Finding Poetry in Wan Chai: 4 Women Artists in Hong Kong

Jaffa Lam, an installation in the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards at the Hong Kong Art Museum

On the way from Sydney to Beijing I had 4 days in Hong Kong in which to criss-cross the city (Star Ferry, MTR, red minibuses, trams and taxis, as well as a LOT of walking) visiting artists' studios in Fo Tan, Kennedy Town and on university campuses; and galleries in Central, Chai Wan and other locations. I have been interested for a long time in the way in which contemporary art in Hong Kong differs from that on the Mainland, and the much more limited opportunities that artists there are afforded. In the past some have told me bitterly that they feel they are regarded as insufficiently Chinese to interest collectors. I wondered whether that is changing, after the big Saatchi 'Hong Kong Eye' show and all the hoo-ha about the development of West Kowloon into a massive cultural centre, incuding M+ which will house Uli Sigg's very significant collection of contemporary Chinese art.

On past trips to Hong Kong I have met and interviewed Lam Tung-pang, Hanison Hok-shing Lau, Wong Chung-yu and Carol Lee Mei-kuen - all fascinating artists and all passionate about Hong Kong and its history. 

Carol Lee Mei-kuen, 'Little Lace Frock', 2011, sun on paper, image courtesy the artist

I specifically wanted to meet female artists on this visit as that is the focus of my current project in China. I intended to ask them about their practice, their views on the Hong Kong art scene, and also that thorny question which Chinese artists on the Mainland often find so hard to respond to - "is it harder for women to sustain a successful art career, and if so, why?" Responses I have had in the past to this question vary from a very terse "Of course it's harder, China is still a patriarchal society!" and "There is no feminism in China - it's a western construct" (both responses from very famous artists in their 50s who shall remain nameless for now) to "No, it's easier for me because I don't have to support a family" and "No, it's easier because there is more pressure on men to be successful" (both responses from young - and currently childless - artists in their late 20s and early 30s) to a blank "I don't understand this question." The other day a translator told me in the midst of my interview with an artist that she could not translate the word "feminism" into Chinese. This surprised me a little since both my dictionaries and even Google Translate seem to have no problem with it. I had to say, "But I think you can, actually!", and then give her a rather long-winded explanation.

Hong Kong is a very different place however, and I was fascinated to discover the highly sophisticated and aware understandings of contemporary critical theory and art practice in the work of 4 very different artists. Here is the start of my article about those recent encounters, published today on theculturetrip.com I have added a few additional images to this post.

When people talk about contemporary Chinese art they are invariably referring to art from Mainland China. Despite recent international exhibitions, even in Hong Kong itself few people seem to be aware of the interesting contemporary art being produced there. Initially it can seem less dramatic, less extraordinary, than the work produced by artists trained in the powerhouse PRC art schools such as Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. However, on closer inspection the fascinating subtleties of a liminal place with a complex postcolonial identity emerge. Hong Kong has been something of a transit zone since the days of the Treaty Ports and the British seizure of its harbour at the end of the first Opium War in 1842. Its unique history results in contemporary art quite unlike the current shape of art from China’s mainland.

Some facts about contemporary art in Hong Kong:

- More than 60,000 people attended the inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong Art Fair in May this year. And more than half of the participating galleries came from the Asia Pacific region.

- 7,000 people visited Song Dong’s exhibition in 3 weeks during January this year.

- Major international galleries such as Gagosian and White Cube now have a Hong Kong presence, as do Edouard Malingue, Pékin Fine Arts and Pearl Lam.

- The West Kowloon Cultural District when complete will comprise 17 arts and cultural venues.

- Hong Kong is now the world’s third largest art market by auction sales.

Clearly, there is a hunger to see contemporary art. But what does it mean for Hong Kong artists? There is a sense that artists who live and work there are the 'poor relations' of the art stars from Beijing. Despite recent exhibitions such as Saatchi Gallery’s Hong Kong Eyewhich featured the work of 18 artists never before shown outside Hong Kong, it is still difficult for local artists to find gallery representation, partly due to prohibitively huge gallery rents.Liminal, at K11 Art Mall by young artists Kenny Wong and Marco de Mutiis conveys the anxieties so evident in Hong Kong - lack of space, the pressure of sky-rocketing rents, anxieties about cultural identity, and 'big brother' watching from just across the border – through the metaphor of computer operated ‘drones’ equipped with video cameras observing and recording unaware passers-by outside the gallery. The Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards also reveal a rich diversity of practice. The fact that so many artists in Hong Kong see their work as a form of social activism is often unacknowledged: they are engaged with their city and its myriad concerns in a way which distinguishes their work from other artistic centres. Artist Annie Lai-Kuen Wan says, 'For me the social issues are overwhelming.' Ivy Kin-chu Ma’s work ‘Cambodia / Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum / Numbers Standing Still’ exemplifies this seriousness of purpose. A series of ghostly sepia numbered tags suggestive of labels attached to a person’s clothing are arranged according to the Fibonacci sequence, bearing marks of erasure and over-drawing on the archival prints.

Ivy Kin-chu Ma, Cambodia / Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum / Numbers Standing Still, 2012, Pastel Graphite and Ink on Archival Print, set of 11, each 79 x 60 cm, image courtesy the artist and Hong Kong Art Museum.

