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Hundreds of migrant laborers packed the exhibition hall at Jianwai SOHO provided by culture-savvy real-estate magnate Pan Shiyi. Many dressed in their finest attire, especially the young ones who aimed to show the assembled hordes of media at the UNESCO "Together with Migrants" Festival that "mingong" (the common term for migrant "peasant-workers") have style and dignity just like any other social group. Curated by Zhu Qi, one of China’s most pioneering, risk-taking critic/curators, the "China’s Happiness and Pain" exhibition provided a visual compliment to the series of cultural events surrounding the festival that included public debates, poetry readings and even musical performances by migrants. |
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Together with Migrants: Chinese Contemporary Art and Social Criticism – Nathaniel M. Stevens
Hundreds of migrant laborers packed the exhibition hall at Jianwai SOHO provided by culture-savvy real-estate magnate Pan Shiyi. Many dressed in their finest attire, especially the young ones who aimed to show the assembled hordes of media at the UNESCO "Together with Migrants" Festival that "mingong" (the common term for migrant "peasant-workers") have style and dignity just like any other social group. Curated by Zhu Qi, one of China’s most pioneering, risk-taking critic/curators, the "China’s Happiness and Pain" exhibition provided a visual compliment to the series of cultural events surrounding the festival that included public debates, poetry readings and even musical performances by migrants. The contemporary art exhibition featured prominent Chinese artists including Cang Xin, Zhang Xinmin, Chang Qing, Zheng Dongying, Zhu Yan, Zhang Jianhua, Ah Qing, Hu Jie, Han Bing and Japanese artist Wan Li.
Wan Li, who hails from Tokyo but lives and works in Shanghai, offered pages of a 3D fiberglass newspaper—The Migrant Worker’s Daily—with powerful quotidian images from daily work and life, including on-the-job injury, depicted in this make-believe newspaper. "The scenes I depicted are real events," Wan Li explains, "but there is no Migrant Worker’s Daily to speak to the everyday concerns of this group. I thought that such a large population, so critical to China’s development and ‘modernization,’ should have a space of its own."
Documentary video art by Hu Jie displayed the living and working conditions of mine-workers in China with gritty pathos. When he shot the film, he encountered numerous obstacles raised by officials anxious about the muckraking effects of his work, but when the video made it to the upper echelons of power, the central government began to take the plight of mine-workers seriously and the dangers of their profession are now a much discussed topic in the mass media.
The most controversial part of the exhibition was the collection of fiberglass sculptures by Zhang Jianhua. Some were well received by the migrants who attended, such as the Village Head sculpture. Others, such as depictions of beggars groveling for spare change and homeless migrants with exaggeratedly ugly, and even mentally retarded features, became the topic of much discussion among spectators on the nature and effect of the stereotypes circulating in the dominant society.
"Stirring up impassioned public debate is one of the functions contemporary art should perform," relates Zhu Qi. "I am especially pleased to hear migrants commenting on the works and engaging the wider public in discussions about their place in society."
"For me," relates Liu Jun, one of the migrants who participated in the “New Culture Movement” performance art piece orchestrated by artist Han Bing, "the best part of this whole event was being able to be a part of making art."
"I didn’t know there were people who made art about ordinary people like us," said Zhu Lei, a Sichuanese migrant who also took part in the performance. "I thought art was something for people with culture, so I was happy to learn that there are artists who think we have culture too."
When Han Bing asked migrants to take bricks in hand and make themselves into living monuments of the New Culture Movement—a burgeoning culture of construction and modernization (in contrast to the original New Culture Movement at the beginning of the 20th century, that heralded the rise of literacy and the value of book-learning in China)—he asked them to manifest the dignity of their labor in public and reclaim their contributions to China’s "modernization," contributions the urban society often denigrates. Not one of the migrants asked why they should pick up bricks. They understood precisely what the red brick symbolized, in all its ironic complexities: "Bricks are hope," said migrant worker Zhou Rui. "Maybe no one in the city wants bricks anymore, but for us, they still have value. We can use them to build a home for our families, a home that’s better than the mud and straw we had to use before."
The “New Culture Movement” (2001-2006) is an ongoing nationwide performance photography series by Han Bing, who is one of the few Chinese contemporary artists to hail from a poor rural village. The piece comments on the paradoxes of China’s "modernization" process, which has been swept up in a frenzy of pell-mell urban construction—construction that is undertaken by rural migrant laborers who build glamorous gated communities and gleaming high-rises of steel, glass and concrete in which they will not only never live, but are also not welcome to visit. In the 80s, being modern meant yearning for a modest house of bricks. Now bricks have been deemed substandard, outmoded materials and are prohibited for use in urban construction, but back in the countryside, where the vast majority of China’s population is still rural and still poor, the best that the sweat and toil of the migrants working in the cities can bring is a simple brick construction back home. There is a powerful poignancy to these images of laborers, families and even schoolchildren with bricks in hand like little red books, maintaining their tenacious dreams of making a place for themselves in a society that refuses to acknowledge their worth or contributions.
