Urban Mythology and Spiritual Drive
Beatrice Leanza
Nowadays scientific rationality and technological development have favoured the transformation of values into needs, and allowed the conquest of an ever-expanding industrial society upon a boundless geography. Looking at massive China running the rat race to systematization, new sorts of interpretations arise, shadowing its ability to further economic and social responsibility while equally developing a spiritual identity. The form of soft power which is called for by important voices like economists Shwab and Pansak is what enables a system to formulate individualized visions about its own future, forging creative power to integrate those into a multi-channelled public debate, inside and outside the country.
This sort of infoscape designs the historical time concealed between the actual, the real and the wanted, as well as the possible, the dream and what is feared. The current unrestrained production of life-ware in Chinese cities for a competitive urban experience has shortened the horizons of the aesthetic realm within the syntax of the formula, imploding the time of creation in an unmediated processing of desires and expectations, somehow dehydrating the capacity of people to rediscover the unexpected and fantastic in the everyday. The architectonic Babel of past and future describing the contemporary Chinese city is likewise reproducing its disconnected entropy, where the space of development becomes one of dispute and retreat. Generation gaps widen, and the original link between art, philosophy and practice is migrating to new limits and understanding.
Song Dong’s installation work entitled Waste Not, featured in an exhibition at the BTAP in Beijng, and curated by art historian Wu Hung, is a wonderful example of this. The title refers to the Chinese expression wu jin qi yong, a very common Chinese habit of saving everything for future usage, a "code serving as the basis for daily operations" especially in past eras (50s-70s) when the fear for shortage of goods and political instability were impinging on everyday values. As Wu Hung states, what happens throughout this artistic action is the merging of art with social life; these "things," mundane objects collected over the years by the artist’s mother–the entire gallery space is also arranged by her–are intended to recover that magical aura and represent a way of thinking and living. The cathartic gesture that Song Dong had been planning for over three years–aimed at relieving her mother from the grief and solace after her husband’s death–is soliciting an important reflection: despite the changes and improvement in living conditions there are differences in people’s mentalities, foreshadowing the cumbersome task that most of the population will sooner or later have to cope with. If contemporaneity is living "out of time" as art critic Gillo Dorfles says, in this atemporal magical era all tenses (past, present and future) are swallowed up into new forms of life and habits. But while exploring the atmosphere of contemporary Chinese modernization we realize that ideological commodification is sort of de-individualizing the city and still hindering the invention of what Pansak called "new products for a totally new Asian lifestyle."
The virgin land of China is turning into a phantasmagoria where the future is not only accelerated but also displaced in time. What is real is possible and vice versa. The mythological time of creation–the one that lies in-between these two extremes, is the one that originates in the mysterious universe of sensitivity, one that Paul Valéry calls a "furious desire to break the always future cycle, and holding its order in one inhabiting contradiction and difference."
If much of Chinese conceptual photography has largely been provoking the threat of mechanic urban despoliation by freezing it in depiction, more hints are provided by the increasing lure that this "missed" time of personal and spiritual construction is pushing artists to. It is the art on canvas like that of Yan Lei (with the series Superlights where snapshots of urban scenes are reassembled and re-layered on fictitious palettes of colours), the urban archaeology of Cai Guotai, portraying industrial scenarios from the heart of big cities like Beijing, and that of Li Dafang and his impressive series of new canvases that had been shown last October for his solo show at CAAW.
Li Dafang, who moved from Shenzhen to the capital in 1992, started his career very early during the 80s as an illustrator for literary journals and comics, to later move into painting where he tried to replace his fascination for story-setting.
His first body of work is still highly influenced by a visual allocation of narration timings and symbols transplanted from the strict interdependence of images and text required by the immediacy of paper reading. Yet this essential eye is what allows him to read through his surrounding as on a blank sheet. As the artist himself states, his dialectic is shaped by maintaining narration and story telling as a point of departure, and enhanced in this last series of works with a mysterious veil of ambiguity harmoniously fusing the unrealistic and estrangement.
Accustomed to find truth within reality, the artistic syntax of traditional landscape painting forges here a superimposition of urban debris where everything is life-like and plausible, runs piping through the city as a nervous system of vitalizing energy bringing destruction before reconciliation, while figures of dream are writing their story from within. In fact, what much of local art tends to reduce out of the apparatus of external appearance, is far detached from what might be comparable to the hyper-thrill that was for futurism, of the coming of the modern Multiple Man, of the Rising City. On the contrary this reduction to the limit makes the "external become the manifestation of spirit and freedom." This statement of philosopher Marcuse, taken from his "One Dimensional Society," reveals something that the current planned obsolescence of globalized life in China is engendering: a full exposure to a process that is impossible to size and capture as a solid and intimate experience, and still needs to fill the discrepancy between the economical time of development and the spiritual one. Collective shows promoted by local curators and artists are increasingly investigating ways and forms of interpreting the concept of community and mapping the urban landscape with a pulsating spiritual derive. From Imaginary Communities (Tianjin 2004), to Multi-layered Communities and Intercultural Communication (Beijing — Biennale’s satellite show 2005) and 10.000 Years (Beijing 2005), all of these shows attempt forwarding discourses about the artists’ own outside world’s values and beliefs–being overturned by modernization and the inner ones that the new Chinese dream is prompting. As curator Feng Boyi stated for the Biennale’s show, this dream is stimulating people to take their future in their own hands to be successful.