To find out more, I spoke with four very different artists in Hong Kong. They all happen to be female. In an art world which is still somewhat testosterone-fuelled this is just one more factor to add to the difficulties experienced by local artists in a place which tends to look beyond, rather than within, its own borders.

Sculptor and installation artist Phoebe Man works with materials some would see as not only unorthodox but confronting. Most notoriously these have included sanitary napkins and fingernail clippings. She engages her audience in participatory works, blurring the boundaries between artist and viewer. Man has made works which could be viewed as overtly feminist, dealing with sexual assault and violence against women; and is planning a piece in Taiwanin which she will work with the remaining WWII ‘comfort women’. She sees these now very elderly survivors as extraordinarily brave for bringing what was once a shameful secret into the light of day.

Phoebe Man, TIme Regained, papercutting, image courtesy the artist

Annie Lai-Kuen Wan, ‘Looking for Poetry in Wan Chai’, relief sculpture comprising ceramic moulds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Annie Lai-Kuen Wan works in highly unconventional ways to reflect on the changing nature of her city. Often using moulds, as a way of 'mapping reality', she examines our relationship to the material world and its meanings. Her work ‘Looking for Poetry in Wan Chai’ recorded the fabulous tapestry of text in the oldest parts of Hong Kong, a visual landscape of signage that is under threat from development. Currently showing in the Hong Kong Art Museum, ‘Crafting a Reverse Scenario for a Lost Sheep’ is an investigation of time’s actions on organic substances. Ceramic sheep figurines are sealed in glass containers, together with wet clay and bean sprouts, creating enclosed micro eco-systems, surreal landscapes of growth and decay in miniature.

Monti Wai-Yi Lai works with materials found in the natural environment, in particular with pigments she creates from ground leaves, once again reflecting on Hong Kong’s very particular social and environmental issues. Lai uses the traditional tile patterns found on post-war Hong Kong apartment blocks as an organising principle and key design element in her ephemeral, often participatory, site-specific works. She wants to make works in which her own memory of growing up in a semi-rural area of Hong Kong, now rapidly submerged in the urban megalopolis, connects with significant issues both local and global. She thinks that an authentically Hong Kong voice is increasingly being heard. 'Artists and audiences are looking for that!' she says.

Annie Wan, Time Regained, Installation View, image courtesy the artist

Celia Ko, a painter trained in the conventions of academic realism, adapts Baroque and Renaissance conventions and iconography to create highly theatrical staged images. She reflects on the relationships between her protagonists and their contemporary lives, as well as on her own history and cultural identity. Some works focus on her grandparents and the significance of family in traditional Chinese culture; others on the complex hybrid identities and relationships which emerge in the contemporary city.

With Celia Ko in her studio, September 2013

To read on, and find out more about each artist and her practice, click HERE

北京日记 Beijing Diary: Ten Things I Love About Beijing (and a few that I don't)

Ten things I love about Beijing - even apart from the art!

1. The kindness of strangers. When I smile at people they invariably smile back, and often stop for a chat in a weird mix of mime and Chinese. I suspect people are talking to me in a kind of pidgin baby talk when they realise that my communication skills are pretty limited, but I don't care if they are having a laugh at my expense as it is all so good-humoured. People go out of their way to be helpful, chasing after me with change, showing me where I am on a map (which it sometimes turns out I am holding upside-down) making sure I understand the special deal in the supermarket (so I now have 2 dozen eggs even though I only wanted 6!) and generally being kind. I notice otherwise insanely aggressive drivers stop for old people crossing the road (well, OK, only sometimes!) and there is much public affection for children.

2. Public singing. Often as people ride their bicycles or scooters past me they leave a trail of music behind them. I love the unselfconscious way that people sing loudly to themselves as they walk or ride through the streets or round the park. Despite the rather unnerving way in which Xi Jinping is making public statements about a return to 'Mao Zedong thought' I also can't help enjoying the public singing of revolutionary songs in the local park each morning. These are people singing the songs of their youth, and remembering a time which many thought was much simpler than the present day.

3. Food! No need to say more - chuan'r, baozi, jiaozi, noodles, beautiful tiny mandarins from the markets, chestnuts, peanuts with Sichuan pepper and chilli, cakes filled with sesame paste - it's all good! But I am avoiding the following menu items: Donkey sandwich, Pig intestines in soup, vanilla chicken (God knows!) and the mysterious and terrible-sounding "pale baby soup". At least for now. Even the multinational chains have an intriguingly local flavour - the 24-hour KFC on my street serves congee for breakfast (or so I am told), and Pacific Coffee sells red bean cheese-cake and osmanthus flower cake.

4. Beijing babies. Swaddled in so many layers of clothes, they are like little fat Buddhas. Babies are everywhere, usually being doted on by both parents and at least one grandparent. I have lots of smiling encounters with grandparents - in the street, in the park, at the shops, in the subway.

