The Annual Report of OCD. Zhang Peili Solo Exhibition

Rén Space (No.10, Lane 133, Shangwen Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai)

November 5, 2019 – July 28, 2020

This exhibition puts the artist on display, literally. From the inside out. You may never again have an opportunity to see so much of one individual laid bare before your eyes all at one time. But whilst the project is a no-holds-barred depiction of the artist himself, it is far from a conventional self-portrait. Anyone hoping to achieve a selfie with Zhang Peili, who is after all one of China’s better known contemporary art figures, will be in for a shock.

What lies in store is hinted at in the phrase “from the inside out.” This is not literary license. It is literal truth. Language is littered with phrases in which impossible actions are invoked against various parts of the body, not to belie actual intent but states of mind. We pour our hearts out, or wear them on our sleeve. We open ourselves up to speak frankly with friends, which may lead us to cry our eyes out. Eyes that stand out on stalks when surprised, while anxiety tends to tie stomachs in knots. We tear our hair out in anguish; we vent our spleen; and are prone to go out of our mind.

Zhang Peili, 2019. (Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

Naturally we don’t mean any of it in a literal sense. Such sayings evolved because the body is both closest to us homo sapiens, and the one thing we have in common. In sickness and in health, the body is universal, so we reasonably assume its sensations to be shared by all peoples when speaking of emotional experiences. The caveat in the case of “The Annual Report of OCD” is that the taking/coming “out” actions, so blithely uttered as metaphor, is literally the modus operandi of Zhang Peili’s project.

Literal metaphor aside, universality is central to Zhang Peili’s art. From the first of his conceptual experiments, he has worked with topics, experiences, and knowledge that are closest to the universal “us” – a random list that includes sax players, swimmers, tai qi, latex gloves, blood samples, acting, adoration, claustrophobia, control, a children’s toy, and chicken soup, which all make perfect sense in the context of the form they inhabit in his art. In 1993, he was quoted (in the catalogue to the exhibition China’s New Art Post 1989) as saying, “We (artists) should not build barriers in the name of art.” Zhang Peili’s commitment to this belief clearly continues. Over the last several decades his artworks have been generally accessible to all. The possible exception being here, in the case of people who feel faint at the idea of seeing inside the body at close quarters. But fear not. Zhang Peili counters overt realism here with the soothing, ethereal quality of the unexpected materials that have been used to fabricate the works. So, in line with an ethos that appears to drive this artist, “The Annual Report of OCD” is but the latest in a career full of works that communicate directly, fluidly, if at times disturbingly, across borders, cultures and ethnicities, and which speak poignantly, as sharply, about one or another aspect of the condition of being human.

In contrast to the accessibility of Zhang Peili’s customary approach to visual language, but perfectly aligned with another of his long-established practices, the phrasing of “The Annual Report of OCD” for this display is somewhat obtuse. A no-frills statement of fact, yet one clearly intended to misdirect attention, and confound assumptions about what visitors can expect to see. For the artist, this is a conscious backdrop for the project’s staging; a titular overture that is mundane on the one hand, academic on the other, but which ultimately heightens the intensity of an encounter with the body that is laid out for perusal, part by part, through the show.

关于强迫症的年度报告》场景图
‘The Annual Report of OCD” (installation view)
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

关于强迫症的年度报告》场景图
‘The Annual Report of OCD” (installation view)
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

Followers of Zhang Peili’s career won’t bat an eye. Aware of his track record of conceiving and equating art with “reports”, adopting a clinical approach to painting both in technique and subject-matter, and the consistent precision of hand in the execution of video films and installation works, fans will take “The Annual Report of OCD” at face value. “Another title like so many others attached to Zhang Peili’s art,” they say knowingly, “nominally dull in its ordinariness but just wait ‘til you see the exhibition.”

This paradox is affirmed by the literal form of objects on display, each a one-to-one scale replica of the artist’s own, and entire, body contents. In fact, here you will find everything of which Zhang Peili is comprised, but the skin. Creepy? Weird? Well, yes, a bit, but not for reasons of the individual pieces per se. There’s precise realism in scale and form but no attempt to make each body part conform absolutely to reality. On the contrary, each transposed piece of the artist here is nothing short of exquisite, be it a sensual mass of luminous white marble, a pristine block of pure crystal glass, or the softly rippling surface textures of a range of unusual stone, their innate pattern revealed through the masterful craft of their carving and polishing.

Zhang Peili, “Password”, 2019 (detail). (Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

张培力
密码 | 2019 装置，荧光纸本丝网，装置版数 3
Zhang Peili, Password, 2019, installation, Fluorescent silk print, Installation ed: 3 40 X 40CM, 10 PIECES (Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

Instead, the exhibition is unsettling for the deeper message to which each piece contributes. A more intimate self-portrait is hard to imagine, so deep and dark because “The Annual Report of OCD” feels like a fearless opening up of an individual’s most private self as a genuine confession of innate human vulnerability. The resulting aura infuses the exhibition with an air of mystery and wonderment, but at the same time, a profound unease. Zhang Peili gives us the human body unpacked, deconstructed, and compartmentalised into familiar anatomical spheres – bones, organs, liquids, data. The requisite number of bodily components (plus commensurate volumes of blood, urine, and fat) are placed elegantly over all floors of the Ren Space building, but begins, however, with a strange, also somewhat obtuse element; a set of pyjamas hung on a wall, on a clothes hanger to give them form and facing outwards into the space. Simple gestures like this are typical of Zhang Peili’s style, hinting at a state of mind, the artist’s possibly, but also that which he wishes to communicate. But what might it mean here? The immediate sensation is absence. The person who should be in the pyjamas is nowhere to be seen. Might this be read as the outer skin of a patient, shed for the purpose of physical examination, off to be probed for whatever malfunction might be ailing them?

In setting up an ambiguous dichotomy between absence and disappearance, Zhang Peili finds means to impart a sensation of physical vulnerability. The humble pyjamas thus establish a disquieting overture; a point of inflection that is likely to be life-changing when the diagnosis is revealed. The spotlight under whose cool glow the clothing is illuminated equates entering the exhibition with stepping onto a stage – or, perhaps, being placed under a microscope. As a viewer, you could feel yourself to be “the patient,” unclothed and vulnerable, naked metaphorically as well as physically, for at this point you, the visitor, have no clear sense of where this ”play” will take you, or what the denouement will be. One naturally aspires to a successful outcome, but can’t shake off the impression that it is ultimately one over which you have no control.

关于强迫症的年度报告》场景图
‘The Annual Report of OCD” (installation view)
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

张培力
19-O001 | 2019 白色玛瑙，版数 6
Zhang Peili, 19-O001 | 2019 White Onyx, Ed: 6 14 X 15 X 14.5 CM
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

Equally, as you set off on this adventure, you could see yourself in the role of mortician embarking on the investigation of a corpse, charged with identifying what went wrong. As if to affirm this, the pyjamas seem to being “looking” at a low flat plinth in the centre of the space, upon which an arrangement of bones – a full skeleton, in fact – is laid out in random rather than proper anatomical order as if on a mortuary slab.

We thus follow the artist on a journey into the universal body, which just happens to be his own and, by extension, ours too. Moving through the exhibition, you become aware that all has been set up to make you aware of yourself, your body: somebody, anybody.

The Ren Space occupies an old building. It has been renovated with a light touch to maximise room for art in which neither architecture nor design interferes with the presentation. But, being a house on three floors, in Zhang Peili’s presentation the steep and narrow staircase becomes an instrument of physical examination, testing stamina, heart rate and lung capacity.

