Social Factory

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10th Shanghai Biennale

In modernity, this ambiguity of the social, and the possibility

to plan and engineer society that hinges on it, has been a
matter of ongoing contestation. Bureaucratic procedures,
surveys, statistics, and concepts of identity have variously
sought to reduce the complexity of the social hieroglyph
(James C. Scott), in order to separate the meaningful from
the meaningless or legible signals from noise. Drawing on
both contemporary and historical works, as well as music
and cinema, the 10th Shanghai Biennale presents art works
that call such separation, and its historical productivity, into
question.

Social Factory

(James C. Scott)

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Social Factory

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The 10th
Shanghai Biennale

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Contents

Foreword
Hu Jinjun

13

17

21

Foreword
Gong Yan

Social Factory:
The 10th Shanghai Biennale
Anselm Franke

35

In Conversation: Manray Hsu

with Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas
and Anselm Franke

Social Factory

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45

Artists

221

Noise to Signal, or why a soft signal can be loud

Nicholas Bussmann

225

The Laundromat by the Sea

Yan Jun
233

Music Program: Artists

241

Examining the Footnotes of History:

Notes on the Social Factory
Liu Xiao

253

The Vanguards Advance: Looking Back on the

Origins of the Modern Woodcut Movement
Tang Xiaobing

To the Front: The Modern Woodcut Movements

Performative Sites
Liu Xiao
Social Factory

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293

Film Program Introduction

Hila Peleg
CAMP

297

305

313

321

In Conversation:
Shaina Anand with Zhou Xin

Chinese Independent Film

from a Modernist Perspective
Zhang Yaxuan

The Power of Narrating and the Politics of

Listening in Ko Sakai and Ryusuke Hamaguchis
Tohoku Documentary Trilogy
Ayako Saito
Film Program: Participants

265

341

The Sharpest Ideology: That Reality

Appeals to its Realistic Character
Alexander Kluge

11

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347

Foreword
Hu Jinjun

The New Left Within Heterotopia

Chan Koonchung

361

Tomorrow I will be a Painter

Hans-Christian Dany

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Time ceaselessly flows; days and months follow one after the other. The Shanghai
Biennale, founded in 1996, has to date reached 10 editions. For 18 years, this
oldest and most intellectually respected of biennials in mainland China has successfully established a local locus for exchanges in international contemporary
art, witnessing and propelling the internationalization of contemporary Chinese
art. With the international metropolis of Shanghai as host, the Shanghai Biennale
has always maintained its Chinese stance and has continually explored Chinese
forms of expression. Since its inception, the Biennale has quietly been forging a
path forward and is now becoming one of the most important major art exhibitions
in Asia, fully manifesting the international prestige of this major cultural brand.
In 2012, the Power Station of Art opened. The Shanghai Biennale formally shifted
its base from Peoples Square to the riverbanks of the Huangpu River. The 9th
Shanghai Biennale the opening exhibition of the Power Station of the Art etched
a lasting impression on our memory. Now, two years later, the opening of the 10th
Biennale is upon us. Thanks to the recommendations of the Academic Committee
of the Biennale, Anselm Franke from Germany has taken on the role of Chief Curator. The curatorial team he has built takes Social Factory as the main theme and
undertakes a fascinating academic inquiry into the systems and modes of social and
artistic production, providing a productive significance and playing a promotional
role for Chinas push to build on its contemporary cultural soft power. From the
proportions seen with the curatorial committee as well as the participating artists,
the degree of internationalization in this edition of the Biennale is unprecedented.
This fully showcases the openness and self-confidence in the cultural construction
of contemporary China.

service for ever greater numbers of visitors. In the four-month period of the exhibition, Shanghais thoroughfares, public squares, commercial buildings and
airport will become the sites and exhibition platforms for the Biennale. Out of the
numerous metropolitan cultural calling cards in Shanghai, the Shanghai Biennale
continues to consolidate its own position, tirelessly expanding the social influence
of contemporary art.
I wish the greatest success for the 10th Shanghai Biennale.
Hu Jinjun

Director of the Organization Committee of

the 10th Shanghai Biennale

Director of the Shanghai Municipal
Administration of Culture, Radio, Film and TV

Aside from the main theme pavilion of Social Factory, this edition of the Shanghai
Biennale has also set up city pavilions with the theme of Urban Work & Shop,
which continues the many years of tradition that the Shanghai Biennale has deeply
immersed itself into urban living spaces, in order to provide a superior cultural

199618

2012

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Foreword
Gong yan

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The burden on biennales needs to be lightened. With respect to social evolution, an

emotional journey or a tectonic shift, the two-year waiting period is far from enough
to repay the wait with a commitment. It thus collapses into focused descriptions
and operational soothsaying. Lightening the burden will allow it to attain more ways
to observe, which will in turn change its set-up. The 10th Shanghai Biennale, now
entering its 18th year, is poised on exactly such a precipice temporally.
Therefore, as the operator of the Shanghai Biennale, the young Power Station of
Art hopes as much as possible to long maintain the natural instinct of skeptics and
search out a path with a rhythm that is not linear but rather akin to a montage. This
edition of the Biennale started off making attempts in its operational mechanism.
Anselm Franke is not only the youngest curator in the history of the Shanghai
Biennale but also the first foreign curator selected to be its Chief Curator. Though
the internal arrangements and reorganization cannot be visually represented, they
will certainly affect the working model in the core installation process, imparting
some remnant compassion in a mechanical age. The main theme of this Biennale
as proposed by Anselm Franke is Social Factory, which exceeds the hackneyed
discussion of the mechanisms of production of contemporary art. For me, this is
extremely relevant to Shanghai, situated as it is between the contradictions of globalization and self-construction. Anselm Franke places his ideas and reflections about
production and society into all kinds of reality faced by humanity as well as their
reflected images resulting from the social progress since the Industrial Revolution
to the present day. An exhibition can be a document of both the real and fiction, in
which artistic intelligence challenges the rationality and conventions of the world
factory. (Anselm Franke, Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale, 2014)
Looking back on history, Mr Fang Zeng, ink painting artist and the founder of the
1st Shanghai (Art) Biennial in 1996 (the name was changed to Shanghai Biennale
in 2000), then stated a simple wish: A starting point to link up internationally,
which will certainly be the gate through which contemporary Chinese art heads

towards the world. In less time than a university degree, the Shanghai Biennale
had handed in its results. Thereafter, the Biennale has gone through two changes in
space (Shanghai Art Museum Power Station of Art), increasing the exhibition area
seven times, and even adding the concept of the City Pavilions from the 9th edition;
53 curators, 698 artists (or artist groupings), and countless numbers of people
working behind the scenes have all manifested the mutual regard and confirmation
between China and the rest of the world. If our elders back then could be said to
have undergone this journey full of basic questions and amid perplexity, today we
discover that some of the initial questions raised at the outset have still not been
answered or restated in this wave of self-renewal. For instance, how can the little
times of an exhibition curated and produced, lasting three to six months, contend
with our everyday revelry? How can we remove the theoretical shell performed
and promoted in order to rediscover the primal drive of creativity?
Just as we are about to unveil a new chapter in the history of the Shanghai Biennale,
we cannot forget the leaders and elders who have quietly supported the Shanghai Biennale for nearly 20 years. Their dedication and ardor have ignited and
strengthened the determination of a group of young people to struggle bravely
and confidently take on the baton of history. We must once again thank all those
who have poured their hearts and souls into this years Biennale: the curatorial
team, the Academic Committee of the Shanghai Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale
Office, the members of the design, installation and operation teams, as well as all
our friends who have provided all kinds of support.
Gong Yan

Director of the Power Station of Art, Shanghai

53698

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36

(Anselm Franke)

2014

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Social Factory:
The 10th Shanghai Biennale
Anselm Franke

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So the first kind of talent that the Academy will train is artists,
who are the voice and vision of society, and will express emotions
that society cannot express.
Sun Fuxi, quoted by Tang Xiaobing in this volume

One
Few cities in the world represent the image of a society-in-the-making as dynamically
as Shanghai. This city characterizes Chinas rapid modernization and ascent to
world power. And yet, Shanghai also embodies materially and as image, a promise
for the post-industrial future the China that will no longer be the world factory,
but rather a social factory. But, what would that signify? And, what sort of social
realities does this society-as-factory produce?
It should be made clear from the outset that our point of departure is
neither a vision of a society as the sum of actions produced by pre-existing individuals (as some Western theories would have it), nor of society as an organic
totality (as the Confucian tradition, among others, tended to imagine). Instead,
we have been thinking about a different kind of commonality, whose contours
have yet to be articulated, but which has already become crucial to the emerging
forms of production that have come to be analyzed by some under the umbrella
concept factory society (Hardt/Negri). To understand these contours, we need
to conceive of production in the widest possible sense not simply as that which
takes place on the factory floor, but the myriad ways in which actions, habits, and
language produce effects, including effects on subjectivity, ways of perceiving,
understanding, and relating to the world. (J. Read).

Two
The 10th Shanghai Biennale begins in the foyer of the Power Station of Art with a
quotation of the principle to seek truth from facts, the main theme of a specially
commissioned work by composer Peter Ablinger. This ancient Chinese principle
was famously invoked by Mao Zedong in 1938, and then 40 years later in 1978,
by Deng Xiaoping, as he prepared China for his policy of reform. Both leaders
invoked this principle in order to transform the conceptual categories that citizens
deployed to make sense of reality, in recharging the grounds of social practice as
the benchmark for change.
To seek truth from facts has become a guiding principle within the
radical social and political transformations that China underwent in the 20th
century, when the nation-state was confronted with the challenge of building its
ancient society anew, following the humiliating defeats suffered by the Qing dynasty
in the Opium War in the 1840s, and its final breakdown in 1911. At this time, the
truth-value of the entire order of the imperial past had to be radically questioned,
and truth, as common good, needed to be established on new foundations.

But the very definition of a fact, to a certain degree, is equally contestable; facts too are social constructions and the constructed nature of a fact calls
upon the participation of multiple other-than-human factors and agencies. From
the 19th century right into the 1970s, the history of modernity in a global context
remained immersed in a certain objectivism, a belief that modern science provided
access to immutable facts. Poised against the conceptualization of both empirical
experience and ethics, this objectivism derived its legitimacy from the natural
sciences and leaned towards a mechanistic worldview. Yet it has experienced an
endured crisis especially, yet not only, with regard to the social sciences. Though
the social sciences produce innumerable amounts of data, its theories have somehow consistently failed when predicting how society and its subjects will behave in
the future. They also remain unsuccessful in gauging the antagonistic realities that
manifest in human consciousness as political subjectivities. And as the history of

(Peter Ablinger)1938

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2019

1911

19 70

(Hardt/Negri)

(Jason Read)

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the social sciences reveal to us, claims to objective knowledge of the social are
always quick in being overhauled by social dynamics themselves thus proving to
be a product of particular temporal circumstances and an environment of ideas.
However, that facts are produced (evident also in the word factory)
does not mean that they are necessarily untrue. It only implies that what matters
most is their mode of production, and that their truth-value is contestable itself
a matter of politics.
In consumer society, the primary fact arrives from the factory, and is
called commodity. The commodity, in Marxist terms, has the notorious tendency to
displace the social by concealing social relations of production and labor. Capital
encourages us to observe the world upside-down, making us believe implicitly that
the primary task of human existence is the production of commodities, rather than
the collective production of social relations and our fashioning of one another
as human actors. A derivative of this reversal has also persistently haunted leftist
theories, as they have continuously undervalued the primary production of the
social through care, affection and education in what is being assigned as reproductive labor.
The 10th Shanghai Biennale uses the term social factory in order to
embark upon critical reflection. It wants to imagine what a social factory that put this
relation back on its feet may look like not in the sense of an utopian projection,
but as a task in the here and now, in confronting our immediate environments. What
if we considered the production of the social or even the production of humanity
as our primary task?

For such an undertaking, the primary fact from which we depart is
something that neither scientific, objectivist knowledge can easily grasp nor that
which allows itself to be commodified. We may call this the relational fact. This is
a kind of fact, which only active consciousness may grasp and as a society, we have
access to it only through art. That is to say, it is within the realm of image-making
and cultural production that we comprehend truths about the complexity of social
relations that otherwise remain inaccessible.

What I would characterize as the artistic thinking of the present, the very
basis of contemporary art and its multiplicity of forms, is deeply informed by the
crisis of objectivist knowledge and the related crisis of the high modernist project
of rationalizing the production of society itself. This statement is valid universally,
even if the particular circumstances of this crisis are vastly different. In art, this
crisis first surfaced as a crisis of the art object itself and has continued to transform artistic practice radically across all domains. This transformation consists of
a massive attempt to translate fixed and structurally monologic relations, which
produced their knowledge through the objectification of their subject matter, into
relations of reciprocity. The primary task of the artist is to engage with, and speak
to, the social conditions of production of art, and to make work that exhibits these
conditions.

What used to be artistic products have since been translated into
processes (and for the ends of the art market, back into products). In no singular
artistic discipline was it possible to maintain an objectivist focus on the product
and an established canon of forms, or even a particular idea of the function of art
in society. Everywhere, the conditions of production, the entire network of practices in which art occurs, has been put into question and has been continuously
transformed, as these aspects of production are now always maintained in the foreground, defining both the content and form of the work of art. This is an irreversible
process, which bears its own truth the truth of the radical transformations in the
production of subjectivity, for the production of art, as the Chinese tradition knows
well, can never be dissociated from the production of subjectivity.

But this level of social production, although its unconscious dimensions
may rightly be called machinic by certain philosophers, could not be further away
from the logic of the factory, insofar as the factory is a completely controlled and
planned environment. The production of subjectivity is above all, a relational fact,
and the subject simultaneously a product, and a producer of social relations.

(fact)(factory)

(the social)

(reproductive labor)

(relational fact)

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 Three
In addition to the principle of seeking truth from facts, the Chinese woodcut movement which began in Shanghai in the 1920s is another important reference for
this Biennale. The importance of this movement in modern Chinese art history has
been underlined by, among others, Tang Xiaobing, who has also contributed to the
present catalogue. The movement instigated a passionate discourse on subjectivity
(X. Tang), as it grew out of a situation of profound sociocultural uncertainty and
violence, in which the making and remaking of an entire society and culture was
at stake. The woodcut was then to become a mass medium, and a tool of social
mobilization and critical reflection at the same time.

We were interested in how the woodcut movement reflected the New
Culture Movements goal of aesthetic education, and a wholesale transformation
of the values and spirit of an entire people, reflecting the 20th century Chinese
obsession with cultural revolution, and the role and status of art and tradition
therein. Its quest to create a socially consequential art form reflected a series of
paradoxes associated with the making and remaking of society in modernity and
the status of culture, fiction, peoples minds and spirituality, which we can
relate to the problems emerging from the modern production of subjectivity today.
These paradoxes reflected themselves in the thought of great Chinese reformers
associated with the cultural-intellectualistic approach to modernization, who sought
above all to change peoples minds, especially those of the anti-traditionalists
since the May Fourth Movement, who were often simultaneously upholding and
reviving the very traditions they were so forcefully rejecting.
This primacy of reform in the realm of culture was pursued by some
of Chinas most prominent modern reformers, from the journalist Liang Qichao
(18731929) to the eminent writer Lu Xun (18811936). For Liang Qichao, who
in 1902 prepared the grounds for Chinas new literature, a reform of fiction would
need to result in a reform of the entire culture of a people and their way of life. A
few years later, Lu Xun started his literary career with a similar appeal. However, the

relation between peoples minds and social reality is obscure, and no one captured
this better than Lu Xun himself, when he coined the ambivalent concept of spiritual
victory in the face of actual defeat. His Story of Ah Q is a satirical narrative that
would prove to become hugely influential in debates about national character,
structures of power and subjectivity, and what he has metaphorically called the
cannibalism of Chinese society. To this date, through numerous interpretations,
The Story of Ah Q continues to be a foil for the negotiation of social reality. The
Biennale displays a woodcut cycle by the recently deceased Zhao Yannian, whose
powerful rendering of The Story of Ah Q was produced as a response to the political
and social upheavals in China in the 1960s and 70s.

So what kind of social and mental facts did the woodcut movement
manage to capture and produce? In retrospect, the woodcut movement serves us,
at this Biennale, as a way to reflect on the dramatization of the dialectics between
objective structures, and subjective agency and perception, in a manner where
art works negotiate the opacity of the social and articulate relational facts thus
bringing to the fore the conditions, tensions and scenarios of social production.
It is also the materiality of the woodcut method the making of a positive and
a negative through a material impression, that directly carries within itself a
dialectical arrangement.
Four
The Biennale seeks to explore a tension that exists between rapid transformations
and slow processes. In its description, I borrow from the work of German writer
and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, whose literature records the histories of what he
calls the subjective side. This is staged as a history of emotions, and a history of
the imprints that have coined the psyche and mental life, over long periods of time.
Such a history is composed mainly of life stories, and of the way people rationalize
and make sense of their own biographies. It also results in the creation of a horizon

1920

Q6070

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(18731929)(18811936)

(Alexander Kluge)

1902

(subjective side)

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Reductionist concepts of social order at one extreme, sprawling connections on

the other it is between these poles that the exhibition Social Factory oscillates,
from one work to the next. On the one hand, social relations are limited to those
that are conscious, formalized and situated within a particular symbolic syntax and
order. On the other hand, there is the anarchic flow of social interconnections, a preindividual stratum and a mediality extending across various ontological registers.

In this latter world, there is no a priori limit to social relations. Various kind of
animisms in various cultures show that it is relatively possible to be social with,
and hence to perceive reciprocity and grant subjectivity to, the most remote kind
of things in this world from stars via spirits to stones. But they also show that
the social is always striated, marked by opposition and divisions, and that there is
always a limit, a realm with which no communication can be established, a limit
that hence must be the ultimate benchmark of politics, of inclusion and exclusion.

For the Confucian tradition, too, the entire cosmic order was social,
in the sense that there existed social relationships between the ten thousand
things, connected through a flow of empathy. But the Confucian tradition was
also characterized by a permanent tension between the larger cosmic order and
actual social reality. For the Confucian scholar, it was clear that there was a fundamental oneness in the order of the cosmos, and that this oneness ought to be
reflected and realized in the social order. But they struggled acutely in realizing
this vision of harmony, in closing the circle against the backdrop of the actually
existing plurality cognitively like rough waters on the open sea and socially, a
persistence of moral wilderness. The awareness of this gap between their ideals
of social order, and this wilderness within and without, crucially informed the ritual
and routine of bureaucratic administration and attitude. The 10th Shanghai Biennale situates itself within this gap between the wild waters and the sprawling,
anarchic connections across ontological barriers.
In the entrance, and throughout the entire exhibition, there are works
literally dealing with water and its (impossible) containment: waves drawn by thousands of pencil lines, a silent inversion of tradition (Hu Liu); water that has been
salted with the salt of all oceans, leaking from a container (Erik Steinbrecher); and
sculptures reproducing the large wave-breakers made from concrete that are used
at harbors and shorelines to prevent erosion and to control or govern the sea (Li
Xiaofei). And then, nearby, there is an animated stereoscopic photograph showing
a yarn factory from the 19th century, with children at work (Ken Jacobs). What
is the relation between mechanization and the living social fact? Water and the

of myths, which produce and reproduce structures of cognition, like how maps help
us navigate a territory, while at the same time creating this territory as a social
fact. The history of the subjective side needs to be understood and sensed in the
very shape of thoughts and emotions, as well as the forms, languages and means
of expression in which they materialize.
How is the experience being described and what narrative models are
available to make sense of ones life? Kluges work begins with contrasting relatively
fast changes in the physical world of matter and objects, with the long duration of
changes of the subjective side. The world of objects around humans changes
in periods ranging from 150 to 6,000 years, he says, but even more resilient is
the subjective side which needs around 12,000 years or longer to grow.

Where could one better test such a proposition than in China? The
previous 10 editions of the Shanghai Biennale have been largely dedicated to reflecting on the breathtaking speed of transformation in China but here, the resilience
of the subjective side also makes itself felt as a very real experience; that is to
say, above all, but not only within family structures, in which many micro-social
patterns usually described as traditional prevail. It is a resilience of deep-seated
patterns and orientations, which are resurfacing time and again. Many modernizing
schemes for reforming society have come up against this resilience, on which, it
seems, all socially transformative forces remain hinged.
Five

(Erik Steinbrecher)

(Ken Jacobs)19

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How to build a society? We began to think of this question through the conceptual pair signal and noise. (This conceptual pair was developed by Nicholas
Bussmann for the contributions of experimental music to the Biennale, further

explained in his text in this volume). Ever since the literati-bureaucrats broke the
power of the aristocracy and turned a vast amount of peasants primarily attached
to the bonds of kinship into a society, China has produced an enormous quantity
of documents, data and statistical analysis about its population. Like the waves
hitting upon the shore, noise stands for the ungovernable multiplicity of voices
and relations within the social. There is no outside to the social, in the broad definition of the term as suggested above. This universal immanence of the social is
perhaps explicable by the first axiom of communications theory, which states that
we cannot not communicate for even its negation is still communication. Yet, there
are countless ways of socialization, and they produce a subjective conscious and
collective culture through a system of distinctions and forms of literacy. Similarly,
all noise can become signal, if there is a respective filter that can render it legible.
But more generally, noise threatens to erode hegemonic meaning, which relies on
the authority of the signifier. How is such an empire of meaning maintained, if not by
permanently sorting signals from noise, and thus guarding its terrain of authority?
And is this not also a possible description of what institutions and bureaucratic
procedures do? In this exhibition, we wanted to suggest that works of contemporary art, by the mere virtue of their notorious play with the instability of meaning,
act like membranes, always situated between signal and noise, in that no mans
land where one can register the traffic that exists between the two, and, using the
words of Sun Fuxi as quoted in Tang Xiaobings essay in the volume, express
something about society that society itself cannot express. And this realm is of
course co-extensive to the realm of images.

Signal to Noise: this is also the distinction between a particular rationality
and its outsides, between appropriate subjects and identities from inappropriate
ones, and of legitimate representation and its relation to counter-hegemonic narratives. The process of discerning signals from noise, for the individual, is typically
a process fostered by socialization and of learning to read certain signs, that is,
of assuming a particular form of literacy. But in modernity, the main agent of this
distinction, and only accepted representative of society, has been the state.

machine, both are images for what elsewhere we called the infrastructural unconscious of modernity. Just as life, and what in the Chinese tradition was referred
to as the living flow of things, is born from water, so the world of modernity, and
its conflicts, is born from the factory. The sound of the factory then echoes that of
the waves crashing against the shorelines of stable order.

What kind of order, what sort of relation between the living flow of things
and its regulation is produced in our times? A time of multiplication, acceleration
and of networked global exchange. What is the relation between standardization
(produced through machines and other devices of capture) and subjective experience? The living flow of things, too, was a key concern in the Chinese tradition,
whose literati-bureaucrats at the same time conceived large-scale engineering
projects such as river dredging in order to control the ten thousand things and
put in order heaven and earth. But in modernity, the always precarious order of
heaven and earth was violently derailed. If earlier, a key concern of the Confucian
tradition had been the attempt to find a remedy for the persistent failure to close
the circle and realize in social order the oneness of their cosmic vision, then
this circle, and indeed any social bond, has been called into question in modernity.
And this is not only because modern technology and science has upset the cosmic
orders of the past. It is also because modern consciousness radically calls into
question all previous certainties and sources of authority. Ever since, thinking itself
has revolved around the legitimacy of power and old sources of authority, such as
a cosmological order or divinities, which no longer provide the same social glue
as they once did, when helping to forge societies.
Six

Nicholas Bussmann

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 Seven
While not being identical, political and scientific reductionism have worked together
throughout modernity and variously exchanged legitimacy. What their collaboration
has brought about was the modern, disciplinary and conformist society, crafted by
state power. High modernity in particular sought to disempower all other rationalities, such as religion, and universally charged the state and its institutions with the
task of fabricating society. The state then reduced the polyphony of the social, by
suppressing certain voices and allowing others, through a large institutionalized
apparatus, in the form of bureaucracy and media.
In his book Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott has described these
state simplifications as abridged maps. According to Scott, they transform the
social hieroglyph (that is, the complexity of social life) into a legible and administratively more convenient format. But they do not represent the actual activity
of the society nor do they simply depict a particular slice of reality. Rather, these
reductions enable the reality they depict to be radically remade. Modern statecraft
sought to remake society in the image of the machine, sought to organize all of
society like a factory a planned and controlled environment, based on automatization, standardization and rationalization. But there were limits to such remaking,
limits which started becoming clear around the time of Deng Xiaopings speech
in 1978. Objectivist and reductionist knowledge was in a crisis universally; the
object that such knowledge addressed and created simply refused to conform
and instead spoke back in myriad ways.
Eight
In the wake of this crisis, cybernetics has become the new paradigm of social
production. The cybernetic approach emerged in the late 1940s in the US
with a detour via China. Its inventor, Norbert Wiener, had spent several years at

Tsinghua University in Beijing in the 1930s, and some see him as influenced by
Daoism. Wiener saw the entire world as consisting of systems that were controlled, or that regulated themselves, through mechanisms of feedback and flows
of information. Cybernetics operated indirectly, not by subjugating life-processes
to machinic procedure, but by setting technological framework conditions, and
translates social and other life processes into governable systems with certain
boundary conditions. The homeostat is paradigmatic here, as a system that produces equilibrium, being both the subject of Stephen Willats work in the Biennale,
and mentioned in the article by H.C. Dany in this catalogue. Cybernetics did not
try to reproduce life, instead life has been understood as a system and has been
enclosed by circuits. Cybernetically informed strategies subsequently inscribed all
of society to ever-increasing degrees into the technological apparatus, generating
dynamic couplings with computational machines. Compared to high-modernist
objectivism, the direction has now been reversed and it is life and society that
animate the technological environment. Every time we interact with a machine, we
help this environment to improve its algorithms; we lend to technology the life, the
mind and the body that it doesnt possess.
As philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy pointed out, digital technologies
and algorithms release us from the burden of cognition, the work of symbolization,
and the making of decisions. The enhanced reality of intelligent data is a map
that is no longer abridged in James C. Scotts sense, rather, it is always already
adapted to ourselves, mirroring our preferences, attitudes and behaviors. But this
techno-animistic world of animating and animated selves, paradoxically, is entirely
de-subjectified. It bypasses any encounter with reflexive human subjects, in favor
of the computational, pre-emptive, context and behavior-sensitive management of
risks and opportunities. This leads to a situation in which it is no longer the consequentiality of the labor of symbolizations in art, that is in question the central
question of the historical avant-gardes. The question today is the consequentiality
of subjectivity as such, its ability to refuse identification with its own data-mirror,
and to insist on making a difference by engaging in recalcitrant processes of

1940

(Norbert Wiener)1930

(James C. Scott) (Seeing Like a State)

(homeostat)

(abridged map)

(Stephen Willats) H.C.(H.C. Dany)

1978

(Antoinette Rouvroy)

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sign-making, representation and symbolization, and cultivating its literacy towards

the unscripted parts of the world, towards the noise.
How does one insist on the ability to make such a difference? Many of
the artists that are exhibited in this Biennale turn to the particulars of history, in a
form of archaeology of the kind of behavior that today is individually and collectively
reproduced and mirrored back to us. Can we imagine that artists, through such an
archaeology of the present, engage in a critical modernization of our mental and
psychological resources with the grounds of subjectivity? This is the background
against which the distinction between signal and noise, and the focus on what we
have called mental resources and the infrastructure of psychic life have become
the main motives for this Biennale.
Contemporary art displaces and mirrors the frames through which we
perceive the world. It throws us back onto the background assumptions which we
carry with us at all times, and makes these assumptions and frames of perception
explicit; it exhibits them by making them apparent to us. This is why the production of social relations, in art, can become a subject of debate and reflection like
nowhere else. An exhibition can be a document of both the real and fiction, in which
artistic intelligence challenges the rationality and conventions of the world factory.

In Conversation:
Manray Hsu with
Freya Chou,
Cosmin Costinas and
Anselm Franke

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Dengs pragmatic perspective of seeking truth from facts and his legacy
of changing the direction of Chinas development. More than once, Xi has
quoted Deng in public and reaffirmed his framework of policies. That
landmark speech of 1978 is an important reference point for the Biennales
concept because it closely embodied Chinas process of modernization, as
well as its current political and economic reform. I think the urgency for us
is to slow down and look back over history and ask: what has been produced
in society and what are the facts, social values, cultural norms and structures
that we are seeking?

Many artworks in the Biennale are departing from this point, using
various levels of recourse to re-channel forms from new perspectives.
Outside of the Power Station of Art (PSA) building is a work by Taiwanese
artist, Musquiqui Chihying: a grotesque five-meter high metal bed, positioned
beneath a street lamp. The prototype for the bed was based on sketches
of factory workers in Shanghai. The artist depicts these workers memories
after leaving the factory, on their return to their places of rest. As the first
work you see in the Biennale, it creates a spectacular and impulsive welcoming
gesture to the idea and reminiscence of what factories leave behind.

M a n r a y Hs u ( M H ) As early as 2011, with

rapidly rising wages and shrinking labor forces in China,
global media began commenting on the end of the
countrys role as World Factory. The term endures,
but increasingly in relation to India, Indonesia, Russia,
Brazil and other emerging industrial countries. The title
of this years Shanghai Biennale Social Factory, as
opposed to World Factory captures some aspects
of Chinas development since Deng Xiaopings historic
inauguration of the countrys Reform and Opening Up
in 1978. On the other hand, Social Factory seems to
also echo Italian Workerisms focus on the social life of
workers in their community. What are the links between
these recent histories of the world? What is the urgency,
or particular relevance, of the subject in the case of
2014 Shanghai Biennale?

C o sm i n C o s t i n a s ( CC ) There is no doubt that whatever
the outcome of the current slowdown in Chinese growth and whatever
soft landing might occur, China will truly become and remain a world
factory for the 21st century. The process will produce a degree of urbani
zation and a change in social classes that are unparalleled. The effects of
these interrelated processes will not be fully understood by simply recali
brating methods devised for a different scale and ultimately, for a different
historical reality, be it in the West or other developing and emerging
economies. The social forms that will occur as consequences of these
processes will have other parameters for which a language and a vocabulary
still needs to be devised. This will not only be about a numeric expansion
of subjectivities an expanding consumer market that suddenly has a few
more million customers but would alter the general framework of the
processes of subjectivation. As such we need to see what role art could
play in these processes, and what institutions would support its circulation.

A n s e l m F r a n k e ( A F ) We are used to discussing the concept

of the social factory in relation to the transformations of capital and power.
It derives from Italian Workerism, but it is equally concerned with debates
surrounding networks and information society, neoliberalism and bio-politics.
Alvin Tofflers theories of a Third Wave Society were apparently widely read
in 1980s China, which influenced policies. The social factory means that
all of society has become a factory, that is, desire, subjectivity, cognition,
information and life are economized. Martin Becks work in the Biennale
reflects this new level in the penetration of the social, and the widespread
ideological fantasies of society as a factory that can be managed. To that
end, it uses the metaphor of a forest of aspen: the tree forms a superorganism, a kind of rhizome with its roots and super sensitive leaves. Thus,
it allows for increased productivity, because the sunlight reaches more
leaves, allowing for more photosynthesis.
It is important to place a critical vocabulary like this in the Chinese
context. Not least because this context also challenges some of the

F r e y a C h o u ( F C ) At a speech marking the 110th anniversary

of the birth of Deng Xiaoping earlier this year, President Xi Jinping praised

2011

110

1978

1978

2014

21

(Alvin Toffler)80

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assumptions and certainties of such discourse, especially with regard to

historical sequences. We have always been bio-political, even before socalled civilization, but certainly the Chinese state has always been this
way. Indeed, Chinas long history of social fabrication forces us to revise
these genealogies. On the one hand, we have to de-center the Europeancentric Marxist narrative, and on the other, we have to de-center the
civilizational and nationalist myths, too. But these concepts can of course
also contribute a great deal to understanding China today, and also present
a challenge. The urgency was simply to establish a broad conceptual
platform, which then can be used to debate critical differences.

new meaning of the term social for instance, how did computer networks
become social? Consider what Geert Loovink has to say about the
relationship between Big Data and the social: The term social has
effectively been neutralized in its cynical reduction to data porn. When did
we stop speaking of the social question, and instead began to see the
social as network? What is a social fact today, outside of the ubiquitous
network and data analysis? I like to think of the psycho-history of an art
historian like Aby Warburg as proposing a very different kind of social fact.
We tried to create an exhibition that supports the perception of these kinds
of social facts that are inscribed in the infrastructures of psychic life. It is
also important to look at the implicit aspect of social relations. In larger
social contexts, particularly of power, this marks a benchmark of successful
reform. Think of the highly problematic social fact of the qian guize the
hidden rules as recently discussed by party historian Wu Si. They effectively
undermine the accountability of an entire institutional system.

M H How should we understand the term the social

in Social Factory? Does it mean aspects of relations
between humans which go beyond individuals, as defined
by classic sociologists like Durkheim? Or, as implied in
animism, does it mean the inter-subjectivity between
things, including humans? Nicholas Baurriaud, curator
of the 2014 Taipei Biennial, referenced Anselm Frankes
Animism exhibition in proposing The Great Acceler
ation as the title for his Taiwan event, which centered
on this idea of the relationships of things. What is the
role of non-human resources in social factory?

CC China is in a paradoxical situation where a regime that still actively

claims the fabrication of society as one of its central missions, meets a
rapidly expanding consumerist society with all the related processes of
subjectivation. This is in a way the great cultural specificity of China at the
moment: constant negotiation, and the need to reconcile processes that
have been antagonistic in the development of other societies. It remains to
be seen what arts role will be in this process. So far it has been primarily
a mark of subjectivities manifested within a new social class and part of the
associated markets circumscribed to this. Nevertheless, there now seems
to be an effort to circumscribe contemporary art to the central efforts of
ideological engineering. The question remains: how to subtract contemporary
arts agency both from class dependency and from being instrumentalized
at higher levels? Probably the answer would lie somewhere at the scale of
institutions and of audiences and of how they would in fact be able to create
other structures for the circulation of art.

F C What Durkheim said about social facts should be considered as things,

as unanticipated consequences of human behavior. Things outside of us;
that could be sense, noises or signals. A large section of the Biennale has
been curated by Nicholas Bussmann: it seeks to draw connections between
technological developments in the science of management, social engineering,
as well as with imperial bureaucracy in China, and its relation to social and
cultural production.
A F Bruno Latour predicts that all disciplines are condemned to become
branches of sociology. The basis of our discourse is certainly the broadest
possible understanding of social relations, from which then we can start
understanding various reductions. It is also important to reflect on the

M H Greater China is entering a new stage of trans

formation. On the one hand, new sociometric tech
nologies are being innovated and used systemically to

(Martin Beck)

(Bruno Latour)

(Geert Loovink)

(Aby Warburg)

(Nicholas Bourriaud)2014

(Anselm Franke)

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produce an unprecedented scale of market and resource

mobilization. Alibaba Group, the Hangzhou-based
e-commerce company which The Economist called the
worlds greatest bazaar, is just one example of this
social production. On the other hand, there is also a new
surge of antagonism in society. How does the Biennale
reflect on these events? How to globally and historically
situate the exhibition in relation to other art events and
biennials?

CC The Biennale does not want to be part of a soft power effort, an

effort that hasnt in fact really started in earnest. So it is hardly about polishing
the edges or reconciling conflicts and antagonisms. That being said, there
is undoubtedly a need to reconsider what are the parameters of a critical
position to be employed and to not automatically reproduce positions
expected in contemporary discussions about China in the West.

F C There are several works in the show that touch upon different agendas
related to your question. On the second floor, a large-scale installation by
Edgar Arceneaux called The Algorithm Doesnt Love You: From Detroit to
Shanghai depicts the history of the American industrial city Detroit. The
metropolis was the historic site of race riots and social conflicts, and more
recently, has become the symbol of economic decline, a demonstration
of how social and economic forces utilize a fundamental incidence to
impact the lives of individuals.

What you mentioned about Alibaba is an interesting example. The
rise of Alibaba has much to do with Chinas changing direction of its
economic policy from export-orientation to domestic infrastructure
investment. Even now as China hits an all-time low in terms of economic
growth, Alibaba becomes the worlds largest IPO. So from an investors
point of view, it actually suggests a recovery of Chinas economy in the
next one to two years. Alibaba and Detroit are two different stories under
the intrusion of algorithms, but both bring about the same effects in our
social and psychological consciousness.
Art is more about triggering questions from within. Therefore, and
as per Anselms comments, it is the role of contemporary artists to modernize
our dealings with mental resources. They are cultural and psychological
resources, the material for our thoughts, desires and dreams. They are
resources being used increasingly in our consumer-oriented digital societies.
Art can enable us to open these resources to new forms of use.

M H In recent years, hundreds of museums both

public and private have been constructed and opened
across China. Museums are important sites of social
production in modernity. (Workers leaving the factory
go to the museum?) How does Social Factory reflect
the role of the museum, and of art institutions?
CC The museum boom in China in the last decade has been very much
connected to the rise of a new social class that needed legitimization in a
set of cultural references. But this accumulation of cultural goods is not
only a logical analogy of the primitive accumulation of capital that China
has been going through, it has also been a major effort of undoing the
effects of the Cultural Revolution without denying its historical position.
This ambivalence is to be seen in other aspects of contemporary China,
and it is an indication of the complicated processes of fabricating an
ideological pattern for the Chinese culture and society in the 21st century.
This field is thus extremely interesting and since art automatically contains
these contradictions, it is an apt field to investigate. The Biennale is far from
being so ambitious, but we have tried to reveal these forces, to point to
such conflicts and to seek analogies.
F C Shanghai is a city where you can have three art fairs within one week,
when the commercial vibe dominates the art scene so violently, it seems a
good window for us to present a different genre of exhibition. The 10th
Shanghai Biennale is hosted by Power Station of Art, which is a city-funded
institution. Structures on the site have witnessed the development of Shanghai
since the 16th century: latterly as a formal power station, now as a public
art institution. It is ironic that having endured the rise and fall of industrialization,

(Edgar Arceneaux)

IPO

12

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PSA now finds itself caught in the cultural boom, or museum mania, that
follows post-industrialization.
This Biennale features a large collection of historical works, including
woodcuts from 20th century China. They refer to the central role mass
media played in the birth of the New Art movement, inaugurated by Lu Xun.
The museum is not only the place where you can see these historical
documents, it is also the institutions responsibility to preserve history and
art. This is one of the features that distinguishes them from art fairs. Social
Factory is about telling stories which reflect on the questions and crises of
our society. PSA offers the 10th Shanghai Biennale a platform to address
such issue at a critical point in time, and as living proof of social reproduction,
seems also to give another layer of meaning to the exhibitions overall theme.
A F I believe in the museum as a space of aesthetic education, which
produces a kind of literacy and allows for the ever-greater negotiation of
meaning and representation. It makes small shifts in signification culturally
and politically of great importance, essential in a time of postmodern
erosion of signification, fostered by the economization of all fields of culture.
But the literacy produced by museums is crucially one that extends beyond
linguistics: it concerns consciousness. In this sense, I absolutely believe in
the modern institution of the museum, and its capacity to contribute to the
production of subjectivity. On the other hand, we need to always defend
this literacy as a public good, and resist its capture by an elite. In short, it
must remain a factory for the magic of surplus and symbolic capital. One
of the initial references was Andy Warhols factory: a paradigmatic biopolitical theater, in which life itself went to work. Warhol showed how an
artist can become his own product, and many artists today do the same in
a far less reflexive and ambivalent way.

20

PSA

21

16

PSA

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ARTISTS

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False Statement, extract from The Whole Truth

, 2012, mixed media installation

The Whole Truth

The trigger for the audio documentary

The Whole Truth was the current application
of voice analysis as a lie detection method
recently piloted by European, Russian and
Israeli governments, as well as being employed
by border agencies and insurance companies
all over the world. This technology uses the
voice as a kind of stethoscope, an instrument
to measure internal bodily responses to
stress and tension; it is a material channel that
allows the law to bypass speech by listening
and effectively delving into the body of its
subjects.

Inaccuracy, extract from The Whole Truth ,

2012, mixed media installation

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Lawrence Abu Hamdans research has

been dedicated to understanding the role of
the voice in law, as well as the changing
nature of testimony in the face of new regimes
of border control, algorithmic technologies,
medical sciences and modes of surveillance.
He argues that we now live in an era when
the conditions of testimony have insidiously
shifted, and seeks to demonstrate how
the diminishing agency of words is being
drowned out by laws amplification of accents,
inflections, reflections, impediments and
prosody. For Abu Hamdan, ours is an
age when the voice itself becomes like a kind
of stethoscope, an instrument that allows
the long ear of the law to probe deeper into
the body of its subjects.

1985,
Born 1985; lives and works in London

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46

Truth, extract from The Whole Truth ,

2012, mixed media installation

14-11-21 3:30

Exploring questions of concealment and

identity, Amorales works across a variety of
media, from paintings and drawings, to
animations and performances. In one of his
earliest performance pieces, Amorales vs.
Amorales (1999), lucha libre wrestlers grapple
in a ring, masks concealing their identities, as
the artist directs the brutal struggle. Fascinated
by horror and fantasy, Amorales also creates
worlds populated by ambiguous figures,
uncertain morals and ghostly silhouettes. In
Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague
(2008), bizarre and macabre renderings
of animals and human figures are placed beside
digital animations of apocalyptic landscapes,
distorting reality and creating an atmosphere
of unease.

Drawings, and a Plague)

575

We'll See How All Reverberates , 2012,

mixed media installation . Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto,
Mexico City

Well See How

All Reverberates

Carlos Amorales

Well See How All Reverberates is an

installation based on the mobiles of Alexander
Calder. But instead of reproducing the
late American sculptors organically shaped
forms, Amorales mobile is equipped with
some 35 cymbals, turning the piece into
a musical instrument. The cymbals are meant
to be played by the exhibitions audience
as well as by musicians. It creates an acute
sense of awareness of space, of people,
and of silence. If played by several individuals
at once in collective improvisation, the
work reflects how social interaction
oscillates spontaneously between chaos and
harmony. Thus, a sculptural installation
becomes a means of social reflection and
experimentation.

(Alexander Calder)

35

1970,

Born 1970; lives and works in Mexico City

(Amorales vs. Amorales1999)

2008
(Four Animations, Five

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On entering the multi-part installation,

the viewer first encounters eight paintings,
hanging not unlike flags. Taken from
Arceneauxs The Gods of Detroit series, they
feature strange, vaguely human-shaped
figures rendered in clay, charcoal and enamel.
Written underneath are misspelled names of
urban institutions: BKANS, EDCAITUON,
PUILBC SIVEERCS, MUUESMS AND
LIRBRAEIS. By calling upon these
institutions the very building blocks of urban
civil life as gods, Arceneaux alludes to
the elemental forces of civilization, as well
as manmade mechanisms outgrowing human
control. The work appears like an attempt
to remember and re-construct, unsuccessfully,
a social order, and recall a once civilized past.

This unsteady environment is further

alluded to in a series of drawings featuring
tectonic geometric shapes, floating pieces
of land, as well as burned-out ruins of pubs
and bars. Known historically as Blind Pigs,
their remnants are ubiquitous throughout
Detroit today.

The second part of the work is titled

The Crystal Palace. Here, several shelving
units installed around the room hold
cardboard boxes and books. These objects
have been treated with a sugar solution
until crystals have grown on their surfaces.
The arrangement of this Human Sugar

(The Crystal Palace)

(Human Sugar Factory)

(The Gods of Detroit)

1972,

Born 1972;
lives and works in Los Angeles

BKANS

()EDCAITUON()PUILBC SIVEERCS(

)MUUESMS AND LIRBRAEIS()

(Blind Pigs)

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Blind Pig #8 #8, 2011, charcoal and graphite on paper ,

229 396cm. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
; Photo Bill Orcutt

Factory traces the main thoroughfares of

Detroit. Rich in cultural and aesthetic
connotations, the sugar crystals fossilize time
and history into concrete form. In the center
of this space, a light hangs from the ceiling
almost touching the ground, swinging
back and forth like a pendulum. The shelves
and boxes cast swaying shadows on the walls
that resemble the skyline of a city in turmoil.
All in all, the work evokes Detroits stable
ground literally moving underneath and around
peoples lives.

The Slave Ship Zong, 2011, acrylic and graphite on paper

, 203 330cm. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
; Photo Robert Wedemeyer

The Algorithm Doesnt Love You:

from detroit to shanghai

Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneauxs works engage with history,

place and time. Central to The Algorithm
Doesnt Love You is the city of Detroit: once
a world-renowned metropolis thriving
with factories; the site of the largest race riots
in US history; and now a symbol of postindustrial decline. The work seeks to
understand how social and economic forces
overwhelm the lives of the people who live
there. In this way, Arceneauxs investigation
is like an archaeology into repressed and
hidden layers of the present.

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Social Factory

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The Gods of Detroit (muuesms and lirbraeis) (),

2010, mixed media on canvas , 274.3 172.7cm. Courtesy the
artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects ;
Photo Robert Wedemeyer

Detail from Blind Pig #3 #3, 2011, acrylic and graphite on paper
, 183 426.7cm. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter
Los Angeles Projects ; Photo Bill Orcutt

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Art & Language

Flags for Organizations

Flags for Organizations , 1978, flags and photostats .

Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London

Founded in 1967; based in London

1967,

Flags for
Organizations

principles were like this, Id identify with it, and similarly

mutatis mutandis for the ones with which they didnt identify.
Or they might say: If there were organizations with these
principles, then Id see certain merits in all of them.

Art & Language

Simply to assert: I agree with these principles, might be

(would be) a misreading or an incomplete reading of the
work since it fails to account for the fact that these are the
axiomatic principles for admittedly fictional organizations for
which (real) flags fly. The relevant possible world starts
outside the axioms themselves.

