| The flash of orange scales scintillates in the swirling water as the washing machine churns. Chinese Koi are tossed about like inanimate objects in the unforgiving torrents of the machine. At the end of the cycle, they lie gasping for breath as the machine empties. No reason is given for this low-grade torture, but the video by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng raises myriad questions and incites an array of visceral and cerebral responses in viewers from China to Europe to the United States, many of whom are arrested by the hypnotic horror of this scene—who want to turn away and yet are unable to stop looking. |  |
Putting Nature in its Place – Maya Kóvskaya
The flash of orange scales scintillates in the swirling water as the washing machine churns. Chinese Koi are tossed about like inanimate objects in the unforgiving torrents of the machine. At the end of the cycle, they lie gasping for breath as the machine empties. No reason is given for this low-grade torture, but the video by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng raises myriad questions and incites an array of visceral and cerebral responses in viewers from China to Europe to the United States, many of whom are arrested by the hypnotic horror of this scene—who want to turn away and yet are unable to stop looking.
Ma Yongfeng’s video work, The Swirl, critiques society indirectly, highlighting the difficulty, or even futility of resistance. Playing on the apparent power of exogenous forces or seemingly autonomous processes to move us and our lives into rhythms beyond our will, he presents a disturbing scene in order to provoke thoughts about the order of things, the status of our volition and the limits of our powers within an order of mechanized, domesticated nature.
The Swirl has generated controversy over its use of six live Koi, Chinese symbols of fertility and prosperity, which are subjected to a brutal 15-minute wash cycle in an upright washing machine. After a 2004 showing at the Los Angeles MOCA in the "How Can You Resist?" exhibition devoted to the difficulty and urgency of resistance following the US invasion of Iraq, after its subsequent showing at PS1 this year and at another at the Inova art school at UWM, the artist received numerous angry emails about his callous abuse of animals in the name of art. While there are obviously many domains in our everyday lives—from the clothes we wear, the products we use, the medications we take, the food we eat, the habitats we displace and the ecosystems we annihilate—implicated in the (less visible, but no less real) routine cruelty towards and exploitation of animals, these concerns are nonetheless legitimate. And perhaps, inciting such controversy is part of the artist’s agenda. To set the record straight, however, the video did not actually involve the killing of these fish. There was certainly no small amount of physical discomfort for them during the wash cycle (no detergent was added, however) and some scales were lost, but the end result was a group of dizzy, but still viable fish who went on to live a normal fish life in the care of a friend of the artist.
In a conceptual vein similar to that of The Swirl, Ma Yongfeng’s 27-minute video Beijing Zoological Garden uses the round-frame of the traditional Chinese Song Dynasty "bird and flower" palace paintings to both aestheticize and criticize the suffering of animals kept in captivity for human entertainment. This is also to comment on the ways in which our relationships to nature and the natural world in part constitute how we conceive of ourselves. While the zoo is a site of childhood fantasy and imaginings of the vast and glorious natural world, the often cruel and squalid conditions, especially those in Third World contexts where the term "animal rights" is still years from making its way into the national household lexicon, give that fantasy a dystopian undertone. Exposed in these hypnotic and disturbing pieces are routinized, aestheticized violence and suffering, the casual objectification and wanton abuse of other lives, the sense of estranged agency and the futility of resistance in contemporary society.
Another kind of futility is examined in Ma Yongfeng’s Confrontation Exercises. In this three-minute video, sequences of a pair of naked butts bumping together over and over again are interpolated with bouncing orange pingpong balls. The balls have no discernible rhythm, but they fall with stubborn predictability. Over and over, the butts bump and the balls fall. That is all there is. Senseless, pointless, ceaseless, humanly-created conflict. There is no resolution, only impasse, hinting at the human being’s stupidity and our stubborn insistence on embroiling ourselves in irresolvable conflicts.
In Storm Model, the artist inverts his strategy to address a related set of issues. The five-minute video impersonally records the destruction of a model village by forces of nature. While the turgid water tossing the helpless fish about in The Swirl is obviously part of a human-made design and a mechanized expression of routinized abuse, the water depicted in Storm Model is supposed to be torrential rainfall and flooding—a simulated retribution to humanity for its iniquities, perhaps, like the biblical floods meant to cleanse the earth. Here, however, here there is no Noah, no ark and there are no animals to fulfill promises of regeneration. There is only destruction as simulated nature reclaims the earth, sending us back to our origins.
Indeed, in Ma Yongfeng’s latest work, a photography and installation series entitled The Origin of the Species, it is absence rather than presence that makes the strongest point. After photographing the pathetic attempts at recreating a natural habitat for birds at the zoo replete with painted waterfalls (painted for whom, we might ask, but the visitors at the zoo themselves?), images of flowers and even a fake, two-dimensional sunshine on the concrete with a few dry sticks to serve as branches on which the birds are to perch, the artist has removed all traces of the animals themselves. This artistic fiat that has emptied the cages simultaneously foregrounds the invisible hands that have wrought these miserable spaces. Our hands. For, these spaces were built for us as a part of the collective narratives that we tell ourselves—narratives about who we are, what nature is and what our place in the world is—and not for the comfort of the animals that we remove from their original habitats and confine within these spaces. By removing the animals, our true motives are presented in stark relief; showing both the anthropocentric hubris within the impulse to cage and categorize, as well as the embarrassing poverty of our visions. Without the animals to adorn and animate these spaces with their gay colors and lively movements, the meagerness of our own creation is laid bare.
To be clear, Ma Yongfeng does not see himself as an animal rights activist, nor does he see his work as primarily about their fate at our hands. Rather, his work refracts the ways in which we make ourselves relationally, through our engagement with, and even exploitation of, the world in which we live. He does not tell us directly what he thinks of our species, but leaves the work to make us question things for ourselves. His solo show in December at the Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, certainly promises to make us question our place in all this.
