the films’ contribution to each resistance movement. I will first examine the 1995 evictions carried out in Yuanmingyuan artist village filmed by Zhao Liang and Hu Jie. Shot in the mid-1990s, the two documentaries feature a traditional ‘rural’ architecture typical of the suburban areas stretched around the capital, with brick courtyard housing lined up along narrow streets. The various art districts featured in Zheng Kuo’s (郑阔, b. 1974) The Cold Winter (暖冬, 2010, 103 min) in the following section, stand in stark contrast with this spatial configuration. They are located on the opposite side of the city, in the vicinity of the ‘official’ 798 art district from which they derive. Here, a tabula rasa urbanization style has cleared all trace of previous settlements although most of the surrounding basic amenities still look unfinished. The art studios and galleries shot in The Cold Winter are somewhat reminiscent of the post-industrial and contemporary design of 798, with high ceilings and vast open spaces. In this film, the synergy between performance and documentary resulted in the elaboration of vigorous – although somewhat ineffective – protest methods to oppose the large-scale evictions carried out in 2010. Similar performative practices are at play in Wang Wo’s (王我, b. 1967) A Filmless Festival (沒有电影的电影节, 2015, 79 min) examined in the last section. The film describes the forced cancellation of the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) in Songzhuang. In terms of architecture, Songzhuang is characterized by a mix of rural and contemporary: a village of courtyard houses still occupies most of the area, but many taller new buildings with bold architectural styles have been erected over the years to host art-related activities. However, A Filmless Festival takes place almost exclusively in the ‘rural’ area, as the BIFF activities have grown increasingly unwelcome in other art spaces over the past few years. Most of the film is therefore shot inside the homes or offices of the BIFF organizers, or on the surrounding narrow dirt roads.

244 

Judith Pernin

Archives of the Disappearance of Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Solidarity between unofficial artists and independent film-makers during times of crisis is manifest in two documentaries on the Yuanmingyuan artist village, Hu Jie’s Artists of Yuanmingyuan and Zhao Liang’s Farewell Yuanmingyuan. These films narrate how, after a decade of cohabitation next to Yuanmingyuan Park on the western outskirts of the capital, the Beijing municipality decided to empty the village from its artist residents before the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995. International events such as this one routinely justify ‘beautifying’ measures in the city, an excuse to chase away undesirable populations (Broudehoux 2004: 25-37). In this case, many artists did not possess the necessary permits to reside in the area and knew that in case of control, they would be forced to return to their original cities, a treatment applied to all irregular migrants. Both films depict the artists’ reactions to the eviction threat during the last days of the artist village in August 1995. Typical of the early stage of Chinese independent documentaries, they mix the observational, participative, and performative modes, with the protagonists making territorial claims in direct addresses to the camera, or through the film-maker’s engagement in the film dispositive. However, the depiction of unofficial artists differs on several grounds because of the film-makers’ personal style. Born in 1958, Hu Jie graduated in oil painting from the People’s Liberation Army Arts College. He was living in the village and had close ties with some of the artists, recording their everyday life as an early attempt at documentary film-making. As he lost some of his footage, the film is of a short format.6 Zhao Liang, almost fifteen years younger, was still studying at the Beijing Film Academy in 1995 and routinely visited the area ‘for fun’ as many art lovers, journalists and curious people did at the time. When he heard about the eviction notice, he thought that ‘he really had to film the village.’7 His documentary, however, underwent postproduction only in 2006, giving the film a reflexive distance with the event. The final credits remind the viewer that a decade later, some of the protagonists have become ‘big names,’ and have regrouped in other peripheral art villages. Guided by a young female painter, Hu Jie films a desolate area and artists more preoccupied by administrative and material issues than by creative ones at the time of the shooting. The village itself is mainly described 6 Hu Jie, in interview with the author, Nanjing, 3 March 2015. See also Shen (2005). 7 Zhao Liang, in interview with the author, Beijing, 9 July 2011.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

245

spatially by a few exterior sequences shot in dark and empty narrow alleys, showing that the inhabitants’ famed ‘bohemian lifestyle’ has vanished. Hu Jie symbolizes the cause of this disappearance by inserting short images of Tiananmen Square – the distant site of political power representing the cause of the collapse of the commune. Another short descriptive scene is shot in nearby Yuanmingyuan Park, with the melancholy ruins of a utopian space – the exotic garden destroyed by imperialist armies – echoing the artists’ failed emancipation attempt. The artists themselves are shot in their private apartments and very little is effectively said or seen of their artistic pursuits. They are depicted as a vulnerable group of ‘ordinary people,’ a representation playing down the subversive significance of working as an unofficial artist in those years. Zhao Liang’s much longer Farewell Yuanmingyuan rigorously follows the chronology of local authorities’ interventions in the village and the artists’ gradual departure. As in Wu Wenguang’s film, since most of the protagonists do not possess a Beijing residential permit, they need temporary work permits to legally establish themselves in the capital. However, by the time these papers are finally delivered to some, they are suddenly no longer considered valid. The protagonists expose their problems in conversations highlighting slight differences in their status, state of mind and strategies. Like in Hu Jie’s film, these discussions are not voiced out as protests and are not recorded in public areas but in private settings, when artists gather in their living rooms, to eat, drink and smoke, sometimes expressing their distress over a song. A painter gives nonetheless a reading of his personal diary to the camera, reporting his efforts with the administration. In a direct address to the camera, he states that Zhao Liang’s ‘role’ is to ‘record this historical moment,’ the artists having the duty to resist before returning to creative practices. This short statement sums up the complementary role of film-maker and artists, the former being in charge of preserving memories of the latter’s lifestyle and struggles. These private sequences of solidarity differ with the depiction of the police as a threatening foreign body entering the community. Dissimulated inside a house and zooming at the fullest extent of his camera, Zhao Liang shoots through a window a cohort of men in uniforms walking down the street, while passers-by look on. Later, the film-maker suddenly runs away, his camera showing bumpy and almost abstract images of a greyish road and green patches of grass. The kinetic quality of these images accompanied only by the sound of the cameraman’s breathing contrasts with the tension built in the static shots of the arrival of the police, and the viewer can feel Zhao Liang’s fear and excitement. A final burst of laughter off-screen marks

246 

Judith Pernin

the resolution of this chase scene strangely reminiscent of war films, with the film-maker shooting the sequence first as a remote and dissimulated observer, then as an emotional participant running from the police. Already visibly engaged in interactions with artists, Zhao Liang becomes here directly and subjectively involved in the action, recording his personal experience of escape in the performative mode. These two films depict the vain attempts of unofficial artists at keeping their spatial position in the Beijing periphery. Any resistance seems to be doomed to failure in Hu Jie’s documentary by the reminder of crushed utopias (Yuanmingyuan Park), and ubiquitous power (Tiananmen Square), and Zhao Liang’s retrospective view makes clear from the outset that the village would be cleared. Both films testify to the looming disappearance of this community by describing the residents’ daily life while giving voice to their frustration in ‘real’ or ‘virtual performances’ carried out mostly in private (songs, readings, conversations and speeches against the relocation). For both film-makers, the artists’ daily interactions are worth recording especially at the critical time of their disappearance, when their performances of everyday life are infused with critical discourses on their right to live at the outskirts of Beijing. The film-makers constitute a body of nostalgic archives intended to preserve the memory of a vulnerable group, rather than publicizing the issue to the outside world. In other words, documentary film is not used as a tool for mobilization and resistance, but for its archival function.

Evictions from Beijing Art Districts in the 2010s: The Cold Winter Almost two decades after the ‘private’ and passive resistance to the Yuan­ mingyuan evictions, artist communities still routinely face relocation problems, although the causes might differ from those exposed previously. Zheng Kuo’s The Cold Winter8 offers a good insight into the evolution of the unofficial art scene in peripheral Beijing. Filmed during the resistance movement of artists working and living in various art districts threatened with expulsions, the film shows their turn to performance as a form of protest. In winter 2010, several art districts located in northeast Beijing (including Heiqiao, Zheng Yang, and 008 art districts) were designated for major 8 Trained as an artist, the f ilm-maker is also a long-time observer of Beijing art districts, working in 798 as a curator. Interestingly, he studied documentary film-making at the Li Xianting Film School in Songzhuang (see below). His first documentary is 798 Station (七九八站, 2010, 105 min).

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

247

redevelopments that would soon deprive their inhabitants of their studios and apartments. Some artists and gallery owners had signed long-term agreements (some for up to 20 years), and engaged in massive renovation works. They reacted with anger and disbelief to the sudden notice and the subsequent measures undertaken to clear the districts – namely, cutting water, electricity and heating in all buildings during an extremely rigorous winter. When excavators and demolition workers arrived at the scene, the artists promptly regrouped in an informal collective to carry out resistance actions with the support of various people from other art districts. Their project was called ‘warm winter’ (暖冬) as an ironical reference to the extremely low temperatures. The Cold Winter is composed of direct-style sequences and ‘talking heads’ interviews. The film’s first three-quarters depict the resistance project chronologically, with a few inserts of post-event interviews in which artists reflect on the situation. The last section gathers interviews discussing controversial issues raised during the protest movement and gives a bitter conclusion on its resolution. Inaugurated by exhibitions in the districts under threat, the ‘warm winter’ project was followed by various performances taking place outside of the precincts, and culminated in a demonstration on Chang’an Avenue on 22 February 2010. Attended by very few artists, this march became highly controversial both on and offline as it was an attempt to voice political issues beyond the art district disputes. During the whole protest movement, policemen and developers routinely attempted to silence the artists, leading to quarrels, arrests, and violent fights. The first protest-exhibition was immediately challenged by policemen. They demanded the artists to remove ‘shocking’ artworks visible on the walls surrounding the district thus preventing the issue from attracting public attention. While media coverage was quite important at the outset, it gradually faded as the conflict escalated. Soon, the artists found themselves increasingly isolated in art districts under heavy surveillance. Consequently, they turned to performances in ordinary public spaces. A collective run in support of the artists was organized on the streets of neighbouring and more recognized art districts. Many prominent artists joined in order to generate media following. Another one involved a group of artists wearing masks of monstrous animals on the subway. At each station, they stepped out on the platform to take a group picture, with the embarked cameraman recording both the excited participants and the surprised and sometimes startled passengers. Although these performance-protests took place in public spaces such as streets or subways, the participants were either anonymous or costumed. A degree of secrecy or symbolism was therefore

248 

Judith Pernin

favoured over clarity: the artists’ claims were indeed probably impossible to decipher for ordinary passers-by. Nonetheless, these performances allowed artists to appropriate spaces open to the public and attract media coverage while avoiding the subversive nature of more direct forms of protest, such as demonstrations. In Zhao Liang, Wu Wenguang, and Hu Jie’s documentaries discussed above, the camera was often dissimulated or operating in private settings. Here, the cameraman films exteriors such as the outside areas of the art districts and even violent interactions between artists, construction workers and the police, conveying a greater feeling of openness and participation in the depiction of such conflicts. The interior scenes featuring interviews or conversations between protagonists are also very different from the two previous films. Confined in their dark and modest homes, Hu Jie and Zhao Liang’s melancholy protagonists brought about a feeling of powerlessness and constraints. The Cold Winter focuses instead on protagonists actively engaged in a protest movement. The artists’ efforts are depicted in great detail by a cameraman that does not shy away from its position of witness, and at times participant. In their new and almost luxurious studios compared to those of unofficial artists in the 1990s, the protagonists elaborate on their rights to stand their ground.9 In direct addresses to the camera or to the film-maker, they denounce their opponents’ use of violent and illegal means to force them out. The documentary therefore turns the real estate business, the local administration and their envoys into villains, while the artists are depicted as a legitimate and law-abiding group. The artists’ actions and discourses are indeed loosely based on the idea of ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien 1996), a mode of protest used by a wide range of people typically in cases of land disputes. The protagonists’ mode of expression (especially during stern meetings with the landlords and developers), their use of legal documents and references to the law show that they seek to achieve their goals by acting within a legal framework supposed to protect a rightful claim. No longer associated with the ‘underground,’ the artists featured in The Cold Winter are depicted as confident in their economic and social status, while their profession provides them with protest tools and the possibility to reach out to the media. Their strategy is based on the access to a public space where they can voice their concerns through exhibitions and performances, 9 If Yuanmingyuan artists were also claiming their rights, they were facing other administrative difficulties. As household registration regulations have become more flexible by the time of the 2010 events, artists feel more self-confident regarding their right to reside in Beijing in The Cold Winter.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

249

while methodically documenting their interactions with landlords and developers as a protective measure against wrongdoings or accusations. While Zheng Kuo is clearly advocating on the artists’ behalf, he takes a critical stance in the epilogue by revealing tensions in the group after the conflict’s resolution. Compensations have been obtained from developers, but the negotiations were made in a secretive manner and many galleries and artists are dissatisfied with what they have obtained. In the final series of interviews, several prominent artists are accused by others of capitalizing on the incident artistically or financially. Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未, b. 1957) even offers a ‘virtual performance’ of the artist as engaged citizen when he criticizes paternalistically those who didn’t join the demonstration. The alternate editing of these interviews makes clear that the group, initially united against a forced relocation, eventually ends up dislocated by inner power struggles. The documentary dispositive, as well as the film-maker’s engaged but distanced position, gives The Cold Winter a distinct take on the Beijing art milieu in the 2010s. Zheng Kuo is an observer-participant who remains committed to the artists’ cause without involving himself emotionally. All the performative aspects are shouldered by artists during public happenings replacing ordinary and more explicit modes of protest. This active though largely symbolic resistance contrasts greatly with the artists’ private resis­ tance and resigned attitude filmed by Zhao Liang and Hu Jie. Similarly, in The Cold Winter, the cameraman does no longer try to conceal his presence, choosing instead to film at the frontline of the conflict. The discordant narratives in The Cold Winter’s cynical epilogue also mark an evolution from the representation of artists in 1990s films. While they were depicted as a vulnerable group of romantic idealists, here Zheng Kuo displays the pettiness and hypocrisy of some protagonists prompt to criticize each other as soon as financial matters intersect with the collective action. Zheng Kuo’s critical perspective is in line with the larger purpose of The Cold Winter: recording various protest actions in order to constitute evidences, and to facilitate discussions on effective strategies in cases of legal disputes. In this context, the epilogue highlights one of the potential causes for failure in rights defence movements: the fragmentation of the protest group over financial and ideological matters.

Protests and Performances for an Independent Film Festival While in previous examples independent film-makers were recording artists facing relocation, the following film documents a quasi-reversed situation. In

250 

Judith Pernin

Wang Wo’s latest documentary, A Filmless Festival, unofficial film activities organized in Songzhuang art village are forced to cancellation, prompting reactions from the local artist community. Before analysing the film, a brief history of the structures dedicated to independent film hosted in this art village should be exposed. The Songzhuang artist community emerged in the second half of the 1990s, partly from the ashes of the Yuanmingyuan experiment. Around 1993, the artist village was already attracting too many visitors for some artists, who started to look for quieter areas (Li 2002: 19). Gradually, artists moved to Tongzhou district, especially in a small village called Xiaopu, within Songzhuang town. Ten years later, Xiaopu already boasted a vast art museum, and many of its several thousand artist residents were well-established in the art scene at home and abroad. Prominent art critic Li Xianting (栗宪 庭, b. 1949) was one of the first to settle down in Songzhuang, where he soon became interested in supporting independent cinema, especially documentaries. Independent film-makers never managed indeed to achieve the same kind of commercial success as contemporary artists. However, around the mid2000s a few directors started to gain recognition on the international scene, and small unofficial film festivals appeared in major Chinese cities. These film screenings operated on a non-profit basis, some supported by charitable overseas foundations (such as the Ford Foundation), or international festival funds (such as the Jan Vrijman Film Fund), and film-makers relied on other sources of income. In Songzhuang, they also benefited from the patronage of contemporary art collectors and artists. In the beginning of the 2000s, the Songzhuang thriving art community provided an excellent environment for nurturing independent film structures. The remote village seemed to guarantee a certain distance from the film administration, while the presence of other contemporary artists gave it a sense of community. Thanks to his connection to the artists and the local authorities, Li Xianting helped establish a cluster of small structures dedicated to independent cinema in 2006, including the Li Xianting Film Fund (LXTFF, in charge of film festival organization, film archives, film funding), the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF),10 and later a film school. For a few years, these structures flourished (Nornes 2009; Pernin 2015). However, from 2011 on, the festival’s organizers were pressurized into cancelling events by the local as well as the higher-up administration. As a result, film activities were disrupted or 10 The activities of an earlier structure, Fanhall film established in 2001, were progressively incorporated into this cluster.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

251

relocated in a hotel in Yanjiao, a village in nearby Hebei Province (Wang 2012). In 2014, right before the opening of the BIFF, a group of people claiming to be Xiaopu villagers appeared in front of the Li Xianting Film Fund to protest against what they perceived as a disruption to the village’s peace. The festival attendees were prepared for trouble of some kind, as it was almost a yearly habit. This time, the confrontation escalated in a street fight and the arrests of main organizers Li Xianting and Wang Hongwei (王宏伟, b. 1969). A forcible search and the confiscation of the totality of the film fund’s documents followed, even though the BIFF cancellation notice had already been circulated on social media. As the hotel located in Yanjiao refused to host the event, almost no film-related activities took place that week, save for a few private screenings at a film-maker’s home, and a press conference in Li Xianting’s courtyard.11 From the outset, the festival attendees’ main concern was documenting the events. On the opening night, people were already exchanging video files documenting the fight shot on personal devices in order to disseminate them online, as well as to preserve them by multiplying copies. These images ultimately allowed Wang Wo to edit together the 1 hour and 20 minutes of A Filmless Festival, with additional footage shot by himself or by other BIFF workers during the incident. An artist, graphic designer and film-maker who used to teach at the LXT film school, Wang Wo is a major figure of this close-knit community. He shot several activist documentaries, a few experimental works, and ‘montage documentaries’ edited from official TV and Internet news excerpts (Zheteng 折騰, 2010, 115 min). A Filmless Festival draws on these experiences and interests by presenting footage shot by him and fellow independent film-makers during the event. The film is divided into two parts, the ‘opening ceremony,’ and the ‘closing ceremony.’ It starts with a brief introduction to Songzhuang, its artists, and the film structures founded by Li Xianting. Then, the film follows the event chronologically, starting on the day of the festival’s announcement (18 August 2014), and ending on the closing ceremony day, originally planned on 28 August. As for most montage films, the footage displayed in A Filmless Festival varies in quality, format, and style. Many sequences were discreetly shot by people dissimulating themselves, especially near and in the police station, or on the streets around the LXTFF. Others images are in contrast carefully framed with the camera placed on a tripod, mostly in artists’ 11 The panel discussions with overseas film festival curators were relocated in the city.