Works from an international coterie of artists (America, Germany, Italy, Belgium and China) were located under the title "Convergence at E°116 and N°40", the exact topographic coordinates of the three venues where the exhibition took place: a combination of spaces, times and people searching for the joy of communication rather than forcing it. Fantastic creatures from lost time dwelled in the largest space inside Dashanzi art district: the Paper Tiger of Li Songsong mounted on a carpet of 160 light bulbs and made actually in aluminium, the miniature, post-technological cities of Wang Shugang and Yuan Shun, the mechanized man in Xu Zhongmin’s Tunnel, Michael Najjar’s Invisible Cities–images of international urban gridlocks superimposed in an endless screening of vanishing city structures, together with the Art Farm of "outrageous" tattooed pigs by Wim Delvoye, removed after just few days because of a Lenin portrait unfortunately misplaced on the back of one of the animals and many more. "This kind of dream–continues Feng Boyi–can only take place in the future and the inevitable consequence is that our cities are being built on virtual foundations. But than again the future exists within the unfolding of reality and reality exists in the promise of the future."
This conflict between the real and the possible, of imperatives (natural and humans) clashing and searching for reconciliation with the "art of life" are pushed beyond (or better backward) in the artists-run show 10.000 Years.
Taking place inside the under-construction locales of Post Contemporary City buildings, the show has been designed to be experienced under the spell of natural times and without exhibition’s structured artifices of lightning and illustration. Too late at night the mysterious installations couldn’t be viewed and it was open just for the brief time of a couple of weeks. The show was announced by a spooky affiche reproducing the back of a human head, totally covered with hairs from the top down to the shoulders, a primordial looking figure that eventually welcomed the visitors by standing on top of the glass roof overlooking the entrance passage. While the audience could only see the feet and hardly recognize the appearance of the hairy man walking above (actually a rock singer), artist Peng Yu was recording the reaction of the audience, hesitating between wariness and suspicion with their eyes looking up. The labyrinth-like layout of the works displayed on two floors, was imbued in slowed and silenced sounds, smiths’ hammer stomps coming from above (seven people in a totally dark room whose presence was revealed by the feeble sparkles light gushing from the metal, hit at cadenced interval by each of them), a huge scale of wood and ropes stood by a carpet of men lying frozen in sleep, every now and then rolling over at the pace of the mystical chants of artist Qing Ga. Locked rooms with life-size dummies of straw and shrub branches were standing behind glass doors like fossils from an undetected time. A huge tumulus of grass and earth landed over a carbon-traced path where people had to tiptoe to pass through, which was actually the married work of Sui Jianguo and Wang Yiqiong, and the beautiful green mattress eventually revealed as the silhouette of a laying human body. People whispering, not daring to break the mixed atmosphere fabricated by the casual Argonauts, travelling back in time to bring us responses to interrogatives of the present. Leaving the exhibition was like leaving another moment in time, a primordial and lost one, thrown out there in a likewise shredded container of magical powers: the incipit to the show quoted from a poem by Mao Zedong to comrade Guo Moruo (which incidentally is also the one cast on the stele contained in the south chamber of his mausoleum) says "10.000 years are too long, size the day, size the hour." Time is pressing and China’s historical run is leaving everyone behind? This is what art is asking, to rejuvenate its suspenseful capacity to tell the ever-changing intellectual fable by which nature is recounted and new man and new possibilities are made-up, filled with hope and bewilderment. Even by the time of one day: "24 hours" is a concept of time that is both lengthy and fleeting. In "24 Hours," what can we achieve? To what extent can we achieve? Will artists adapt? Will the audience adapt? In this growing art show, this experimental art group once again challenges the boundaries of exhibitions and art practice.
This quote is the presentation of an intriguing art show curated by Rania Ho, artist of the CAPE (Complete Art Experience Project collective from Beijing, who organized this time-based, ever-changing round of work construction and modification inside the Beijing Film Studios (n.1). The show kept on changing until the very last minute by really making art go public and involving the audience in a collective exploration into the unintended and the unexpected. Featuring works by Liu Ding, Wu Ershan, Rania Ho, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Wei, Shi Qing, Zhang Hui and Yu Ji. (see the works at http://www.caep.com.cn/24hours.htm)