5. The Beijing accent. Everybody talks like a pirate! I am learning to make sure I say "Sanlitun'r" instead of Sanlitun. Taxi drivers keep kindly telling me my Chinese tones are good, which makes me happy, but then if the conversation continues I am forced to reveal how small my vocabulary is, and how bad my grammar. Shame. But I persevere. One day I am determined to have "yi kou liuli de hanyu" (literally: a mouth of fluent Chinese.) I may be 150 years old before that day comes, however.

6. Public Parks. All of life is here - ballroom dancing, public singing, mass aerobic dancing, qigong, flying kites, water calligraphy, mahjong, cards, singing Chinese opera, playing every possible variety of musical instrument, knitting, fishing, rowing boats, exercising (mainly old people exercising with great vigour and seriousness) and hundreds of people just sitting: reading, chatting, listening to radios (loudly) and eating.

7. Beijing taxis. They are cheap, they are everywhere, and sometimes the pushing and shoving in the subway just cannot be borne! I would like people to stop complaining about Beijing taxis. The drivers work REALLY long hours and very rarely try to cheat you. Some of them are mercifully silent and others are natural comedians. A driver the other day punctuated his swearing at the traffic with teaching me new words - many are self-appointed language teachers. I was dutifully repeating the things he said until I inadvertently repeated one of the names he had just called a guy riding a 'san lun che' who had cut in front of us. He gasped in shock, swerved the car momentarily onto the wrong side of the road (not that unusual, but terrifying nonetheless) and made me promise never, never, never to say that word again. So now I am too scared to look it up and find out what terrible thing I cluelessly uttered! Taxi drivers often want to tell me things about Australia, which I sometimes understand and at other times I have no clue. My tactic is to smile a lot and pretty much agree with everything, which seems to work OK in most situations - although it occasionally backfires when ordering in restaurants.

8. Late Autumn Weather. Most especially those rare and wonderful blue sky days when the air is not choked with smog. You walk around feeling cheerful all day and thankful to be alive in such an exciting city.

9. Hutong architecture. I hope that the government is belatedly realising that this absolutely unique and incredibly beautiful form of urban design is worth preserving. And I mean preserving in an authentic way rather than the Disneyfied versions that sprang up before the Olympics, after whole neighbourhoods had been razed. However, one must be wary of romantic Orientalism - people also need reliable electricity, running water, and internal private bathrooms. The thought of living through a Beijing winter and having to use a public bathroom is a truly dreadful one - an indication that true Beijingers are a really tough breed.

10. The constant surprises. To follow the sound of music at 9 o'clock at night, enter the park and find more than a hundred people dancing in the dark to recorded disco music. To come upon the water calligraphers still absorbed in brushing their beautiful characters onto the pavement at dusk. To round a corner in the park and find a man taking his songbirds in their cages for a turn around the lake. The other morning I came out of the gate of my lane onto the street and found all the young real estate agents lined up outside their office with their hands on their hearts while the national anthem was played. This was quite a sight - especially as they are usually fully occupied with lying across their motorscooters playing games on their phones, playfully pushing and shoving each other and combing their hair. One in particular is always picking his nose when I walk past. I'm tempted to give him some tissues.

11. The art. Of course, the art. OK I lied about ten things - here is number 11. One of the  things I most love is the art here. And I could have definitely put it at Number 1. It is unlike anywhere else on the planet. Beijing really feels like the beating heart of the artworld. In a place where even the smallest artists' 'village' contains hundreds of studios with artists working away in every possible form, the excitement is palpable. Not all of it is good, or interesting, of course, but there is such incredible volume of production that in any visit to the galleries of 798 or Caochangdi one is sure to find things that will amaze and delight. I am here to meet artists for 2 months - in 2 years I would not be able to see everything I want to see in just this one Chinese art  centre, to say nothing of Shanghai, Chongqing, Hangzhou and other art centres. And the new graduates pour out of the Central Academy of Fine Arts each year. A group of CAFA students attended the Redgate Open Studios event this week, at which I gave a talk about my research, and crowded around me to ask questions and tell me their ideas about what is driving the youngest generation of contemporary artists. So earnest, so passionate, and so interesting!

Liang Yuanwei's studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Liang Yuanwei in her studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Bing Yi Huang in her studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Bing Yi's assistants unroll her 30-metre long ink painting,
 photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artists

With Gao Ping in her studio

And some things NOT to love:

Air pollution. Enough said. Public spitting. This really is horrible.
Even more disturbing though, is the sense of a place which may lose its heart and soul unless there is a collective will to reconsider the social cost of the 'to get rich is glorious' ethos. While it is unquestionably admirable that China has lifted so many of its population out of poverty (so much so that according to Forbes Chinese Mass Affluent Group Report 93 million Chinese households are expected to join the ranks of the middle class) there is much public angst about whether China has lost its moral compass. The pace of change has been extraordinary. As recently as 2000, only 4 percent of urban households in China were middle class; by 2012, that share had soared to over two-thirds.  ( the diplomat.com ) 

In a review of the immensely popular movie 'Tiny Times', Sheila Melvin says,

 " Since the Cultural Revolution ended and the era of opening and reform began, the Chinese government has preached the gospel of materialism.  The Deng-era slogans “To get rich is glorious,” “Development is the irrefutable argument,” and “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse” have been thoroughly absorbed.  Wealth-generation has become virtually the sole measure of success – for the nation, provinces, localities, leaders, and individuals. It thus comes as little surprise that a movie in which young people are obsessed with luxury goods and opt for money over love and in which parents will do anything to see their child marry rich – a mother in “Tiny Times’ tells her son’s girlfriend, “Our family is not open to the lowly poor like you!” – should be popular with young people.