252 

Judith Pernin

homes or offices. Still pictures are also included in the film as evidence: Wang Hongwei is immortalized at the police station, and the raid over the LXTFF is illustrated by a series of digital stills showing policemen removing computers and boxes from the office. A Filmless Festival also includes many screen-shots of WeChat messages of support posted during the event, showing the incident’s impact on social media. It ends with an editing of an online performance-protest carried out for the closing ceremony. A major part of A Filmless Festival is dedicated to interactions between the ‘official milieu’ (local officials, uniformed and plain-clothes policemen) and the ‘independent milieu’ (artists, film-makers, festival organizers and attendees). Many of their discussions are elaborate debates on art and the law, and the ‘independents’ use legal references and arguments in a similar way as in The Cold Winter. During the violent confrontation on the opening’s afternoon, the film-makers are depicted as rational and peaceful subjects facing an angry mob of plainclothes officers or thugs enrolled by the local government. This sequence, as well as those depicting the raid on the LXTFF, or film-maker Geng Jun’s (耿军, b. 1976) vain attempts to file a formal complaint for physical assault highlight the police’s disregard for the law, turning the independents into rightful protesters, as in The Cold Winter. A protest-performance occurred that same evening around 7:30 pm in front of the police station to demand the release of Wang Hongwei and Li Xianting. Performance artist Zhuihun (追魂, b. 1972) is filmed in a semiconcealed manner, the camera discreetly moving around him while he shouts: ‘Li Xianting, we support you!’ A few minutes later, more people joined him for a candlelight vigil. The image is steadier, has a higher definition, and the cameraman uses a form of on-site spontaneous staging, bringing alternatively his camera close to each of the silent protester-performers’ faces. Shouting slogans, participants take and post selfies, until finally Li Xianting and Wang Hongwei are released around 10 pm. The dynamism of the participative mode of filming is reminiscent of activist cinema, while the f ilmed subjects’ mode of protest suggests an underlying influence of performance art. The affinity between the two is discussed in a later sequence filmed during a collective lunch with performance artists and Hu Jie, who since his debut with Artists of Yuanmingyuan has become the most politically sensitive film-maker selected in the festival.12 Contrasting their work with the action performed the night before, Zhuihun says: ‘Performance 12 Hu Jie was even attending the BIFF incognito, isolated from the other participants by the organizers.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

253

Figure 8.1 Candlelight vigil staged by Songzhuang artists to demand the release of the BIFF organizers. Wang Wo, A Filmless Festival, 2015, screenshot. Courtesy of the artist.

is about the body, it’s about art. This is political.’ Calling for the festival organizers’ release in front of the police station is unambiguously labelled a political action. Instead, in The Cold Winter, the majority of participants of protest performances were reluctant to acknowledge the political nature of their acts – except for those who took part in the final march. While most of the protest actions were disguised as performances and participants were using masks or symbols to implicitly voice their discontent, here the participants spontaneously and directly address their demands to the police. The protest action was initiated by a performance artist who has quite some experience in participating in political movements. Zhui Hun lives in the neighbourhood and had been arrested several times already for his involvement in micro protests following the ‘Jasmine revolution.’13 The reaction to the arrest of Wang Hong and Li Xianting not only demonstrates the solidarity between Songzhuang artists and film-makers, but also the porosity between performance art and protest. By contrast, at the end of the film, the WeChat selfie performance relies on a symbolic expression of discontent. Social media users were invited to post a self-portrait with their eyes closed in solidarity with the BIFF. The 13 Zhuihun was later jailed for nine months for showing his support to the Hong Kong Umbrella movement starting on 26 September 2014.

254 

Judith Pernin

Chinese term for ‘closing ceremony’ is indeed homophonous with ‘closed eyes’ and this collection of selfies hints ironically at censorship, as no film could be screened that year in Songzhuang. While artists’ direct opposition to an unjust arrest seem to bear fruits in A Filmless Festival, the WeChat performance-protest was merely carried out to raise awareness of the BIFF’s difficulties to other artist communities in China, as well as journalists, festival programmers or film viewers around the globe. In the context of a conflict such as this one, documenting protest actions and performances of protest seem even more indispensable. The records acquire more than the mere status of an archive or of an artwork – they constitute evidence of a rightful action of resistance, and as such, they also act as a protection for the participants by being circulated in the media. The complementarity of performance and documentation therefore seems to become even higher when legal and political considerations meet artistic ones.

Conclusion Considered chronologically, the films presented in this chapter seem to indicate a change in attitude for embattled artist communities from passive resistance in films on the Yuanmingyuan period towards direct opposition through protest actions in more recent cases. In The Cold Winter and A Filmless Festival, these actions consist mostly in performances expressing protest symbolically or implicitly. They can however evolve into more direct and explicit actions when conflicts escalate, as shown in the Chang’an avenue march in The Cold Winter or in the protests organized in front of the police station in A Filmless Festival. The representation of artists and film practitioners has definitely evolved in this body of films, as they seem to have gained a sense of self-confidence over their rights and have elaborated strategies to voice territorial claims. The increased engagement of film-makers in these protests translates in their use of more participative filming or editing modes favoured in the two more recent films. Although protest movements in The Cold Winter and A Filmless Festival result in semi-failures,14 contemporary artists and independent film-makers are now depicted as an active and committed group, quite business-minded in the case of the former film, and perhaps 14 Although compensated, the group of artists ends up divided in The Cold Winter. In A Filmless Festival, the organizers are released, but the BIFF is cancelled that year, and the next.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

255

Figure 8.2 Online performance-protest for the closing ceremony of the BIFF. Screenshots from WeChat edited for Wang Wo’s A Filmless Festival. Courtesy of the artist.

more idealistic in the latter. Zheng Kuo’s ironical distancing and the achronological dispositive of The Cold Winter discourages any blind empathy towards them, as the artists seem to be able to unite to tackle a common issue as much as to revel in petty rivalries and internal infighting. In A Filmless Festival the irony is mainly turned towards the police and local officials, perhaps because most of the protagonists did not go through an ‘officializing’ process due to their political ideals, and lack of marketable skills. Even though the depiction of artists in A Filmless Festival departs slightly from the The Cold Winter, they are not the romantic starving artists depicted in the films on the Yuanmingyuan artist village, but citizens with rights and specific means of protest.

256 

Judith Pernin

In The Cold Winter and A Filmless Festival, as well as in other documentaries on contemporary protest movements, recording practices have become crucial to all: journalists, protesters, and their opponents are all engaged in filming each other. These images represent precious evidences that can be used as weapons in a battle of representations. The nostalgic and archival use of documentary images on the Yuanmingyuan artist village contrasts therefore dramatically with the activist purpose of recording performances and protests in Zheng Kuo’s and Wang Wo’s films. Although artist communities are represented as legitimate inhabitants of the Beijing periphery in these films, their actual position in increasingly ‘officialized’ art spaces has hardly stabilised over the years.15 It is striking to see that the last film brings the viewer back into a rural landscape similar to the one depicted in the first two documentaries. The spaces featured in A Filmless Festival and the two documentaries on Yuanmingyuan artist village are the same narrow rural streets and confined interiors, which indicates that in case of conflicts, the artists’ access to actual art spaces is undermined, and that their use of public space to voice concerns is as restricted as decades ago. In the case of Wang Wo’s film, festivalgoers channelled their anger into a selfie protest over WeChat, but this action is characterized by the use of indirect forms of critical discourse, something that also defined the masked performances in The Cold Winter. The overlapping of the activist, artistic and film-making milieus, and the proximity of performance art and modes of protest ensures the underlying influence of performance and documentary performativity on these resistance movements. Once recorded for their archival value (in Artists of Yuanmingyuan and Farewell Yuanmingyuan), these episodes are now filmed to circulate news, provide insight on resistance strategies as well as to constitute evidence to protect the individuals involved. In all these independent films, spatial conflicts in the art village are always represented from the point of view of the artists, and they emphasize their rightful claims of belonging. Their protests are prompted by the interference of external figures of authority (the police, developers) that effectively disrupts activities or lifestyles depicted as organic to the peripheral urban environment. If artists are at times perceived as anomalies in the urban landscape, what causes disruption in these films are not art-related activities, but rather, the interference of developers and police in the peripheral urban landscape. 15 With the planned relocation of a part of Beijing city administration services to Tongzhou, activities in Songzhuang art village might become even more controlled. See Xinhua (2015).

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

257

Filmography Cao Fei, Ou Ning, and Zhang Jinli (2006), Meishi jie (Meishi Street), 85 min. Hu Jie (1995) Yuanmingyuan de Yishujiamen (Artists of Yuanmingyuan), 33 min. Li Yifan and Yan Yu (2005) Yanmo (Before the flood), 150 min. Wang Wo (2010) Zheteng, 115 min. Wang Wo (2015) Mei you Dianying de Dianyingjie (A filmless festival), 79 min. Wu Wenguang (1991) Liulang Beijing, zuihou de mengxiangzhe (Bumming in Beijing: The last dreamers), 150 min. Zhao Liang (2006) Gaobie Yuanmingyuan (Farewell Yuanmingyuan), 104 min. Zheng Kuo (2010) Nuandong (The cold winter), 103 min. Zheng Kuo (2010) Qijiuba Zhan (798 Station), 105 min.

Bibliography Berghuis, Thomas (2006) Performance Art in China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Berry, Chris, Lu, Xinyu, and Rofel, Lisa (eds) (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Borggreen, Gunhild, and Gade, Rune (eds) (2013) Performing Archives/Archives of Performance. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Braester, Yomi (2010) Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham: Duke University Press. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2004) The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. New York: Routledge. Currier, Jennifer (2008) Art and Power in the New China: An Exploration of Beijing’s 798 Art District and Its Implications for Contemporary Urbanism. Town Planning Review 79(2/3): 87-114. Gao, Minglu (2001) Happening on the Street: Contemporary Chinese Performance Art. In Kim, Yuyeon (ed.) Translated Acts: Performance and Body Art from East Asia, 1990-2001. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt/New York: Queens Museum of Art, 98-102. hooks, bell (1990) Marginality as a Site of Resistance. In Ferguson, Russell, Gever, Martha, Minh-ha, Trinh T., and West, Cornel (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 341-345. Hou, Hanru (2002) On the Mid-Ground. Ed. Yu, Hsiao-hwei. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Kim, Yuyeon (ed.) (2001) Translated Acts: Performance and Body Art from East Asia, 1990-2001. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt/New York: Queens Museum of Art.

258 

Judith Pernin

Laurans, Valérie (2005) Shanghai: Modern Conveniences as an Argument for Displacing Residents. China Perspectives 58. http://chinaperspectives.revues. org/459, accessed 11 November 2015. Lefebvre, Henri (1967) Le droit à la ville. L’Homme et la société 6: 29-35. Li, Xianting (2002) Zhi shi xiang zhu nongjia xiaozhuang [We only wanted to live in a small rural village]. In Wang, Qiang (ed.) Songzhuang Yishujia Qunluo [Songzhuang artist group]. Self-published, 19-22. Nichols, Bill (1994) Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill (2010) Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nornes, Abé Mark (2009) Bulldozers, Bibles, and Very Sharp Knives: The Chinese Independent Documentary Scene. Film Quarterly 63(1): 50-55. O’Brien, Kevin J. (1996) Rightful Resistance. World Politics Journal 49(1): 31-55. O’Brien, Kevin J. (ed.) (2008) Popular Protest in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ong, Lynette H. (2014) State-Led Urbanization in China: Skyscrapers, Land Revenue and ‘Concentrated Villages.’ China Quarterly 217: 162-179. Pernin, Judith (2010) Filming Space/Mapping Reality in Chinese Independent Documentary Films. China Perspectives 81: 22-34. Pernin, Judith (2015) Pratiques indépendantes du documentaire en Chine. Histoire, esthétique et discours visuels (1990-2010). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Phelan, Peggy (2006) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Oxon, Routledge. Ren, Xuefei, and Sun, Meng (2012) Artistic Urbanization: Creative Industries and Creative Control in Beijing. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(3): 504-521. Reynaud, Bérénice (2003) Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary. Senses of Cinema 28. http:// sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/chinas_new_documentary/, accessed 5 April 2018. Robinson, Luke (2013) Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sargeson, Sally (2013) Violence as Development: Land Expropriation and China’s Urbanization. Journal of Peasant Studies 40(6): 1063-1085. Shen, Rui (2005) To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks about His Documentaries. Senses of Cinema 35. http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/conversations-withfilmmakers/hu_jie_documentaries, accessed 1 November 2015. Wang, Meiqin (2010) Art, Culture Industry and the Transformation of Songzhuang Artist Village. International Journal of the Arts in Society 5(1): 187-205.

Relocating Further or Standing Ground?

259

Wang, Meiqin (2013) The Art World of Post-Deng China. In Kuo, Jason C. (ed.) Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 37-65. Wang, Qi (2012) Closed and Open Screens: The 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival. Film Criticism 37(1): 62-69. Weibel, Peter (ed.) (2015) Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Werbner, Pnina, Webb, Martin, Spellman-Poots, Kathryn (eds) (2014) The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wu, Hung (2014) Rong Rong de Dongcun: Zhongguo shiyan yishu de shunjian [Rong Rong’s East Village: Moments of Chinese experimental arts]. Shanghai: Shanghai Shijichubanshe. Xinhua (2015). Beijing to Shift City Admin to Ease ‘Urban Ills.’ Xinhuanet, 13 July. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-07/13/c_134408425.htm, accessed 22 March 2017. Zhang, Zhen (ed.) (2007) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhou, Shangyi, and Breitung, Werner (2007) The 798 Art District in Beijing, China: Production and Reproduction of Culture in a Global City. Geographische Rundschau 3(4): 56-62.

About the author Judith Pernin Associate Doctoral Graduate, French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC), Hong Kong [email protected] Judith Pernin is a visiting scholar at the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan National Central Library. Her PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Science (France) is entitled Moving Images, Independent Practices of Documentary in China (1990-2010) and she co-edited Post-1990 Documentary, Reconfiguring Independence (2015).

9

Out of Service Migrant Workers and Public Space in Beijing Elizabeth Parke Abstract Beijing’s post-1978 urban transformation obscures the exploitative economics of the building boom subsidized by migrant workers attracted to the capital in search of jobs. Scrawled phone numbers advertise services to obtain fake certificates to migrant workers living in a legal gray area. This type of advertising is cheap and widely deployed while it is concurrently derided by urban planners and the press as a blight on the face of the capital city. I take these numbers, heretofore largely disregarded in scholarship on visual studies of Chinese cities, and argue that these numbers are instead an act of defacement and as a performance of public calligraphy. These theoretical framings reveal a visibility often denied migrant workers in the capital. Keywords: migrant workers, Beijing, public calligraphy, defacement, inscription

Beijing’s pursuit of ‘world-class’ city status is vertical in direction. From the International Finance Center (IFC) and Chinese Central Television (CCTV) towers to the multitude of luxury apartment blocks, Beijing continues to thrust itself skyward as if trying to shed its nickname ‘the big pancake’ (Wang 2003: 31). The verticality of development and showcasing of buildings by internationally recognized architects is evident in the wildly popular government-funded TV show about routing out political corruption In the Name of the People (人民的名义, 2017). Episode 1’s establishing shots focus on the Olympic Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, the CCTV Tower, and the IFC tower, demonstrating that through this spectacularly transformed and carefully managed skyline, Beijing has garnered prestige (mianzi 面子, literally,

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch09

262 

Elizabeth Parke

‘face’) for itself and metonymically for the entire nation-state (Broudehoux 2004: 29-30). However, it must be noted that this prestige is formulated according to criteria of the international neo-liberal city, criteria that are exploitative and elitist, and that aim to attract global investment capital and the hyper-mobile bodies rather than privileging the local citizenry’s needs and living conditions. Hence, the eyes of citizens and visitors are drawn up to the shiny new buildings and invited to linger on the carefully crafted urban spectacles orchestrated to position Beijing as ‘a showcase of China’s contemporary material and cultural achievements and represent the country’s window to the outside world’ (Broudehoux 2004: 37). As a deliberate and critical redirection of the gaze, my reading of the city and its varied visual fields begins at the ground level, beginning instead with an urbanism from below rather than that of the aerial. In so doing, it thus provides insights into competing subjectivities and rights to the city of Beijing. On the streets of the capital, one is struck by what at first appears to be meaningless strings of eleven-digit numbers.1 This numerological graffiti is, upon on closer inspection, discrete phone numbers which are also frequently accompanied by two characters: banzheng (办证).2 Banzheng is a two-character shorthand roughly meaning in English ‘services available for obtaining forged certifications and faked official documents.’ The character 证 is an unmistakable reference to official documents or certifications necessary for any citizen of the PRC (e.g. diplomas, school registrations, household registrations, electrician credentials), while the format, on the streets and linked only to a mobile phone number, points to the questionable legality of these documents. Tugging at the spidery threads of paint that make up the numbers causes multiple devices to tumble out, from the tools necessary to create the adverts, paint, brush, body of the painter; to the implied telecommunication infrastructure that enables the transaction: the mobile phones, SIM cards, cell service providers; and lastly the paper, seals, ink, and computers needed to 1 This chapter builds on the arguments of an earlier article (Parke 2015) that specif ically addressed the relationship between migrant worker (农民工) bodies and contemporary art practices. The strings of numbers touched upon in that article are the focus of this chapter. 2 Different mobile phone service providers can be identified in the first three digits of an eleven-digit number. For example, China Mobile (Zhongguo Yidong) numbers begin with 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 and the remaining eight digits are an individual’s number that are tied to a SIM card. The price of the number is dependent on availability and desirability of the digits (e.g. having the number contain ‘8’ increases the price, having the number ‘4’ decreases the price). See China Mobile (2017).

Out of Service

263

Figure 9.1 The phone numbers function as ads for counterfeit documents like driver’s licences, diplomas or safety certifications. Note the accompanying characters banzheng. Beijing, 2011. Photograph by the author.

create the certificates themselves. By focusing on the heretofore unexplored meanings of these numbers – as a tactic and as a critically understudied visual practice in the city – these phone numbers in their form, ubiquity, and content reveal new articulations and evidence of contested ‘rights to the city,’ most notably articulated by Henry Lefebvre (1996) and David Harvey (2008). While Judith Pernin in the previous chapter analyses the right to the city from the perspective of artists and film-makers, the phone numbers illuminate the contestation between local residents and migrants. The highly visible banzheng adverts function as a foil to the invisibility of the exploitation of migrant workers. What is not immediately clear upon examining these numbers, is that given their placement throughout the city who constitutes the intended audience for these advertisements. While I am not suggesting that it is only migrant workers who are the intended audience for this advertising, I contend that migrant workers constitute a targeted audience for the services on offer in these adverts.3 3 Fieldwork, Haidian and Dongcheng districts, Beijing, 2011. This tactic of advertising is referred to broadly as small advertisements (小广告) in policy documents and the popular press.

264 

Elizabeth Parke

The vulnerability, instability, and exploitation of migrant workers are points I return to in my discussion below. However, before I turn to close conceptual readings of these phone numbers I want to clarify the parameters of the category of advertisements for the purposes of this chapter. There are a multitude of other similar types of small advertisements that frequently appear inside apartment buildings either as stickers, stamps, or stencils that are linked to, but distinct from, the painted numbers. In the case of these adverts, the services they promote are related to the maintenance of a home such as bottled water delivery or waterproofing services, rather than for forged certificates, permits, or documents. The distinction here is between advertisements for a specified service, versus the intentionally ambiguous advertisement for certificates (证) where certificate remains as an intentionally vague category. 4 Besides content, there are also formal differences between these advertising tactics. The deliberate vagueness of the banzheng ads, their placement, and their state-sponsored removal, makes these ads key actors in a complex network that constitutes Beijing’s urban growth in the post-Mao era. The publicness of the phone numbers also makes them distinct from other service ads, because the phone numbers tend to be in high-traffic, high-visibility areas such as sidewalks and overpasses, where a variety of people and therefore, a variety of publics, are exposed to them. The heterogeneous and aleatory nature of the publics exposed to these phone numbers serves to reinforce the significance that these numbers play in Beijing’s visual culture. Put another way, regardless of one’s status in the city, Beijing residence permit (户口) holder or not, one cannot avoid seeing these advertisements. These numbers serve primarily one particular group, but are written in places that make them visible to all Beijingers. In this chapter these ads are situated amidst the dense networks of migrant labour imbricated in, yet also off icially removed from, life in Beijing. I seek purchase on these numbers through two theoretical lenses: benefitting from but also expanding on Michael Taussig’s (1999) formulation of the potency of defacement, and from what Yen Yuehping (2005) terms public calligraphy (题字). These lenses open up an analytical space in which to consider the numbers as neither visual noise nor as a violation of public space, but rather as potent signifiers of the (in)visibility of migrant workers in the capital, whose presence is simultaneously both illegal and accepted as a necessity by city officials. Furthermore, despite the ubiquity of the advertisements, the frequent coverage of removal campaigns in the 4 Engraving services providing faked seals or stamps (刻章) are also prevalent in street advertisements, but fall outside of my discussion here.