The work Flags for Organizations consists of four flags

and four posters. The flags are in four middling decorative
colors yellow, blue, green and orange and they all carry
the same emblem in black. The colors do not readily evoke
any classical or grand political passions (the blue is not
the blue of British conservatism, the green is not the green
of the Levellers or of Islam). They are harmless brightbut-not-too-bright colors of organizations or corporations.
Their common emblem is in fact the logo for the People for
Rockefeller campaign of 1968. Here we will say no more
then than the obvious; it is modern, unsubtle, brutal and tacky.
Each of the four posters carries a series of axioms, which
serve to establish the characters of a fictional organization.
It may well be that the four fictional organizations over
whom the flags fly are, like the colors themselves, somehow
corporatist (and ultimately vacuous) in their various ways.
The viewer, however, is not rendered blind to the work
if they disagree with this derogation and believe that there is
virtue in one or all of them. If the viewer accedes to the
proposition that they are all equally vacuous, they can enter
tain the idea of someone identifying with one or all of these
fictional entities hypothetically or imaginatively. If they see
virtue in one of them they will presumably identify (somehow)
with the relevant organization in accordance with the counterfactual conditional. If there were such an organization whose

(Flags for Organisations)

1968

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The organization which flies the blue flag (it could fly any
of the other three colors) owes its political and organizational
beliefs to the humane, rational and responsible but
highly corporate conservatisms of what is called the left of
the British Conservative party and which broadly coincides
with the economic and social theory of European Christian
democracy. This is a conservative ideology which seeks
only moderately and meekly (but scientifically) to regulate the
predations of corporate capitalism, preferring to live in the
illusions of bourgeois consensus.
The organization that flies the green flag (it too could fly any
of the other three colors) is also founded on atomistic
individualism. It is attached to the political and moral theories
of John Rawls, a liberal theorist much occupied with
questions of fairness. Basing his theory of justice on the view
that the principle thereof is to be grounded in or derived from
reason itself, his influence in bourgeois politics is undeniable.
Of course, the justice and rationality of constructed
individuals who conform to a philosophical fiction that they
themselves are rational and normally self-interested. They do
not exist in reality.
Merely deducing the necessity of equality of opportunity does
little to stay the hand of a barbarian who is already within
the gates. Like the blue-flagged organization, the green one is

56

resolutely bourgeois. It is immune to a sense of social and

political contradiction and is uninspired by the thoughts of the
self-transformation.
The organization flying the yellow flag (it could fly any
of the other three colors) is of the left. Some aspects of its
analyses are undoubtedly realistic. Its political tendency,
however, is to put the structural cart before the horse and
to overestimate the power of ideological critiques to
inaugurate a desired social transformation. Its other fault is
to underestimate the critical and reflective powers of the
dominated. It seeks to foster resistance to the dream work
of capitalism, believing that such resistance will provide an
answer to the question of how we might change the social
process from reproduction to transformation.

organizations of which they are supposed to be indices do not

exist. We quantify them only in a possible world a fiction in
which the actual flags and the actual texts are used, believed,
discussed and possibly changed. In light of this, it would be
inviting to try to develop a social theory of art in which all its
middle-sized physical manifestations might be regarded as
the inscrutable and redundant identifying cyphers of endlessly
developing political organizations and institutions.

The organization flying the orange flag (it could fly any of the
other three colors) is also of the left. It is of a statist and
authoritarian nature and its type was much reviled by the New
Left in the West and, more riskily, criticized and exposed in
samizdat activity in the East. It fundamentally equates
socialism with sate-party control of the means of production,
distribution and exchange plus planning. Indeed, its
obsession with planning reaches a high level of absurdity and
oppressiveness. It plans for fictions as other organizations
philosophize for (and with) fictions, monetarize for fictions or
seek to discover their political virtue in fictions.
All sets of axioms will have their contemporary adherents.
All will introduce one form or another of a perceived criticism
of capital today. It can be cogently argued however, that with
the triumph of global capital and corporatism, all of them
(or all but one of them) are critically toothless as they stand.
But the viewer faces an ontological problem. What are they
supposed to be looking at? What is redundant here? To the
extent that the sets of axioms are of little present power, they
might be thought of as texts to join the flags which fly over
them as allegories of art; redundant political symbols. But the

(John Rawls)

57

14-11-21 3:30

No longer needed to scare away birds,

these puppets have become signifiers of the
absence of an entire generation, or perhaps
a means to attract a return.

Avikainens installation sees an exchange

between the artist and transformations
to village life that surround him. The different
elements of the work come from the artists
experience of living in a small town in
rural Japan, unconnected even by railway.
Farmers used to grow indigo in this area, once
used as a dye to repel mosquitoes and snakes
before becoming a commodity on the
global market. In the disused upper floor of
a community center, Avikainen installed a
waiting room of sorts, or what he describes as
a train station, or uni-dimensional port.
Its walls are covered with indigo paintings he
created using local materials. The room
was imagined by Avikainen as a place to
be suspended in time, and that is suspended
in time itself, creating an atemporal present,
out of a collapsed history.
Like numerous other rural places, the nature
of labor for farmers in the area is rapidly
transforming, and the young generation is
abandoning villages and small towns in search
for work in larger cities. A sign of this
transformation is the migration of humanshaped puppets that were once used
as scarecrows on the fields, into the city.

1978,
Born 1978;
lives and works in Kamiyama

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New Loco Pilot, 2014, photograph .

Courtesy the artist

Blurry Compost's
Steam Engine

Adam Avikainen

In the work of Adam Avikainen, the very

definition of the social and social networks
undergoes a radical transformation.
He locates the social in the underground
currents of the organic, in the myriad
connections that tie forms of life together, in
the vast and unknown grammar of relations,
all of which are currently being re-made at
a rapid scale.

58

59

14-11-21 3:30

as a possible metaphor for the deepening

of capitalist relations of production in the turn
towards neoliberalism and affect-driven
economies. Furthermore, the aspen tree is
not an individual organism; rather, the entire
forest is connected through its roots to
form an expansive, interconnected network
or rhizome.

Baudrillards statement is the main focus of

Becks video, which was shot in an aspen
forest close to the area where the conference
was held. In the film, we see a group of
young people rehearse and recite parts of
Baudrillards polemic. The film also sets
out to introduce elements not present in the
lectures and conversations held during the
1970 conference: the forest that surrounded
the event, and its eponymous species of
tree aspen. The aspen tree is known for
its nervousness, that is, for its leaves that
rustle at the slightest breeze, a movement
that allows sunlight to better penetrate the
entire volume of the tree thereby increasing
photosynthesis. Here, the process serves

2008

1970(Aspen)

(Jean Baudrillard)

1963,
Born 1963;
lives and works in New York

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The Environmental Witch-Hunt, 2008, video , 10'.

Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

The Environmental
Witch-Hunt

Martin Beck

The starting point for Martin Becks film,

The Environmental Witch-Hunt, is the
1970 Environment by Design conference
held in Aspen, Colorado. The French
delegation to Aspen refused to take part and
instead, issued a statement written by Jean
Baudrillard. Therein, the late sociologist,
philosopher and cultural theorist claimed that
pollution and other environmental concerns
were simply smoke screens for real problems
of class inequality and capital. Baudrillard
argued that environmental advocacy had now
replaced religion as the disrupting opium
of the people. Comparing pollution controls to
Napalm bombing, and the prestigious design
conference to Disneyland, Baudrillard wrote
that there was nothing better than a touch
of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social
classes, except perhaps a witch-hunt (the
mystique of antipollution being nothing but
a variation of it).

60

61

14-11-21 3:30

World Domination

Nel Beloufa

Nel Beloufa recruits amateur and professional

actors for set-up situations that explore
enigmatic subjects ranging from nationalism to
terrorism.
For World Domination he cast teams of
non-professional actors as senior figures
of imaginary nationalities: President, Minister
of Internal Affairs, military leaders and so
on. Dressed in stereotypical costumes, they
discuss geopolitical issues in political jargon.
As representatives of nations and their
administrations, they are tasked with solving
crises of unemployment, overpopulation,
economic and financial difficulties. Despite
their extensive exchange, there is always
but one solution: war.

World Domination, 2013, HD video , 28'

In much of Beloufas oeuvre is a palpable

playfulness and irony that makes the works
compelling. In World Domination, one of
the leaders conferences addresses the idea
of attacking Europe from Africa in order to
protect the latters young people from the siren
song of European luxurious lifestyle. Beloufa
reflects on the ambivalence of state power, the
symbolic picture of civil societies, and means
of government. Together, these viewpoints
serve as a warning against the self-contradiction
of power.

1985,

Born 1985;
lives and works in Paris

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62

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Soul and Feelings of a Worker

Soul and Feelings of a Worker is a

response to Rexford B. Herseys 1932 book,
Workers Emotions in Shop and Home. In
the book, Hersey sketches out a set of criteria
for studying workers state of mind during
the process of production. Following Herseys
principles for more than a year and using
a specific color for different states of mind,
KP Brehmer developed a schema showing
scales of time versus mood and temperament.
The study is based on the emotional life of
one selected worker and indirectly, his attitude
towards the nature of work and its conditions.
Brehmers methodology also closely aligns
with the ways in which businesses have sought
to quantify the personal capacities of their
employees, showing how artwork is a model
kind of work in todays economy.

(19381997)

(Rexford B. Hersey) 1932

(Workers' Emotions in Shop and Home)

Born 1938;
deceased 1997, Hamburg

1938, 1997

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64

Soul and Feelings of a Worker (Version 2), 197880,

emulsion paint and pencil on paper , 42 28.9cm. Courtesy Sammlung Block

KP Brehmer
KP

With a training in graphics and printmaking,

KP Brehmer (193897) experimented
with ways of visualizing the abstract processes
of global capitalism, and addressed the
commodification of art. Using common infor
mation systems as templates figures and
charts from educational books and magazines,
maps and graphics from sociological studies
he linked data management to the operations
of capital.

14-11-21 3:30

Working in tandem with this deliberate

evacuation of content are the circumstances of
the works production: an absurd performance
in which the British Army, unsuspectingly,
played the lead role. Co-opted by the artists
into transporting the box of photographic
paper from London to Helmand, these soldiers
helped in moving the container from one
military base to another, be it on helicopters
Hercules and Chinooks, buses, tanks and
jeeps. In this performance, presented as

20086

(Helmand province)

BBC

100

The Day Nobody Died The Brothers Suicide, June 7,

2008 , 200867 ,
2008, unique C-41 , 76.2 600cm.
Courtesy the artists

a film, the box becomes an absurd, subversive

object; its non-functionality sitting in quietly
amused contrast to the functionality of
the system that for a time served as its host.
Like a barium test, the journey of the box
becomes an analytical process revealing
the dynamics of the machine in its quotidian
details, from the logistics of war to the
collusion between the media and the military.
The Day Nobody Died comprises of a series
of radically non-figurative, unique, actionphotographs, offering a profound critique of
conflict photography in the age of embedded
journalism and the current crisis in the
concept of the engaged, professional witness.

The Day Nobody Died III, June 10, 2008

III2008610, 2008, unique C-41
, 76.2 600cm. Courtesy the artists

The Day Nobody Died

Adam Broomberg
Oliver Chanarin

In June 2008, Broomberg and Chanarin

traveled to Afghanistan where they were
embedded within British Army units on the
front line in Helmand province. In place of
their cameras, they took a roll of photographic
paper contained inside a simple, lightproof
cardboard box. They arrived during the
deadliest month of the war. On the first day
of their visit a BBC fixer was dragged from his
car and executed. Elsewhere, nine Afghan
soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The
following day, three British soldiers died,
pushing the number of British combat fatalities
to 100. Casualties continued until the fifth day
when nobody died. In response to each
of these events, and also to a series of more
mundane moments such as a visit to the troops
by the Duke of York and a press conference,
all events a photographer would record,
Broomberg and Chanarin instead unrolled
a seven-meter section of photographic paper
and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds.
The results deny the viewer the cathartic
effect offered up by the conventional language
of photographic responses to conflict and
suffering.

7
20
1970,
1971,

Adam Broomberg, born 1970;

Oliver Chanarin, born 1971;
live and work in London

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Person Confined by Persons , 1979, pen on paper , 23.5 23.5cm. Courtesy Thip Tang

Tang chang

Of Chinese heritage, Tang Chang

(193490) represents an important figure
in Thai modernism. Self-taught, he was
active as a poet, drawer and painter. His
abstract paintings from the late 1950s and
early 1960s, a time when abstract expres
sionism engulfed the US-dominated side
of the Iron Curtain, were deeply influenced
by Chinese traditions of calligraphy and the
relationship between images, words and
matter. Through heavy brush strokes typical
of Chinese painting, combined with the
materiality of paint that defined a decade
internationally, a complex artistic figure
emerges: he never fully resolved his status
of an outsider in a country where identity
and an often caricatural representation of
Thai-ness are at the core of the discussions
in the cultural realm. He is also the author
of highly conceptual, imaginative and
intellectual poems. Somewhere in between
his paintings and poems are a series
of drawings produced from the 1970s and
employing suggestive words in Thai script,
forming graphic compositions akin to
concrete poetry. The path from Chinese
calligraphy to the manipulation of
the graphicqualities of the Thai language
and script contain a strong political
dimension, commenting on the upheavals
in Thai society of that decade.
The presentation of Tang Changs works at the
Shanghai Biennale has been organized together
with David Teh.

(19341990)
50
60

70

Born 1934;
deceased 1990, Thailand

1934, 1990

David Teh

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By re-examining historical incidents through

the lens of the occult, Chen is not only
attempting to rethink the subjective awareness
of history writing in textbooks from the past,
she is also questioning whether such actions
by humanity are inevitable under the
predetermined and inexorable laws of the
universe, whether these laws constitute a
form of cosmic force majeure. Corresponding
to the belief that purification and perfection
are achievable through violent means, in the
artists video work, the planet Mars represents
the god of war and Pluto represents the utter
persecution and destruction that precedes
the reconstitution of order. This underlying
concept is similar to Jungs belief that ones
natal chart could represent a prototype of

collective human consciousness. In critiquing

Chens work, critic Rikey Cheng pointed out
that natal charts are a form of intellectual
temptation for their audience, as their symbolic
meaning only surrenders to the manipulation
of the hand that draws the chart, provided that
information is masked and phases are
purposely made vague And these sketches
adhere more closely to the labors
of ancient astrologers rendering natal charts
by hand in the absence of computer techno
logy. Rather than bringing audiences an instant
chart readout with internet technology,
they lead viewers on a voyage of discovery
towards the soul.(1)

(1) From A User Guide to

Internal Maps, Rikey Chengs
commentary at Yin-Ju Chens
2014 Dead Souls at the Test
Drive exhibition.

(1)

1987
1942 1975
19991980

Liquidation Maps Sook Ching Massacre, Singapore, 19421942, 2014,

charcoal and pencil on paper , 125 126cm

Liquidation Maps

Yin-ju Chen

Liquidation Maps is a series of works that reexamines and investigates political genocides
and massacres in recent Asian history from an
occult angle, fusing astrology and astronomy.
Yin-ju Chen has chosen five historical events:
Lesser Kinmen Massacre in 1987 (Taiwan),
Sook Ching Massacres in 1942 (Singapore),
Khmer Rouge genocide in 1975 (Cambodia),
massacres in East Timor in 1999 and Gwangju
Uprising in 1980 (South Korea). Chen has
created star charts based on astrological
permutations at the time when these historical
incidents started, and extrapolated upon the
circular nature of the star charts into mandalas
for each incident. The star charts and
mandalas are symbols of reincarnation and
non-linear time. The circular shape bring
to mind the circular design of wrist watches,
and the Chinese title plays on the Mandarin
homophones of chart and wristwatch.

1977,

Born 1977;
lives and works in Taipei

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(1)

2014, 63
201412

70

71

14-11-21 3:30

14000859-3-ly-p72-77.indd 1-3
14-11-21 3:14

Liquidation Maps East Timorese Crisis, East Timor, 1999 1999, 2014,
charcoal and pencil on paper , 125 126cm

Liquidation Maps Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, 197578 197578, 2014,

charcoal and pencil on paper , 125 126cm

Liquidation Maps Lieyu Massacre, Taiwan, 1987 1987, 2014,

charcoal and pencil on paper , 125 126cm

14000859-3-ly-p72-77.indd 4-6
14-11-21 3:14

Chen Chieh-jen , Bade Area: After Demolition , 2006, gicle print , 170 109cm;
Military Court and Prison: Temporary Monument , 2008, gicle print , 170 109cm;
Friend Watan: The Ritual of Film Screening , 2013, gicle print , 170 105cm

Bianwen was created to spread Buddhist

teachings to the layman. Monks preached
Buddhist stories using narration and
song, in a way simple enough for ordinary
people to understand. These popular lectures
(sujiang) in writing were called bianwen.
The form became immensely popular and
gradually shed its Buddhist tones, transforming
into vernacular art forms folk literature,
opera and story-singing (shuochang) that
reflect Chinese social realities.

why huaben novellas became popular

during Song, and the origins of numerous
singing and storytelling forms.
Chen Chieh-jens Transformation Text is a
creative reimagining of bianwen. Not only has
he extended the significance of bianwen into
contemporary art by transforming, translating
and rewriting contemporary realities via
audio-visual narrative; in keeping with the
nature of bianwen, he has also formed a
collection of his audio-visual creation over the
last decade by reassembling blueprints of
social production, photographic records,
symbolic objects and texts, video clips, and
a temporary movie theatre as a threedimensional spatial book with six chapters:
1. History of the Production of Folk Culture;
2. Labour History; 3. Ridding The New Cold
War; 4. Temporary Communities; 5. Social
University; 6. Self-reliance.

Yet, bianwen only became known in

China in 1907, when English scholar Aurel
Stein, French sinologist Paul Pelliot and
others illegally bought Buddhist manuscripts
and documents found by Daoist priest Wang
Yuanlu hidden in the Sutra Cave at
Dunhuang Grottoes. This discovery gave
literary historians a better understanding of

Empires Borders I I, 200809, 35mm video, 35, 27'

Transformation Text
(Book of Bianwen)

Chen Chieh-jen

Literary historians usually divide the history

of Chinese narrative novel into four stages:
first, records of the strange (zhiguai) and
of men (zhiren) during Wei, Jin, and Northern
and Southern dynasties (220589); second,
Tang dynasty (618907) stories of the
marvelous (chuanqi); third, vernacular stories
(huaben) from Song dynasty (9601279);
fourth, novels in chapters (zhanghui) from
Ming (13681644) and Qing (16441911)
dynasties. Tang dynasty was key to the
emergence of huaben vernacular stories:
at the time, classical Chinese prose (wenyan)
was popular among the literati class,
and in reaction, a new vernacular style
transformation text (bianwen) took hold
among the populace.

1960,

Born 1960;
lives and works in Taipei

(1907)

(A .Steine)(Paul
Pelliot)

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78

79

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Waste Management addresses the global

problem of electronic waste by focusing
on the efforts of a particular recycling company
in Taiwan. Famous for its electronics industry,
Taiwan leads the pack in terms of developing
e-waste processing technologies. Current
outputs of recycled waste include architectural
bricks, gold potassium cyanide, precious
metals and even art. Waste Management thus
takes the form of an installation of found
artworks: two cast stones made of CRT
monitor glass, and glass fiber powder from
printed circuit boards. Accompanying these
objects are two audio monologues played
on wireless headphones, both read by
the same person. The English text is Coburns
fictional Adventures of a Genre: creating
a Parliament of Objects, it describes the
circulation and eventual transformation
of a CRT monitor into the installations stone
artworks. The Chinese reading, meanwhile,
recites Joseph Addisons 1710 story,
The Adventures of a Shilling, culminating
with an artist melting the protagonist into
one of his works.

Shilling into Chinese, Coburn writes a story

in keeping with the genre, meditating on
its checkered history and imagining how it
could give an account of the present age.
His narrative follows a single grain of sand
becoming a series of CRT monitors and
ultimately, electronic waste. These stories not
only describe adventures of technological
production and disposal, but also address the
neoliberal myth of frictionless circulation that
belies geopolitical divides.

Both stories follow traditions of the

it-narrative, a sub-genre of 18th century
literature in which currencies and
commodities narrated their circulation within
a then-emerging global economy. Instead of
simply translating The Adventures of a

Waste Management, 201314, sound and found artworks

Waste Management

Tyler Coburn

Tyler Coburns work reflects upon the

mechanisms that make up todays technologies,
from server farms to speech-recognition
software, through to the growing problem of
electronic waste.

CRT

1983,
Born 1983;
lives and works in New York

(Adventures of a Genre)(Parliament of
Objects) CRT
(Joseph Addison)
1710(The Adventures of a
Shilling)

(it-narrative)18

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80

81

14-11-21 3:32

By Night With Torch

and Spear

(19031972)

By Night with Torch and Spear, 1942, video , 8'.

Courtesy Anthology Film Archives, New York

Joseph Cornell

A key figure of American surrealism, Joseph

Cornell (190372) is best known for his
box-assemblages. He was, however,
also one of the most original and outstanding
filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist
movement. Reclusive in nature and resistant
to public screenings during his lifetime,
his filmic work is little known, despite bearing
a deep and lasting influence on the world of
avant-garde filmmaking. By Night With Torch
and Spear is composed of found-footage
of industrial processes and of various
indigenous groups of people. Film clips have
been manipulated in differing ways, sometimes
shown upside-down, other times played
backwards. The work seems to be alluding
to romantic myths of undoing industrializa
tion and of celebrating the noble savage.
A powerful product of its time, it was created
at the height of the Second World War: faith
in modernity and in the moral progress brought
about by industrialization was collapsing,
prompting various escapist fantasies. The
fetishizing of pre-industrial references in places
where industry stops being the focal point of
economic activity remains an important
aspect of the aesthetics of contemporary
consumption of today.

(By Night With Torch and Spear, 1942

)

Born 1903;
deceased 1972, New York

1903, 1972

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Bouquet iv; Bouquet v;

Bouquet ix

Willem de Rooij

Willem de Rooij began working on the

Bouquet series a group of floral sculptures
in 2002, then in collaboration with Jeroen
de Rijke (19702006). Since then he
has created 11 Bouquets, three of which will be
presented at the Shanghai Biennale. Across
various human cultures, bouquets of flowers
are charged with a range of meanings
with regard to different events and contexts.
Placed within the museum as a work of
art, the fleeting, temporal nature of flowers is
emphasized, as well as their nature as
complex social signs. Our attention is hence
directed not only to the signs meaning,
but also to the wider process of signifying.
In this context, the bouquet becomes a means
to enact the cultural role of the museum: as a
place where meaning is negotiated. Museums
house a surplus of signs, inevitably more
than any single individual is able to grasp.

Bouquet V (2010), meanwhile, consists of

95 different flowers, each occurring just once
in the elaborate arrangement of various sizes,
colors and textures. The work touches on
concepts of diversity, and the tension between
the individual and the collective.
Finally, Bouquet IX (2012) is made up of
ten different species of flower, all of which are
white. Encapsulating ideas of sameness and
difference, the work is above all about the
multiple meanings attributed to whiteness.

iv; v;
ix

Bouquet IV (2005) consists of a flower

arrangement and a framed black and white
photograph depicting the work in its
actual size. The colors of Bouquet IV, when
reproduced in monochrome, are all reduced
to a standardized, mid-gray. It is a work about
the mainstream, the middle, without extremes
of blacks or whites.

2002

(Jeroen de Rijke, 19702006)

(Bouquet)

V(Bouquet V, 2010) 95

IX(Bouquet IX, 2012) 10

1969,

Born 1969;
lives and works in Amsterdam

IV(Bouquet IV, 2005)

IV

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Bouquet V V, 2010, mixed media installation

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Some of de Rooijs Bouquets have clear

social or political connotations; others have
merely formal ones. What they all have in
common, though, is that like a play or film, if
not reconstructed, they exist only as an idea.
Furthermore, all works are collaborations
with a florist responsible for works execution
and maintenance during the exhibition period.

84

85

14-11-21 3:32

Archaic Torso, 1971, 16mm film, 16 , 31'.

Courtesy Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute

Archaic Torso

Pter Dobai

Archaic Torso, the 1971 documentary by

Pter Dobai (cinematography by Lajos Koltai)
was produced at the groundbreaking
Balazs Bela Studios. This crucial Hungarian
incubator for avant-garde cinema and
video art managed to elude state censorship
for several decades. The film shows an
exceptional young mans self-imposed solitary
lifestyle and strict regimen, meant to achieve
an ideal of human perfection, both physical and
intellectual. He is obsessively engaged in this
process of renunciation and will power,
involving both intense bodybuilding and
extensive philosophical readings. The first part
of the documentary follows him on his daily
physical exercise routine; the second sees him
read philosophical texts out loud. Eventually,
he breaks down and cries, his system of selfcontrol in apparent meltdown. Read in the
context of Hungary in the early 1970s, the film
exposes conflicts embedded in processes of
subjectivation taking place in a socialist society.

1971
(Lajos Koltai)
Balazs Bela Studios

70

1944,

Born 1944;
lives and works in Hungary

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86

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14-11-21 3:32

Domanovic
first started researching the
story of the domain .yu when she learnt of its
acquisition by the Museum of Yugoslav
History, marking the first non-physical object
in their collection. A key figure featured
in the film is computer scientist, Borka
Jerman-Blaic
. In From yu to me, JermanBlaic
describes how she came to connect
Yugoslavia as the 16th country in Europe
to the internet.

yu80

.yu

(Diego Rivera)

.yu2010330

(A Dream of a Sunday

Afternoon in Alameda Park), (Frida

Kahlo)

1989

(Norbert Wiener)

30

The Dream, 2014, mixed media .

Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

From yu to me

hold specific objects and symbols. The version

included in the Shanghai Biennale references
Diego Riveras A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon
in Alameda Park, a painting depicting
Frida Kahlo holding a yin and yang symbol.
Presented in the context of China, the hand
serves as a reminder that cybernetics is
also partly a Chinese creation insofar that its
inventor, Norbert Wiener, worked at Tsinghua
University in Beijing during the 1930s.

Continuing her inquiries into feminism,

cybernetics and science, Domanovic
learned
from Jerman-Blaic
of the Belgrade Hand.
This multifunctional, externally powered
prosthesis was developed at the Mihajlo Pupin
Institute in Belgrade in 1964, and was the
first prosthetic hand that could not only grab
objects, but also had a sense of touch.
Domanovic
has been making a series of 3D
prints of the hand, creating sculptures that

yu

AleKSandra DomanoviC

From yu to me is a film about the introduction

of the internet to the former Yugoslavia in
the late 1980s, and about the country-code
top-level domain, .yu. When the suffix was
abolished on March 30, 2010, it became the
first ever top-level domain to disappear as
a consequence of geopolitical events. In this
way, the domains story is emblematic
of the fate of the borderless, post-national
world that some believed the internet and
globalization would bring about. It was only
shortly after the domain had been registered
in 1989 that socialist Yugoslavia began to
disintegrate, leading to years of war and the
creation of several new nation states in
South-eastern Europe.

.yu

Borka Jerman-Blaic
Borkayu

1981,

Born 1981;
lives and works in Berlin

17

Borka Jerman-Blaic

1964
(Mihajlo Pupin Institute)

3D

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Grand Openings events form an important

part of the film and take on a structure
somewhere between a feed and philosophical
treaty.

Grand Openings has five core members Ei

Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Jay Sanders, Emily
Sundblad and Stefan Tcherepnin with
different backgrounds in art, music, curating
and criticism. Their partly-scripted, partlyimprovised actions; loose choreographies;
musical scores; and acts of self-reflection
coexist within a chaotic structure.
Grand Openings, Return of the Bloggers
documents a series of events held at MoMA
in New York between July 20 and August 1,
2011. These happenings equaled an inter
ruption of the museums everyday operations,
and were conceived as a dialogue with its
materiality, staff, and with specific and
generic fantasies about the museum as a
social space.
The actual dates of these events are impor
tant: summertime in New York, the audiences
we see in the film are therefore largely
tourists. For this reason, each section of the
film is introduced by a weather report. Sweaty,
hot, sticky and tired, the assembled crowds
are frequently shown sitting down
to rest. As part of the process, several
bloggers were also invited to participate.
Some were existing members of the group,
others were outsiders. Their written
responses to what was presented during

Grand Openings

Grand Openings

Grand Openings
Ei ArakawaJutta KoetherJay SandersEmily Sundblad
Stefan Tcherepnin

201172081

Grand Openings, Return of the Bloggers, 2012, HD video

, 40'. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne

Grand Openings,
Return of the Bloggers
,

Loretta Fahrenholz

Grand Openings, Return of the Bloggers was

created by Loretta Fahrenholz at the invitation
of the group Grand Openings, not as a
documentary but as a film to both capture
their practice, as well as exist as an artwork
in its own right.

1981,

Born 1981;
lives and works in Berlin

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Tang Chang , Untitled , 1978, pen on paper .

Courtesy Thip Tang
= People carrying guns ; = Forest

Tang Chang , Untitled , 1978, pen on paper .

Courtesy Thip Tang
= Forest ; = People carrying guns

Tang Chang , Untitled (5) 5, 1960, oil on canvas , 80.5 92cm.

Courtesy Thip Tang

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Stephen Willats , The World As It Is and The World As It Could Be

, 2006, mixed media on paper .
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

Stephen Willats , I Dont Want to be Like Anyone Else , 1977,

printed panels , 109 76cm. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

Tang Chang , Untitled , 1978, pen on paper .

Courtesy Thip Tang
= Forest ; = People

Parallel II

Harun Farocki

Conditions of visibility, forms of repre

sentations, and structures of knowledge are
all subject to historical change, together
with the human senses and modes of pro
duction. The late Harun Farocki, film critic,
documentary filmmaker and artist, left a
large body of work interrogating the
relationship between contemporary image
production, ideology and technologies
of creation. His varied approach continues
to pose questions surrounding what it means
to see, the extent to which technology
is involved in this process, and in what ways
seeing produces subjectivity. In doing
so, he addressed the various ways in which
subjects become anchored to image,
and how specific modes of production relate
to cognition and psychology. These were
the pertinent, recurring issues that have
punctuated Farockis oeuvre for more than
four decades.

imagery for battle simulations, as well as in

the rehabilitation of traumatized soldiers.
During combat, the technology is combined
with mapping tools to better define
landscapes and pinpoint enemy fighters.
In Parallel II, Farocki examines how some
of the most popular and complex games
today have designed their limits. Is it possible
for the players to find an exit within the
games virtual worlds?

II

20122014IIV

Parallel IIII, 2014, HD video , 9'

II

Parallel IIV (201214) explores the visual

language and iconography of computer games.
The series sees Farocki trace the history
of digital animation from the simple, abstract
pixel, through to the hyper-real, cinematic
aesthetics of todays interactive games, many
of which arguably surpass reality. How is the
visual field of these worlds and the subject
within them constructed? His commentary
describes the architecture of gaming as
if it were a film set or theater stage. Much of
the work of Farockis final years look to the
digital realm and new image technologies:
Eye/Machine IIII (200003) and
Serious Games (201214), for example,
focused on how the military use digital

1944, 2014
Born 1944;
deceased 2014, Berlin

20002003/
IIII(Eye/Machine IIII) 20122013
(Serious Games)

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Begun by Friedl in 1995, Playgrounds

is an ongoing series of photographs taken
by the artist during his extensive travels
all over the world. The playground has been
characterized by Friedl as the arena for the
first public experience of young or
small subjects as a social person. What is
the relationship between this experience
and the genre of conceptual photography?
And what is the status of playgrounds in
urbanism, incidentally perhaps the most
successful mode of modern architecture
due to their near-universal outreach?
The color images are arranged alphabetically
according to locations, and displayed as
child-height slide projections.

This remark was originally made by Spanish

painter Francisco Pacheco to his student
Diego Velzquez, and was later employed by
Michel Foucault in his controversial Las
Meninas essay.

Sculptural piece, The Dramatist (Black Hamlet,

Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint) created in
2013 is composed of four marionettes. The
four characters in search of an author to
recount their exemplary lives are: Julia Schucht,
the wife of Antonio Gramsci; Toussaint
Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution
who died a prisoner in France in 1803; John
Chavafambira, the Black Hamlet from early
South African psychoanalysis documented
in a novelistic narrative in Johannesburg in the
1930s; and Henry Ford, the automobile
magnate from Detroit.

Theory of Justice is a large and wide-ranging

archive of press images collected from
newspapers, including pictures from Fidel
Castro and Hugo Chvez in baseball gear; to

The Children (2009), is a work based on a

painting by Albanian artist Spiro Kristo,
created in 1966. Friedl moved Kristos street
scene of armed children inside, to a Tirana
hotel room designed in the Italian Fascist style.
In the scene, girls in white ankle socks bear
fake guns strapped to their backs. In voiceover,
and speaking in Albanian, a girl intones: The
picture has to step out from the frame.

1971

(The Dramatist)2013

1995(Play

grounds)

1803

2030

(Theory of Justice)

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American children pledging allegiance. Pre

sented here as wallpaper, the work comprises
uncut pages from an eponymous publication.
The images are detached from their textual
description, creating an excess of historical
and aesthetic references. The title refers to A
Theory of Justice (1971) by the US philosopher
John Rawls, a liberal revival of social contract
theory. Friedls collection of images appears to
denounce social contract theory by highlighting
struggles, antagonism and autonomy. At the
same time, they also question the nature of
what he calls pictorial justice, and the
relation of aesthetics to hegemonic theories.

The Children, 2009, video , 2'. Courtesy the artist

and Guido Costa Projects, Turin

Playgrounds; Theory of Justice;

The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry,
Giulia, Toussaint); The Children
; (,
, , );
;

Peter Friedl

1960,
Born 1960;
lives and works in Berlin

Peter Friedls works form an in-depth

engagement with the historicity of represen
tations. His works are conceptual acts
aimed at destabilizing instrumental knowledge,
and increasing iconographic literacy by
emphasizing gaps between text and image;
between ideas and practice; social experience
and official historiographies in modernity.
He interrogates images, and how relations of
power rely on and are permanently re-affirmed
through them. Viewing children as inaccurate
subjects who are not yet fully subjected,
representations of childhood occupy a key
place in Friedls work, together with critical
historiographies and aesthetic problems
of representation that pertain to theater.

(The Children)2009

1966

(Las Meninas)

100

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Playgrounds, 19952014,
Shanghai Street / Market Street Playground, Hong Kong
, 2011

Playgrounds, 19952014, digitized color slides

Urban Council Centenary Garden, Hong Kong
, 2011

The Dramatists (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint)

, 2013, marionettes .
Courtesy the artist and Guido Costa Projects, Turin ;
Photo Maria Bruni

total solar eclipse

Gao Shiqiang

Artist statement: On 22 July 2009, what

was apparently a once-in-a-century full solar
eclipse occurred in China. At the same time,
the financial crisis that erupted in New York
also began to affect the lives of Chinese
people.

With the extension of the timeline, several

seemingly ordinary scenes gradually enter into
a fantastical scene of space-like weightless
ness, with every scene ending with an intense
flash of blinding white light that blows
everything out.

This crisis for us is not only an economic

calamity but an opportunity the linkages in
everyday order started to shake loose;
normal logic, once solid like metal plates,
started to crack. Through the wrinkly surface
of life which struggles to make ends meet,
we seem to be able to glean at what lies
at the bottom of our hearts those desires,
fantasies, remembrances and illusions
that have long been suppressed by everyday
morality. This allows us to re-evaluate our lives
with a different method and from a different
perspective.

I hope to refine, like the words finely hewn

in poetry, every shot, every image, to render
them full of tenor, air and feeling. By using
cameras with higher frame rates, a sense
of time frozen is created; with the studio
set-up, a fantastic spatial imagery is forged;
through the poetic logic of the camera, the
spiritual portrait of contemporary China is
depicted. Gao Shiqiang

This film was shot inside a factory, abandoned

soon after its completion because of the
repercussions of the financial crisis. There
is a major thread throughout: representative
time gradually morphs into abstract time.

2009722

Total Solar Eclipse, 2010, HD video , 46'

When the solar eclipse occurred, things

seemed to have started changing. At that
instant, when heaven and earth turned dark
and day traded places with night, the soul was
also loosened from its restraints. Clearly, the
total solar eclipse was not only a one-time
description but a provocation prying away
at the cracks and shaking up ordinary days,
unchanging and stuck in a rut, brushing away
the flavorless, prosaic, commonplace day-today, and unveiling the surreal nature of life.

1971,

Born 1971;
lives and works in Hangzhou

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Self Fashion Show , 1976, 16mm film, 16, 14'.

Courtesy Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute

Self Fashion Show

(Self Fashion Show)

Tibor Hajas

Tibor Hajas experimental film Self Fashion

Show was produced in 1976 with the
groundbreaking Balazs Bela Studios. An
incubator for avant-garde cinema and video
art in Hungary, it eluded censorship from the
government for several decades. In this piece,
Hajas asks passersby on the street to pose
for the camera, each for a period of one
minute. He then overlays a directorial voice,
adding a psychological layer to this ambivalent
process of both individuation and repression
of individual agency. The film exposes
deep conflicts and bleak realities of Eastern
European socialist societies before 1989.
The incongruous singularity of these ad hoc
models, set against a grim urban backdrop
and offset by an ominous, anonymous
voice is startling. The films focus on individual
presences runs contrary to the collectivist
spirit of the time, manifested both as a state
ideology and as a deeper force creating a
homogenizing aesthetic regime.

1976
Balazs Bela Studios

1989

Born 1946;
deceased 1980, Szeged

1946, 1980

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Every day, He Xiangyu uses the tip of his

tongue to carefully explore his upper and lower
jaws, and the space between the lips and his
teeth. This has gone on for over a year, much
like keeping a diary. This requires him to
use a new method of exploration every day, to
overcome the anxiety of prior influence, in
order to glean new perceptions from this small
and not fully visible space, before transcribing
them into images and sculptures.
Through repetition and training day after day,
he gradually grasps the explorative powers
of the tip of the tongue. He is able to sense
how the conditions inside the oral cavity differ
when the body is under different states. The
complex, variegated sensations are expressed
through fanciful images that are not stringent.
Such a transcription is akin to pseudo-science,
bringing out a certain sense of mystery.
By treating the ever-renewing sense of touch
as an invention of perceptive ability, the body
with its limits can also produce an infinite
method of perception.

Everything We Create is Not Ourselves 68-1 68-1,

201314, mixed media , 31 41cm

Everything We Create is
Not Ourselves 68-1

68-1

He Xiangyu

Touch, observation, perception, transcription.

1986,

Born 1986;
lives and works in Beijing

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EARTH
(black to comm)

Ho Tzu Nyen

The world revolves as we dissolve. As

the light alternates between day and night,
we see 50 humans oscillating between
consciousness and unconsciousness, life
and death, upon the site of an unknown
catastrophe.
EARTH is a post-apocalyptic tableau vivant,
but it is at the same time a collage of a
number of classical European paintings by
Caravaggio, Girodet and Gricault.
EARTH exists with multiple soundtracks,
created by different experimental musicians
and sound artists. This version of the film
features a soundtrack by Black to Comm.
Ho Tzu Nyen

EARTH (Black to Comm)(Black to Comm), 200912, HD video , 42'.

Soundtrack Black to Comm; mixed for installation Titus Maderlechner

(black to comm)

Artist Ho Tzu Nyen works with theatre,

performance, writing, video and sound. His
works dives deep into the unconscious of
history. They explore the co-dependency and
tensions between ideas and iconography,
through which history articulates itself in the
present. They also explore the way complex
and violent histories have informed the psyche
and collective consciousness on the one
hand, and bodies and emotions on the other.

Black to
Comm

1976,

Born 1976;
lives and works in Singapore and Berlin

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Asian Father

Hou Chun-ming

Since 2008, Hou Chun-ming has been

exploring relationships with fathers
in different cities across Asia as part of his
Asian Father project. Hou has been guiding
his participants gradually, inviting them to
dismantle figurative symbols representing
their fathers through questionnaires,
writing and doodles. He then reconstructs
participants images of their fathers with these
symbols, returning the converted images
and prompting them to respond anew to the
unpacked memories of their fathers.

product of this self-healing process. Through

self-deconstruction, Hou takes part in the
relationship between his interviewees and their
fathers as an artist. The image of the father
is no longer tied to the family structure.
It sublimates into a symbol of identity, allegory
or self-realization.

Following the lifting of martial law in Taiwan,

the disintegration of patriarchal Fascism
gave Hou a niche to launch desiring machines.
His early works, such as Pleasure Tableaux
and Searching Gods, pushed the line between
art and erotica. He challenged patriarchal
law and struck out against the Fascist elements
inherent in capitalist society. However, the
entwined relationship between Hous artistic
creation and life experiences brought upon
a depressive breakdown, prompting him
to spend six, seven years writing and painting
mandalas, which transformed this period
of psychological distress into a new
mode of artistic creation. Asian Fathers is a

2008

1963,

Born 1963;
lives and works in Taipei

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Asian Father, 2014, pastel on paper , 79 55cm

As a guide to his participants throughout this

ritualistic procedure, Hou unearths the
microcosmic essence of the Asian father
by seeking out the symbols of the participants
fathers. When memory is mixed with the
present, the original image of the father
begins to change as symbols are converted
and reinterpreted, and life experience is
transmuted into myth.

112

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Asian Father Chen Chin-lien, Chiayi , 2014, acrylic on cardboard , 200 117cm

Asian Father Zhang Gui-zhi, Chiayi, 2014, acrylic on cardboard , 200 117cm

The Long March is a legendary founding event.

The March went to Chinas northwest, partly to
seek a breakthrough and broader mass support,
partly to formally secure the geographical
make-up of the country, turning the region into
the most important revolutionary base. There,
the revolution entered a new age that unfolded
on a magnificent scale.
The majestic, heart-rending xintianyou
(rambling in the sky) is a vernacular folksong
from Chinas northwest. It frequently employs
metaphors and analogies from the sun, moon
and stars, to mundane household matters
and romantic love. It is also the most familiar
and accepted narrative mode for people
from the area. In that revolutionary age and its
consolidation, xintianyou was employed
to carry the weight of revolution and history,
shaped by practical exigencies of politics.

In the post-revolutionary period, revolutionary

fervor and energy to change the world have
transformed into more prosaic and everyday
measures and steps. In the process of starting
over again, new forms and content are gained:
earth-shattering emotions now revert to
everyday stories of individuals.

20028

The visible and the invisible coexist

in Hu Lius pencil drawings. Using the pencil
to portray what can be termed grand vistas
mountain ranges and oceans is an extension
of her work in recent years. Hu Liu fully
understands her talents and excels at employing
them: patiently and repeatedly drawing and
coloring in, unfailingly sustaining her powers
of perception, eventually capturing a mountain
or watery scene and expressing this in black,
anonymous and mysterious. Only under
specific angles can the landscape she drew
be seen on this plane of black.
In this day and age, all things will vanish; in
contrast, only by fixing these originally
objective, eternal and specific worlds will
historians be able to reckon with things outside
of writing, and finally having them passed
down. Because the scale is not at all small, Hu
Lius tools can no longer satisfy her drawing
style; she started conceiving, inventing and
producing tools that belong to her own way
of drawing. In this sense, Hu Lius work even
has a certain classicism and becomes the
means by which she takes in things. Sensation,
perseverance, focus these qualities, too,
take cover within the darkness and yet emerge
within. One is reminded of the sentence
the German artist Maria Eichhorn once wrote
with white paint on a white wall: Invisible is
invisible, visible is visible, invisible is visible,
visible is invisible.

(the visible) (the invisible)

Waves, 2011, pencil on paper , 110 80cm

Xintianyou; waves;
bamboo forest; grass

Hu Liu

In August 2002, Hu Liu set off on foot from

Xian. On the road, she bought a donkey and
led it along to Nanni Bend in northern Shaanxi.
Along the way, she gave red carnations to local
peasants, exchanging and collecting their
unused old bowls or vases.

1982,

Born 1982;
lives and works in Beijing

Maria Eichhorn

(Invisible is Invisible, visible is

visible, Invisible is visible, visible is Invisible)

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Xintianyou, 2014, performance and mixed media installation

Xintianyou, 2014, performance and mixed media installation

provinces/overseas Chinese: Chang

Te-pen, Yin Ling, Jung Shuenwen
4. Taiwanese Hakka/Cross-dialect: Chang
Fang-tsu, Du Pan Fang-ge, Luolang
5. Taiwanese Hokkien/Cross-dialect:
Song Ze-lai, Lim Chong-goan, Zhan Che,
Chan Ping, Huang Ling-tzu
6. Taiwanese aboriginals: Yang Tzu-chiao,
Auvini Kadresengan, Malaosz Monaneng

Poetry is aural literature, and literatures voice

is poetry. With the changing times, poetry
readings have become a forgotten tradition
within mass media modes of transmission;
with the loss of cultural belonging, the
gap between author and reader widens by the
day. Spoken words become a form of resis
tance against modernity. Through the voice,
Minds of Fringe Poets reveals the complex,
multi-ethnic structure of the island of Taiwan:
Taiwanese Hokkien, aboriginal, Chinese from
other provinces, overseas Chinese, Hakka,
cross-language and other dialects reveal
different geopolitical and individual identities.
These poems form a certain cross-section
of Taiwan in the face of modernity, and the
selection demonstrates the changes in voices
and accents. Transcending time and space,
they come together to write an alternate
history of the island.

2000

Poet classifications:
1. First generation of poets from other
provinces: Zhou Meng-die, Shang Qin,
Jang-Mo
2. First generation of poets from other
provinces: Hsing Yu, Lomen, Yung Tze
3. Second generation of poets from other

5. /

6.

Minds of Fringe Poets Monaneng, 2004, DVCAM video , 2'

Minds of Fringe Poets

Huang Ming-chuan

Since 2000, Huang Ming-chuan has

been working on a decade-long film project
about 100 Taiwanese poets. He has recorded
100 poets reading their poetry, creating
an important chapter in Taiwanese literature
through oral history. Minds of Fringe Poets
is a partial anthology compiled for this years
Shanghai Biennale, featuring 58 poems by
20 poets.

2058

1955,

Born 1955;
lives and works in Taipei

1.