On the contrary, it looks like a true reflection of contemporary society in which conspicuous consumption is often the dominant ethos; those who vocally advocate an alternative path – of religious faith or opposing politics – do so at their own risk; and the elite inhabit a parallel universe of privilege that, on those occasions when it is exposed (as following a sports car accident, a corruption trial, or a gang rape) makes the wealth-flaunting in “Tiny Times” seem truly tiny.  A rethinking of official rhetoric is already underway and I, for one – while recognizing the need for continued growth – hope that the new “Chinese dream” will encompass goals other than getting rich at any cost." (Best of Times or Worst of Times)

When you walk down a lane filled with family washing drying in the dusty air, with people eating noodles sitting on plastic stools, and then you round the corner and find a Lamborghini show-room, and boutiques selling Versace and Prada, the juxtapositions are breathtaking. And while this is partly what makes Beijing so fascinating for the visitor, it is also an indication of the dizzying speed of change and the resultant inequality. A potent mixture of influences, economic factors and social policies, this is causing considerable anxiety here. Two years ago there was much discussion about a return to Confucian values. Today the line is about returning to the core values of the Communist Party. I suspect that none of this means a huge amount to those young real estate agents at my gate, with their cheap suits and their expensive mobile phones. Once Pandora's box has been opened.....

Knowing Shadows: three conversations with Gao Ping

Gao Ping in her studio, photograph Luise Guest, reproduced with permission of the artist

This post is an edited and expanded version of a piece I wrote about Gao Ping last year, published as part of a longer article on The Culture Trip.

“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” 

(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey)

 I first spoke with artist Gao Ping in 2012, when she arrived in Sydney for shows of her work at Stella Downer Fine Art and at the Maitland Regional Gallery. She told me that for Chinese artists the traditions of ink painting are “like the ground under your feet”. In December last year when we spoke at greater length in her Beijing studio, she expanded on this idea, telling me of her admiration for the painter Ba Da of the early Qing Dynasty, adept at creating visual metaphors, who famously observed that there were “more tears than ink” in his paintings. His expressive landscapes achieve a balance between stillness, space and closely observed detail, which Gao Ping returns to again and again. She finds his work both sad and “calm in heart”, a description which could equally be applied to her own work, and especially to her drawings. In these works, created with traditional inks on silk or rice paper, tiny lonely figures or objects float in a vast empty space, creating a dynamic relationship between the forms themselves and the space they inhabit. Her deep knowledge and understanding of traditional painting is evident in the ‘rightness’ of her placement and the confidence of her mark-making. She says that tiny things are sometimes more important than the large and obvious, and her work creates an ongoing narrative grounded in her idiosyncratic observations of people, places and events. The life of an artist in Beijing is a lonely one, she says, and she believes that painting is like a secret language, creating mysterious layers that reveal themselves slowly to those willing to take the time to look carefully. Reticent and not keen to talk much about herself or about the meanings of her work, she says, “What I want to say is in the paintings.”

Ink paintings of tiny female figures, some nude, some clothed, perhaps represent a kind of self-portrait, an exploration of loneliness. Still Life – Girls contains 4 minute figures: an overtly sexy one in black stockings, an exhausted one slumped flat on her back, and two who turn away from the viewer. Their outlines are softly blurred. They are touching and whimsical, as are her representations of lonely toys, battered teddy bears and stuffed animals, pot plants, electric fans, figures seated on park benches, slightly shabby gardens and simple houses like those around the courtyard where she and her husband work intently in separate studio spaces, heated by a wood burning stove. These works express fragility and vulnerability. They evoke memories of childhood, as well as her astute observations of the world around her and her responses to it. “The drawing is in my heart,” she says.

In contrast, her oil and acrylic paintings, some large and powerful and others on smaller square canvases, are at once strong and lyrical, often employing a subtle grisaille in which translucent washes are layered to create great depth. She began to experiment with introducing washes of colour underneath her palette of greys after looking closely at the work of Marlene Dumas, an artist she much admires. These painterly works evoke ambiguous landscapes which to the artist represent an ideal world, a place of harmony and retreat from the chaos of the city. Gao Ping is a quiet observer of contemporary urban life, and much of her work speaks of her distress at the pace of change in Beijing, and the constant and unsettling transformation of familiar places in a never-ending process of demolition and urban renewal. She is creating a different, calmer world in her paintings.