张培力 水总量 | 2019 人造水晶，版数 6
Zhang Peili, Total Water Volume, 2019, Artificial Crystal, Ed: 6 17 X 38 X 43 CM
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

张培力
19-O004 | 2019 白色米开朗基罗大理石，版数 6
Zhang Peili, 19-O004, 2019, White Michelangelo Marble, E: 6 18 X 21 X 18 CM
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

In those moments you pause to draw breath, it’s hard not to be over-awed by the realisation of the amazing volume of odd-shaped things we each contain within. At the same time, you find yourself marvelling at the perfect proportions of each organ-as-artwork, even if you can’t readily conjure their name. It doesn’t seem important to the artist if you recognise them or not. He gives them cryptic numbers as titles, conflating the issue further. If you are in any doubt that these specimen truly represent the heart/liver/lungs of Zhang Peili, know that he underwent an intensive scanning process to map his interior and achieve a complete 3D rendering. Scanning technology is commonly used in medicine today. So, too, 3D printing. This is already in use in bio-technology to replicate the human tissue used to grow tailor-made organs for patients in need but, as Zhang Peili discovered, is an as-yet-imperfect technology for use in art. “Even using the best equipment available, 3D engraving can’t achieve the accuracy I want,” he explains.

Thus, having completed a full 3D body scan, he elected to have his individual organs carved the traditional way, by hand; not without assistance from an AI hand along the way. To achieve the requisite degree of perfection, he also chose to have this done in various locations locally between Qingtian and Hangzhou in his native Zhejiang province, New York, and Carrara, the famed Italian centre of the stone-carving art. This also enabled him to use a wide range of stones local to each region, including onyx, Dragon egg stone, and white “Michelangelo” marble, as well as the finest crystal and resin, appropriate to the “nature” of each organ. So, while advanced technology produced the prototypes for the organ-sculptures, the resulting artworks never stray far from the fundamentals of what an artist does in using whatever are the best tools at their disposal to achieve the exacting form they require.

张培力 血液总量 | 2019 人造水晶，版数 6
Zhang Peili, Total Blood Volume, 2019, Artificial Crystal, Ed:
6 13 X 13 X 13 CM(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

张培力 脂肪总量 | 2019 圣安娜黄大理石，版数 6
Zhang Peili, Total Fat Volume, 2019, Giallo Siena Marble, Ed: 6 21 X 21 X 21 CM
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

Moving through the exhibition, the pyjama/skeleton juxtaposition is proceeded by Data on the Lungs, Gallbladder, Arterial Blood Vessels, Pulmonary Blood Vessels, and Pulmonary Nodules. Belying its grand name, this is a relatively minimal combination of data with a single bone suspended on a wire, which is turned by a small motor. Next comes a trio of bodily fluids – blood, water, and fat: blood volume is rendered as a pristine cube of pure sanguine glass-like resin; Body fat as a block of creamy Giallo Sienna marble from Italy; Water is clear resin with the brilliance of a diamond. Further on, a cluster of luminous white onyx is revealed to comprise the lungs, kidneys, and stomach. Undulating one above the other in a dance of shadow and light, the smaller and larger intestines, fashioned from silky white Michelangelo marble. Not least, what must be gonads are, appropriately, sculpted from the yellowy, semi-opaque Dragon egg stone.

Up a floor, we find a room full of bones and organs fabricated from a mix of materials. These are randomly scattered on the floor, and to remind you of the experience of patient-undergoing-examination, you are required to remove your shoes and shuffle carefully around the fragments while wearing disposable slippers, as if through a crime scene.

Also upstairs, the installation (Password) has light bulbs suspended over various expressions of digital data relating to the artist’s body. The lights are on a timer which switches them on/off in quick succession to simulate the effect of lighting. From the 19^th century, lightning and, later, electricity was believed to possess a life-giving force – if harnessed and directed in the right way, at the right voltage – which inspired all manner of Frankenstein monster myths. Who was to say what that voltage might be? The answer has yet to be found, while electricity is indeed used today upon patients in cardiac arrest, and has a long, controversial function in becalming troubled minds, as so-called electroshock therapy. In the context of the exhibition, we may imagine this piece representing the flashpoint between life and death; the instant of shock the patient experiences upon learning that the body is not at all well. Passwordencapsulates a sensation that is at once bewildering and frightening as you realise how far humans have advanced in scientific knowledge, yet how little we still know about what makes a body work. How little we are able to predict of what mechanisms direct cancer here, arterial collapse there. Medical science still has no definitive answer.

张培力 影像报告 | 2019 双屏视频 , 版数 6
Zhang Peili, Image Report, 2019, dual-channel video, Ed: 6 3‘15’‘, 3’15”
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

Quarry in Carrara, Italy, where the marble was sourced (Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

In the context of Zhang Peili’s career, intangible malady runs like a common thread through his works. Especially, the iconic works. It’s always something unseen that caused affliction – a chicken submitting to a bath (in Document on Hygiene, 1991), the Uncertain Pleasure in the 1996 video installation, which shows fingers scratching various parts of the body, are two obvious examples. The root of this awareness-fascination can be traced to the experiences of youth. Zhang Peili spent his whole life around hospitals because his parents worked in one. He was absorbing sights, sounds and odours from laboratories and wards, long before he became conscious of them. This proximity created opportunities to get closer still. After high-school, he took a temporary job in a medical school, drawing wall charts used for teaching anatomy. “I often went to my father’s place of work to look at specimens,” he recalls. “The subconscious influence of these experiences is more or less certain.”

There is, also, an element to his process that could be perceived as obsessive… “I don’t think I have obsessive compulsive disorder,” he says, before adding “I always thought my father was OCD. I cannot escape the impact of my DNA.” Anyone in doubt that the artist’s genial façade might conceal OCD tendencies should ask Zhang Peili how he takes his coffee. He will tell you how real coffee should be made – he has an absolute procedure for achieving aromatic perfection which, if you are making him coffee, you may ignore at your peril. On a more serious note, there is ample evidence of attention to detail and precision of execution in his artworks, and of a fairly extreme form. Like the dogged determination used to complete pieces like the single-channel video 30×30, 1988; the obsessive patience brought to the photo-work Continuous Reproduction, 1993; or, the tighter-than-tight control of his brush used for his early photo-realist paintings. In this sense, the same degree of adherence to procedure for making coffee can be said to apply to the way he implements the concepts behind his art. Should that be seen as OCD, though, or simply a creative artist’s desire for perfection? When does one become the other?

Zhang Peili in the studio, 2019 (Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

“The Annual Report on OCD” is exemplary of a perfectionist’s desire. The objects are odd. They jar; feel awkward. As they should as exacting replicas of organs, none of which are particularly attractive in themselves in real life and yet here they are, nonetheless, perfectly crafted and lovingly finished. That dichotomy is disconcerting but the exhibition is nothing if not memorable. As a sum of the individual components it presents, with “The Annual Report on OCD” Zhang Peili forces viewers to think, to question the health we all too often take for granted vis-à-vis this body of work (pun unavoidable here). Contemplating the paradox between the wonder of the body and the calamity that ever lies in wait behind the scenes, in the name of art, Zhang Peili opens himself up for examination. He takes on “self” and reflects this back upon all the selves that visit, questioning the essence of what it is to exist, to ask what it means for their own state of being, and the role human intelligence plays in this.

张培力 全身的骨头 | 2019 白色卡拉拉大理石，版数 6
Zhang Peili, Full Set of Bones, 2019, Carrara White Marble, Ed: 6 28 X 59 X 181 CM
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

And while the exhibition has little truck with beauty in any conventional visual or aesthetic sense, there is something extraordinarily moving in what can only be described as the beautiful poetics of all that Zhang Peili has created here. Such that by the time you return to the entrance, the pyjamas have morphed into a sign of hope, return, renewal. “You can get dressed now and go home,” you imagine the patient has been told. And, having looked “inside” this body and seen so much pristine perfection, you may assume that everything now returns to normal. Except that it doesn’t. The questions Zhang Peili asks are impossible to answer. We “look”, as we assume doctors do. Like them, we can’t always “see” the problem. And even when malfunctions are observed, it is not possible that all can be remedied. Such is life. Yet, recognition and acceptance of frailty, as highlighted by the impossible perfection of Zhang Peili’s self-renderings, should encourage us to embrace that body (our body) and celebrate life whilst we have it. A more accepting attitude towards malfunction and ultimate death that go hand-in-hand with life may, literally, be the only true sinecure.