Out of Service

265

popular press, and the amount of contemporary Chinese artworks that address issues related to or involve migrant workers (农民工) (Parke 2015: 236-238), the numbers themselves have yet to be studied or contextualized within the framework of contemporary Beijing’s urban visual field or artistic practices. Aside from three paragraphs in Mathieu Borysevicz’s Learning from Hangzhou (2009: 251), the banzheng phenomenon has not yet been adequately examined in English language scholarship for their role in Chinese urbanization or urban visual culture, or their role in the networks of illegal certification production that often cater to migrant workers. Through close formal analysis of banzheng my chapter not only contributes to but also multiplies the discussions of visibility/invisibility in relation to marginalized subjectivities in contemporary Chinese art such as those illuminated by Maurizio Marinelli in Chapter 2. Moreover, while the possibilities of the new publics and subjectivities formed in the cities through various visual practices are a common theme shared by the chapters in this volume, my aim is to present a novel theoretical reading of the numbers in order to recover them from being simply dismissed as visual nuisance or denigrated as a transgression of public space, asserting instead that they are a foundational aspect of Beijing’s urban visual field and should be treated as such in any study of everyday urban practices in contemporary China.

Public Spaces, Migrant Messages Hoardings, the large-scale walls that are erected around construction sites and cloaked in slogans and advertisements, offer a spectacular counter point to the mundane and maligned phone numbers. Moreover, like the numbers, hoardings are ubiquitous in Beijing and are frequently used as advertising space for the construction project they encircle, or as a space of aspirational slogans as is the case in Figure 9.2. The slogan on this hoarding, located in the Dongcheng district of Beijing in 2010, reads ‘be a civilized urbanite’ (做文明市民). The official intent of the slogan was to encourage inhabitants to ‘be civilized’ and project a carefully crafted vision of the Dongcheng district, a vision complete with blue skies and freshly painted traditional buildings. The text and images on this hoarding function together to formulate an ideal version of Dongcheng in some undetermined, post-construction future time. It is certainly not my contention that the images on hoardings are some utopian ideal that is possible. On a basic level, the hoardings are part of a long but complex

266 

Elizabeth Parke

Figure 9.2 Hoarding in Dongcheng district, note the slogan ‘Be a civilized urbanite’ with the two characters wen and ming in the calligraphic font. Beijing, 2012. Photograph by the author.

genealogy of propaganda in the form of public displays of slogans, murals, posters, and banners created by the municipal government that are also discussed by Meiqin Wang and Stefan Landsberger in their chapters in this volume. Yet, the visual work they do in the city is important, especially when placed in dialogue with practices such as the number ads because they reveal the tensions I am seeking to excavate. For instance, the slogan’s proclamation ‘be civilized’ is in direct opposition to the action of writing the number advertisements because to write the numbers in public spaces is to transgress the accepted uses of the space and is therefore illegal. In Beijing, like all cities, the management of urban space is always carefully produced and maintained. Such a desire to control the appearance of the city is evidenced in Section 23 of the Regulation of Beijing Municipality on City Appearance and Environmental Sanitation that outlines the illegality of any ‘disorderly posting of notices or posters [乱张贴], disorderly scribbling [乱涂写], or disorderly engraving or painting [乱刻画]’ (Beijing Government 2006). In Section 43 of the same regulation, the penalty for getting caught posting ‘disorderly’ images ranges from 100,000 to 500,000 yuan. Advertisements (广告) are specifically listed as a punishable offence (ibid.). The regulation criminalizes such a guerrilla advertising tactic as

Out of Service

267

scribbling phone numbers in public spaces, and yet, the ash-gray bricks of Beijing’s sidewalks are coated with these phone numbers. A 2006 Beijing Daily article begins by enumerating the various locations of small adverts in the city: ‘[o]n telephone poles, pedestrian overpasses and underpasses, street signs’ (Huang 2006). The advertisements are pathologized by the press and critics, resulting in the moniker ‘urban psoriasis’ (城市牛皮癣), but they remain steadfastly part of the visual field in Beijing (Xu 2012: 2; Rao 2014: A13).5 An article in China Youth estimated that the average Chinese citizen needs between 30 and 40 certificates (证) in his or her lifetime (Feng 2014). A cartoon accompanying the article pokes fun at the need for such a large number of certifications by using certificates (birth certificate, national identification card, work certificate, passport, and retirement certificate) to spell out the phrase ‘all one’s life’ (一生). The certificates seem to be ominously pursuing an old man with a cane who cranes his neck to look back at the certificates, his eyebrows raised in concern and with knees shaking. The parody of the cartoon is relevant to the discussion of the services the phone numbers offer because it humorously, yet realistically, enumerates the quantity of certificates necessary for an average citizen during his or her lifetime. Furthermore, each of the moments of acquiring a certificate represents citizen-state interactions. On one hand, these citizen-state interactions surrounding the application for these certifications, particularly those related to residency, social benefits, and housing, functioned as a method for the state to contain and administer internal migration after the 1978 economic reforms. On the other hand, the size of the floating population (流动人口) was estimated at 150 million in 2009. The difficulty in measuring this vague category of the population indicates the volume of migrant workers entering cities in search of work and opportunities, even if it isn’t a completely accurate accounting of the number of migrants (Chan 2013: 980-995). The need for workers as well as the desire to move to cities for improved living standards works to further encourage rural to urban migration. Migrant workers from rural areas who have moved to urban centres are often caught in a double bind. While they constitute a vast cheap manual labour force, residual socialist era residency laws that tie household residency to social services mean that migrants are unable to access such services 5 Liu (2002: 233) calls them pollution and a harm to public space. Psoriasis is a skin condition characterized by a red flaky rash caused by the overproduction of skin cells that the body is unable to shed efficiently. For a discussion of graffiti in China, see Valjakka (2015).

268 

Elizabeth Parke

in cities because they hold rural household residencies. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong characterizes such an ambiguous status as existing in ‘states of exceptions’ (2006: 4). The advertisements in the form of phone numbers make this ‘state of exception’ visible. Broudehoux further clarif ies the relationship between Chinese urbanization and the growing inequality between citizens by linking commodification and resulting feelings of ‘insecurity among the more vulnerable sections of the population’ (2004: 10). In the current post-socialist moment of urban planning and neo-liberal market reforms in China, the exploitation of the migrant population is the key factor that allows officials to maintain the rapid rate of urban growth. The reliance on and tacit acceptance of ‘illegal’ underscores the complexity and ambivalence of the situation (Solinger 1999; Zhang 2001; Borysevicz 2009). Stephanie Helmryk Donald explains: But for Beijingers […] even today, the sight of a scruffy migrant worker on a bus […] is an excrescence of the market, a necessary but hardly welcome temporary addition to the urban landscape. S/he speaks with the wrong accent, s/he doesn’t belong in the laneways, or in the new high-rises that have taken the place of many of them in the past ten years, and significantly, s/he reminds the aspirational middle class that class divisions, until the late 1970s the preserve of Maoist categories and critiques, are now visible as haves and have-nots, as locals and outsiders. (2011: 329)

The visible haves and have-nots articulated by Donald recalls the dialectic of the visibility-invisibility of migrant workers in the city; this dialectic is addressed by Zhu Fadong’s performance work Missing Person Announcement (1993). In this work Zhu took photographs of himself and created a missing person advertisement that he posted in public spaces (Gao 2005: 176). As a migrant to Beijing himself, Zhu identifies with the unique issues related to relocating to urban centres, looking for work, and establishing connections with the new environment (Wu 2005: 213-214). His choice to use a low tech, but highly visible tactic such as posters shares formal similarities to the phone number advertisements. Missing Person Announcement activates the participation of the by-passer through text and image, calling out for information for the ‘missing’ artist Zhu Fadong. The concept of the work revolves around Zhu’s own migration from Kunming to Beijing, and in that he is the producer of his own missing person advertisement. He is not lost, but rather hiding in plain sight, which is what many migrant workers are doing everyday in Beijing – concealed behind hoardings that encircle

Out of Service

269

their dorms in construction sites, or in domestic spaces where they are hired to cook, clean, and care for children. Like Zhu’s missing person ad, the banzheng advertisements, too, hide in plain sight. In the following section, I turn to Taussig’s notion of defacement to further articulate how the phone numbers in public spaces reveal competing claims, status, and rights to the city. By bringing together defacement and mianzi the next section address how the phone numbers when considered defacement of public property are also a potent transgression of the prestige that Beijing seeks to project on the world stage. However, the persistent visibility of the phone numbers, despite the officially stated desire for unmarked, orderly spaces, therefore demonstrates tensions in contemporary Beijing.

Defacement Beijing as a lived space and as an idea is frequently asked to stand in for various aspirations of the PRC. It is cast as a political centre, cultural hub, and headquarters for foreign multinationals with exceptional infrastructure to whisk bodies, goods, and capital through specialized conduits. Contemporary Beijing is superimposed on an ancient city plan. Scholars of Chinese urban form have linked the capital’s distinct gridded morphology to the projection of power and to cultural notions of prestige and reputation, which, as noted above, can be translated literally as ‘face.’6 Urban growth, economic reform, foreign investment, and changes to land-use policies have fundamentally altered Beijing’s form and concurrently the mianzi or image of the nation. Considering Beijing as the metaphorical face of the nation is a conceptual move that opens up a heretofore unexamined line of inquiry into the forbidden advertising campaigns to be considered an act of defacement. The connection between mianzi and defacing is further clarified in The Oxford English Dictionary: ‘1. To mar the face, features, or appearance of; to spoil or ruin the figure, form, or beauty of; to disfigure. […] 4. To destroy the reputation or credit of; to discredit, defame (Obs.)’ (OED 1989: 368). While now obsolete, the fourth meaning of ‘deface’ – the ruining of one’s reputation – provides an etymological link between the act 6 For discussions of mianzi and Beijing, see Broudehoux (2004: 29); Wu (2005: 51-53); Braester (2010). For discussions of the relationship between the built form, politics, and the Chinese capital throughout history, see, among many, Bray (2005); Wheatley (1971); Liang (2001). In order to indicate the complex nature of mianzi as a concept that exceeds the English translation ‘face’; hereafter I will use the pinyin. For an extended discussion of mianzi, see Brownell (1995: 289-302).

270 

Elizabeth Parke

Figure 9.3 Billboard in Chaoyang District, near 798 Art District with phone number defacements. Beijing, 2012. Photograph by the author.

of defacing, the face, and one’s reputation. The connection between physical face and reputation as rendered as mianzi therefore provides a powerful connection when considering the banzheng as an act of defacement in relation to the mianzi of the city. Such a marring, ruining, or disfiguring of a metaphorical face, the mianzi, is implied in the articles by Xu and Rao when they call advertisements an ‘urban psoriasis’ (Xu 2012: 2; Rao 2014: A13). A People’s Daily article suggests that the advertising is ‘a blot on the landscape’ (大煞风景) and recommends that public spaces be controlled and managed to treat the ‘disease’ of chaotic advertising (Tian 1997). Beijing policy documents on the regulation of city spaces define the ‘blots on the landscape’ as illegal and punishable by fines, but also as a threat to the spiritual culture (精神文明) of the city (State Council 2011).7 It is not my intention to characterize these ads as a political act. They are on basic level simply a ploy to disseminate contact information for a service 7 For a discussion of the relationship between the act of writing and ‘having culture’ (有文 明) in a Chinese context, see Yen (2005: 33-56).

Out of Service

271

to the largest audience as possible. However, the contested nature of these ads – that they are illegal but still exist in vast quantities – does reveal the opportunity for a particular political reading of this performance of writing to be considered a defacement of the mianzi of Beijing. Curator and scholar of Chinese contemporary art Gao Minglu articulates the relationship between state power and architecture in China thusly: Architecture has become an important contemporary cultural phenomenon in China. In China today, the significance of architecture goes far beyond the functionality of physical spaces for living and work, and far beyond the architectural concept itself as an art form. Rather, […] architecture has become the most important and most representative cultural form in China’s transformation from an agricultural society to an industrialised urban civilization. Because architecture exists within established pragmatic political systems, it reflects the complicated relationships between the government, business, developers, contractors, and architects. (2005: 218)

For Gao architecture and urbanization are fundamentally part of the economic and political changes post-1978 and are also tightly coupled with the rural immigration of migrant workers to the cities necessary in order to accomplish the scale of urbanization China is pursuing. Considering how public space is leveraged in Beijing to represent the nation, and that the built environment is part of the mianzi of the country, I propose extending anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of defacement to the ads that are systematically overpainted in municipal clean-up campaigns. For Taussig the battle between covering and unmasking is at the heart of the act of defacement. For him when ‘a nation’s flag, money, or public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself’ (Taussig 1999: 2). Whereas Taussig is focused on defacement of statues and money, I suggest that given the highly controlled nature of urban space in China the petty crime of ‘disorderly scribbling’ in the form of public adverting be considered an act of defacement. Furthermore, the evidence in the popular press of people caught painting being made to clean off the ads as punishment, supports my assertion that the ads are an interesting extension of Taussig’s concepts of defacement. The defacement of public space allows for the power of the state to be reinforced particularly in the public staging – captured in news photographs – of the removal by people caught writing the numbers (Borysevicz 2010: 251). By staging the performance of removing the numbers

272 

Elizabeth Parke

Figure 9.4 Defacements of the defacement. Beijing, 2011. Photograph by the author.

Out of Service

273

the state takes this as an opportunity to demonstrate its power over public space, power that is re-inscribed because of the act of defacing and what Taussig (1999: 30) calls as ‘a defacement of the defacement.’ The on-going battle between the ads and their removal creates a palimpsest within the visual fields of Beijing. Rarely are the removals completely successful, neither are they a deterrent nor are they particularly aesthetically pleasing. Government-sponsored programmes to remove small advertisements often target people who have been caught posting or writing these advertisements (Xu 2012: 2; Rao 2014: A13). However, attempts to remove the numbers in order to restore the space often do not obscure the strings of numbers. The layers of writing and removal serve to mark a contested public space inscribing the various actors seeking to use the space. The territorializing of space to use as advertisement and the re-territorializing of the space by the state through clean-up campaigns can be read as a metaphor for the on-going negotiations between migrant workers, the state, and the market. The circulation of images via newspapers and online websites functions to re-inscribe the state’s ability to control public spaces. In defacing public space by writing the phone numbers, this underground economy unknowingly creates an opportunity for the police to enact their power. Ultimately, it is in the attempted restoration of public space through the overpainting of the defacement that turns back on itself, ironically serving to make the battle over control of public space even more evident. A performative-calligraphic work by Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰, b. 1969) provides an unexpected, but illuminating example to this state-sponsored urban practice of overwriting the phone numbers. His work Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” One Thousand Times (1990-1995) appears, upon first inspection, to be a monochromatic colour field of rich black tones with brushstrokes bleeding tentacle-like towards the edges of the paper. However, when exhibited with photo documentation, the viewer becomes aware of the performative aspect of the work, seeing the first phase of the project that took place in 1990 and ends with the obliteration of the text five years later in the final photograph (Qiu 2018). Qiu, as the title attests, copied the text of the Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion, a celebrated piece of Chinese calligraphy originally written by the famous fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi, a thousand times on the same piece of paper. The overwriting and complete obscuring of the text renders the text unreadable, however, given the conceptual framing of the title and the photo documentation of the stages of the work, the viewer can no longer claim not to know what is being copied over and over. It is as if in the effacing

274 

Elizabeth Parke

of the individual words of the Preface that the text rises to the surface. This is how in the futility of copying something one thousand times on one piece of paper is recalls of the constant battle between the writers of the phone numbers and the city works crews that work to remove the numbers. Just as Qiu’s ink builds up, eventually creating a field of blackness, the numbers are ‘re-scrawled atop this fresh drippy surface and the layering continues’ (Borysevicz 2010: 251). This is also the case with the overpainted numbers. It is as if in the act of making something difficult to read, we become more attuned to what is being covered up, which in this case is the defacing of public space. In a sense it is this battle between writing and covering up of the phone numbers that the services that they are advertising are unmasked. It is thus through the defacement in the form of this repetitious painting and overpainting and the visual struggle reveals what Taussig calls the ‘public secret.’ He defines public secret as ‘that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated’ (Taussig 1999: 2, 5-7; emphasis in the original). The multitudes of phone numbers visible on almost every surface in Beijing are, I suggest, place from which to trace one of Beijing’s public secrets, that of the uncertain, semi-illegal status of migrant workers. Despite their hyper-visibility and the spatial integration in the urban, migrant workers, their exploitation, living conditions, and exclusion from social services, remain a public secret – known but not articulated. Hence the phone numbers reveal the public secret of the need for the labour the migrant workers provide, but at the same time, the denial of full rights to urban citizenship. The public secret is ‘knowing what not to know’ (Taussig 1999: 2). Through the act of covering the phone numbers, migrants’ state of exception remains a public secret.8 The layers of defacement and restoration serve to mark a contested public space, and ultimately the uncertain legitimacy of migrant workers in urban centres. This is the public secret the phone numbers reveal – the secret of the need for migrant workers while at the same time denying them full rights to urban citizenship. In the act of making something difficult to read, difficult to see, we become more attuned to what is being covered up, what Rancière terms ‘nothing to see’ when there is in fact something to see (2001). The numbers make us aware of the vast need for legitimization – the need for forged documents – while also making us aware of the need to ‘know what not to know’ – that the state’s need for migrant labour ensures the continued 8 For further discussions on the relationship between power and secrecy that is beyond the scope of this chapter, see Foucault (1990); Canetti (1973); Scott (1990); Simmel (1950).

Out of Service

275

presence of migrants in the city regardless of being denied legal status. The phone numbers and their removal are traces of the workers’ state of exception, and are therefore an important testimony to the tension between the state and a large reserve of labour. Through the covering of the phone numbers, migrants’ ‘states of exception’ are kept as a ‘public secret.’ The phone numbers are at once banal and ubiquitous, and yet also evoke public secrets. The defacing of Beijing’s mianzi in the form of these numbers reveals the grey markets of migrant labour, where the need for workers out­weigh their illegality within the city, and it is in the act of painting over the numbers that reinforces the public secret, making it superficially appear as if the defacement of public space is not being tolerated, but at the same time tacitly accepting the presence and need for of the services advertised. I’ve suggested in this section that the repeated writing of text in Qiu’s performative-calligraphy is evocative of the battle between the writing and removing of the numbers on the streets of Beijing, but there is another connection I want to elucidate between these two examples, and that is, their medium. In the next section the number strings are examined as public calligraphy further exploring the power dynamics at work when writing in public in China.

Public Calligraphy In Figure 9.1 the flow of the interlocking characters of banzheng suggests the embodied action of the writer, the movement of the body that was necessary to create this ad remains as a trace in the pooling of the paint in the two dot strokes (点) of ban. By repositioning the castigated phone numbers from being bearers of meaning of public secrets that I detailed above, I now shift to position them as part of a long tradition of public calligraphy where the act of writing has key historical, political, and cultural resonances. Anthropologist Yen Yuehping in her tracing of the importance of calligraphy and its display in public spaces termed these public inscriptions (题字) as public calligraphy (2005: 17). According to Yen, ‘China is literally covered in calligraphic brushstrokes’ (2005: 1). She details the intimate relationship between the written word and its display within the everyday lives via the reproduction of calligraphy on surfaces and in print in order to link power with the written word in China. The role and power of the written word in Chinese statecraft dates back to before 1949, and it continues today: ‘Political orders and communications did not just appear primarily as written texts, they had to be written in the

276 

Elizabeth Parke

Figure 9.5  Banzheng, Beijing, 2011. Photograph by the author.

author’s original calligraphy as well’ (Yen 2005: 15). The connection between power, public calligraphy, and handwriting is an important one (Kraus 1991), and it is this interrelatedness that I want to extend to the decidedly sloppy, bordering on illegible, handwriting on display in the strings of numbers. As scholars of graffiti in China have pointed out, the term tuya (涂鸦), while problematic, is typically used to translate graffiti (Valjakka 2015). The character 涂 means ‘to scribble, to scrawl’ and has the implication of poor handwriting (Luo 1995: 1176-1178). Given the historical and aesthetic relationship between good handwriting (one’s calligraphy) and moral character and fortitude (McNair 1998), the term 涂, when applied to the strings of numbers, further denigrates them as a public malady. However, given the history of public calligraphy and its displays in the public sphere there is, I would argue, an interesting avenue for pursuing the numbers as public calligraphy because of the poor quality of the handwriting in relation to power and public secrets. Thinking of public calligraphy is illuminating when conceptualizing how power is communicated and immortalized through the gestural act of calligraphy. In contrast to the writing of phone numbers that is regarded as a public nuisance and disease, calligraphy by those in power is both welcomed and expected. This agonistic relationship between those in power and those with little power, both of whom write in public, is indicative of the current urban condition in China.