2.
3. /
4. /

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The Administration of Glory

Connections are forged between a surface

that feigns tranquillity, self-contradictory
endeavors and spiritual disorder, as well as a
feverish, chaotic condition. Such contra
dictions arising from within have replaced
actual physical images about the violation of
commandments, challenging under a highly
dubious Romantic and Expressionist light
the very boundaries of our moral aesthetics.
Huang Ran

1982,
Born 1982;
lives and works in Beijing

The Administration of Glory , 2014, video , 33'

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee, London

Huang Ran

In this untitled work, Huang Ran invited British

artisans to use their craft to engrave the
phonetic transcription in the English alphabet
of this question in Chinese: Is this the creative
intelligence we have? Using handcraft
techniques, he directly tackles discussions
about the self and creativity within the field of
art, and definitions of art and knowledge.

Artist statement: With five intersecting

narratives, the film tells a story about deceit,
theft, control and infringement. To a large
degree, The Administration of Glory is actually
a very personalized film. Underneath the
complex plotline and the constantly overlaid
visual language are hidden my reflections on
the creative conditions faced by my personal
practice and my doubts about a language
I trust.

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Capitalism: Child Labor

Capitalism: Child Labor, 2006, video , 14'

Jacobs writes: A stereograph celebrating

factory production of thread. Many bobbins
of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space,
the many machines manned by a handful
of people. Manned? Some are children.
I activated the double-photograph, composer
Rick Reed suggested the mechanical din. Your
heart bleeds for the kids? The children will
surely be rescued by their bosses! Boys, they
will say, Have we got a war for you

Ken Jacobs

In acclaimed experimental filmmaker

Ken Jacobs film Capitalism: Child Labor, the
artist appropriates an old stereoscopic
image of a Victorian thread factory, digitally
animating it and then focusing on the humans
hidden amongst the mechanical. Picking
out the faces of the boys and men operating
the huge machines, the images stutter onwards
in a loop, trapped by the confines of the
source photograph: a steady march that makes
no progress. In this way, the awkward,
uncomfortable flickering of the film stands for
the nature of capitalism itself.

(Rick Reed)

Born 1933;
lives and works in New York

1933,

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PUBLIC GRAIN; On the High Branches;

THE THREE GORGES DAM MIGRATION;
TREE OF ANCESToRS

Portraiture is image-creation a way for

officials and gentry to pass their likenesses
down the ages. Unlike traditional landscapes
and portraiture, Ji creates portraits for the
nameless in modern historical events. These
nameless subjects are all named by historical
events: migrants and vagrants. He requisitions
historical events commonly regarded as
turning points in ordinary historical narratives
and treats them as his point of entry into a
concern for reality. He also wishes to find a
modern space for ink: with humans and things
shorn of mystery, they become a portrayal of
the upheavals of the world at large.

Boxers, 2004, ink on paper , 35 1000cm.

Courtesy of artist and James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai

Yun-Fei Ji

Historically, literati immersed themselves into

the landscape through painting a complex,
organized representation and conception
of reality. Traditional Chinese ink painting is
generally small, to be enjoyed in close
encounters: from the distance of the palm,
a painting reveals the relationships of men and
things as well as the charm and intent of
heaven and earth. In contrast, many of todays
ink paintings have emerged from history and
landscape. Instead of being a site of hermetic
seclusion, they plunge into the roaring
currents of the age. Within the historical
narratives captured by Yun-Fei Ji, several are
highly important social narratives within the
process of modernization that also constitute
historical turning points. As determined
historical narratives, they have existed to the
present day. Under Jis brush, fiery flames,
absurdity, gravity, collapses and humor allow
the historical experiences of modernization to
outline new vistas along folk narratives.

1963,
Born 1963;
lives and works in Beijing and New York

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The Three Gorges Dam Migration, 2009, watercolor woodblock print

on paper and silk , 35 306cm. Courtesy of artist
and James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai

14000859-5-ly-p128-133-c6.indd 4-6

14-11-21 3:15

Mount Song

(Mount Song)

7080

Born 1973;
lives and works in Durham, North Carolina

1973,

Mount Song, 2013, HD video , 9'

The work comprises repurposed excerpts

from Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s and
1980s. A rapid transition of scenes depicts
super-natural forces, acts of magic and
haunted sites. The invisible energies of the
elements and of particular sites are the
actors in these scenes. Kauls selection of
clips reflects her interest in set constructions
and special effects: a cinematic language
employed to convey and make cinematicallylegible a sense of deep attachment. The
film itself raises questions of what is being
re-shaped and re-articulated, as well as the
very process of representational translation.
Kauls montage follows her speculative
intuition that in these films, widely distributed
across America, Europe, India and beyond,
something takes place outside of the easily
recognized image of the ancient East.
She explains: I have a feeling that the eve
of the global era is recorded in these films by
a very particular representation of place.
It is one that retrieves, from the colonial era,
a kind of imagery that may be internationally
understood and exchanged, but that has
been updated with sci-fi elements and special
effects.

Shambhavi Kaul

Shambhavi Kauls film, Mount Song,

weaves its way through time and experience
like a gust of wind, coursing ahead,
eddying, almost disappearing then surging
back again. Like all good poetry, it invites
and encourages any connection, any
engagement, and like the great works of film
from which it takes inspiration, it enchants
and captivates with its sheer beauty and
sense of bewilderment.

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The painted planks exhibited under the

title Mad Garland are a body of work that is
not easy to pin down, partly because it is
in a constant flux. The work shifts: it
materializes and liquidizes, appearing in new
roles every time, be it as a prop, a reader
or a supporter of another work. They can be
used in performances, hung on the wall,
piled on the floor; they can be a sculpture,
a wall, or border.
The projects name, Mad Garland, comes
from the artists encounter with fragments of
a Roman fresco in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York. The works garland had
effectively been displaced from its original
context.

The works appeared first to be part of a

performance held at the conference Art and
Subjecthood: a Conference on the Return
of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism
at the Frankfurt Staedelschule. Koether
responded by describing the topic of subject
hood as a material problem in relation to
painting. My method: literalize, materialize,
liquidize. Impermanent configurations.
Irrepressible flux of compositions and re
appropriations. ... Desire for painting as the
medium to deal with the ontological
uncertainties of our times. As she spoke,
five assistants ceremoniously presented five
of the black planks at the front of the
room. Koether declared, Coming out with
a painting is coming out to go into a
battle with a totally inadequate material.
To shove materiality in everybodys face.

Through its generic repetition in such

diverse sources as Egyptian coffins, Flemish
still life painting, and the images of Dionysian
intoxication, Koether saw the garland as
shedding its iconic status. And adding to the
non-ness of the garland as such a multiple
was the role it continually played within
any one of these historical painting-contexts.
The garland could be described as a
surrogate, a cipher, or an extra: standing in
for the honored dead of Egypt, for the deities
of the Counter-Reformation, or simply for
the capacity to transform a subject from one
state to another. Jenny Jaskey

(Stdelschule)

Mad Garland, 2013, mixed media installation .

Courtesy Campoli Presti, London/Paris

Mad Garland (Non-Standard

Version: For it requires a
Double Crisis to Succeed)
(:
)

Jutta Koether

The production of meaning and production

of art form a cycle: leaving and destroying
both and beginning again. Jutta Koether

Born 1958;
lives and works in New York

1958,

Jenny Jaskey

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Great Wall, 2011, acrylic on paper , 25 25cm.

Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Great Wall
and other paintings

Firenze Lai

The grammar of Firenze Lai's paintings

evolves from her observations of individuals
within their environments, social milieus
and material circumstances. Her paintings
depict a range of different characters.
She creates representations that engage with
the representation of subjectivity: seeking
to depict interior life and psychological land
scapes in utmost simplicity, her paintings
manage to draw its viewers into the lifeworlds of individuals. The works presented
in the Shanghai Biennale focus on different
social classes and groups. She is particularly
concerned with how individuals respond
to contemporary ideological imperatives
of self-management, or to circumstantial
limitations Hong Kongs notoriously cramped
living spaces, for example, or oppressive
political situations. Lai explains, Space
and context are two fundamental concerns
when I paint these situation portraits.
I always wonder how oneself adapts the mind
and the body in different circumstances.

1984,

Born 1984;
lives and works in Hong Kong

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Tracings

Louise Lawler

Louise Lawlers work offers a reflection

on the perception and institutional framework
of contemporary art. Over the last 30
years, Lawler has been making photographs
that depict views of artworks installed in
museums, homes of private collectors, gallery
storage spaces, or auction houses. Our
attention is turned from the artwork itself
to its environment, and to the framing
devices and modes of distribution that affect
the works reception.
Traced directly from her own photographs,
and made in collaboration with illustrator
John Buller, the black lines are executed in
vinyl and directly applied to the wall. Each
tracing exists as an adaptable digital file that
can be printed in any size. Thus, a tracing
takes material form only when exhibited, and
can be destroyed and remade into different
scales for different spaces.
It Could Be Elvis, 19942013, tracing , 254 312.4cm.
Courtesy the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; Sprth Magers, Berlin/London

Lawler trains her attention on the rituals

of the art world, implying that militarism runs
through them like a steady line, smoothly
connecting the dots. At the same time, her art
reveals another trend of militarism, which
is the colonization of daily life, the relentless
intrusion of state violence into our so-called
private lives. To expose the ruse of militarism,
Lawler suggests, we must open our eyes to
its most intimate and most insidious effects.
Mignon Nixon

(John Buller)

Born 1947;
lives and works in New York

1947,

Mignon Nixon

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Assembly Line Projects

Unknown Facets

In every harbor, the pre-fabricated concrete

parts of anti-wave barriers as architectural
structures placed between the sea and land
prevent the coastline from being eroded by
waves and silt, thereby allowing ships to moor.
Li Xiaofei replicated with fiberglass the prefab,
cross-shaped concrete parts. Objects with
specific practical value are thus transformed
into purely formal abstract objects. In the
exhibition hall, he also constructs a small
island embankment, with the difference that
on the other side of the embankment instead
of the vast oceans of global shipping lies
the venue for artworks.

Li Xiaofei

For Li Xiaofei, the assembly line represents

a repetitive, identical, mechanical and even
unemotional means of production, one which
efficiently and rapidly expands the value
of production to the utmost. Such repetition
and sameness do not refer merely to machines
but also include the workers living amid all
this as well as the final products. The assembly
lines in factories seem to protect a funda
mental order of social systems on the surface
through validating the means of production.
Given this sense of order, what is unexpected
is that he even senses a collective Romanticism.
Order exists at once inside and outside their
bodies while possessing a sense of reality
beyond that of the everyday. After production,
the products from the world factory embark
on their journey towards different ports
around the world.

Born 1973;
lives and works in Shanghai

1973,

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142

Assembly Line Projects Unknown Facets,

2014, mixed media installation

14-11-21 3:33

They are all familiar with the sense of

touch, yet their perceptive ability through
touch shows different degrees of intensity
and levels of guidance. The artist has a
pair of professional hands, familiar with
the feel of clay and knowing how to shape it,
while the blind Xu Macheng has a pair of
hands that touch and feel everything around
him. They shape each others face in clay
to humorous and surprising results.
The material world felt by Xu Mazhengs
hands is much greater than that felt by people
with sight. Precisely because there is no
support from sight, he can only think through
the sense of touch. The result displaces our
usual visual judgement of sculpture.
We are looking at a likeness that is not visual,
but resulting from the sense of touch. The
work thus questions the relations between the
distinct senses, as well as between the
senses and our making sense of the world.

And unsurprisingly
I felt that
Time had already flourished into a lush
forest
A long while
I strode forward with both feet
At that instant
I discerned that
Time and tide had already been patched
up as a mountain path!
At last
I sprinkled time on my body
Clutching it tightly in my hand
Treading it with my feet
And carefully turning its form in my mind
I thought
If time really could congeal
Then what kind of sculpture would it be?

Tactile Perception
Xu Mazheng

One day
When I turned my back away
All of a sudden
I discovered
Time had flouted and flowed as a river
I stretched my hands

1953,
Born 1953;
lives and works in Hangzhou

Li Xiuqin (foreground) and Xu Mazheng (background) , Touch and Image Give an Opportunity
for Equality , 2013, aluminum cast

Touch and Image

Li Xiuqin

For 20 years, Li Xiuqin has kept close contact

with a group of blind children, attempting to
discover a parallel sense of creativity through
touch in the absence of vision.

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C2RMF Rembrandts
Bathsheba at her Bath,
Paris, France, 2014
C2RMF ,
, 2014

our planet by modernity. The other, meanwhile,

documents ways in which representations
of the world are processed in specific, highly
controlled environments ruled by particular
kinds of knowledge and expertise, such as
laboratories.
With special thanks to Centre de Recherche et
de Restauration des Muses de France.

In these images, we look into the restoration

laboratories of French museums, specifically
that of the Louvre in Paris. One of the
most sophisticated worldwide, the facility is
equipped with various specialist equipment,
including a particle accelerator. In Linkes
photographs we see technicians undertaking
restoration work on Rembrandts Bathsheba
at Her Bath (1654). The painting is a
reinterpretation of two reliefs and was begun
around 1647, followed by a continued
process of alteration and repainting until its
completion in 1654. X-rays, such as the
one visible in this photograph, show that at
some point late in the painting process,
Rembrandt lowered Bathshebas head from
its initial upward angle. The subtle change
increased the sense of the figures withdrawal
into reverie, imparting a feeling of solemnity
and contemplation.
C2RMF Rembrandt's Bathsheba at her Bath, Paris, France, 2014C2RMF

Linkes photographic work is akin to a visual

anthropology, analyzing how human activity in
general, and science and technology in
particular re-shape our world. One part
of his body of work is devoted to the recent
large-scale transformations inflicted on

2014, 2014, c-print

Armin Linke

The work of culture has frequently been

described as the making of signs. Societies
are constituted by production of meaning,
creating different forms of literacy. Museums
are places in which meaning is negotiated,
and culture is preserved, represented and
actualized. To withstand the flow of time, and
the transformation of matter, such preservation
demands a vast effort and technological
apparatus.

1654
(Bathsheba at Her Bath)

Born 1966;
lives and works in Berlin and Milan

1966,

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14000859-5-ly-p148-153-c6.indd 1-3
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Peter Friedl , Theory of Justice 19922006 (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani

de Barcelona, 2006) 19922006 (2006)

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Liu Ding , Class AA, 2014, oil on canvas , 200 x 150cm

Qian Weikang: Artists have all changed,

eager to participate in European exhibitions.
International exchange has become a vanity
fair. No one pays attention to Shanghai,
only to New York. Whatever art events are
taking place in New York, Shanghai knows
them all. As to whats happening to the
Shanghai people, no one really cares. I also
face another issue. I have to accept the
curators theme, or otherwise, they wont give
you (the opportunity). I feel artists have
become actors: if I take part in an exhibition,
Im presenting your theme. My work is
serving you, serving the exhibition. Im slow
at acclimatizing, not coping that well.

to install your work, you might not even meet

the curator, even if you do, you shake hands
and thats it, not much real exchange. Thats
not very exciting.
Chen Shaoxiong: Yeah, forget about ideology.
Ideology makes both physical body and spirit
public, so there are two paths. In the 1990s,
I stressed so much on the fortress of the person,
to emphasize psychological and intellectual
privatization. It was necessary. Had I not done
so then, had I not done all the work, I couldnt
have realized the work afterwards. Looking
back now, there are connections.

1999

Zhang Peili: Because I cant speak English

well, Im always very nervous when taking part
in exhibitions in the West. Ive always wanted
to have discussions with foreign artists
and to visit their studios, to talk with curators.
But with my bad English, theres little I can do.
Most curators dont know me, but they want
my work and I dont know why. Of course,
Im happy that there are lots of good
exhibitions. I didnt know many people when
I went to the Sydney Biennale. You go there

2012

90

1999
90

90

Class BB, 2014, oil on canvas , 200 x 150cm

1999

Liu Ding

The following quotes came from interviews

conducted with Chinese artists and critics
active in the 1990s, in preparation for the 7th
Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, which I curated
with Carol Yinghua Lu and Su Wei in 2012.
With 1999, I hope to provide an account
of the Chinese art world in the 1990s as I have
observed and experienced it. From what Ive
seen, not much from that period has changed,
especially our intellectual foundation.

Born 1975;
lives and works in Beijing

1975,

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Socialist Realism
and the Present
Liu Ding
Carol Yinghua Lu

The ideological regime that has molded and constituted

our creative direction and value systems within the
field of contemporary art is a subject we have discussed and
researched to a relatively greater degree in the last few
years. From Little Movements and Accidental Message
onwards, our pressing need and urgency to revisit historical
perspectives have kept surfacing in our own work. Opening
up research into Socialist Realism was a natural extension,
and this is also connected to the keen desire for selfunderstanding in an opaque socio-political context. At the
same time, we have never been satisfied with leaving
research work at the level of revisiting the past. We have
always treated research as something that is initiated for
the purposes of discovering intellectual resources to view
and understand the world today, as much as possible
discovering and recovering deeper ideological structures.
We have, moreover, always conducted discussions through
the creation of works, writing and exhibition-making.

within the framework, whose content was the Party and

state politics. Similarly, if we examine artistic practice
since the end of the Cultural Revolution, it has not been able
to form a new political subjectivity on top of the foundations
of society, but rather has still continued moving within the
Party and the state. In other words, from the beginning of the
20th century to this day, the practices and accomplishments
of Chinese intellectuals and of literature and art have
been produced through the recognition and acceptance of
this framework of the existing social order and of central
political power.
We have chosen Socialist Realism as a line of investigation
in order to face and evaluate it squarely as a philosophy
that organizes society and life, rather than merely as form.
How does it influence and mold the positioning of our cultural
values? We return to the original point of ideology, pushing
back the range of observation on contemporary artistic
practice in China from 1976 onwards to before 1949, placing
and viewing art on a path parallel to intellectual history, and
juxtaposing the progress of art next to Chinas modernization.
What we observe are Socialist Realist creative techniques,
aesthetic principles, processes of thought and mechanisms
of dissemination popularly employed and internalized
under intense ideological control. The process, alongside the
modernization of Chinese art, has morphed from its selfevident existence to becoming invisible or even an object of
criticism and rejection, but it has, from beginning to end,
remained an important foundation of our artistic creation and
discussion today.

In our view, the understanding and narrative of contemporary

arts origins and foundations as rebellious, oppositional
and against the official system is a fabrication and some kind
of projection. Artists who had joined the Chinese Communist
Party before and after 1949, guided forms of artistic
expression and formations of artistic awareness in the state
ideology. They all worked, practiced, discussed and educated

1949

, 2014, fiberglass

For the Sake of Ten Thousand: The Bust of an Old Hero

20

19761949

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The Machinists Lament

In the third part, a team of women put multiple

metal parts on a dancer: their coordinated
movements are reminiscent of car race repair
teams. The women continually try to apply
objects to the dancers body in the futile hope
that she will turn into a robot.

A constellation of related ideas, The Machinists

Lament speculates on re-industrialization,
while retaining the irrational magical
mechanics that speak between the lines. It is
a sequel to her work, Safety First (Bad, Dont
Touch, Mercy!) (2013), which imagines a
non-specific future for female factory workers.
The video consists of three plots: the first
features five dancers locked inside a nonspace with masks. 3D and animated elements
flash over the video image intermittently,
working with and against the dancers move
ments. The masks reference another piece by
Liu, The Managers and Division Managers
(2013). There, masks serve to ease the
discomfort of the reverse transition from one
production and power model to another:
from faceless outsourced management to that
of the localized and industrial.

The second part is an animated illustration

of rubber-gloved hands with a voiceover text
taken from Emile Durkheims Division of
Labor in Society. The footage and voiceover
is cut with a 3D animation of a rotating welders
mask. Meanwhile, Beethovens Moonlight
Sonata is played haltingly, with mistakes.
When slips occur, the mask hovers, the rotation
stops briefly, and then resumes.

(Emile

Durkheim)(Division of Labor

in Society)3D

2013
[Safety First (Bad, Dont

Touch, Mercy!)]

The Machinist's Lament, 2014, HD video , 18'

Jen Liu

In her work, Jen Liu explores ideas of

propaganda and sloganeering. Using paintings
on paper, video, music, as well as perfor
mances scripted for amateur actors, she
disguises surfaces that not only mask but also
ease entry into underlying structural problems.

Born 1976;
lives and works in New York

3D

1976,

2013
(The Managers and Division Managers)

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Segmented Landscape

Liu Chuang

The chuang in Liu Chuang means window

in Chinese. Following his namesake, Liu pours
over a group of geometric images that have
permeated life in the last few decades.
Putting anti-burglary grilles over windows
was a collective memory and life experience in
China in the 1980s and 1990s. Every
household installed these cages on balconies
and windows preventing burglars from the
outside, shielding what goes on inside.
These anti-burglary grilles often have simple
designs as decoration, becoming a fixed
visual model visible in everyday life. The bars,
separating inside and outside, seem to
represent a programmed production and life,
and to this day, they still poke through in the
view among buildings within and without.

Segmented Landscape , 2014, mixed media installation .

Courtesy of the artist and Leo Xu Projects

Liu Chuang adds a screen for these grilles.

Under the intense sunlight and gentle
breeze of northern China, the fixed symbol of
the window lattice momentarily takes on life,
turning into different scenes seen from
inside and outside the windows. The once
prison-like bars now give the people living on
both sides a fluttering chance to look again
at the modern planned metropolis.

8090

1978,
Born 1978;
lives and works in Beijing

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Podwrka

Sharon Lockhart

The title of Sharon Lockharts film, Podwrka,

literally translates to courtyard in Polish.
It displays six different courtyards in dz
and the children that live and play there.
These spaces serve as the playgrounds for
the youngest residents of the surrounding
apartment buildings, safely separating them
from the street. In this way, the courtyards
provide a sanctuary from traffic and the chaos
of the city. Despite dzs makeshift play
grounds being far from their overly-designed
counterparts found in Lockharts home
country of America, they nonetheless form an
integral part of the urban environment.

Podwrka, 2009, 16mm transferred to HD video, 16, 28'

Courtesy the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels;
and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

In the still images of the courtyards we

see the children playing, transforming parking
lots, storage spaces and metal armatures
into jungle gyms and sand boxes, evoking the
resourcefulness of childhood. In her practice,
Lockhart often illuminates the forgotten
and the overlooked. In play, all the complex
ities of childhood development are manifest.
Culture, social organization and architecture
all come together in the way these
children interact with each other and the
camera. In Podwrka, Lockharts fixed camera
portrays the games that are played in the
background, relocating them to the foreground
of our consciousness.

Podwrka
(dz )

This is not the first time Lockhart has

focused on the world of children. In her film
Pine Flat (2005), she took unmoving shots
of similarly unsupervised children and teen
agers in a small California mountain town as
they read, played, slept or waited for a bus.

1946,

Born 1964;
lives and works in Los Angeles

2005
Pine Flat

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Sensorium Tests

Daria Martin

Is there something like a social life of the

senses? A social life that resists the
rationalization and partition of perception that
modern division of labor has inflicted on
the human sensorium, and which includes the
creation of a separate realm for aesthetic
experiences?
Daria Martins film, Sensorium Tests, explores
notions of spectatorship and sensation through
the conceit of a scientific investigation into
mirror-touch synesthesia. A neurological
disorder in which sensory information from
one pathway leads to some kind of response in
a second pathway, synesthesia literally means
union of the senses. In the case of mirrortouch synesthesia, people may experience the
feeling of being touched when they observe
other people, or even objects, being touched.

Sensorium Tests, 2012, video , 10'.

Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Martin contrasts the distant objectivity and

rationality of the lab with the slippery
subjectivity with which we are all familiar,
raising questions about experience, artifice
and our engagement with the world around us.
The idea of touch at a distance, as well
as the union between the gaze and its object
both feature prominently in Martins film.
Moreover, they bear deep implications for our
engagement with art in all its forms.

(mirror-touch synesthesia)

1973,

Born 1976;
lives and works in London

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might use one single excuse, or several.

The excuses were paid once the period of
absence had ended.

This is the starting point of The Value

of Absence Excuses to be Absent from Your
Work Center: the recording of the creative
mental process involved in making excuses
to avoid work. Melis took advantage of the
lack of motivation he observed in Cuba,
and made contact with a range of individuals
who get paid for not going to work. People
use the telephone as a privileged means of
explaining their absences, the medium
seemingly offering a greater range of fake
stories to concoct. The artists aim was
to compile as many excuses as possible
by purchasing the right to record telephone
conversations. The price paid for one excuse
was the same as the salary deduction arising
from its respective day(s) off work. Thus,
the artist generated a community of people
who received the same income that the State
would have paid for their presence at their
places of employment. In this case, however,
payment was still made despite a lack of
actual productivity.
The efficacy of featured excuses spans one
day up to one month, and occasionally,
longer still. Excuses foster periods of absence
in different ways: to obtain a given absence
(be it one, three or more weeks) a worker

The Value of Absence, Excuses to be Absent from Your Work Center, ,

2012, installation , exhibition view from New Structures of Production, ADN Galera .
Courtesy ADN Galera; Photo Roberto Ruiz

The Value of Absence Excuses to be

Absent from your Work Center
,

Adrian Melis

In Cuba, dissatisfaction, indifference and a

lack of motivation toward the socialist system
of production has led to an ongoing wave of
workers excusing themselves from work.
This absence seems to be further encouraged
by a widespread attitude of tolerance
apparently displayed by most of Cubas stateowned enterprises.

2014

1985,

Born 1985;
lives and works in Amsterdam

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The Bedroom

amusing proclamation, implying that the

vestiges of memory and history are but
dreams mere recollections upon waking.

Interview record of The Bedroom Visit with Zhang Li

, 2014

In The Bedroom, Musquiqui Chih Ying sought

out old workers who once worked on the
production lines, interviewing them about their
former lives in the factories and their places
of leisure after leaving the factories. The artist
places special emphasis on imagery of sleep
and the surrounding environment; during this
process, the artist makes casual sketches
of beds structures, nearby furnishings and
decorations, dreams remembered, and so on.
With these sketches as prototypes, Musquiqui
Chih Ying has constructed a massive bed
on the same scale as the streetlights at the
entrance of the Power Station of Art a
museum that had been renovated from the
former Nanshi Power Plant. Such exaggera
tions revolving around the bed and the
workers memories present a bizarre and

19

Musquiqui ChihYing
Musquiqui

Since the 19th century, the relationship

of production between humanity and factories
has always yielded a structural analysis into
the distribution of economic benefits on a
metropolitan or even national scale whether
in terms of management, operational
mechanisms, structure of capital, or the role
that workers play in the system of production.
Shanghais Huangpu District home
of the Power Station of Art as well as Xuhui
District and Pudong New Area, which are
adjacent to the Huangpu River, were once
important export-processing zones in
Shanghai. Factories witnessed Shanghais
economic take-off. However, with changes in
the structures of industry, abandoned factories
and workers who are forced to change
careers have become footnotes in the history
of prosperity and development.

Musquiqui

1985,

Born 1985;
lives and works in Berlin

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different phase in the life of the native North

American people. The seventh fire eerily
predicts the current economic and ecological
situation of North America.

The specific logos in these works, however,

represent the very companies whose
exploitation of natural resources in Canada
has been the backbone of the continuous
invasion of native land since colonialism and
industrialization. Nonetheless, the issues
these works address are far from unique to
Canada. People all over the world find
themselves in an ongoing land struggle with
corporations and nation-states.
Viewed close up, the works materials reveal
themselves: made from beadwork, their
process was extremely laborious. Beadwork
is common to Myres culture, the Anishinaabe
Aboriginal visual language, and alludes to
a process of collective symbolization. Here,
however, the craft is used to indicate a
different kind of collectivity. In Myres work,
beads reference the collective action that
stands behind the monolithic corporation
and the invisible hand of capitalism, drawing
attention and awareness to its activities.

The title of the work, Journey of the Seventh

Fire, refers to the Anishinaabe peoples Seven
Fires Prophecy, which is closely linked to the
fate of the Anishinaabeg through the ages.
Each of the Prophecys fires relates to a

Prophecy)

Journey of the Seventh Fire CamecoCameco, 2008, beads on canvas

, 144 144cm. Courtesy Art Mr Gallery; Photo Guy LHeureux

Journey of
the Seventh Fire

Nadia Myre

From a distance, these large works depict

generic corporate logos, specifically of
large mining and hydro companies in Canada.
By omitting the textual elements from
the graphics, the artist focuses purely on the
iconic representation of the corporation
and the quasi-magical use of logos by brands
today.

1974,

Born 1974;
lives and works in Montreal

(Anishinaabe)

(Journey of the Seventh Fire)

(Seven Fires

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Sketches for Solo Show by Robbie Williams , 200814, mixed media installation
. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Johann Knig, Berlin

SOLO SHOW

Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Uwe Schwarzer
Robbie Williams

Williams first major solo exhibition in China,

SOLO SHOW is a research-based project
on art production initiated by Natascha Sadr
Haghighian together with Uwe Schwarzer,
head of production company mixedmedia
berlin. The pair conceived the fictional artist
Robbie Williams and had mixedmedia
produce the exhibition. The company produces
works for internationally-renowned artists,
generally remaining anonymous and invisible
to the public. SOLO SHOW, which includes
a two-part installation and a publication,
raises multiple questions around topics such
as authorship, deskilling, the division of labor
in art, and the myth of the SOLO artist.

The work of Stockholm-based EgyptianTaiwanese artist, Robbie Williams manifests

itself across a wide range of materials.
Williams hybrid sculptures evoke questions
surrounding the conditions of the individual in
representational spaces and reflect on what
shapes our daily lives. On the occasion of
SOLO SHOW, the artist displays a set of five
objects that resemble obstacles for horses
arranged in the space as if for a show-jumping
contest. The objects are loosely assembled,
and would collapse in the same way as a
fence when hit by a leaping horse. But instead
of using wood, Williams has chosen materials
that refer to his own biography and playfully
quote from the history of modern and
postmodern art.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian wishes to draw readers

attention to bioswop.net.

bioswop.net.

Mixedmedia Berlin
mixedmedia

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In Conversation:
Natascha
Sadr Haghighian
with Raimar Stange

R a i m a r S t a n g e ( R S ) The exhibition
SOLO SHOW presents artist Robbie Williams
in cooperation with the art development and production
company mixedmedia berlin. Could you tell us how you
and mixedmedia berlin cooperated, perhaps by describing
what made you go for this artists name?
N a t a sc h a S a d r H a g h i g h i a n ( N S H )
I met Uwe Schwarzer, the founder of mixedmedia berlin, in
Sharjah during the Biennial. He was overseeing the installation
of an artwork by one of his artists. We began to talk and the
more I learned about his work, the more I wanted to know.
I am one of those people who self-produce their work; I dont
even have an assistant. If I work with other people, its usually
by way of collaborations. Thats why I found the notion pretty
absurd that there should be a company that exclusively
produces artists works. But at the same time, there have been
distortions in my own practice. As soon as you are involved
with bigger institutions, their structure is kind of grafted onto
you. Suddenly youre having to deal with all this division of
labor, all these hierarchies, the distinction between alienated
and non-alienated work, which is one of the reasons why
I could never be happy in the normal world of labor. I also
found the notion of such a company confusing because I felt
pushed into the role of the traditional artist with a romantic
view of his work or of artistic expression as such which

kinds of shapes. But they all fall over easily, like real show
jumping obstacles. Coming in all their diverse materials and
forms, they work like a box of quotes. At the same time, they
represent an approximation of the average output of workshops
such as mixedmedia. In other words, these workshops will
supply anything, from hand-blown neon strip lights on a stack
of chairs, to a wall of monitors emitting white noise. It also
has to be said that its hard to define their range of possibilities
because it expands with each new commission.

is really not true at all, actually. So it was time to take a closer

look at the relationships of production in art.
I decided to ask Uwe whether I could document his
work so that I might arrive at a better understanding of how
he and his mind work. That was quite a difficult undertaking,
because Uwes work relies on his complete discretion.
What occurs between him and the artists he works with,
and what is produced in his office, is confidential. I therefore
agreed not to talk about anything I saw and heard there.
But we had to find a work-around, a strategy to enable us to
collaborate on this project. The name of this work-around
is Robbie Williams. He is a fictitious artist whose first solo
show has been produced by mixedmedia berlin. It is this
production that has permitted us to document and discuss
what actually occurs behind mixedmedias closed doors.
So, while Robbie is merely a means to an end, he does have
a profile of his own, even if it has been kept to a minimum.
We hit on the name Robbie Williams because no one thinks
to ask who that person actually is. Peoples curiosity tends
to be satisfied when you say, the artist, not the singer.
The name also carries connotations of the glamor and
tragedy of a solo career. And that is an important aspect of
the SOLO SHOW project. It is about the construction of the
solo artist, whose name floats above the Tate Modern in big
bold letters. But actually he relies on a huge team of people,
specialists, technicians, architects, assistants, engineers,
management staff, etc. At best, their names will be listed in
the imprint of the catalogue. But the public is fed the intact
image of a singular individual whose extraordinary talents,
or whatever, have enabled his works to float so boldly bove
the Tate Modern. There is a discrepancy, a distortion of
the actual relationships in the art scene that is increasingly
veering towards a mega-event culture. So we needed an
icon to engage in iconoclasm. And Robbie took the job.

precisely by instrumentalizing his assistant, Kippi leads his

own authorship into absurdity. How do you approach this?
Does your critical reflection (only) address the hierarchically
authoritarian style of art cooperation, or do you also explore
the issue of authorship as such?

R S But how far do you take the iconoclasm, the

unseating of the godlike artist? I have just written an essay
on Martin Kippenbergers work Heavy Burschi. Here,

N S H mixedmedia built five objects for Robbie. They

are show jumping obstacles, with the only difference being
that theyre made of all kinds of materials, and come in all

(Heavy Burschi)Kippi

Mixedmedia

N S H To me the issue of authorship is immanent. No one

does anything on their own. But funnily enough, a lot
of people behave as though they do and perhaps they even
believe its true. I think thats very silly. The image of the
illustrious artist just wont go away. Everyone actually protects
it, even the institutions. So we have to parade this absurdity.
Funnily enough, theres always a point where the institution
feels its authority is jeopardized. For example, the museum
people couldnt write the foreword for the Robbie Williams
catalogue. But Uwe also defends the artists authorship.
After all, it is the cornerstone of the definition of his work.
I asked him several times about his relationship to the works
he has produced. In his mind, theres no doubt that the artist
is the author. He, Uwe, merely carries out a commission,
for which he is paid. But I dont think its that simple. Ultimately,
he has to make sure that the work emanates what he calls
the artists personal style. But there is no manual that outlines
what exactly this style consists of. Which means that its
pretty hypothetical to know that artist X, for example, would
never use such and such a material and so we wont either.
Actually, I think thats pretty impressive. Companies like
mixedmedia produce virtually all the works of an artist. This
shows that the notion of an artists personal style is actually
a fiction. And the same is true for the notion of authorship.

R S That is one part of the show. As a complement to the

gallery containing Robbies objects, there is a second,
mirrored gallery at the rear that you enter from the other side
of the museum.
N S H The space is empty save for speaker boxes. In an
eight-channel sound installation, you can hear a horse gallop
across the space and jump over imaginary obstacles.
A wall inscription near the entrance to the obstacle part reads
SOLO SHOW Robbie Williams; on the sound side, a
similarly placed inscription reads SOLO SHOW, followed
by the names of the fifty or so people who produced the
work, including myself.

R S What else will we be able to see of Robbie Williams

in the show?

(SOLO SHOW)

Mixedmedia Berlin

MixedmediaMixedmedia

Mixedmedia

Berlin

(SOLO SHOW Robbie Williams)

Mixedmedia

SOLO SHOW

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Can the Sun Lie?

According to the indigenous people, in

the Canadian Arctic, the sun is setting many
kilometers further west along the horizon
and the stars are no longer where they should
be. Sunlight is behaving differently in this
part of the world as the warming Arctic air
causes temperature inversions and throws the
setting sun off kilter. The longstanding
dispute between lay knowledge and scientific
expertise is forcefully reanimated by
current climate change debates, particularly
with respect to indigenous storytelling
traditions. This is a reordering of expertise
and its claims to truth that turns on
the evidence proffered by nature itself.

Can the Sun Lie? , 2014, HD video , 13'

Susan Schppli

Can the sun lie? asked a US court in

1886 when reflecting upon the reliability of
photographic evidence. As photographic
practices became increasingly commonplace
and awareness of the ease of image
manipulation more widespread, so too did
doubts relating to their trustworthiness
as evidence. As a result, photographic experts
soon began being called upon to confirm
the veracity of images, bringing about a new
order of certainty produced by the domain
of expertise.

1886

1967,

Born 1967;
lives and works in London

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world ocean;
Fore Head
;

(Fore Head)

A1

(World Ocean)

Fore Head, 2014, poster , 84.1 59.4cm

Erik Steinbrecher

Fore Head is also a large-scale monochrome.

A wall is covered with numerous A1 posters
with a close up image of the artists own
forehead, the same image repeated incessantly
to form the works shape. Fore Head alludes
to the idiosyncrasies of artistic producers,
and more generally, to the fact that the social
is never transparent. Behind every forehead
is a unique mind that nonetheless acts within
certain common frameworks and desires,
all mirroring each other. Furthermore, between
one forehead and another, there is never
any reliable medium: transmission is always
risky and subject to interference, not to
mention the eternal difficulty of separating
signals from noise. The forehead is
a physical and visible barrier: we can never
know with certainty what goes on in other
peoples minds. At the same time, though, all
social life is a process of mind working upon
mind (Gabriel Tarde).

1963,

Born 1963; lives and works in Berlin

For Steinbrecher, the act of abstraction is not

an act of aestheticizing, but rather of removing
information. The work World Ocean consists
of a 1000-liter tank, filled with water and large
amounts of salt: Mediterranean salt, black salt
from Crimea, Atlantic salt, tropical salt, Indian
salt and many more besides. Mixed with water
to create a saline solution, the receptacle
now contains a surrogate global ocean.
But it is leaking: water is slowly seeping out,
transforming the museum floor into a
monochrome seascape. Steinbrecher refers
here to traditions in painting, specifically
Yves Klein, but of greater importance is the
works play on scale, its relationship between
what is present and what is absent, and
of what is seen and what must be imagined.
Similarly, the work evokes the oceans
qualities of embracing concepts that exceed
even our minds eye: a setting for unimagined
possibilities and a medium of modernity, the
global seascape is as fundamental in literature
as it is to economic reality. Steinbrechers
work presents the vast expanse of oceans
as a metaphor for unstable grounds,
liquefaction and the inescapable instability
that is intrinsic to the age of modernity.

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what happened in
dragon year

Sun Xun

Sun Xun refuses to be an animator.

Drawing and animation are only one part
in each of his large-scale projects, as
the media which allows for opportunities of
growth and transformation within his oeuvre
over the years. He used what could be
called an archaeology of the real to present
the various characters within the real world,
and then conferring on each a paradigm of
images, or even mythological tones.
The magician is a peculiar existence.
The brilliant and surprising performances in
the public square seem to have grasped the
spells to traverse time and space. The
magician that appears in Sun Xuns work
cuts through all kinds of historical scenes.

Tomorrow, This Will Have Become the First Myth About Today

, 2014, ink on wall

For this exhibition, within the picture plane is

another reality. He focuses on the Huangpu
River, with cargo boats plying the waters
by day and by night. The workers going in and
out of the factories throughout history let the
surrounding artworks come alive amid this
immense scene of reality conceived within the
artists mind breathing life even into the
contemporary social factory, innumerably
complex, endlessly chaotic, but also pregnant
with vitality.

1980,

Born 1980;
lives and works in Hangzhou

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contemporary attitudes to science and

technology.

In HEXEN 2.0, Treister takes the Macy

Conferences of 1946 to 1953 as her point
of departure. These conferences, which
took place in the US, are widely regarded as
initiating a new era: they expanded on
cybernetics as a science of control and infor
mation initially developed in military contexts,
and sought new applications of these
theories in the management of people and
society. The goal of the Macy Conferences
was to lay the foundations for a general
science of the human mind.

HEXEN 2.0

Treisters work brings together diverse

philosophical, political and literary
responses to scientific advances, and
utopian and dystopian visions of the future.
In doing so, the work offers a means to
envision alternative futures and reflect on

HEXEN 2.0

20

HEXEN 2.0

HEXEN 2.019461953

1958,

Born 1958; lives and works in London

(Macy Conferences)

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HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From National Socialism via Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences to Neo-Totalitarianism

Central to HEXEN 2.0 is an investigation

into the convergence of science, sociology
and psychology in the context of a growing
military-industrial complex. Technologies
of control and manipulation are the focus
of this research, with Treister expressing
caution to a future of societal manipulation
and the march towards controlled societies.

HEXEN 2.0//, 200911, medium variable .

Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W., New York

HEXEN 2.0

Suzanne Treister

Suzanne Treister is the creator of the HEXEN

2.0 project which deals with governmentcommissioned scientific research programs
relating to the control of the masses in
the 20th century. The project serves to link
various programs as well as individuals,
institutions and organizations spanning secret
services through to activist movements.
HEXEN 2.0 addresses the political-military
framework created by the United States
after the Second World War that has gone on
to become a near-global network today.
Under the banner of cybernetics, this
framework brought about the interweaving of
technology and the social sciences that
led to the development of the internet and by
extension, todays collection of data on a
previously unimaginable scale.

182

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HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From Diogenes of Sinope to Anarcho-Primitivism and the Unabomber via Science-Fiction
HEXEN 2.0//, 200911, medium variable .
Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W., New York

HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/The Computer From the Antikythera Mechanism to Quantum Telepathology
HEXEN 2.0//, 200911, medium variable
. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W., New York

HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From ARPANET to DARWARS via the Internet

HEXEN 2.0//DARWARS, 200911, medium variable .

Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W., New York

Louise Lawler
Chandelier (traced), 2001/2007/2013
Signed certificate, installation instructions, and PDF formatted file
Dimensions variable to scale
Edition of 10, 2 AP
(MP# LL--594-C)

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Louise Lawler , Chandelier, 2001/2007/2013, tracing .

Courtesy the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; Sprth Magers, Berlin/London

Willem de Rooij , Bouquet IV IV, 2010, mixed media

installation . Courtesy the artist and Galerie Daniel Buchholz,
Cologne/Berlin

Dust, 2007, installation

Dust;
Dust Square

1986
Vacaresti

Mona Vatamanu
Florin Tudor

The Romanian artist duo are often tracing the

outlines, the grounds, or the ruins of buildings
demolished by dictatorial regimes in Europe.
To that end, here, the pair turn their attention
to the Vacaresti monastery, destroyed in 1986
in Bucharest. This symbolic recuperation,
based on a performative understanding of the
monument, gains resonance in light of present
day plans to build a commercial mall on the
same site. Dust seeping from bags of concrete
functions as a historical hourglass between
an unclear then and a problematic now.
The process points to loss, and to the collapse
of the order that architecture constructs
in its role of embodying power, be it political
or economic. It conjures materiality where
abstraction had prevailed. But it also questions
the reversal processes taking place across
the post-socialist world to a pre-revolutionary
past, and its need for grounded, solid pivots.
Dust Square performs a similar function,
unsettling a European avant-garde reference,
bringing matter discarded matter, no less
into a space of suspension and questioning.

(Dust Square)

Mona Vatamanu, born 1968;

Florin Tudor, born 1974;
live and work in Bucharest

1968,
1974;

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Cosmos

Based on the ideas of Russian philosopher,

Nikolai Fedorov, Anton Vidokles 2013 film
was shot in Siberia, Crimea and Kazakhstan,
and features a soundtrack by John Cale.
Fedorov, like others, believed that death was
a mistake, because the energy of cosmos
is indestructible, because true religion
is a cult of ancestors, because true social
equality is immortality for all. Federov was
one of the Cosmo-Immortalists, a surge of
thinkers that emerged in Russia in the late-19th
and early-20th centuries. They linked
Western Enlightenment with Russian Orthodox
and Eastern philosophical traditions, as
well as Marxism, to create an idiosyncratically
concrete metaphysics. For the Russian
cosmists, cosmos did not mean outer space:
rather, they wanted to create cosmos on
earth. To construct a new reality, free
of hunger, disease, violence, death, need,
inequality like communism.

This is not a film

This is an irradiation session
Color red
Projected by light-emitting diodes
Has a therapeutic effect on animal and

human cells
Increases blood capillary circulation
And vascular activity
Stimulates synthesis of adenosine
tri-phosphate
Relaxes muscles
Reduces nerve excitability
Stimulates nerve transmission
Reduces scar tissue and stimulates wound
healing
Increases lymphatic system activity
Relieves edema
Stimulates immune response
Stimulates production of collagen
Increases phagocytosis
Increases RNA/DNA synthesis
Viewed on LED screen
Calibrated to 670nm
This video can improve your health

In the 1880s and 1890s, Fedorov developed

The Common Task: the creation of the
technological, social and political conditions
under which it would be possible to
resurrect all men who have ever lived through
technological, artificial means. Here, the
Christian promise of immortality and
resurrection would be realized by techno
logical means. Above all, however, Fedorov
believed in the power of social organization:
in this sense he was a true socialist.

For Fedorov, true social justice meant justice

also for the dead the end of the privileging
of the living in their relationship to the dead.
This artificially-produced immortality was,
for him, a way to unite technology with social
organization. After the October Revolution,
Fedorovs ideas became especially attractive,
since materialist philosophy constituted the
core on which Communist ideology was built.

2 013

(John Cale)

(Nikolai Fedorov)

1965,

Born 1965;
lives and works in New York and Berlin

RNA /DNA

LED

670

19 8 0 9 0

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192

Cosmos, 2014, HD video , 31'

Anton Vidokle

This is Cosmos. We are here to make a

film about invisible energy, immortality and the
resurrection of all human beings who ever
lived.

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Those who have left the countryside carry

about their unfamiliar urban life in a way that
is neither of the city nor of the village. They
are constantly changing between different
areas of labor, wandering inside and outside
the factory, getting smothered by information
from mass media, adding in all kinds of new
experiences and forging together some form
of social life in a period of transition between
the city and the countryside.

