Images of China

Lorenzo Marsili

China. A train drives to Shanghai at 300mph, a young woman with a bamboo hat washes Soya beans by a river, a water buffalo walks past carelessly in the swamp, throbbing crowds push into pulsating shopping malls.

The past that erased the past, the Maoist totality that enveloped consciousness and memory, is now the past of an indecipherable present. Looks of puzzlement, at a present that has become spasmodic vortex. The resignation of those left out, the excitement of those born within, the nostalgia of the simple, the resentment of the old.

In the eyes of the peasant, the madness of the other, the advance of a mechanical giant that bears no promise or utopia. Indifference, alarm with peaks of horror, enmity, as the train cuts through the fields blowing the hat in the air.

Cheering away in a velvet red Jazz bar, the heavy man embraces a mini-skirted smoker. The beer that’s worth the waiter’s salary drops dead in the stomach, waves of excitement sweat from the forehead, electrical impulses enliven the body, proud without belief.

The park on Sunday is a beautiful sight. Men and women exercise tai-chi, tea houses smell of Jasmine, pagodas become the quarters of the lazy, the grass softens under the wondering crowd. The old woman by the white tree sings old revolutionary slogans. Evoking the ghost, in this patch of artificial nature, of a time where beliefs were solid and tomorrow certain.

In a neon-lit shopping promenade, the bustle of the many, the excess of the few, the smell of money being exchanged, the electrified eye of the customer, the satisfaction of the newly dressed, ice-cream a token of love. The torturing gaze of a woman too old to have had, and now too tired to desire.

It is a strange story that of modern China. The collapse of the empire, the proclamation of the Republic, the Communist takeover and the sublimation of all sense and of all past, the abandonment of certitude, the departure from the last great ideals, and the ongoing schizoid ferment whose direction is yet unknown.

Chords play, the orchestra moves, the tone absent, the director out to lunch.

The workers collapsed, the peasants starved, guards with terrifying looks marched ahead and torched the past. The seeds planted, insufficient, miserable, beaten by the wind and humiliated by the rain, trampled over, flattened to the ground, still attempted, decisively, with belief, the movement that would make them blossom.

The day the sky was knocked to the ground, the day the demigod was silently wrapped and turned into an empty idol, the day the flowers no longer came, the day of mourning for the past, the day the past was trialled and the day the past was sentenced.

The transition that bore expectation, the transition that seemed like a mother’s touch, the transition to happiness, that transition that opens up and makes the world come alive, a looking-around, the perception of the other, an end to intestinal madness, a long breath.

The present of absence, the present of the senses, the present where utopia is lost and the direction blurred, this present that seems to run everywhere simultaneously, this present ready to implode, this present that can no more, this hypocritical stretching towards a future no-one sees.

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The special section that follows, varied, eclectic, and arbitrary as it may be, colours a movement from utopia to disbelief, to use such words, a departure from the eschatology of the Maoist promise and an adventurist fall into confused hedonism, noisy up-turning of life’s past stability, and puzzled accumulation for an end always to come. This is explicitly addressed in the two articles of philosophy, the first drawing the grand-narrative of the movement and the second trying to come to terms with the results.

Within the context of contemporary art, it is easy to mark the great divide of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. The new Chinese avant-garde, developing full of creative energies and optimism in the 1980s, generally a period of relaxation of social and political control, bangs straight against Tiananmen when the China / Avant-Garde exhibition of 1989, taking place just before the protests and the ensuing repression, is closed down by the police after an artist shoots two bullets at her own installation. As Karen Smith remarks in her interview, during the 1980s artists truly believed of being invited to participate in the great transformation of the new China, furnishing a solid cultural basis to the emerging economic might. This optimism comes to an end as tanks roll in the square.

The early 90s, on the other hand, are the years of Political Pop and Cynical Realism, a truly ironic reaction malgr? lui the first, a cry of resignation, failure, and indifference the second. Political Pop, mixing as it does Cultural Revolution imaginaries with multinational logos, surrenders its irony in the most ironic (albeit bitterly so) of manners—by joining the army of corporate logos it employs. Itself now a logo of Chinese contemporary art, finally become repetitive in its industrial production of requested collectors’ items. Cynical Realism, with its distorted faces and absurd conglomeration of masses, shows the absurdity of the inhabited reality with a detachment that smells of resignation, with a distance that prohibits contact.

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As I write, the Dashanzi Art Festival is taking place, hosted and organised by Beijing’s art village, Area 798. Varied, eclectic, impossible to categorise, it nonetheless shows a particular attention to notions of “modernity”. The theme of the festival is Beijing/Background, and it would not be a mistake to claim that Beijing, today, is the modern. Modernity understood as perpetual and complete transformation, as ceaseless up-turning of the established order, as the erasure of the past and the glorification of the future, the eternal “new” covering the familiar ancient.

In philosophy and critical thought, an analysis of Chinese modernity/post modernity is at the order of the day, with numerous conferences, publications, and fervent debates.
Judging by some the works presented at the Dashanzi Festival, the process of the modern, replacing an idealised but frightening past with an affluent but spiritually empty present, is viewed more as a destructive then a creative force. One exhibition, Seduced and Abandoned, features the work of eight Chinese photographers investigating the passage of time and the unfolding of progress over the Chinese reality. A telling and technically exquisite photograph presents a lonely, nude, withered tree at the centre of a flattened field at the edges of the city. What it once was – blooming countryside, or perhaps a small urban enclave, a few houses and a few goats – is rendered sacrificial object to the passage of time. And what approaches? At the far edges of the photograph, we can distil the relentless advance of anonymous, alienating, frightening tower blocks.
A video, by the name The Last Judgement, presents a characterless human figure, produced with digital technology, floating in an empty, grey, homogeneous haze. The question “where must I go?” is endlessly repeated, receiving, as sole answer, the unintelligible, confusing, paradoxical, bitterly ironic response “You must go there”.

Lorenzo Marsili

Beijing, May 2006