Coda

Inspired by childhood experiences of being exposed to life in a hospital courtesy of his parents, many of Zhang Peili’s early conceptual works expressed his fascination with the latex glove, and  especially to the “plague” that was hepatitis B in the 1960s and 1970s for Chinese families, all living in tightly-packed communes and work units, and eating in communal dining rooms. With hindsight, do we read this fear of contagion as an underlying thread in the work? It seems so prescient now in the time of the COVID-19. And, as affirmation, Zhang Peili has been, among all artists, most active in supporting and fund-raising for medical staff on the frontline of the epidemic.

张培力 全身的骨头 | 2019 白色卡拉拉大理石，版数 6
Zhang Peili, Full Set of Bones, 2019, Carrara White Marble, Ed: 6 28 X 59 X 181 CM
(Courtesy the artist and Rén Space)

The finalized sculpture is now exhibited all by itself in a room at Almine Rech Gallery. The intricacies of its genesis are not immediately apparent; instead, a sense of simplicity prevails as it does with all the artist’s works, from Flats to Lenses, or Sky Backdrops to Self-Portraits. Indeed, his works always seem extraordinarily simple, belying the complexity of the processes through which they came into being. They present themselves with an immediacy that makes them seem benevolent, friendly, or almost compassionate in a way. Unlike so many artworks nowadays, Israel’s works aren’t particularly contentious. They appeal neither to our tolerance, nor our cynicism, nor even our credulity; in short, they are the ideal artworks for “Generation Wuss,” an expression coined by Bret Easton Ellis to describe those Millennials who avoid conflict and repress criticism at any cost. What is remarkable about this era, in which Israel’s practice thrives, is that it bears witness for the very first time in the history of the avant-garde to a generation of artists who do not oppose the preceding one, nor the other ones before that. It is a generation that “likes,” yet never “dislikes”—a judgment deemed so taboo that Instagram and Facebook don’t even offer it as an option.

When the string is pulled, the bird engages in a gracious and hypnotic movement for about a minute: its eyelids start blinking, and its wings begin to flap. Since the automated sculptures of Jean Tinguely or Takis, the possibilities for animated sculpture have evolved in tandem with the emergence of new technologies. Yet, the blunt reality of such animatronics couldn’t be more opposed to the disarming quietude of our pelican, which offers a kind of commentary on them through its use of a hand-powered spring mechanism. Its resolutely low-tech appearance brings to mind Georges Braque’s Oiseaux noirs or the simple paper cut-out birds of Henri Matisse. As is the case with all outstanding artworks or exhibitions, the sculpture distinguishes itself through its ability to trigger a multitude of associations, which arise spontaneously like pop-ups on a computer screen, a rich ensemble inviting the mind to go beyond mere comprehension.

Alex Israel has titled the monograph, which has just been published on his work, b. 1982, Los Angeles. The two pieces of information that constitute this title define what characterizes his art—his generation and the city of Los Angeles being decisive factors when it comes to approaching his practice, which might be conceived as a continual self-portrait, figuratively speaking. In a more literal sense however, his portrait (the signature outline of his face) gives form to many of his paintings, the contents of which are drawn from photographic images. Among his latest Self-Portrait paintings, one depicts a pelican on the waterfront in Santa Barbara, which served as the model for the one flying at Almine Rech Gallery. Another represents three surfers, all young but each a different age, all wearing black wetsuits. Further on in the exhibition are the artist’s new Self-Portrait sculptures, which also reference wetsuits. Made of painted aluminum, Alex Israel’s body was cast to give shape to these sculptures, which celebrate Los Angeles by alluding to one of the city’s most emblematic sports. Their stiffness, however, and their lack of heads, hands, or feet, make them more evocative of Greco-Roman statues and the remains of lost civilizations than of surfing per se.

The title of Alex Israel’s previous exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery (June 13 – July 25, 2015) was Summer. He has titled this new one Summer 2. In doing so, he has adopted the strategy of the sequel, commonly used for tentpole summertime films by Hollywood studios. However, while Israel’s art certainly has narrative ambitions akin to those of a fictional movie or TV show, its overall purpose is arguably closer to that of a documentary (dedicated to Los Angeles) or a biopic (dedicated to Alex Israel). No matter what, his work exemplifies the ways in which art and entertainment coexist and cross-inform one another in our current day and age.

The serenity of Ha Chong-Hyun’s gestural abstraction
by Alfred Pacquement (translated from French by Violaine Boutet de Monvel)

In 1972, Ha Chong-Hyun made a small sculpture, which appears on its own as if anticipating his subsequent work as a painter. It consists of a hemp rope stretched across a wooden box so tightly that a few unraveling strands threaten to break the entire cordage. Extremely effective, the composition is as simple as its material is banal. An image of great tension and resistance, it epitomizes the artist’s practice and further announces his Conjunctions, a lifelong series of paintings, which was initiated in 1974 and is still ongoing to this day.

Ha Chong-Hyun turned to abstraction in the early 1960s, belonging to the first generation of Korean artists who embraced this aesthetical direction. While he first approached it by applying heavy materials onto canvases, his way of structuring the pictorial space was also close to that of European Informel[1]. He then continued his investigation by painting geometrical and polychromatic forms, which completely differed from the works he made initially. His nation’s traditional colors dominated in these new abstractions.
In the early 1970s, the artist made sculptures for a brief period, using “poor” materials in the spirit of the time: for example, he installed a pile of newspapers next to a pile of blank sheets of paper, or he set a wooden beam upright on a rope, which he then strained between two walls. The 1972 sculpture we mentioned earlier takes us back to A.G. (Avant Garde), a group cofounded by Ha Chong-Hyun, within which he played a prominent role. All these works inevitably bring to mind Western artists of the same generation or active during the same years: to mention just a few, those gathered around Arte Povera, Post-minimalism, Supports/Surfaces, who used similar processes. A.G. also coincides with Japanese Mono-ha, which emerged around the same time and shared many striking similarities[2]. All these movements coexisted, more or less related to one another, or completely independent from one another, if not ignorant of the others’ existence. In Korea like anywhere else, the Zeitgeist alone may as well explain these similar tendencies (to some extent at least).

However, the historical context in Korea was very different from that in Europe or the United States. On the one hand, student protests, anti-Vietnam War manifestations, prolongations of the Cold War and a certain economic prosperity, which the first oil crisis was about to shake, were happening in the West. On the other hand, after having endured Japanese occupation and a devastating war with its Northern region, Korea was about to enter two decades of dictatorship, which would see a spectacular economic growth. During this difficult period for intellectuals and artists, an autonomous Korean art would eventually rise. Indeed, from then on, two opposite trends coexisted turning their back on each other, like two sides of the same coin: a politically engaged figurative trend and a predominantly monochromatic abstract one. The artists associated with the latter also sought to retrieve their nation’s cultural identity by promoting Korean traditions, yet they remained open to the world and modernity. Thus, contemporary abstraction in Korea was founded on a dichotomy.[3]

[1] This tendency in Korea is actually referred to as “Korean Informel.”