Out of Service

277

Careful formal analysis of the numbers, particularly those that use paint as their medium, reveal the motion of the writer’s body visible in the interlocking numbers and the cursive-like rendering of the characters. The phone numbers are gestural in their application of paint; however, their function, intentionality, and communication of information while distinct from the dance-based work of Cao Fei’s discussed by Chris Berry in his chapter in this volume, do share similarities in the flow of bodies in space and the urban location of these gestural practices. The need to write quickly is predicated on the fear of being caught and potentially fined by the authorities, which in turn precipitates the scrawling appearance of the numbers. The scribbled (涂) appearance then leads to the characterization of the numbers as a blot on the landscape. In contrast, Mao’s distinctive calligraphy marks well-known spaces and monuments, such as the inscriptions on the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. His calligraphic markings are carved into the surfaces of monuments, steles, and other built surfaces throughout China. His power over space is thus inscribed physically and metaphorically via his calligraphy. In contrast, the unknown, unnamed writers of the small advertisements, while also marking spaces, remain weak in relation to the power of the state despite their persistent mark-making. The stakes of writing in public are clarified when comparing these two forms of writing in public. On one hand a single, lauded author is given pride of place for his/her calligraphy, while on the other hand, the anonymous hands of the masses are rendered illegal. Public calligraphy is the realm of the privileged and powerful. The ephemeral quality of the phone numbers, the state’s programmes to remove them, and yet their persistence in the urban sphere, makes this public calligraphy a critical aspect of contemporary urban visual culture. Examples of famous calligraphic inscriptions abound in Beijing, functioning to demarcate spaces and stand as testimony to important state-sanctioned historical events (Wu 2005: 29-31). However, the numbers too carry meaning and reveal public secrets that underpin China’s urbanization and economics such as the role of migrant labour and the exploitation inherent within this system. By examining how the numbers and characters flow together in banzheng ads, with trails of paint connecting them, the viewer is seeing the hand of the painter through this remnant trace of the gesture. While the writer of the numbers remains anonymous, the numbers record the sign of the individual. In contrast to the single named author associated with the public calligraphy examined by Yen, I argue that these unsigned calligraphic acts too contribute to this genealogy of public calligraphy.

278 

Elizabeth Parke

Positioning banzheng as public calligraphy offers an additional way of connecting the ads to other aesthetic practices of writing and communicating. For instance, if we consider that the phone numbers represent one half of a dialogue yet to take place, the presence of the mobile phone number therefore interpolates the viewer in an imagined conversation that may or may not ever take place. The act of communicating the information – the service and the number to call to engage this service – is legible to any passer-by. Additionally, the suggestion of a dialogue regardless if it takes place or not recalls the calligraphic practice of Zhang Dali’s series Dialogue (对话, 1995-2005) (Valjakka 2015: 256; Woodsworth 2015; Wu 2000), also discussed by Maurizio Marinelli in his chapter in this volume. Dialogue is characterized by black spray-painted outlines of a bald head shown in profile, which is sometimes also accompanied by the text: AK-47. Scholars have argued for Zhang’s role as a graffiti artist within the context of Beijing; however, what interests me about his work in the context of this chapter is the choice of the title Dialogue. Zhang’s works sought, through these spray-painted heads, to create a dialogue with the city in response to his experiences with graffiti abroad and because of the pace of urbanization of Beijing in the late 1990s. He has frequently commented that he wanted to initiate a conversation between his artistic insertions and citizens, but ultimately the works did not create the intended dialogue (Wu 2000: 756). The desire for communication that Zhang’s works aimed for is underscored by their placement in visible locations throughout Beijing; however, what he was communicating to the public was unclear and led to mixed responses from viewers and officials in the city. The phone numbers do communicate a clear message; however, like Dialogue they too have mixed results in sparking a connection. It is impossible to quantify how many of the phone numbers painted on the streets are actively in service, or how many are still connected to operations engaged in forging certificates. Unlike Zhang’s now immortalized photographs of his series, the potentiality of connection remains embedded in these strings of numbers. The public’s ability to interact with and forge a link to Zhang’s Dialogue now predominately takes place via photographs as they circulate via global art exhibition spaces. Both Dialogue and the phone numbers use the built environment as a canvas and therefore can both be considered public calligraphy. To return to Yeh’s formulation of the marking of space with the hand of a calligrapher, it is once again a named calligrapher, Zhang Dali, who is connected to the practice. What interests me about Zhang’s work in relation to the phone number advertisements are the similarities in practice, gesture, location, and communication they share while at the same

Out of Service

279

time these two examples maintain the hierarchy identified by Yeh in that of the privileged position of a singular named calligrapher, over the many unknown and unnamed writers of the numbers. The relationship between Zhang’s works and street advertising is made explicit in a newspaper article from 1998 in which reporter Jiang Tao connected Zhang’s work to other public writings in Beijing: ‘Some believe that the image of the head is an artistic performance to be distinguished from the little ads on the street’ (Jiang 2010: 209). By articulating that there was a possibility of viewers to mistake the heads for other street advertising, one can conclude that both Dialogue and ‘little ads’ were operating in similar locations and were being interpreted by the public as potentially related. Images and aesthetic practices in dense urban spaces are always competing for viewers’ attention. The example of Zhang and the so-called ‘little ads’ speaks to the various ways in which artists and service providers look to integrate public spaces into useable spaces for their own use. The now iconic photographs of Zhang’s Dialogue series stand in stark contrast to the maligned phone numbers; yet both tactics are predicated on creating, however fleeting or ineffective, moments of connection and exchange. By repositioning Dialogue and the phone numbers as practices of public calligraphy, the banzheng is saved from obscurity or derided vandalism, while also placing Dialogue within an expanded notion of urban aesthetic practices that includes other forms of communication and marking of space through text.

Conclusion: Writing on the Wall In 2003 photographer Wang Fuchun (王福春, b. 1943) took a photograph titled No. 258 in Beijing that was subsequently included in the exhibition ‘Humanism in China – A Contemporary Record of Photography’ at the Guangdong Museum of Art (2003-2004) (Wang and Hu 2006: 281). The inclusion of this particular photograph in a large-scale photography exhibition, one focused on the trope of humanism, is telling for two reasons. First, the photograph’s content depicts a street scene with an advertisement covered in phone numbers, and the second is the inclusion of the photograph under the theme of ‘humanism’ in relation to the services and targeted audiences for the banzheng that I have been tracing in this chapter. No. 258 in Beijing captures three men in front of an advertisement of a smiling woman whose face is covered in banzheng. None of the men make eye contact with the camera, distracted as they are by their phones and

280 

Elizabeth Parke

newspapers. The composition is pyramidal, the shape is formed by the man reading the newspaper, the woman in the ad, and the man on the phone, thus creating a compositionally stable image, while the man sitting at the far left draws the viewer’s eye out of the picture frame. The image is made more dynamic because of the diagonal lean of the far left man’s body, and because of this, the viewer of the photograph lingers on this figure. The man’s stuffed backpack and the package on his right suggest that he is in the midst of travelling, perhaps he’s even a migrant worker himself. The photograph also makes clear the elements of this advertising tactic I have traced in this chapter considering the numbers as both defacement and as public calligraphy. The description of the photograph in the exhibition catalogue reads: ‘a street filled with scrawled phone numbers advertising fake certificates’ (街头广告涂满假证件的联系电话). The phone numbers and the fake documents are what are described in this photograph’s caption – not the humans in the picture – and as a result it is the numbers that are given a kind of agency in the photograph. Moreover, the use of the pejorative term 涂 replicates the official stance on banzheng as being unattractive and unwanted in public space. Considering the phone numbers in this way, as active participants within the constellation of the bodies of migrant workers and the services of certificates they provide, rather than simply a banal and maligned aspect of Beijing’s streetscapes, they become markers of exploitation and exclusion that make Beijing’s urbanization possible. The seeking of legitimacy or rights to live in the city through certifications characterizes many non-Beijing residents’ experiences in Beijing. In this chapter I have suggested that the advertising tactic, when considered as defacement and public calligraphy, can be repositioned from an urban psoriasis, to a crucial reconsideration of the multitude of visual practices that compete for attention within Beijing. The complex relationship between migrant workers and urbanites is one of constant negotiations of inclusion and exclusion, need and rejection, visibility and invisibility played out in public spaces across the city. The artistic works of Zhu Fadong, Qiu Zijie, and Zhang Dali offer comparative, yet also, distinct examples to the phone numbers. These artists draw on the rich urban environment of Beijing for inspiration and their works in turn respond to the urbanization of the capital. Many scholars have followed contemporary artists’ works in relation to the city, tracing how artists mobilize urban aesthetics in their practices. However, as I have shown, there are other unsigned, unremarkable mark-making practices that are pervasive in the urban visual field of Beijing. In this chapter I have argued for a deliberate redirection of the gaze away from the famous artists’ works, and the prestigious building projects of

Out of Service

281

the last decade that have reshaped Beijing’s skyline, shedding light on the banzheng of the city. Humble in their use of material and production, these numbers offer the starting point for locating the networks of (in)visible migrant workers coexisting in Beijing, but often denied full rights to the city. Whether unable to attain legal residency status or obtain a valid work card, the people that seek out the banzheng services are often marginalized residents. Their presence in urban centres is necessary because as migrant workers they are still the main source of physical labour for building the city’s ever expanding footprint; however, despite the need for their bodies, their social status is relatively weak and thus, often exploited. Instead of denouncing the banzheng as an urban disease, perhaps the root causes that drive the demand for these services should be addressed. The city of Beijing, in its pursuit of world-class status, has followed other global cities down a path of exclusion and elitism marked architecturally by central business districts built to accommodate financial capital, mobile bodies, and oases of wealth shielded from the majority of citizen’s experiences. The increasing inequality – a feature of our global moment and certainly not unique to China – is being made visible in the cracks of sidewalks, on telephone booths, and on overpasses. This chapter has argued for considering banzheng as a constitutive part of Beijing’s urban visual space and that it should be repositioned as such along side discussions of mianzi projects like the CCTV tower, and by doing so, new socialities and realities are brought out from the overlooked spaces and offered a visibility often denied to these marginalized segments of Beijing’s population.

Bibliography Beijing Government (2006) Beijing shi shirong huanjing weisheng tiaoli [Regulation of Beijing municipality on city appearance and environmental sanitation]. 1992, rev. 2002 and in 2006. http://zhengwu.beijing.gov.cn/fggz/bjdffg/t889873.htm, accessed 27 December 2015. Borysevicz, Mathieu (2009) Learning from Hangzhou/Xiang Hangzhou Xue Xi. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Braester, Yomi (2010) Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham: Duke University Press. Bray, David (2005) Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2004) The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. New York: Routledge.

282 

Elizabeth Parke

Brownell, Susan (1995) Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canetti, Elias (1973) Crowds and Power. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chan, Kam Wing (2013) China, Internal Migration. In Ness, Immanuel (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Vol X. Chichester: Blackwell. China Mobile (2017) Zhongguo Yidong [China Mobile]. http://service.bj.10086.cn/ phone/jxhsimcard/gotone_list.html, accessed 20 April 2017. Donald, Stephanie (2011) Beijing Time, Black Snow and Magnificent Chaoyang: Sociality, Markets and Temporal Shift in China’s Capital. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (7-8): 321-339. Feng, Xi (ed.) (2014) Bai xing ‘Ban Zheng Nan’ [Common people’s difficulties with (official) certificates]. Zhonghua Er Nv Bao Kan Shi. Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books. Gao, Minglu (2005) The Wall – Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art. Qiang: Zhongguo dangdai yishu de lishi yu bianjie. Buffalo: Albright Knox Art Gallery. Harvey, David (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review 53: 23-40. Huang, Xiuli (2006) Beijing: luan tie xiao guang gao qiang zhi ‘ting ji’ jiang li fa [Beijing: (people) posting disorderly small advertisements will face ‘phone disconnection’ legislation (that will be) strongly enacted]. Beijing Ri Bao, 16 May. Jiang, Tao (2010) Report on Zhang Dali’s Dialogue. Trans. Kela Shang. In Wu, Hung and Wang, Peggy (eds) Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 209-212. Previously published as ‘Duihua,’ Lantian Zhongguo minhang bao [Blue sky, the Civil Aviation Adminstration of China newspaper], 27 March 1998. Kraus, Richard (1991) Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1996) Writings on Cities. Ed. and trans. Kofman, Eleonore, and Lebas, Elizabeth. Oxford: Blackwell. Liang, Sicheng (2001) Liang Sicheng Quan Ji [The complete works of Liang Sicheng]. Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe. Liu, Meng (2002) Pishuo yu jianyi [Comments and suggestions]. In Han, Xiaohui (ed.) Chengshi Piping. Beijing Juan [Urban criticism: Beijing volume], Di 1 ban. Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe. Luo, Zhufeng (ed.) (1995) Tu [To scrawl]. In Hanyu Da Cidian [Great Chinese word dictionary]. Shanghai: Hanyu da cidian chubanshe. McNair, Amy (1998) The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. OED (1989) The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ong, Aihwa (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.

Out of Service

283

Parke, Elizabeth (2015) Migrant Workers and the Imaging of Human Infrastructure in Chinese Contemporary Art. China Information 29(2): 226-252. Qiu Zhijie (2018). http://www.qiuzhijie.com/worksleibie/calligraphy/lanting.htm Rancière, Jacques (2001) Ten Theses on Politics. Trans. Panagia, Davide, and Bowlby, Rachel. Theory & Event 5(3). Rao, Pei (2014) Gaowen gaoya ‘shui qiang’ zhuanzhi chengshi ‘niupixuan’ [High temperature and pressure ‘water gun’ used in cities to treat ‘psoriasis’]. Xinjing Bao, 15 April. Scott, James (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Simmel, Georg (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. Wolff, Kurt H. Glencoe: Free Press. Solinger, Dorothy (1999) Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley: University of California Press. State Council (2011) Chengshi shirong he huanjing weisheng guanli tiaoli [Regulations on the administration of city appearance and environmental sanitation]. 1992, rev. in 2011. http://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2011/content_1860772. htm, accessed 20 July 2015 and 21 December 2015. Taussig, Michael (1999) Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tian, Yuan (1997). Rang jie tou xiao guang gao ‘liang’ qi lai [Let street advertisements become (more) beautiful]. Ren Min Ri Bao, 29 July, 10. Valjakka, Minna (2015) Negotiating Spatial Politics: Site-Responsive Urban Art Images in Mainland China. China Information 29(2): 253-281. Wang, Huangsheng, and Hu, Wugong (2006) Zhongguo Renben: Jishi zai Dangdai [Humanism in China: A contemporary record of photography]. Dangdai Yingciang Congshu. Hong Kong: Gongyuan chuban youxian gongsi. Wang, Jun (2003) Cheng Ji [City record]. Beijing: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian. Wheatley, Paul (1971) The Pivot of the Four Quarters; a Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woodworth, Max D. (2015) From the Shadows of the Spectacular City: Zhang Dali’s Dialogue and Counter-Spectacle in Globalizing Beijing, 1995-2005. Geoforum 65: 413-420. Wu, Hung (2000) Zhang Dali’s Dialogue : Conversation with a City. Public Culture 12(3): 749-768. Wu, Hung (2005) Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Xu, Xiaofan (2012) Man qiao jinshi xiao guanggao [Small advertisements completely coat the bridge]. Zhongguo Qing Nian Bao, 18 March, 2.

284 

Elizabeth Parke

Yen, Yuehping (2005) Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Zhang, Li (2001) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zhu, Fadong (2010) State of Existence. Trans. Loring, Kristen. In Wu, Hung, and Wang, Peggy (eds) Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 213-214. Previously published as ‘Shengcun zhuangtai’ in Heipishu [Black cover book], 1994.

About the author Elizabeth Parke Postdoctoral Fellow, Media@McGill, McGill University [email protected] Elizabeth Parke is a postdoctoral fellow at Media@McGill, McGill University. Previously she was the Jackman Humanities-Digital Humanities Network postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, where she completed her doctorate in the Department of East Asian Studies.

10 Translocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativity in Mainland China Minna Valjakka

Abstract The forms of urban creativity mediated to Mainland China since the 1990s are reshaping cityscapes. The contributions of foreign artists and practitioners are facilitating the rise of novel subjectivities, sites, and interventions. Inspired by discussions on interrelations of art and street art with site (Kwon 2000, 2004; Bengtsen 2013, 2014; Valjakka 2015) and translocality (Low 2016; Brickell and Datta 2011), I propose the framework of translocal site-responsiveness to deconstruct local/global dichotomies and to contribute to a more rounded understanding of artistic and creative practices. The analysis of selected examples reveals the interdepen­dence between the varied forms of agency, manifestations, and site/place/ space and contextualizes these negotiation processes in local and global discourses. I posit that urban creativity, whether created by foreigners, locals, or in collaboration, can provide a meaningful engagement with urban environments. Keywords: translocal site-responsiveness, urban creativity, street art, contemporary graffiti, site-specific

Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all ‘local places’ consist of. – Lucy Lippard (1997: 6)

In 2008-2010, the Urban Carpet (都市挂毯) project resonated in the alleys of Beijing. By bringing a novel method to envision a neighbourhood, the project inspired residents to share their individual and collective memories of the local

Valjakka, Minna & Wang, Meiqin (eds.), Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462982239/ch10

286 

Minna Val jakk a

area (Figure 10.1).1 The residents were mesmerized by interventions engaging directly with their communities because they lacked previous experience of such meticulous maps and, more importantly, because of the unusual form and aesthetics. The first maps that Italian architects Marcella Campa (b. 1974) and Stefano Avesani (b. 1977) used for their project were provided by their Venetian university because similar records were not readily available in Mainland China at that time. With the support of the Italian Cultural Institute, movin’UP, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Campa and Avesani commissioned eight maps of particular old residential areas (hutongs 胡同) in Beijing to be hand-embroidered on large canvases. To emphasize the characteristics of each community, the carpets were made in different colours although without any specific relation between the colour chosen and the area in question. Each map depicted a district of around one-square kilometre and about 25,000-30,000 residents, a community of its own within the capital. After the first layer of coloured embroidery was made by women who specialize in tapestry weaving, Campa and Avesani added a second layer of intermittent, white woollen parts and threads to transcend simple depiction of spatial relationships. Without any official authorization but with a respectful attitude to the local settings, Campa and Avesani displayed the carpets first in the neighbourhoods in question and later collectively in a vacant house in the southern part of the city.2 Urban Carpet demonstrates how creative agency, not limited to contemporary artists and their art projects, can form what art historian Grant Kester (2011: 152) regards as a ‘generative, improvisational relationship to the site’ in urban public space. At the same time, Urban Carpet also challenges the prevailing perception that local artists are an assurance of successful engagement with the local communities. Admittedly, the global allure of new collaborative art practices may result in a kind of provincialism where artists rely ‘on a generic set of creative solutions and a priori assumptions that are imposed indiscriminately onto each site of practice’ (Kester 2011: 135), but this is not always the case. As this chapter exemplifies, foreign artists, practitioners, companies, organizations, state-led initiatives, and institutions3 can bring forward innovative ways to renegotiate urban environment 1 This chapter develops further the conceptual analysis of site-responsiveness proposed in an earlier article (Valjakka 2015). 2 Marcella Campa and Stefano Avesani, in interview with the author, Beijing, 18 September 2015. Campa and Avesani started to investigate urbanization in China in 2003, while still studying at the Venice Institute of Architecture. 3 The understanding of ‘foreign’ is highly debatable and problematic. Put bluntly, here it denotes people whose ethnicity and/or nationality is not ‘Chinese’, as well as companies, institutions, NGOs, and NPOs established, owned, managed, and/or registered by non-Chinese.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

287

Figure 10.1 Three of the eight Urban Carpets, 2009. Courtesy of Instant Hutong.