Floating Life in Crevice, 2014, HD video , 5'

Floating Life in Crevice

Wang Ziyue

Wang Ziyue invited a group living in buildings

awaiting demolition to re-enact their lives
in fact this is not acting, this is them doing
what they do in everyday life: going to work
during the day, chatting after dinner, keeping
accounts at night. This building has three
floors with two rooms each, and each room
becomes a stage. They treat the building
as a way station, rehearsing their lives in each
room, taking turns to perform. Aside from
documentary-like sections, the video also
contains rooms that can only be peeked into.
Through the peephole, only abstract forms
of touch, sound, shadows and crawling, in all
their theatricality, can be seen. These anony
mous individuals take on a more secretive
state within the private space.

1988,

Born 1988;
lives and works in Hangzhou

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Organic Exercise; Conceptual Tower

Drawing; I Dont Want to be Like
Anyone Else; Diagram Wall
; ;
;

notion, illustrating the difference between our

historical systems of control where information
is contained within a set hierarchy and the
idea of a continually shifting, self-determining
system. The Shanghai Biennale presents
four reproduced works by Willats, from 1962,
1977, 2008 and 2009, including a wall of
what he calls ideological diagrams against
the backdrop of Homeostat Drawing, moving
images of couples interactions in public
spaces in Paris, a sculptural setting conceived
as an interactive experiment for visitors, and a
photograph/text work that examines the
position of women in society.

Willats works testify the importance of

cybernetic theory for the historical dream of
a different form of control for society. Based
on the idea that systems can be self-regulating
through processes of feedback, many see an
opportunity to break with the hierarchical
social organization of the past, by looking at
the entire society as an information system.
The basic unit of many of his works is a
drawing he made in 1959, called Homeostat
Drawing, which depicts a model with four
nodes, totally interconnected by input-output
relationships. For Willats, it is a basic model
for relationships and information within
society: The homeostat model poses another

(Stephen Willats)

2050

1962197720082009

Homeostat Drawing, 1969, pencil on paper , 55.8 x 71.1cm.

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

Stephen Willats

What is the relation between individual

consciousness and behavior, and collective
structures? What is the relation between
computation and meaning-making processes?
How does the reflexive human subject relate
to structures and the flow of abstract data
today? Such questions find a mirror in the
works of conceptual artist Stephen Willats.
Since the late 1950s, Willats has developed
a practice that combines studies of local
communities and the abstraction of social
relations through diagrams, which he employs
as a speculative tool for mapping social
systems. He describes his work as committed
to the ideals of self-organization and social
change, critically questioning the relation
between artist and social context. He explores
social realities through multidisciplinary
incursions, modeling flows of information
and relationships and investigating the
markers of the modern individuals position
within larger structures and patterns.

1943,

Born 1943;
lives and works in London

1959

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Notes on
Organic
Exercise
Stephen Willats

Whilst working in the Drian Gallery in London as a Gallery

Assistant in the late 1950s, I had started to question the
traditional role of artwork in society and the relationship
between audience and artwork. I had been reading a
number of papers concerning the notion of the random
variable, the meaning of meaning, semiotics of experience,
and importantly of learning theory and the role of feedback.
As a result a realization I had was that the acquisition
of a new perception and understanding by an audience of
a work of art was more likely to take place if they actually
experienced and internalized the intention of the artist for
themselves rather than by someone telling them of their
experience. That is to say, referential experience as against
actual experience. Referential communication would be
reliant on the understanding of mutually shared language
codes and, of course, deals with secondary relayed
experience, which by definition is once removed. I had
come to the realization that directly engaging oneself with
a symbolic but actual task based experience was more
real to the self and thus changes in perception were more
possible.
In the early 1960s this led to various attempts by me to
engage the audience in acts of participation where a person
was invited to take part in acts of self-organization and
problem solving, by reordering variables such as shapes and

colors in a series of Manual Variable constructions,

which originally were meant to be presented together
in a sequence of six. Each work in the series increased the
amount of participant involvement, as different frames
of variables were left for people to reorganize, and then
document their decision making choices on Response
Sheets. The individual works were thus seen more as
tools and it was the display of the Response Sheets that
I considered important as a display of the relativity inherent
in perception. There was no right or wrong, good or
bad in the outcomes of peoples decisions, or what they
expressed, each being seen as valid as any other.

based sculpture was seen as a tool to be used in creating

a process through time, not as an emulative object and
therefore it was deemed permissible for it to be continually
remade each time it was presented, the concept and
rules and events for its presentation and the experience of
participation constituting the work, and so it has continued
until this day; each time it is presented it is remade and
then destroyed.

While I was planning the Manual Variable series in 1962,

prior to their realization I was also looking at the organic
structure of environmental experience, its random base,
how it was the perceiver who created order, who gave it all
meaning and coherency, and this gave rise to a series of
drawings that explored the structure of modern buildings
and simple piles of stones or bricks. The participatory
sculpture Organic Exercise came out of one of the drawings,
which acted as a catalyst for the form of the work,
which was to be, what I termed event based. The work
demonstrated to the participants the idea of selforganization and relativity, and the potential of their own
creative decision making by them actually engaging in a
process of making decisions. A set of variables was
provided on a grid, which was left for people to participate
in rearranging as they thought fit, interesting and
meaningful.
The variables are plaster blocks all of the same size and
weight which start the beginning of each day as a square in
the middle of the grid, and then as the day progresses
are reorganized and distributed over the grid, one person
leaving their set of blocks in place for the next person
to continue working with, and so on as a series of events
by the participants within the territory of the grid. The event

1962

50(Drian Gallery)

60

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Windows on the World, 2014, video installation .

Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Windows on the World

Ming Wong

As part of Ming Wongs long-term exploration

of popular cultures incubation of narratives
and building blocks for ideological constructs,
this work (in collaboration with Thomas
Tsang of Dehow Projects) focuses on
the concept of future in Chinese modernity,
and particular, how it is manifested in the
unlikely relationship between sci-fi and 20th
century Cantonese opera. The former has
been at the core of Chinese modern
reformation, Liang Qichao being an early
enthusiast and translator of Jules Verne; the
latter is also viewed more as a potent modern
national identifier, than as a continuous art
form, surviving from pre-modern times
unaltered. The structure featured as part
of the Shanghai Biennale could represent the
deck of a space ship in a fictional Chinese
sci-fi movie from the 1960s or 1970s.
Although Chinas radical approach to both
tradition and to redesigning the future was
different from communist countries elsewhere
during this time, Wong nonetheless
incorporates elements from an icon of 20th
century Soviet cinema. Specifically, the artist
references Tarkovskys Solaris (1972),
its oceanic landscape and infinite horizon
of islets. The individualist melancholy
and alienation of the film are contrasted with
a history shaped by the scale and scope of
the Cultural Revolution.

(Thomas TsangDehow Projects

)

(Jules Verne)
20

Born 1971;
lives and works in Berlin and Singapore

1971,

(Tarkovsky)(Solaris1972
)

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2013621

Questions, Soil and Socio-Botanic, 201314, mixed media installation .

Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Keywords Lab / Xu Tan

Questions, Soil
and Socio-Botanic
,

20122005

Socio-botany

(research in progress)
Unmarketable Tree:

Madagascar Almond
Shot at a plant nursery in Chancun, Shunde
District, Foshan on June 21, 2013. This plant
nursery specializes in growing a few species
of trees in big number for greening purposes.
At the same time, there are tens of thousands
of trees set aside because they have no market
demand, victims of shifting market taste
Madagascar Almond. The sales performance
of a particular species of trees does not only
depend on cultural ideology and tradition or
greening policy, there are also many irrational
reasons governing their transactions.

Initiated by Xu Tan in 2005

| Keywords Lab
2005

The Social Botany Project was initiated in

2012 as a Keywords Lab project, a part
of Xu Tans ongoing series Keywords (2005
present). The work featured in the Shanghai
Biennale marks an extension of previous
research into the Pearl River Delta region,
its rapid development and resulting inconsis
tencies. Xu interviewed the inhabitants of
several rural areas and farming villages
regarding their views on cities and the urban
sphere. Through these interactions, the artist
exposes the complexities that govern our
relationships with the natural and built environ
ments in which we live. The interviews touch
on the artificiality of nature and in doing so,
draw analogies and comparisons between the
conventions of natural and social realms.
Here, codes of language, systems, metaphors
and formulae are set alongside a laboratorylike installation of objects and artifacts.
Together, they present a far-reaching analysis
of the processes of urbanization in
contemporary China.

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Adam Avikainen , Views from the Indigo Train, 2014, photograph

Always on Time in My Head , Tokushima, October 2014, 201410

Adam Avikainen , Views from the Indigo Train, 2014, photograph

Conductor in the Wings , Tokushima, October 2014, 201410

Adam Avikainen , Views from the Indigo Train, 2014, photograph

Run-away Parents , Tokushima, October 2014, 201410

The Imagined Park writing project

Yuan Wenshan

coastal and inland regions have produced an

unprecedented movement of people. Weighty
issues like the elderly in their empty nests
looking after the young, and the challenges
of living in unfamiliar cities have emerged. The
loss of individual experiences, the closing-in
of interactions, and value systems in disarray
Facing the world today, how then should
we deal anew with the imagined public park
of the future?
Commissioned by the Shanghai Biennale,
curator Yuan Wenshan initiates a writing
project on the subject of the imagined public
park that echoes the Biennales theme Social
Factory. The public park in this project is
both a symbol as well as the site where social
production occurs and manifests.
This project calls on writers from all
over the country to bring together writing and
social observation about what is currently
happening with the production of images
beyond that of the scenic. It hopes to excavate
through writing the idea of the public,
hidden beneath the surface of Chinese social
values, neglected and even forgotten within
revolutionary and modern narratives.

At the same time, with economic policies

as the pull factor, the huge economic
gaps between city and countryside as well as

Adam Avikainen , Views from the Indigo Train, 2014, photograph

Her Stone Turned to Dog , Tokushima, October 2014, 201410

Adam Avikainen , Views from the Indigo Train, 2014, photograph

Does He Know... I'm Also Watching Him? Tokushima, October 2014, 201410

In the early 20th century, the appearance of

public parks in China was marked with the
imprint of colonialism and racism, while their
rise accompanied the gradual expansion of
the concept of the modern nation-state
together with capitalist modes of production.
The traditional modes of social organization
and production had been shattered, the new
world, however, was being established in fits
and starts. In this crucial transitional period,
village governance with local gentry
at its core played an important role. The local
gentry were usually intellectuals on the lower
social rungs who had participated in civil
examinations. Though they held no official
position, they played an important part
in helping officials who came to take up their
posts from elsewhere, defending different
issues like the local economy and governance.
In actual fact, they were not forced to accept
this but harbored a cautious yet expectant
attitude in opening up their arms. Within the
process of constructing a modern nation-state,
the public parks that rural gentry helped
build became an important site in nurturing
citizens. Today, nearly a century later,
the rural gentry, with the clan as the center,
is slowly disappearing; instead, the individual
and the nuclear family are becoming the new
social units. The ways of social organization
have undergone greater possibilities; our
interests, work structures and the environment
we grow up in are all elements that affect our
social interchange.

20

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Maracuj Road, 2014, installation

Maracuj Road

TREVOR YEUNG

In his practice, Trevor Yeung uses natural

bodies and systems as a pretext for describing
human processes and relations. Rather than
using phenomena from the natural world as
metaphors in a romantic tradition, he instead
projects emotional and intellectual scenarios
onto biological substitutes, which he manipu
lates and alters with a full acceptance of
the artificiality of nature. Yeung creates worlds
with their own logic, only vaguely allowing
the logic of objects, animals or plants he uses
to function undeterred, and imposing his own
rules and parameters and staging dramatic
scenarios that are intimately connected to
his own experiences from the human world.
The artists own limitations in both the social
and emotional realms are often morphed
into elaborate fables. But instead of receiving
satisfaction, the artist perversely continues
to enact the failures and imperfections his
main driving force. Maracuj Road shown
in the Shanghai Biennale is such an example:
an elaborate bamboo and metal structure
is an ideal ground to support the spread of the
naturally invasive passion fruit plant. The
pots are arranged in such a way, however, that
the plants do not reach the structure, their
impulses remaining unsatisfied, their blindlypursued goal unattainable.

(Maracuj Road)

Born 1988;
lives and works in Hong Kong

1988,

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has chosen to focus on the relational

mechanics behind artistic creation, unearthing
a reality show that treads the line between
real and contrived through the axis of
dramatic narrative. Punning on the word life,
Practicing LIVE is a live broadcast of a con
stantly rehearsed and practiced life. As
viewers, we observe the plays recording
as it happens, thus serving the same function
as spectators in the audience; our reality
is that of a viewer observing actors rehearsing
a play but while watching, we are constantly
pulled away by the actors off-stage interviews.
What, then, is reality? What is rehearsed?
And what is drama? As the line between truth
and fiction begins to crack, we are pulled
back into the reality of the play before we are
able to determine what is real or not. As the
play is rehearsed over and over and the
video is looped, we begin to sense several
layers of reality in existence simultaneously.
Whose reality and whose existence are
being rehearsed in Practicing LIVE?
Whose reality is being recorded live? The
actors? The artists? Or the audiences?

Practicing LIVE has transcended Yus usual

inversion of language via mistranslation. He

(reality

show)Practicing LIVELIVE

Life

Practicing LIVEPracticing LIVE, 2014, video installation , 31'.

Courtesy of the artist and Chi-Wen Gallery

Practicing LIVE

Practicing LIVE shifts the scene to an

actual stage of a miniature play. The
30-minute script involves an ordinary family
coming together to celebrate the fathers
birthday. What makes this family special is
each members employment within the art
scene, which creates intersections between
work and familial ties in even the most
commonplace of conversations, revealing
long-hidden realities of the art world.
All seven actors are professionals from the
world of visual arts: museum curator, collector,
gallery manager, independent curator, artist,
critic and professor. Through the tensions
between their real and fictional personae in
their enactment of this family drama, the actors
dismantle and reconstruct their relationships
with each other.

Practicing LIVE

Yu Cheng-ta

Yu Cheng-tas works often engage with

photographed subjects and audiences through
a playful and broken style of communication
generated through linguistic slippages in
translation. His observations on the politics
produced within the crevices of language are
evident in early works created while partici
pating in artist residencies in various places.
The contradictions arising from these crevices
also reflect his improvisatory choices on the
scene of the shoot whether in a temporary
structure by the roadside, or in front of the
green screen often used in post-production.
Yu intentionally creates a living theatre
by setting up scenes of real and imaginary
conflicts.

Practicing LIVE

Practicing LIVE

30

LIVE

Born 1983;
lives and works in Taipei

1983,

Practicing LIVE

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Black Face, White Face

Black face, a coal miners face after work

is covered in ash
White face, a lime factory workers face
after work is covered with lime powder
The back of a messy-haired migrant worker
If we take human life to be one long-angle
shot, then every little record and every
photograph is only one still frame in the chain
of life. In these depictions, as little as a few
minutes long, the moving portraits of a miner
and a stonemason are the dilemma the artist,
as one who depicts, faces in the flow of time.
Such videography has no background or
dramatic tension; their faces are abstracted
from their bodies, becoming a freeze frame.
Black Face, White Face, 2014, video , 10'. Courtesy Pkin Fine Arts

Zhao Liang

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Oliver Goldsmith,
The Deserted Village (1770)

The faces, only a few steps away, are frozen

within these few minutes. The countless
little acts of life are actually the ungraspable
twists and turns of reality. Whether as a
photographer or as a draughtsman, what the
artist has to summon up is to return them
into their photographed selves, returning to
the real world. We return to the site of socio
logical research and confer on these living
individuals within sites of production a
practical significance; yet we can also employ
artifice to let these faces and bodies regain
another kind of life value within the artifice.

1770

1971,
Born 1971;
lives and works in Beijing

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Unfinished Garden, 2004present , video installation .

Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Unfinished Garden

nature doesnt add any judgment. This world is

equally on one level with nature. It can shrink
inwards, it can also expand outwards.

Zheng Guogu

The Age of Empire, later renamed Liao Yuan

(Unfinished Garden), is a longterm
project reflecting on the metaphorical and
actual significance of land as an object of legal
transactions, and as a core subject in the
language of representation of Chinese
traditional painting. The artist bought a piece
of land in 2000 from a farmer in the outskirts
of his home town, Yangjiang. Gradually, he
set about reshaping the land and building
on it, all the while observing the relationships
between land and soil, agriculture and
architecture, and how these concepts migrate
and apply to seemingly disparate realms of
the virtual, spiritual and legal. Indeed, not only
does the projects original name evoke a
well-known computer game, the works setting
is also important: China, where issues of land
reform and land ownership are at the core
of an ideological struggle for the future.
In Zhengs own words: In 2005 I started the
construction of my personal architectural
ideal and that is to look at everything as
construction. This kind of construction requires
an artist to have the same kind of approach
as a farmer. This approach engraves an artists
awareness deeply into this one piece of land,
in the same way a farmer plants a seedling
only for it to take root, germinate, blossom and
bear fruit. The plant effectively develops
from something simple and one-dimensional
to something altogether more complex. In this
same way, a house with a pond, a river or
a garden develops in line with a corresponding
mirror image or alternate space generated
in the natural environment. True or real con
struction is a world that is reflected outwards
from the hidden depths of the soul. Real

2000

2005

Born 1970;
lives and works in Yangjiang

1970,

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Blue and Red, 2014, HD video , 25'.

Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Blue and Red

Zhou Tao

Zhou Tao is a thoughtful observer of the

world, both of his immediate surroundings
and of unfamiliar places he is just discovering.
He creates compositions of gestures and
fragments from daily life that come together
to form a vision of society, and its complex
backdrop of psychological and symbolic
processes. Blue and Red shifts its gaze from
public squares in the city centers of Guangzhou
and Bangkok, to metal mines and villages in
the mountains and valleys of southern China.
The film focuses on those moments during the
recent anti-governmental protests in Bangkok
when society could be seen slowly coming
together, revealing all the digestive processes
needed to form a political community. In
Zhous words: Bathing in the color spectrum,
people in the square are stained with the blue
ray refracted from nowhere... Limbs grow
and penetrate through the public squares, as
close as flesh and blood, the skins attached
with the earth crust. The video is accompanied
by photographs and drawings representing
an anatomical analysis of the worlds
depicted on screen, each focusing on an angle,
an individual, or a fleeting thought.

1976,

Born 1976;
lives and works in Guangzhou

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Noise to Signal,
or why a soft signal can be loud
Nicholas Bussmann

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As a child, it must have been in Berlin, I made up a game in a moment of boredom.

A game with a self-imposed task that nearly every child is familiar with: You can
only tread on the paving stones; if you tread on one of the cracks between the slabs
then you have lost and will be eaten up by a crocodile.

It is a little algorithm, a set of instructions for solving a problem. The
problem is boredom, the algorithm recognizes right and wrong, zero and one,
paving stone or crack. The algorithm intensifies ones experience of the present
by organizing the future. By completing the specified task I solve my problem:
boredom.

I relished the threat of the imagined punishment more than an imaginary
reward, especially as I was certain that I would never be eaten by a crocodile, i.e.
not receive a reward after all I had thought it up myself.

The algorithm extends a clearly delineated path into the future before
me, which I only need to follow, laying out problems in front of me like the beads
of a rosary. It organizes the world of play in clear signals. If I become sick of the
game I only need to jettison the structure, leap in the air and enjoy the moment of
liberation from my self-created structure.

Recalling this childish, nave oscillation between self-imposed law
and lawless freedom helps me to assert my autonomy today, at a time when these
algorithms have long since gained their independence and, seemingly godlike,
establish facts and organize our future in the internet.

It is still possible to recognize this emerging world as synthetic, resem
bling as it does the graphics in old computer games where the landscape rears
up in front of us, outlined in rough polygons, demanding considerable fantasy to
transform the green triangles into hills and view them perspectively.

Today it is still possible to recognise advertising as advertising, but
sometimes we have a feeling of dj vu when we find precisely what we believe
we are looking for. In the future we will only experience what we believe we desire.
In the future an invisible hand will be extended to us from the invisible advertising
banner, an eagerly awaited sign of promise in a moment of extreme receptivity.

This world is based on a new idea of truth, for which the statistical, harmonic mean
suffices a sufficient truth. In a parallel process personal experience becomes the
logical result of a behavioral pattern, momentary experience becomes a predictable
action, for example the purchase of a TV sofa, which ultimately serves the fulfill
ment of a personalized, constructed task: following orders rather than choosing.
Capitalism will also come to an end as a result.

If one considers how comprehensively our movements are calculated
in advance in order to organize them into an exploitable harmony then one is con
fronted with the idea that what is being composed here is a music of the spheres.
Pythagoras, a European contemporary of Buddha, Lao Tse and Confucius and the
founder of the mathematical analysis of music, used this term to describe an inaudible
music of the cosmos. The accord of the heavenly bodies resonating in their orbits,
revealed to us humans in the numerical world of music. Even the vocabulary of the
constructors of this modern music of the spheres, the statisticians, programmers
and advertising psychologists, is rich in musical terms. Noise, the harmonic mean,
rhythm, signal and dynamic for example. Clearly they are using the same tools as
those we employ as musicians and composers, albeit with a completely different
motive.

For myself, as a music maker, this means that my music is bound to
interact with this new world, whether I want it to or not, due to the fundamental
structural affinities. As a consequence, composers now enjoy basic social pre
requisites which the avant-garde of the last century could only dream of. Free of
ideological ballast we can transpose and permute the numbers, design alternative
algorithms or, with a joyful sense of destruction, noisily waste our youth, muddling
the signal-to-noise ratio of the statisticians in participation mystique. We musicians
are the black swans of this new world, we hold the trump card we can be very
quiet, and still be heard.

01

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The Laundromat by the Sea

Yan Jun

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Noise music: like noise musicians, a contradictio

in terminis. Its an innate self-confliction, a selfcontradictory term that joins its self-destructive
counterpart. But for now I dont want to address
noise art, and sound art even less. I even want
to draw a clear line from noise in everyday
language I just want to talk about sound events
realized with electronic equipment and speakers
at an extremely loud volume that have no

musical aspect whatsoever. After emerging

in 1980s Japan, it found its steady shape
in Europe, America and Japan in the 1990s.
This isnt low volume noise or the previously
mentioned noise music. It includes Luigi
Rossolos noise machine Intonarumori, the
Soviet noise experiments, the electro-acoustic
improvisation in the UK and live electronics
in the USA in the 1960s, or the Los Angeles
Free Music Society (LAFMS) Not noise
in nature, not the renovations next door and
not differences in political opinions nor protest
songs, not swearwords nor depression
not the open rhetoric and symbolism of the
word noise, not NOT in capital letters.

Its just amplifying no such thing
infinitely. Like suddenly coming eye to eye with
the void itself, and then it suddenly explodes.

But this line of argument is somewhat
heartless. Thats because it excludes many fore
runners and colleagues, including those who
were shot by Stalin because they played with
noise. But then theres only this line of argument:
to push the logic of noise beyond its boundaries.
And only this kind of music (or non-music) is the
loudest, the most noise: its the most a-logical,
with least time for reflection, the most profound
emerging from out of the ruins of ones existence.
Many noisers insist on saying noise isnt music,
but they dont mind the term noise music.
Theres no need to get worked up over a word,
but a sentence is a different matter.

People have long gotten used to the word
music. Its not specific, and used rather casually.
Being casual is important. Dont ever be a freaking

snob. Contemporary art sounds a bit like one

( :s ), sound art even more so ( :s +1 ). Carrying
on with such a worn-out, washed-out word shows
we are playing an ancient game. Maybe its
even the only game, a game that despite the lack
of specifications never stopped taking place.
Music originates in rituals. Its a game of com
munication with the myriad things of the cosmos,
with the spirits and the deceased its every
where. You can find refuge in this old and
washed-out attitude, and subsist in equality with
everything else. Moreover, such mundaneness
is a necessary condition for uniqueness to come
forth. Just like hearing a cell phone ring tone of
a stall owner in the vegetable market and catching
a trancy high pitch and the rhythm of the heart.
Let them return to Gods side. The vegetable
market is the world.

Noise: there are no eternally fixed differ
ences, only the commonness of the chaosmos.

Music: when the ubiquitous, mundane
noise is being ignored, music ubiquitous and
specific will replace it and become the atmos
phere, the background, and even noise.

Noise is the original state of all sounds,
the order-less order of the universe. Amplify
it and you get an explosion. Free your reigns and
its chaosmos. Really, the moment you let
go everything falls back into the primordial soup.
When you see people that are dressed to the
nines, those celebrities and brides, dont you feel
sad and amused that theyll one day be wrinkled,
drooling and dying?
Also, when noise starts breaking down
into categories: Harsh Noise, Harsh Noise

1980

+1

1990

Intonarumori

1960

(Live Electronics)(LAFMS)

(Electro-

Acoustic Improvisation)

What do you do?

Im a musician.
So you play music?
No, I play noise.
Isnt noise a kind of music then?
No, noise isnt music.

This exchange of words is all too common.

Many of the people that make loud noise call
themselves noiser, but for ease of communi
cation they usually introduce themselves as
musicians. Its just to make do, but this way
they are also terrorists blending into the general
population. All of this is quite different with
the people that make noise at lower volumes.
Whether they are composers, like Iannis Xenakis
or David Tudor, or register as improvisational
musicians, engaging in electro-acoustic
improvisation with niche audiences, in either
case they embrace the idea that noise is a kind
of music too, up to the point where they argue
for its recognition as such, and, in the worst
case, even seek to defend its rights.

Noise could be part of music. That was,
by and large, the conclusion of the mid 20th
century. At the time, all kinds of freaks could find
acceptance troublemakers and social elites
seemed only one step apart. Action paintings
became American national treasures,
conceptual art entered collections, and Fluxus
and experimental music became part of the
compulsory curriculum of middle-class culture.
In the end, hearing John Cage talk about silence
became as exuberating as hearing Osho talk
about love. Along with silence, music welcomed

noiser

noise into the fold. Tolerance. And a ton of

politeness. But like Cages undying smile,
it quickly becomes annoying. Why cant noise
be itself? Why must it be music?

In that promise as excellent as the
American Dream every sound can become music,
every urinal can turn into art, every individual can
make it big the radiant light of mercy and
wisdom (and wealth and democracy) will shine
on all corners. Except for what it does not shine
on. Also except for photographs of Cage not
smiling. This is in any case a bit sad for him.

Why must it be successful? Cant we do
politics without becoming politicians? Do dumbasses have a right to existence? Without the
grace of composers, can noise, skulking about,
be heard as well? If it isnt heard, does it have
the right to exist? The right not to exist?

Noise music is an answer to the questions
above. Similar to this dialogue:

Are you a musician? Do you play music?

Are you a noise musician, or a noise
artist?

No, Im no such thing! Im no such thing!!

Im no such thing!!!

(Harsh Noise)

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Wall (HNW), Fast Cut Noise, Psychedelic

Noise, Noisecore, Shitcore then noise
must from start to end stay in one body, in
one state. Thats just like if youre labeled wise,
youll have to gently smile all the way Apparently
even noise longs for some sense of security
but maybe its more apt for noise to exist within
paradox, which is why by the early 1990s, the
Japanese started saying noise is dead. It had
been defined. That weird group, Gerogerigegege,
who masturbate and sing karaoke on stage,
didnt they reach the absurd dignity of noise,
only to disappear, rejected by all the categories
mentioned above?
Come to speak of it, living an alreadydead life is yet another paradox. If noise is a
paradox, then today, to keep playing noise while
not being played by noise is not only impossible,
but also possible.

The Intonarumori, a futurist instrument
of the 1910s, was a pile of wooden boxes
that made noises by striking and rubbing gears
and levers. The Soviet noise machines of the
1920s came in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes
they used steam engines, film strips and guns,
sometimes just their hands. In the 1930s, Marcel
Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters employed record
players. In the 1950s, Cage bought short-wave
radio sets. In the 1960s, everyone was welding
electronic parts. In the 1980s, guitar effects
were cheap and numerous After the 1990s,
subwoofers became common, along with laptop
computers. Noise is the product of machines.
Without electricity, there will be no 130 decibel
out-of-body experience. More precisely, noise

occurs when people throw themselves into the

sea of machines. The earth has already started
warming, melting. Since were doomed anyway,
why not die swimming. Who knows, you might
even die a worthy death.

In the 1970s when industrial music
sprang up in the UK there was a famous slogan:
Industrial Music for Industrial People (by
the artist Monte Cazazza). So noise was also
the noise for noisers, an instance of feedback.
Since the industrial revolution, we have all
become noisers, but only a minority actively
embraces this fact. They dont look like they are
resisting the times, as they dont seek to
return to nature or believe that heaven and man
are one. Instead, they are even further from
nature than machines. They listen to machines
and garbage, amplify their sounds, and make
them break through their limits, which brings
their malfunctioning and destructions out into the
open. Then in the 1970s, the Survival Research
Laboratories appeared in San Francisco,
with performances centering on fighting with
and destroying robots. It no longer was a
question of performing with the human body,
because the old body had already been
sacrificed to the machines.
All this should be traced back to the
Futurists, Dadaists and the Soviet Avant-Garde/
Communists. In that strange new world riven
with conflicts, those people were equally strange.
They are the forerunners of the sacrifice because
they did not only bid farewell to the illusion
of pastoral melodies but also to individuality and
the self. There would be no techniques and

masters anymore, no aesthetics and morality

either. Through mechanization the willful death of
the old body took these worn-out clichs down
with it, a suicide bomber. And this in the end was
for the sake of a better world. In a society
that at the time embodied the greatest promise,
Tatlin designed the Soviets a flying machine,
demonstrating the potential of science and
poetry (and tragedy and destruction). Soviet
youngsters putting on their gliding wings, that
image resonates with that of Hugo Ball in Zurich
in 1913, when he dressed up in a Cubist cone
of a costume and recited that sound poem
(called Karawane) that imitated the sounds of
machines and war. The scene also resembles
how Gerogerigegege electro-shocked their
anuses and used vacuum cleaners on their dicks.
In machines new bodies are born.

Todays loud noise music/non-music
builds on the noise movements of a century ago.
But it would be better to say that it builds
memorials to the failure of these movements.
The Art of Noise, that oft-cited (over-cited)
manifesto, starts off from listening to the sounds
of everyday life. Sound poetry from the same
era began by abolishing the meaning of language
and returning to the physicality of language.
However, they all failed, including the Italian
and USSR efforts to reform society through art.
One reason was the lack of sufficiently loud
instruments. Another lies in the marriages with
powerful parties with diverging agendas. And
there are many more reasons, not least the
fact that noise actually wants to fail. In a world
of success noise has a propensity for failure, for

returning to the chaosmos, for preserving the

potential of returning to scratch, for striking out
taxonomy and museums and bank deposits

Through the prism of noise, the idea that
heaven and man are one an axiom of ancient
Chinese philosophy reveals an attitude against
the modern world. Either you destroy yourself
and thereby destroy the systems of circulation
attached to the self, or you cut off circulation,
including the circulation of capital (economics),
the circulation of meaning (language), the
circulation of subjectivity (symbolic order), and
so liberate the self and return it to nothingness.

Loud noise, with its forced, immediate
physiological reactions, is larger than the
scandals of the avant-garde of a century ago,
or the happenings and bloody events of Fluxus
and the Viennese Actionists. Its roughly akin to
the drugs of shamans and witch doctors. In
terms of temporal delimitation, its the time in
which ancient sorcery and ceremony, symbols
and experience co-exist. On the other hand,
its cyberpunks drug-enabled fusion of man and
machine. Its a future witchcraft that mashes
up flesh and machines. Noise as a drug is neither
natural nor chemical. Its an intense physical
vibration and neurological activity. To the
modernized, anxious body, noise is like seizing
oneself by the hair. Not to leave the earth but to
shake the body up, to exorcise it.
After the loud, intense and extreme
Japanoise, Harsh Noise Wall (HNW) appeared
on the scene. The French group Vomir described
them in this way: no dynamic, no change,
no development, no ideas. This emotionless

(Psychedelic Noise)(Noisecore)(Shitcore)

(Tatlin)

1990

(Industrial Music for Industrial People)

1913

OKGerogerigegege

(Monte Cazazza)

100

Gerogerigegege

1970

(The Art of Noise)

(Survival Research Laboratories)

1920

1930

(HNW)Vomir

19501960

(no dynamics, no

19801990

change, no development, no ideas)

(subwoofer)

Gerogerigegege

130

(Fuck compose,

1910Intonarumori

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1970

228

/100

(Japanoise)

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14-11-21 3:36

manifesto reminds one again of Gerogerigegege,

who said: Fuck compose, fuck melody,
dedicated to no one, thanks to no one. ART IS
OVER. This resembles conceptual arts obituary
for Dada. When noise is defined and familiar, it
becomes just another abstract expressionist
painting (expressing what?) or free jazz (free in
what sense?), a show of venting by subjects.
Then there will be new noises to overthrow these
performers, these suicides, these emotionally
moving subjects (is that not a crime? When you
help others to say what they cant put into words,
when you make people cry and find answers?).

In other words, noise returns to the
chaosmos. Moreover, its another return out of its
own volition. Those sounds are like deer in
headlights. Vinyl records, 15 euros, bring them
home and the neighbors think youve bought
three washing machines. Or a sea. The sea, too,
is dull like a deer in headlights.

The sea is a sound which people do not
tire of. Provoking it would be ill-advised, and
since the human body is made up of 70% water,
the sea is home. Humanity comes from amino
acids, which come from the sea. Or from a stinky
sewer its all the same.

Humans come from the uterus, immersed
in amniotic fluid, vibrating occasionally. If noise
wouldnt surge out so intensely, it should immerse
us like amniotic fluid. So why shouldnt the
washing machine take the place of the Rinpoche
lama, especially when you own three of them?
About this ordinary, beginningless
and endless noise, the Boddhisattva Guanyin,
who once lived by the sea, said: At first by

directing the organ of hearing into the stream

of meditation, this organ was detached from its
object, and by wiping out (the concept of)
both sound and stream-entry, both disturbance
and stillness became clearly non-existent.
Thus advancing step by step both hearing and its
object ceased completely, but I did not stop
where they ended. When the awareness of this
state and this state itself were realized as
non-existent, both subject and object merged
into the void, the awareness of which became
all-embracing. With further elimination of the
void and its object both creation and annihilation
vanished, giving way to the state of Nirvana
which then manifested. Suddenly I leaped over
both the mundane and supramundane, thereby
realizing an all-embracing brightness pervading
the ten directions (Meditation on the Organ
of Hearing, u
Srangama Sutra).(1) She found the
path through listening. Later, she was recast as
a divinity who answered all prayers, being
especially apt at helping people get pregnant and
give birth to boys. But she cant listen to noise
in our stead. So at the laundromat by the sea,
is what she hears the same as what I hear?
Can she, like dogs, hear frequencies around
50,000 Hertz? It seems trivial, at least she
doesnt care anymore. She has cast away
the interface between the listening subject and
the sonic object. In the movement of sound/
listening, she has entered that moment between
life and death where the continuity between the
two doesnt exist anymore. They are experienced
as basic physical forms, which is vibration.
Then they disappear without differentiation.

The human voice is a specific bioelectric
phenomenon. From the beginningless and
endless vibrations of the myriad things, it selects
frequencies between 20 and 20,000 Hertz,
and converts these into electric signals, which
are transported by the brains nervous system.
Overly weak signals are called silence.

We invented the concept of noise because
we invented language and music. From all vibra
tions we selected a small part reorganized,
produced and reproduced, compiling a circulated
network of meaning. And the rest is noise (here
I borrow Alex Roses book title).

However, its not this rest that produces
noise, but the excess. The definition of zao
noise in classical Chinese is an excess of
sound. This is a condition rather than an eternal
form. The sounds that at one time co-exist
peacefully with us, whether as chaosmos or in
clarity, whether theyre crude and simple or
pleasantly reverberating, once in excess theyre
annoying. Then theres no way to filter accurate
meaning (separating the signal from the noise
and interpreting the data), and the brain crashes.
From another point of view, if humans could
shrink at will and observe every particle of
sound, these particles will again appear out of
the chaosmos into distinctness. Who knows,
they might even have noses and faces?

Excess is a gift of nature, and also of
human endeavor. Perhaps the latter takes on a
greater proportion. We dont, after all, rely on
foraging for wild fruits. We harvest petrol. Excess
language, excess thought, excess expression
cant really be stocked in granaries. The will of

energy is in its inclination for liberation, thereby

returning to the void. Entropy is a universal law
that seems to go against human desire. Yet it
acts up in every place of excess. In the words of
Georges Bataille, the inevitability of modern
war lies in the inevitability of excess in modern
economics. Precisely in this sense Jacques
Attalis political economy of noise can arrive at
the consumptive celebration of noise.
As a politician and a banker, Attali himself
a success collects, guides and manages noise
in political and economic contexts. He doesnt
agree with consumption and exploitation at all,
he simply excels at the circulation and accumula
tion of capital. Music in the 20th century has
done everything it can to absorb and organize
noise, even giving it names. It acted just like how
capitalism digests economic crises, turning
cold money into hot money, making slow cash
fast, converting ideological enemies into
business partners, transforming violence into the
aesthetics of violence. The century of noise is
being confounded by this conundrum: emerging
from the chaosmos, existing intensely, and then
exposed to attention, acquiesced to, and inserted
into reproduction, only to destroy the road
ahead, veering from the trajectory, ambiguous
and lost.

In a fatalistic world, machines and people
only produce noise through malfunction. That is
not to live a more worthy life but, on the contrary,
the life span of both of them could be shortened
(just like the Buddha did not live long). And a
malfunction is a valueless breakthrough. And the
lack of value and meaning lead to ultimate

Fuck melody, Dedicated to no one, Thanks to no one. art

is over)

15

70%

202

Alex

Rose

20

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Translated by Daniel Szehin Ho

Revised by Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau

(1) Translated by Upasaka Lu

Kuan Yu, Buddha Dharma Education
Association Inc., 1912

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Noise to Signal:
MUSIC
PROGRAM

equality. Its the starting point, which contains

all possible directions. Noise consumes excess
information, like when during the Chinese New
Year consumption racks up eating, drinking,
setting off firecrackers all for a years peace
and silence. Yes, these traditions have already
been twisted. So noise has become the radical
version of the Chinese New Year, and also its
realistic version, by means of a response to
this world where even getting through Chinese
New Year becomes reproduction. Go back to
the starting point.

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Noise Hypnotizing

Yan Jun

Yan Jun does not play an instrument.

Uninterested in melodies and harmonies, he
develops acoustic fields of tension instead,
within a constellation of objects, the audience
and himself. Everyday objects table
tennis balls, loudspeakers, grains of rice and
toys often serve as sound generators in
Yans work. The artist captures their sounds,
generating feedback using contact and para
bolic microphones. Feedback is the central
element in this music as it breaks through the
practiced, hierarchical order of the concert.
Feedback dissolves the traditional systems of
prowess, virtuosity, dedication and passion.
What remains is a playing field of the moment
in which the relationship between the
listener, objects and the musician is placed
in question. Here, the objects play him,
while he plays with both them and the listener:
all three become protagonists.

Living Room Tour, Montreal, Canada, ,

2014, performance . Photo Eric Mattson

Throughout, Yan Jun insists upon noise

as noise, without domesticating it as sound.
An ongoing process, it effectively and
incessantly redefines the meaning of sounds.
Noise Hypnotizing, the project for the
Shanghai Biennale, is based on a discovery
made during a series of living room concerts
held in Beijing and Shanghai at the beginning
of 2014. A special instance of feedback,
which he enticed from a defective cassette
recorder, repeatedly revealed itself as
soporific, effectively forming a door to sleep.
The installation is based on this noise.

Born 1973;
lives and works in Beijing

1973,

2014

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WEISS/WEISSLICH 7 7, 1994present , sound installation .

Photo Siegrid Ablinger

(Quadraturen)

2014

Rauschen()

1959,
1964,

Peter Ablinger, born 1959;

lives and works in Berlin
Winfried Ritsch, born 1964;
lives and works in Graz

433
90

A Letter From Schoenberg, 2006, sound installation .

Photo Maria Tran

THE TRUTH or: HOW TO

TEACH THE PIANO CHINESE

Since the 1990s he has developed a series

of compositions with the title Rauschen. This is
contrasted with the speaking voice as a chain
of significant auditory events. By bringing the
spoken voice so close to music that its
meaning begins to resonate with its sound is
the other musical boundary he explores in his
series of compositions, Voices and Pianos and
Quadraturen. The Quadraturen are composi
tions for automatic pianos comprising voice
recordings which Ablinger has processed in
a manner that enables them to be played back
via the same technology, as if through a
loudspeaker. His work for the 2014 Shanghai
Biennale furthers this Quadraturen series.

Peter Ablinger
Winfried Ritsch

Berlin-based artist Peter Ablinger explores

the outer limits of music, abstaining from
completing his works as the mediums frontiers
constantly shift. Instead, he generates series
of compositions which he continually develops.
In this way, a composition is a step on the road
to expanding our auditory space. To that end,
noise and the human speaking voice as
frontiers of music occupy polar positions of
noise and signal. For Ablinger, the German
term Rauschen is important to his definition of
noise, a term for which there is no satisfactory
equivalent in English. Rauschen could
reference the forest or the sea, the Rauschen
of data, or the blood in ones ears in a moment
of great silence. To the artist, Rauschen is the
locus of the void, rather than the silence of
Cages 4'33", and simultaneously, the totality
of all sounds.

(Voices
and Pianos) (Quadraturen)

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(Chico Mello) Telebossa

(Werner Dafeldecker) Rydberg

(Lucile Desamory) Nicholas

DesamoryGrand

Prix dAmour

The traffic engineer transforms disorganized confusion into orderly chaos.

Barnes Dance, opera and installation , 2010.

Photo Florian Riegel with Yussuf Ergn and Charles Ndubisi

The News Blues

including the duo Telebossa with Chico Mello;

Rydberg with Werner Dafeldecker; and
Nicholas Desamory with Lucile Desamory.
He is a composer of music for film, a curator
and the organizer of the annual Grand Prix
dAmour song writing contest.

Bussmann is a conceptual musician and

composer. Originally a cellist, he has since
expanded his practice to a wide range of
musical genres, from electronic to conceptual.
He works with a number of collaborators,

Nicholas Bussmann

Conceptual opera The News Blues will be

performed at the Power Station of Art almost
daily throughout the duration of the Biennale
by a group of Shanghai-based singers
representing a variety of backgrounds and
training. With the morning newspapers as their
prompt, the performers will engage in a
musical dialogue, effectively singing the news.
The work is structured like a game in which the
performers must take it in turns to follow each
other, relying on group dynamics and makebelieve. The News Blues forms a core part of
the Biennales Signal to Noise program.
It questions viewers emotions and standing in
relation to news and current affairs. How does
this constant stream shape our understanding
of world events, and of ourselves? What
role does it play in imagined communities
(Benedict Anderson), and in collectives such
as nationalities? How do we relate to news on
an individual level; how we do we internalize;
and in what ways do we externalize? Nicholas
Bussmanns The News Blues is conceived
as a social and artistic experiment. At the core
of the performance is the interaction between
the singers, which reflects changing social
dynamics and internal moods as well the
changing climate in world affairs. On a broader
level, it also connects the entire exhibition
through the presence of live voices, as well
as links the Biennale to external events, filtered
though the channels of official journalism.

Born 1970; lives and works in Berlin

1970,

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Examining the Footnotes

of History:
Notes on the Social Factory
Liu Xiao

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As a group capable of critically analyzing questions of survival and the state of life,
artists have internalized the theme of social factory in their practice. Yet, there
remain countless lively individuals and events that respond to or echo the production
of society or a producing society in the ongoing production of fact and so-called
history, and they should be taken seriously.
Referencing Li Hongzhang and Sun Zongcai, we want to place them
back in their context to test our intellectual status: are we giving
continuation to our ancestors or forging new grounds?
Borrowing from the modern woodcut movement, we want to repeatedly affirm the objectives of our perception and creation be
it in art or in life.
With photographs and texts from Ten Mile Inn as a site, we want
to open up history and expression, seeking inspiration to take us
beyond existing reflection, to renew our understanding of the village
and her history.

Hu Yichuan , To the Front , 1932.

Courtesy National Museum of China

With Chen Chieh-jens work Friend Watan as a point of reference,

we follow the artist to draw our own map of life in society, then
inspect and reflect on it.

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 Li Hongzhang, Sun Zongcai,

the Factory and the Park
In The Biography of Li Hongzhang, Liang Qichao summed up two decades of the
statesmans career in Westernization (yangwu): Westernization is the reason why Li
was important, the reason why he was reproached, and the reason why he was pitied.
A century ago, Li Hongzhang decided that the country should lead itself
towards Westernization. The Jiangnan Shipyard was the most important project. It
was the first modern Chinese enterprise. It created the first batch of formal industrial
workers. It was considered the birthplace of modern Chinese industry. Chinas
modernization embarked from here, and its original site happens to be adjacent to
Shanghais Power Station of Art.
Could Li Hongzhang have predicted that, we would be gazing into the
distance from an art museum today, pondering on the significance of the strategy
Chinese learning for substance, Western learning for function that he and his
colleagues vehemently promoted, in todays intellectual arena?

Li Hongzhang knew that the greatest transformation of the last three
millennia was happening today. With political reform and abolishment of old ways,
factories rang with sounds of weaponry being made and the prosperity of merchants
took priority. Merchants management under government supervision invented the
modern enterprise system (Wu Xiaobo). This furnace of history is a series of actions
and choices made in response to the material realities of late Qing (16441911)
and the logic of a modern state in the international consciousness of the modern
era a large-scale implementation that gradually permeated into the daily life of this
country. Undeniably, it formed new industries, new communities and new citizens.
From there, their fates became inextricably tied to the process of modernization.
In the century of modernization after Li Zhongtangs death, we saw
innumerable figures walk the path of history. Emotional or rational, optimistic or
pessimistic, each carried their ancient and fragile imagination and ambition for the
modern, to face all kinds of circumstances they were in.