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora (I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities) —Ovid, Metamorphoses

Ovid opens the Metamorphoses (AD 8) with an explicit statement of intent. In the 250 myths that follow, the Roman poet chronicles the subject of transformation—sometimes in an arbitrary fashion, sometimes retelling well-known Greek fables, and sometimes straying in other, unexpected directions. One of these stories, which entered our collective consciousness, can be seen at Rome’s Galleria Borghese, where Giovanni Bernini’s famous sculpture tells the tale of the nymph Daphne in mid-metamor­phosis—her limbs turning into the twines of a laurel tree as she escapes from the love-stricken Apollo. Transformations occur in our everyday lives, too; we experience this in cinema, as film scores transport audiences sonically through visual imagery. In Ikon of Light (1983), for instance, the composer Sir John Tavener articulates the transformation of matter between the duality of absence and the fullness of light in music. The work is an expres­sion of light in sound—light as both a physical illumination and a resplendent spirit. This fluidity and mutability of the sonic and the visual can equally be found in performative practices: in both classical Indian dance and Beijing Opera productions, a multitude of hand gestures and movements communicate a very distinct narrative meaning. Gestures, then, can be heard, music seen, and literature transmogrified.

关小，《日落》，灯箱照片、木头、金属、假花、树脂，尺寸可变，2012 / Guan Xiao, “The Sunset”, lightbox photo, wood, metal, artificial flowers, resin, dimensions variable, 2012

Guan Xiao, too, is interested in all kinds of transitions between forms, be they intermedia or conceptual. She explores how contemporary ways of seeing are influenced by digital imagery in a world of hyper-interconnectedness. By way of example, she has previously referenced (in a Frieze “Portfolio” piece in which she describes her sources of inspiration) a news event from 2013 showing a group of Russian photographers taking pictures of a gigantic meteor. We receive such imagery via social media platforms day in, day out. Technology telescopes us into other times and other places, collaps­ing geography and temporality and resulting in a state that means we no longer operate in a singular moment—one that opens the technological object to repetition (and even distortion). What we physically see can be transformed, as can the way in which we view it. In Guan’s own words: “What is shown is now very common: an image of an event being documented and so widely circulated to the extent that the event itself ceases to be the subject. The image is no longer in the service of the event; it’s the other way around.”

It is within this fluid framework that Guan Xiao presents two new works, “How to Disappear” (2016) and “Weather Forecast” (2016), in Jeu de Paume’s 9th Satellite program entitled “Notre océan, votre horizon / Our ocean, your horizon.” An installation consist­ing of sound, video on a small screen, and a projection of disap­pearing text, “How to Disappear” includes a soundtrack composed of three intermingling voices, each speaking a different language and announcing a disappearance, after which the image and the sound effectively vanish. As we reorient ourselves, we begin to think about the difference between discussing a disappear­ance and actually experiencing an absence. This is exactly what Guan Xiao wants to achieve—an environment that makes visitors more aware of their cognitive processes. We become almost hyperaware of our senses and what might occur next. She sees this artwork very much as a preface to her next work in the exhibition. It’s as if “How to Disappear” forms the first part of a diptych to her show at Jeu de Paume, prim­ing the viewer to fully experience “Weather Forecast”.

The three-channel video “Weather Forecast” presents a more vivid look at the possibilities for conceptual transformation. Taken from footage found on the internet (a frequent source for the artist and a process she describes as “them finding her” rather than the other way around), the videos use travel as a metaphor to con­vey the parameters of conceptual transformation. Just as travel can transform us, so can a concept, a thing, and even human beings and animals. The artist chose “Weather Forecast” as the title because weather, in its very nature, is an impermanent, fluctu­ating, amorphous phenomenon. It is both an abstraction and an apt apparatus through which Guan Xiao can weave her narra­tive of change.

The video, although nonlinear, is separated into three sequential parts spread over three screens. In each segment, Guan uses images and video that, in her words, share “the same rules or logic.” In her narration of these sections, which informs processes of transforma­tion that occur in the work, she attempts to correlate one piece of subject matter to the next. Between each sequence, a text appears on all three screens that reads: “How can you view Europe from a chair?” Guan Xiao suggests that the phenomenological change that takes place through travel and from experiencing new sights and sounds is a transforma­tion that can be provided in your own home.

What is fascinating in this is that Guan Xiao’s work itself becomes an agent for transportation. In the science fiction world, transport­ers (à la Star Trek) convert a person or object into an energy pattern or dematerialized form before “beaming” it to a destina­tion, where it is reconverted into matter, or rematerialized. Guan Xiao poses a question by typing in coordinates that her viewership might choose to accept. Is physical movement from one place to another necessary for transformation to take place? What else can we beam across the world? If we needn’t travel to experience other places, how might we identify ourselves or where we are from in the first place? Although the artist does not directly focus on ideas of identity in this particular case, she does allude to how identity can trans­form from one thing to another.

Guan recently had her first solo show in the United Kingdom, “Flattened Metal”, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). The exhibition included a new installation comprising five large printed screens in front of which were placed sculptures composed of various materials, including muted speakers. The assemblage of objects conflated history, transforming linear assumptions of time. For instance, in one work, a replica of a sev­enth- to tenth-century Amazonian bird head, remade using resin and fiberglass, sat above what looked like the handle of an ancient scepter. These two pieces, which appear to have been sourced from antiquity, interacted with a high-tech racing boot to form a strange composite structure that perhaps belonged in the future. This work reiterates the artist’s interest in finding formal equivalences between objects that are dissimilar in time, place, and purpose. In her view, “whether a plant, a human, or an animal, the process of how they feel the world is exactly the same.” In a world where the internet provides a platform where voices are commeasurable, Guan Xiao, with this work, seems to ask how we might create our own hierarchies amid new information.

In “Action” (2014), a three-chan­nel work that was also included in the London exhibition, the artist likewise integrates sound, text, and images to produce a visual journey. The three screens display a rhythmic harmony: hands clap while feet tap, and as the pages of a book turn on one screen, a girl’s hair flies in the wind on another. On the central screen, text displays Guan’s inner musings: “For me, rhythm means all the intersections of sense. It’s a way I understand the associations between things. It helps me to try and transfer action, see, listen, think about interactions and freely build a link between them.”

This way of seeing rhythm visu­ally, through imagery within moving image work, reminds me of how a musical score can carry out the visual sensibilities of a film. Birdman (2014), directed by Alejandro Iñárritu and scored by Antonio Sánchez, comes to mind. Sánchez, a jazz percussion­ist, was tasked with finding “the internal rhythm of the film.” An intrinsic rhythm governs the film’s visual imagery, narrative, and storytelling, and it seemed to me that this rhythm moved and trans­formed the characters to interact, not the other way around.

In a recent interview, Guan observed that “we have five senses, but we are becoming more and more focused on just seeing and hearing.” In her work, she appears to equalize the hierarchies of value inherent in senses, objects, and humans. A democra­tization (of the sensorium) occurs in order to facilitate our understanding of this, because for the artist, different pieces of matter are comprehensively interrelated.

It seems natural that digital mediums provide the perfect environment for the entropic variables Guan Xiao likes to manipulate. Guan’s unique voice, her innate ability to recognize anomalistic associations and express her ideas about the transformative nature of objects has seen her featured in prominent international exhibitions (in addition to the ICA and the Jeu de Paume) including the 13th Lyon Biennale, the 9th Berlin Biennale, and the 5th Moscow Biennale for Young Art, as well as in the Zabludowicz Collection.

All of this recent activity makes for an impressive lineup for the artist, who incidentally isn’t very interested in labels such as “young,” “female,” or “post-inter­net.” Hers might be an assertive and conscious resolve to be set apart, as if, and not unlike Heisenberg’s uncertainty princi­ple for quantum mechanics, her ideas might suddenly lose their meaning if they were classified. At a time when some suffer constantly from a “fear of missing out,” perhaps these transformative experiences are needed in order to engage us: a real transporter, beaming us between our own and other, more virtual realities.

 About the writer

Ying Tan is the curator at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in Manchester, UK, where she is in charge of the annual program of exhibitions and public program, as well as national and international touring shows. She has curated numerous exhibitions at CFCCA, in addition to many off-site projects in London and internationally. She is a visiting lecturer for Christie’s Education (UK) and a contributor to KALEIDOSCOPE Asia magazine. Ying is on the curatorial faculty for Liverpool Biennial.