288 

Minna Val jakk a

through aesthetic strategies and spatial practices that may result in collaborations with or forms of inspiration to local artists and residents alike. While so doing, they challenge to a certain extent the dominating urban aesthetics which are controlled by the off icials, as Stefan Landsberger elaborates in his chapter in this volume. 4 Novel forms of urban creativity may employ methods of counter-visuality through subversive messages, but even more importantly, the phenomenon is creating sites, places, and spaces for especially young urbanites to mitigate the growing anxieties of alienation in the city. The forms of engagement with urban public space, such as contemporary graffiti and street furniture, are not easily understood as ‘art’ in Mainland China today. As discussed in the previous chapter by Elizabeth Parke, the same perception applies to some forms of public writing. In recent EuroAmerican discourses, the term ‘urban art’ has been increasingly applied to art based on graffiti or street art styles and techniques but presented and sold by art institutions (Young 2014: 3). The understanding of ‘urban art’ as commercial art does not yet apply to Mainland China, where art markets for contemporary graffiti and street art are undeveloped despite the efforts of both local and international galleries. Instead, similar to other parts of East Asia, ‘urban art’ usually refers to events including contemporary graff iti and street art or public art projects organized by companies in urban space. Although graff iti art (涂鸦艺术) is still the most-often employed concept in Chinese, street art (街头艺术) and urban art (城市艺术) are gradually emerging, too, in (social) media. These shifting implications and novel forms of self-expression were missing from Robin Visser’s (2010) otherwise insightful study on post-socialist urban literature, film, and art. For her, the undefined concept of urban art seems only to include Chinese contemporary arts and artists who address issues of urbanization, some of which were created in urban public space but many of which were not. I propose that the more comprehensive concept of ‘urban creativity’ can include a great variety of different (sub)categorizations depending on a given city and the varying perceptions of the people involved (Figure 10.2).5 With urban creativity, I denote (un)authorized artistic and creative practices that emerge in urban public space by urbanite(s) 4 Forms of urban creativity, such as contemporary graffiti and street art, are also employed for official purposes (Valjakka 2015: 258-260). 5 This approach aims to be more comprehensive than my previous takes on the topic (cf. Valjakka 2015).

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

289

Figure 10.2 Urban creativity as an umbrella concept to include artistic and creative practices in urban public space. Copyright by the author. INDIGENOUS FORMS IN MAINLAND CHINA – Street calligraphy – Advertisements of services – Murals and wall paintings – Big character posters – Street furniture

CONTEMPORARY ART IN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE

NEW / MEDIATED FORMS

– Performance art – Happenings, events – Sound art – Site-specific installations – Participatory art – Environmental art

– Contemporary graffiti – Train/ subway graffiti – Tags – Street art – Urban art – Wheat pastes / posters – Stencils – Stickers – Murals (spray painted) – Installations – Interventions – Street photography – Urban knitting – Light art / projections/ laser graffiti – VJing

and practitioners from varied professional backgrounds. While urban creativity may also include indigenous forms and contemporary art, my research focuses on the new forms that have been mediated from other cultural contexts, and mainly from Europe and the US to Mainland China since the 1990s. Urban creativity is an umbrella concept aiming for more inclusive understanding of urban aesthetics as well as artistic and creative practices in urban public space. The forms and concepts employed are not exclusionary but rather overlapping and occasionally even interchangeable. Some of these forms, such as urban knitting,6 have not yet gained popularity in Mainland China but are already visible in Hong Kong. Instead of defining the varied forms, my primary aim is to enable more detailed recognition of the complex dynamics of agency, manifestations, power relations, and value structures in urban creativity. The seminal commingling of both concepts and forms of artistic and creative practices in urban public space is richly symbolic of the vibrant interplay between the local and the global that continuously manifests itself in the streets in culturally fascinating ways. 6 Urban knitting (aka yarn bombing) employs knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre on public structures.

290 

Minna Val jakk a

Translocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativity As the HomeShop project discussed in the introduction indicates with the multicultural background of its founding members, Campa and Avesani are not alone as foreign practitioners examining Chinese urbanization through artistic and creative practices. I argue that translocal and multilayered mediation is also an essential part of ongoing transformations of new postsocialist urban aesthetics proposed by Visser (2010). Since 2005-2007, Chinese cityscapes have been significantly reshaped by translocal trends and agency in artistic and creative practices although the contributions and potential of foreign artists, architects, gallerists, film-makers, graffiti writers, graffiti artists, and street artists have remained largely unacknowledged. The significance of translocality is especially visible in the new forms of urban creativity emerging gradually in Mainland China since the 1990s. While the individual impact of a single work or practitioner might be rather short lived, as a whole the phenomenon is opening up new possibilities and subjectivities, especially among younger-generation Chinese citizens interested in interacting with urban public space. New forms of urban creativity that challenge the prevailing conceptualization of the urban as a fixed and regulated space are unfolding around the world, advocating the importance of art, creativity, and aesthetics in reformulating not only the urban public space but also envisioning it (Grierson and Sharp 2013; Klanten and Hübner 2010). These reverberations are gaining ground in Chinese cities, too. For instance, a growing number of graffiti and street art events, projects, and festivals are being organized and their impact on urban aesthetics cannot be ignored.7 Based on ethnographic research since 2006 in various cities in East Asia and benefitting from a comparative perspective across regions, I propose a more rounded investigation through the conceptual frame of translocal site-responsiveness in relation to urban creativity. This perspective not only incorporates an aesthetic, temporal, and spatial analysis but also takes into account forms of agency and manifestations as well as the cultural and social flows and networks, situating them in the context of local, regional, national, and global discourses. I posit that the understanding of urban creativity as an organic process of translocal site-responsiveness and the detailed analysis of multilayered interactions between the three main variables – forms of agency; manifestations; and site, place, and space (as multilevel physical and 7 For a brief historical study of urban creativity in Beijing and in Shanghai, including Zhang Dali’s (张大力, b. 1963) limited contribution, see Valjakka (2015, 2016).

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

291

Figure 10.3 Urban creativity as an organic process of translocal siteresponsiveness: the multilayered interactions between the three main variables, namely, forms of agency; manifestations; and site, place, and space (as multilevel physical and conceptual contexts); and their varying features. Copyright by the author. Forms of agency Practitioners/artists Collaborators/assistants Institutions /foundations Supporters

Manifestations Subject-theme Materials, methods, forms Aesthetics/style Intertextual/contextual references Languages

Site/place/space Physical, social, and cultural infrastructure History, heritage, memories related to the site, the neighborhood, and/or the city Ownership of the site

conceptual contexts); and their features – provides an illuminating starting point for further analysis (Figure 10.3). More importantly, because all these aspects can have a different and continuously changing degree of translocality and locality, the analysis benefits more nuanced comprehension of both urban aesthetics and social engagement. Indeed, in the midst of global artistic and creative practices travelling across the continents, questions of how to differentiate local from global, and whether such separation is even feasible, have become ever more challenging. The new manifestations of urban creativity are based on a reciprocal relationship between them and the city – and even a specific neighbourhood of the city – but are not limited to the issues of ‘localness.’ New global dynamics across, within, and beyond the city produce several multiscalar and contextual levels with which urban creativity can resonate. Simultaneous and often contingent translocal flows, and how they interact with characteristics of the site in question through artistic and creative practices, underlie my conceptualization of translocal site-responsiveness. I posit that urban creativity, whether created by foreign or local forms of agency or both in collaboration, bring forward meaningful ways of engagement with and

292 

Minna Val jakk a

envisioning urban environments. The approach offers new insights and enables alternative readings of the interdependences of visual arts and urbanization in Mainland China. Sharing the need for a broader understanding of current translocal artistic practices, I also aim to contribute to critical and comparative art research that examines local, regional, national, and global agency, manifestations, trends, and discourses.

Deconstructing ‘Local’ Engagement The definition of ‘translocal’ has been widely appropriated after it was introduced, among others, by Arjun Appadurai (1996) in his investigation of local disjuncture amidst global flows. ‘Translocality’ is often perceived as an element of spatial processes and identities created by agency of mobility in different scales. It is constructed in ‘simultaneous situatedness across different locales’ (Brickell and Datta 2011: 4) and by people experiencing multiple places which results in ‘linking of localities through space-time compression’ (Low 2016: 174). The value of this concept lies in its intermediate potential to enable further recognition of ‘the diversity of Asian and African experiences and agency in the transformatory process often subsumed under the blanket term of globalisation’ (Freitag and von Oppen 2010: 3). My understanding of translocality draws from this emphasis of socio-spatial and cultural processes that interlink both people and spaces, but I adapt the approach to investigate the reciprocal relationships resonating between manifestations of urban creativity; the varied forms of agency involved; and the sites, places, and spaces employed. In her discussion on causes, possibilities, and outcomes of translocal spaces, Setha Low further elucidates how, through affective processes and exchange of information, translocality can become collective experience and translocal space ‘a network of multiple localities shared by families, neighbourhoods, groups and communities’ (Low 2016: 174). In urban creativity, the acknowledgement of affective processes, along with the shared knowledge exchange, and how they enhance solidarity and participation, is an essential starting point. Through this acknowledgement, it becomes possible to decipher the complex negotiation processes because the translocal networks and spatiotemporal experiences are the prerequisite for the vibrant existence of the phenomenon. Hence, instead of focusing on translocal flows and networks among Chinese people in China in terms of place and identity making (cf. Oakes and Schein 2006), I take ‘translocal’ to denote more multilayered mediation processes which also include transnational

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

293

agency and transcultural forms, trends, styles, and images transcending the national borders. Chinese cities are not immune to translocal flows of information, and their urban planning is engaged with foreign expertise and capital. The translocal manifestations and agency in contemporary art have challenged the def initions of ‘contemporary Chinese art,’ ‘contemporaneity,’8 and ‘Chineseness,’ especially among diasporic Chinese artists across the globe.9 Even if some scholars of Chinese art history, including Craig Clunas (2009: 234), have argued in favour of ‘art in China’ to evade ‘the flattening effect of “Chinese art,”’ and others have urged the need of ‘deconstructing the global/ local dichotomy’ in favour of more heterogeneity (Wu 2008: 291), existing research continues to focus on Chinese artists in China or abroad while not taking into account foreign artists working in China. The dominating emphasis based on artists’ nationality is intriguing not least because illuminating studies address transcultural flows in the visual arts in premodern and modern eras.10 Admittedly, the focus on Chinese artists has been well justified because of the need for detailed art historical research and because of these artists’ unquestionable prominence in shaping contemporary art in China. Concerns of ‘Western hegemony’ in global art discourses – valid as such – may nevertheless have led to an unjustified exclusion from the discussion of foreign stakeholders and their practices. As indicated by the Urban Carpet (Figure 10.1), the neglect of foreign agency and mediations in terms of artistic and creative practices in Chinese cities hinders a deeper understanding of the multileveled interactions between local, national, regional (Asian), and global practices, some of which restore the sense of place and foster a meaningful engagement with the city. The appreciation of the Urban Carpet project naturally varied among the Chinese residents: some claimed that the carpets appeared like they were made by Chinese artists and were surprised to learn they were made by 8 Debates on definitions of modern, contemporary, avant-garde, experimental, and conceptual art have been abundant. See, e.g. Gao (2008: 133-145); Wu (2005: 13-16); Lü (2013: 202-203). Also what constitutes the contemporaneity (当代性) in Chinese contemporary art has been debated. Wu Hung (2008: 291) maintains that contemporaneity ‘must be understood as an intentional artistic/theoretical construct, which asserts a particular historicity itself.’ 9 As Melissa Chiu (2006, 2011) has analysed, Chineseness as a self-identity is a contested concept, dependent and modified by different cultural environments for different purposes by Chinese artists living abroad. 10 Among the most extensive studies of mediated discourses in visual art are Clark (1998), Clarke (2011), and Lü (2010). In his recent study, Lü (2013) wields an informative discussion throughout the book on the agency of Western collectors, gallerists, and researchers in contemporary art in China, but omits foreign artists.

294 

Minna Val jakk a

foreign architects; others argued that because of their innovativeness, such works could not have been created by Chinese artists. Despite the different takes on the agency, the majority of the local residents clearly enjoyed the possibility to reflect on and share their insights and memories of the local area with each other and the practitioners. For Campa and Avesani, this social process – sharing the experiences – is the essential outcome of the project. Urban Carpet is one of their many ‘micro-urbanism interactions’ included in the Instant Hutong project, launched in 2005 when Campa and Avesani moved to Beijing to deepen their investigations of urbanization in China. For them, ‘micro-urbanism interactions’ are based on ‘the sense of small-scale urban spaces with the possibility to temporarily use them as a public stage on which the audience’s response becomes the main event.’11 The elements that made Urban Carpet well received among the Chinese residents as a form of micro-urbanism interaction include the employment of materials not commonly available for the locals, transformation of these materials into a visually intriguing form, and making them directly accessible to the residents in their community instead of displaying them in an art institution. Breaking through both the temporal and spatial constraints with an innovative engagement was the cornerstone of the project that enabled it to enhance belonging to a specific place and a shared local identity. As such, the project directly deconstructed the local/global dichotomies called for by Wu Hung, although diverting his advocacy of an artist ‘simultaneously constructing his or her local identity and serving a global audience’ (2008: 291). Instead, Urban Carpet benefitted from the translocal agency and materials of the work, including the possible surprise regarding the nationality of the practitioners. The ethnicity and/or nationality of the foreign architects or their lack of fully fluent Mandarin did not prevent the interaction of the locals with the work or obstruct the outcome as dialogical process as a whole. Campa and Avesani were not interested in documentation or translation of the narratives. Neither were they keen to transform the collected stories into an art project to be exhibited in an art institutional context because that would have altered the dynamics of the whole engagement into a more structured and monitored project, possibly preventing the local residents’ open-minded participation.12 Urban Carpet is an illuminating example of a timely translocal site-responsiveness, challenging the prevailing assumption that ‘successful’ social engagement depends on local expertise and agency or acceptance of the contemporary art scene: re-creating the project in the 11 Campa and Avesani, interview. For more information, see also Instant Hutong (2017). 12 Ibid.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

295

2010s would not have the same impact because different map applications have already made geographic/visual representations of the neighbourhoods more accessible for urbanites.

The Impact of Translocal Agency The role of foreign agency in the contemporary art scene in China remains an understudied phenomenon and is beyond the scope of this chapter. For the sake of more nuanced contextualization, it is nevertheless relevant to bring forward examples that indicate how the varied commitments have inevitably contributed to the diversity in contemporary art. For instance, the Red Gate Gallery opened in 1991 by Brian Wallace was a pioneering art gallery to operate in Beijing and has actively continued to provide new platforms for artists from China and abroad, and since 2001, a residency programme.13 At the other end of the spectrum are the state-sponsored exchange programmes, such as the Austro Sino Arts Program funded by the Austrian government which has organized numerous exhibitions featuring Austrian artists in China (Austro Sino Arts Program 2014). Chinese curator Tang Zehui, who has started to pay attention to foreign artists working in China, represents a more recent form of translocal agency. In 2015, Tang curated an exhibition, Reverse the Perspective, which toured from Beijing to Tianjin in order to promote more extensive perceptions of the contemporary art scene. In urban creativity, despite the groundbreaking practices of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group in the 1990s discussed in detail by Nancy P. Lin in her chapter in this volume, the translocal mediations are a prominent part of the phenomenon. Although Zhang Dali’s (张大力, b. 1963) experiments with spray-painted silhouettes in Beijing for his Dialogue series (1995-2005) have been repeatedly examined (including by Maurizio Marinelli and Elizabeth Parke in this volume), what is usually ignored is that they were inspired by his translocal experiences in Bologna,14 as also mentioned by Jiang Jiehong in Chapter 3. However, Zhang Dali’s impact on the development of contemporary graffiti and street art in China can be questioned because he did not collaborate with any other graffiti writers or artists or technically advance the scene (Valjakka 2016). As Zhang Dali’s case nonetheless indicates, the history of urban creativity in China cannot be written without 13 John Lui, director of the Red Gate Residency programme, email communication to the author, 18 January 2016. 14 Zhang Dali, in interview with the author, Beijing, 13 August 2009.

296 

Minna Val jakk a

acknowledging the complex mediation processes across national borders since the 1990s. The flows of exchange vary significantly from one city to another and are in continuous flux. While Guangzhou and Shenzhen have clearly benefitted from the closeness of Hong Kong and its international take on contemporary graffiti and street art, the translocal atmosphere of Shanghai has contributed to the development of urban creativities, too. The first known practitioners of contemporary graffiti and street art in Beijing in the late 1990s were locals, whereas in Shanghai, the presence of foreign practitioners has been significant since the emergence of contemporary graffiti around 2005-2007. Some artists and designers have lived in China for years while actively contributing to urban creativity. One of the best-known protagonists is Dezio, a French graffiti artist who for over ten years has been active in Shanghai.15 Besides polishing his own distinguished style of lettering, Dezio has often explored with Chinese visual elements and Chinese language, and has even chosen the Chinese characters (度西奥) for his name.16 Dezio’s work fulfils the notion of translocal at several levels because he is a French graffiti artist living and creating his work in China, occasionally in Chinese and with contextual references to Chinese culture and society. Furthermore, his work, including the experimentation with Chinese characters, is appreciated by Chinese graffiti writers and graffiti artists and has encouraged them to further explore the possibilities of their own language. Besides his own participation in building up the scene, Dezio’s interconnectedness with many international graffiti writers, graffiti artists, and street artists has brought a vast number of them to visit and paint in Shanghai, transforming the long wall along the Moganshan Road leading to the contemporary art district, M50, into an informal but seminal site of translocal exchange. His long-term presence and impact on urban creativity as a source of inspiration transcends Low’s (2016) perceptions on how translocality can be transformed into an affective process and exchange of information spreading into the community. In the case of Dezio, he has also brought about physical change to urban aesthetics and spatial politics in Shanghai. The definition of ‘local’ agency is further complicated by forms of collaborations. Although many contemporary graffiti crews in Mainland China today are either all-Chinese or all-foreign, there are a growing number of translocal crews both in terms of the members’ nationality and also their place of residence across the borders. As an example, the best-known crew 15 To protect their identities, the birth years of creators involved in urban creativity are revealed only with permission. 16 Dezio, French graffiti writer, in interview with the author, Shenzhen, 23 March 2013.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

297

in Shanghai, the OOPS crew, represents the many levels of translocal siteresponsiveness through agency, subject matters, use of languages (English and Chinese), styles, and trends. Established in 2007 by Shanghainese Tin.G, REIGN, and READ (aka HURRI), the crew expanded to include SNOW from Shanghai, KITE from Guangxi, AEKONE from Yangzhou, and two Europeans, STORM and DIASE.17 Another feature that adds translocal layers in terms of agency are projects commissioned, funded, or supported by transnational organizations, institutions, or companies which employ both Chinese and foreign creators to work around China. Individual practitioners can also initiate translocal collaborations with official support. The most extensive example so far is the series of graffiti workshops, events, and exhibitions organized by German graffiti writer Akim Walta (aka ZEBSTER) in collaboration with local graffiti writers and various institutions in several cities. In 2009, Walta launched the Shanghai 2010: German Chinese Hip Hop Project, which consisted of fifteen events over two years (workshops, talks, exhibition, live painting, and the finals of the Wall Lords graffiti competition) in Wuhan (2009), Shenyang (2009), Guangzhou (2009 and 2010), Beijing (2010), Shenzhen (2010), and Shanghai as the main site of events in connection with the Shanghai Expo 2010 and the German Pavilion Day in 2010. The core participants included Chinese, German, and Hong Kongese graffiti writers, graffiti artists, and street artists. Although the majority of the sites were local, the translocal space of the Shanghai Expo 2010 and especially the events organized in relation to the German Pavilion increased the exchange project’s degree of translocality.18 The total impact of the project was immeasurable because of the large number of people taking part throughout the events that varied from dozens to thousands. Although the singular events might have been short in duration, each added to the public acceptance of contemporary graffiti as part of youth culture and urban aesthetics. One of the most tangible results was visible on Huachi Road in the Tielu residential area in Shanghai. In a local school, some German graffiti artists and street artists took part in a painting workshop which gradually spread to nearby houses – because the residents had asked the visitors to paint on their walls. However, because the residential committees had not approved this intervention, the works were soon threatened to be painted over. The residents’ desire to defend the works and their right to decide about their own property won support from the local 17 Tin.G, Shanghainese street artist, in interview with the author, Shanghai, 20 April 2015; HURRI, Shanghainese graffiti writer, email communication to the author, 12 May 2012. 18 Akim Walta, graffiti artist, in interview with the author, Berlin, 18 July 2016.