Sun Zongcai was the last generation of Chinese gentry in the full sense
of the term. He was the largest paper manufacturer in southern Fujian and had
built four modern primary schools and police academies in Zhangzhou. He also
made substantial financial support for urban construction during the Constitutional
Protection Movement (191722). Zhangzhous First Park (renamed Zhongshan
Park in 1927) would not have been built without Sun. It was the former site of the
Zhangzhou prefectural government and Danxia College also operated here. Researcher Yuan Wenshan attempts to free the historical figure of Sun Zongcai from
textbooks, resurrecting his life journey, his geography and his deeds. In the narrative
of Suns life, Zhongshan Park was where he exercised his dual identities of citizen
and gentry for public causes. It was also where his imagination for future life and
the world was realized. It was a material symbol of realizing the modern state at a
local site.
Later, Zhongshan Park became the site where one political era gave way
to another, witnessing Chinas journey across revolution and modernization. This
coordinate of history exists in nearly every Chinese city as center of civic activity.
The course of modernization is fraught with difficulty and complexity,
hovering at crossroads to this day. Chinas political system and society structure is
not entirely suited to a Westernized worldview and Enlightenment is not a cure-all
for its traditional civilization and social structure. Capital from the globalized age
and its big data management have already permeated into this society, at the same
time, planting seeds of reflection for todays international perspectives and ideology.
This Chinese reality cant be saved by its factories nor its citizens.

Zhao Yannian first read Lu Xun when he was 14. His illustrations of Lu Xuns writings
were the results of a spiritual relationship with the author over six decades. During

Woodblock Printing,
Everyday Objects and Art Objects

1927

18771977

2013P20

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the Cultural Revolution, nearly everyone had their woodcut tools confiscated. Other
than the Little Red Book, the only books available were Lu Xuns. In his memoir,
Zhao recalled, It was only when I read his words I felt a glimmer of light. When this
woodcut practitioner picked up the carving knife again in 1974, the first image he
carved was Ah Q, the national image Lu Xun created of his countrymen of a certain
period, when social chaos gave everyone even the tragic and contemptible a
chance. In 1921, Lu published the first chapter of The Story of Ah Q in a newspaper
column called Funny Stories, yet he felt the character deserved to be treated more
seriously, so he published the second chapter in New Literature and Art. In Lu Xuns
words, Ah Q had joined the revolution. Fifty years later, Zhao started carving The
Story of Ah Q which took him more than two decades to finish. Each stroke of the
knife harbored a complex mix of rage and angst. How should Ah Q exist in pictorial
form is a question every artist faces. What they are seeking is how the individual
should survive in their bright and tumultuous time and how this is tangled with the
social actions they manifest.
As part of the emotional engineering of the new nation, woodcut practitioners used images to process the individuals, groups, nations and ethnic groups
of modern society and nationhood. As black and white woodcuts were created and
disseminated, they critiqued their contemporary art forms. Woodcuts reproduced
their era, they also created the new era yet to come.
After the May Fourth Movement, participants in the nascent woodcut
movement held onto their ideals for creation, and carried within themselves an agitated debate on living for art or for life. The success of the woodcut movement
was due to its artists, who had gone beyond describing the feelings within and
constructed a subjective fighting spirit. In revolution, woodcuts are most widely
used made in a rush, achieved in an instant. They were fervent, loud, indignant
and rebellious (Lu Xun). As the revolution progressed, woodcut became the medium
for disseminating information and educating the masses in everyday life. Printing
of woodcuts became the locus for labor, for battle and for change. They hoped to
carve out new members of society with a new awareness, but they themselves were

shaped the art form. Woodcut practitioners used their hands and knives to publish
reports, make headers, create new year prints (nianhua) and make emblems for
armbands. Art was something they could only recall at a certain time.

To the Front is roar of those determined to fight against their predicament. It is the frontline of survival, the frontline of life. Hu Yichuans To the Front!, Li
Huas Raging Tide basic, direct, these small woodcuts called to the people. They
were active in publications in Kuomingtang-controlled areas and they kept the moral
high in the trenches. Woodcuts from the liberated areas depicted the new look of
the new era: unending poverty shaken off, effective production being developed,
new social identity granted and new companions appeared.

For woodcut, a medium with a unique historical significance, the power of
revolution and the power of art were inseparable revolution in art and revolution in
politics rolled into one. Woodcut practitioners used their medium to make a promise
of the new world to the masses: self-motivation, self-reflection, transformation and
creation.

But after the revolution, revolutionary objects and daily objects became
myths, shelved away and transformed into art objects and cultural relics. The artistic
energy generated at their creation has since begun to shed and transfer.
Images and Records of
Ten Mile Inn
As the core of Chinas traditional underclass, Chinese villages harbor the possibility
to break from the fate of its locality even from the fate of the nation. How to return
agency to individuals and localities is an issue all must confront. Yet, during different times and under different circumstances, the villages significance to reality
changes constantly.
Ten Mile Inn provides such an entry point.
The dear friend in George Orwells 1984 was David Crook, legendary

1974

Q19741994

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photographer of Ten Mile Inn. Recommended by the Communist Party of Great

Britain, he decided to stay in China. With his wife, he published Revolution in a
Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn and Mass Movement in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile
Inn, documenting their experience living in the homes of Ten Mile Inn villagers and
participating local party meetings for eight months from November 1947. The books
are a collection of data, observations, photographs and records of land reform work.
The eight months at Ten Mile Village is a microcosmic onsite record of a historical
turning point.
Generally, photography or other methods of representation determine
our thought process. We habitually seek that decisive moment, magnifying lifes
details or historians narrative into a single turning point. Yet, the images of Ten Mile
Inn I have come across do not form explicit symbols of historical issues, nor do
they exhibit the so-called humanistic concern of documentary photography. What
was eliminated is the sublimed sense of mystery when viewing photography. What
we see are daily scenes from life in the rural north: family rituals, farm meetings,
weaving and spinning, even photographs of villagers with their houses. The photographs can be seen as consolidations of certain social habits.

Descriptions of these eight months at Ten Mile Inn have become complex, multilayer narratives, with the Crooks records and manuscripts, reports from
counterparts at Peoples Daily, editing work by British publishers, recent recollections
from Isabel Crook and current research on Ten Mile Inn adding to the mix. Even
the photographs are constantly repeating and renewing their stance, adding more
dimensions to the understanding of a village and her history.
There is a difference between revolutionary rhetoric and the actual
image. As long-time researcher of Ten Mile Inn, Gao Chu puts it, as a village, Ten
Mile Inn continues to remain autonomous and self-consistent in its operation.
Today, many are responding to this issue through trial and error and
experimentation. Historical narrative may embellish with a sense of mystery and
anticipation, but the reality of Ten Mile Inn will never be as fascinating as historical
fiction. Like other villages, agriculture no longer sustains everyday life. Working the

land has become the habit of an older generation. There is a factory by the village,
and villagers have become industrial workers. This is the indisputable truth. Compared to the eight months documented by the Crooks, in 60 years, the management
of everyday life has changed and it is now placed under the modern management
system: village planning, factory management and other powers. In this seemingly
peaceful time, the internal logic of the village family, relationship, production and
religion has gone through the most intense collapse.

Conclusion:

Friend Watan
Looking at Chen Chieh-jens work Friend Watan, I wonder what kind of art is it con
fronting? Which counterpart? And counterpoint?
Chens working method has made the decision: to act through image.
The result cant just be an image, and it cant just be a work in an exhibition space.
In the film, Watan can be worker, teacher, artist or whatever the moment
asks. In the film, you cant see an artist, worker or teacher. In the film, he can be
none of them, or all of them. Because the real Watan is the living Watan.
This microcosm of art has no beginning or end, unable to extricate
itself from the production of art, the upgrade of concepts, the production of artistic
relationships. Actor/director, subject/author, production/relationship these are the
realities within arts little world, fixed within some established narrative, reinforced
by humanities and morality. Faced with relationships that are established, readily
available, already described and characterized, we must retreat to a time before
the end, return to the vivid expanse of the individual.

Friendship is a validation of the mind and emotion. It is more important
than any other identity. The significance of Chen and Watans collaboration is also
here, allowing the individual to act, allowing an equal gaze from inside and outside
of the film. This is the difficulty, and importance, of art.

1984

194711

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 Art, literature, history, none of them can replace the sensibility we must
rediscover. History, allegory, friendship are coordinates to take reference from.

When I first saw Chen Chieh-jens map in 2008, I was puzzled by how
one can encounter these spaces and people so dramatically in ones life and as one
grows. Military dependents compound, processing plant, military court, prison,
docks and Western company, all of these were sites where he learnt and worked.
Today, I understand their significance better: as cultural traditions collide with modern systems, as the everyday becomes more encoded and prearranged, we take it
as habitual, tightening our ability to observe and act, and the imagination in action.
Chen is confronting and has realized the reality that surrounds us which weve
have learnt to ignore.
However, maps dont just explain and simply describe the reality and
history. They are not there to give directions to some haven of peace and quiet. In
fact, they point to concrete life in society the society that has long engulfed us,
which we cant refrain from responding to any more.

Ten Mile Inn |

Translated by Fei Wu

2008

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The Vanguards Advance:

Looking Back on the Origins of the
Modern Woodcut Movement

Tang Yingwei , Forward!, cover of Woodcut World vol. 4,, 1936.

Courtesy Lu Xun Art Museum

Tang Xiaobing

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 One
Spring 1928 was a season full of hope, particularly
around the Jiangnan area in the lower Yangtze.
The year started off with the Guangzhoubased Nationalist government designating
Nanjing as the capital in a ceremony, while the
National Revolutionary Army pressed on with
their victories in its historic Northern Expedition.
The nation was sick of the hardships inflicted
by political turmoil and tired of seeing the country
rent asunder by warlords. There was general
celebration that unification was about to take
place, and much expectation of the new
government that vowed to revive the nation.
That March, with the approval of the
University Council of the Nanjing government,
a National Academy of Art was established in
Hangzhou. Several months before, also with
the support of the head of the University Council
Cai Yuanpei, the National Conservatory of Music
was established in Shanghai. While the Northern
Expedition was still going on and many pressing
issues on the agenda of the new government,
efforts to build a system of art education were
already underway. This development certainly
reflected Cai Yuanpeis philosophy of improving
society through aesthetic education; it also
made abundantly clear the Nanjing governments
blueprints for a modern nation. The deanship
of the National Conservatory of Music was
held by composer Xiao Youmei, who had studied
in Japan and Germany, while the dean of the
National Academy of Art was the 28-year-old
artist Lin Fengmian, whom Cai Yuanpei had met

1928

in Europe several years before. These two

appointments revealed the Nanjing governments
principle of systematically learning from and
modeling after Western culture.
On March 12, an article by Sun Fuxi
entitled Offering West Lake to Mr Lin Fengmian
appeared in Art Movement, the cultural
supplement of The Central Daily, a newspaper
run by the Nationalist Party Kuomintang. The
piece expressed a heartfelt respect and welcome
for the artists beneficent descent to Hangzhou.
We have long looked up to your renown, and we
keenly desire that you grant us the rewards of
art, for art gives us a great and uplifting force,
allowing us to have the belief to search out for
knowledge, to laugh and cry with true emotion. In
Lin Fengmians work, Sun Fuxi saw the composed
dignity of Northern Europeans, as well as the
sensibility and passion of Southern Europeans
You will certainly be able to tutor and mold the
Chinese people with this. As for the West Lake,
whose sentient nature resembles that of the
French, it was undoubtedly the best environment
for Lin Fengmian and his comrades to put this
mission of fostering the arts to the best use.
Though the academy is by the West Lake, it is
still the heart of the entire nation because its
existence takes the entire country as its object.
The goal of the academy may be either social or
antisocial but it will never be separated from
society. So the first kind of talent that the
Academy will train are artists, who are the voice
and vision of society, and will express emotions
that society cannot express. (Coincidentally,
on the same day, in commemoration of the third

anniversary of the death of Sun Yat-sen,

The Central Daily published a woodblock print,
Portrait of the Late President, by Jiang Xiaojian,
a sculptor who had studied in France. This
was one of the very first published modern
woodcuts in China.)

What Sun Fuxi and his fervor highlighted
was not only keen expectations for the National
Academy of Art, but also the liberal humanism
of the May Fourth Enlightenment tradition. His
embrace of the ideas of the New Culture
Enlightenment was precisely the starting point
of Lin Fengmians early artistic work and
organizational activities, and it was for this
reason that he won Cai Yuanpeis appreciation.
In his Letter to the Art Field of the Nation,
written in 1927, Lin Fengmian systematically
expressed his ideas about art as the director of
the Commission on Art Education of the
University Council. He addressed in full the
values and functions of art from the perspectives
of emotion, belief system, religion and aesthetics.
He deplored the rottenness of old art and
the absence of new art in China. Even the May
Fourth Movement, which had caused such a
profound stir, in Lin Fengmians eyes was only
something led by writers and intellectuals
and overlooked the most important domain of art:
Now, no matter how we talk about it, the
disunion and despair among the Chinese cannot
but be blamed on the neglect of art during the
May Fourth Movement! Comrades in art across
the country! Where is our art? Arise and unite!
In the Italian Renaissance, art occupied the
highest position. We too should reserve the best

for art in the Chinese Renaissance!

Lin Fengmians objection to how the
May Fourth Movement overlooked art expressed
his pressing desire to carry out the New
Culture Movement and to realize a Chinese
Renaissance. The artistic movement called for
in the Letter to the Art Field of the Nation was in
fact a movement to promote art, an Enlightenment
movement to re-validate the social and cultural
functions of art. On top of the tenets of the
art movement, aside from diligent practice, we
must add another, that of promotion. This art
movement replicated and extended the May Fourth
Movements jettison of traditional culture and its
embrace of modern Western humanistic values.

What differed was that Lin Fengmian
and his colleagues no longer emphasized the
individualistic spirit of the May Fourth Movement
period but rather were well aware of the
necessity of government resources and state
institutions. No matter what, it is necessary that
things in China must start off from the top if
the art movement requires expediting action,
there must be art educational institutions created
by the state. Large-scale state-organized art
exhibitions and so on must also be there!
It was precisely this recognition that caused Lin
Fengmian to move from Beijing then under
the control of the Beiyang government to
Shanghai, joining the numerous members of the
cultural elite who migrated to the south following
the establishment of the Nanjing Nationalist
government around 1927. And it was precisely
due to such a belief that he happily accepted the
deanship at the National Academy of Art. For

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in the Southern Art Institute. Tian Han, for his

part, did not at all attempt to cover up his disdain
for bureaucratized artists and official schools.
In April 1928, he even organized a high-spirited
Expedition towards the West, students were
taken to rowing on West Lake and singing Who
indeed does the West Lake belong to?
The standoff between the National
Academy of Art and the Southern Art Institute
can be seen as a match between officialdom and
the opposition outside, also as a contradiction
between a strong and newly established system
and a reality that has not been incorporated
within. Yet in actual fact, both traced their
spiritual origins back to the May Fourth New
Culture Movement in other words, the two
slogans of Cultural Enlightenment and
Individual Liberation. With the establishment of
the Nanjing government, Cultural Enlightenment
was reshaped and elevated as the official
discourse, becoming one part of the ideological
project of the modern nation, while the demands
for individual liberation, which equally belonged
to the New Culture Movement, became scattered
and marginalized. The structural opposition of
these two art academies symbolized the
unavoidable fissures in May Forth Movement
when it was ideological incorporated within the
operations of the official system, while at the
same time exposed the ineluctable dissatisfaction
and conflicts when cultural enlightenment was
contained as a national project.

Three

Very quickly or should we say completely

naturally, even Lin Fengmian was considered as
a spokesman for the state-led art movement.
But for other art movements which had defined
themselves as liberal, as folk belonging to the
people, or as revolutionary, they were competing
and against each other. Moreover, the policies
of standardization that the Nanjing government
had taken to promote official colleges and to
ban private colleges, rendered this opposition
even more fraught with emotions. In February
1928, right after the advertisement calling
for students to apply to the National Academy
of Art was posted in Shun Pao, an enrolment
advertisement appeared for the Southern Art
Institute: The founding of this academy is aimed
at the urgent and necessary guidance for literary
and artistic youths in these turbulent times,

for the sake of undertaking a revolutionary

movement of art. The institute consisted of three
major subjects literature, fine art and theatre
led respectively by Tian Han, Xu Beihong and
Ouyang Yuqian. The advertisement called for
all those willing to take part in our art movement
that is not associated with the state to gather
under our flag. The soul of the Southern Art
Institute rested with Tian Han, the Neo-Romantic
dramaturge. The simple, unadorned and urgent
art movement in the wilderness he sought,
clearly had that free, unrestrained Bohemian
spirit, departing from orthodoxy. According to his
analysis two years later in his famous text Our
Own Criticism, he related in anguish how running
the Southern Art Institute was aimed at building
an open, independent art space that belonged
to those without permanent property, unlike
both the National Academy of Art in its reliance
on government support and Shanghai Fine Art
College which was abducted by wealth and vanity.
Such a revolutionary movement of art,
fusing Romanticism and a stance in favor of the
people, did not aim to advocate for the redemptive
functions of art but rather to focus on opening up
artistic experience; art was not seen as a means
to better society and perfect human life but
rather as the exploration and expression of life.
In fact, as an artist, Lin Fengmian was deeply
sympathetic to German Expressionism, so he
should not have felt unfamiliar with Tian Hans
artistic ideas at this stage. But as the spokesman
of the only institution of art education estab
lished by the Nationalist government, he could
not identify with the unofficial spirit capsulated

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Lin Fengmian, the academy was a base to

promote the art movement, he also carefully
safeguarded the dignity and symbolic
significance of such a institution. He encouraged
and advocated academic freedom, but he also
emphasized order and discipline, showing
no mercy for political antagonists. In April 1928,
before the academy founded in a rush even
had time to hold its official opening ceremony,
there was a student strike. The harsh attitude and
uncompromising policy adopted by the school
administration set the tone for the academy
management later on.
Two

Yet, a more profound opposition had long been

haunting the art world of this period, leaving
behind an even more long-lasting influence
on the development of modern Chinese art and
development of society. The world now
has already been divided into two distinct groups:
one striving to exploit to the utmost, the other
struggling in blood. The fierce battles between
the two are about to become even more intense,
without one tiniest place for compromise.
This quote from poet Wang Duqing, who once
studied in France, was published in Creation
Monthly in August 1928. We who are struggling
must strive to liberate art. We must strive to
liberate ourselves from art to be liberated
from commoditized and enslaved modern art,
from the worship of art for arts sake, and then
to begin building a liberated art, an art for the
masses. Only by first achieving the liberation
of art can a liberated art be created.
The new opening Wang Duqing declared
here was not groundless rumor, but was descrip
tively related to the Program of Action of Leftwing Culture, centered in Shanghai and deeply
inspired by international left-wing movements.
In the beginning of 1928, the newly reorganized
Creation Society daringly and forcefully clamored
for the slogan from a literary revolution to a
revolutionary literature, demanding new art and
literary fighters to head towards the battle
ground of theoretical struggles (in the words of
Guo Moruo), to bring to a conclusion the
Aufheben (sublimation in German; in the

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words of Cheng Fangwu) of historical process

and of artists and writers themselves, and
proclaiming that the era of Ah Q is already dead
and would be transcended. Applying historical
materialism to analyze art and society, proletarian
art can represent a new socio-political force.
Soon, the then-recently established Sun Society
also entered the scene. Nanjing government
resorted to bloodcurdling party purges to suppress
its left-wing power, the cultural left wing, which
was deeply influenced by the leftist current of
thought during Japans Taisho period, instigated
an impassioned revolution of theories and
thoughts, a new Enlightenment movement of
wholescale criticism. This clashed most
prominently against new literature in May Fourth
Movement, which was considered to be an
expression of petit-bourgeois humanism and
individualism.

Within this new Enlightenment movement
that yelled at the top of its voice, art movement
was still a key concept; art could be fine arts
concretely and also more broadly any symbolic
creative activity. In October 1928, Shen Qiyu,
who had returned from studies in Japan,
published an essay on essential concepts of art
movement in Creation Monthly, arguing that
the art movements conclusion should converge
with politics in other words to aid and abet
a political movement. This convergence was
to enlighten the masses through the power of
art, thereby constructing a proletarian art
which could encourage and promote the masses.
At the same time, this meant that the masses
were about to invade the history of art. The art

movement described by Shen Qiyu without

a doubt directly transcended Lin Fengmians art
movement as Enlightenment. Actually, both sides
use art as a tool to encourage and to inculcate,
but their fundamental differences lay in the
following: Shen Qiyu confirming the refusal of
and resistance to the current system, advocated
that art belonged to politics and formed as a
part of a revolutionary movement; Lin Fengmian,
meanwhile, accepting the legitimacy and
necessity of the existing system, believed that the
burden of art ought to be the responsibility to
beautify society (in the words of Lin Fengmian).
To put it simply, the former was the mobilization
and destruction of revolutionaries, while the latter
was the planning and construction of rulers (not
without irony was how the Nationalist authorities
labeled left-wing magazines such as Cultural
Criticism as reactionary publications.)
Since the fundamental concept of the art
movement were confirmed, the Left-wing
Enlightenment Movement as a matter of course
undertook a wholescale criticism of the
development of modern Chinese art since May
Fourth Movement. This work was brought to
a conclusion by Xu Xingzhi, an oil painter who
had twice studied in Japan and had participated
in the Northern Expedition. In The Mission of the
Emerging Art Movement, which he wrote at the
end of 1929, Xu declared that the art movement
since May Fourth has been the history of mutual
fistfights between scholarly cliques, no matter
large and small; not only had this left behind
a wasteland in the arts, but also misled
young students into a labyrinth where art is

omnipotent. The mission of the emerging art

movement is to struggle thoroughly against
the dominating class and against art in the pay
of the dominating class; at the same time,
it must also complete the artistic Enlightenment
Movement unfinished by the dominating class.
In June 1930, Xu Xingzhi further published an
article entitled The Prospects of Chinas Art
Movement, where he undertook an ideological
analysis of the art movement since the May Fourth
Movement and divided it into two stages an
earlier period of the enlightenment and a later
one of decline and compromise. The turning
point was in 1927 when the Northern Expedition
reached the Yangtze basin and after the entirety
of the national capitalist class capitulated to
the forces of imperialism and feudalism, and
betrayed the revolutionary proletariat class. In
this text, Xu Xingzhi could still see the sprouts
of the emerging artistic movement. Specific
examples included the Epoch Fine Arts Society
which he organized at Shanghais China College
of Art, the Cartoon Society under the leadership
of the newly founded League of Left-Wing
Writers, as well as the West Lake Eighteen Art
Society at the National Academy of Art.
The reason Xu Xingzhi mentioned the
West Lake Eighteen Art Society was because
he himself had visited Hangzhou around March
and April in 1930, meeting the members and
introducing the newly founded League of
Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai and the Epoch
Fine Arts Society that he participated in. By the
time The Prospects of Chinas Art Movement
(finished on April 20) was published in the June

The later growth and accomplishments of

the Eighteen Art Society probably far exceeded
Xu Xingzhis fervent hopes at the time. Its
members held an exhibition in Shanghai in June
1931. At the time, Literary and Artistic News,
which followed up and reported on this exhibition,
considered it to have had extraordinary
significance because the exhibited works included
modern woodcut works never before seen
among various art groups in China. On June 15,
Literary and Artistic News even published the
Small Foreword Lu Xun wrote for Eighteen Art
Societys 1931 Exhibition, confirming the group
represented art that was new, young,
progressive, art that was full of promise. Two
months after the exhibition ended, Lu Xun, very
much taken with the black-and-white woodcuts,

issue of Siren Monthly that year, the West Lake

Eighteen Art Society had already split. One
fragment formed the Eighteen Art Society without
West Lake, bringing in new members such as
Hu Yichuan, Wang Zhanhui, Yao Fu, among
others. In the text, Xu Xingzhi introduced the West
Lake Eighteen Art Society thus: it united many
young writers with fresh ideas; their actions
cannot be freely developed due to the fetters and
surveillance everywhere of the school authorities.
But their earnestness, their research attitude,
and their awareness of the proletarian art move
ment give us fervent hopes in their struggles in
the journey forward.
Four

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invited his Japanese friend Uchiyama Kakichi

to organize a woodcut study group whose
participants included members of the Eighteen
Art Society who founded the Shanghai Eighteen
Art Society. In September, members of the
woodcut study group started the Modern
Woodcut Research Society, which included
many members of the Eighteen Art Society who
had previously made great efforts in the study
of woodcuts (see Literary and Artistic News,
September 14, 1931). The Origins for which the
research association publicly solicited funds was
tantamount to the earliest Woodcut Manifesto:
Recently, ordinary Chinese youths have worked
hard on researching woodcuts. The essential
reason is that ordinary youths in the art world
cannot afford the expensive materials of oil
painting. At the same time, woodcuts contain
within themselves the elements that are most apt
for creating works with robust energy which is
exactly what ordinary poor youths desire.
Literary and Artistic News, which reported on the
founding and the fundraising activities of the
Modern Woodcut Research Society thus declared:
Replacing the Brush with the Knife the Chinese
woodcut movement has officially launched.

Without a doubt, in the period of over
a year between 1930 and 1931, members of the
Eighteen Art Society centering in Hangzhou and
Shanghai marked off a distinct era in the develop
ment of the emerging woodcut art in terms of
various aspects such as organization, practice,
creation and theorization. The Eighteen Art
Societys 1931 Exhibition, held in June 1931, fully
deserved its place as the start of the modern

woodcut movement whether in terms of

memorable date or symbolic significance. This
new force the modern woodcut movement
erupting as a fully self-conscious force in
1931 was inextricably linked to the Left-Wing
Enlightenment Movement since 1928. It was
precisely this political awakening vowing to
overcome the Enlightenment tradition of liberal
humanism that furnished a new theoretical
language, historical consciousness and artistic
concepts for a generation of young artists.
The emphasis the new Enlightenment Movement
placed on social classes and class struggle,
its elucidations on the relationship between art
and politics, and its description of the progress
of social history not only granted young artists
a critical eye in judging existing artistic theories
and practices, but also allowed them to
discover a specific artistic form able to express
the novelty of its concepts: black-and-white
woodcuts. The split in the West Lake Eighteen
Art Society in 1930 was the result of the trial
by fire of the New Enlightenment Movement.
And with its ability to discern the oppositions in
socio-economic positions within different art
media, and to see the possibilities of expressing
a new subjective consciousness amid the
aesthetic results of woodcuts, what the Modern
Woodcut Research Society presented in 1931
were the insights and self-confidence that youths
working on woodcuts had secured from new
artistic theories.
The most crucial connections between
the Left-Wing Enlightenment Movement and the
modern woodcut movement was Lu Xun, who

began to actively introduce and promote modern

woodcuts from the second half of 1928. In the
beginning, the New Enlightenment Movement,
who emerged as a force sweeping away
everything in its path, first took direct aim at Lu
Xun, painting him as a drunken and bleary-eyed
evil feudal remnant and as someone with a
vested interest in the existing literary system. But
very quickly, Lu Xun and the cultural left wing
reached the same ends albeit through different
means. In March 1930, together they established
the League of Left-Wing Writers. In 1928, faced
with indiscriminate attacks by the left wing, Lu
Xun not only applied himself to translating Itagaki
Takahos Trends in the History of Modern Art but
also founded the magazine Benliu (Currents). He
systematically tried to understand the origins and
developments of left-wing literary theories and
also began to introduce modern woodcuts from
the West methodically.
In March 1929, when he self-published
the second volume of Selections of Modern
Woodcuts, Lu Xun especially underlined forceful
beauty as the principal aesthetic characteristic
of woodcuts. At the same time, he sighed and
said: But this forceful beauty will probably
not be able to please our eyes at once. Popular
decorative paintings these days mainly have
beauties with sloping shoulders, emaciated
monks, paintings by disbanded Constructivists.
Only writers and observers brimming with vitality
will be able to produce art with force. Images
from the heart, I fear, will find it hard to exist
within a society that is dejected and delicate.
In a subsequent series of texts, Lu Xun

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passionately provided unyielding theoretical

and spiritual support for youths working on
woodcut, encouraging them to create vigorous,
clearly demarcated woodcuts, because this is
the art of the new youth, art of the good masses
(Foreword to Wuming Muke Ji [Unnamed
Woodcut Collection]).

What Lu Xun saw in woodcuts was a new
artistic form, a new method of production and
dissemination, new artists, and a new relationship
between art and social life. The reason why the
vigorous vitality in woodcuts (in terms of visual
language) was worth advocating for was because
it was completely at odds with then current
aesthetic tastes and therefore roused even the
apathetic. This forceful beauty, when united with
the challenge that young and anonymous artists
posed for the existing art system, rules and
standards, not only upturned aesthetic experience
(confusing the elegant and the vulgar), but also
expressed a new historical reality and conscious
ness (the soul of modern society), and therefore
was supported by the masses (see Lu Xuns
Foreword to Special Collection of National Joint
Woodcut Exhibition). When Lu Xun defined
woodcut as the art of the good masses, masses
was distinguished from society. Society could
be dejected and delicate; it could also ignorant
and detached, and oftentimes the object of
contempt or pity, or of self-contradictory passive
emotionlessness. The masses, on the other
hand, were active, malleable creators of history
with a subjective consciousness. The formulation
and acknowledgement of such a large historical
subjectivity was one of the fundamental impetus

1931

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between the left and right was exceptionally

significant. A year later, in May 1933, Ye Lingfeng
edited Selections of Modern Chinese Woodcut for
that magazine and published them as illustrations.
Among these included three works by Xia Peng
(Yao Fu), while the one that caught everyones
eyes was Hu Yichuans To the Front (1932).
The publication of these woodprints was arguably
what prepared public opinion for the National
Joint Woodcut Exhibition held in Beiping (Beijing)
on New Years Day in 1935.
From Famished Peasant, exhibited in
Eighteen Art Societys 1931 Exhibition to A Scene
in Zhabei, and then To the Front published in
1933, Hu Yichuan had on the one hand improved
upon his maturing expressive woodcut skill, while
on the other hand had managed startling
conceptual leaps. From the engraving Famished
Peasant, sympathetic towards the povertystricken and helpless underclass of paupers, to
A Scene in Zhabei, with its grief, indignation and
silent tribute for compatriots killed in cold blood
amid a nation under threat, all the way to the
work To the Front where the people, united in
their hatred of the enemy, shouted out beyond the
edge of the picture plane, as though rushing to
the frontlines of the anti-Japanese resistance,
these three works encapsulated the themes that
the modern woodcut movement was interested in
during its first stage of development: the different
imaginations of the masses brought about by
the transformation of the historical environment,
as well as the changes in artists relationships
with the masses. After the Sino-Japanese war
broke out in 1937, Hu Yichuan rushed to Yanan,
and the masses appearing in his woodcuts
correspondingly gained a completely new image
and clarity. This similarly symbolized how the
modern woodcut movement later moved into a
new and broader stage of development, heading
towards what Lu Xun had once predicted as a
brighter and more glorious enterprise.

Translated by Daniel Szehin Ho

262

Li Hua , Roar, China! , ! , 1935.

Courtesy National Museum of China

Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut

Movement (
2008)

Tang Xiaobing, Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies and

Comparative Literature at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
at the University of Michigan. Publications include The Origins of the Chinese
Avant-Garde: the Modern Woodcut Movement, University of California Press,
2008.

of the Left-Wing Enlightenment Movement,

and also the core demand of the modern woodcut
movement. In contrast to Lin Fengmian and
others search to beautify society within the
discursive tradition of the Cultural Enlightenment,
the avant-garde character of the modern woodcut
movement stems precisely from its interest in,
appeal to and fusion with the masses.
Yet the avant-garde nature of the modern
woodcut movement, in terms of historical origins,
cannot be separated from the May Fourth New
Culture Movement as well as the relentless
renewal of the official system since the late Qing
dynasty and the early Republican period. The art
schools and new education that first sprouted in
the early 20th century along with the art groups
and exhibitions in different scales emerging
afterwards, the art publications, theories, schools
and debates succeeding one after the other
(including the renewed defense of the social
value of art and the identity of the artists accom
panying the New Culture Movement), and finally
the Enlightenment-style movements to promote
art all these were one part of the fundamental
structure required by a modern art movement.
If Lin Fengmian had not called for the formation
of a national art world, then a modern art
education system with the National Academy
of Art as its highest representative would not
have come into being. Consequently, the modern
woodcut movement would not have benefited
from a space in which to develop or secure
an object of resistance, while at the same time,
it would not have won historical significance.
Concretely speaking, woodcut youths could not
otherwise have appeared as inventive and
creative artists. An art movement with an avantgarde character by necessity maintains a
tense relationship between dependence and
conflict with an already existing art system.
Simultaneously, as a conceptualized
historical subject, the masses, which marked
out the mission of the modern woodcut
movement, certainly would have constantly been
substituted as history progressed. An important
turning point in the history of the development
of modern woodcuts was in June 1932, when
the second issue of Les Contemporains
(published in Shanghai), printed Hu Yichuans
A Scene in Zhabei. Founded in May 1932, Les
Contemporains was an influential mainstream
literary magazine that emerged after the January
28 Incident (a short war with Japan in Shanghai
in 1932). The fact that A Scene in Zhabei,
as a modern woodcut work, appeared in this
nationally distributed magazine beyond the divide

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To the Front:
The Modern Woodcut
Movements
Performative Sites
Liu Xiao

In the spring of 1898, Kang Youwei established the Society

for Protecting the Nation in the capital Beijing, proposing to
protect the country, protect the race, protect the Teaching
(baoguo, baozhong, baojiao). In June that same year, the
Guangxu Emperor issued an edict that advocated major
reforms. On June 19, Kang Youwei entreated the Emperor in
a petition, systematically proposing his idea of Confucianism
as a religion. In reference to Western religions, the reformers
modified traditional Confucianism and created a format to
make Confucian learning into a religion for the sake of the
unity of the nation and the people.
In 1917 at keynote speech at the Shenzhou Scholarly
Society, Cai Yuanpei proposed replacing religion with
aesthetic education in response to this one demand of
the reformers. Early on within the New Culture Movement,
he advanced this idea numerous times and emphasized
that aesthetic education is an education of a worldview.
He believed that in order to rekindle the human spirit, three
aspects must be dealt with: The first is intelligence and
knowledge; the second is the will; the third is the feelings.
Compared to religion, aesthetic education has several
superior and distinctive qualities: free, progressive,
universal. Such a proposal, then and even several decades

later, stimulated the renewed understanding of art and

religion within all fields of academia and stirred a major
dispute. Yet the idea of replacing religion with aesthetic
education informed Cai Yuanpeis whole life.
In 1928, Cai Yuanpei established the National Academy of
Art in Hangzhou and exerted himself to invite Lin Fengmian
as the principal; Lin was then just 28 years of age and had
just returned from his studies in France. Outside the school
grounds, storms were brewing, and art saving the country
became a key drive within the art world. This young
principal strongly backed the students artistic creations and
at the same time argued that the primary aim of the art
movement is to propel art to find its modern consciousness.
What needed to be expressed was not merely a modern
revolutionary consciousness but a deep concern for society
and the times. Lin Fengmian contended that art must have
individual character, national character, temporal
character which became an extremely important idea in
the history of Chinese modern art.
Precisely at such intersections between the epoch and the
school, an intense debate between art for art versus
art for life took place within this art academy on the shores
of the West Lake. These intellectual ideas and the facts
of the time paved the way for the emergence of the artists
and creators of this new era, as well as the appearance
of a new state of art, providing a fertile field for germination
and priming these future players intellectually. The first
and second years of graduates from the National Academy
of Art were spurred by the League of Left-Wing Writers and
the League of Left-Wing Artists; the students also gained
heartfelt care and inspiration from Lu Xun. Many of them
later came to form the backbone of the modern woodcut
movement.
In the foreword to the 1933 Methods of Creating Woodcuts,
Lu Xun said: Creating woodcuts is the direct creative work

Ma Da , Portrait of Xian Xinghan, 1939.

Courtesy National Museum of China

1898

19

1917

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192828

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of artists; it absolutely does not rely on engravers and

printers. He described the artists conditions and methods
as replacing the brush with the knife, replacing the paper
with wood and tackling it directly with the knife. In a
revolution, the use of woodprints is the most widespread.
Even if it is rushed, just a moments engraving would
suffice; it is heartfelt, clamorous, indignant, resistant.
Under their knives were no longer the old landscapes and
birds and flowers, still objects and nudes, but rather
peasants, beggars, ship hands, workers, resisters, starving
refugees, victims of disasters, villages up in smoke. Blackand-white woodcuts became for woodcut workers the actual
site of labor, of struggle, of transformation.
In 1932, Hu Yichuan engraved To the Front: a man in a
Chinese-style jacket tightly clenching both fists and yelling
forcefully. Behind him gathered a mass of people just like
him, howling. In a woodcut as big as the palm, one can
discern the forceful attack of the knife, the swift lines
which by themselves summon up the call To the Front!
This is also a cry of the artist for himself. In 1937, Hu
Yichuan headed to Yanan. In the liberated zone, as the
organizer of Lu Xun Woodcut Group, he used woodcuts to
accomplish the task of awakening and encouraging the
masses. Even when photojournalists lacked film, they could
still pick up the knife and engrave a stretch. They created
woodcuts periodicals, mastheads, New Year pictures,
badges, permeating countless everyday propaganda
and objects in the liberated zone. Woodcuts became the
most widespread means of transmission and medium of
instruction in everyday life. As one part of the emotional
engineering in the new state, woodcut workers molded the
imagined individuals, masses, villages, cities and country
with images they all gained a whole new image and were
offered a new target of struggle: life, as well as the future.
At the same time, it was an important conduit for the
construction of the system from hygiene and labor to
education and elections offering the most effective

dissemination for all kinds of constructive work at the time.

While engraving, they could hone the issues of what and
how to engrave; as a medium, they must face the question
of what the readers saw and how they thought.
Individuals practicing with woodcut taking part in this
historical process all made their way past the smolders
of life and seemingly gained and created new life. The
black-and-white woodcuts, born at the same time as them,
became an artistic form constantly forging its way ahead.
While it was created and applied, it also critiqued the
art contemporaneous to it not only caring for the times
in which it dwells but also bringing into being a new age
about to come.

Li Qun , Listening to Reports, 1940.

Courtesy National Museum of China

1932

1937
,,

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Wang Renfeng , The Market, 1946.

Courtesy National Museum of China

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Li Hua , The Raging Tide Fight, 1946.

Courtesy National Museum of China

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Tang Yingwei , A Record of Major National Event, 1936. Courtesy periodical

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Wang Renfeng , Constructing the Furnace, 1953.

Courtesy National Museum of China

In 1966, as spring turned into summer, the

Zhejiang Art Academy was completely covered
with dazibao (big character posters) in all
shapes and forms. Zhaos works, source
materials and woodblocks were confiscated.
He was not the only one that this happened to:
a raging tide was sweeping up the whole of
society. But, Lu Xuns works were not banned.
For the heartbroken Zhao facing such
lawlessness, they were a ray of light amid
infinite darkness. Zhao wrote in The Causes
of The Story of Ah Q that he only got to know
and understand Lu Xun 20 or 30 years
afterwards. He thought at that time, if he
could pick up the carving knife again, he would
want to depict the titular character Ah Q that
fusion of earthy, unsophisticated peasant and
cunning vagrant, the compatriots whose
misfortune he mourned for and whose docility
angered him. So, in 1974, Zhao started to
create woodcut illustrations for Lu Xuns short
stories and essays; some of the images were
reworked four or five times before he was
satisfied.

Illustrations on page 281 to 285 | 281285

The Story of Ah QQ, 197894, woodcut , 24 17cm.
Courtesy Zhejiang Art Musuem
Text Lu Xun, The Story of Ah Q, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang,
1953; Q

1938

Woodcuts stark distinctions between black

and white, aside from the mediums inherent
Manichean duality, also carries the engravers
fury. Such fury arises from discontent with and
resistance to reality; its affective technique is

1966

Born 1924; deceased 2014, Hangzhou

1924, 2014

1974

QQ

tightly connected to the creation: Every stroke

of the knife is committed with emotion and
righteousness. Zhao Yannian defines himself
as a woodcut worker. He uses it as a tool to
open up a path of soul-searching.

Baldhead Ass In the past Ah Q had cursed under his breath only, inaudibly; but
today, because he was in a bad temper and wanted to work off his feelings, the words
slipped out involuntarily.

Unfortunately this baldhead was carrying a shiny, brown stick which Ah Q called a
staff carried by the mourner. With great strides he bore down on Ah Q who, guessing
at once that a beating was impending, hastily braced himself to wait with a stiffened
back. Sure enough, there was a resounding thwack which seemed to have alighted on
his head.

The Story of Ah Q

ZHAO YANNIAN

The first time he read Lu Xun, Zhao Yannian

was 14. He had no inkling of who Lu Xun was.
As a teenager, the impression that Lu Xuns
writing left on him was the authors cynicism
with Chinese reality, embalmed in absurd
expressions from Ah Q, like sons hitting
fathers and whats yours is mine.

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Weichuang did not see Ah Q again till just after the Moon Festival that year. Everybody
was surprised to hear of his return, and this made them think back and wonder where
he had been all that time.

Ah Qs return this time was very different from before, and in fact quite enough to
occasion astonishment. The day was growing dark when he appeared blinking sleepily
before the door of the wine shop, walked up to the counter, pulled a handful of silver
and coppers from his belt and tossed them on the counter. Cash! he said. Bring
the wine! He was wearing a new, lined jacket, and at his waist evidently hung a large
purse, the great weight of which caused his belt to sag in a sharp curve. It was the
custom in Weichuang that when there seemed to be something unusual about anyone,
he should be treated with respect rather than insolence, and now, although they knew
quite well that this was Ah Q, still he was very different from the Ah Q of the ragged
coat. The ancients say, A scholar who has been away three days must be looked at
with new eyes. So the waiter, innkeeper, customers and passers-by, all quite naturally
expressed a kind of suspicion mingled with respect.

QQ
Q
Q

QQ

When Amah Wu, the only maidservant in the Chao household, had finished washing the
dishes, she sat down on the long bench too and started chatting to Ah Q.
He put down his pipe and stood up.
Our young mistress Amah Wu chattered on.
Sleep with me! Ah Q suddenly rushed forward and threw himself at her feet.
There was a moment of absolute silence.
Aiya! Dumbfounded for an instant, Amah Wu suddenly began to tremble, then rushed
out shrieking and could soon be heard sobbing.
Ah Q kneeling opposite the wall was dumbfounded too. He grasped the empty bench
with both hands and stood up slowly, dimly aware that something was wrong.

Q
Q

One warm day, when a balmy breeze seemed to give some foretaste of summer, Ah
Q actually felt cold; but he could put up with this his greatest worry was an empty
stomach. His cotton quilt, felt bar and shirt had long since disappeared, and after that he
had sold his padded jacket. Now nothing was left but his trousers, and these of course
he could not take off. He had a ragged lined jacket, it is true; but this was certainly
worthless, unless he gave it away to be made into shoe soles. He had long hoped to
pick up a sum of money on the road, but hitherto he had not been successful; he had
also hoped he might suddenly discover a sum of money in his tumbledown room, and
had looked wildly all through it, but the room was quite, quite empty. Thereupon he
made up his mind to go out in search of food.

During this encounter he had already forgotten Whiskers Wang and the Imitation Foreign
Devil, as if all the days bad luck had been avenged. And, strange to relate, even more
relaxed than after the beating, he felt light and buoyant as if ready to float into the air.

In fact, by this time he was in rather a nervous state himself. In a flurry, he stuck his pipe
into his belt and decided to go back to the rice. But bang! a heavy blow landed on
his head, and he spun round to see the successful county candidate standing before
him brandishing a big bamboo pole.
How dare you... you...

Just then, however, a small nun from the Convent of Quiet Self-improvement came
walking towards him. The sight of a nun always made Ah Q swear; how much more so,
then, after these humiliations? When he recalled what had happened, all his anger revived.
So all my bad luck today was because I had to see you! he thought to himself.
He went up to her and spat noisily. Ugh! Pah!
The small nun paid not the least attention, but walked on with lowered head. Ah Q went
up to her and shot out a hand to rub her newly shaved scalp, then laughing stupidly
said, Baldhead! Go back quickly, your monk is waiting for you
Who are you pawing? demanded the nun, blushing crimson as she began to hurry away.
The men in the wine shop roared with laughter. Seeing that his feat was admired, Ah
Q began to feel elated.
If the monk paws you, why cant I? said he, pinching her cheek.

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QQ

aQ

After the Chao family was robbed most of the people in Weichuang felt pleased yet
fearful, and Ah Q was no exception. But four days later Ah Q was suddenly dragged
into town in the middle of the night. It happened to be a dark night. A squad of soldiers,
a squad of militia, a squad of police and five secret servicemen made their way quietly
to Weichuang, and, after posting a machine-gun opposite the entrance, under cover of
darkness they surrounded the Tutelary Gods Temple. Ah Q did not rush out. For a long
time nothing stirred in the temple. The captain grew impatient and offered a reward
of 20,000 cash. Only then did two militiamen summon up courage to jump over the
wall and enter. With their co-operation from within, the others rushed in and dragged
Ah Q out. But not until he had been carried out of the temple to somewhere near the
machine-gun did he begin to sober up.

Ah Q was lifted on to an uncovered cart, and several men in short jackets sat down
with him. The cart started off at once. In front were a number of soldiers and militiamen
shouldering foreign rifles, and on both sides were crowds of gaping spectators, while
what was behind Ah Q could not see. Suddenly it occurred to him Can I be going to
have my head cut off? Panic seized him and everything turned dark before his eyes,
while there was a humming in his ears as if he had fainted. But he did not really faint.
Although he felt frightened some of the time, the rest of the time he was quite calm.
It seemed to him that in this world probably it was the fate of everybody at some time
to have his head cut off.

Tra la! sang Ah Q, unable to imagine that his name could be linked with those words
old chap. Sure that he had heard wrongly and was in no way concerned, he simply
went on singing, Tra la la, tum ti tum!
Q, old chap!
I regret to have killed
Ah Q! The successful candidate had to call his name.
Only then did Ah Q come to a stop. Well? he asked with his head on one side.
Q, old chap now But Mr. Chao was at a loss for words again. Are you getting rich now?