“关小：扁平金属”，展览现场，伦敦ICA ；与K11
艺术基金会合作（摄影：马克·布洛尔）/ “Guan Xiao: Flattened Metal”, exhibition view, ICA London; in association with K11 Art Foundation. Photo: Mark Blower.

“关小：扁平金属”，展览现场，伦敦ICA ；与K11
艺术基金会合作（摄影：马克·布洛尔）/ “Guan Xiao: Flattened Metal”, exhibition view, ICA London; in association with K11 Art Foundation. Photo: Mark Blower.

“关小：扁平金属”，展览现场，伦敦ICA ；与K11
艺术基金会合作（摄影：马克·布洛尔）/ “Guan Xiao: Flattened Metal”, exhibition view, ICA London; in association with K11 Art Foundation. Photo: Mark Blower.

关小，《五个漫步穿过黄昏》，雕塑，黄铜、汽车轮壳、自拍杆、流苏，47 × 75 × 245 cm， 2015。/ Guan Xiao, “Five Walks Through the Dusk”, Sculpture, brass, car wheel, selfie stick, tassels, 47 × 75 × 245 cm, 2015.

关小，《基本逻辑》， 展览现场，天线空间，2015 / Guan Xiao, “Basic Logic”, exhibition view at Antenna Space, 2015.

关小，《调色板—冷酷棕》，雕塑，木板、模型土、漆，164 × 120 × 7 cm，2015 / Guan Xiao, “Palette—Cold Brown”, sculpture, wood board, poly clay, lacquer, 164 × 120 × 7 cm, 2015.

关小，《蓝蛙》，雕塑，黄铜、汽车轮壳，164 × 120 × 7 cm，2015 / Guan Xiao, “Blue Frog”, sculpture, brass, car wheel, 105 × 200 × 70 cm, 2015.

关小，“基本逻辑”，展览现场，天线空间，2015 / Guan Xiao, “Basic Logic”, exhibition view at Antenna Space, 2015.

关小，《日落》 （局部），灯箱照片、木头、金属、假花、树脂，尺寸可变，2012 / Guan Xiao, “The Sunset”(detail), lightbox photo, wood, metal, artificial flowers, resin, dimensions variable, 2012

关小，《叮叮ja》，黄铜、汽车轮壳、绳子、树脂，115 × 40 × 78 cm，2015 / Guan Xiao, “Din Din Jaarhh”, brass, car wheel, robe, resin , 115 × 40 × 78 cm, 2015.

The summer exhibition presents three projects from artists each exploring an artistic and historic link to Xi’an in terms of culture and heritage. “Felt”, the centre piece of the summer exhibition, presents news works by Beijing-based abstract artist Aniwar, originally from Xinjiang, which invoke the history of traditional woolen felt carpet-making techniques that can be traced back to the core of the Silk Road trade.

Projects by Luo Yongjin from Luoyang and aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) from Xi’an (both now based in Shanghai) play with visual elements that evoke famous sites like the city wall and the stone stele at Beilin. In Luo Yongjin’s installation, this takes the form of assemblage, with striking black and white photographs overlaid with rubbings, made using traditional techniques.

New media master aaajiao creates a series of “stele” that represent a monument to outmoded versions of familiar software. In an era characterized by the regularity of the “upgrade” in every aspect of the technology and media we use on a daily basis, how quickly software becomes outdated. Here, aaajiao presents a thoughtful and whimsical graveyard to remind us of the speed with which we are accustomed to discarding the old for the sake of something new.

Felt, Aniwar Solo Exhibition, 2016/06/18－2016/09/11

Aniwar’s work is unique within China’s contemporary art, first for his distinctive artistic language, which approaches abstraction. Second, because this artist’s approach draws deeply on his cultural roots, as part of the rich, colorful traditions of aesthetic sensibilities found in Xinjiang and its textile heritage. Aniwar makes paintings, drawings, photo and film works which reflect emotional currents within life. There is, he suggests, an emotional timbre to even the most rigorous of intellectual practices in art—as he previously demonstrated with a series of monochromatic pencil line drawings that he titles Diary—each one carried out within the space of a day, and where the length and intensity of the line reflects the artist’s mood of the day.

Aniwar brings to this tradition a contemporary language—the geometric and spatial arrangements of bands of color. To achieve this, Aniwar worked alongside the craftsmen to determine the range of natural-dye pigments to be used, and the proportions of the strips of felt to be produced and dyed. These were then composed in a painterly pattern by laying the colored bands across the surface of a larger sheet of felt. The whole was then rolled using a bamboo mat—as if making a giant sushi roll—until the material was compressed together and the final form of the paintings was achieved. Aniwar’s felt works are remarkable examples of contemporary textile art unlike the traditional patterns and pictorial motifs used across Central Asia. A link remains however in the sublimation of descriptive motifs, meaning readable pictorial figures, into an abstraction form. This underscores Aniwar’s evolution as an artist over time in which such readable figurations as human forms, flowers, elements of nature, were reduced to pure color and a form of geometric line that is intended to create a spatial sensation on and embedded within the flat surface of a painting or textile work such as those on display in “Felt”.

Portrait of Xi’an 1: “Wall”, Luo Yongjin Photo Project, 2016/06/18－2016/09/11

Luo Yongjin’s photographic works deftly show architecture as a manifestation of a particular time and place: from the Fort Houses in the west of China to the “McMansions” of the wealthy traders in Hangzhou and its environs; from massive commercial developments like Oriental Plaza in Beijing to the grand edifices along the Bund in Shanghai, to the disintegrating traditional houses on the fringes of so many urban centers, the shifting tides of taste, of excess and austerity, of ambition, expense and fantasy invested in these diverse construction projects come to the fore. Both as single images and as mosaic-style composites, the photographs effect a visual metaphor of a dramatic era of social change from the 1980s to the present. The element of documenting a place is preeminent in the works. “I liked how you could express yourself and narrative through documentary photographic images,” he says. “That is how I became interested in photography.” This documentary element will make Luo Yongjin’s body of work increasingly important over time.

Another distinctive element in the work is the experimenting that Luo Yongjin does with established, or traditional, techniques. The “Wall” project embodies a combination of elements; traditional/ancient bricks, rubbings, and photographs printed not on conventional paper but in rice paper. A long-time teacher at Shanghai’s Art Academy, Luo Yongjin says that artists “need to figure out how not to just use the techniques they learn at art academy and to do their own art. Traditionally, the techniques are very strict. Take calligraphy—you have to hold the pen this way, have to move to the right, have to move left, up then down. It’s very tempting just to follow these rules, because students are often paid to just use those techniques. But that’s not really what creates art.”

Remnants of an Electronic Past, aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) special commission, 2016/06/18－2016/09/11

Leading new media artist aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) returns to his native Xi’an this summer with a tribute to the significance embodied by the forest of steles at Beilin Museum, which offer unique examples of early texts; prototypes for fonts and a linguistic lexicon that is still referred to today. To the project, aaajiao brings his own inimical approach to contemporary technology and forms of technological media to muse, in his distinct expressive manner, what happens to outmoded versions of software as technology moves forward, becoming ever more sophisticated? Or, where does software go to die?

Many of aaajiao’s works reflect a new thinking around the phenomenon of the Internet, acknowledging all its inherent controversies and contradictions, with specific projects focusing on data processing, the blogosphere and China’s Great Fire Wall. Hinting at the paradoxical nature of the new values attributed to technological advance vis-à-vis traditional knowledge, with the 2013 project The Weight of Data, aaajiao wanted to know if one could use a standard measurement of value—that of gold—to measure the value of data. “I found a writer on a website and he’s been writing his blog for ten years. I collected all of his data, saved it onto a SD card, and put it on the scale. On the other side of the scale I placed some jewellery. We wanted to see how this data stacked up to the jewellery. The results were obvious—data is really light compared with the jewellery, but what I tried to express was that, right now, these blogs we create are worthless according to ancient views and measurements.”