When we met once again last week at her Beijing studio, she showed me the acrylic-on-paper works for her new show at Yun Gallery, in the 798 Art District here, as well as more of the beautiful ink works mounted on silk in the traditional manner, which she has just recently shown in Perth at Seva Frangos Art

Gao Ping, Still Life - Chairs, Chinese ink on paper, image courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

In a long conversation punctuated by many tiny cups of tea Gao Ping told me that she often walks after nightfall in Ditan Park (Temple of Earth Park), observing the natural and architectural forms which loom out of the darkness and the shadowy forms of people. Like every park in Beijing it is still busily populated by dancers, walkers and water calligraphers long after sunset, and the artist enjoys the experience of encountering others in the vast spaces.These quiet experiences in the midst of a chaotically busy city inform her work, the images staying in her memory in an almost photographic manner, as she experiments with ink, sometimes mixed with gesso and water, drawing freely and quickly onto large sheets of heavy paper. The first mark is the hardest, she says, but after that it flows almost effortlessly. This is a process quite unlike the meticulousness of traditional ink painting, which may look spontaneous but in fact is utterly controlled and deliberate. In these new works some of the most interesting surface qualities and marks have been arrived at through experimentation and unorthodox combinations of materials.

Gao Ping, untitled, acrylic, ink and gesso on paper,photographed in the studio, image courtesy the artist

She has developed a technique of layering her materials, brushing and scraping thinned washes of acrylic over the ink underneath, in a process akin to a wax resist.The final works are built up of many layers, creating images which are moody, atmospheric and subtle. She uses stencils to create forms reminiscent of traditional Chinese carved window screens, seen in the pavilions bordering the lakes in public parks and gardens.

Gao Ping, Untitled, acrylic on paper, 2013, 100 x 100 cm, image courtesy the artist

She has said that during this process, the works become images – but not an image of ‘reality’ – "it’s a kind of vague trace on the surface of the paper without clear definition." I suggested to her that she would be interested to look at some of Bill Henson's works - especially the Port Phillip Bay series where the cargo vessels appear almost invisible against the inky blackness of sky and ocean. To me there is something of the same sensibility at work here. A quiet and acute observer of her surroundings, Gao Ping possesses a unique ability to transform the mundane - a teapot, a window, a branch of blossom seen in the park - into something mysterious and other-worldly.

Gao Ping, Untitled, 2013, acrylic on paper, 350 x 100 cm, image courtesy the artist

北京日记 Beijing Diary: Ruminations on the Revolutionary Past, Chinese Comedy Routines and the Weather

View of the city wall from Redgate Gallery

Well the Beijing blue sky days definitely were a temporary phenomenon. Today the air pollution index reads "301: Hazardous" and the American Embassy's website advises people to stay indoors. Wealthy expats maybe; everyone else is out in the streets as usual, although I notice more cyclists wearing masks today.

After my first week of  Chinese classes  I am waking in the middle of the night with all the Chinese sentences that I wish I had thought of during the day floating around in my brain. Some time ago I read a book of essays by an American linguistics professor about her time in China, 'Dreaming in Chinese,' and that is what seems to be happening to me. And not only am I dreaming that I am speaking, but now that I am (ridiculously) attempting to learn to read Chinese as well, all the characters that utterly bewilder me in class float around in front of my eyes all night while I try to sleep. During lessons I confuse the character for 'potato' with that for 'climb down the mountain' (yes, yes, dumb, I know!) I have a German, a Dutchman and an Italian (I know, it sounds like the start of a joke) who began at the language school a week earlier all eagerly helping me. In my dreams I am fluent. If I ever experience the emotion of pure envy it is not of people with money or power or good looks; it is reserved for westerners who can speak fluent Chinese. At times I hate them with a passion! 

Last night I went to a lecture by French academic Michel Bonnin, about his book 'The Lost Generation: the rustication of China's 'Educated Youth" ' I have read a certain amount about this generation, the "Zhiqing" who include in their number most of the current leaders in the Standing Committee of the Politbureau, including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, but I had no idea of the numbers. Between 1955, when it began as a Soviet-style experiment after the terrible famine caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward, to the late 1970s when it was finally concluded, almost 20 million teenagers and youth were sent to far provinces, many with no hope of ever returning to the cities from whence they came. In 1962 when Mao said, "Never forget class struggle" 100,000 were sent from Shanghai to the poverty stricken rural areas of Xinjiang Province. Bonnin described the process thus: "One sentence from Mao and 20 million young urbanites became peasants." 

Bonnin has spent many years interviewing those who were 'sent down' to the countryside to be educated by the peasants under Mao's policy, including those who swam from Guangdong to Hong Kong and were (at least initially) accepted as refugees. Later they were redefined as 'economic migrants' and returned to the Mainland (sound familiar, Australia?)

Designer: Revolutionary Committee of the Sichuan Art Academy (四川美术学院革命委员会供稿)
1969, April
Educated youth must go to the countryside to receive re-education from the Poor and Lower-Middle peasants!
Zhishi qingnian dao nongcun qu, jieshou pinxiazhong nongde zaijiaoyu! (知识青年到农村去, 接受贫下中农的再教育!)
Publisher: Sichuan renmin chubanshe (四川人民出版社)

While there are some, including China's current leaders, who have positive memories of this time, there were many for whom it was heartbreaking and lonely, and for whom it created a lifetime of bitterness and regret. It was interesting to hear about the open resistance after 1978. In Yunnan 50,000 went on a hunger strike and sent a delegation to Beijing. They were ultimately successful in being sent home, but the Shanghainese in Xinjiang Province were not so fortunate, and their tragedy and anger continues to play out in that city even now, as I found when I interviewed the performance artist Wu Meng last December. She has been documenting the protests in Shanghai of those zhiqing who are agitating for some recognition of their lost earnings and lost education.. 