Q
Q

Q
Q

Q
Q

For some time Ah Q seemed to be walking on air, but by the time he reached the
Tutelary Gods Temple he was sober again. That evening the old man in charge of the
temple was also unexpectedly friendly and offered him tea. Then Ah Q asked him for
two flat cakes, and after eating these demanded a four-ounce candle that had been
used, and a candlestick. He lit the candle and lay down alone in his little room. He felt
inexpressibly refreshed and happy, while the candlelight leaped and flickered as on the
Lantern Festival and his imagination soared with it.

Q
Q

It would be wrong, however, to say that there were no reforms in Weichuang. During the
next few days the number of people who coiled their pigtails on their heads gradually
increased, and, as has already been said, the first to do so was naturally the successful
county candidate; the next were Chao Szu-chen and Chao Pai-yen, and after them Ah
Q. If it had been summer it would not have been considered strange if everybody had
coiled their pigtails on their heads or tied them in knots; but this was late autumn, so
that this autumn observance of a summer practice on the part of those who coiled their
pigtails could be considered nothing short of a heroic decision, and as far as Weichuang
was concerned it could not be said to have had no connection with the reforms.

Ah Q had long since known of revolutionaries, and this year with his own eyes had
seen revolutionaries being decapitated. But since it had occurred to him that the
revolutionaries were rebels and that a rebellion would make things difficult for him,
he had always detested and kept away from them. Who could have guessed they
could so frighten a successful provincial candidate renowned for 30 miles around?
In consequence, Ah Q could not help feeling rather entranced, the terror of all the
villagers only adding to his delight.

Ten Mile Inn

David Crook
Isabel Crook

everyday, along with our awareness of

photography, land reform, the village,
modernity and whatever that lies underneath all
these. They await our renewed organization
and discussion:

In November 1947, David and Isabel Crook

arrived in the liberated areas of Shanxi,
Hebei, Shandong and Henan provinces with
recommendation letters from the Communist
Party of Great Britain. They ended up living in
a village deep within the Taihang Mountains,
called Ten Mile Inn (Shilidian) in Wuan County
within Hebei. Settling in with a local villagers
family, they participated in leading Party
members group meetings as well as mass
meetings; they also collected data, observed
and took photographs, visiting and recording
the work done with land reform in the area.
In the 1970s, Revolution in a Chinese Village:
Ten Mile Inn and Mass Movement in a Chinese
Village: Ten Mile Inn were published by
Routledge and Kegan Paul in the UK. In 1982,
the Chinese edition was published by the
Beijing Publishing House, and re-issued in
2007 by the Shanghai Peoples Publishing
House. Isabel Crook wrote in the foreword to
the re-issued edition of Ten Mile Inn that the
first work recounted how villagers in Ten Mile
Inn resisted the Japanese invaders in the
1930s, protecting their own village and aiding
in the Eighth Route Armys fight. In the lead
were poor peasants and farm labourers who
overturned the old system of landlords versus
hired farm labourers. The second work
is a continuation of the first, recording the
experiences of the Communist work team
composed of young journalists from the
Peoples Daily (the print shop of the Peoples
Daily then was located inside cave dwellings in
a neighbouring village). In Ten Mile Inn,
they led villagers to launch two kinds of mass
movements The book also detailed all kinds
of changes they themselves brought to Ten

Mile Inn during the momentous year of 1948.

194711

70

The reorganization of the Crooks photographs

and manuscripts has been the work of young
academics Gao Chu and Wang Shuo since
2010. Gao Chu started the project, organizing
photographs from liberated zones in the
1940s. To date, they have completed
reorganizing approximately 700 photographs
along with archival research.
The two young academics also made this
attempt: they converted the village of
Ten Mile Inn and its stories into personal
experiences of the villagers. Aside from
treating images as archival material, as
evidence and as reliable methodological
records, can images be seen as an encounter,
an invocation of a problem? The solution to
the problem comes not only from the wealth
of data within these images, but even more
so from the process of answering these
questions. For instance, in the project of Ten
Mile Inn, the research and verification of these
photos depend on returning to the fields of the
villages. These images become a chance to
enter the village, to enter the life experiences
of people in the images. Yet the complexity
of such life experiences cannot be contained
within the photographs. (Gao Chu, Chongfan
Shilidian [Return to Ten Mile Inn])

1.
A counterpart to grand formulations like
revolution, modernity and the nation, this is the
site where time and space embeds into a
subjectivity of everyday life. This could very
well become the contradiction between time/
history and individuals.
2.
A common development and
evolutionary history can be realized within the
realm of thought and writing. And at any
moment, plain, ordinary individuals have to face
both an insuperable aesthetics today and also
an inescapable theoretical discipline. This is
the arrogance of human inclination, and a more
flagrant example has yet to be found. Better
instead to treat the Crooks writings and
photographs as their notebooks, theatre and
exhibition hall, providing new incitement and
references for the creation and ideas of the
present day.

Evidently, these photographs along with the

conscious premises Gao started from raise
issues that are worth considering. Unlike
photography of war, these images present a
formulation other than the customary ones of
revolutions and modernity. They concern the

1982

2007

2030

1948

1.

2010

40

2.

700

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Cultural activities in the street during Lantern Festival |

Measuring the land |

The inauguration meeting of the peasant union |

Women doing their work together |

A peasant with his fruits of struggle |

Cultural activities in the street during Lantern Festival |

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The funeral of the village head Wang Xitangs mother |

Rural life of Ten Mile Inn |

The gate of Li Ancestry Hall |

The courtyard of the house in which David and Isabel Crook lived in Ten Mile Inn |

Acrobatic performance |

Acrobatic performance |

Film Program Introduction

Working in the fields |

Hila Peleg

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The film program for The 10th Shanghai Biennale: Social Factory consists of nine
experimental films made recently in China, India, Japan, Algeria and the US. Never
before presented in China, the films will be screened several times a day during
the course of the Biennale in specially constructed cinemas throughout the Power
Station of Art building.

These are not conventional documentaries but they do engage with the
form of documentary in terms of authorship, meaning-making and real life experience. A commitment to the pressing political and social realities in the filmmakers
respective places of production does not mean that tensions and conflicts are
presented as quasi-scientific truths; instead, the filmmakers have devised novel,
multifaceted ways to present reality and history as an ongoing, dialectical exchange
that includes sites, subjects, authors and spectators. Film itself thus becomes a
site from which to investigate the workings of making and asserting meaning on
the interface between politics and aesthetics, between representation and reality.

The films in the program radically modify the structural conventions of
filmmaking, each taking their own distinctive conceptual and practical approach.
Several films combine aesthetics with ethnographic tradition. In Leviathan, for
example, Vrna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor film a groundfish trawler in the
North American Sea, using an array of miniature cameras attached to the fisher
mens heads, to nets and poles dangling overboard, to produce a visceral and brutal
image of the collision between industrial fishing and the life of the sea. Several
other works deploy storytelling practices and re-enactment to explore histories of
conflict and struggle, as in Narimane Maris Bloody Beans, a film produced on the
beach of Bologhine. Seventeen children improvise, rehearse and re-enact scenes
from the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s and 60s, based on what they
have learned in school and the stories told by neighbors or family members. Other
films in the program express powerful communal and collective experiences in a
shared time and space, as in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf by CAMP. We are introduced
to a vast network of autonomous sailors who transport everything from macaroni to
used cars in robust, self-built wooden boats traversing the Western Indian Ocean.

The film is a genuine selfie, consisting of footage made largely by the sailors them
selves with non-professional camera equipment or cellphones, which was then
skillfully edited as a record of the floating communitys geographical journey during
one season at sea.

Formally and technologically innovative, these films and the others in
the program provide an unprecedented insight into the interrelatedness, com
plexity, fluidity and elusiveness of realitys many different levels.

Three catalogue texts contextualize other films in the program: an essay
by film theoretician Ayako Saito addresses the massive earthquake and tsunami
that hit the Tohoku region in Japan in 2011 in her analysis of the personal intimacy
that acquires a political dimension in Ko Sakai and Ryusuke Hamaguchis Voices
from the Waves and Storytellers.

Film critic Zhang Yaxuan writes about several genealogies of contemporary independent filmmaking in China and outlines the cultural context that led
to such films as The Man with No Name by Wang Bing and Qiao by Huang Wenhai.

A conversation between filmmaker Shaina Anand from CAMP and
writer Zhou Xin offers further background information on the work and ideology
of the collaborative studio.

2011

(Vrna Paravel)

CAMP

- (Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

(Narimane Mari)
1750
60CAMP

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In Conversation:
Shaina Anand with Zhou Xin

CAMP

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Since 2007, Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP has been making art out of a variety of media, ranging
from cycle rickshaws, wooden ships, state records, web browsers, and basic public utilities like water and electricity,
as well as institutional environments like CCTV control rooms and archives. CAMP was invited to give a talk at
the Asia Art Archive in America this May, and I took the opportunity to discuss with Shaina Anand, one member
of CAMP, ways of complicating the act of documenting, the triangular relationship between subject, author and
technology, and the everyday life of video today.

Z X I want to go back to the project made in East

Jerusalem, The Neighbor Before the House (200912).
A big part of the project is making the whole filmmaking
process visible, instead of only showing the product, as
a film normally would.
S A Just to rewind a little: as a filmmaker, when I was coming into my own
authorship of material, I was asking really basic questions, two of which
were: Whats postcolonial? And whats post-feminist? Why then when we
make films do we just say, Im an Indian woman and Im making a film.
Yeah, thats postcolonial, and post-feminist, if you will, but then why am I
using the same imaging devices, the same ways of framing, the same similar
kind of techniques of engagement? Why isnt this being ruptured or at least
being radically reconfigured? And so a lot of our, or a lot of my, experiments
came out of that problem of this triangle between the director, the events
behind the lens of the cameraperson, and then the subject, who is framed
a certain way, who is massaged a certain way to give themselves over to
the technology and the author.

And this flows one way, its pretty unidirectional, and weve always
wondered why we cant change this. And in a slightly more sincere way, if
youre going to be the 700th filmmaker from the outside going to a place
like Palestine to make a film just because you feel politically for the cause,
you have to question yourself and say: Palestinians are living in this
permanent state of exception. If you go there and ask them the same
questions, because you want answers about what is it like to live in this
permanent state of exception? then you will repeat what we all know, what
they all know. And how is this liberating for anybody? Not just the audience,
but the Palestinians, the subjects. So how do we trouble this, and how do
we interrupt it?

In Jerusalem our questions were quite simple: 1) how not to be the
type of filmmaker whos going to make that kind of film, 2) how to really
make an independent film without any Israeli support to not get police
permission, or any such thing, or, you know, letters of authority to say Im
so and so, Im researching this film, could I be allowed to film on such a
street? You dont want to go to the Israeli authority because you dont

Z hou X in ( Z X ) Youre one half of CAMP, and

also co-founder of Pad.ma, an online archive of densely
text-annotated video material.
S haina A nand ( S A ) Im one founding member of CAMP,
but there are three others, and a number of other members its a setup that is more fluid, a collaborative studio, and not an artists collective.
Pad.ma, short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, is much larger than
CAMP. Its a platform we have shaped and run in collaboration with some
comrades at Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore and 0x26.20 in Berlin.
The online platform opens up different ways of looking at moving images,
documentary images in particular ways that conventions of editing and
making films tend to suppress or leave behind. I think one thesis for us is
that filmmaking needs to be not just beautiful from the outside but also
beautiful from the inside. And by that I mean that we need to think really
hard about the artistic process.

In our practice, the process is always evident in the finished work.
Theres a kernel of how this was shot in the moment of filmmaking that is
retained when we follow normal filmmaking devices, such as editing,
constructing, giving things a certain length. But somewhere the kernel of
what went on, and every intentional act that is present in the moment of
filming, is visible. Its there for you to read, whether you choose to read it
or not. The genesis of that footage, the very process and clarity of how the
film was made, what may have proceeded even though its edited, you
have a sense of what came before and what came after the footage. In
Pad.ma, there is the possibility of being able to see video beyond the finished
film: its fuller self, rather than a part and to be able to read and write over
it, by way of textual annotations.

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static, rooted in one place, and in many ways it is also about the question
of mobility for Palestinians.

What excited us most about From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf was the idea
of freedom. It depicts a kind of de facto free trade, which exists because
Somalia has no united government, and is not serviced by the UN, or
Mdecins Sans Frontires, or World Food Programme, ostensibly because
of the phenomenon of piracy. So these sailors who travel from the Gulf of
Kutch who may never have a passport and may never even have been to
the capital city, Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat are traversing the
entire Western Indian Ocean, in giant wooden boats built by their cousin
or their uncle, or even themselves. A very robust and vital form of free trade
is happening in the Western Indian Ocean, of a different world trade order.
This mobility of goods, of people and even money here is something that
is really unusual, vital and important in this time of homogeneity, security
and globalization. Bernd Cohen said empire is the view from the boat; this
then is Engseng Hos view from the other boat.

acknowledge the power of the authority. So I guess both of these conceptual

questions and problems were put to use, turned around by us using CCTV.

So the Palestinian families chose to mount the camera in a position
of vantage, usually their own terraces, or their own verandas. They chose
the positions. And often it was on top of their own houses. Like a tripod
made of stones. And the wires went down into their bedrooms or living
rooms. And they watched it on the television, their own TV sets or on a
monitor, speaking live over what they saw. In one case, settlers had moved
into their home, a couple of months ago, and the Palestinian family that had
lived there for 60 years had been evicted, and had been given a restraining
order to be 150 meters away from their house. The family was looking at
their home from across the street, controlling the camera by panning, tilting,
zooming with the joystick with the camera mounted on a neighbors roof.
Z X Its like a cyborg kind of thing, to let them speak
with the camera rather than for the camera. What about
the name of the film?
S A The title The Neighbor Before the House comes from a Quranic saying.
It just means consider the neighbor or think of your neighbor, before you
think of your house. Which is like, love thy neighbor; I dont know if you
ever say that in Chinese. In Sanskrit they say, The guest is like a god in
your house.

Z X A lot of this background is missing from the film

itself, however.

S A Yes, thats quite interesting because in The Neighbor Before the House
there are eight families, in a claustrophobic East Jerusalem. It is a structure
mapping each of the neighborhoods, but all of them are seen from one static
position in each location. A panopticon view the camera turns and does
a 360-degree pan and a 180-degree tilt up and a 220x digital zoom. It is

S A Its there. You could say the film has no structure, but it has an
unbelievably precise geographic structure. Its a liner journey one season
at sea. It begins in the west. In the Gulf of Kutch, the boats are being built.
They take form, and leave for the open seas. They sail sometimes empty
into the Persian Gulf, meeting similar wooden boats from Karachi and Iran.
They dock in the downtown creeks of Dubai and Sharjah, which will be
home, or base for the season, usually nine months at sea.

The boats are loaded with everything from macaroni to petrol pumps,
used hospital equipment, diesel and cars. Some head across the strait to
nearby ports in southern Iran, but most take a 14-day journey to the Somali
Region. There are destinations, journeys, storms, songs, food, work and
leisure as goods and boats move between ports on the east coast of Africa
and the littoral nations around the Gulf of Aden. If you pay attention to the
ports, if you pay attention to the goods, its pretty precise. The geopolitics
is present; the geography is present. We edited the film with Junas Bhagad,

Z X Comparing From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013) to

your previous project, which is based on one fixed site,
this film covers a vastly expanded network. In the film,
sailors are given the cameras and document whats
happening on the sea.

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long before our film project came along, and yet Ive read reviews that said
we gave sailors cellphone cameras to film with (they do have their own!)
and asked them to put in music of their choice. That gives the film a whole
other patronizing spin. Talk about appropriation!

But back to the everyday lives of video. The CCTV image from The
Neighbor Before the House is not a poor image. Neither is the video feed
we claimed from the largest shopping mall in Europe. Look around: I can
see in this tiny Chinatown cafe five CCTV cameras staring at us. In our
post-9/11 world, we have to think hard about the how and why of creating
images. Weve just begun researching the history of hidden camera sting
operations in India, and we recently had a government that called on every
citizen to be the police, to use their cellphone as their weapon. There is a
mound of evil media, there is richness in broken pixels all gestures in
video should be measured, or rubbed up against, its own everyday. We have
to place ourselves in the front-end and back-end and get inside these systems
to make sense or poetry out of images today.

one of the sailors who co-presents the film with us. We had a beautiful shot
of them praying on the upper deck that we wanted to use at the start of a
particular journey, but no way: in that sequence we were heading from the
UAE to Bosaso, and the direction or the sun, of Mecca, the wind, the color
of the water would all be wrong.

The film does have some complexities that are harder to read, but
nonetheless clearly present. There is also a whole text working for the sailors
that even an Indian audience wont read, down to the meaning of the Hindi
title. Its a coded radio call sign.
Z X To talk about the quality of the images, do you
prefer to use DV or miniDV?
S A In From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf theres VHS, there are videos from 2002
that are 120 pixels and only 10 frames a second. Theres 13 frames a second,
theres 1080 HD, theres HD camera EX-3, theres single-chip old handycams, mini DVs. So theres everything and we flattened it in the film. While
theres the linear journey in the sea, the storm sequence, for example, was
taken from 14 different cellphone clips over four years, but it is edited as
one storm. So in the temporality of the film, the video quality changes and
the time frame changes even though there is a linear structure of going from
here to there, as one year at sea.

Z X What you just said reminds me of the essay by

Hito Steyerl.
S A The Poor Image? Yes. Its fine but, for me, these images are not the
lumpen proletariat, or the wretched orphans of the image regime that need
to be defended. For one, they are created to live, circulate and die in their
own circuits, and much like the trade, they have some autonomy, and they
escape capture. The provenance of the music videos in the film is impor
tant that the images were found, married to the songs, and have been
edited in situ and in-camera by sailors. They were found circulating in a
bluetooth world, boat to boat, port to port, to be deleted to make room for
newer ones. Cinematic ephemera. These videos existed in the sailors world

: 2002120
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Chinese Independent Film

from a Modernist Perspective
Zhang Yaxuan

This interview was originally printed in the June Issue of The Brooklyn Rail, 2014.

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In 1927, Lu Xun created his famous imagery of

wild grass: Wild grass has no deep roots, no
pretty flowers and leaves. But it absorbs dew and
water, sucks up the flesh and blood of long dead
corpses, wresting its existence from each and
every thing Lu Xun has since been given many
titles the pioneer of the modern Chinese literary
revolution, standard-bearer of the May Fourth
New Culture Movement, a great revolutionary
and thinker Along with his reputation, the
imagery of wild grass has for generations been
taught to young Chinese from a very tender age.
Almost a century on, this image remains current.

The wild grass imagery illustrates a
stubborn will to live against all odds in the era in
which the writer lived. Rather than arguing that its
currency stems from the influence that the classic
has had, one might rather say that its power
comes from its enduring effectiveness throughout
decades of social upheaval. But 80 years is no
short span of time, which is why today this kind of
imagery is still relevant: it has regained its
signified in the contemporary context still fresh,
still intense. This signified goes to the form of
Chinese independent film.

A relatively new form of media, film
appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It participated in social and cultural construction
in different regions in different ways. China was
no exception. If we look at film history and
Chinas recent history, we will see that the origin
and development of Chinese film coincides with
a process of striving to achieve modernity.

If we view film as symptomatic of cultural
phenomena, and retrace our steps and look at its

development over different periods including

the relationship between film production,
filmic text and political ideology, the space of
authorship in creative films, and the fluctuation of
the industrial and entertaining features of film
we can gain a good idea of the twists and turns
experienced in the process of Chinas pursuit of
modernity. There are, of course, plenty of
poignant scenes in that process.

The landscape of contemporary Chinese
film has been molded in that process. Several
important points in Chinese film history were also
key moments in contemporary Chinese history.
The first was the setting-up of the Film Bureau
soon after the country was founded in 1949 and
the establishment of a state-owned studio system.
This was a direct result of study tours undergone
by Film Bureau leaders to the Soviet Union
in the mid-1950s, leading to the comprehensive
nationalization of the film industry. Film was seen
as a force for social organization and mobilization
as well as a tool for educating the masses in
the ideology of the times. Its main purpose was
on political correctness. The second important
moment was the Reform and Opening Up pro
cess started in 1978, which brought ideological
emancipation and, more importantly, gave new
life to social spaces. These spaces opened
up step by step, and then went on to create more
and more spaces. At this point, Chinese society
entered what become vaguely known as a
transitional period, a term that remains applicable
to this day. This transitional period has been
all-pervasive but in actual fact has constituted a
re-launch of Chinas modernization program.

Independent film is one of many
phenomena borne from the spaces created in
this transitional period. Due to its industrial
nature, independent film was about a decade
behind contemporary art, which started to make
ripples in the late 1970s right up until the 1989
China Avant-Garde Exhibition. Independent
film only began to make its mark in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. At this moment Chinese film
has experienced the aesthetic breakthrough of the
Fifth Generation. These filmmakers contributed
to the creation of a number of masterpieces
of that era, and were naturally considered to be
explorations of modernity. Against this backdrop,
independent film appeared especially conspic
uous as a form of practical cultural action,
because it had surpassed, in unprecedented
ways, the limits set by authority, becoming an
artistic expression beyond the scope of state film
studios and the Film Bureau. Outside space did
not exist until independent film came into being.
In turn the existence of independent film garnered
significance from the extension of this cultural
space. That is also why independent film was
immediately defined by the system as naturally
being in opposition to the authorities. Within
this logic, the content expressed in film was of
secondary importance. The cardinal offence
was that it was operating against the rules. The
subjects who performed this action were later
identified as the Sixth Generation of filmmakers,
though that simplistic label does not do justice
to the complexity of the situation.

This clash has arisen as a part of the
natural progression of the re-launching of the

modernizing drive. It is a necessity inherent in

the process as well as being an inevitable result
of that process. In this sense, the emergence and
existence of independent film possesses its own
internal rationality. However, it is not the product
of the challenging of the system that it appears
to be. This rationality is also the reason why it has
become an extensive cultural form on a global
level even though the definitions of independent
film have to be adjusted based on local cultural
institution.
Returning to the local context, this is not
the only clash independent film faces. The
clashes exist in every sphere and have a sort of
social universality. In other words, once one digs
beneath the various superficial representations
of a consumerist society, one will find that the
modernity drive itself is also the process that will
resolve these clashes; the extent to which these
conflicts are addressed also indicates the degree
to which modernity has been achieved.

Yet the tension between independent film
and officialdom has not been resolved, because
the nature of Chinas film system has remained
fundamentally unchanged. In describing the
nature of this system, censorship arises as a key
term. Censorship not only takes on the form of
a set of expressly written regulations and a single
committee made up of specific members, it is
also a symbol of authority. Despite the incredible
transformation of the Chinese film industry
over the last few decades (it has experienced
a development that could rival the Chinese real
estate boom), the fundamental ideas behind
Chinas film censorship remain an extension of

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the political ideology of the 1950s; the purpose,

too, is to maintain this ideology. Thus, indepen
dent film remains estranged from the film
industry. This estrangement may not have been
as distinct as it is today. During the 1990s
filmmaking was restricted by technical obstacles,
which meant directors often needed to use the
resources in the official system to complete their
works. But with the onset of the digital age
in the late 1990s, this dependency on the official
system became unnecessary. Consequently,
independent films relationship with society
became simpler and clearer just like the shoots
of wild grass spreading out across a wasteland,
it possessed an explicit non-official nature.
This is another important moment in film history:
the advent of digital cameras and film-editing
programs on personal computers have become
an enduring driving force behind the development
of Chinese independent film.

Certainly, the deconstruction of traditional
methods of film production by digital technology
is applicable on a global scale, but rooted within
the context of Chinas realities, along with the
aesthetic impulses triggered by some other
specific circumstances, digital technology has
had a truly revolutionary impact on filmmaking in
China. This impact is consistent with classic
Marxist logic: improvements in the means of pro
duction have fundamentally liberated productive
forces. Concurrently, the rapid and intense
social changes taking place in Chinese society
have created another solid basis upon which
independent film can trigger responses with an
unprecedented level of tension and different

formats. It has profoundly altered the face of

Chinese film and reconstructed the relationship
between film and the reality of this age as well
as with people and their emotions, even if this
has not yet been fully and extensively
recognized.

There has been a kind of consensus:
digital technology did launch an era of democ
ratization for Chinese film. The arrival of digital
video cameras on the mainland has provided
filmmakers with significant levels of empower
ment: it has distributed power and possibilities
to every individual for them to use video cameras
and make films. The individual is not obliged
to come from the right family, or possess any
specific identity or an elite background. This is
why the cumulative number of independent
filmmakers and films over the last two decades
has far surpassed the pioneers of the first
decade. In terms of output, they loyally continue
the two threads developed from the early days:
documentary and fiction, while also looking
at experimental film and independent animation.
Out of all these, independent documentary film
is undoubtedly the greatest part.

In fact, the advent of independent film in
the digital age truly began around 2000 with a
number of DV documentaries. As these works
made their way into to the public eye, the younger
1970s generation of filmmakers also came to
prominence. Chinese film history has a formula
of generational divisions. The Sixth Generation
refers to the group of directors, all born in the
1960s, who first attempted to create independent
works during the 1990s. However, the further

development of independent filmmaking makes

this generational divide nonsensical because
more and more filmmakers came into the field,
altering the age distribution among independent
filmmakers. There no longer existed a direct
and inevitable relationship between their back
grounds and the shape of their work. Thus, in
terms of film scholarship, generational divide is
no longer a convincing indicator.

The texture of the independent docu
mentary comes from its entry into the strongest
fields of this era. Chinas vast territory has
offered sufficient breadth for those works, while
their depth has arisen from the individual points
of view and emotions engraved in their depiction;
these points of view have become irreplaceable
because they are distinctively different from the
official or the mainstream medias standpoints.
They have discovered more details and the
truth in areas where these have been neglected
or obscured. That is the reality of ordinary life
at the grassroots level of Chinese society, often
called the underclass. Contemporary indepen
dent documentary filmmakers honestly record
the difficult paths that these members of the
underclass are being coerced to traverse due to
the advancing forces of time, and catalogue
their ignorance, awareness, pain, frustrations
and struggles. Each work is built on the basis
of long-term observation and communication
between the filmmakers and their subjects.
These great works have acquired impressive
insights, which often embody profound emotions
in addition to struggles for survival and the
tough nature of these peoples lives. This is the

grassroots nature of Chinese contemporary

independent film. It is also the source of its
unquestionable moral strength.

Within Chinas film history, there has
never been a moment like this: the relationship
between the image of the film and the lives
of ordinary people has never been so intimate
and attached. The experience accumulated over
the last two decades has meant that independent
documentary has been able to present this
perspective and played this role. This approach
has constructed the relationship between the
image and the subject and this naturally shows
up in the diversity of the form, methods and
aesthetic significance. The majority of the works
correspond to cinma vrit and direct cinema
in world documentary history terms. These forms
emphasize the field, intrusive or non-intrusive
observations, and the capturing of complete
segments of time, so as to represent the changes
of the events following the natural flow of life
and daily rhythms, attempting to extract a certain
essence from within. These kinds of work make
up the principal inclinations of the independent
documentary of this era. While they touch
upon some realistic issues quite strongly, they are
inevitably quickly perceived as being politically
sensitive. These works take on two dimensions:
when the emphasis is on the aesthetical, it
forms a realist narrative with film auteur appeal;
when the film subject attempts to practice
a civic duty by focusing on public incidents and
expressing political demands, the camera is
transformed into a tool supporting the subject
in the pursuit of social participation.

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At the same time, other filmmakers turn
the camera on themselves, dealing with subjects
about the individual and the family. Hence,
independent documentary has also been
developing relationships with the private sphere.
In these cases the filmmaker and their subject
become one, and life in front of and behind
the camera cannot be separated. Actually it is
utilizing the commensurability between the
private and public spheres, when personal stories,
emotions, experiences, scenes and memories are
revealed and addressed, that the individual is
transformed into the collective. Such transforma
tions are not only a form of release but also
a form of sharing. Other works purposely
distance themselves from the regular formats of
documentary by elaborating a creative visual
language within the text. They emphasize the
auteur feature in the documentary following other
lines, charging the genre of documentary film
with greater aesthetic intent. Roughly speaking,
these several orientations cover the main
genealogies of contemporary independent
documentary filmmaking in China.

Independent documentary is building its
own traditions, feeding on the nutrition and
energy absorbed from the soil of the reality. Even
though it echoes classic models such as direct
cinema, cinma vrit and self-reflexive
documentaries, Chinese independent documen
tary has not been nourished much in terms of
its cinematic language and approach by Western
classics and practices, with the exception of a
very limited number of documentary masters and
some anecdotal inspiration along the way. Due

to limitations in terms of the channels available

to obtain resources, the vast majority of
independent filmmakers start their film work by
simply picking up a camera and filming. Some
of them were formally educated in art schools.

The spirit and visage of independent
documentary of this time period forms a break
with the official mainstream documentary format
in China be it in terms of ideology, approach
or aesthetics. Chinese mainstream documentary
has tended to inherit the tradition of political
propaganda film initiated by newsreels. Though it
has undergone some adjustments in different
time periods with some variations, it has never
stopped serving its function as a mouthpiece for
the states ideology. Prior to the digital age, the
television networks in the 1990s attempted some
innovative documentary practices before really
developing into a tradition. The lives of ordinary
people have on occasion become the subject
of documentary programs on one or two big tele
vision stations for a while, but they then rapidly
disappeared from the spotlight.

One some level, it is independent docu
mentary film that has taken on the responsibility
that the TV stations would not, and it is this
that has made documentary images of this era
avoid the emptiness. The collection of works
from this period has not only formed its own
body of tradition but has also helped create the
history of contemporary Chinese documentary
film, bringing it into a dialogue with the broader
tradition of international documentary film
and becoming part of its contemporary extension
and self-renewal. The contribution of Chinese

independent documentary to this renewal

lies in the vitality and driving force it offers based
on local and regional experiences. These works,
based on in-depth local experiences, convey
their own sense of time and rhythm which
are formed on site, adjusting the filmmakers
perspective and position, and redefining the dis
tance that can be achieved between filmmakers
and their subjects. The video camera takes on
an existence from the here and now which
encompasses language, faces, bodies, emotions
and all the flavor of what is brought along with
it. Wang Bing, one of the most illuminant
and iconic examples, provides a convincing case
study with over 15 years of consistent indepen
dent work. His series of films are rooted
deeply in Chinas history and present, and have
invariably confronted some of the most urgent
political and realistic issues. He has conducted
thorough field studies on these issues, making
him engage in profound reflection as a
director and then presenting them through his
cinematic language and method. He once
claimed to be a conservative, but every one of
his works possesses a form of modernist
aesthetic impulse. Not only has he conducted
creative practices and important studies in
different fields of contemporary Chinese society,
he has also expanded the language and boundary
of documentary film by applying the possibilities
provided by new media. He is determined
to break through the limitations of documentary
as a genre, while trying to rebuild its relationship
with cinema. In this process he has stretched
the boundaries of film. His efforts have gained

extensive international recognition. He has

re-awakened an awareness of documentary film
and updated some stereotypes about this genre.
As creative documentary undergoes a slow
waning amid the institutionalization of a certain
global scale of documentary, the validity of
Wang Bings work has been demonstrated by the
reputation he has achieved in international film.

Wang is not alone in confronting his era.
Many other filmmakers have been working
and advancing in silence. This is the resilience of
Chinese independent documentary. They have
all taken their own paths, but they all delve deeply
into the textures of Chinese society, recording,
preserving images and memories for posterity.
That is why the history of independent documen
tary has not been built upon a few outstanding
works by a handful of individuals, but rather
is the result of a collective and dedicated effort.
Naturally, there are differences in the quality
of films from the past three decades, but
together, these films constitute an archive of this
era and this society, with a value that extends
beyond film and into the realms of sociology
and anthropology.

The turn of the new millennium was a
turning point for the dissemination of independent
film in China. Its efforts to enter public spaces
commenced at that time, starting with film clubs
scattered in a few big cities and later spawning
independent film festivals. Since that time, due to
the identity of independent film and the situation
that has been shaped by the system in which it
exists, its endeavors has proven to be a consistent
struggle revolving around social inclusion and

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exclusion. Contemporary art experienced a

similar phase until it finally gained a solid foothold,
but independent film has never been able to
come out of its predicament. Within the cultural
fabric of Chinese society, independent film
has not yet achieved a conclusive and appropriate
position let alone an imposing one. This is
also the reason why the imagery of wild grass
remains such an appropriate analogy for
independent film today.

Since it has already developed, the
existence of independent film of course makes
sense. Its reason for being lies beyond the textual
sphere. As powerful as those filmic texts are, the
actions of the many individual filmmakers are just
as impactful, and such actions are symbolic since
they are testimony to an individuals social inter
vention and participation through the media of
film. This participation has something to do with
freedom, which is hidden within the crevices of
this era. The filmmakers have discovered these
crevices, delved into it and explored a wider world.
The space offered by the state and these times is
like this, and filmmakers have immersed them
selves into these crevices, demonstrating with
their actions the limits and possibilities of freedom.

This is an unfinished process and still
underway. If there is no modernity with a single
dimension, then what independent film especially
independent documentary offers is the flipside,
which is actually an indivisible component of
this systemic whole. Many years later, if it has
not been forgotten and submerged by the passing
of time, independent film will always have an
opportunity to release an energy accumulated

from within, and re-launch a dialogue with us in

the form of collective memory.

Translated by Fei Wu
Revised by Miguel Fialho

The Power of Narrating

and the Politics of Listening
in Ko Sakai and
Ryusuke Hamaguchis
Tohoku Documentary Trilogy
Ayako Saito

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From 2011 to 2013, they conducted a series

of interviews and conversations with residents
of the affected areas in vast regions of Tohoku.
The result is the trilogy, consisting of The Sound
of the Waves (2011), Voices from the Waves
(2013), and Storytellers (2013).

All three films consist of people narrating
their stories, be they personal experiences
or local folktales, bracketed by the images of
scenery captured from inside a car on the road
from place to place in the affected areas of
Tohoku. In the simplest settings with some
chairs, desks and tables, in barely furnished
rooms in most cases, people sit and talk,
narrating various stories. No additional images
are inserted to illustrate their stories when
they speak, no emotional music accompanies
their narrative in a bid to heighten drama, and
no extra information is presented about them
or their lives.

In the first two films of the trilogy, The
Sound of the Waves and Voices from the Waves,
the focus is on the survivors, recounting their
experiences during the earthquake and the
tsunami, reflecting on their experiences of the
disaster and how they and their lives have been
affected by it. The third film, Storytellers, on
the other hand, is not about the disaster as such;
it features a few old women and men sharing
old folktales unrelated to the disasters that have
been passed down in the Tohoku region for
generations and collected by the Miyagi Folktales
Association. The sequences of storytelling
are punctuated by the shots of conversations
taken from inside a moving car between the

filmmakers and Ms Kazuko Ono, the founder of

the Association, who introduces each storyteller.
As the trilogy unfolds, we realize it in one way
or another deals with the lessons of survival,
implicitly confronting us with what we should
learn from the history of individual experiences
in both private and public terms. At the same
time, they shed light on the subtle complexities
of the singularity of each experience, manifested
forcibly in the optical records of individual
storytelling as captured by the camera.

In The Sound of the Waves, as we listen to

stories, which invariably convey the fear and
shock experienced during the disaster, we come
to realize that it is impossible to generalize
each narrators experience. Although there are
common expressions and similar experiences,
each story and experience told in the film is
radically different. Such differences may come
from differences in background, age, gender,
occupation and familial setting, or personality;
some narrators are more open than others,
some more reticent; some are more cheerful,
and some more serious. Those who have lost
their families and friends express more acute
pain, and those who actually witnessed the
tsunami or were swept up by it have different
views on the future from those who did not
directly experience it, including whether or not
they would continue to live in the area after
recovery and reconstruction. Whatever damage

they might have had from the disaster, however,

they are the ones who survived; they are keenly
aware of those who suffered more, and those
who did not survive. These differences become
starker and more evident through the repetitive
nature of the filmic construction.

But what is most striking in the trilogy
is the way in which the filmmakers incorporate
the elements of fiction filmmaking into the
documentary construction of the events. Half
an hour into The Sound of the Waves, it soon
becomes evident that the filmmakers carefully
avoid the familiar methods and manners used
for conventional TV news or documentary
films about disastrous events. One cannot help
but feel that something different is going on.
In conventional documentaries that generally
aim to educate the viewers with the edifying
information, peoples testimonies are presented
as non-fictional truth in order to convey specific
messages. They often use voice-over narration
as an omnipresent guide to form a neatly
organized narrative in the viewers mind so that
the viewers unconsciously feel they understand
the event. They underline the non-fiction
nature of the event, emphasizing the real people
talking about their real experiences, while
downplaying the various cinematic manipulations
in the process of reconstructing the event into
an organized narrative such as mise-en-scne,
editing, the presence of the camera or the
filmmakers behind the camera, the use of music,
and the commentary of the voice-over narration.
All these elements necessary for a cinematic
representation of the event are supposed to be

20112013

2011311

(The Sound of the Waves, 2011)

(Voices from the Waves, 2013) (Story

tellers, 2013)

30

2011

3.11

(http://recorder311-e.smt.jp/)

One
When the unprecedentedly massive earthquake
and tsunami hit a vast area of the Tohoku region
of north eastern Japan on March 11, 2011,
catastrophic images of the disaster proliferated
throughout the world. Those who were not
directly affected by the immediate destruction
experienced the disaster through various images;
the representations of the disaster were con
stantly broadcast on television, transmitted and
disseminated via the internet and social media
throughout the world. This was not the case with
the people directly affected in the ravaged areas,
however. They were shielded from the multitude
of images of disaster, because there was no
electricity in the affected regions in the immediate
aftermath and for some time thereafter.

Among the many visual representations
of the disaster within the last three years, Ko
Sakai and Ryusuke Hamaguchis Tohoku trilogy
occupies a special place. In the early summer of
2011, the two young filmmakers participated in
Sendai Mediatheques Center for Remembering
3.11, a project which encourages the collabo
ration of media studios, experts and staff,
citizens and filmmakers with the aim of sharing
information and promoting the recording and
preservation of photos, films and texts,
archiving the process of disaster recovery
(http://recorder311-e.smt.jp/). Both of them
had made fiction films (and in fact, Hamaguchi
was working on a fiction film project as well
while working on the trilogy), but this was their
first project dealing with a non-fiction subject.

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made unobtrusive so that the viewers can

concentrate on the natural flow of information so
as to authenticate the representation as
unmediated reality. Images and testimonies are
used primarily to prove or support the overall
argument or message of the production but the
content is what matters. Filmmakers usually
choose the best way to deliver the content; the
less conspicuous is the form, the better. Images
and testimonies, the testimonial evidence, are
presented not for their own sake but for the
overall message.
In The Sound of the Waves, we sense
quite clearly that there is something unusual
about the way the speakers are filmed. In a
conventional setting, we usually see the speakers
alone in the frame, often in a long-take, talking
to invisible interviewers off-screen so that the
artificiality of the situation is not usually
recognized. In Sakai and Hamaguchis film,
however, men and women do not speak alone
to the interviewer behind the camera; they are
often presented as a pair, be they sisters,
friends, couples, and sometimes with one of the
filmmakers, sitting face to face, and speaking
to each other. Shots alternate between the
speakers; that is, the camera alternates between
shots that show one person at a time (usually
the person talking). This is what we call the
shot-reverse shot structure, one of the most
common ways of showing two people interacting
with each other in a piece of typical Hollywood
cinema. The filmmakers utilize the stylistic
conventions of narrative film into their documen
tary subject, and throughout the trilogy, they

choose to employ this editing style when filming

the narrators. The directors thus attempt to
structure the film as if it were a fiction, narrative
film, thereby challenging the generic conventions
of documentary filmmaking.

But not only do they use this fictional
style, Sakai and Hamaguchi also modify this
conventional style so as to go against its
conventionality. The shot-reverse shot structure
is typically used to situate the viewers right in
the middle of the conversation, crossing over the
screen boundary, inviting them to identify
closely with the fictional characters. In classical
Hollywood cinema, the characters thus never
look at the camera to position the viewer as
the anonymous voyeur. The filmmakers seem
to be quite aware of the danger of voyeuristic
seduction of the viewers in the use of shotreverse shot structure so they film the speaking
subjects looking directly into the camera, which
is not a typical way of constructing the shotreverse shot structure (but most well-known in
Yasujiro Ozu films, or Jean-Luc Godard films),
thus aimed directly at us, forcing us to be aware
of the camera intervention, yet at the same time,
encouraging us to concentrate on the act and
the process of narration.

In this manner, rather than being totally
absorbed into the content of the story itself
and forgetting the outside reality, we are
constantly aware that each narrator is a real
person in the real world, not a fictional character.
Moreover, by the visual power of close-ups in
each frontal shot, we become highly attentive to
all the subtleties of facial expressions, of body

reactions, of tones of voice. We slowly become

avid listeners, invited to share in the act of
narrating and listening. There emerges a certain
sense of simultaneity of the onscreen unfolding
of the storytelling with the experiences of the
viewers in the theater. By way of being invited
to participate in reproducing the act of narrating
and listening, we no longer simply watch and
hear about their experiences, but rather we
actually relive the experience with the narrators.
We then comprehend that the narrators also
relive their experiences when they recount their
no longer raw and unmediated stories. Through
a meticulous framing of the speaking subjects
and a rigid control over the camera placement,
reconstructed by the variations of the shotreverse shot structure, the filmmakers achieve
such an extraordinary effect. By exploiting the
cinematic style of narrative film but with a
highly self-reflexive modification of its effect,
The Sound of the Waves manages to underscore
the documentary process of articulation and
narration, capturing the intimate moments
of interaction in real life, making the viewer an
emotionally and intellectually engaged participant
and rather than a voyeuristic onlooker.

In psychoanalysis, the talking cure was a point of

departure. There is something therapeutic about
the act of talking. In dealing with trauma, talking
is the first step towards coming to terms with the
wound. The trilogy, both at the site of production

and reception, creates a space where the un

bearable reality of the disaster and the feeling of
loss are first evoked, and then by recounting the
experiences of going through the unspeakable
event, the space can be transformed into a public
sphere, in which personal intimacy attains a
certain political dimension and begins to repre
sent the recovery process. It is also an act of
reclaiming the affective ties that have been violently
severed by the loss and the damage caused by
the disaster. Recounting the actual experiences
is always fused with fiction and memory.

Even in Storytellers, which does not
directly deal with the disaster, the vivid
recounting of local folktales by storytellers is not
simply about the content of the stories. What
underlies these stories is the collective memory
of the hardships experienced by the local
communities. In the act of narrating, a folktale is
transformed into the private fantasy of the
storyteller. The practice of narrating folktales
translates personal expression of suffering and
the hardships of survival in everyday life.
The film captures the incredibly rich moments
of the story being generated by the act of
storytelling; in fact, we are not only fascinated
by the stories themselves, but more mesmerized
by the strong voices of the female storytellers,
with different melodic tones, rhythms and
tempos. They narrate as they sing, as the original
Japanese title of Storytellers, Utauhito (singers),
articulates.

The first story presented in the trilogy in
the opening sequence of The Sound of the Waves
is by an 86 year old woman who, with her

Three

//

189633

1896

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(Utauhito)

316

86

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14-11-21 3:21

self-made picture-card slides, narrates the story

of her familys survival of the two big tsunamis
which hit the region in the last two centuries. She
talks about her own grandfather, the sole
surviving family member from the disastrous
tsunami on June 15, 1896 (known as the 1896
Meiji Sanriku Earthquake), who endlessly
recounted his experience to his granddaughter,
who in turn experienced another big tsunami in
the Showa era on March 3, 1933 (known
as the 1933 Showa Sanriku Earthquake), which
ravaged the region. The story ends with
her anguish and damnation of the sea that has
destroyed so many lives. The shots of local
graves and the monument to the 1933 tsunami
disaster that immediately follows her slide show
give silent voice to her repressed tears. Then the
film shows her and her sister in dialogue with
Hamaguchis intervention.

The concluding film of the trilogy is
Storytellers, whose focus has moved from
recording the survivors to the storytellers who
pass down the rich tradition of storytelling in
the Tohoku region. In retrospect, we recognize
that the first story told in the picture-card
slides show, presented with some shots of graves
and monuments in The Sound of the Waves,
epitomizes the entire trilogy in the contemporary
mode of representation and articulation. Instead
of the picture-card slide show, we have film;
instead of one old woman telling her story to the
local community, the film is exhibited all over
Japan and the world.

The trilogy is as much about memory as
about traumatic disaster. The three films testify

to the power of the act of narrating, the

complexity of human emotions, the incredible
ability of reflection, and the underlying tradition
of storytelling in the Tohoku region. They convey
in a highly nuanced manner the tragic loss
felt by the survivors in the community, and at the
same time, we witness the empowering and
transformative process of telling and retelling
traumatic experiences that unfold in the course
of the film. The impact on the viewer is in
no way sensational, but a deeply moving shared
experience, generating a space and time for
the public act of film viewing to also be intimately
private. In the end, the Tohoku trilogy defies
any simple distinction between fiction and nonfiction, between narrative and documentary,
enticing us to reflect on the intricate relationship
between cinema and memory, between images
and voices, and the production of a site
where private and collective memories converge,
through which new social and political awareness
is generated.

Storytelling requires both tellers of tales
and listeners to those tales. Sakai and
Hamaguchi started as listeners themselves
when they began filming, and they searched for
ways to capture the power of storytelling with
their cameras in an attempt to reconstruct it in a
manner as forceful as the original. As we listen
to the stories told and retold on screen during
the viewing experience of the trilogy, we are trans
formed into the social subject, bearing witness
to the production of meaning in our attempt
to come to terms with the disaster. Despite the
enormity of the damage and the tragic loss of

1933331933

1933

life experienced by people in the Tohoku

region, in the body of each and every person
who appears on the screen lies a story their
bodies and their voices attest to the power
of remembrance, so forcibly and cinematically
demonstrated in the trilogy.