There is no way to measure this phenomenon in terms of a value judgement, meaning if it is good or bad. For the time being, it simply “is”, engendering a seam of futility and melancholy that reverberates in this elegantly imagined project. “Remnants of an Electronic Past” has particular resonance in Xi’an and the region which is home to some of China’s most advanced technological innovation and thinking.

This exhibition centers on HUANG’s Book series, which embodies his―verstehen‖ of linear vestige, from a rope that binds the book to the book itself.HUANG prefers to avoid narratives by setting a performing line on stage of thedramatics. Therefore, not every style bears implications, as his goal is toexplore the poetry in shapes and forms. While the hand-sketched lines are plainand gentle, they possess an elastic quality that bounces the vividness of colors,incorporating a hint of mystery to the picture.

For the variety of vestiges, wood is undoubtedly a precious gift fromMother Nature.HUANG is especially keen on the characteristics of wood,which may not be as strong as iron, but its texture can endure and deliver thepassage of time that steel can’t. He deliberately adds the texture of wood to themain contours in his paintings to integrate the material into a 2 dimensionalpainting via a thickened pictorial effect, to exhibit his ―verstehen‖ of wood.

HUANG Jingjie is born in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province in 1988. He has a BAof Public Art from China Art Academy in Hanghou. He currently lives andworks in Hangzhou. Your World, My Sight will last from October 17th, 2015 toNovember 25h, 2015.

The installation works of the artist relate to space. He described with “diaphragm” the objects or spaces he produced. “Diaphragm” separates and blurs object and space. A geological term, folds, is used by the artist to refer to both the appearances formed by the counteraction between internal movement and the outer wall, and the conflict of the composer’s internal states and his works. Zhang Xinjun, after being graduated from the oil painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, got a master degree in CAFA. In the artistic practice of that period, he had doubts of uncertainty about the sense of distance between painting and human body. He felt constrained within the coordinative techniques of consciousness and experience. The physical consumption of body or the experiences of laboring led to his abandoning the drift of consciousness; he came to be closer to the natural movement and action. He often undertakes his expressions in a clumsy and coarse way, without polishing and covering up the flaws and traces of artificial production, which come to be another part of naturalness of the work. The unstableness is one of the traits of Zhang Xinjun’s works. There is an implicit fear for stableness in his installation works in which spaces are correlated with each other by threads and ropes. Off the scene, the works were often folded and packed to conceal themselves; and the display of them often quietly comes and goes. Human body is for him a movable object, sustaining in the repetitive transformations of energy; it is a “diaphragm” between the inside and outside, decaying into and remaining in the medium of materials in the process of energy consumption. By his works of performance and installation, the artist records the connections of individual and environment in time and space, and the “folds” formed in the conflict of the fluid movement and the solid outer wall.

This exhibition in Gallery Yang has two parts. The main body displayed in the hall came from an object or space the artist casually obtained, which was enlarged proportionally by methods of mathematics and geometry. Being dragged by ropes, it holds its foot slowly so as to become another object or a new space. In the small display room are exhibited the videos and photographs of his other works related to the theme of “folds”, one of which is “Drawer Man”.

Born in 1950 in Taiwan, Hsieh arrived in Philadelphia on a ship in 1974, having trained as a sailor as a means to get to America. Before leaving Taiwan, he had made paintings, a performance of duration wherein he turned over a legion of photographic sheets which gradually reacted to the sunlight, then turned them back over again, and jumped from a window, breaking both ankles. His life’s major series of performance art works commenced in 1978 with “One Year Performance 1978-1979”—the “cage piece” in which Hsieh spent a full year locked inside a wooden cage he built himself in his second floor studio at 111 Hudson Street. “Time Clock” [as it is informally named] followed from 1980-81 (“One Year Performance 1980-1981”), for which he set himself the task of clocking in and photographing himself every hour for one year. From 1981-2, armed with a sleeping bag, Hsieh stayed outside, forbidding himself from entering any kind of shelter (“One Year Performance 1981-1982”). July 1983-July 1984 was spent tied to the artist Linda Montano with an 8-foot rope, forbidden from touching (“Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984”). In 1985-6, Hsieh permitted himself no contact with or talking about art—“I just go in life,” read the artist’s statement (One Year Performance 1985-1986). For a final documented piece from 1986-1999 (from his 36^th to 49^th birthdays), Hsieh promised to make art, but not to show it publicly (“Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999”).

In 2009, 31 years after it was first undertaken in Hsieh’s adopted city, the cage and documentation from “Cage Piece” were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. The same year, “Time Clock Piece” was featured as part of “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Further presentations of selected works have followed—but no retrospective, the form for which Hsieh envisions carefully.

Tehching Hsieh at his studio, New York, 2015. Photo: Iona Whittaker
謝德慶在他的工作室，紐約，2015。 圖片提供：Iona Whittaker

Iona Whittaker: You don’t very often give interviews, do you?

Tehching Hsieh: No, I always feel I am repeating myself—you know, similar questions. But I forget, too. Every time it’s new! I just say what I know, simply.

IW: You seem like a practical person.

TH: I don’t write because I’m not a language person, I just do. [Laughs]. I feel my work needs some sort of bridge; every conversation means I learn a different point of view. I have my way to approach things. Some people want you to be more political, but actually I am more like a cave man—primitive. I trust my intuition. Of course, I understand civilization; New York is civilized—very strong. I came to do my work in the city; I didn’t go to the mountains to be a hermit because I knew that staying in the city to do this kind of work would be ironic, and that’s what I wanted. I am more interested in philosophical thinking.  But I leave my work open to different interpretations. For example, some people think of the time clock piece as industrial, as if it is about workers.

IW: As labor?

TH: But that is talking only about working. I’m also talking about life. It’s not a 9-5 job: I lived in it, 24 hours a day for a year—it is life. Your heartbeat continues. Art and life become one. My work shows different perspectives of thinking about life. For me, life is a life sentence; life is passing time, life is free thinking.

IW: You put yourself in a situation, and stay absolutely in that situation.

TH: Right. Basically, I use time. Life is passing time; how to pass time is not my concern. It doesn’t matter what kind of life one has—everybody makes their own schedule. I created my schedule for passing time. I don’t do art anymore, but to me doing life and doing art is all the same—doing time. The difference is that in art, you have a form.

This approach gives me freedom—nobody tells me what to do or expects what my work should be. If they say I’m not good any more, that doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel I owe anybody anything [laughs].

IW: I think, for you, it’s not about whether you have succeeded; it’s more a case of “Do I feel I need to do more work like this?”

TH: Adrian (Heathfield, who co-authored with Tehching Hsieh Out of Now, a monograph on Tehching’s work) said I am like a successful failure! [Laughs]. It means I tried—I did four pieces and then the last two. I created, then I became less creative; the first four works are footnotes for the last two—it’s time passing. I think about how free I could be and how far I could reach. Each time you are presented with a choice; when I say I’m not making art any more, it’s my exit.

Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, “Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984,”
life image © Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano
謝德慶，Linda Montano，《一年行為表演1983-1984》 © 謝德慶，Linda Montano

IW: Freedom, in many ways, is the ability to make a decision.

TH: I don’t see art as a career—it’s simply my life. At the beginning, I was at the bottom line [Tehching washed dishes and cleaned restaurants for four years upon arrival in the US]. I was passing time in a basic way. I didn’t know many things, but at least I practiced. I asked myself questions and I tried to find answers. You won’t be able to find answers from others or from knowledge— you have to go back to yourself, practice a lot, then answers will gradually emerge. I think this is essential. Through art, you transform.

IW: What did you ask yourself?

TH: I think everybody has some focus—something that makes you more stuck or more confused. And you want to fix it. You find answers by practicing, then you move on. This is something to do with art. What could I do in life in order to do art? I dropped out of high school, entered the United States illegally. I did six pieces, lived in art, passing time; then, in 2000, I stopped doing art. I’m doing life, still passing time; I don’t feel much difference. I plan to do a retrospective. I need a 900 x 70 foot space to show my lifeworks—22 years all together. The timing of the show is not important—it’s important that the concept is brought up. I’m glad I didn’t have a gallery when I did those early works; people would have collected my work, then it would have gone everywhere and I would feel that this long, intentional duration of my work and its sequence had just been thrown away. If I had been successful back then, it would have been a problem.

IW: I hope it happens. Early on, you made paintings, didn’t you?

TH: Yes. I understand art from painting. Some say I jumped from painting to performance, but I can only do one step at a time. I can’t jump. But maybe my steps are big.

IW: This is something I wanted to talk about. The way you approach things seems quite extreme. You do art or don’t do art; you stay inside, or outside; your work is visible, or invisible.

TH: My whole life has been about art and growing. I was very much into painting, including during three years of compulsory military service. The work was not mature, but at least I did it, and I grew. I feel I’m more an action kind of person. I did paintings of an active kind. That’s how I understand my work.

IW: So really, you changed the method from creating paintings to action itself—not making something, but being it.

TH: Right. Like breathing, lived in art-time…

IW: But when you came here, it was with a very clear purpose: you wanted to be a real artist.

TH: Yes. But I felt good doing my work in an illegal context; it was difficult, but I had some kind of freedom. I had no identity. Of course, that’s a difficult status, but it gave me energy. If you’re scared, you can’t do it. You have to take the risk. In 1974 when I came here [to the US] I was 24, and didn’t even know Soho. I went to Washington Square and saw people painting portraits in the street. I thought that was the art scene in New York. I found Soho by accident.

Tehching Hsieh, “One Year Performance 1978-1979,” life image, photograph by Cheng Wei Kuong © Tehching Hsieh
謝德慶，《一年行為表演1978-1979》， 攝影 程偉光， © 謝德慶

IW: Talking of confidence, it must have taken real bravery to do the cage piece. I wondered what made you feel confident at the time—or perhaps you didn’t?

TH: The experience was strong. I had already wasted four years [doing menial work], so I could waste one more year of time to do art! I just changed the way of passing time. [Laughs] Of course, in my mind I thought it was new, but it was not really new—life before was already harsh. Staying in the cage was extreme, but if you turn back you just return to harsh reality. I tried to make it better than what went before.

IW: It was better because you made the decision to do it.

TH: Right, it had that quality. If I didn’t make it and went back to washing dishes, it would have been worse.

IW: So the worst thing would have been not to have completed it?

TH: Yes, yes. [Laughs heartily]

IW: When you did the time clock, you missed 133 punches, didn’t you?

TH: Yes, 133, 134.

IW: Does this mean anything to you, or is it just how it is? There is always something you cannot control.

TH: For me, it’s still natural. 94–95%, I made it.  [Energetically, he pulls out the record] You see here? December was the worst month. Then I thought, “I mustn’t get worse!” Up to that point it was natural, but after December I felt concerned about it. The way I understand it is, if I got 100% right, it would feel too strict and not an understanding of human beings. This 94–95% means that I’m not perfect, and that’s human. If I got just 60%, of course, the audience would think, “You didn’t do this job well.” But I would say that everybody is different; some people could do better than me, I’m sure. But nobody would want to waste time doing this without a reward. [Laughs heartily again.]

IW: Speaking of support, your family supported you, didn’t they?

TH: They did; they really have a good heart to support me, and they did what they could, but it doesn’t mean we really had an understanding. I know it’s better that I stay here. Here, I have more freedom; I am the oldest son, but I don’t behave like a Big Brother. I left Taiwan, so I cannot expect more from them— that’s the price I pay. I think the worst thing is if you admit your guilt but don’t do anything to change it. So, I would rather not confess.

IW: But you have a great sense of humor.

TH: Thank you. I’m not always that serious. I’m not masochistic. No matter how hard life is, you still have to laugh, otherwise you can’t continue.

IW: I think these performances would not work without a light heart. I imagine people ask you: “Is this a fulfilling thing to do?”

TH: Well, it’s not easy to complete the work, but the work is not about endurance. I pass time in an art form. I did work every hour, continuously, like breathing. It is one year, a cycle. It doesn’t matter if you’re creative not, or if you are poor or rich. The quantity of one year of time is the same; that is universal. I just keep the work basic, keep my life simple. But you need complexity in order to be simple.

Tehching Hsieh, “One Year Performance 1980-1981,”life image, photograph by Michael Shen © Tehching Hsieh
謝德慶，《一年行為表演1980-1981》， 攝影 沈明琨， © 謝德慶

Tehching Hsieh, “One Year Performance 1981-1982,” life image © Tehching Hsieh
謝德慶，《一年行為表演1981-1982》 © 謝德慶

Tehching Hsieh, “Paint. Red Repetitions”, acrylic on paper, 30-sheet sketchbook, 38.1 x 53.3 cm, 1973
謝德慶，《畫. 紅的重複，壓克力彩，紙，三十頁素描本，38.1 x 53.3公分，1973年

Over twenty days I traveled through six provinces, covering selected institutions in lesser known locations—a mixture of public and private. Included here are surveys in brief of those outside Beijing and Shanghai. Largely, these museums display antique and older art forms, using new buildings to espouse traditional, didactic or state values. The difference between public and private spaces was overwhelming; the public tends to lean on scale and location to persuade visitors of their value, while private museums each adhere to a unique and intimate vision.

OCAT Xi’an gallery view, ground floor
OCAT西安馆画廊一楼

SHAANXI

OCAT Xi’an Terminal, Xi’an
Public (Completed: 2013)

Xi’an, China’s Tang Dynasty capital, is cluttered with history. Contemporary offerings are, however, vastly limited, so the OCAT site here (located in an upscale commercial and residential compound) is an important contribution.

Speaking with some of the staff there, there was genuine excitement at being involved in a contemporary arts institution. Even the security guards were eager to assist. The danger with many of these spaces is harnessing the audience: who is this work for, and how are those people brought in through the door? “About Painting”, shown earlier this year, was an exhibition particularly sensitive to questions newcomers may have about this form of working and its relevance today. Li Shurui’s painted installation sweeping over the walls upstairs lifts even structural spaces into the foreground. In the exhibition-mounted video interview, she explains that the environments we live in speak so much of our perspectives and sensibilities.

The gallery has added an activity center (QR codes cover every surface) and a steadily growing reading room—likely the personal collection of the director, the British curator and writer Karen Smith. Their weekend public programs are open for anyone to apply and propose content. This is obviously a valuable opportunity, and it will be interesting to watch the evolution of the space as it seeks a balance between being a guiding resource and open platform.

Elaborate sunken courtyard, adjacent to the Qiujiang Museum of Fine Arts, Westin Hotel Xi’an
曲江美术馆旁精致的下沉庭院，威斯汀酒店

Qujing Museum of Fine Arts, Westin Hotel, Xi’an
Private
Completed: 2012

It’s hard to get past the entry ticket to the Qujiang Museum, which at RMB 380 for a place with only two rooms might be the worst cost to museum size ratio in China. However, if you are a guest of the five star hotel in which it is housed, entry is complimentary.

Inside there is minimal signage for the museum, and only one elevator which descends to ‘Museum’ in B2, below the Spa and restaurants on higher levels.

The two rooms are the temporary and permanent exhibition spaces. Temporary being beautiful Dunhuang mural copies, unfortunately hung in a dank basement with dryboard walls, poor lighting and non-chic piping. The permanent space, however, was like a vaulted jewel box. An extension of Neri and Hu’s hotel edifice, artifacts were displayed in careful clusters within a strongly delineated architectural space. The collection is that of Zhou Tianyou (former Shaanxi History Museum curator) and on show was only a fraction of the total. The famed gold suit of armor and (advertised) 7000 square meters of exhibition space were nowhere to be found. It was, perhaps predictably, devoid of other visitors.