Today in the centre of Beijing from a stationery taxi on my way to Redgate Gallery (of course - Beijing traffic!) I watched parents meet their primary school children - many wearing red pioneer scarves - at the school gate. Bicycles sailed past with children on the back. I watched a young father laugh with his cheeky-looking son, then spontaneously take his hand and kiss it lovingly. Teenage girls strolled arm-in-arm. Two men stood arguing on the corner, one so drunk that he listed from side to side like a ship in a storm, the other threatening to get on his bicycle and drive away. Old men rode tricycles loaded with timber, paper and other recycling, and the tiny 'beng beng' vehicles zig-zagged through the chaos. Meanwhile brand new Lexuses, BMWs and other luxury cars manoeuvred aggressively and a cyclist yelled angrily at a taxi driver who had hit the back of his bike. A constant honking of car horns is as much a feature of the Beijing aural landscape as the sound of hawking and spitting. The motto is, whatever you plan to do in your car, honk your horn first, then honk while you are doing it, then honk again when you've finished, just for good measure. The other feature of taking taxis is the radio sound-track. All the drivers listen to comedy routines which I assume are the classic 'xiangsheng' or 'cross talk' double acts. I keep thinking of old-school vaudeville routines when I listen to this; even though I can't understand much of the routines, they  have that style of exaggeration, fast question and answer, and punning. Think Roy Rene speaking Chinese!

Here's a famous routine by comedian Jiang Kun, just to give you the flavour:

A: On the wall of the shop was a piece of paper, and at the top it said NOTICE TO ALL CUSTOMERS.
B: What did it say?
A: It said: “All revolutionary comrades who come in the revolutionary door of this revolutionary photography shop, before asking any revolutionary question, must first call out a revolutionary slogan. If any of the revolutionary masses do not call out a revolutionary slogan, then the revolutionary shopkeeper will take a revolutionary attitude and refuse to give a revolutionary response. Revolutionarily yours, the revolutionary management.”
B: Really “revolutionary”, all right. It was like that in those days. As soon as you went into the shop it went like this: “Serve the People!” Comrade, I’d like to ask a question.
A: “Struggle Against Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism!” Go ahead.
B: [to the audience] Well, at least he didn’t ignore me. [Back in character] “Destroy Capitalism and Elevate the Proletariat!” I’d like to have my picture taken.
A: “Do Away with the Private and Establish the Public!” What size?
B: “The Revolution is Without Fault!” A three-inch photo.
A: “Rebellion is Justified!” Okay, please give me the money.
B: “Politics First and Foremost!” How much?
A: “Strive for Immediate Results!” One yuan three mao.
B: “Criticize Reactionary Authorities!” Here’s the money.
A: “Oppose Rule by Money!” Here’s your receipt.
B: “Sweep Away Class Enemies of All Kinds!” Thank you.

Source: splitsider.com/2011/02/translating-chinas-xiangsheng-comedy-scene/

Love it!

 

Apart from my ruminations about weather, revolutionary history, Chinese comedy routines and the impossibility of ever learning to speak with "yi kou liuli de Hanyu" (a mouth of fluent Chinese) I have also been doing what I came here for: interviewing artists.

Next post - Liang Yuanwei, Han Yajuan, Huang Jing Yuan and Liu Shiyuan

Redgate Gallery from the City Walls

北京日记：秋风 Beijing Diary: Autumn Winds

Artist Gao Rong in Beijing, photo Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

View of the lake, Tuanjiehu Park

I went to Hong Kong for the weekend and returned from that steamy city to find unexpected blue skies and a definite chill in the air here in Beijing. The women in my neighbourhood with their baskets of shopping and tiny grandchildren are rugged up in warm coats, and even the small skinny dogs loved by Beijingers are wearing bizarre fluffy coats. Some of them appear to be wearing velour tracksuits of the type once favoured by Hollywood starlets, which is most disconcerting. The vendors of grilled corn and sweet potatoes are out each morning as I walk to Chinese class, and there are chestnuts in the market. The clear(ish) blue skies won't last, but it is very cheering. Beijing can be a grey city under grey sky filled with dust, smog and soot. This time around I am noticing that fewer people are smoking in the streets and restaurants.But compared to most cities Beijing is still a smoker's paradise and I've had a few trips in taxis where the driver smoked continuously. The air outside is worse, so no point in opening the windows! Unfortunately the spitting in the street habit is still very much in evidence. I am startled every time I see a chic young girl, dressed to the nines, suddenly clear her throat loudly and spit right onto the footpath beside me. 