298 

Minna Val jakk a

media, whose coverage made the officials back down.19 Although the project did not evolve to include participation by the local residents in painting, it did inspire engagement and ownership with the works. The locals’ willingness to voice their own aspirations and resist the official perception indicates their commitment to and awareness of defending their use of public space. At the time of writing, the area has been partly demolished and many works have disappeared because of unauthorized structures built by and overpainting by the development company. Nonetheless, for a moment, the translocal urban creativity enlivened and empowered an unprivileged residential area and made it more inspiring, especially for children. Furthermore, it inspired local interventions. After the area had started to be torn down, a Shanghainese man, 50 to 60 years of age, came and painted a few works in a traditional Chinese style with ink and brush on the walls, adding his own layer to the translocal urban aesthetics of the neighbourhood.20 These examples, from individual long-term commitment to forms of collaboration between locals and foreigners, demonstrate how translocality in relation to agency can occur in varying degrees through physical presence and participation of a practitioner, translocal networks, cross-border collaborations, financial and/or institutional support, and as a mediated source of inspiration. All of them have the shifting potential to contribute to the transformation of perceptions and practices regarding urban public space and how it can be employed for urban creativity. Whether long-term processes or one-time events, what the diversified forms of translocal agency share in common is both a tangible and an intangible impact through affect, knowledge, inspiration, and reclamation of sites for urban creativity.

The Interdependence of a Site and a Manifestation Even though urban public space is managed mainly by the government and global companies (Visser 2010: 4), vast areas of Chinese cities provide potential sites for urban creativity. Questions about how the spatial politics are (re)negotiated and when, where, and by whom are relevant to all forms of urban creativity. Officially, both writing and drawing in urban public space are banned by law,21 but in practice the general attitude has been fairly 19 Ibid.; Loomit, German street artist, in phone interview with the author, 5 July 2010. 20 Information obtained from fieldwork, August 2015. 21 Surveys conducted with English word ‘graffiti’ and Chinese words 涂鸦 and 涂写 in the Peking University law database (2013); China Law Info (2013), and HKSAR law database (2013).

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

299

lenient. The interpretation of spatial strategies of urban creativity depends directly on the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in question. For instance, because of relational tolerance towards urban creativity in China and its lack of residential areas reserved for ethnic minorities, the features of spatial analysis of graffiti in New York City in terms of racial segregation and ethnic identity (see e.g. Anderson 2012) are not applicable. In Mainland China, the act of urban creativity itself is not necessarily considered subversive, but the evaluation depends mostly on the site and content.22 As elaborated in previous chapters, creating site-oriented art in urban public space is a prominent method for contemporary Chinese artists to explore the characteristics of a particular site or space in the city. For new forms of urban creativity, however, the multilevel engagement with the site, place, and space is both a premise and a defining factor. Each particular intervention is created in a specific physical site for a reason (e.g. visibility, accessibility, cultural, and architectural values or the lack of them). The interdependence between forms, content, language, style, visual and textual reference, materials, size, agency, and speed of the action in urban creativity is, nonetheless, often highly organic and spontaneous. Interaction with the site, place, or space cannot be limited only to the conscious examination of a site. Scholars on street art have touched upon the interconnectedness of the site and the street artwork but fail to provide any comprehensive analysis that could apply to all forms of urban creativity. The urge to rigidly define the existing plurality of urban creativity into smaller categories causes limited perceptions. For instance, Nicholas Alden Riggle’s attempt to demand that ‘[a]n art work is street art if, and only if, its material use of the street is internal to its meaning’ (2010: 246) fails to give any pragmatic analytical tools for examining the intertextuality that he calls for. As Peter Bengtsen observes, Riggle’s interpretation is problematic. How can we define when ‘the use of the street is indeed essential to the meaning of a specific artwork’ (2014: 132)? According to Bengtsen, the interrelation of street art and site varies depending on the use of pictorial space, the medium, and the placement of the work (2014: 132-135; 2013: 252). Anna Wacławek maintains that any analysis must examine how the urban artwork interacts with its environment, including ‘the media, architectural forms and signage that envelop it’ along with ‘local history and contemporary issues’ (2011: For the regulation concerning the cities in Mainland China, see especially article 17 in State Council (2011). 22 For a more detailed discussion on the changing understanding of il/legality, see Valjakka (2014).

300 

Minna Val jakk a

139). Although I agree with Bengtsen and Wacławek, my fieldwork in East Asian cities leads me to argue that the interconnectedness with the site is far more complex. First, when would a site not be essential, even for the meaning and value of a tag, a seed bomb, or urban knitting?23 Second, in today’s global world, the intertextuality goes clearly beyond the particular site and local discourses. References are frequently made by the local and the foreign artists to national, regional (Asian), and global issues, as well as to traditions and popular trends. A primary example of this kind of deconstruction of local/global dichotomy is the above-mentioned wall on Moganshan Road that has (art) historical relevance as the translocal site for urban creativity. Third, instead of directly referencing the locality, translocal site-responsiveness can be expressed through aesthetic and conceptual juxtaposition, as Kaid Ashton,24 a Canadian photographer and visual artist, does in his interventions in Asian cities. Kaid Ashton uses two major visual strategies to create translocal juxtapositions: he puts up portraits of people and photographs of urban or natural landscapes from abroad. The power of the contrast is directly based on the translocal site-responsiveness of the subject theme – displaying, for instance, the portraits of impoverished Indonesian urbanites in the midst of the affluence of Hong Kong with texts explaining their stories. In 2011-2013, the artist hung up large colour photographs of unspoiled Saskatchewan nature in Manila, Sri Lanka, Dhaka, and Guangzhou, where they were readily appreciated by the locals – even in derelict neighbourhoods. He found similar positivity in Guangzhou in March 2012. The discrepancy of the images in the industrialized and polluted urban environment was extreme, to say the least. While he was putting up one of the works in a residential area, people gathered to defend his right to make art and improve the area when a military representative in a camouflage-patterned outfit tried to stop him (Figure 10.4). Echoing the contemporary graffiti in the Tielu residential area in Shanghai, Kaid Ashton’s photographic intervention encouraged the people to care about their right to decide on urban aesthetics.25 During his one-week trip to Beijing in August 2011, Kaid Ashton put up the series Dignity in Labour, depicting the variety of labourers he has 23 A seed bomb is a small package of seeds and fertilizers which can be strewn on public or private land to plant seeds. 24 Kaid Ashton is a pseudonym chosen by the artist. 25 Kaid Ashton, in video call interviews with the author, 14 May 2013 and 30 November 2015. See also Kaid Ashton (2012).

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

301

Figure 10.4 A local person defending Kaid Ashton’s right to put up a photograph in Guangzhou and the result of the negotiation. Courtesy of the artist.

encountered in different Asian countries. With the help of a friend fluent in Mandarin, the stories of the people were translated and a bilingual text appeared next to many photographs. For residential buildings, permission was always asked from and given by the inhabitants. In a demolition area, the family of the last house standing approached the artist and asked to have one photograph for their house, which he allowed them to choose

302 

Minna Val jakk a

Figure 10.5 Family choosing a photograph for their house in Beijing and the outcome. Courtesy of the artist.

(Figure 10.5). In Kaid Ashton’s own experience, Beijingers were intrigued by the series and read the stories of the people depicted.26 Through a translocal site-responsiveness, Kaid Ashton’s works obviously raised interest and gave a chance to simultaneously connect with different countries and nationalities. Even if his practice does not fulfil Kester’s (2011) perceptions of an artist-led collaborative art project, the photographs and the process of putting them up established engagement with the local people. The depth of the impact on the audience of this exchange of knowledge cannot be demonstrated; but, similarly to many other events of urban creativity, the photographs have brought forward possibilities to use the walls of private houses for non-commercial and non-official purposes, challenging the current urban aesthetics dominated by advertisements and official imaginaries. Given the ephemerality and discontinuity of the project, the effect of these interventions on urban creativity in Mainland China could be criticized, but we have yet to see another experiment with a translocal subject matter, conceptual and aesthetic juxtaposition through 26 Kaid Ashton, in video call interview with the author, 30 November 2015. See also Kaid Ashton (2011a, 2011b). The date in the posting does not correspond with the actual date of the trip.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

303

colour photographs and with bilingual texts contextualizing the pictures as an art exhibition on the street. As Kaid Ashton’s works indicate, a more nuanced analysis is needed than the site specificity suggested by Miwon Kwon (2004). Although in her earlier work, Kwon (2000) investigates site-oriented works by itinerant artists and how the narrative trajectories resonate with previous projects in other sites, her analysis remains too static for grasping the translocal and often-contingent aspects of urban creativity. As Bengtsen maintains, Kwon’s focus on site-oriented art that consciously explores the site’s role is not fully applicable to street art, in which ‘site specificity is not dependent on such conscious deliberations’ (2013: 252). My findings in urban creativity resonate with Kwon’s perception that it is not only physical locations that can function as sites and be reflected in the content of the artwork but, instead, various cultural, theoretical, institutional, societal, political, and historical debates, issues, and events can also perform this role (2004: 26-30). However, the processes of resonating with the physical and conceptual features of site, place, and space in urban creativity go beyond conscious deliberations and are far more organic, spontaneous, and complex than previously acknowledged. Many forms of urban creativity, such as Kaid Ashton’s projects, are (re)created in multiple sites around the globe as a continuing, multi-sited project. Some works are deliberately moved from a place to another without the work being destroyed. As a result, urban creativity’s interdependence with the site is clearly more multileveled, flexible, and translocal. Because the physical and conceptual contexts inevitably vary when the work is moved or re-created in different sites, the layers of meanings are increased: the work resonates differently in each particular site, which adds to the interpretations of the whole series of works across the national borders. In Kaid Ashton’s work, the simultaneous situatedness is transformed to apply the works themselves instead of people. 27 The photographic series becomes part of the translocal knowledge exchange and affective processes that have the possibility to provide new perceptions not only by reflecting the local characteristics but also juxtaposing them through materials, forms, and aesthetics. Hence, they may inspire innovative methods to envision the city and people’s relationship to it and even spark civic participation.

27 For a detailed analysis of simultaneous situatedness in terms of movements of people across specific locales and different scales, see Brickell and Datta (2011).

304 

Minna Val jakk a

Figure 10.6 Julien Malland’s partially demolished painting, Shanghai, September 2015. Photograph by the author.

Manifold Translocal Site-Responsiveness An even more multi-layered example of a transcultural site-responsiveness is provided by Julien Malland (aka Seth Globepainter, b. 1972), who started as a graffiti writer in the 1990s but gradually became more interested in forms of street art. In recent years, he has been painting around the globe, with or without authorization. His interest lies in building a dialogue with the

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

305

people through his works despite the language barriers. During his visits to Shanghai in 2013-2015, Malland painted ephemeral human figures at demolition sites that caught the eye of the local media and raised popular interest among a Chinese audience. The works reveal the scars left on the urban environment and in the urbanites themselves because of the alienation and rootedness caused by the ongoing urban redevelopment. The domicide, as Qin Shao (2013) describes destruction of homes with severe repercussions to communities and the whole city, is a commonly known phenomenon among Shanghainese and is visually captured in Malland’s paintings. While Urban Carpet represents the historical significance of the hutongs to their residents, the graffiti workshop in Shanghai transformed the everyday space, and Kaid Ashton’s photographic juxtapositions emphasize the shifting realities of the urban environment, Malland’s ephemeral paintings epitomize both the material and immaterial destruction of cityscapes. It could be argued that Malland’s paintings merely regress to indexical employment of the ruins echoing the artistic practices among the contemporary Chinese artists in the 1990s,28 but the use of abandoned buildings and demolition sites is also characteristic of urban creativity in Mainland China and elsewhere. More importantly, the significance of Malland’s work derives directly from translocal site-responsiveness that combines the local, regional, national, and international levels of the unavoidable challenges of urbanization to private citizens. Some of the human figures can be identified as Chinese, but occasionally Malland paints the figures faceless (e.g. depicting them from behind), a style that leaves the question of a figure’s ethnicity ambiguous. Whether the ‘facelessness’ of the figure is a deliberate visual strategy by Malland or a contingent result of demolition (as in Figure 10.6), in either case it directly contributes to the degrees of translocal site-responsiveness. An unidentifiable human figure transcends the experience communicated to the viewer into a universal level of humanistic emotions. The painful dislocation caused especially by globalization and domicide is shared among the less privileged in cities around the globe, causing translocality among many without a choice. In here, too, the work itself becomes a vehicle of communication, and affective processes provide a discursive site for shared experiences across the borders. The composition and colour choices add a notion of sadness to the human figures. The aesthetics of the works as well as the translocality of Malland and his works resonated well, especially with the commonly shared notions of nostalgia and cosmopolitan aspirations in Shanghai. The 28 The ruins provided an essential visual strategy for contemporary Chinese artists to approach the unseen urbanization (Wu 2012; Visser 2004).

306 

Minna Val jakk a

works directly addressed the Shanghainese’s mixed feelings regarding the continuous changes in the urban environment, and the wave of popularity they received in the Chinese media was not left unnoticed. The Japanese art supplier Nippon Paint contacted a local non-profit organization, Shanghai United Foundation (上海联劝公益基金会), to find ways to collaborate. With the combination of both translocal and local support from Nippon Paint and Baosteel Group, the local foundation commissioned Malland to paint nine murals for its annual An Egg’s Charity Walk (一个鸡蛋的暴走) around Fengjing. Since 2011, the charity walk has raised funds for improving children’s living conditions around China. In 2015, teams of four to six people walked 50 kilometres in twelve hours. An estimated 3,300 participants raised 13.62 million yuan for the cause on 16 May 2015.29 As usual, Malland preferred to get to know the local ways of life before deciding what to paint and then apply them to make the works communicate to the people. Resonating with the main aim of the event, all the works depict children in peaceful compositions and bright colours. For instance, in Xinyi village, Malland incorporated a window frame as the cornerstone of the whole composition by turning it into a home. A local girl is hugging her village home while forced to move to the city to earn money, which is indicated by a fake Louis Vuitton bag with signs for yuan as the decoration (Figure 10.7). The visual metaphors of the painting were easily read by the villagers, the audience of the charity event, and foreigners alike. ‘The respective site specificity,’ suggests Bengtsen, ‘is also conditioned by the way in which their non-material pictorial spaces interrelate with the surroundings’ (2013: 252). By this statement, Bengtsen refers only to the pictorial space: in the case of a human figure, the subject is incorporated in a pictorial frame or cut by the outline of the figure. However, as Malland’s works illuminate, site-responsiveness in urban creativity is conditioned by much more complex material interconnectedness of the work and the site, especially when physical features are employed in the compositions to emphasize the emotional message, as is the case with this girl positioned around the window. Another practical method of translocal site-responsiveness for Malland is to collaborate with local artist(s). While in Fengjing, known for its peasant painting tradition, Malland grew interested in the traditional form of visual arts. The local off icials turned to Cao Xiuwen (曹秀文, b. 1955), a peasant painter who had previously participated in mural 29 Cao Haiyan, media representative of the foundation, in interview with the author, Shanghai, 21 September 2015.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

Figure 10.7 Julien Malland’s painting in Xinyi village, September 2015. Photograph by the author.

307

308 

Minna Val jakk a

Figure 10.8 Julien Malland and Cao Xiuwen, a sleeping girl in Xingta village, September 2015. Photograph by the author.

projects in the town centre. In the Xingta village, Malland conceived of an idea for a painting of a local girl sleeping and dreaming about her home village and, while Malland painted the girl, Cao painted the village (Figure 10.8). The result is an illuminating combination of both artists’ individual styles and perceptions highlighting the multileveled translocal site-responsiveness of the work with the site (wall in a local house), the place (a rural village), and the contextual space (An Egg’s Charity Walk). The hybrid forms of agency (local/French), styles (local peasant painting/ international street art), and techniques (brush/spray paint) advocate far more intricate deconstruction of local/global dichotomies than called for by Wu Hung. At the same time, the collaboration challenges any clear definitions in visual arts today. Despite the notions of alienation and longing, the mural is aesthetically pleasing without direct criticism of urbanization and globalization found in many other works of Malland. As such, it can be interpreted to represent apolitical beautification becoming close to officially sanctioned public art. A farmer planting in front of the mural in the Xingta village claimed that the art in the village created with the support of the local government lacked impact. Inevitably, the mural brought more visitors and media, but because there were no services available to the visitors to use, the village did not

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

309

directly benefit from the project.30 Cao instead emphasized the positive effect of publicity raised in the local and national media,31 but her view is likely to be shaped by the fact that she has her own studio in the ‘painting village,’ a tourist attraction built by the local government. According to the head of Fengjing’s local government cultural section, Ding Yehong, the whole project was very successful, attracted visitors from all parts of the country, and let the people be proud of the villages.32 The foundation was similarly pleased with the results: because of more works resonating with the main aim and a longer period to engage with them in open space, the works encouraged the participants to appreciate life and everyday things outside of the city centres.33 Inevitably, the nine murals by Malland enhance the branding of Fengjing and nearby villages as an art area, and also through their re-use in various advertisements. Compared to the existing murals of peasant painting in the area, Malland’s works provide new methods, aesthetics, and perceptions in relation to urbanization and its outcomes even in rural areas. They highlight the individuals, their concerns, and hopes which resonate with the local and global audience and may hence inspire new trends in visual arts around Fengjing, too. For Cao, the mural represents peasant painting (农民画), although Malland is neither a peasant nor Chinese.34 From the global perspective, the mural is an illuminating example of contemporary hybrid forms of street art that are becoming ever more accepted forms of contemporary art, especially in Euro-American contexts. While the work resonates with Jerome Silbergeld’s (2009) notion that contemporaneity in Chinese art cannot be limited to Chinese artists focusing on novel forms of arts but should include Chinese art regardless of the method and style, it further challenges the interpretations of Chineseness in terms of agency, form, style, and aesthetics. To which extent, if any, could this collaboration, based on peasant painting and street art, qualify as Chinese contemporary art or, even, contemporary art in China? ‘Contemporaneity consists precisely in the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world,’ advocates Terry Smith (2008: 8-9). He further argues that the asynchronous temporalities, together with contingencies of 30 Local farmer, in interview with the author, Xingta village, 20 September 2015. 31 Cao Xiuwen, a peasant artist, in video call interview with the author, 7 November 2015. 32 Ding Yehong, local government representative, email communication to the author, 1 December 2015. 33 Cao Haiyan, interview. 34 Cao Xiuwen, interview.