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14000859-10-p320-372.indd 320-321

FILM
PROGRAM

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On the banks of the Yangtze River, men

living in on-site barracks provide the manual
labor needed to produce enormous ships,
each of which will be sold to a German client
for 15 million. A compact portrait of place,
Qiao charts the daily existence of these
men amid the hiss and whir of machines,
but also in the midst of the globalized circuits
of production and consumption in which
they participate. We see where the men
work and live, but Qiaos task is not simply
a straightforward rendering visible of this
normally occluded labor. The intense fog
of exterior shots and cloudy darkness of the
ships interiors suggest instead a failure
of visibility, an opacity that serves to allegorize
the disjunction that exists between the
visceral immediacy of work and the elusive
and expropriating flows of transnational
capital. A brief interlude near the films end
provides the only respite, countering the crush
of modernity with a moment of bodily
strength and grace shot in warm ocher hues.

2013 | 13'

Qiao (Crust) , 2013, 13', China

Qiao (Crust)

Huang Wenhai

2013 | 13'
China

1500

1971,

Born 1971;
lives and works in Hong Kong

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14-11-21 3:21

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault

looked forward to the day when the concept of
man would be erased, like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea. Leviathan offers
one possible response as to what cinema
might look like afterward, coincidentally
turning to the same maritime locale from which
Foucault drew his famous simile. Men, of
course, still exist in the film: they work in the
commercial fishing industry in the dark, cold
waters off the coast of New England. But no
longer does man function as the organizing
principle of knowledge and of cinematographic
language. Rather, the fishermen figure as
but one part of an assemblage that includes
both nature and technology, challenging an
anthropocentric worldview with an immersive
picturing of non-hierarchical relatedness.
The disinterested stability of monocular
perspective is jettisoned in favor of cameras
that bob, soar, roll, swim and probe not
separate from the world they depict, but
actors within. Produced in Harvard Universitys
Sensory Ethnography Lab and shot on a
dozen digital video cameras including the
tiny GoPro format the film confronts ancient
themes with the most contemporary of
concerns.

2012 | 87'

//

Leviathan, 2012, 87', US/UK/France //

Leviathan

Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Vrna Paravel

2012 | 87'
US/UK/France

Lucien Castaing-Taylor, born 1966;

Vrna Paravel, born 1971;
live and work in Boston and Paris

1966,
1971,

Go-Pro

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14-11-21 3:21

In northern China, a man lives alone in an

underground cave. Light snow dusts the
bleached-out grass of the plains he crosses
each day in order to complete the meager
activities required for his survival: collecting
dung and sticks, making food and gardening.
Entirely without dialogue, The Man With
No Name offers a portrait of solitude,
of an existence engulfed by only the barest
necessities. For the artist, the mans way
of life represents a compelling alternative
in the era of the New China: We are
living in a time of growing material desires,
both individual and as a society. It is a time
of hypertrophied desires. Then here is
someone who might be the poorest, the
loneliest, but also the simplest, someone
on his own and pretty much self-sufficient.
After concentrating for so long on the
landscapes of post-industrialization, here,
Wang gestures to the unevenness and
asynchrony of development, capturing not
the dark underside of the economic miracle,
but also its radical outside.

The Man With No Name, 2009, 98', China

The Man With No Name

Wang Bing

2009 | 98'
China

2009 | 98'

1967,

Born 1967,
lives and works in Beijing

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14-11-21 3:21

Rati Chakravyuh
Rati Chakravyuh

2013 | 106'
India/Germany

On the night of a complete lunar eclipse,

12 newly wed couples come together after
their mass wedding with a priestess and
talk So begins Rati Chakravyuh, a film shot
in a single take, depicting the groups final
conversation before they commit mass suicide.
Whereas most wedding nights would fall
under the sign of Eros, here, Thanatos rules.
The 13 sit in a tight circle as the camera
rotates around them, capturing a wide-ranging
discussion: topics include origins, existence,
death, popular culture, and the sex lives
of protagonists in the Ramayana, among
others. Avikunthak has said the work is in part
inspired by Da Vincis rendering of the Last
Supper; it is a scene of final communion and
revelation within a collective. Rati is the
Hindu goddess of love, the personification of
enjoyment, pleasure and carnal desire.
Chakravyuh, meanwhile, refers to a
circular military formation described in the
Mahabharata that appears labyrinthine
when viewed from above an apt model for
the films spiraling cinematography.

Rati ChakravyuhRati Chakravyuh, 2013, 110', India/Germany /

Ashish Avikunthak

2013 | 106'
/

Rati Chakravyuh

(Eros)
(Thanatos)

Born 1972; lives and works

in Kolkata, Mumbai and New Haven

1972,

(Ramayana)

Rati
Chakravyuh(Mahabharata)

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Peoples Park is a 78-minute journey through

a crowded park in Chengdu, captured in
a single take on 30 July 2011. A product of
Harvard Universitys Sensory Ethnography
Lab, the film shares with Leviathan an interest
in experimenting with new modes of
nonfiction filmmaking, but makes strikingly
different formal and technological choices.
In place of 12 cameras and extensive editing,
the mesmerizing unbroken duration of
Peoples Park was accomplished using the
simplest of means: Cohn sat in a wheelchair
pushed by Sniadecki, holding a consumergrade digital camera. Direct sound was
recorded via a microphone strapped to the
wheelchairs armrest. As the filmmakers
move through the park, they capture manifold
dimensions of public experience: sleeping,
singing, dancing, exercising, waiting, eating,
even mugging for the camera. The advent
of digital cinematography made possible
longer shot durations than were never feasible
in analogue film, allowing for new and
unprecedented explorations of the continuous
unfolding of space and time. Whereas the
96-minute Steadicam sequence of Alexander
Sokurovs Russian Ark (2002) exploited this
ability in order to showcase virtuosic
choreography and labored mise-en-scne,
Peoples Park uses the long take to different,
arguably more appropriate ends: a quiet
exaltation of the everyday that gives reign to
contingency, interconnectedness and joy.

2012 | 78'

Peoples Park, 2012, 78', US/China /

Peoples Park

Libbie D.Cohn
J.P. Sniadecki

2012 | 78'
US/China

78

96(Russian Ark, 2002)

2011730

(Sensory Ethnography Lab)(Leviathan)

12

1989,
1979,

J.P. Sniadecki, born 1979;

Libbie Dina Cohn, born 1989;
live and work in the US

(Alexander Sokurov)Steadicam

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2013 | 83'
India/UAE

Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran of CAMP

pursue their ongoing interest in infrastructure
and circulation in this project of collective
documentation. Merchant sailors from the Gulf
of Kutch in India travel across the Arabian Sea
to the Persian Gulf and beyond, transporting
all manner of goods. Working with footage
collected over a four-year period, Anand and
Sukumaran weave together their own HD
video with images made by the sailors using
mobile phone cameras and camcorders. These
heterogeneous textures from crisp clarity to
painterly pixelation combine with Bollywood
and religious songs chosen by the sailors
to form a compilation film displaying at once a
palpable intimacy and a grand scope.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, 2013, 83', India/UAE /

From Gulf
to Gulf to Gulf

CAMP

CAMP

CAMPs directorial agency is largely

withdrawn from the moment of image capture,
asserted instead in the creative act of
montage. But in so doing, this film based on
actual events and videos of actual events
poses the question of what it means to make
an image at its very core. Like Qiao, From Gulf
to Gulf to Gulf offers a striking reminder that
though our global system is so often described
as cognitive capitalism trafficking in
information and fuelled by immaterial labor it
still rests on the physical work of real bodies,
fabricating and transporting real goods.

2013 | 83'
/

(Shaina Anand)

(Ashok Sukumaran)camp

(Gulf of Kutch)

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in 2007;

based in Mumbai

CAMP (
Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)
CAMP, 2007,

CAMP

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2014 | 84'
Algeria/France

In this hallucinatory film, set over a single

day in Algiers, a band of children sick of eating
beans decide to storm the French barracks
in search of better food. This revolution, borne
of innocence and necessity alike, is nothing
other than a microcosmic rendering of
the Algerian War of Independence. Seen in
this way, Bloody Beans is indeed an historical
fiction. But another way of approaching this
playfully magical tale of colonial uprising
is as a document of collective re-enactment;
a complex engagement with the past rather
than a representation of it. This tension
between fabulation and record yields results
at once beautiful and powerful.

2014 | 84'
/

Bloody Beans, 2014, 84', Algeria/France /

Bloody Beans

Narimane Mari

1969,
Born 1969,
lives and works in France

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From 2011 to 2013, Ko Sakai and Ryusuke

Hamaguchi conducted a series of
conversations with residents of the northern
region of Tohoku, Japan, an area heavily hit by
both the earthquake and tsunami of March
2011. Their research resulted in three films:
Namino oto (The Sound of the Waves, 2011),
Namino koe (Voices from the Waves, 2013),
and Utauhito (Storytellers, 2013), which have
come to be known as the Tohoku trilogy. In
Storytellers, inhabitants of Tohoku deliver
mukashi banashi (folk tales of rural life, often
replete with talking animals), not to the camera
but to others present in the room. These tales
are mixed with autobiographical reflections
and thoughts on the process and function of
both telling and apprehending oral narratives.
Centering on this rich folk tradition and the
dialogic encounter it involves, the film explores
the roles established in the complicity between
speakers and listeners. The voice emerges as
the engine of storytelling practices,
constituting a site at which meaning and
materiality converge, allowing individuals to
make sense of and seize their experience of
the world.

Storytellers, 2013, 120', Japan

Storytellers

Ko Sakai
Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2013 | 120'
Japan

2013 | 120'

20112013
20113

(The Sound of the Waves, 2011)

(Voices from the Waves, 2013)
(Storytellers, 2013)

1979,
1978,

Ko Sakai, born 1979;

lives and works in Tokyo
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, born 1978;
lives and works in Kobe

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In this installment of the Tohoku trilogy,

inhabitants of the region recall memories of
March 11, 2011, the day that a 9.0 magnitude
undersea earthquake triggered a powerful
tsunami that reached over 40 meters in
height, causing meltdowns in three reactors
of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
As in Storytellers, these narratives take shape
within a lived social relation, as friends
and family members relate to and for each
other their recollections of that unforeseen day.
These accounts diverge sharply from the
ossified discourses of victimhood and catas
trophe broadcast by media outlets the world
over. Rather than reproducible soundbites,
these stories are given time to unfold in their
complexity, allowing for the transmission
of individual experience in a manner too often
foreclosed. Filmed over the course of a year,
Voices from the Waves testifies not only to the
trauma of the tsunami but also to the diverse
ways in which this event has been incorporated
into the fabric of life in the region, a life that
continues long after the worlds attention
has turned elsewhere.

Voices from the Waves, 2013, 212', Japan

Voices from the Waves

Ko Sakai
Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2013 | 212'
Japan

2013 | 212'

2011311 9
40

1979,
1978,
Ko Sakai, born 1979;
lives and works in Tokyo
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, born 1978;
lives and works in Kobe

Film program texts Erika Balsom

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The Sharpest Ideology:

That Reality Appeals to its
Realistic Character
Alexander Kluge

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It must be possible to present reality as the

historical fiction that it is. Its impact on
the individual is real and is fate. But it is not
fate, rather made by the labor of generations of
men who actually wanted and want something
completely different, the whole time.

In this sense reality is, in various
respects, simultaneously real and unreal. Real
and unreal in every one of its individual aspects:
the collective wishes of men, labor power,
relations of production, persecution of witches,
history of wars, life histories of individuals.
Each of these aspects in themselves and taken
together have an antagonistic quality: they are a
crazy fiction and they have a real impact.
This makes for rigidity. Frozen coldness.
Men die as a result, are pulled apart, are
subjected to bombing raids, are dead while alive,
are placed in asylums and called mad. And so on.

Reality is real in that it really oppresses
men. It is unreal in that every oppression only
displaces energies. They disappear from sight
but they continue to work underground. The
repressed is the source of all labor, underneath
the terror of the real.

A so-called love scene is such a real
fiction, for example. We are all accustomed to
measuring such a scene in a film or in reality
according to realistic criteria, which are
supposedly contained in this scene itself. The
love scene, however, is only realistic if, for
example, the future abortion is also built into it.

But also the history of all earlier
abortions. The same applies to a love scene in
reality whether or not the pair thinks about

abortion, whether or not this is relevant for the

concrete case.

All previous experience, also that
excluded by contraception, also that of parents
and grandparents and of all other love scenes,
is present in the concrete scene. The conflict
between tenderness and the un-tender
consequences, the excessive expectation and
how much of it is fulfilled, this is precisely the real
content. All other perceptions are measured
against the sharpness of this conflict. Isolated,
reduced to the present, the love scene becomes
ideological. The scene also becomes ideological,
if all illusions are cast out. It could not take place.
The history of whole generations and of
all its consequences stamps the capacity or the
incapacity for love, all forms of expression in the
scene, all contact, all hesitation, the spontaneity.
The foreshortened perception of the sexuality
of the woman is real if it is thought that it applies
to orgasm, but also to her real sexual history,
which goes on being narrated until the child is
born, grows up, including the history of children,
who through contraception are not conceived,
but who then negatively determine any particular
moment. Whole novels are involved, without
which the individual scene is not realistic.

An admirer of reality lets things be, takes
a walk through reality, lives. Apparently he has
a congruous relation no protest occurs. This
is an error, however. How does it come about
that the monstrous assembly of commodities
takes no notice of his human needs and doesnt
notice this? In practice I can only relate humanly
to things when things relate humanly to men.

Things do not, however, relate humanly to him.

How does it happen that he doesnt
perceive this? The distorters of consciousness
have already had their effect on him. He has to
have destroyed all realism of the senses in
order to attain and maintain his contentedness.
This highly ideological labor presupposes
the protest, which must have occurred very
early in this case, now the energy of protest has
been worked off, transformed into harmony.
Social nature can produce no balanced relation
to the real.
The motive for realism is never the con
firmation of reality but protest. Protest expresses
itself in various ways: through radical imitation
(clowning, insistence, mimicry, surface coherence,
absurdity, mimesis), through escape from the
pressure of reality (dream, negation, exaggera
tion, invention, replacement of a problem by
another, salto mortale, simple omission, utopia)
or attack (destroy what is destroying you,
aggressive montage, annihilation of the object,
clich-ing the opponent, self-doubt, represen
tation taboos, destruction of the metier, guillotine).
The distinction between escape (schema
tism of the pressure of reality) and attack
(schematism of the self-defense of the subject)
is outwardly gradual and mostly not recognizable
in reality. A variant of the attack, the annihilating
reaction, is the violent righting of the inverted
relation to things. The reactions of the apparatus
of consciousness (imitation, escape) are repressed
in the interest of a rational, balanced attitude.

In all these cases protest (moral feeling,
rage, reason) finds direct expression. This direct

response, however, distorts the capacity to

differentiate within reality, the grid of attention.
What is realistic in this response (the protest
itself, the motive) and what is ideological
(the result, the statement) cannot be separated
from each other.
This is least harmful in the case of
imitation. Only the analytic interest, the clarity,
of the statement is affected here. In the working
strategies of escape and attack the real deter
mination can still be indirectly comprehended
by translating back. In the case of violent righting,
of rationalizing on the other hand, the original
relation to reality is almost impossible to recon
struct, it has disappeared in favor of the clarity of
statement, of the precision of the battlefront.
Thus not only reality as object is
antagonistic but also every human method of
working on this reality, whether the effort
operates within the real relations or whether it
places itself above the object. What is realistic
here, the anti-realism of the motive (protest,
resistance) produces the unrealistic.
The key lies in the work process itself.
First of all it is a question of producing the
capacity of differentiation at any price: not the
radicalizing of the results (they are not the root)
but the differentiation of the realism of the
motive (first step).
The realism of the motive is determined
by its confrontation with all the collective
and individual, immediate (events) and mediated
(reported knowledge) contents of experience.
This takes place in the head and is real. It
presupposes the method of association and an

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organized capacity of remembrance. The

restructuring of sensuous interest to a sensuoussocialized, thoroughly analytic second instinct.

Inseparable from the realism of the motive
is the realism of the method of operation of
the human perceptual apparatus (second step).

It has its own laws of motion. An analytic
method is hidden in them, which has to be trans
lated back. These laws of motion of the apparatus
of consciousness are the outcomes of the work of
protest of the whole human species, its living
work. In an unreal social context (of alienation)
they express themselves through resistances,
distortions, inhibitions, exaggeration, illusionary
identification and subtraction; that is to say, in a
completely unrealistic way. But it is precisely this
resistance that provides their analytic, realistic
key. For only what does not fit into this world is
true (Adorno). The recognition of the realism of
protest and of the realism of the human brain,
with its reshaping reaction to reality that is, the
species given nature of protest is the
fundamental condition of realism.
This is the subjective side, to which
corresponds the mediation of the objective side:
the actual situation (third step). Nowadays it is
almost never naturally available to the senses.
It has to be produced, constructively, reductively,
even when it appears as though it has only
been found. This finding already presupposes
analytic and synthetic labor, otherwise nothing
is found. This finding is active, because it is
determined by the leaving out of everything else.
It is etched out. What the individual camera
shot does not include is shaped into a situation.

Only in this way can the pre and after

history, which is intrinsic to every situation, be
made visible.

It is always the question of a constellation.
An actual situation in itself, that is, the mere
individual shot, does not contain the organizing
element that makes it concrete. Thus the
discovery of concrete situations presupposes the
production of the means of production, the forms
of authentic observation (fourth step). This
production process is not for instance identical
with the application of film technique or of styles.
The production of the forms of expression must
rather be concrete, following the analytic method,
and respond to the proceeding steps one to
three. Strictly speaking, authentic laws of form
would thus have to be newly developed for every
film. In every case the taking-over of formal
laws from the history of the film has to be freshly
tested for each new film.
The classical ideal of the unity of form
and content will thus reveal itself as schematic.
The realisms of the motive, of human perception
(distortion), the realism of the actual, that is,
social situations, and the realism of the filmic
means of production they are all formal laws of
the social reality and not the substance of the
individual film or of the individual artists head.
The alien formal laws of society in relation to the
individual film material give the proportions of
the resultant product.
The means of expression is the difference,
the basic disharmony between the individual pro
duct and reality, not the easily fabricated harmony
of the individual material with itself.

Finally, the production of the horizon of
experience (fifth step). Without such a context of
experience, which mediates experience in the
production of experience, neither motive nor
perception of constellation can exist or direct
themselves, nor are there criteria for the
authenticity of the means of production. Without
it there would be no collectivity.
This horizon of experience is the specific
form of the public sphere, in which the whole
cultural work of experience takes place. The
reshaping of the public sphere is therefore the
condition and, at the same time, that most
important object which the realistic method works
on and against.

It is not a question of waiting for the
reshaping of the horizon of experience because,
for instance, the separation of experiences
through the compartmentalization of the bourgeois
public sphere hampers each of the steps named
here. Rather, the uncompromising production
of realistic products is itself the means of
changing the horizon of experience, by breaking
through the limits of the public sphere. If it is a
question for example of changing the cinematic
horizon, then films are one of the means of
expanding the horizon of experience.

On the other hand reality itself produces
a breaking through of the classical horizons of the
public sphere. For instance, forms of perception,
contents of reality penetrate the cinema, which
did not originate in the cinema but arise from the
permanently changing reproduction of society.
The cutting out of the secondary in favor of the
primary, for example the feet or the body in the

interest of the close-up, is prepared through the

social cutting into shape of labor power. Only
if this is given in the experience of the audience
can the film make film language out of it. All this
has the character of a construction site.

It is fundamentally imperfect and it is
therefore permissible to make an outline of the
realistic method without taking into account that
neither ones own films nor film history, neither
the practice of todays author films nor the films
of the Proletcult movement, nor the work
of groups of political filmmakers can fill in this
outline, because it is anyway only provisional.

Cinema, author film, political film are
a program unrealized. For this reason it is not
a contradiction when radical method and early
capitalist forms of production of 1810 stand
side-by-side in the practical work of author films.
Another aspect: it is not a contradiction when
one expresses ruthless modernity, that is, formal
laws of the present, in the most primitive
possible forms of the silent film.

I do not take up the silent film in my
films for stylistic reasons, but because it is a
question of radically keeping open the
elementary roots of the film as long as the total
structure of the cinema is only a program.
This is the source of the need for robustness.
Not because it is a question of robustness,
but because it answers elementary interests of
the audience, who have this robustness,
the unfinished, the open character of a building
site in themselves. Therefore method, yes,
but anti-professional, with all imperfections:
cinema impure.

1810

13

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This essay was originally published in Alexander Kluge:

Raw Material for the Imagination, Amsterdam, 2012, 1916.

Alexander Kluge: Raw Material for the

Imagination2012, 1916.

Some additional comments: the method

described above of violent righting (rationalistic
procedure) has to be excluded. The direct interest
in a realistic result, which is contained in it and is
in itself correct, makes every one of the necessary
steps impossible. It is not so much a stumbling as
a damaging of the means of production, of the
object of production, of the apparatus of conscious
ness and a chopping to pieces of the raw material
of experience. It cannot be too strongly opposed.

Against this, the method of imitation,
together with the examination of all the escape
movements of the human subjective apparatus,
offer outstanding new material. These movements
contain the whole collective historical store of
experience, admittedly fragmented into individual
segments together with distortions, which result
from the antagonisms of subjective and objective
reality, that is to say, the complete raw material of
historical experience in a disguised form. Who
ever does not have the confidence to engage with
this material can forget about the realistic method.
The finding of situations is an extraordinarily
comprehensive and radical labor of construction.
One gets an idea of it if one observes how in
his novel Ulysses James Joyce writes more than a
thousand pages to concretize 24 hours of the
average man, Leopold Bloom.

Proust: capacity for remembrance in
seven volumes. The concreteness of the situation
presupposes a radical complexity of the narration.
All forms of expression of the bourgeois public
sphere the principle of actuality, the obviousness
of the points, the grammar itself, the grid of the
language of communication, the ways of organizing

narrative interests and types, including the epic,

etc. fragment the complexity of perception,
which is in fact the basic form of the senses.

My intention is to make clear what the
production of sensuous concreteness, the produc
tion of filmable situations, is. The reason why
such a grasping and narration of situations does
not exist in any medium, lies in the fact that too
little labor power is invested in this direction.

Reality does produce such complexes
in natural form. It is simply that they remain unnarrated. Reduction and construction, both
methods of production of scenes, are possible
artistic forms of expression but they are also real
forms, with which history cuts men into shape
for its own novel of reality. All aesthetic laws
of form are in this sense read off from reality and
never artistic invention. They are also always
produced in the heads of the audience before
they occur to an author. The author merely has
the possibility of using them correctly or falsely.

What does apply is the following: either
social history narrates its novel of reality without
regard for men, or men narrate their counterhistory. They can only do this, however, on the
level of the complexity of reality. This demands in
the most literal sense the art object, an aggre
gate of art objects. Sensuousness as method is
not a natural product of society.

(James Joyce)

(Ulysses)(Leopold

Bloom)24

(Proust)

The New Left

Within Heterotopia
Chan Koonchung

Translated by David Roberts

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This text imagines an attempt to think through

social renewal in a heterotopic world(1) neither
utopian nor dystopian. This is done without
avoiding an open discussion of controversial
post-Marxist and post-postmodern ideas,
transforming Western theoretical discourse into
half-raw, half-cooked Chinese variations.
The hope is to uncover potential progressive
implications, to sort out unimaginable threads,
and to blend perhaps useful ideas or maybe,
shall we say, to allow terms to emerge from
their existing homes into the wider world
of thought. This is not merely for the sake of
defamiliarization, but also with the aim of
perhaps making thinking and meaning overflow
beyond the destiny set down by the distribution
of the sensible.
The overflow of sense perception and the
transgression of imagination, along with idle
chatter, can be very subversive. This has been
known in China and abroad, from the past to the
present. Thus, rulers do not like people other
than themselves chattering, especially by people
who care not for their position, identity, or proper
decorum. In Platos ideal city, people who do
not know how to play defined roles and make idle
talk, and then even dispute with words, will be
exiled. In his utopia, everyone does the one job
for which they are best suited one job, one role,
one profession, one function whoever does
not follow his role will be censured. Of course,
the question of who does which line of work is, if
not determined by birth, then by the rule of the
rulers. In a modern way of saying things, students
should be good students, workers should be

(1)

workers, peasants should be peasants,

foreign laborers should always be foreigner
laborers. Each has set actions which cannot be
transgressed, and the mixing of roles is
forbidden. And thus, this is termed a speciali
zation for each one way of making a living, one
role, one profession, one function as though
only then can the world be in great order (dazhi).
Those familiar with China will at this point be
reminded of the rule of the Qin empire (221
206 BCE) with the emphasis on agriculture and
war, the Han (206 BCE220 CE) system of the
Four Classes (scholars, peasants, artisans,
merchants), or the hukou (household registration)
system today. Those more aware of Hong Kong
issues may think of how the rulers admonish
students to stay at school, go to class, and mind
their own business; or the system of functional
constituencies in the Hong Kong Legislative
Council and the Election Committee for the Chief
Executive; or else local permanent residents
peculiar treatment of foreign workers as secondclass citizens though they, too, live in the same
city. Nevertheless, such great order always
only helps the governance of ruler (and the
beneficiaries) because he got a good draw of
luck and his special skill is in ruling others. Plato
also left behind an escape route for himself,
crowning himself philosopher and saying that idle
chatter is the special skill of the philosopher: he
could guide the world as the teacher of a nation,
and even argued that if those with less wisdom
than he began speaking out, then the city and
the country will fall into disorder. Such a Platonic
state where sense perception is partitioned,

imagination disciplined, work assigned, narration

restricted, and remarks not permitted for ordinary
people, certainly will not welcome social action
that arises upwards from the lower social
echelons. Some thinkers like Jacques Rancire
even believe that all stratified systems of
governance and oppression for Rancire there
is practically no order of stratification without
oppression is Platonic. In the eyes of Rancire,
Plato is the reactionaries founding master.(2)
The distribution of the sensible (le partage
du sensible) is both the framing and compartmen
talization of narration and experience but also
the domination of the corporeal body (think of the
hukou household registration system and forced
demolitions), the policing of privacy (think
of Snowdons revelations), and the protection of
a certain stratified and exclusionary order. The
new normal techniques of governance panoptic
surveillance, proceduralized administration,
segregation by social class, grid management,
stalking by Big Data, corporeal domination,
policing privacy (all this will be labeled mass
surveillance below) allow this unbalanced domi
nation to be practically ubiquitous. The policeification of the ruling order is now the norm
rather than the exception, while capital and power
creatively collude, distributive justice has
weakened, a strong state has replaced acknow
ledged truth with sheer force, and the logic of
life and the planet is not respected. The
secularism, human rights, democracy, equality,
internationalism, social justice(3) fought for by
the wise over centuries are still an unfinished
task.(4) The good lack confidence; the evil

abandon themselves. A society even a little

upright(5) cannot find successors. Needless to
say, the Anthropocene(6) forcibly forged
by humanity, one must fear, will find it hard to
persist and endure.
The question is never merely to describe
the world, but rather, how to change it.

Is change still possible?

At this point, Foucauldians might be unsure
whether Im on their team or with the Rancire
faction who want to overturn Michel Foucault.
Neither side will be satisfied with the terms
tinged with liberalism that I used (in fact, the
secularism, human rights, democracy, equality
and internationalism, and social justice came
from tienne Balibar, with left-wing origins) and
the Habermasian awareness of the question
(to treat the question as unfinished work rather
than like those anti-Enlightenment thinkers who
see modernity as the problem itself). I believe
what I want to say is far more complicated than
the pigeonholed label of either or. Just like
Karl Marxs dissection of capital, I consider
that Foucaults interrogation of power and the
affirmation of subtle internal resistance within
systems can galvanize in todays high-tech,
panoptic world of administration of bodies. But
to avoid the immense depression brought on
by the hopelessness of liberation in Foucaults
narrative, we cannot rely on Jean Baudrillard
whose play of the virtual makes one equally
dejected, or those Communist theologians who
with their fabrications refuse to take in the
lessons of the Gulag, like that contemporary
disciple of Plato, Alain Badiou (as well as the

)(7) (

(3)

()

(4)

(5)

(8)

(6)

()

()()

()

(2)

()(

()

()

(9)

()

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theoretical talking head Slavoj iek). At this

point, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris
multitude(7) might perhaps have a comforting
effect. But if one switches tack and turn to
radical self-regard like Rancire, or ieks
action of making imagination transgress bound
aries, or Paul Virnos Autonomist face-changing
hostility,(8) only then could it lead more people
to take to the streets, to resist and fight bravely,
to undertake all sorts of disobedience like,
civil disobedience (constitutionalism), community
disobedience (the first Communitarianism),
ethnic disobedience (the other Communitari
anism), occupational disobedience (the first
politics of interest), disobedience of the
disadvantaged (a second politics of interest),
syndical disobedience (the first class politics),
class disobedience (the other class politics),
disadvantaged or ethnic minorities disobedience
(the first identity politics), generational
disobedience (the second identity politics),
disobedience of the multitude (anarchism),
disobedience in search of social progress
(humanism, equality, environmentalism,
internationalism), united disobedience of different
groups or across class lines (mass movement,
united front, popular front) in sum, many
different kinds of subjectivity, but disobedience
that sometimes overlap in their demands. It so
happens that at this time and age when Rancirian
politics constitutes an exception, these are classic
actions and moreover ordinary actions in an
extreme age great events that are frequently
expected to change the rules of the game. Rancire
often emphasizes that the real politics in his

mind is path-breaking (the rest is all police).

It is those without a social position requesting a
position and identity, or to use ieks way of
talking about great events: an event is the effect
that seems to exceed its causes.(9)

At this point, some liberal public
intellectuals in the Chinese-speaking world
would probably ask (if they actually hadnt given
up reading this piece), Has research been done
on the transition? Rancire might not deign
to answer this question actually for him, after
action lies more action. He does not believe in
any social accomplishments that can be
accumulated. iek would probably satirize the
liberals who ask this question, but he himself
would not give a direct answer. Theorists of the
multitude and the Autonomists will probably
offer up self-organized collectivities (a society of
Datong [Great Harmony], un-formalized and
without national boundaries or governments).
Yet will this attitude or answer gain the approval
of the majority of even a disorganized multitude?
When they go on the streets or sing Can You
Hear the People Sing?, would the multitude
really not be able, before the event, to internalize
an actually existing value system, and even
some non-terminal ideas about how things will be
set up the day after? After experiencing over
a century of utopian wet dreams and dystopian
nightmare, who could prevent the multitude with
still a bit of collective memory to ask: what will
happen on the second day of the revolution?

In my two interviews exploring the heritage
and current state of the Left in China,(10) aside
from lamenting how some Chinese liberals

only read books from their own faction, I also try

to remind social actors from the New Left to
pay more attention to the relatively more practical
social democratic movements over the past
century in China and abroad(11) rather than
obsessing too much about the predominantly
French major theorists. I also said that among the
group of theorists connected to Louis Althusser,
only Balibar is what we could say in Cantonese
as gau3 dzing3 or shchng in Mandarin
(aboveboard or legit). Balibar emphasizes
how equality and freedom are born together
and must continue to coexist (he coined a calque
equaliberty). He is unafraid of using words
that are not so fashionable like social welfare,
equal rights, education, morality and religious
tolerance, directly saying that after the subject,
it is the citizen who comes onto the stage, and
citizens are inseparable from equality, freedom
and democracy. His constant, in-depth investiga
tions into concepts and categories concerning
secularism, human rights, democracy, equality,
internationalism, social justice(12) have for people
like me living in Beijing and thinking about the
issues related to China, including Hong Kong
greater practical significance. It also helps all
kinds of honest intellectuals and folks engaged in
social action to find a common discourse, an
overlapping mutual understanding, and collabo
rative points of intersection.(13) Of course, Balibar
was just labeled as a reformist by Badiou whose
every word is about Communism this precisely
reflects how empty revolutionary terms and
Communist-sounding high-mindedness is of no
use to social action.

Certainly, theorists of the multitude and
Autonomists do not want to touch the words
the people, which has descended from Thomas
Hobbes. What they advocate for is a democracy
of the multitude and not a democracy of the
people, emphasizing a multitude with differences
and against a homogeneous people. They
believe the term the people has given birth to
oppressive sovereign nations including govern
ments with administrative power how many
crimes have been committed in the false name of
the people on the second day of the revolution
like in France, how the people gave birth to the
republic, and after the Chinese people stood up
and so forth while Baruch Spinozas multitude
happens to be directly opposed to such a
people of the nation-state. However, many
multitudes in actual reality subjectively prefer to
see themselves as the people, like how the multi
tude in Taiwan campaigning against the CrossStrait Service Trade Agreement call themselves
the people, while the democracy imagined by
the masses is very frequently only a democracy
within one country or one system (including
formal institutional democracies). These chal
lenge but do not overthrow all presently existing
political and legal orders and class systems.
The two kinds of understanding about the
process and results of social action are similar
to the two kinds of ontologies with leftist politics
mentioned by Chantal Mouffe.(14) The first is to
presuppose that the proletariat or the multitude
could in the end, through internal self-redemption,
leap over government systems and sovereign
states and establish a harmonious Datong society,

(14)

(12)

(13)

()

(11)

(: equaliberty)

()

(10)

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Along these lines, then, if Marx was the first type,

then Max Weber was the second type of
understanding; Hardt and Negri, Paolo Virno,
Communist theologians are the first type, while
Gramsci, Mouffe, Balibar, as well as social
democrats and even Isaiah Berlin are the
second. Early utopian Socialism and Communism,
Proudhon-style anarchy of spontaneous order,
freedom-first market fundamentalism, Confucian

harmonious worldview are all variations of the

first idea. The first type of understanding implies
the ultimate disappearance of the political sphere,
while the second type of understanding states
that all the political rough and tumble, the endless
tussling and scuffling is exactly the normal state
of a truly plural society.

Mouffe (as well as Ernesto Laclau)
identify themselves as the second kind of leftwing politics, which affirms plurality and does not
shy from social differences. Rather they aim to
turn away from the black-and-white political
struggles, to life-and-death in the manner of Carl
Schmidt towards a democratic politics that allows
for co-existence with the opposition including
but not restricted to representative democracies
with universal suffrage, consultative democracies,
republican participatory democracies, direct
(referendum-based) democracies, and democ
racies with direct action by the multitude
believing that democratic politics is founded on
top of truly plural differences and conflicts.

If the first kind of understanding still
shows traces of utopian and dystopian thought,
I believe that the second kind of understanding
acknowledges that we are situated within a
stalemate that is neither utopian nor dystopia.
At this point, the subjectivity of the masses is
awakening from either a utopian wet dream or a
dystopian nightmare, half-asleep and half-awake,
with the sexes tingling, almost believing that
one could guide the development of the story in
the dream, and even hearing from the distance
Can You Hear the People Sing? Some people
could with their sheer will awake from it, or laze

about in bed barely recovering from fright, or

clamber up and about, doing what ought to be
done. Yet, even more people would have no
means to shake off these dreams, though they are
aware of the fact that they are dreaming.

Or to use another analogy: I want to
mention a heterotopic state. The term heterotopia
is from Foucault (though the hetero has been
used earlier), though I cannot resist employing it
since it helps people gain a multi-angled
imagination of society, just like binocular humans
suddenly become multi-ocular insects, or felines
with night vision I am thinking of Lu Xuns
line: People who love the night must have ears
to hear the night and eyes to see the night.
Alone in darkness, seeing all darkness.(15) I am
not, however, very faithful to Foucaults usage.
I borrow this in contrast with another mode
of thought about society the utopian/dystopian
thinking.
Tuobang in Chinese comes from topia
and the earlier topo, connected to place, area,
topology, and space, while the Chinese word yi
is the translation of hetero, which just by
reading one can divine a sense of difference
(of heterosexuality, different, different race,
heterodoxy), and other (outlier, heterologous,
heterogeneous), all representing the different
and the plural. The broadest literal meaning of
heterotopia is varied spaces and places with
differences, like physical spaces, secret spaces,
public spaces, virtual spaces, imagined spaces
and so on, and including natural scenes, artificial
scenes, technological scenes, symbolic scenes,
fictitious scenes and spiritual scenes. It could be

a space from another dimension or another place.

It could also be the places that seem ordinary or
which we have gotten used to as ordinary; there
is no fixed nature and the boundaries are unclear.
It could be mutually penetrating (like how in a
Taichi diagram there is white within the black and
vice versa). It could be pluricentric or decentered; the center does not hold, the falcon
does not listen to the falconer. And so non-linear,
fractal, and transmogrifying currents and
tracks can all appear. This is my expanded use of
heterotopia with the aim of outlining the
possibilities of social renewal in the 21st century.
The term utopia emerged in the 16th
century.(16) The use of u encapsulates the two
meanings of ou (not having or lacking) and
eu (good). Late 19th century utopian novels
including Looking Backward by the political
reformer Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere
by the cultural conservationist and social innovator
William Morris all imagined a future world
which the writers considered to be good but which
currently does not exist, highlighting the imper
fections of the existing world. So utopian novels
have two aims: a grand negation(17) of the
current world, and the belief that the future will
hold out a perfectly good society with a drasti
cally new form. The great social innovator Robert
Owen pushed his own efforts to the utmost in
realizing a utopian commonality. In the last
200 years, many in China and abroad have had
utopian dreams and wanted to implement them
in reality; unfortunately, they have mostly failed.
The greatest manmade disasters in human
history occurred in the 20th century. Humanity

oueu19

1907

(15)

(17)

hetero

()(

(19)

20

(),

20

(20)

(18)

21

1924

1932

once and for all resolving all manners of social

contradictions. The second is to confirm that in
all truly plural societies differences will always
exist; the mutual clashes and conflicts between
different social forces are unavoidable. Politics is
a Gramscian struggle for leadership, and the
battleground lies both within the system and
without, on the streets but also in the assemblies
and establishment, on a spiritual as well as
material level. In order to gain political power,
every class or multitude will at times need to
maintain common nodes of action and even joint
organizational fronts, agreeing over gradualist
core values, shared consensus and targets, even
if not directly calling themselves the people
(collective consciousness, united intent, being in
the same boat, identity). There must still be a
sense of us, which is also constructing an
opposing them. This is also the reason why in
the end that which achieves leadership power
and represents the people might not necessarily
be the opposition, but also the establishment;
it might not necessarily be democratic but also
Fascist; it could be emancipatory but also
oppressive.

topiatopo

16(16) u

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20

352

353

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grand goal but overestimating their abilities and

the keener they are to discover a utopia, the
more they pit themselves against their own selves
at moments of clarity, and the more they become
disappointed, dejected, resigned. They set
out to seize the heavens, but clutching only at air.
At the same time, emphasizing the dystopian
nature of reality will make people feel that resis
tance is futile, that social action is utterly inad
equate, and also become disappointed, dejected,
resigned, even disbelieve that we have to rely on
ourselves to create human history. Rather, they
despair and cry, in Heideggers words, Only a
God can save us!

Disappointment, dejection, resignation.
People under an evil system run hither and
thither belaboring themselves to become good
citizens. It is a bit like how Tony Judt said:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we
live today... And yet we seem unable to conceive
of alternatives.(21)

did not experience the prophesized utopia but its

obverse, the diametric opposite of utopia
dystopia. Thus, novelists before World War I in
the beginning of the 20th century started to write
dystopian novels to warn the world not to believe
the perfect future promised by others. Though
these also use the future as a metaphor for the
present, the future has become evil and contrary
to what we expected. They warn: your dreams
could be a nightmare.
Two types of totalitarian societies in the
20th century have generally been recognized as
being the closest to a dystopian state.(18) There
were irrefutable human experiences based on
historical evidence of huge human cost, but all
forms of modern societies have the possibility of
becoming dystopias. We, the novel by Yevgeny
Zamyatin, portrayed a high-tech dystopia; Aldous
Huxleys 1932 novel Brave New World predicted
a hedonistic dystopia, while as early as 1907,
Jack Londons novel The Iron Heel warned of how
the American democratic system could decline
into a Fascist dystopia. Dystopias and the
Apocalypse have long been an important theme
in science fiction.

From the perspective of this text, what
needs to be emphasized is not the optimistic naivet
of utopian thinking or the pessimistic realism of
dystopian thinking, but how both kinds of
imagination are very Manichean and dualistic a
great affirmation or else a great refusal, heaven
or hell, either this or that dualistic oppositions
which are either all in or all out. In Zhang
Nings words, Midas logic: if it is not all good,
then it is all bad.(19)

What utopian and dystopian narratives
portray are for the most part a type of future
societies where the internal norms are basically
set, the class structure (or lack thereof) is
basically stable basically societies that are set
in stone. In later academic terms, these are
governing, homogenous grand narratives. In such
societies, especially the dystopias, people who
are heterogeneous cannot be seen or have been
removed from the sight of the vast majority
of people; practically no space for idle chatter,
let alone the impetus for social renewal within the
people. Only a few isolated and scant dissidents
are left, who seem to be like those described
in the foreword to Lu Xuns Call to Arms those
few people who have awaken in the iron house
without windows or air.

Hollywood action blockbusters regularly
reproduce utopian/dystopian imaginations and
moral messages, all the while adding in heroic
and romantic elements. The plot usually first states
how a utopian, harmonious society had originally
existed and then when evil overran this harmonious
society, the utopia was destroyed. Fortunately,
at that last moment before the gate to the iron
house was shut, the instant before evil verges on
complete victory, a small minority especially
the hero exercises positive will and against all
odds overcomes fate and defeat evil, rebuilding
utopia. Think of the animation film Frozen, where
princess Elsa could not control her Midas-like
touch of turning things into ice and the entire
kingdom was hijacked by evildoers. The utopian
land becomes a dystopia completely covered
over by ice but fortunately in the end, sisterly

true love melts Elsas worries of the heart; all

spells are released and the utopian homeland is
recovered. This is a fairytale. But similar
examples are too numerous to count: from the
ordinary worker in The LEGO Movie to the
military generals in the online card game Legends
of the Three Kingdoms all could turn the tables
in utterly horrible circumstances. The reason why
the whole situation could change course in an
instant is often because the two sides of the
situation are utopias or dystopias dualistically
opposed, either this or that, with a clear division
between good and evil. Only this is fun which
goes to say how utopian/dystopian thinking,
with the romantic hero saving the day, fits the
psychology desired by many people. Thus,
Frederic Jameson believes that the specific
utopian desires that Ernst Bloch mentions
bringing along hope as well as control are alive
in mass culture and everyday life.(20)

For people involved in social action, this
is a paradox: without a bit of utopian impulse,
how could the multitude be motivated to believe
that there is strength in unity? Without projecting
a dystopia, how can the target of resistance
be constructed for the masses? For those who
love the truth, without an understanding of
dystopias, or taking in the lessons of history, or
using fables to tell the story of dystopias, not only
would it be hard to experience exactly how evil
could be, it might also lead to history sickeningly
repeating itself. But now, except for liars and
ignoramuses, no one could offer any utopian
blueprints. The more those in search of utopia are
like Father Kua chasing the sun pursuing a

Old-school Marxists believe that this is because

they do not know the truth or they are deceived
by a dominating ideology, forgetting their class
nature while carrying a false consciousness in
their minds. And so they are good citizens, docile
citizens; they do not resist, all because they
dont know what theyre doing but nonetheless
theyre doing it. But iek had once described
the current situation thus: They know it, but they
are doing it anyway. This is one subjective
consciousness of doing what one knows to be
wrong reformed under the idea of futile actions
and hopeless changes generated from the

enter(22)

)(

(21)

()()

()

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()

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dystopian imagination. They are the loyal

subjects, the escapists, the defeatists, the cynics,
the rational-objective neutrals, the uninvolved,
those who shut in on themselves, the unconcerned,
the compromisers, the numbed, the crafty, the
opportunists, those diligently getting rich, the
when in Rome, do as the Romans do type, the
undecided, those who divide the spoils without
putting in effort, those who rely on power to gain
fame and riches, the guides who seek shelter with
power, those who mock others about not
understanding the times, those who actively play
accomplice to evil, those who do evil boldly and
assuredly, and so on all with a common
psychological secret of consorting with power.
On one end is that what I do is useless; in the
middle is that it is already good enough if I dont
do evil; and on the other end is that what could
you do if I do do evil? They know it, but they are
doing it anyway.
The cause of loyal subjects and those
consorting with power in different societies have
common as well as peculiar elements; here I will
not discuss in detail. I will get back to giving
those who still have the will for social action with
another imaginary space of a plural society:
heterotopia.

If we do not slavishly imitate Foucaults
views and rather treat heterotopia as a somewhat
inexpressible, mutable, pluricentric and
decentralized place, wrapping everything around
is not an impermeable, pitch dark iron house (Lu
Xuns iron house comes from a metaphor of the
dystopian imagination of the old society in
China), but rather a large, high and great labyrinth

of a garden riddled with all ills. The multitude

inside could creatively connect up together
relatively freely like Deleuzian rhizomes; the
rhizomes might not be rooted very deep but often
spreading out near the surface of the soil.
Sometimes, a sprout will break through; it could
grow very large all of a sudden, but then at once
it could be suppressed. But the shape of the
rhizome cannot be completely held down
especially since the real world is a bit connected
altogether. One sprout breaking through on one
side could affect the other side and reaching
the critical point, a major situation, crisis, incident
could ensue, destroying the structure of this
labyrinth. It could come in waves, breaking out all
of a sudden and then retreating. Such a state of
rhizomes is manifold in shape and size.

And within the labyrinth of a garden, any
power is merely a beautiful robe covered in fleas.
Whoever wore the beautiful gown and gained
power could not help but itch all over, and each
atomized individual, no matter how they are like a
snail hoisting a heavy shell (perhaps a cyber-snail
that has learned to employ its own medium), in
his/her own ways could still till the soil (provided
it is not eaten first). Then social change, even
if slowed down and unpredictable in its direction,
is not impossible.

