Book Review

By Valerie C. Doran

Throughout his impressive and interestingly varied oeuvre, the art historian Wu Hung has shown in his scholarship a radicalism of approach made powerful by being implicit rather than explicit. Like the traditional connoisseur of Chinese art, he is above all concerned with the question of authenticity; but while the connoisseur is focused on judging the authenticity of objects, Wu focuses on developing an authenticity of understanding itself.

Concept 21, Beijing-Tibet By Sheng Qi, 1998 Computer-generated images `Departing from China', cancelled exhibition at the Design Museum, Beijing Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, p. 180

In his primary identity as a specialist in ancient Chinese art and architecture, previously on the faculty at Harvard and currently at the University of Chicago, Wu early on gravitated to the notion that to appreciate an art's significance in its totality, comprehending the materiality of an artwork - what he has described as its `[physical] form, actual viewing, and actual handling' - is as important as understanding its image (definition quoted in Andrew Campbell, `Investigations: Medium and Message', University of Chicago Magazine, April 1997). This concept, subtly veering from the parameters of material culture, informs a number of his acclaimed volumes on traditional Chinese art. In his The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting, for example, Wu re-examines the fundamental question of what, exactly, constitutes a Chinese painting, and proceeds to seek answers through an approach that `naturally breaks down the confines between image, object and context' (London, 1996, p. 9). In Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, we encounter Wu in another mode, applying these concepts as a curator, chronicler and critic of the extreme edge of Chinese contemporary art. Although this aesthetic alter ego may come as a surprise to those familiar only with Wu's work on traditional Chinese art, his interest in China's new art and artists has been of long standing, and this is his second major book on the subject. Wu's apparent ease in negotiating the contrasting - indeed, some might say oxymoronic - worlds of the Chinese art of the ancient past and the turbulent present may in part derive from his experience as a curator at Beijing's Palace Museum from 1973 to 1980, a period that includes the last three years of the Cultural Revolution, when caring for ancient works was in itself a radical act. The present book is nominally the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Wu Hung last year for the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and entitled `Canceled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China'. Like the exhibition itself, however, the book breaks new ground to become a much more ambitious construction. In both cases, rather than presenting and critiquing a specific group of works, Wu has sought to forge a dynamic narrative and visual synthesis through which to communicate, with a kind of tactile immediacy, the social reality within which Chinese experimental artists survive, create and disseminate their works in China today. Thematically, Wu does this by placing his focus on the act of mounting an exhibition of experimental works in China, rather than on the works themselves, as a semiotic vehicle by which to illuminate the social and physical conditions within which such acts take place and by which they are circumscribed þ an extension of the idea of `[physical] form, actual viewing, and actual handling' that he has applied to his studies of traditional art.

The concept and the primary material for both exhibition and book derive from an intensive year Wu spent in China, from 1999 to 2000, investigating the current state of experimental art there. Wu's double-edged status as both a kind of celebrity academic observer and cultural insider allowed him an enviable depth of access: he attended exhibitions public, private and underground, spent long hours in discussion with experimental artists, curators and critics, asked for and received detailed statements concerning their personal views and experiences, participated in round-table discussions, and along the way seems to have discovered new paradigms for his own critical and curatorial approaches. One of his key observations in the present book is that an exhibition of experimental art in China today is `a heavily contested social event that brings a nexus of social relationships into interplay. This means that an exhibition can be itself a highly inventive act' (p. 44).

The aspect of inventiveness is strongly felt in the book's textual and visual presentation. Reflecting Wu's concern with authenticity, the text juxtaposes the voice of his own art-historical and critical analysis with a lively and compelling mix of voices direct from the Chinese experimental art world. These are in the form of interviews, first-person narratives, eyewitness accounts and critical assessments from a spectrum of individuals involved in the complex and often dramatic process of exhibiting experimental art in China, from artists, independent curators and exhibition sponsors to critics and audience. The book's visual design also breaks away from the typical art catalogue approach (evidenced even in recent publications like Inside Out: China's New Art, where the art direction of the book seemed less than up to the task of showcasing the disparate and challenging works). Here, image and text become integral to one another; and the range of graphic devices used, including photomontage, colour-blocking, text art and a dramatic deployment of double-page spreads, manages to be appropriate to the material rather than intrusive. It is clear that Wu has allowed himself to be influenced and also guided by the art culture he is investigating.