310 

Minna Val jakk a

cultural and social multiplicities, ‘highlight the fast-growing inequalities between them and among them’ (ibid.: 9). If we accept this perception of contemporaneity to apply also to discourses of art in China, as indicated by Maurizio Marinelli in Chapter 2, we can start to perceive the intricate inequalities indicated by the collaboration of Malland and Cao despite the positive effects aimed for and achieved. The translocal site-responsiveness of this project was formulated at the nexus of commissioned work for charity purposes through the collaboration of a local foundation and partially translocal funding along with intercontextual references to local traditions, the contemporary realities of everyday life permeated with translocal elements, and the physical sites – the local walls. Whether the villagers benefit from the project or not, the murals by Malland and their translocal site-responsiveness had a positive impact on the charity walk. They gave a reason to continue walking the whole route and added joy to the equation. The murals, nonetheless, raised unanswered questions regarding fluctuating and contextually based evaluation criteria and positions of different agency, forms, and aesthetics in today’s global art world.

Conclusions: Transcending Dichotomies Local and global are increasingly indistinguishable in visual arts in China today. As Robin Visser (2010) maintains, in Mainland China the post-socialist urban aesthetics enables new forms of civic agency to emerge while serving as a new realm in which to envision, experience, and assess the city. As I have shown in this chapter, these novel possibilities of civic participation apply also to foreign graffiti writers, local graffiti artists, street artists, architects, designers, and artists working individually or in collaboration with foreign or Chinese peers, organizations, companies, and institutions. Along with globalization of visual arts and urban space, urbanization and its implications, such as demolition sites, open up new physical and conceptual sites for urban creativity in Chinese cities. As Visser (2004: 277) advocates, ‘an aesthetics of disappearance functions as a site of resistance while also working to reposition artists at the center of commercial culture.’ Her emphasis on disappearance as an aesthetic strategy which resists simplified dichotomies as well as temporal, conceptual, and normative frames cannot be restricted to contemporary Chinese artists, though. As the examples discussed clearly indicate, the multiple flows of translocal ideas, materials, trends, forms, images, and agency increase the chances for urban creativity in China and its translocal site-responsiveness. The global networks, especially in

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

311

terms of trends, collaboration, and localities, are shared among the groups and communities interested in the novel forms of urban creativity. Their manifestations, events, and projects are negotiating the official discourse of urban aesthetics while the continuing exchange at various scales also enables the creation of translocal spaces in cities. The understanding of urban creativity as an organic process of translocal site-responsiveness provides alternative readings of artistic and creative practices in urban public space and their contingencies as well as challenges in terms of contemporaneity, engagement, and civic participation. The more nuanced analysis of the varying degrees of translocality of main variables – the forms of agency; manifestations; and site, place, and space – and the aspects of these variables facilitate better understanding of interdependence between urbanization and visual arts in Chinese cities today. Not only foreign practitioners, but also crews, groups, foundations, companies, and institutions are transforming the cities and the use of urban public space. At the same time, through employment of selected forms, methods, and aesthetics in relation to specific sites (e.g. Moganshan Road), places (e.g. old residential neighbourhoods in Beijing) or spaces (e.g. demolition sites), they facilitate new subjectivities and possibilities for envisioning one’s city, especially among the younger generations interested in reshaping the urban conditions. This more dynamic conceptual framework is especially helpful for examining the multilayered urban aesthetics and how it is de/ reconstructed in Chinese cities. The cases discussed show the variety of potential forms and manifestations of translocal site-responsiveness that are challenging the common norms of urban public space while also opening up sites for engagement and civic participation. From conceptual juxtaposition to varied forms of engagement and collaboration, foreign creators have inspired locals to experiment with artistic and creative practices to voice one’s concerns and hopes. As a long-term impact, Chinese artists, practitioners, and urbanites are being encouraged to proclaim spaces for urban creativity (e.g. walls of fame) and develop the forms to their own needs. In relation to Yang Fudong’s (杨福东, b. 1971) films, Craig Clunas maintains that the decision of whether to emphasize Chineseness or the contemporary and global connections of Yang’s works ‘is fundamentally a political one which has no easy, or indeed no definitive, answer’ (2009: 234-235). Similarly, the evaluations on the translocal site-responsiveness in urban creativity and its varying degrees of ‘locality’ or ‘translocality’ can be seen as political ones, as was the case with Urban Carpet. However, for two main reasons, the story of urban creativity in Mainland China cannot be told without translocality: first, because of the inevitable impact of mediated discourses and trends of

312 

Minna Val jakk a

European and American urban creativity since the 1990s in Mainland Chinese cities; and second, because of the active participation of foreign creators in major cities, especially in Beijing and Shanghai. This is not to belittle the Chinese creators’ impact. Quite the opposite, their efforts to adapt and develop styles and forms for their own needs deserve much more research. The focus on translocal site-responsiveness is also not to ignore the contradictions, issues, and unequal opportunities for projects and funding based on ethnicity and/or nationality for both Chinese and foreign artists and creators. The forces causing translocality are not necessarily positive (Low 2016: 202) and they may influence the complex dynamics of translocality in urban creativity, too: misinterpretations, frustrations, unjust treatment in terms of commissions, and questions of Western hegemony require more research in the future. As Low (2016: 203) rightfully maintains, translocality and translocal space nonetheless have the potential even to facilitate ‘the emergence of new political practices and the expansion of the public sphere.’ In relation to translocal site-responsiveness in urban creativity, the sites, works, and projects also become a vehicle of affective processes and knowledge exchange that broaden the understanding of the public sphere in Chinese cities today.

Bibliography Anderson, Colin L. (2012) Going ‘All City’: The Spatial Politics of Graffiti. Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture 5: 1-23. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Austro Sino Arts Program (2014) http://www.austrosinoartsprogram.org/, accessed 10 December 2015. Bengtsen, Peter (2013) Site Specif icity and Street Art. In Elkins, James, and McGuire, Kristi, with Burns, Maureen, Chester Alicia, and Kuennen, Joel (eds) Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline. London: Routledge, 250-253. Bengtsen, Peter (2014) The Street Art World. Lund: Almendros de Granada Press. Brickell, Katherine, and Datta, Ayona (2011) Introduction: Translocal Geographies. In Brickell, Katherine, and Datta, Ayona (eds) Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections. Burlington: Ashgate, 3-20. China Law Info (2013) www.chinalawinfo.com, accessed 4 March 2013. Chiu, Melissa (2006) Breakout: Chinese Art outside China. Milano: Charta.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

313

Chiu, Melissa (2011) Theories of Being Outside: Diaspora and Chinese Artists. In Genocchio, Benjamin, and Chiu, Melissa (eds) Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 327-345. Clark, John (1998) Modern Asian Art. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Clarke, David (2011) Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Clunas, Craig (2009) Art in China. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freitag, Ulrike, and von Oppen, Achim (eds) (2010) Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective. Leiden: Brill. Gao, Minglu (2008) ‘Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth’: Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art. In Smith, Terry, Enwezor, Okwui, and Condee, Nancy (eds) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham: Duke University Press, 133-164. Grierson, Elizabeth, and Sharp, Kristen (2013). Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization, and Urban Spaces. Bristol: Intellect. HKSAR law database (2013) http://www.legislation.gov.hk/index.htm, accessed 4 March 2013. Instant Hutong (2017). The Instant Hutong project. http://www.instanthutong.com/ index.html, accessed 16 February 2017. Kaid Ashton (2011a) Dignity in Labour: Beijing 1/2, http://kaidashton.blogspot. jp/2011/09/dignity-in-labour-beijing-12.html, 15 September accessed, 12 December 2015. Kaid Ashton (2011b) Dignity in Labour: Beijing 2/2, http://kaidashton.blogspot. jp/2011/09/dignity-in-labour-beijing-22.html, 21 September, accessed 12 December 2015. Kaid Ashton (2012) Saskatchewan Skies to Guangzhou Smog, http://kaidashton. blogspot.jp/2012/03/saskatchewan-skies-to-guangzhou-smog.html, 27 March, accessed 12 December 2015. Kester, Grant H. (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham: Duke University Press. Klanten, Robert, and Hübner, Matthias (eds) (2010) Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Spaces. Berlin: Gestalten. Kwon, Miwon (2000) One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity. In Suderburg, Erika (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 38-63. Kwon, Miwon (2004) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lippard, Lucy R. (1997) The Lure of the Local: Senses of the Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New Press.

314 

Minna Val jakk a

Low, Setha M. (2016) Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. New York: Routledge. Lü, Peng (2010) A History of Art in 20th-Century China. Trans. Doar, Bruce Gordon. Milan: Charta. Lü, Peng (2013) Fragmented Reality: Contemporary Art in 21st-Century China. Trans. Doar, Bruce Gordon. Milan: Charta. Oakes, Tim, and Schein, Louisa (2006) Translocal China: An Introduction. In Oakes, Tim, and Schein, Louisa (eds) Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space. London: Routledge, 1-35. Peking University law database (2013) www.pkulaw.cn, accessed 3 March 2013. Riggle, Nicholas Alden (2010) Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68(3): 243-257. Shao, Qin (2013) Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Silbergeld, Jerome (2009) Chinese Art, Made-in-America. In Silbergeld, Jerome, Liu, Cary Y., and Chin, Dora C.Y. Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum & P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art/New Haven: Yale University Press, 115-139. Smith, Terry (2008) Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question. In Smith, Terry, Enwezor, Okwui, and Condee, Nancy (eds) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1-19. State Council (2011), Chengshi shirong he huanjing weisheng guanli tiaoli [Regulations on the administration of city appearance and environmental sanitation]. 1992, rev. in 2011. http://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2011/content_1860772. htm, accessed 20 July 2015 and 21 December 2015. Valjakka, Minna (2014) Contesting the Levels of Il/legality of Urban Art Images in China. Revista de Cultura/Review of Culture, International Edition 45: 96-118. Valjakka, Minna (2015) Negotiating Spatial Politics: Site-Responsive Urban Art Images in Mainland China. China Information 29(2): 253-281. Valjakka, Minna (2016) Claiming Spaces for Urban Art Images in Beijing and Shanghai. In Ross, Jeffrey I. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art. London: Routledge, 357-387. Visser, Robin (2004) Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning. Journal of Contemporary China 13(39): 277-310. Visser, Robin (2010) Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Wacławek, Anna (2011) Graffiti and Street Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Wu, Hung (2005) Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tr anslocal Site-Responsiveness of Urban Creativit y in Mainl and China

315

Wu, Hung (2008) A Case of Being ‘Contemporary’: Condition, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art. In Smith, Terry, Enwezor, Okwui, and Condee, Nancy (eds) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham: Duke University Press, 290-306. Wu, Hung (2012) A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Young, Alison (2014) Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. London: Routledge.

About the author Minna Valjakka Adjunct Professor of Art History and Asian Studies, University of Helsinki; Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore [email protected] Minna Valjakka’s research on urban creativity in East and Southeast Asia is located at the nexus of art history and urban studies. Through a comparative approach she explores the discrepancies and contingencies of urban creativity in relation to civil society.

Index 798 art district 238, 243, 246, 270; see also art district; art village; East Village; M50; Songzhuang, Yuanmingyuan aesthetic gendered − 36 − practice/-s 212, 229-232, 278-279 − revolution 63, 66, 82 − strateg-y/-ies 23, 288, 310 documentary − 23, 35, 117, 120, 124 xianchang − 37, 39, 44, 50, 54, 243; see also sidewalk aesthetics 13, 15, 22, 24, 26, 61-62, 68-69, 76, 82, 93, 108, 125, 148, 241, 286, 290-291, 303, 305, 309-311 − of disappearance 69, 310 urban − 15, 26, 152, 280, 288-291, 296-298, 300, 302, 310-311 Agamben, Giorgio 231-232 agency/-ies 13, 15-16, 18, 21-22, 25-27, 44, 48, 118, 280, 285-286, 289-299, 308-311 civic − 15, 310 Ai Weiwei 67, 130, 191, 221, 249 Aitken, Ian 231 AK-47 69-70, 81, 278; see also Zhang Dali Appadurai, Arjun 292 appropriation 40, 54, 148, 201, 242 archive/-s 36, 38, 55, 90, 97, 242, 244, 246, 250, 254 art district 237-239, 241, 243, 246-248, 270, 296; see also 798 art district; art village; East Village; M50; Songzhuang; Yuanmingyuan art/-ist village/-s 237-239, 243-246, 250, 255-256; see also 798 art district; art district; East Village; M50; Songzhuang; Yuanmingyuan art/-istic practices 181, 183-184, 203, 262, 265, 286, 292, 305, see also artistic and creative practices visual − 15, 22, 88 artistic and creative practices 13-15, 17-18, 20-21, 24-25, 27, 285, 288-291, 293, 311; see also art practices Austro Sino Arts Program 295 avatar 217, 219 Avesani, Stefano 286, 290, 294 Balázs, Béla 231 ballet/-tic 214-215, 222, 226; see also dance; hip-hop banzheng 22, 262-265, 269-270, 275-281 Bengtsen, Peter 299-300, 303, 306 Beijing 13, 23, 26-27, 35-39, 41-42, 44-50, 55-57, 61, 66-71, 73, 77, 79-81, 89, 92-99, 101, 103-104, 118, 128, 140, 147-148, 152-160, 165-166, 168,

183, 185, 191, 203, 210-211, 216-219, 229, 237-246, 249-250, 256-257, 261-281, 285-286, 294-297, 302, 311-312 Beijing International Airport 154 Beijing Olympics 2008 103, 128, 147-148, 151-155; see also Olympics Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) 153-154, 158, 160 Berghuis, Thomas 184, 191, 242 Big Tail Elephant/Working Group 21-22, 25, 105, 181-186, 191-194, 198, 201, 203-205, 212, 295 billboards 24, 115-119, 121, 123-124, 126, 131, 133, 135, 138-141, 153, 158, 164 Bird’s Nest (the National Stadium) 103-104, 154-155, 162, 218-219, 261 Bishop, Claire 220-221, 232 Bislev, Ane 151 Black Cover Book 130, 191 body 41, 44-45, 47, 50, 55, 151, 164, 166, 182, 185, 196, 198, 200, 203-204, 217, 231, 241, 245-246, 253-254, 262, 275, 277, 280 Borysevicz, Mathieu 265 Boutonnet, Thomas 161 Brady, Anne-Marie 151 Braester, Yomi 15, 39, 148 Broudehoux, Anne-Marie 128, 268 Buddhist 36-37, 49, 52, 54-56; see also religion; religious Build a harmonious society 117, 119, 125, 130; see also Harmonious Society calligraphy 26, 93, 273, 275-277 public − 26, 261, 264, 275-280 street − 289 water − 46 Campa, Marcella 286, 290, 294 Campanella, Thomas 209-210; see also urban revolution Cao Fei 22, 25-26, 83, 209-214, 216, 218-224, 226, 229, 231-232, 239, 257, 277 Cao Xiuwen 306, 308-309 Castells, Manuel 25 censorship 18, 27, 55, 150, 185, 225, 241, 254 Chaoyang district 49, 158, 270 Chen Xiaomei 150 Chen Shaoxiong 25, 87, 88, 105-106, 182, 185, 191-193, 198, 201 Cheng Long 161 Cheng Zhanxiang 80 China Avant-Garde exhibition 185 China Civilization Office 163, 165, 167, 169, 172 China Pavilion 148, 164: see also Expo 2010; Shanghai Expo 2010 Chin-a/-ese Dream 51, 56, 117-119, 125, 128, 147, 151-152, 162-168, 170-171; see also Olympic Dream

318 

VISUAL ARTS, REPRESENTATIONS AND INTERVENTIONS IN CONTEMPOR ARY CHINA

Chinese Central Television (CCTV)/building/ tower 218-219, 261, 281 Chinese Photographers Association 165 Chineseness 200, 293, 309, 311 CITIC Plaza 182, 193-195 civic agency 15, 310; see also agency civic engagement 25, 220-221; see also civic participation; engagement; socially engaged art civic participation 13, 15, 25, 303, 310-311; see also civic engagement civilization/-ized 51, 63, 66, 78, 80, 82, 130, 151-152, 154, 160, 162-163, 168, 265-266, 271 civil society 14, 16, 18, 25, 27 Clunas, Craig 293, 311 collaboration/-s 13, 15, 17, 22, 25, 285, 288, 291, 296-298, 308-311 collective body 185 commercialization 139, 190, 203; see also commodification; consumer culture; consumerism, consumption commodity/-ies 116, 131, 134, 137, 139; see also commodification; consumer culture; consumerism; consumption commodi/-fication/-fied/-tized 38, 40, 69, 268; see also commercialization conceptual photography 115-117, 119, 124; see also photography construction 44, 48, 61, 70, 73-75, 78, 80, 87-90, 92-94, 97, 100-101, 103-105, 108, 117-118, 123, 126, 128, 131-132, 135, 139-140, 154, 160, 164, 181-182, 187-188, 190, 192-198, 214, 218, 220, 238, 248, 265, 269 − elevator/-s 193, 196-198 − site/-s 97, 100, 103, 117, 126, 140, 160, 164, 181-182, 187, 192-193, 195, 265, 269 consumer culture 134, 138, 141; see also commercialization; commodification; consumerism; consumption consumerism 24, 39, 115-117, 120, 133, 137, 141, 183, 225; see also commercialization; commodification; consumer culture; consumption consumption 116, 131, 133-135, 138, 141, 192, 195, 222; see also commodity; commodification; consumer culture; consumerism contemporaneity 81, 309 contemporary graffiti 287-289, 295-297, 300; see also graffiti; inscription Cui Zi’en 50 cultural activism 13-18, 21, 25, 27, 88 cultural and creative industries (CCI) 19-20 Cultural Revolution 45, 49, 62, 89-90, 93, 168, 190 Dai Guangyu 23, 61-62, 71-74, 79, 82 Dan’er 99 dance/-ing 36, 39, 41, 44-48, 50, 53, 57, 213-214, 216, 221, 225-229, 231-232, 277 plaza – 45

social − 23, 35-36, 39, 44-46 see also ballet, hip-hop Dazhai 147 defacement 26, 261, 264, 269-275, 280 demolition 20, 70-71, 80, 89, 92-95, 105, 118-119, 124, 126, 128, 171, 187, 210, 247, 301, 305, 310-311 Deng Xiaoping 89, 119, 123, 150, 186 destruction 62, 70-71, 73, 78-80, 87, 90, 92-94, 97, 108, 123, 182, 196, 305 Deutsche, Rosalyn 184, 194, 204 Development is the most important principle 117, 119 Dezio 296 dialogue 27, 70, 76, 97, 232, 266, 278, 304 Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands 164 disenchantment 56, 225 distribution of the sensible 63, 68 documentary/-ies 17, 20, 23, 35-37, 39-41, 44, 49, 51, 54-56, 95, 108, 124-126, 139, 210-211, 213, 228, 237, 240, 242-244, 246, 248-250, 256 − aesthetic/-s 23, 35, 117, 120, 124; see also xianchang − film/-s 22, 26, 44, 237, 240, 242-244, 246, 248-250, 256 − photography 90 − realism 36-38, 124 DV − 35, 38-39 see also independent domicide 71, 210, 305; see also Shao Qin Dongcheng district 158, 263, 265-266 Donald, Stephanie 268 Dreyer, Jacob 151 East Village 94, 191, 242; see also 798 art district; art district; art village; M50; Songzhuang: Yuanmingyuan − artists 191 engagement/-s 13, 44, 82, 181, 184, 188, 201, 209-210, 212-213, 220, 228, 240-243, 285-286, 288, 291-294, 298-299, 302, 311 artistic – 24-25, 183 bodily − 182 creative − 37 political − 220, 232 site-based − 184 site-specific− 194 social − 17, 291, 294 see also civic engagement; socially engaged art Esarey, Ashley 149 ethical 47, 66, 70, 212-213, 220, 222, 231-232, 239 − practice 212, 229-232 ethics 77 eviction 61, 126, 128, 238-241, 243-244, 246 experimental art/-ist 25, 183, 205 Expo 2010 126, 128, 164; see also China Pavilion; Shanghai Expo 2010

