Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture

Reading Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture to pass the time while waiting the cable guy this morning, I was struck by a question posed by Bhabha.

Bhabha asks “are the interests of ‘Western’ theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc? Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?” (Bhabha, Location of Culture, pg. 20-21)

This is the same exact question that has plagued me since starting my research into Contemporary Chinese Art. Throughout my research for my thesis, I have applied the language of Western theory such as Stuart Hall, Derrida,Foucault among others, to my analysis of Contemporary Chinese Art. In doing so, I have felt as if I am using an inadequate system of theoretical critique. Does my use of Western theory to analysis Chinese art “produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?” I am not sure I know the answer to this question but the best answer at this juncture I can give is that the aim of my thesis is to discuss the perception of Chinese Contemporary Art in the West and therefore perhaps it is appropriate to place Chinese Contemporary Art within the theoretical frameworks of the West. I do not view my project as an assertion of Western power or knowledge but as an exploration of Contemporary Chinese Art in the global context. Either way I think it is important for me to consider this question as I continue my research.

HONG KONG: Fo Tan Artist Studios

Fo Tan Artist Studios

HONG KONG: The Endless Possibilites of Calligraphy: An Afternoon with Fung Ming Chip and Yim

Material Number 747 (Zone Script) (FMC-223)

http://www.hanart.com/artistArtwork.php?artist_number=47&page_number=1

Never formally trained as a calligrapher, Fung Ming Chip (b. 1971) plays with the calligraphic tradition to explore time, space, and water. Using over 100 different styles of calligraphy, his work expands on the definition of calligraphy. The only thing traditional in his work is the materials: paper, ink, water, and brush. Using traditional materials in a non-traditional calligraphic process, Ming questions what is "Chinese" in which work and what is "contemporary". The process is what is important in his work. In addition to being compositionally rich, his work portraysthe boundless possibilities of calligraphy in the contemporary context.

HONG KONG: Visit to Asia Art Archive

(photo courtesy of http://www.aaa.org.hk/contact.aspx)

The Asia Art Archive, conveniently located across the street from my hotel on Hollywood Rd in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong, is an amazing source of information on contemporary Asian art. Started in 2000, AAA strives to make information about contemporary Asian art available to the public. I could have spent my entire 18 days in the AAA however my time was quite limited leaving me only one morning to explore the breadth of material.

At the moment, the AAA has an exhibition of archival materials on the start of the avant-garde movement in China. Organized into four sections: Reading Fever, Zhejiang Academy of Fine art, Art Groups (Northern Art Group, Xiamen Dada, Southwest Art Research Group, Southern Artists Salon, and Pond Society), and finally the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition, this exhibition is an excellent way to explore the start of the avant-garde in China. A trip to the Asia Art Archive is essential for anyone interested in viewing primary materials on the beginnings of Chinese contemporary art and was the perfect way to start of my journey through the contemporary art world in China.

To learn more about the Asia Art Archive visit their website http://www.aaa.org.hk/home.aspx

Asia Art Archive

11/F Hollywood Centre,

233 Hollywood Rd,

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

(On the junction of Possession Street and Hollywood Road)

Tel: (852) 2815 1112
Fax: (852) 2815 0032
Email: info@aaa.org.hk

Opening Hours: Monday - Saturday 10am-6pm
Open to the public, free of charge. 
Closed Public Holidays and from 25th December to 1st January

Zhang Huan's Three Heads Six Arms Explored

Three Heads Six Arms, 2008, currently displayed in the Civic Center plaza in San Francisco, reflects the shift away from performance art to sculpture. In place of his own body, Zhang build a 26’3 x 59’ x 32’9-3/4” copper sculpture of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, with six arms and three heads. “Bodhisattvas are future Buddha’s whose role it is to help all sentient beings along their paths to Buddhahood.”[1] One of the heads is a portrait of Zhang himself. The inspiration came from finding broken Buddhist statues in a Tibetan market. Broken during the Cultural Revolution, these Buddhist statue fragments represent to the artist the destruction of the Chinese culture during the Mao era. [2] But in these Buddhist fragmented sculptures, Zhang saw that they were still potent images. The incorporation of his own portrait emphasizes the idea of Buddhism as a part of Zhang’s individual memory and thus part of his cultural identity. Zhang appropriates the image of the Bodhisattva not as a reference to principles of Buddhism, but as a means to construct his own personal identity.