Divided into four sections, the narrative of Exhibiting Experimental Art in China begins with an introductory overview of the emergence and development of experimental art in the post-Cultural Revolution era, with a periodization based on the watershed developments of the last twenty years: the Stars exhibitions of the late 1970s and early 1980s; the exuberant experimentation and appropriation of modernist modes of the `85 Art New Wave' movement; the unprecedented `China/Avant-garde Exhibition' at Beijing's prestigious National Art Gallery in February 1989, closed down by the police after an artist fired a gun at her installation; the emergence of Cynical Realism and Political Pop from the gloom of the post-Tiananmen period; and the powerful presence of conceptual art, installation and video in the mid-to-late 1990s. Much of this material has been covered in articles and catalogue essays on these topics published by both Chinese and Western critics since the early 1990s. What is different about Wu's comparative assessment is his focus on the intentions and methods of exhibition. For example, he cites the political mass movement concept of duoquan (`taking over an official institution') as the primary motivating force of experimental artists and curators in organizing exhibitions throughout the 1980s. This is why the `China/Avant-garde Exhibition', in which a national exhibition of experimental art was finally allowed to `take over' the National Art Gallery was seen as such a major triumph, albeit short-lived.

By contrast, Wu characterizes the experimental art of the last decade as having shifted `from a collective movement to individualized experiments'. The motivations and concerns of artists and curators in organizing exhibitions has also shifted, and social revolution is no longer the primary goal. Rather, artists and curators today have become more concerned with `building a social foundation which would guarantee regular exhibitions of experimental art and reduce interference from the political authorities' (p. 17). It is striking that while in the post-Tiananmen period the seductive outlaw status of experimental art in China was a strong factor in arousing international interest in this art, Wu identifies the most compelling development in the Chinese experimental art world today as the efforts of local artists and curators to legitimize this art by creating new channels to exhibit it openly and publicly in a Chinese context. The task of communicating the `Chinese context' at the turn of the millennium remains a central concern throughout the book. Wu portrays the negotiations and inventiveness of artists, curators and sponsors involved in presenting experimental art to various audiences - including both art-world insiders and the unsuspecting masses - in a complex cultural climate characterized by official hostility, institutional atrophy, and intense socio-economic change. `Generally speaking', Wu comments, `China in 2000 is no longer a socialist monolith, but a huge mixture of old and new, feudal and postmodern, excitement and anxiety. The country's future depends on the outcome of the negotiation between conflicting social forces' (p. 21). To Wu, the efforts of the Chinese experimental art world to go public with their exhibitions reflect the complex dynamics of these `negotiations between conflicting social forces' occurring on all levels of Chinese life today.

Wu chronicles exhibitions held in supermarkets, over the Internet, in department stores, in nightclubs, in the abandoned basement of an apartment building (where the neighbours thought the artists were members of the outlawed Falun Gong religious sect and called the police) and in venues unexpected just because of their more visible and official status, such as Beijing's Forbidden City. At times, to avoid the exigencies of censorship and the possibility of being shut down, an exhibition would be announced only on the day of the opening, or shows would be staged at undisclosed venues in the suburbs, with advance flyers instructing the audience to meet at a designated spot in the city from where they would be bused to the site. Despite such efforts, however, Wu found that the spectre of censorship loomed large over the efforts of the experimental art world to go public. Even when curators took precautions such as inviting representatives of various authorities, from the local police to members of the government exhibition bureau, to vet their shows and identify the most politically suspect works, their exhibitions were routinely cancelled or closed down. Indeed, it is just such a show that forms the subject of Wu's exhibition `Canceled', and which is the focus of Parts One and Two of his book. The exhibition in question is `It's Me: An Aspect of Chinese Contemporary Art in the '90s', a group show of experimental artists that was to have taken place from 21 to 24 November 1998 in a highly unusual venue for experimental art: the Main Ritual Hall in the former Imperial Ancestral Temple, now designated the Workers' Cultural Palace, an imposing 15th century structure at the entrance to the Forbidden City. This ambitious multimedia exhibition, with the stated theme of self-discovery and self-representation, was cancelled just before the opening reception. In `Canceled', Wu took the novel approach of `re-presenting...an exhibition that was never realized'. Essentially, his purpose was to distil the most compelling aspects of the cancelled exhibition as an event in its own right. As part of this process, Wu focuses in the book on four individuals intimately involved in the aborted presentation of `It's Me': the independent curator, Leng Lin; one of the exhibitors, the installation and performance artist Song Dong; the official exhibition sponsor, Guo Shirui; and a witness to the cancellation, the documentary film maker Wu Wenguang. Part One of the book, entitled `Canceled: An Exhibition about an Exhibition', primarily documents the physical presentation of the exhibition at the Smart Museum, including artist's renderings of the exhibition design; photographs and text of the single work from `It's Me' included in `Canceled', Song Dong's powerful video installation Father and Son in the Ancestral Temple (both the original installation in Beijing and the adaptation shown at the museum are featured here); and a wonderful chronicling of Diary: Snow, Nov. 21, 1998, a 14-minute impromptu video documentary shot by Wu Wenguang as he rode in a friend's car to the exhibition venue on a snowy afternoon, only to find that the show had been cancelled. Wu Hung provides stills from the video as well as the transcript of Wu Wenguang's cryptic but oddly moving commentary, ad-libbed as events unfolded before his camera. His comment upon arriving at the Ancestral Temple that `the artworks are all inside; the people are all outside' was a primary inspiration to Wu Hung for the exhibition design, which Wu describes as `the opposition of a closed interior space (i.e., the Main Ritual Hall of the Ancestral Temple) and an open exterior space (i.e., the courtyard surrounding the hall)' (p. 49).