As I sit here with a cup of green tea and a packet of cashews ("Taste of fashion, experience of the most valuable") I can't help feeling a little pleased with myself for negotiating this vast city and all its complexities without too many major mishaps of communication. I am quite possibly putting my big Australian foot in it all over the place unknowingly, but I find people so helpful and friendly in a way that is utterly disarming. They are willing to decipher my attempts to communicate which include mime and semi-theatrical performances of acts like sending letters, or buying band-aids, or asking for a shopping bag in the supermarket - words so often fail me. They are happy to try to teach me how to say things in Chinese. A young barista in Starbucks (Xing Ba Ke!) patiently taught me how to ask for an extra shot of espresso. Beijing taxi drivers in particular seem to be self-appointed language teachers, but their accents are usually so full of extraordinary rolled 'r' sounds that I can never understand what they are trying to tell me. But we all keep our good humour and I often end up taking the "phone a friend" option when all else fails. In fact taxi drivers frequently beg foreigners to phone a friend and get someone on the phone who speaks Chinese. Amazingly, despite the hair-raising traffic, the propensity for people to drive on the wrong side of the road, and the legendary traffic jams, I end up more or less where I intended to go. And I really do love that Beijing rolled 'r' - every day here is "Talk like a Pirate Day"!

Gao Rong, Mailbox, Embroidery, cloth, and foam, 26 3/4 x 27 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches (68 x 70 x 21 cm)

image courtesy the artist

Today I went to Songzhuang Artist Village to meet once again with the extraordinary artist Gao Rong, who so impressed Sydney with her embroidered fabric replica of her grandparents' house in Inner Mongolia shown at the Biennale. She has just returned from her first New York solo show, at Eli Klein Fine Art (who also show another artist I have interviewed, Han Yajuan). Gao's work is still currently showing in the Moscow Biennale. Quietly spoken and gentle, she told me that she took her mother with her to New York - she relies on her mother's assistance to embroider the largest and most ambitious of her works, such as the full size 'Beng Beng' motor tricycle so characteristic of Beijing streets. She joked that she thought if she managed to sell that work she could swap the Beng Beng for a car. 

The exhibition, called "I Live in Beijing" is a celebration of the daily life of the artist, especially a record of her impoverished student years. She created water-stained furniture, a rust-stained shower stall, and assorted mailing boxes and packing crates, all carefully and lovingly embroidered with tiny detailed stitches. She creates a simulacrum of the humdrum that is more real than reality itself - a kind of hyper-reality. Today she told me that her traditionally rigorous and academic training in sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts taught her how to represent reality, but what she is really interested in creating is a deeper reality. She is happy when people initially mistake her works for the real thing, doing a double take and coming back for a second look, as this forces them to look more carefully and to think about what they are seeing and the nature of 'reality'. Here is a link to an article I wrote about Gao Rong after our previous interview in December 2012: Randian Online: In Grandmother's House

Gao Rong, 'Station', 2011, fabric wire and thread, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Her work is about memory, and also about the way in which the tangible objects of our daily lives are embedded with meanings not always obvious to the casual observer. Even the most banal object tells a story to those willing to take a moment and hear it.

This seems especially true in Beijing, this vast city in which many older people continue to re-use cardboard, plastic bags, and containers, and where tricycles carrying enormous loads of recycled paper frequently veer round street corners at an alarming speed. I think of artist Song Dong's mother saving bars of soap after the Cultural Revolution, just in case there came a time of hardship and her children needed it. All those bars of soap and toothpaste tubes laid out on the floor in his touching and evocative installation 'Waste Not' evoked a palpable sense of the careful thriftiness of a generation that is passing.

Tonight on my way home at dusk, I went into the park and found the old water calligraphers still quietly practising their art in almost complete darkness. Beijing - where the ordinary is so often extraordinary.

北京日记：ruminations inspired by Yiyun Li, daily life in Tuanjiehu, and some artists in their studios

A view from the studio of Bing Yi Huang, reproduced with permission of the artist

I sat this morning at my tiny table at the window, with the noise from the street and the market floating up to me, immersed in a book of short stories by Yiyun Li. Her first collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” was the first contemporary Chinese fiction that I read before my very first trip to China, and it has haunted me ever since. Her stories are achingly sad but filled with the ordinary details of daily life so they never seem forced or artificially constructed. The first story in “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” is simply told in the voice of a woman who has never married, works as an English teacher, and lives alone following the death of her parents. Her army service in a far province was the only time she has left Beijing. A meditation on kindness and cruelty, it has made me look at the middle-aged women walking down Tuanjiehu Zhong Lu with their bags of shopping and speculate about their past lives.

The second, told in the voice of Teacher Fei, is so sad that I had to put the book down and leave the house. “At eighteen he had been an ambitious art student about to enter the nation’s top art institute, but within a year, his father, an exemplary member of the reactionary intellectuals, was demoted from professor to toilet cleaner, and Teacher Fei’s education was terminated. For the next twenty years, Teacher Fei’s mother accompanied his father from building to building, one hand carrying a bucket of cleaning tools and the other holding her husband’s arm, as if they were on their way to a banquet. Yet, in the end, even she could not save her husband from despair. Teacher Fei’s father had killed himself two years after he was restored to his position at the university.”

Artist Jin Fei has described China’s history as “brutal and tragic” and I have been watching some of the very old men I see in the local park, with their walking sticks, Mao jackets and cloth shoes, and wondering about all they have seen and experienced. The past and present often seem to merge in China; or rather it sometimes appears as if the present is a very thin veneer laid upon the past, which can bubble up through it unexpectedly.