The use of Buddhist references in the work of Zhang is not to convey the principles of Buddhism but is used as a way to construct his personal identity. The basic philosophy of Buddhism is to end the endless cycles of rebirth and enter nirvana through the suppression of the individual (ego). The work of Zhang portrays the opposite, as his work is a search for his individuality.

Throughout his oeuvre, Zhang Huan portrays the notion of identity as a ‘production’ whether in Beijing, New York, and Shanghai. While in Beijing, Zhang Huan used performance as a means to make political statements and express his individuality, a radical statement in an oppressive state. The work produced in New York explores feelings of isolation due to the Diaspora experience. His most recent work produced since returning to Shanghai reflects the search for his cultural identity through recollection and memory. Not only do changing political and social conditions play a key role in the work of Zhang Huan but location whether in Beijing, New York, or Shanghai greatly informed the ‘production’ of Zhang Huan’s identity.

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[1] Huntington, Susan, The Art of Ancient India, pg. 97.

[2] Holmes, Pernilla, Zhang Huan: Beyond Buddha, Haunch of Venison, 2008, UK.

Interview with Leung Chi Wo

conducted June 30, 2010 in Hong Kong

PART ONE:

CM: Charlotte Miller

LCW: Leung Chi Wo

CM: Please talk about the inspirations for you work?

LCW: I think being an artist in Hong Kong, I am was born in the late 1960’s and when I graduated it was the early 90’s in Hong Kong there were not a lot of opportunities for artists. I didn’t mean to be an artist, I just wanted to do something for myself. Now adays if you ask graduate students they will tell you they want to be an artist and have a bid career in a gallery but I didn’t think about that. I was very young. I got a scholarship so I went to Italy. It was only the beginning that I learned about so called artistic practice. So I returned to Hong Kong in 1992. It was a very interesting moment for me. And then I thought maybe I could be an artist. Which is kind of vague but trying to be an artist that means to try to create continuously in whatever situation. Of course, there were not many commercial galleries it was also the beginning of contemporary Chinese art being international. I remember after I came back there were really big exhibitions like Post 89 at Hanart TZ so it was an interesting moment. In HK most interesting activities were artist run or artists initiatives. Hong Kong Art Center was crucial in the 1990’s because the museums were always boring and because part of the government structure. Hong Kong Art Center would show internationally and local artists until the late 1990’s when Oscar Ho left and so it was interesting for me. I got a job at a publishing house and it was the time where I learned about local culture. I didn’t think about learning about Hong Kong history until I worked in the publishing house. It was before the Hong Kong handover and so for the publishing history there was a big need to publish works that were by Hong Kong authors or that were about Hong Kong and then I was lucky to work with fantastic colleagues and we explored interesting topics. I worked for so called mainly pictorial. We published interesting titles like the post cards of Hong Kong, mainly the popular arts that was interesting for me. That made me think about using Hong Kong as an artistic practice. It was always part of my job to visit historical sites but at the same time I learned from it and tried to make photographic works. From 1993-mid 1990’s I made a pinhole photographic series of old Hong Kong, which was very interesting for me. I really loved to add so called sites of the cities in terms of the historical context or cultural context and I think the transitions of Hong Kong back to China. Nowadays I look at it a little direct or maybe naïve but it was important but it was enlightenment for myself to learn about what is happening before you. I think developed a keen interest in art then which was 5 years after I graduated. I really loved my job but I wanted to further my practice of my studio art so I decided to do my MFA in China U. I spent two years there. Being an artist, I always had a job here. I had a great job actually but that means you wouldn’t spend as much time doing work. This is around the time I started Para/Site.