Part Two, `It's Me: A Case Study', makes its greatest contribution by providing detailed portraits of Leng Lin, Song Dong and Guo Shirui that illuminate the social reality within which these three very different individuals operate and within which they also came to interact - an illumination that neither mere analysis nor critical theorizing could effect. We learn, for example, that Leng Lin, like many independent curators in China, has a day job that would not seem to predicate his involvement with experimental art: in his case, working as an academic researcher in aesthetic theory at the Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Yet as a student of art history at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1980s, Leng was drawn to the wave of experimentation taking place on the fringes of the official art world. His direct engagement with the experimental art circle began in the early 1990s, when he began to frequent the Hanmo Art Center, one of Beijing's first private art galleries and a gathering place for experimental artists, curators, art critics and foreign collectors - until it was closed down in 1995. Through Leng Lin's personal account of the events surrounding the cancellation of `It's Me', we also learn something about the mix of social and cultural elements and extremes that make up the existential milieu of the Beijing contemporary art world. Leng Lin's description of the moments leading up to the cancellation of his exhibition convey part of this scene:

That evening I went to a reception of an exhibition at the German Embassy. It was a huge gathering. Several hundred people turned up, and the reception turned into an exuberant party that continued into the early morning of the next day. Spontaneous performances were staged and some involved nudity. I and some artists in It's Me distributed invitations to our exhibition, scheduled to open the next day at two o'clock. I was totally unaware of anything problematic about my exhibition. Only later did I learn that the person who ran the exhibition office in the Ancestral Temple received a phone call around midnight, informing him that the exhibition was canceled because of its "failure in completing the required procedure for approval". (p. 128)

Song Dong has played an influential role in China's experimental art circles since his first solo exhibition in 1994, a performance piece that was, incidentally, cancelled on the day it opened. From Wu's descriptions and the visual images of projects Song has created and initiated, and from the artist's own commentary on his search for alternative means of bringing experimental art to the public, we see the levels of inventiveness inspired in such an artist by the challenges of moving beyond restriction. At the same time, as Song Dong relates in an autobiographical statement, he is also devoted to his day job as an art teacher in the Number 41 Middle School in Beijing, for which he has received Annual Model Teacher Awards in 1997 and 1998.

The book chronicles one of Song's most ambitious alternative-venue projects, a year-long collective art event involving the staging of individual exhibitions and performance pieces by seven different artists in seven locations across China, from Beijing to Hainan. Known as `Wildlife', the exhibition was given the expressive subtitle `An Experimental Art Project Held Outside Conventional Exhibition Spaces and Devoid of Conventional Exhibition Forms, Commencing Jingzhe Day, 1997, One of the Twenty-four Divisions in China's Traditional Calendar, Which Marks the Moment in a Year When Animals Wake Up from Hibernation and All Creatures Revive'. (It is interesting here to learn the little-known fact that the `Wildlife' project produced one of the most publicized images in Chinese experimental art in the last three years: the photograph entitled `Fishpond', an image from a performance piece of the same title created for `Wildlife' by Zhang Huan.)

Perhaps the most surprising and instructive portrait is that of Guo Shirui, a government bureaucrat willing - and for a time, able - to use his official position to unconventional ends. Guo filled the important function of official sponsor for `It's Me', an asset without which the exhibition would never have been considered for a venue as visible as the Ancestral Temple in the first place. While serving as director of the Contemporary Art Center, a state-run company specializing in packaging officially approved exhibitions for export to foreign countries, Guo had become a strong personal advocate of experimental art. Under his stewardship, the Contemporary Art Center developed into a major supporter of experimental art exhibitions in the mid-to-late 1990s, until the government finally curtailed its activities in this area - and transferred Guo to another division. Describing Guo Shirui as an unsung hero, Wu provides a vivid description of the events leading to Guo's involvement with experimental art:

Guo Shirui became attracted to experimental art through Song Dong, a personal friend who was also his son's art teacher. Song Dong's 1994 installation/performance One More Lesson: Do You want to Play with Me? was the first experimental art exhibition Guo Shirui ever attended. He was fascinated by the unconventional appearance of the show: several students were reading wordless textbooks, while the audience freely participated in the performance. But what fascinated Guo Shirui even more was the cancellation of Song Dong's show on the day it opened. He told me in an interview that this was an eye-opening event to him because art suddenly gained meaning. Working in an official exhibition company he had been organizing numerous exhibitions for export. Most of these exhibitions featured conventional academic oil paintings and traditional ink paintings; not once had these government-sponsored projects generated a strong reaction, either positive or negative. But here was Song Dong's show, a small and seemingly incomprehensible installation which, however, aroused intense reaction. To Guo Shirui, the intensity of the reaction provided the best evidence for the show's meaningfulness. He was eager to know more about experimental art, and soon found himself organizing an exhibition of this art later the same year. (p. 99)

Another surprising revelation of the book is the way the phenomenon of a cancellation is viewed by the artists and curators involved. During his investigative year in China, Wu had been amazed at how little active opposition there was when an exhibition was cancelled, despite the obvious anguish, disappointment and frustration expressed when this occurred. Questioning artists and independent curators about this, Wu found that in their eyes, at this time `a cancellation does not mean a failure. In fact, a cancellation always enriches the significance of a canceled exhibition: it confirms the experimental nature of the exhibition and enhances its impact on the public consciousness. It also confirms the unofficial identity of the curator and participating artists, and strengthens their determination to change the system. Instead of stopping experimental exhibitions, a cancellation encourages the effort to organize them' (p. 42).

In Part Three, `Twelve Experimental Exhibitions: A Documentary History', Wu provides vivid documentation of influential exhibitions held between 1997 and 2000, and gives centre stage to the range of experimental art being produced in China as well as the exhibiting of it. Wu's concise descriptions of the content and background of each exhibition are balanced by transcripts of interviews with the curators and often the artists involved, as well as by excerpts from original catalogue essays and a number of curators' extremely candid accounts of the negotiations, struggles - even occasional fist-fights - occurring among the various parties to the exhibition process. Practical problems, such as how to finance a catalogue (most often the artists pool their money to pay for it), how to find a sponsor, and how to beat the censors while sacrificing as little autonomy as possible, are candidly addressed. Discussions of the art itself are also vivid and sometimes as shocking as a slap in the face; as is the seeming arbitrariness of the censorship process, where extreme exhibitions featuring human corpses and the basic torture of live animals (anyone who has read up on the fringe scene at last autumn's Shanghai Biennale will be familiar with these phenomena) are allowed to take place while others featuring comparatively tame subject matter, such as models for experimental architectural structures, are shut down.

Another major insight provided in this section relates to the tenor of the current critical discourse on experimental art, which tends to focus on ambivalent or negative feelings about the treatment of Chinese experimental art in the Western art world. An excerpt from a catalogue essay by Feng Boyi, curator of the exhibition `Traces of Existence', which was held at the Art Now Studio in Beijing in January 2000, more or less sums up points made by a number of other critics quoted elsewhere in the book:

Since the opening of China in the late 1970s, the impact of Western art on Chinese art has not only been unstoppable, but has turned Chinese art into grist for its own mill. Chinese art is taken as an alien system, and is given a place as such in a global system of cultural and commercial production. A by-product of this global commmunication is that the gaze of contemporary Chinese artists must be continually fixed on Western models. Even when Chinese artists occupy the international spotlight, the Western curatorial bias interferes with their ability to communicate with a Western audience as equals. As long as this situation prevails, Chinese artists must pander to the sensibilities of Western curators and adhere to a Western image of what "Chinese contemporary art" should be. Despite the many circumstances inhibiting the development of contemporary art within China, this Western approach to exhibiting Chinese contemporary art is no less harmful. (p. 150)

Other critics go somewhat further, characterizing Western interest in experimental Chinese art as evidence of a new kind of hegemony. There is much to be considered and addressed in these particular arguments (not least the fact that a number of the major exhibitions of Chinese experimental art shown in the West in the last decade have been curated or co-curated by Chinese critics and dealers), but this is not the platform from which to address these issues. Suffice it to say that the inclusion of this critical discourse is an important contribution of the book. Given today's increasingly globalized framework for any kind of art, Wu's most valuable contribution lies in having provided a basis for a comparative reading of Chinese experimental art based on the understanding that there may still be different answers to the same questions. Throughout the book, his careful attention to an authentic re-presentation heightens the reader's awareness that, although many aspects of Chinese experimental art resonate with Westerners, and indeed in many ways seem familiar, the context from which this art is generated and within which it exists is so different from our own that nothing, not even the grounds for that sense of familiarity, can be assumed.

Exhibiting Experimental Art in China By Wu Hung The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000 224 pages, 111 colour and 29 black-and-white illustrations ISBN 935573-33-X Price: US$40