Here I must immediately add more:
I used the metaphor of the snail with its shell only
to point to one possibility of individuals exceeding
their own hardships in the direction of social
change. Readers must not let my analogy limit
their own imagination you can very well
imagine yourselves to be carefree seagulls, feral

(23)
(24)

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356

cats jumping off the eaves and running up walls,

Bodhisattvas helping the needy and relieving the
distressed, hermaphrodite witches, all-conquering
cyborgs, and compare those who attempt to
belittle others single-mindedness as ants, worker
bees, dogs, rats, sheep and wolves in order to
interpret these in roundabout and playful ways,
freeing up a sense of the polysemous and
emancipatory in these analogies.

A heterotopic world is far from flat or
fluid but has interlocking fangs and checkpoints
throughout; cutting across this is a true
obstacle race. The reality of heterotopias is
not completely a hallucinated simulacrum or
constructed out of nothing. Heterotopias have a
foundation in reality, which in parts can at least
be known, described, expected and transmitted.
It is from multiple origins, it is intermittent, it
clashes, it mutates; its boundaries are unclear,
it has many layers and many vectors; it is both
material and spiritual, it is irreducible; through the
conscious and unconscious activities of humans,
it is constantly produced, and it constantly dis
appears; it is endlessly constructed and endlessly
deconstructed. It is a situational understanding,
and yet it can be perceived and experienced.
But away from ones own mind and bodily experi
ences, away from specific scenes and processes
of action, including away from media such as
writing, photography and video, heterotopia
cannot be clearly expressed. You must press the
enter key every time.(22)

Although heterotopias are de-centered,
non-linear, fractal and metamorphic, this
does not mean that oppression through order has
disappeared or the centrality of power is
ineffective. It does not mean that the stubborn
divisions of class, ethnicity, gender, region and
nation have been dissolved and certainly it does
not mean the police have ceased to exist, or that
mass surveillance has ceased to exist. They are
all there, and could even be ever more ferocious,
but for the moment they do not make for an
impermeable iron house.

With such an imagination of a heterotopic
society replacing the utopian/dystopian image
taken for granted by many, change is possible
within many different kinds of spaces through all
manners of action, including discussion and
organization. But in such a society, it is hard to
avoid clashes between groups and irreconcilable
interests; all sides want to gain leadership
of various social domains. Up and down and at
four corners of society, sparks can fly
citizens (constitutionalism), communities (the
first Communitarianism), ethnicities (the other

Communitarianism), occupations (the first

politics of interest), the disadvantaged (a second
politics of interest), syndics (the first class
politics), classes (the second class politics),
disadvantaged or ethnic minorities (the first
identity politics), generations (the second identity
politics), those in search of social progress
(humanism, equality, environmentalism,
internationalism), the multitude (anarchism)
and those without a position want to gain
a position. It is not necessary to have the idea of
seizing power in politics (this belongs to that
utopian/dystopian thinking of pacifying the land
through force), but it does not exclude reforms
in terms of systems, institutions, policies in order
to allow democracy to gain ground, or even
kicking off a social renewal from another turning
point in any social situation. Such a renewal in
thinking can provide social innovators a greater
degree of imaginative space and overlapping
points of action.

Here, I critique rather than completely
refute utopian and dystopian imagination; I only
fear that habitual utopian and dystopian ideas
have narrowed and even suffocated the notion of
social action. Thus, I have proposed the concept
of heterotopia with an alternative sense of reality
in the hopes of opening up greater space for
possible action. Utopias have long been the plain
and simple desire of humanity, from Datong,
Peach Blossom Springs, Shangri-La to John
Lennons Imagine. As Balibar said: utopias
allow us to imagine ways to replace exploitation,
domination and hate. Just as lessons from
dystopias ought not be easily forgotten, we must
continue to propose non-utopianized Utopian
demands(23) in other words, the yearning for a
good society and hopes for the future. Or
perhaps what we need is exactly a dissimilar,
heterotopic utopian imagination.(24)

Returning back to the point about whether
research has been done on the transition to
come: worrying about the world before everyone
else is a frequent tendency among intellectuals.
But one must beware the trap of utopian/
dystopian thought not to think that once one
center has been toppled, then we can produce a
second center according to the original ideas;
one must both avoid the idea of seizing power
once and for all and also abandon the illusion of
certainly being able to find an ultimate replace
ment proposal. The search for obvious answers
which is either black or white, and will easily end
up short-circuiting thought, making one turn
painfully round and round without finding an exit.

Great events are situational but not

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14-11-21 3:21

isolated. The results could exceed the causes,

but it is not as if without causes, the results could
also be multiple. There are all kinds of incidents
large and small before and after, all kinds of
foreshadowing, actions, and ups and downs of
the masses connecting, conflicts between leaders
and those against the leaders in all kinds of
spheres, the disputes between peoples value
systems, beliefs and social understanding, all
kinds of micro-actions by the multitude. Or
perhaps my two eyes see a dead pond in front of
me, but your multiple eyes and night vision could
observe within the murky waters the dynamic
vitality of the micro-organisms, the movements
of the myriad, seeing hidden currents everywhere,
trickles forming rivers, rivers joining into a sea.
You hear the people humming a tune while diving,
you get a whiff of the adrenaline, and you even
sense that the huge tidal wave is about to come,
and the vanguard swimming out there is waiting
for the right time to show their true colors.

(1)
Michel Foucault had on numerous
occasions used heterotopia as a concept of
space, especially in a lecture Des espaces
autres (Of other spaces) which was published
just before his death in 1984; to learn more about
Foucaults relevant discussion, one can go to
heterotopiastudies.com. I only thought about
heterotopias after reading Wang Der-weis essay
Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia From Lu Xun
to Liu Cixin (2011) and Utopia, Dystopia,
Heterotopia a Hong Kong perspective (2013).
(2)
Rancire, Jacques, The Philosopher and
His Poor (1983) and The Ignorant Schoolmaster:
Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1987).
(3)
Balibar, tienne, On Universalism: A
Debate with Alan Badiou (2007).
(4)
Habermas, Jrgen, Modernity, An
Unfinished Project (1980).
(5)
An upright society could be a form of
a good society, which is sought for in thinkers from
Adam Smith to Karl Polanyi and Isaiah Berlin.
In The Law of Peoples (1999), John Rawls believes
that a good society can also be a non-democratic
and unfree constitutional order, an orderly
class-based society where there are protections
for humans; as long as its class structure is based
on just principles, it could gain the acceptance of
people from all classes.
(6) The anthropocene refers to how once the
ecology on Earth came under human domination,
we entered a new anthropocentric age in terms
of geology from the co-evolution of living beings
and natural elements. This can be traced back to
2000 BCE or even earlier, and since the Industrial
Revolution has accelerated, intensely transforming
the ecology on Earth.

Translated by Daniel Szehin Ho

(7)
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri,
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
(2004).
(8)
Autonomist in English, with Paolo Verni
being a representative theorist of the movement.
(9)
iek, Slavoj, Event: Philosophy in
Transit (2014).
(10) Zhou Lian, Zhou Lian, Chen Guanzhong
duitan xin zuoyi sichao (Zhou Lian and Chan
Koonchung in discussion about New Left Thought),
Pengpaiwang (The Paper), Shanghai Shuping;
Qi Ke, Xin zuoyi sichao de tujing: Gongshiwang
dujia zhuanfang Chen Guanzhong (The prospects

(1) (Michel Foucault),

1984
1967Des Espaces Autres(Of
Other Spaces)
heterotopiastudies.com2011

2013

(2) ,
Ranciere, Jacques (1983) The Philosopher and
His Poor(1987) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
(3) Balibar, Etienne (2007), On
Universalism: A Debate with Alan Badiou
(4) Habermas, Jurgen (1980), Modernity,
An Unfinished Project
(5)

(1999)

(anthropocene)
(6)

2000

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358

of New Left Thought: Gongshiwangs exclusive

interview with Chan Koonchung), Gongshiwang
(21ccom.net).
(11)
Before 1949, aside from the Communist
Party, the Left in China included Anarchists
and also the Social Democrats, with whom a fair
few intellectuals identified; the latter included
social democrats like Hu Shi (Free Socialism),
Zhang Dongsun, Zhang Junli and others. Xiao
Qian, in an editorial for Ta Kung Pao on January 8,
1948, wrote: Liberalism is only a common term;
it could be switched for Progressivism, or
Democratic Socialism. Tony Judt in Ill Fares the
Land (2012) wrote: Social democracy does not
represent an ideal future; it does not even
represent the ideal past. But among options
available, it is better than anything else to hand.
Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahless Building the
Good Society: The Project of the Democratic Left
rather simply summarized the goals of the
democratic Left as building a good society, a
fairer economic entity, a safe, green, and fair
future. On the ideas, history and prospects of
European social democracies, see Berman,
Sheri, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy
and the Making of Europes 20th Century (2006);
Meyer, Henning and Jonathan Rutherford, eds.,
The Future of European Social Democracy:
Building the Good Society (2012).
(12) Balibar, tienne, Equaliberty:
Political Essays (2014); Petitjean, Clement,
A Racism without Races: An Interview
with tienne Balibar (2014); Nicolas Duvoux
and Pascal Severa, Citizen Balibar: An Interview
with tienne Balibar (2012).
(13) For instance, one could dialogue with
Rawlsian left-wing liberals in Chinese-language
intellectual circles. See Zhou Baosong, Zhengzhi
de daode (The morality of politics, 2014);
Qian Yongxiang, Dongqing de lixing: zhengzhi
zhexue zuowei daode shijian (Rationality aroused:
political philosophy as applied in morality, 2014);
Chen Yizhong, Dangdai zhengyi bianlun
(Contemporary debates on justice, 2014).
(14) Mouffe, Chantal, Critique as Counter
Hegemonic Intervention (2008) and The
Democratic Paradox (2000); Laclau, Ernesto and
Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
(1985).
(15)

Lu Xun, In Praise of Night (1933).

(16) More, Thomas, Of the Best State of a

Republic, and of the New Island Utopia (1516).

(17) Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional

Man (1964).
(18) George Orwells novel 1984 (1949)
undoubtedly is a representative work of
a Communist-style dystopia, while Katharine
Burdekins Swastika Night writes about a Fascist
dystopia where the Nazis rule over Europe and
have realized the Thousand Year Reich.
(19) In Greek myth, Midas loved gold
and received from Dionysus the gift of the golden
touch (Midas touch) with which everything
Midas touched turned into gold. And so his
daughter turned into gold, and food transformed
into gold cannot be eaten. Zhang Ning uses this
metaphor to explain a certain mentality of absolutes
in contemporary Chinese history, where one thing
is desired and not the other, and then suddenly
this reverses, where the other thing is desired and
the first thing is not. The only thing neglected is
that resisting a monotone world that had once
brought such terror cannot depend on choosing an
opposing monotone, but rather the myriad colors
of a boundless world. Zhang Ning, Gaobie
midasi luoji (Farewell to the Midas logic), Caixin
Century (2014).
(20) Jameson, Frederic, Archaeologies of the
Future (2005); Reification and Utopia in Mass
Culture (1979).
(21)

Judt, Tony, Ill Fares the Land (2010).

(22) Haraway, Donna, The Haraway

Reader (2004). The many animal and nonhuman comparisons in this text have more
or less been inspired by Haraways post-human
thinking of non-dualistic contextual relations.
(23) For example, Ernest Callenbach wrote
a utopian novel Ecotopia in 1975 where the
American Northwest Washington State, Oregan,
and Northern California secedes from the
United States and gains independence in an
attempt to build an ideal nation based on all kinds
of progressive principles. Yet it must possess
weapons of mass destruction in order to scare off
the United States from invading and recovering
the territory. This is a realistic utopian imagination
in contemporary times. Ralph Nader has said that
the novel describes how [n]one of the happy
conditions in Ecotopia are beyond the technical or
resource reach of our society. Callenbach, Ernest,
Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William
Weston (1975).

(7) Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonia

(2004), MultitudeWar and Democracy in the Age
of Empire

Rutherford, Jonathan ed (2012) The Future of

European Social Democracy: Building the Good
Society

autonomist
(8)
Paolo Verni

(12) Balibar, Etienne (2014) Equaliberty:

Political Essays; Petitjean, Clement (2014)
A Racism without Races: An Interview with
Etienne Balibar Nicolas Duvoux and Pascal
Severa (2012) Citizen Balibar: An Interview with
Etienne Balibar

(9) Zizek, Slavoj (2014) EventPhilosophy in

Transit
(10) (2014)
(2014)

(11) 1949

()
1948 1 8

(2012)

Cruddas, Jon & Nahles, Andrea(2009)

Building the Good Society: The Project of the

Democratic Left

Berman Sheri (2006) The Primacy

of Politics: Social Demcracy and the Making
of Europes 20th CenturyMeyer, Henning &

(13)
(2014)
(2014)
(2014)
(14) Mouffe, Chantal (2008Critique as
Counter Hegemonic Intervention(2000) The
Democratic Paradox Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe
Chantell (1985) Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy
(15) (1933)
(16) More, Thomas (1516) Of the Best State
of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia
(17) Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One
Dimensional Man

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Tomorrow I will
be a Painter

(24) See Mohan, Anupama, Utopia and

the Village in South Asian Literatures (2012).
She believes that many forms of past utopian
imagination are actually only homotopic
which emphasize a homogeneous utopia and
ought to be separated from good and unrealized
utopias which allow for heterogeneity. Dystopia
has also been variously translated with negative
connotations in Chinese (futuobang, daituobang,
huaituobang, fan-wutuobang). As for dystopian
imagination with homotopian qualities, see
Chan Koonchung, Zou chu futuobang (Leaving
dystopia), zhongguo qingnianbao bingdian
zhoukan (2004).

Hans-Christian Dany

(18) (1949) 1984

Katharine Burdekin (1937)Swastika Night

Callenbach, Ernest (1975) Ecotopia:

(19)

(2014)

(24) Mohan, Anupama (2012), Utopia and

the Village in South Asian Literatures

The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston

(2004)

(20) Jameson, Frederic (2005)

Archaeologies of the Future(1979) Reification
and Utopia in Mass Culture
(21) (2012)
(22) Haraway, Donna (2004) The Haraway
Reader

(23) 1975

(MDW)

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Edgar Degas asserted that painting consisted of

a series of calculative operations. They enable
problems of a certain mathematics to be
processed, a mathematics which is more subtle
than the customary variety, and which up to now
no one has been able to formulate, expanded
Paul Valry. A wonderful formulation of the
passage into unknown territory, to be discovered
using a way of seeing currently unknown.
The freedom of the unfamiliar opens up before us.
Vastness becomes possible. We submit to the
grandiose seduction of the unknown.

I have not been a painter up to now, although
I have been painting in my head for a long time.
Tomorrow I will take the brush and dip my hands
in paint. Until then I formulate in words what
I will paint. The phantom. A being or thing moving
beyond a present whose order is controlled
by communication. It is difficult to approach the
phantom. It can only be discerned from a distance.
I cannot think it. In order to paint it I have to enter
spheres of reality which remain closed to thought.
I do the impossible, recovering the ability to act
through incapacity.

Painting the phantom holds opportunities
for accelerating faltering movement. The seductive
pull of the unknown could tear down walls.
Space for action would open up. Behind the hole
in the wall, the thrilling awaits us. Alignments
in which pattern recognition fails. Something will
come to light, which will be more than a signal
recognized by a receiver, challenging the system
of meaning an unthinkable, an un-knowledge, a
secret which confronts even those that release
it with the enigma of what they are actually doing.

(Edgar Degas)

In his book The Unknown in Art, written
in hiding during the Second World War, the painter
Willi Baumeister wrote: Art knows no experience
and is not a derivation. It relates itself to the
unknown. Later Sigmar Polke received orders
from higher beings to paint the right hand top
corner black. The connection to the unknown,
like orders from higher beings, provides a ground
without substantiation.
The word connection employed by
Baumeister now reads like an all-purpose instru
ment from the communication tool box. A channel
through which he can establish contact with the
unknown. However, Baumeister meant the artistic
possibility of overcoming the limits of communi
cation, which back then still needed to be defined.
Instead of transmitting a signal through a channel,
painting connects to something substantially,
through the intransigence of the material, the
dynamics of the colors and their conflict with the
form which cannot be grasped using thought
anchored in language. Such a connection allows
blurring, realities between the signals, contin
gencies, noise and phantoms. They are not signs
but characteristics. They roll up and extend again.
They twist into spirals, float horizontally in the
air, extend upright and mix. Some of them lie flat
on the horizon, diving into it and drawing the eye
into the profound complexity of its depths.

Between now and the next instant

For as long as I can remember, the fish have been

dying. In the meantime the forest has also died.

Now the concepts are dying even quicker. The

wear and tear on mediating language, in its
efforts to ensure that the new and the future do
not reach reality unmediated, is great. With the
assistance of an increasingly refined probability
calculation, the future is determined by recent
past. All the comprehensible factors of that which
has just occurred are plotted on a curve, and its
trajectory extrapolated into the future. Such
prognoses, acting as a filter for the near future as
a region of the unknown, rearrange the familiar in
subtle variations, pre-formulating the image of
that which is to come by continually anticipating
the next moment.

As a result the new can no longer
overwhelm us, instead it is cushioned by the
anticipation of what is to come whose arrival is
announced. One no longer reaches the future,
only the safe room of its prior image. There is
nothing vitalizing about these failed encounters,
the passion has died. One believes one has
already seen everything before it occurs, while
the residual reality is merely an afterimage
of the prognoses. Their rain washes away
all feelings. Anything new which deviates too far
from the state of the recent past is continually
watered down and then ironed out, until it is no
longer noticed. Or it disappears from the field
of vision because it doesnt fit into the prognosis
pre-cut template. One is brought to safety
before it can even happen. The digital, noisefree marshalling of probabilities in the direction
of the known, which repulses the menacing
change, terminates in the boredom of the
electronic state of being-there.

(Willy Baumeister)

One now lives in the continual absence
of an intermediary space, now and in the next
instant. One evening I flee from the interrupted
arrival and go in search of the exciting life
of gambling where the next moment remains
unpredictable.

In the center of the stand, a crown
composed of the numbers 0 to 36 revolves.
The name of the game of chance is derived from
a perpetual motion machine which the French
mathematician Blaise Pascal set out to
invent. However, the game was also unable to
overcome the second law of thermodynamics.
It does not run on its own, the machine for the
production of chance has to be repeatedly given
a push. In 1700, Ludwig XIV presented the
game for the first time in the salons of Paris.
Its public life began precisely 25 years before
the building of a silk spinning mill in the
British town of Derby, the first factory. However,
roulette is less a manifestation of the high point
of feudalism than a precursor of the new age.
The avant-garde gambling concept accompanied
industrial capitalism beyond its high point.
The games continued success is based
on the mathematical law of statistical indepen
dence. This states that every chance event
is independent and cannot be derived from the
previous event. In opposition to the mathe
matical stability of incalculability, the gamblers
speculate in the recurring belief that there is no
such thing as chance. Their bets are assumptions
about the near future. They confront the odds of
1 to 37. If a player who has bet on a single number,
the falling ball, has made the right choice then

(Paul Valry)

(Sigmar Polke)

(Blaise Pascal)

(Willi Baumeister)

1700(Ludwig XIV)

25

1/37

36

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But where are the passages leading
from assured uncertainty to the bottomless
unknown? Philosophical speculation formulates
a hypothetical chain of thought which extends
beyond perceptible reality. For some time
speculative reason has held out the promise of
such transgressions, leading to a fantastic
world in which the phantom could live. At least
certain texts can be read this way. The variety
of theories subsumed under this general term
reject the idea of repeating the repetition,
proposing instead that we direct our gaze to
unsubstantiated hypotheses. Instead of
persisting in the closed circles of perception,
it is suggested that we venture into the unknown,
where thought is of no further use and where
there could be something that cannot be
grasped with human faculties. It is there none
theless. The incognizable hand should be
extended to him blindly, as a something that
human thought cannot comprehend, but about
which it can speculate. The tiny note in the
fortune cookie tells me: You will experience
changing times.

Security and its endless repeatability is what

lends roulette its special appeal, enabling the
players to enjoy themselves within a stable
order. They pay for the rotating stasis with their
wager, losing in the short or long term.
Nevertheless, nearly all of them want to continue

playing in order to savor the experience of

assured uncertainty once again. Thanks to its
reliability, the formalized unknown of the
random drop of the ball is transformed into the
enjoyment of the unchanging. In the alternation
of win and loss, one playfully turns on the
spot. Maybe one ruins oneself, but one does
it in a secure environment.

Although I realize that I have jumped out
of the frying pan and into the fire, I dont leave
the game. Instead, I convince myself that the
scenario reflects the environment. In play, I will
stage an image of the postmodern world
which will be far more concise than any picture
that I could paint. Turning away from the
world, I repeatedly trace the self-referential
loops within the hermetically sealed shelter of
the casino. A complex model composed of
dead ends, where everything appears certain
unfolds before my eyes. It is a predictability
through which I can feel my way, seeing. This
flatters my narcissism. Every relation now forms
a totality whose order I can submit to. Lifted
out of the confusion of being-in-the-world I
achieve a chill peace in rotating stasis. It allows
me an ironic distance, control over feelings and
the relinquishment of intensities. Protected
from my desire for acceleration, I need not fear
losing control. For a while, the casino remains a
safe location where I can imagine a life without
transgression. A structure of abstinence and
the suppression of desires with which I passively
cooperate, until one night I leave the casino
to paint the unknown and cease waiting for the
heat death.

When you think, then you only think that you

think the things. At the same time, the socially
determined often only thinks: I want that.
Conditioned by 250 years of industrialization
and its ideological estrangement in increasing
expediency, a perception calibrated for
utility has been gradually reduced to a faculty

for registering only that which can be caught in

the net spun by the tools of appropriation.
The incognizable that-which-remains, the things
for which there is no terminology and thus
cannot be thought, let alone used, the holes
in perception, yield nothing and so cannot
really exist. Value creation has distorted the
epistemology of the Enlightenment into a coarse
instrument which, with each crisis of capitalism,
is employed ever more aggressively in
an attempt to conquer and exploit the last
remaining corners of the world through rational
transparency.
The advance of the pragmatic exclusion
of unthinkable being reaches a theoretical
high point in radical constructivism. This sequel
to cybernetics provides a neurobiological
justification for why man has to be satisfied with
the closed system of his own perception. That
perception is subject to impulses from outside,
the environment, cannot be verified. Beingexisting-independently-of-thought can be safely
ignored. The assumption that one is moving
within the closed circles of ones own perception
forces man to assume full responsibility for
his actions as he can no longer fall back
on the excuse of being outside of himself. An
assumption which for some people formulates
the positive ideology of the control society.
Delighted with its theses, radical constructivism
declares that the assertion that there is beingoutside-of-man is the invention of a liar. The
observer is the source of everything. Without him
there is nothing (Humberto Maturana). The
system closes in upon itself.

250

(William Ross

Ashby)

he receives 36 times his stake from the bank.

The bank pockets the difference between
the probability of a successful wager and the
winnings paid out. At some point I can no
longer deny it, it is a determinate machine that
transforms chance into a reproducible sequence
and an early form of that which was later
called order out of noise. Thanks to the stable
interplay between statistical independence, the
desire of the players to beat chance and the
banks house advantage, the repetition repeats
itself. Sometimes the players win, however
that is irrelevant for the systems principle:
it remains stable. Roulette can be seen as
a predecessor of the homeostat. Two hundred
and fifty years later, the cybernetic model
transformed random noise into self-organization.
William Ross Ashby, the inventor of the
equilibrium machine, created a technological
version of natures self-organization drive,
homeostasis, by designing a model of movement
with an open end. The uncertainty which
allowed chance, interference to be repeatedly
regulated, only affects the systems states, while
its principle remains stable.

Postmodern art

Holes in perception

250

(Humberto Maturana)]

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[
(Quentin Meilassoux)

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But how can the love of the far side of things

escape the shackles of thought? Certain
forms of artistic activity bear similarities to
the considerations of speculative reason.
A connection is established with the unknown,

the orders of higher beings are obeyed. One

plays dumb, acting as if there is something that
has not been thought, or which cannot possibly
be thought. The parlor trick of ignorance is
employed as a means to reopen a fatigued
perception to something that the gaze, secure in
its knowledge, has been unable to recognize
for some time. The tendency of perception to
close itself off and fall into a lethargic stasis is
interrupted by shutting down its cognitive
processes. This trick is frequently employed to
induce the pleasantly disconcerting state of
floundering, of losing familiar ground under
ones feet and thinking with ones hands.
Fathomless, one no longer knows what one is
doing and what one should make of ones
actions, which almost look as if they are being
performed by a stranger. It almost appears as if
a different type of person has started tackling
the things one hasnt had the courage to do, or
which one would never think of doing. Or, as
Willi Baumeister expressed it: The connection
with the unknown creates the constant and
necessary unleashing and liberation. Actions
are accelerated through the connection with
the unknown, the struggle with the materials
inherent dynamic and the future which
constitutes in subordination, a branch of the
unknown (Baumeister).
The suitcase for the journey into the
unknown contains imaginary shoes for walking
on hypothetical paths. They make the transition
possible. However, at a certain point,
even this transgression looks for a foothold
and form. It is not possible without form-finding,

it probably wouldnt work, however our

understanding of form could be a different one.
A freely floating search for the connection
to the unknown collides with the form-finding
imperative. Slowly the vision-object
(Baumeister), the speculative test balloon and
transformer of consciousness, descends
from its beautiful flight landing on the ground
like a meteorite.

Moles which stop constantly addressing
the restrictions of their vision and leave the
closed tunnel system dont necessarily get any
closer to the, for them, unthinkable being.
However, this is not what is at stake. Instead it
is about leaving the subterranean labyrinth
of dead ends built of assumptions. The
searchers relinquish the cool distance to that
which escapes them in favor of an uncertain,
unredeemable love of unthinkable being.
Still blind and without contact, but no longer
buried, they submit to the void. They cease
denying the realities which escape them just
because they give their faculty of reason the
cold shoulder. They connect hypothetically
to a black room with magical powers of
attraction, eerie and enchanting, like the depths
of the ocean. The lovers no longer presume to
form the center around which the beloved
congregate. They begin to sense the presence
of the darkened thing-that-remains in all its
grandeur. The reward for their devotion is the
loss of the protective roof above their mirrored
heads, the opportunity to put down their
armour and remove the yellowed fabric of their
nerves composed of the endless reflections

(Willi

Baumeister)

In opposition to the assertion that what
man cannot observe and see is nothing,
Quentin Meilassoux, one of the central voices
of speculative realism, has gone in search of that
being which exists independently of man.
The supposed nothing could refer to a host
of things. Declaring that-which-existsindependently-of-man as null and void is above
all an expression of mans narcissism. Turning
in loops, he is now only concerned with himself
and his possible relationships. Such access
problems have long since barred the way to a
glimpse of the intransigence of being. What
is at stake is opening oneself up to the idea that
there is something beyond the thinkable. Even
if man is not capable of thinking this something,
he can incorporate it hypothetically, as a
blind spot that remains blind, embarking on the
adventure of a speculative love of the unthinkable,
in order to leave the confines of his thought
and its limited relation to people and things.
Today the fortune cookie tells me: Search for
similarities and enjoy them.

But arent we all speculators now anyway?
Speculation, the unsubstantiated hypothesis,
is omnipresent, or so we are told. Having an eye
for what something could become, being
prepared to take a risk, continues to be viewed
as the central pacemaker of value creation.
Those who drive it forward are rumored to be
extremely passionate. However, I cant help
feeling that many of the speculators are
confidence tricksters, leading us to believe that
they are betting on risky assumptions, while
cautiously trailing after short-term returns.

Since the 2008 crisis, stock market speculation

has increasingly shrunk to a cowardly business
conducted by feeble machines. Uncontrolled
transgressions, irrational exuberance as Alan
Greenspan called the excesses of the past, have
been avoided since the crash. Lacking vision,
the automated investment machines lay in a sea
of expectations formulated in money. If their
sensors register the acceleration of a value, then
they jump on the band wagon, pursuing the
trend. In the short term, they contribute to the
increasing value of the trend, expressed in
the immaterial vehicle of the share. In order to
avoid the danger of experiencing a slowing down
and reduction in value, they quickly jump back
onto cautiously programmed surf machines with
mechanical good conduct. They lack any vigor,
they are not even greedy. The fearful speculative
robots, appendages of a feeble growth, look like
the bloated survivors of a shipwreck, clinging
to the planks of a tattered ship about to break
apart completely, their exhausted movements
like a slow motion film. They want to escape the
hopelessly ailing ship, but are frightened to let
go of the remains to which they cling.

Love is sweet,
where love occurs

2008

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of their own perception. Instead of observing

themselves in self-referential mirrors, the
unclothed initially see very little, or nothing at
all. However, a new freedom has begun with the
movement. They stand there naked, without
the security of the relations. They lose their
power over language and thus start to live. All
that remains to them, revealing themselves,
are speculative test balloons and vision-objects.
But how is this possible? Maybe in the same
way that Edgar Degas once painted a mountain
that he had never seen, by conducting indoor
rock studies. He emptied a coal bucket onto
the table and began to carefully draw the
terrain created by the chance arrangement of
his own making (Paul Valry). Or completely
differently? As is the case of so many things
where it is not possible to say how it should be
done, the experiments become speechless
answers that must be discarded once again.
Art can serve as a testing ground for such
experimental situations at the edge of the void
that the phantom creates for human perception.
A site for testing transgressions of the limits of
thought. However, the aim is not to leave
language and thought behind one. Instead it is
about becoming conscious that something exists
beyond the horizon of our perception, which
must be endured as an unthinkable, darkened
thing-that-remains, but which can also be a
source of pleasure.

Painting and art can trace potential paths
into the ultimately impenetrable land of the
phantom. They are suited to this task because
their inherent laws, not-thinking and moving

beyond language, are continually recreating

themselves in a supple process, moving at rapid
speed and repeatedly dissolving. Art allows
the vague, the open, a flexible feeling ones way,
the lightness of gestures and possibility. Risky
presentiments feel their way around a terrain
where the feet can no longer gain a purchase,
connecting with the unique, incongnizable
features of being. It becomes possible to love,
without capturing and forcing into a relationship.
Artistic possibility, dancing lightfootedly, enables
one to live in uncertainty and walk on thin ice
for long distances. Dance steps choreographing
a passage into the unknown. In place of the
endless play of mirrors, which ends in closed
loops that continually touch themselves, open
ends are revealed. Through them a transgression
of the narrow field of vision become possible.
Instead of persisting in the distance, a
movement is set in train, brushing against that
existing outside the relations of thought.

By means of such a respectful love of
the inaccessible, replacing a world reduced to
cognizable relationships, it is possible to end the
practice of treading water. The desiring subjects
stop re-spelling history in a state of stasis and
begin to move through the unknown future.
Their liberation from the loops does not preclude
libidinal, irrational, religious or spiritual forces.
The escapees know that they have nothing
to lose, apart from the control circuits woven
into their consciousness control through
communication. In order to protect themselves
from drifting off into arbitrariness, which initially
is always presumed to lie beyond the virtual

The desire to break the repetitions and their

functioning within inauthentic life need not
degenerate into headless excitement.
Perspectively, it would appear better to soberly
observe what happens when the self-referentiality
of the control circuits is abandoned in favor
of risky hypotheses. Opening ones eyes for the
locus where delicate threads combine into
vanishing lines. It is not about a gesture which
needs to prove itself representationally, but
about discrete transgressions, which,
approaching the unknown, leave a trail of
threads leading to the exit. It would be a political
art without critical content whose freedom
resists control through communication,

attempting to escape its clutches permanently.

It would be the fear of idiots at losing their
collective self run wild, celebrating carefree
circumstances.

Historically, realism is understood as
something different to that which I have
attempted to delineate here as possibility.
Photorealism reflects the changes brought about
in the human view of the world by the
visual tool of photography, while socialist
realism represents an aestheticized self-image
of a people and their society entailing specific
ideological assumptions. Neither of these
realisms have little interest in the existence of
something beyond human comprehension.
Painting based on speculative realism and
opposed to prospectless survival in the capitalist
homeostat would not attempt to show this
something. It would remain abstract, an abstract
realism. Artistic thinking allows a form of poised
humility and the upholding of a contradiction
revealed in the capacity to foreground the
imperceptible that-which-remains the other side
of being, without revealing it with the intention of
making it manageable. All that would be visible
would be the vanishing points in the space
of the unknown, through which break-outs could
succeed. The impossible would become possible.
Transgressions often occur without pre
meditation, almost like a prison break-out.
What succeeds as an escape is not planned in
advance, instead opportunity makes the thief.
A plan can be uncovered. Opportunities occur
randomly. Movements are distracted by the
unpredictable. The gaze thrown of course

police system, those who have shot their inner

policemen are always best served with con
centration. Hooked ends pull themselves out of
the crack in the record and continue to
play outside the groove. Something exists off
target. Spheres open up in which visions of the
future are possible again. They are not the
aftershocks of the machine ages past climax,
or variations of the catastrophe. They exit the
careening stasis and accelerate straight ahead,
beyond productivity and technology. On an
unsuspected time axis, mankind journeys into
the inconceivable. Is the forest anywhere so
beautiful as in Chernobyl?

We know nothing.
Something unearthly

has smeared my canvas

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recognizes the impossible and considers

it possible. Such prospects remain momentary
illuminations, however it is not about freezing
something but recognizing opportunities,
becoming receptive to groundless speculations
in order to exit the fabric of control circuits
through their loopholes. Hypotheses become
transformed into abstract images which occupy
the empty panorama of the future. Their power
of attraction focuses desire. What a moment
ago was still forlornly and indeterminately
treading water or nervously turning on the spot
suddenly begins to gain speed, finding the
strength to accelerate. The velocities overtake
an end, which will never come to an end.
The circular movement within a desert of
vacuum unwinds into a straight line. The moon
colors my face yellow before bidding farewell.
I call it the night of my birth. In the light of dawn
I fly over the fabric of control circuits. Through
risk I become capable of action once more.
My head is haunted by the contours of the
phantom. The idea is stimulating, like a bolt of
lightening out of a clear blue sky. God loves
those who laugh, says the fortune cookie.

Translated by Colin Shepherd

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The 10th
Shanghai Biennale Team

Chief Curator:
Anselm Franke
Co-curators:
Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas, Liu Xiao
Film Program Curator:
Hila Peleg
Music Program Curator:
Nicholas Bussmann
City Pavilions Curator:
Zhu Ye

Organizing Committee
Director:
Hu Jinjun
Deputy Managing Director:
Teng Junjie
Deputy Director:
Bei Yaojian
Members:
Luo Yi, Jin Jingsheng, Shen Zhunan,
Tan Shu, Ying Mingda, Liu Dongyan
Secretary General:
Gong Yan
Deputy Secretary General:
Li Xu, Gu Jianjun

14000859-11-p373-392.indd 373

Academic Committee of
the 10th Shanghai Biennale
Rotating Director:
Feng Yuan
Members:
Ding Yi, Gao Shiming, Hou Hanru,
Li Xianting, Zhang Yonghe, Lai Xiangling,
Chris Dercon, Homi Bhabha, Gong Yan,
Li Xu, Li Xiangyang
Secretary:
Huang Mi

Other Departments
Exhibition Directors:
Gong Yan, Li Xu, Feng Yuan,
Xiang Liping
Financial Director:
Zhang Xinyang
Marketing Director:
Zhuang Ji
Exhibition Design and Construction:
On Design Studio, Chen Min
Graphic Design:
Liang Lu (The Exercises),
Maarten Kanters
Design Director:
Thonik
Design Coordinator:
Fan Ling
Education Program:
Zhang Lili
Media and Public Relations:
Liu Jie
Administration Office:
Zhang Yue, Ni Jia, Lu Weiwei, Zhang Shu
Operating and Management:
Chen Min, Qi Jiliang
Equipment Management:
WTI Group, Zhang Jin
Volunteer Management:
Li Weizhen

Shanghai Biennale Office

Director:
Li Xu
Project Manager:
Xiang Liping
Project Coordinators:
Xu Chenfei, Ma Li, Shi Yifan,
Wang Fei, Li Jing
Coordinators and volunteers:
Li Qian, Wei Xiaoyang, Li Chaoyu,
Shan Yiwei, Cao Yu, Yu Mengcheng,
Blake Chou

On Design Studio


(The Exercises)

(The Exercises)

Editorial Committee for the

10th Shanghai Biennale Catalogue
Head of Committee:
Hu Jinjun, Feng Yuan, Gong Yan
Deputy Head of Committee:
Li Xu, Gu Jianjun, Xiang Liping
Chief Editor:
Anselm Franke

373

14-11-21 3:23

Editors:
Gigi Chang, Freya Chou,
Cosmin Costinas, Liu Xiao,
Hila Peleg, Nicholas Bussmann
Catalogue Coordination:
Ma Li
Chinese Editors:
Ma Li, Shi Yun
English Editors:
Frances Arnold, Gigi Chang,
Tim Neesham, Nathan Rippin
Translators and Proofreaders:
Huang Yi, Wang Yuwei,
Daniel Szehin Ho, Fei Wu, Shi Yun,
Sun Jing, Le Jiajun
Catalogue Design:
Liang Lu (The Exercises)

The 10th Shanghai Biennale would

like to extend our gratitude to the following
individuals and organizations:
Kumi Aizawa, Peter Anders, Arsenal Institut
fr Film und Videokunst (Berlin), Heidi
Ballet, Bao Yifeng , Mimi Brown,
Nikita Yingqian Cai , Neringa
C
erniauskaite
, Fang-Wei Chang ,
Johnson Chang Tsong-zung , Sabrina
Chen , Chen Yun , Ethan Cheng
, Rikey Cheng , Amy Cheng
, Jimmy Chua, Biljana Ciric, Collection
Department of the National Art Museum of
China (NAMOC) ,
Collection Department of Zhejiang Art
Museum , Dai Zhanglun
, Diedrich Diederichsen, Dong Biao
, Dong Bingfeng , Mikls Erhardt,
Elke Falat, Marie-Laure Gilles, Natasha
Ginwala, Goethe-Institut China (
), Gong Jow-Jiun , Inti Guerrero
, Guo Xiaoyan , Dra Hegyi, HKW
Berlin, Michelle Ho, James T. Hong ,
Hong Zhan , Lisa Horikawa, Manray Hsu
, Fang-Tze Hsu , Hu Fang ,
Joanne Chi-wen Huang , Huang
Chien-hung , Hui Ganyuan ,
Olga Hungar, Laurent Jeanneau, Jia Hongyu
, Kim Hyunjin, Kristina Konrad, Vasif
Kortun, Maya Kovskaya, Brian Kuan Wood,
Lam Chi Hang , Cortney Lane Stell,
Maurizio Lazzarato, Jenny Wai Man Leung
, Li Xuegang , Tracy Liao ,
Tsun-Ling Liao , Michael Lam, Aimee
Lin , Liu Wei , Liu Jiajing, Liu Ying
, Esther Lu , Lu Jia ,
Raimundas Malaauskas, Edit Molnr, nono,
nono Studio nono , Ouyang
Xiao , Li Xiantings Film Fund (Beijing)

Social Factory

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2014 Inter-Asia
Biennale Forum
(Shanghai)
Till We Have Faces!

, Lvia Pldi, Mary Pansanga,

Park Chan-Kyung, Qiu Shi Art Foundation

, Qiu Zhijie , Davide
Quadrio, Fabio Rossi, Bern M. Scherer,
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Shen Boliang
, Mark Siemons, Song Ta , Spring
Workshop, Olga Starostina, Ah Su ,
Frankie Su , Su Wei , Sun Peishao
, Nadja Talmi, Tang Thip, Tang Peixian
, David Teh, Todosch, Thomas Tsang
, Paola Vanzo, Wang Hui , Wang
Jianwei , Wang Wenjing , Weng
Zhenqi , Athena Wu, Yu-Xin Wu ,
Chia-Hsuan Wu , Xu Zhen ,
Xu Dong , Leo Xu , Koyo Yamashita,
Chi-hui Yang, Pauline Yao , Wei-Li Yeh
, Yim Sui Fong , Sharleen Yu
, Yu Xiao, Ch Zara Blomsfield,
Zhang Yuling , Zhang Qinghong ,
Zhang Yaxuan , Zhao Yong , Zheng
Bo , Tirdad Zolghadr, Zou Shu

The Inter-Asia Biennale Forum is a crossdisciplinary academic project launched by a

consortium of Asian intellectuals in
association with the Inter-Asia School. The
project aims to link together public platforms
of the biennales taking place in Asia and,
based on each individual biennale, to create a
forum of interconnected thought grounded in
the context of Asian realities. Starting with
several key issues in contemporary Asian
thought and art practice, the forum will
respond to the academic topics of each
biennale, with the goal of stimulating
exchange and reflection among the artistic
and philosophical communities in Asia, to
come up with shared concerns and goals for
action based on individual life experiences.

And all the participating artists, lenders,

catalogue contributors, performers of The
News Blues, the entire team of the Power
Station of Art, the Academic Committee of
the Shanghai Biennale and everyone who
helped to make this possible.

Till We Have Faces!

(multitude.asia) Project

Innumerable words have been used to

describe social groups. We have familiar
terms such as people, public, crowds,
masses, multitude, class, all of which are
favored by those who prefer to deploy power
in a top-down hierarchy. Moreover,
intellectuals and populists fall for the same
terminology with similar enthusiasm. With the

development of network technologies, the

significations of these words have been
brilliantly transformed to refer to totally
opposite states of affairs, such as preferences
of the elites, the selected few and bourgeoisie
groups. We now propose to restructure the
contents of these words, not with the purpose
of correcting the misnomers, but to create
ambiguous meanings until they take on new
faces. Metaphorically speaking, what we are
searching for are the seeds of social dynamic
structure, rather than the flowers emerging
from the dynamics.
We wish to show that knowledge and practice
can be self-taught through association with
other groups of people, then mobilization and
networking will also become autonomous.
This faith in the people and their thought has
always been the core belief of the Inter-Asia
School.
Starting from Asia, we will begin to build
archives of group interactions on the website.
Every archive will contain complete video
records and in-depth discussions. We will
also prepare a condensed version of each
archive, which will serve as the catalogue for
dissemination. Until the program rolls, then
faces will emerge.

Cultural Production Inside and

Outside the Tent: Till We Have
Faces! (multitude.asia) Project 2014
Inter-Asia Biennale Forum (Shanghai)

Till We Have Faces! (multitude.asia)

Project will constitute a process of collective
action at the Inter-Asia Biennale Forum, and
will pose a series of questions that have been
gleaned from the results of interviews and
videos, such as, Within Asia, how do we think
about our own cultural production? What
exactly are music, media and theatre? What
functions do they serve? And what could they
potentially be? We will apply a model of
collective action to raise and explore these
questions, inviting the participation of
members of Hong Kongs In-Media group,
Taiwans Black Hand Nakasi Band and Daizo
Sakurai from Japan, to share and discuss
their unique practices.

The multitude exists within societal space: it

Black Hand Nakasi Band

Black Hand Nakasi Band is Taiwans
most important workers band, not only

2014

(multitude.asia)

2014

(societal)

374

is not only a vague category of social

relations. Societal space requires a kind of
adhesive force to help the multitude develop
the possibility of articulation and gain both a
sense of identity of the self and of the
community. Cultural production thus plays a
crucial role in allowing the multitude to
develop a deeper sense of empathic
community/commonality and as a force for
social mobilization that is distinct from
confrontational action. Culture is a product
not only of the contradictions, conflicts,
identifications and emotions that arise in the
pursuit of different cultural entities, it is also a
product of the culture of everyday life and of
the implications of symbols of national
identity.

2004

(articulation)/

2005(wto)

20062007

20092011

2012

375

14-11-21 3:23

performing at workers rallies but also

producing music together with workers and
collaborating with groups from Taiwans
disenfranchised classes. For Black Hand
Nakasi, their music practice is not only an act
of support for social movements but an
integral part of the movements themselves.
Hong Kong In-Media
Since their founding in October 2004,
Hong Kong In-Media group has participated
in major activist movements in Hong Kong,
including the protests during the World Trade
Organizations Conference in Hong Kong
(2005); the movement to preserve the Star
Ferry and Queens Piers (200607); the
Choi Yuen Tsuen; the opposition to the
Northeast New Territories Development Plan
(2011); and the Hong Kong dockworkers
strike (2012). In-Media has become a base
for social mobilization in Hong Kong and a
platform for opinion. More recently, they have
begun to move away from their role as media
activists in opposition to mainstream media,
and towards the development of a more
professional electronic media platform.

formed an independent theatre work and

performance system.

SPONSORS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The preliminary sharing of these valuable

experiences will take place as an action of
collective labor during the Inter-Asia Biennale
Forum. We will invite both forum members
and volunteers to participate in the
construction and collective use of a tent
designed by Daizo Sakurais theatre troupe,
as a process of mutual exchange and
community labor. This will be followed by the
sharing and discussion of experiences of
groups from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and
Beijing, and we will conclude with a series of
voluntary training sessions.

Inter Asia School

Shanghai Biennale Forum Convener:
Huang Sunquan
Inter-Asia Biennale Forum Initiators:
Chang Tsong-zung,
Gao Shiming, Chen Kuan-hsing

Daizo Sakurais Tent Theatre

Daizo Sakurais Tent Theatre is one of the
most important legacies of Japans student
movements of the 1960s. The main focus of
the troupes activities is on creating political
noise and resistance, and theatre is simply a
borrowed form for their actions. Sakurais
unique working methodology, receiving
neither government subsidies nor commercial
support, has been applied by groups from
Japan, Taiwan and Beijing and has effectively

2014

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 / Sponsors

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 / acknowledgements

/ Special Outdoor Media Partner

/ Special Outdoor Media Supports

DESIGN
STUDIO

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 / Multimedia Strategic Partner

/ Exclusive Art Media Partner

/ Special Outdoor Media Partner

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/ Exclusive Video Website

/ Exclusive Magazine

/ Exclusive Photo Agency

/ Associate Online Art Media

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 / Media Partners

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/ Media Support

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 / Media Acknowledgements

/ Culture & Art

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| | | |

/ Fashion & Lifestyle

| | | | | Time Out | ELLE | | | |

| |

/ TV & Radio

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/ Newspapers

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China Daily | Shanghai Daily | | | | | | |

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