CM: Can you tell me about Para/Site?

LCW: It was artist run and we started a few months after I started my artist studies. I have a good friend named Keith Jung It was a time when there were not many artists that were not interested in photography or photo based practice and I found him really interesting and we shared a lot of things in common. There is another self-taught artist Patrick Lee, we found we could share a lot of things and wanted to initiate a project together. There weren’t many opportunities for exhibitions in Hong Kong. Hong Kong Art Center more now then at this time is a huge rental gallery. It was an opportunity that we could just to run a gallery and make a show ourselves but it was expensive and we could not afford it. We started to offer alternative. We just needed a space and that art scene was so marginal. We didn’t need to connect with all of society just our friends and colleagues so we thought we could just rent an apartment with three rooms and have installations there but it was very difficult because space and properties is very difficult in Hong Kong especially almost impossible to obtain a short lease only one or two months and then. A friend told us that the space below her apart. Was available. I saw the space before because an artist rented as an open studio so it was interesting. It was in Kennedy Park so outside main center so interesting for artistic reasons. You need more people to do more people to do bigger projects so it was minimum three four moths to do a lease so we expand our group to include four other members. We basically all had a studio. We had an idea to produce work as a workshop and finally all the works produced there were site specific and we made three exhibitions. Three weeks to produce works an three weeks to show. So we had it for four months. Then the foundation the Hong Kong Development arts council gave individual grants to each artist so then we had the opportunity to really focus on making the work so we were really lucky we got the small grant but that covered the rent. So from the very beginning we wre somehow looking at alternative possible but also right from the beginning had instructional support. It was a successful project and a lot of people cae. One more accidental find was that we attracted lots of neighbors, which we didn’t think to do this. We were in Kennedy Park because we couldn’t afford Sheung Wan. It created new possibilities, which has become the essence of Para/Site. Basically it is a site or a space or collective that would respond to the situation. We look at the neighborhood, the so-called local context. It was only for four months and we had very positive feedback from the arts community and we were very encouraged to continue.

CM: Can you tell me about how Para/Site changed over the years?

LCW: The first para/site was meant as just a project but after that we became to consider if there could be an art space in Hong Kong that didn’t really exist before so after a year we created a better program and apply for grants. You didn’t really feel it was a space or site until you have the time to sense it. The model of maintaining a space started in 1997 when we moved it to not quite the current location but number 2 now it is number 4 so things started from there. We got a lot of energy the first year and were thinking what we could do for this city, what was missing from the city and we got encourage by curatorial practice. At this time there were not that many independent curators. We curated ourselves and encouraged others to curate. Sometimes not all of them were success. We did a lot of publications and a lot of writings. So basically we tried to fill the holes and it was possible because we squeezed all the resources and possibilities. We all worked as volunteers, which is not possible today. Today you could not ask the employees of parasite to work for free so in this case the possibilities were more before when everyone was passionate to do things. It was my honeymoon for 2-3 years 1997-1999 and then it was critical that a lot of core or founding members left. I went to New York because I got a grant and other core members left to do their masters in New York or London. I came back for two weeks in 2000 and it was really changed, the chemistry was changed. It was time when Parasite received a lot of criticism.

Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing in 18 Days!

Follow me as I explore Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing in 18 Days! I will investigate the integration of contemporary Chinese art in the international arena through a series of interviews, artist features, studio visits, and exhibition reviews.

Coming this May San Francisco Calls Three Heads Six Arms Home

Zhang Huan, Three Heads Six Arms, 2008

As part of the Shanghai Celebration, Zhang Huan's sculpture Three Heads Six Arms, 2008 will premiere this May 2010 in San Francisco in the Civic Center across from City Hall. The sculpture weighing 15 tons and standing over 26 feet tall, is part of Zhang Huan's sculpture series depicting Buddha arms, legs, feet, hands, and heads. This monumental series is inspired by the artists experience of seeing remnants of religious sculptures destroyed during the Cultural Revolution for sale in a Tibetan market.

Artist Feature: Qiu Zhijie

Qiu Zhijie is creating calli-photo-graphy, in which he combines, performance, calligraphy and photography as means of exploring Chinese cultural identity in the face of globalization. In Light Writing-24 Seasons, 2005-2006 Qiu Zhijie brings the art of calligraphy into real space alluding to traditional landscape painting by the Chinese literati.

Light Writing-24 Seasons is comprised of 24 color photographs executed over 12 months. In this series, Qiu Zhijie, executes calligraphy in the air using a flashlight as his brush rendering the characters for the traditional 24 seasonal markers (jiegi) in the traditional Chinese calendar. The calendar is also referred to as the agricultural calendar (nongli) because originally the farmers closely observed this calendar. Close observance of the traditional calendar in pre-Modern China was a sign of fulfilling one’s duty to society based on the Confucian ideology that men plow and women sow. Adherence to the calendar ensured not only a successful year agriculturally but also seen as supporting the imperial reign.

As contemporary Chinese society became more industrialized, the agricultural calendar was used less and less. In contemporary Chinese collective consciousness, the names of the each of the 24 seasonal markers are not widely known. Qiu Zhijie in using the traditional agricultural calendar draws on the notion of loss of memory in China. This piece discusses the theme in the Avant- Garde of loss of memory of Chinese cultural identity.

The site for these calligraphy performances was chosen to represent the changing seasons, one for each of the 24 solar markers of the Chinese year. Each background is unique as the he locations range from Beijing, Macao and Dartington hall in England. Instead of drawing on traditional Chinese landscapes as the background for these photographs, Qiu Zhijie picks a new landscape of discarded buildings in China as a reflection of contemporary Chinese culture. Set against this new landscape, Qiu Zhjie renders each character backwards using a flashlight. In marking the space with the character for that season in light, he uses light as a metaphor to explore the relation of self and time. Captured by a camera set on a long exposure, the result is a photograph representing time and the passage of time.

The photograph Xiazhi (The Summer Solstice) uses the 798 Factory in Beijing, which is the hotspot of the art world in China, as the backdrop. (Image 10) In the photograph, a possible installation of a new exhibition is visible through the light in the window. Rendering the character for Xiazhi against the backdrop of a contemporary art center draws on the idea production of art and thus production of identity in China in the wake of globalization, urbanization, and westernization.

In Light Writing-24 Seasons, the body of the artist is sometimes visible signifying the relationship between the body and the passage of time. Juxtaposing old China, the traditional agricultural calendar, with the new China, the urbanized center, Qiu Zhijie through his work Light Writing- 24 Seasons explores how the individual self fits into the larger global culture.

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[1] Qiu Zhijie, www.qiuzhijie.com/html/critiques/e-005.html, Accessed 6 December, 2009.

Exhibition Review: Shanghai Show at Asian Art Museum

http://www.asianart.org/shanghai.htm

The Shanghai Show at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco opens February 12, 2010 in conjunction with the Shanghai Celebration, the year-long Bay Area collaboration honoring SF's sister city and coinciding with the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

The overall mission of the exhibition is to portray the history and culture of Shanghai, however the division of the Shanghai exhibition into four sections: Beginnings (1850-1912), High Times (1912-1937), Revolution (1920-1976), and Shanghai Today (1980-present) provides a very limited view of Shanghai. The wall text for novice viewer of Chinese art provides little to no explanation of the work and therefore the viewer is left confused on the inclusion of each work in the exhibition. It requires background knowledge of the history ofart in China to find the works interesting.

Britta Erickson is the curator of Shanghai Today (1980-Present), which is a section of the Shanghai exhibition. At a lecture on February 5, 2010, Britta explained that each piece of the show was chosen in order to portray the range of styles, media, and references that are present in contemporary art of Shanghai. Britta accomplished her goal of showcasing the range of the artistic practice of artists working in Shanghai. The show reflects the importance of photography, video, and installation as important modes of production in Shanghai.

After the lecture by Britta Erickson, we were able to hear directly from three of the artists in the show: Zheng Chongbin, Li Huayi, Jian-Jun Zhang.

Zheng Chongbin, The Dimension of Ink No.1, 2008 (Courtesy of AAM)

The artist talked about the relation of contemporary Chinese ink painting to traditional chiense ink painting. Contemporary Chinese ink painting extends the traditional vocabulary of ink painting. Contemporary Chinese ink painting refers to various forms of traditional ink painting yet, Chongbing creates a depth to the piece. Traditional Chinese ink painting is very linear, however this piece has a sense of space and depth achieved through the use of acrylic paint mixed with ink applied with a Western brush. Chongbing uses acrylic white paint vs. “white space” typical in Chinese ink painting creating a sense of physicality of the work. Carravaggio and his of the use of dark space also influence his work. Chongbin’s work, The Dimension of Ink No. 1, references traditional ink painting as well as Western influences.

Li Huayi, Forest, 2004 (Courtesy of AAM)

Li Huayi described his work as semi-abstract. His method of working is very similar to Zheng Chongbin’s. He discussed how if he stopped halfway then his work would look exactly like Zheng Chongbin’s. The artist draws on the traditional notion of “Chi” which is the energy and body movement expressed through the brush, however Li Huayi uses a western brush. His work reflects a personal approach to both the past and the present of Chinese landscape painting.

Jian-Jun Zhang, Shanghai Garden, 2010 (Courtesy of AAM)

Jian-Jun Zhang refers to his installation as a “societal landscape”. In this installation the artist draws upon the traditional rock garden form with contemporary elements in order to signify the squeezing together of old and new, east and west. Jian-Jun made molds of Taihu rocks and cast them in silicone. Jian-Jun also made a mold of a antique Han Dynasty vase also cast in peach silicone. The color of the rocks and the Han dynasty vase were chosen by going into fashion schools to see what the latest color trends are thus choosing rose, peach, and burgundy. Each of the rocks and the vase were placed on piled bricks that were taken from houses that were constructed in Shanghai in the 1920’s that were demolished. Referencing the destruction of the architecture of Shanghai. Scattered throughout the bricks are little “trees” which are solar powered and add a touch of fantasy to the rock garden.

This piece is partially visible upon entering into the museum on the left hand side thus drawing you into the exhibit. The placement of this piece is perfect as it combines East and West thus inviting both audiences into the space. The piece is accessible to both a traditional audience as it clearly references the rock garden but also ties in modern issues of globalization.

Liu Jianhua, Can You Tell Me?, 2006 (Courtesy of ArtZineChina.com)

The placement of works within the exhibition detracts from the works themselves. In particular, the placement of Liu Jianhua’s Can You Tell Me? on the west end of North Court greatly from the work as the engravings on the books are barely legible as light streams down on the stainless steel books from the windows above. Can You Tell Me?, 2006, is an installation piece in which Liu Jianhua engraved two questions about the future of Shanghai in English, Mandarin, French, German, and Japanese onto stainless steel books suspended vertically from the wall. The questions range from humorous such as “Can Shanghai make the magic of David Copperfield come true, and move the Bund 100 meters backward to widen the Avenue?” to serious “Can Shanghai build the first welfare bank in the world to allow poor people to get money whenever they need?” The inclusion of Can You Tell Me? asks the viewer to contemplate the future of Shanghai and its global impact, however the message of the piece is lost as the placement of the piece underneath large windows hinders the viewers ability to read the engraved questions.