Listening to the group singing in Tuanjiehu Park, Sunday morning

Tuanjiehu Street Market

I have settled into something of a routine after my first week in Beijing: a morning walk around the neighbourhood which always ends with a circumnavigation of the lake in Tuanjiehu Park, somewhat voyeuristically observing the extraordinarily rich and diverse activities taking place from early morning till nightfall. Today I entered the gates to discover perhaps 100 people energetically exercising in unison, very seriously (although with a smile for me and my camera.)  As usual there are groups engaged in beautifully fluid qi gong, and elderly people everywhere exercising vigorously. Men and women who are clearly well into their seventies use the park benches and railings to stretch their legs, revealing a flexibility and suppleness that I can only envy. One area of the park has open air fitness equipment and there they all are, pedalling furiously, doing push-ups and handstands and even more frenetic stretches. Hundreds of people walk and jog around the lake, many of them vigorously slapping themselves as they go, which I have realised is something to do with stimulating the circulation rather than a form of self-flagellation. And, magically, strolling home after dinner with some other Redgate residents, we followed the music coming from the park and discovered a large group of people dancing in the dark. Quite extraordinary and enchanting.

Qi Gong, Tuanjiehu Park

The thing which forcibly struck me this morning, though, is the visible presence of old people. Apart from the exercisers, elderly couples are sitting on benches watching the lake, old ladies walk in pairs carrying their vegetables from the market, and the really old and frail are being pushed in wheelchairs by sons or daughters. Their presence made me realise how much more hidden away from view old people are in the west. As I left the park at 9.00am today the exercisers had been replaced by the water calligraphers and old ladies lined up in their wheelchairs; and three old men were arguing about how to place a very rickety ladder to remove the red lanterns from the trees, marking the end of the Golden Week national holiday.

Removing the red lanterns from Tuanjiehu Park after Golden Week

Water Calligraphy in Tuanjiehu Park

I spend a little time each day studying one of my various maps of Beijing – all inexplicably different, and most appearing to bear little resemblance to the actual physical streets – to plot a route for grocery shopping, to the English language bookshop, or to a gallery or artist’s studio. The maps bear inscribed upon them the extraordinary changes this city has undergone in the last century. “Five Dragon Pavilion” and “Former Residence of Princess Hejing” are juxtaposed with the Beijing Workers’ Stadium, the Working People’s Cultural Palace, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes. And then the map shows the location of every McDonalds and Pizza Hut in Beijing – and for good measure, Hooters. Cognitive dissonance!

It seems that everything is tumbled one upon the other – the imperial past, the revolutionary years and the capitalism ( or rather the “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”) of the present . Late this afternoon as I walked towards Ritan Park I passed a long queue of people waiting outside a dental clinic, and more waited  outside the attractively named ‘Beijing Hospital for Proctological and Intestinal Disease’. Old men cycled past with huge loads of recycling piled up on the trays of their tricycles. Suddenly an enormous shopping mall appeared in view – glitzy in the extreme, and filled with fashionable sculpture and high-end shops. The mall could be anywhere – Singapore, LA, London. The same shops too – GAP, American Apparel, Kate Spade. Although clearly so new that it was not quite finished, in typical fashion when I visited the toilets of this establishment the taps had come loose from the wall and none of the doors closed properly – near enough is usually good enough in new buildings here. But one block further down the street and I was back in China – little carts whizzing by selling snacks, and groups lounging on street corners playing cards.

This layering of past and present has been a feature of my conversations with the artists I have met this last week. By pure chance in my first week in Beijing I interviewed an artist in her twenties, one in her thirties and one in her late forties. Each woman has experienced a different China. Of course to some extent this is true everywhere – the world my daughters inhabit is not the one in which I grew up. But in China those differences are far more marked, and the artists themselves are very aware of it.

With Ma Yanling in her Songzhuang studio Saturday October 5

Ma Yanling believes that the young artists today cannot understand the experiences of her generation, who saw the brief flowering of the avant-garde in the late 1980s, only to have their ideals crushed after 1989. The young Liu Shiyuan spoke of her generation, children of the 1990s who came too late for the art boom, and must find their place in an incredibly competitive art world. There are just so many artists in China, all struggling to make work, to be seen and heard, to find ways to keep going. I have been in beautiful studios in Songzhuang, with courtyards and goldfish ponds, a high-rise apartment studio on the 21^st floor looking down at Beijing spread out below, and spacious studios in Caochangdi. Today I spent some hours with the extraordinary Bing Yi in her studio on the central axis of Beijing – a Yuan Dynasty temple near the Drum and Bell Tower. 

Bingyi Huang in her studio, explaining her series of ink on paper works

I am hearing stories of struggle and survival and steely determination. I am talking to artists who regularly cross the globe, to New York and Helsinki and Moscow and Montreal and back to Beijing, which pulls them back again for so many reasons. I am discovering that in some ways the differences between each of these artists is more dramatic than the things that unite them.

Han Yajuan explaining her work in her Wangjing studio Thursday October 3 

In my next post I will start to pull some threads together from the interviews I have conducted so far - with Han Yajuan, Liu Shiyuan, Ma Yanling, Huang Jing Yuan and Bing Yi - and start to think about the connections as well as the discontinuities between the work and experiences of these very different women.

Bing Yi, ink on Chinese Paper, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist