Beautiful ephemera and extraordinary transformations

Chen Hangfeng, 'Where the Wind Comes From' 2011

Here are two links to the new work by Chen Hangfeng, whom I interviewed in his studio in Shanghai in April this year. I love the way he incorporates a deep knowledge of Chinese traditions of the scholar painters and the literati, and yet uses materials which contain their own comment about the nature of contemporary society and our cavalier use of non-recyclable materials. In particular, his use of plastic, and plastic bags, strikes a chord with anyone who has ever walked through a Chinese city (and especially the outskirts of big cities such as Shanghai or Beijing) as plastic bags and pieces of discarded plastic litter the ground everywhere you look, and dusty pieces of plastic float in the wind. Chen makes works which make wry comments about contemporary life in Shanghai, but contain within them many references to Chinese tradition, culture and folk art. His work is serious yet whimsical, and combines a tongue-in- cheek wry humour in his observations of his world, with an awareness of the power of art to make one think anew about things we might have taken for granted (such as vegetable gardens - see previous post). 



http://vimeo.com/29653143


http://www.wkshanghai.com/blog/?p=3094



This new work, "Where the wind comes from" is a development of an earlier piece, "Wind from West' which consists of depictions of plants such as plum blossom, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo - “the Four Gentlemen” of literati lore, rendered in pieces cut from black plastic rubbish bags. The leaves of the plants are affixed with pins ("somewhat like a dead scarab beetle pinned to a piece of Styrofoam" says the artist), which suggests the memento mori, or the museum. A row of  fans mounted on the side of the work causes a periodic rustling of the leaves, "yet despite these wayward modern disturbances, when the wind stops, the leaves always return to their original position".See this earlier work here: http://vimeo.com/15700276


Both pieces also remind me of a work by Xu Bing I saw in an exhibition in New York last year. This fascinating show, 'Dead or Alive' at the Museum of Arts and Design, explored the many ways that artists work with nature, the natural world, and unexpected materials ranging from bones, to feathers, to leaves, to beetles and skeletal parts. Xu Bing's 'Background Story' at first sight appeared to be a traditional, lyrical, Chinese scholar painting depicting mountains and water on a scroll or screen. On closer examination this proved to be all a fake, a 'shadow world': when you looked behind the screen you saw that the apparently beautiful landscape was made up of rubbish and detritus, casting shadows onto a frosted glass screen. A whole new definition of 'the floating world'.


Yet another artist working in a similar vein is Yao Lu, with photographic works such as 'Early Spring on Lake Dong Ting', 2008. I saw these works in Hong Kong at the Galerie du Monde in an exhibition of contemporary photography, 'Capturing Cathay'. Once again, apparently traditional and beautiful Chinese landscapes, on closer viewing, prove to be made of refuse, plastic garbage bags and all the detritus of the growing cities and their fast-paced throw away materialist culture.

Yao Lu, Lake Dong Ting, Photograph, 2008

Yibian xuexi Hanyu, yibian ku

The Emperor's Garden in the Forbidden City - attempting to learn Chinese is like scaling  rocks!

Wondering how to avoid becoming completely demoralised about my efforts to learn Chinese, I have been dutifully going over vocabulary lists and repeating words and phrases out loud, much to the annoyance of my family. My feelings of frustration are partly my own fault due to juggling work, life and everything else and therefore neglecting to do the necessary amounts of homework, but partly it's the sheer difficulty of learning a language so different to any European one. Last week was the first lesson of a new term. I entered the room with great optimism and enthusiasm, and left it again two hours later feeling thoroughly dejected. In part this was due to the arrival of a new student with far more fluent Chinese than I feel mine will ever be, who can confidently engage the teacher in conversation, while my attempts are still stumbling simple sentences that make me feel (and no doubt look) like a halfwit. And partly due to a growing feeling that I have engaged on an almost impossible endeavour. I am ashamed of any moment in my 30 years of teaching when I have been less than patient with a student who has struggled with learning something new!


Here is a sentence from this week's chapter of 'Integrated Chinese' (but without tones indicated): " Xie Hanzi, kaishi juede nan, changchang lianxi, jiu juede rongyi" meaning "When you first learn to write Chinese characters, you would find it difficult. If you practise often, you would find it easy." 


I am sorry, but this is clearly a lie. My more truthful, indeed hearfelt, sentence is this: "Wo yibian xuexi Zhongwen, yibian ku" (At the same time as I study Chinese, I weep")



Speaking of lies, I have been reading Jan Wong's earlier book, 'Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now' which recounts her experiences as one of the very few foreign students at Beijing University during the 1970s in the crucial period of the power struggle between the Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping. Unlike her more recent 'Chinese Whispers' (see previous post) this gives a more complete picture of the time, and of the experience of young Chinese of her own generation, the generation which missed so much of their education through being sent to the countryside to work alongside the peasants and study 'Mao Zedong Thought'. In 'Chinese Whispers' she discovers the consequences of her naive denunciation of a fellow student who had asked for assistance to leave China and go to the United States. Reading 'Red China Blues', however, I discovered that there was another, even more unforgivable act of betrayal: she is invited to dinner by a friend of one of her North American professors and his wife, two Beijing intellectuals whose careers had been destroyed by the Anti-Rightist campaigns. They asked for her help to get their daughter out of China. Without hesitation she reported them to university authorities. Embarrassed by being the daughter of the wealthy owner of a string of Chinese restaurants, she believed she was going back to Canada to be 'Beijing Jan', something  like 'Hanoi Jane', in order to bring revolution to the decadent West. Despite my unease about aspects of her writing, it is certainly brave to admit this youthful foolishness, particularly when it had such terrible consequences. She says, "I do not know what happened to Professor Zhao and his family...May God forgive me; I don't think they ever will."

 the image of revolutionary China as a socialist utopia  in which Jan Wong so fervently believed

The chapter that especially fascinated me, though, was about the popular uprising that took place in Tiananmen Square in 1976 after the death of Zhou Enlai. Thousands of people left wreaths and poems, many of them attacking the seventh century Tang Empress Wu Zetian, who reigned after her husband's death: a thinly veiled attack on Madame Mao. There were outpourings of grief in other cities too, in Hangzhou, Zhengzhou and Nanjing. This threat could not be tolerated - the wreaths and poems were removed and the square was cordoned off. The Ministry of Public Security reported that hundreds of demonstrators were beaten and four thousand were arrested. If there was a death toll, it was a state secret. There are some eerie parallels here to later events.


This afternoon at a picnic I met a teacher who studied at Beijing University in the early 1990s, on exchange from Sydney University. She described a very similar experience of constant monitoring and control of the foreign students, but not being a fervent convert to 'Mao Zedong Thought' such as Jan Wong twenty years earlier, she decided to come home and abandon her studies after a PLA soldier pointed a gun at her as she tried to re-enter her locked dormitory after curfew. So fascinating that the stories people recount to me about their experiences of China are all so different, yet there are threads which connect them, both positive and negative.



Jan Wong's book, and also Lijia Jiang's memoir of the 1980s, 'Socialism is Great' are evocative reminders of the daily life of so many people for so long - and the far-reaching effects of that time on current generations. But I thought about my meeting with artist Shi Qing in Shanghai, and his response when I told him how sad  I found his 'Factory Farm' installation, inspired by the Danwei (work unit) in Mongolia where he grew up. He said, "The past is neither sweet nor bitter, it just is." This says something about Chinese resilience, and also about determination, but like the workers leaving poems about Tang Dynasty Empresses as dangerous political comment, it also speaks of the interconnectedness of past and present in China.

Shi Qing, 'Factory', installation photographed at ShanghArt Taopu by Luise Guest and reproduced with the permission of the artist and ShanghArt Gallery

Chinese Whispers / Singapore Stories

Life After Death, Justin Lee, at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

On the plane coming home from Singapore I began to read Jan Wong's 'Chinese Whispers', her excruciating, harrowing, sometimes funny and sometimes very moving account of her quest to track down a fellow student from Beijing University where she had studied in the years immediately following the dramatic upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. At the time Wong was the first foreign (Canadian of Chinese descent) student to be admitted to the university, and an ardent Maoist. A fellow student approached her and asked for her help to get to America. Wong made the momentous decision to denounce her to the university authorities. By her own account, in the intervening 30 years, working as a Beijing-based foreign correspondent and then back in North America, she forgot all about this incident. It was only when she re-read her old diaries that she began to realise the enormity of what she had done, and begin (somewhat belatedly, some might think) to feel a great weight of guilt and remorse. The book recounts her quest in 2006 to find out what happened to this student. 


Without revealing too much, it  goes without saying that the consequences of her action were catastrophic. Despite some reservations about books of this quest-like and somewhat confessional nature (it is too easy to imagine the conversations with her agent and publisher, negotiating a book deal and a trip back to China) I found that I couldn't put it down. I especially enjoyed her astonishment, amusement and dismay at the enormous changes in China and in Beijing since she had last lived there in the 1990s - the condos for the wealthy, the emphasis on flashy designer labels, the BMWs and Mercedes, the shiny new pre-Olympics architecture and shopping malls. And the wholesale destruction of ancient neighbourhoods and significant buildings. All this in contrast with the wages and conditions of the migrant construction workers and maids (once a Maoist.....)


 I recognised much in her descriptions from my own bemused wanderings in Beijing,  although I agree to some extent with those who suggest that the foreigners (and it is mostly foreigners) who are eager to save the old courtyard houses in the hutongs are engaging in a kind of orientalism, a nostalgic chinoiserie of blue jackets, cloth shoes and bicycles.

So, despite being in Singapore and immersing myself in the colonial architecture, the food (fabulous as always) and the chaos and colour of Little India, I found myself thinking about the Chinese diaspora and the ways that it has played out in the artworld internationally, most particularly of course since 1989.  Similarly to Hong Kong, many of the commercial galleries were showing works by Chinese painters from the mainland. However I enjoyed quirky works by Lu Yifei painted on the covers of old books - these have a somewhat Japanese 'kawaii' or cute aesthetic which is also found in much contemporary graphic design. Lu was born in Shandong Province but studied and now lives and works in Singapore. In contrast, I also enjoyed the strong review show at the Lasalle College of the Arts (where Lu Yifei also studied) of abstract painter Ian Woo. 

Ian Woo

Lyrical and beautiful without descending into empty gesture or ever becoming formulaic, this body of work represents a practice of unremitting commitment and a single-minded examination of the possibilities of colour, mark and surface. Owing a debt to Philip Guston or Susan Rothenberg, as well as to canonical abstract painters such as Kline and Motherwell, the resulting series reveals nevertheless a powerful and idiosyncratic visual language. 


And the other huge surprise was the campus building - an  extraordinary sculptural edifice of glass and tilting planes. Designed by RSP Architects and completed in 2007 the project represented Singapore in the architectural section of the Venice Biennale in 2004. 

Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore

That a city of this size has three significant  art and design schools is interesting, although the quality of what was on show in the various gallery spaces was variable. A show running concurrently in the smaller gallery space at Lasalle, Ava Tan's "Woman, Body, Fetish" exploring the representation of the female body in a series of paintings offered little that is new, despite some energetic and expressive painterly surfaces.


At the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Gallery (NAFA)  "Sooner or Later this Happens to Everyone, Everyone" included conceptual works by Erica Lai, Joey Soh and Miguel Chew. These were perhaps more interesting in their conceptualisation by the artists than in the experience of the audience. The always interesting experimental Substation on Armenian Street showed an installation by Bruce Quek, "The Hall of Mirrors". So it would seem that the vital signs of the visual arts in Singapore are in good shape, despite all the usual problems faced by artists everywhere, and others which are unique to this small city of so many diverse cultural traditions and languages. One very strong thread seems to be the interest in design in all its forms, and the breaking down of barriers between artists, architects and graphic designers in particular. The Red Dot Design Museum had a steady stream of Singaporean visitors while I was there, and the works of Zxerokool (see previous post) and Justin Lee demonstrate the successful hybridisation of art and design.

Tupperware Display at the Red Dot Design Museum

Justin Lee installation at the Asian Civilisations Museum