319

Index

flânerie 211 floating population 200, 267 feminist 37, 38, 52 − cinema 35 – film-making 38 Feng Zikai 168 Fengjing 306, 309 film festival/-s 22, 36-39, 49, 52, 239-240, 243, 249-256 Florida, Richard 19 Forbidden City 97, 155 foreign/-er/-s 22, 77, 116, 154, 158, 160-161, 200, 227, 242, 245, 269, 285-286, 290, 293-298, 300, 306, 310-312 Foucault, Michel 148, 150, 170, 213-214, 217, 222 functional site 183, 194, 203 Gao Minglu 271 generic city 211, 216 Geng Jun 252 Geng Yanbo 76 geomancy 71, 73 gestural/-ity 26, 209, 213, 229, 231-232, 239, 276-277 Gibson, William 217 global 18-19, 25, 27, 66-67, 107, 121, 148, 151-152, 154, 158, 160-161, 240, 262, 278, 282, 285-286, 289-294, 298, 300, 308-311 − capitalism 15, 75 − city/-ies 36, 44, 85, 98, 103, 184, 281 − consumer/-ism/culture 116, 138 − market 131 − metropolis 116 − urbanism 19-20, 39, 90 globalization 18-19, 21, 26, 42, 56, 148, 150, 200, 203, 209, 305, 308, 310 graffiti 96-98, 171, 210, 212, 262, 267, 276, 278, 288, 290, 297-298, 299, 305; see also contemporary graffiti; inscription Great Wall 118, 147-148, 155, 162, 164 Gu Zheng 90 Guangzhou 98, 105-106, 123, 181-183, 185-195, 197-201, 203, 210-211, 214-215, 221-222, 239, 296-297, 300 Gutian Conference 149 Guo Jingjing 161 Hangzhou 79, 107-109, 126, 265 Hansen, Miriam 226 Harmonious Society 125, 148, 151, 161-162, 164; see also Build a harmonious society Hardt, Michael 70 Harvey, David 66, 75, 263 heterotopi-a/-s/-c 26, 54, 209, 212-218, 221-222, 224, 226, 229, 232 Hildebrandt, Christine 214 hip-hop 214, 216, 297; see also ballet; dance Ho, Elaine W. 13 HomeShop 13-14, 18, 290

Hou Hanru 107, 184, 186, 194-195, 200, 203 housing rental market 190 Hsing, You-tien 137 Huang Wenhai 50-51 Hu Jie 239, 243-246, 248-249, 252, 257 Hu Jintao 119, 125, 161-162, 164 Huxian 168 independent 237-244, 250-252, 254, 256 − documentary 17, 22, 26, 36-37, 41, 44, 51, 124, 228, 240, 242 − documentary makers 36, 124 − film 38, 243, 249-250 − film-makers 17, 26, 36, 239, 241, 244, 249, 251, 254 see also documentary inequality/-ies 24, 61-62, 66, 81-82, 88, 115, 117, 128, 131, 135, 138, 141, 161, 268, 281, 310 innovations 14, 22 Inri 88, 95 inscription/-s 26, 71, 93, 275, 277; see also graffiti; contemporary graffiti interaction/-s 19, 22, 40, 97, 191, 203, 211, 246, 248-249, 252, 290-291, 293-294, 299 citizen-state – 267 micro-urbanism – 294 see also interconnectedness; interdependence; interface; interrelation; intersection; reciprocal relationship interconnectedness 16, 296, 299-300, 306; see also interaction; interdependence; interface; interrelations; intersection; reciprocal relationship interdependence 15, 19, 26, 27, 90, 285, 292, 298-299, 303, 311; see also interaction; interconnectedness; interface; interrelation; intersection; reciprocal relationship interface/-s 14-15; see also intersection Internet 128, 151, 153, 163, 167, 169, 172, 217, 251 interrelation/-s 13, 15-16, 20, 26, 285; see also interaction; interconnectedness; interdependence; interface; intersection; reciprocal relationship intersection/-s 190, 238; see also interaction; interconnectedness, interdependence, interface; interrelation; reciprocal relationship intervention/-s 13, 17, 19, 21-22, 24-25, 149, 181, 184, 194, 204-205, 225, 227, 245, 285-300, 302; see also urban insertion; urban intervention Ji Jianye 78 Jia Zhangke 37, 50, 56 Jiang Pengyi 88, 104-105 Jiang Yue 39, 57 Jiang Zemin 78, 119, 154 Jin Feng 22, 23, 61-65, 82 Jin Mao Tower 97 Jin Yuanpu 163

320 

VISUAL ARTS, REPRESENTATIONS AND INTERVENTIONS IN CONTEMPOR ARY CHINA

Johnson, Ian 166 juxtaposition/-s 62, 108, 155, 199, 300, 302, 305, 311 Kaid Ashton 300-303, 305 Kester, Grant 220, 286, 302 Koolhaas, Rem 100, 103, 211, 216, 218 Kwon, Miwon 184, 303 Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Fotini 13 Lee, Joyce 166 Lefebvre, Henri 19, 62, 67, 75, 120, 184, 263 Li Keqiang 164 Li Xianting 246, 250-253 Li Zhang 134 Liang Juhui 25, 181-182, 185-186, 192, 196-197, 201-202 Liang Sicheng 80 Liaoning aircraft carrier 164 Lin Gang 166-167 Lin Yilin 25, 181-182, 185, 187, 192 Liu Haomei 161 Liu Huan 161 Liu Xiang 160 Liu Yuyi 161 Liu Zhigui 168-169, 171 Liulitun 95 local/-s/-ness 19-21, 27, 99, 107, 137, 149, 158, 170, 211, 216, 238, 240, 245, 248, 250, 252, 255, 262263, 268, 285-286, 288-294, 296, 297-303, 305-306, 308-310; see also translocal loneliness 42, 48, 228 Low, Setha 292, 296, 312 Lu Xun 228 Lynch, Kevin 76 M50 296; see also 798 art district; art district; art village; East Village; Songzhuang Yuanmingyuan magical 209 − metropolises 26, 209, 213, 225 Malland, Julien 304-310; see also Seth Globepainter Mahoney, Josef 151 manifestation/-s 16-17, 21, 26-27, 74, 110, 120, 128, 153, 240, 285, 289-293, 298, 311 Mao Zedong 63, 79, 147, 149, 152, 168, 218, 277 − Thought 147, 152 Maoist 89-90, 100, 135, 149, 162, 268 maquette 218 marketization 210; see also commercialization mass line 149-150 memoricide 71 Meng Wawa 166 mianzi 261, 269-271, 275, 281 Miao Xiaochun 88, 102-103 migrant/-s 22, 66, 76-77, 103, 131, 134, 137, 183, 200, 244, 263-264, 267-268, 274-275 − labour/-ers 196, 264, 274-275, 277

− workers 21, 26, 45, 70, 126, 131, 133, 135, 140, 170, 186, 198, 261, 263-265, 267-268, 271, 273-274, 280-281; see also workers mimicry 191, 201 miraculous images 56 mobilization 124, 221, 246 modernity 53, 62, 69, 80, 103, 137, 141, 225, 228, 231-232 montage 55, 210-211, 214, 226, 229, 231, 251 moving image 25, 103, 209-211, 219, 239 MUPIs (mobilier urbain pour l’information) 153-154, 164 mural/-s 108, 266, 289, 306, 308-310 music 45, 213, 223, 225-226, 228-229, 232 − video 214, 221 Nakamura, Lisa 217 Nanjing 78 National Basketball Association 158 neo-liberal/-ism 26, 36-37, 50-51, 55-56, 209, 220-221, 262, 268 New Documentary Movement 23, 35-37, 39-40 Nirenzhang 166 Ni Weihua 22, 24, 115-117, 119, 140, 165 Ning Ying 39, 57 Olympic/-s 50, 103, 128, 147-148, 152, 154-155, 158, 160-162, 164, 218-219, 216; see also Beijing Olympics 2008 − Dream/-ing 152-153, 162 − Games 151-152, 155 Green – 154-155 High-tech – 154-155 Humanistic − 154 Ong, Aihwa 268 One World, One Dream 153, 155-157 OOPS crew 297 Open Door policy 89, 186 oppositional 184, 205, 221 Oriental Pearl television tower 218 Ou Ning 210, 241, 257 Ouyang Xiao 13 participation 14-16, 26, 161, 211, 213, 220-222, 224-226, 232, 248, 268, 292, 294, 296, 298, 312; see also engage participatory art 100, 212, 220-221, 223, 232; see also socially engaged art Pearl River Delta 183, 186, 211, 216, 218 peasant painting/-s 168, 306, 308-309 performance 20, 23, 26, 39-40, 45, 91, 97-98, 100, 117, 130, 181-182, 184-185, 188, 190-198, 201, 203, 223-224, 226-227, 231, 237, 239-240, 242-243, 246-247, 249, 252-256, 261, 268, 271, 279 − art 184, 191-192, 203, 242, 253 performative construction 48 place 13, 17, 26-27, 37, 50, 52, 56, 69, 71, 79, 89-90, 94-95, 105, 107-108, 133, 194, 198-200, 214-216, 226-227, 241-242, 264, 266, 268, 274, 277,

Index

285, 288, 290-294, 296, 299, 303, 308, 311; see also site; space photographic intervention 300; see also Kaid Ashton photography 15, 20, 22-24, 87-92, 99, 100, 104, 106, 110, 117, 124-125, 140, 165, 185, 190, 279 conceptual – 115-117, 119, 124 documentary – 90 street – 289 prostitution 190 protest 17, 26, 28, 76, 237-243, 245-249, 251-256 public calligraphy 26, 261, 264, 273, 275-280; see also calligraphy public space/-s 14, 17, 24, 37, 44-45, 77, 93, 97, 115, 120, 126, 130, 133, 147-148, 152, 160, 164, 170, 184, 192, 212, 243, 247-248, 256, 261, 264-271, 273-275, 279-280, 298; see also public sphere; urban public space; urban space public sphere 24, 27, 243, 276, 312; see also public space; urban public space Qiu Zhijie 273-275, 280 QR-code 166 Rancière, Jacques 23, 61, 63, 68, 274 real estate 40, 42, 103-104, 117, 131, 135, 137, 139-140, 188, 190, 196, 216, 218, 228-229, 248 reciprocal relationship/-s 186, 212, 291-292; see also interconnectedness, interdependence, interface; interrelation; intersection Red Gate Gallery 295 redemption 37, 213 re-enchant/-ed/-ing/-ment 26, 53, 209, 213, 224-225, 227-229, 232 religion 38, 51-52, 55, 225; see also Buddhist; religious religious 55, 213, 225; see also Buddhist; religion Ren Mingzhao 171-172 representation/-s 13-15, 17, 19, 21-23, 25, 44, 51, 55, 62, 68, 82, 92, 94, 104, 116, 120, 139, 149, 155, 164, 213-214, 241, 243, 245, 249, 254, 256, 295 resistance 17, 51, 69, 73, 77, 238-240, 243, 246-249, 254, 256, 310 rightful − 248 Reynaud, Bérénice 37, 55 Riggle, Nicholas Alden 299 right to the city 74-75, 239, 263 Rockwell, Norman 166 Rofel, Lisa 17, 220 Rong Rong 88, 94-96 ruins 20, 51, 62, 63-67, 80, 94-98, 100, 245, 305 Ruttmann, Walter 210 Saler, Michael 225 Sanyuanli village 210-211 Schmatzberger, Alice 210 Scientific Development 151 sensory-reflexive 226

321 Seth Globepainter 304; see also Malland, Julien Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 82 Shanghai 24, 27, 63-64, 92, 97-98, 113, 115-117, 120-121, 123, 126, 128, 130-132, 133, 135, 137, 139-140, 148, 164, 210, 218, 296-297, 300, 304-306, 312 – 2010 German Chinese Hip Hop Project 297 – Expo 2010 148, 297; see also China Pavilion; Expo 2010 Shao Qin 210, 305; see also domicide Shenyang 297 Shenzhen 123, 186, 210, 296-297 sidewalk 23, 35, 38-45, 48, 50, 54 Siemens Art Project 214 Sigley, Gary 151 Silbergeld, Jerome 309 Sinopec Towers 193, 196, 198 site 105, 130, 182-183, 193-194, 199, 286, 291, 296, 298-300 − based 183-184, 203-204 − oriented 181, 299, 303 − responsiveness 26, 285, 290-291, 294, 297, 300, 302, 304-308, 310-312; see also translocal − specific/-ity 181, 183-184, 194, 200, 204, 285, 289, 303 skyscrapers 20, 108, 123, 137-138, 193 Smith, Terry 80, 309 social − control 115, 141 − injustices 14 − media 39, 240, 251-253, 288; see also WeChat, Weibo − process 223, 294 socially engaged art 22, 211-212; see also engagement; participatory art socialism 26, 168, 209 Songzhuang 38, 238-239, 243, 246, 250-251, 253-254, 256; see also 798 art district; art district; art village; East Village; M50; Yuanmingyuan Soviet Union 80 spatial politics 26, 296, 298 Special Economic Zones 186 spectacle/-s 16, 24, 44, 94, 115, 117, 124, 139, 191, 262 spectacular/-ly 21, 24, 44, 116-118, 131, 139, 141, 261, 265 spectral/-ity 23, 35-36, 39, 48-53, 55-56 − realism 23, 35, 38 − temporality 35 Stone, Allucquere Rosa 217 street art 26, 285, 288, 290, 295-296, 299, 303-304, 308-309; see also urban art subversive 191, 245, 248, 288, 299 suzhi 151, 154 Szeman, Imre 15

322 

VISUAL ARTS, REPRESENTATIONS AND INTERVENTIONS IN CONTEMPOR ARY CHINA

Tang Zehui 295 Tao Yuanming 95 Tarocco, Francesca 56 Taussig, Michael 264, 269, 271, 273-274 Temple of Heaven 155 temporality 35, 48, 50, 54, 96, 110, 131 Ten Bos, René 232 Three Gorges dam 218 Three Represents 151 Tiananmen 210, 218 − Gate 147-148, 162, 164, 218 − Square 20, 81, 165, 185, 245-246, 277 Tianhe district 193, 195 transformation 14, 21-22, 24, 26, 61, 63, 66, 68-70, 73, 75-77, 82, 87-89, 97, 100, 106-108, 117-118, 120, 123, 130-131, 135, 138, 141, 163, 186, 209, 213, 218, 220, 222, 261, 271, 294, 298 transi/-ent/-tory/-ence 23, 87, 89-91, 96, 104-108, 199 transit/-ion 44, 68, 90, 105, 199-200 translocal 26-27, 239, 285, 290-298, 300, 302-303, 305-306, 308, 310-312 − site-responsiveness 26, 285, 290-291, 294, 300, 302, 304-308, 310-312 translocality 285, 290, 292, 296-298, 305, 311-312 unofficial 26, 237-242, 244-246, 248, 250 urban − advertisements 139 − aesthetic practices 279 − aesthetics 15, 26, 61, 152, 280, 288-291, 296-298, 300, 302, 310-311 − art 204, 224, 288-289; see also street art − artistic practice 183, 204 − artwork/-s 181, 183, 220, 224 − contract 15-16, 39 – creativity 288-292, 295-296, 298-299, 300, 302-303, 305-306, 310-312 − development 17-18, 21, 24, 40, 62, 87-88, 91-93, 96, 98, 101, 123, 139, 193, 210, 229, 237 − environment/-s 15, 26-27, 62, 68, 70, 77, 105, 118, 148, 165, 171, 181-182, 184, 190-191, 194, 198-199, 204, 240, 256, 280, 285-286, 292, 300, 305-306 − generation/cinema 37-39, 239 − insertion 25, 181, 183-184, 194, 201-205, 212; see also intervention − intervention/-s 13-14, 17, 21-22, 24-25, 149, 181; see also intervention − knitting 289, 300 − landscape 23, 35-36, 61-62, 97, 103, 151, 170, 198, 256, 268 − public space 24, 27, 115-119, 124, 137, 141, 148, 212, 286, 288-290, 298-299, 311; see also public space; public sphere; urban space − revolution 19, 61-62, 68, 78-79, 81, 89

− space/-s 13, 15-16, 18-23, 25-27, 40, 53, 62, 76, 81, 98, 105, 120, 124, 128, 134-135, 137, 183-184, 201, 204, 209, 211, 222, 225-226, 237-243, 256, 266, 271, 279, 288, 294, 310 − spatial practice 203-204 urbanism 19-20, 24, 39, 90, 115, 238, 262, 294; see also global urbanism urbanization 13-16, 18-21, 23, 26-27, 37, 42, 61-62, 66-67, 69, 75, 81-82, 87-89, 92, 98, 103-105, 116-117, 119, 128, 131, 138-141, 149, 170, 182-183, 192, 203, 208-210, 212, 231-232, 238-239, 241, 243, 265, 268, 271, 277-278, 280, 288, 290, 292, 294, 305, 308-311 utopia/-n/-s 61, 62, 82, 213, 217, 245-246, 265 vanguard 191-192 village in the city 211 violence 61-67, 70, 78, 82, 97, 117, 124-126 Visser, Robin 15-16, 92, 94, 135, 288, 290, 310 visual arts 13-25, 27, 82, 88, 91, 117, 149, 210, 212, 292-293, 306, 308-311 visual art practice/-s 14-15, 22, 88; see also aesthetic practice; art practice; artistic and creative practice Wacławek, Anna 299-300 Wallace, Brian 295 Walta, Akim 297 Wang Fuchun 279 Wang Hongwei 251-252 Wang Jinsong 88, 93 Wang Qingsong 88, 101 Wang Wo 239, 243, 250-251, 253, 255-257 Wang Xizhi 273 warfare 61-67 Water Cube (The Beijing National Aquatics Center) 154-155, 261 Weber, Max 225 WeChat 252-256; see also social media, Weibo Weibo 163; see also social media, WeChat Whiteman, Maria 15 Wildlife 198 workers 45, 70, 97, 101, 103, 132, 195-196, 211, 214-216, 221-224, 226-227, 247-248, 251, 263-265, 267-268, 271, 273-275, 280-281 working group 185 Wu Fulong 19 Wu Hung 16, 94, 97, 191, 205, 294, 308 Wu Wenguang 37, 40-41, 57, 228, 245, 248, 257 Wuhan 297 Xi Jinping 118, 150, 152, 162, 166, 168 xianchang 23, 35-37, 39, 44-45, 47-48, 50, 54-55, 242-243 Xiaopu village 239, 250-251 Xie Shaoqing 168 Xingta village 308 Xinyi village 306 Xu Tan 25, 181-182, 185, 188-189, 191, 201-202

Index

Yang Fudong 311 Yang Lina 22-23, 35, 37-38, 42-43, 46-47, 51, 53, 57 Yangzhou 78, 297 Yanjiao village 251 Yao Ming 161 Yen Yuehping 264, 275, 277 Yi Qing 168 Yu Hua 61 Yuanmingyuan 238-239, 242-246, 248, 250, 252, 254-256; see also 798 art district; art district; art village; East Village; M50; Songzhuang

323 Zhang Dali 22-23, 61-62, 65, 67-71, 73-82, 88, 96-98, 183, 210, 212, 278-280, 290, 295; see also AK-47 Zhang Peili 87-88, 107-108, 110 Zhang Yuan 37, 39, 57 Zhao Liang 50, 239, 242-246, 248-249, 257 Zhao Meng 155 Zhao Yanxia 154 Zheng Kuo 239, 243, 246, 249, 255-257 Zhuang Hui 87-88, 99 Zhu Fadong 268, 280 Zhuihun 252-253 zombie 228-229