Why would the hotel invest in such a space, apart from providing a guest indulgence, in addition to lavish banquet rooms and a ‘sunken garden’ in a courtyard nearby? Despite a TIME magazine write up, it doesn’t feel like top billing. It seemed unfortunate that while hundreds queued for the Shaanxi History Museum nearby, so few would know about – let alone see – what the Qujiang Museum had to offer.

Artificial lake, visible from calligraphy room, Guanzhong Folk Art Museum, Xi’an
从书法室望过去的人工湖景，关中民俗艺术博物馆，南五台山，大西安

Guanzhong Folk Art Museum, South Wutai Mountain, Greater Xi’an
Private
Completed: 2008

An hour South of central Xi’an on the edge of a small village barely serviced by public buses is a sprawling collection of houses and objects to rival any museum in Shaanxi. Founded by local property developer (and party member) Wang Yongchao with the help of government subsidies, this was apparently the first private museum devoted to folk art conservation in China. The objects, which number close to 35, 000, are housed in the physical homes of Shaanxi’s former aristocracy– wealthy families whose residences were all but demolished over years of decline. These houses were salvaged over two decades, forming the bones of the museum and reason for further development of the project. This is as much an open air architectural village as a platform for the folk art antiquities contained inside. The houses line lush miniature boulevards like an incongruous but seamlessly-planned community. Extensions such as private gardens, theaters featuring heritage opera performances and a lake fill out the 30 acres of space. ‘Categories’ of objects occupy entire rooms, including Qing puppets, bronze bells, carved steles, embroidered robes, handmade slippers and locks. They are beautifully displayed and lovingly maintained. The entire complex is serenely devoid of visitors – although this may be linked to its remote location and RMB 120 entrance ticket. It’s hard to know the gauge of success for places like this, which feel like browsing the spoils of an eccentric collector. It is testament, though, to the breadth of private museums unfettered by public constraints.

External source link: http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/shaanxi/xian/folk-art-museum.htm

Interior entranceway and lobby (pre-opening), Zhi Art Museum, Xinjin, Chengdu
内部入口和大厅，新津·知艺术馆，大成都

SICHUAN

Zhi Art Museum, Xinjin Town, Greater Chengdu
Private
Completed: 2014

The celebration of another Kengo Kuma design project in China nearly eclipsed the availability of any further information on this new museum, located at the base of the holy Taoist Laojunshan mountain near Chengdu. Its cascading exterior walls of floating tiles and dark granite make for an image so striking that even without address or phone number, taxi drivers knew it based on picture recognition alone. Nestled within the Alsatian-guarded ‘Belle Epoque’ luxury residential compound, beside an artificial lake and opposite the self titled ‘CEO Hotel’, the Zhi Museum reaches out to a captive audience, rather than a local public one. Its first exhibition, “Architecture for Dogs”, en route from Miami and Tokyo, applies some of Japan’s top architecture and design minds (led by Kenya Hara) to the creation of canine-functional structures. This curious inaugural show considers our relationship to dogs, animals and –more broadly–, our environment. It closes on September 20, 2014, but information on future plans for this museum is very sparse.

Second pavilion, containing mostly Buddha heads, each displayed individually but with acknowledgement of relationship to the others, Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Museum, Chengdu
二楼摆放的多是互相关联的单个佛像头像，鹿野苑石刻艺术博物馆，新民场镇，郫县，大成都

Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Museum, Xinmin Town, Pi County, Greater Chengdu
Private
Completed: 2002

‘Luyeyuan’ refers to the deer park in which Buddha preached the path to nirvana towards the end of his life. This is a clue to both the content of the (largely Buddhist) Stone Sculpture museum and the holistic sentiment behind its design.

Located in a county village of Chengdu, it is thoroughly remote and barely signposted. The path into the museum begins in a garden, winds through a bamboo forest with scattered steles, then rises on a soft gradient across a lotus pond into the first exhibition room. Designed by Liu Jiakun Architects, the museum was built in homage to stone masonry, but using rudimentary local techniques and materials.

The result is a perfectly-assimilated structure with outdoor light and sound permeating the museum walls while viewing. Articles are lit naturally, accentuating surface textures. The collection consists entirely of Han and Song stone artifacts from the Silk Road unfolding through the space, with separate pavilions for larger pieces and some on their own in corridors and exterior ledges. Perhaps most astounding is the care with which the objects are presented. The chasm between public and private is stark, the Luyeyuan having a vested interest in the project as only a private enterprise can. It feels correct, somehow, to appreciate the objects with the same degree of reverence with which they are presented. This is communicated at every point – right down to the staff, who kept the museum open an extra hour on a Friday evening to allow a single visitor to browse.

Bronze tree, nearly three meters tall, unearthed at Sanxingdui site, Chengdu
,近三米高的铜树，三星堆博物馆，南兴镇，广汉市，大成都

Sanxingdui Museum, Nanxing town, Guanghan County, Greater Chengdu
Public
Completed: 1997

The museum attached to the Sanxingdui archeological site is a more conservative iteration of the ‘contemporary museum’ in China, but its objects are so extraordinary that it deserves to be mentioned. ‘Sanxingdui’, or ‘three stars mound’, throws a theoretical spanner at historians’ understanding of the spread of culture and civilization within the Yellow river region. This is because the Bronze Age objects discovered here are incongruous –completely unlike anything found before throughout China, and unaccompanied by written records. Gold scepters, foil masks, jade tiger’s teeth and, most incredibly, three meter tall bronze trees, these objects have attracted a following of almost cultish status due to the mysteries surrounding their origin. Manicured, hedge-flanked boulevards lead visitors to two gleaming but low-rise exhibition halls. The prized bronzes have traveled globally, including to the British Museum in 1996 and New York’s Guggenheim in 1998. The museum (partially funded by American Express) was no doubt built to boost tourism in the area, and despite a detached location amid Chengdu’s encroaching sprawl, it was filled with local visitors.

Inner lotus pond courtyard, Liangzhu Culture Museum, Hangzhou
良渚博物馆内部的莲花池，良渚文化村，大杭州

ZHEJIANG

Liangzhu Culture Museum, Liangzhu Town, Greater Hangzhou

Public
Completed: 2007

On the outskirts of Hangzhou, the Liangzhu Culture Museum is part of a monumental new development aiming to rejuvenate a formerly contaminated industrial park. Nestled between the ‘Liangzhu Culture Village’ and the ‘Majestic Mansion’, it is also skirted by a bus depot and a ramshackle village. The museum itself is state commissioned and designed by David Chipperfield architects, of Rockbund Art Museum repute. A beautifully articulated space, it houses an impressive collection of artifacts (some dating back 5,300 years) unearthed in the region from seventy years ago to present day.

Although the entrance requests that visitors “do not lie down”, on a stifling hot Sunday afternoon, the Liangzhu is an air-conditioned oasis for families resting in the main foyer and napping in the café. Exhibition halls are largely empty, but the pieces are stunning. A softly nationalist agenda permeates, with introductions describing China’s greatness and strength throughout history. This is sensationalist time machine meets archeological dig. A ‘4D’ screening room provides “a simulated experience by spraying water, puffing, vibrating and sound effects.”

Maybe this is the way to present antiquities? As a non-ticketed, free entry museum on the edge of second-tier urban sprawl, audiences are largely provincial and local. The ‘café’ and gift shop, constructed from Iranian travertine stone, is a handsome house for a shop selling water guns, candy, mosquito repellant and plastic slippers. The appropriation for local audiences is slightly at odds with the museum’s lofty ideals, but certainly makes sense given the context.

Exterior of Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou
浙江美术馆外景，杭州

Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou
Public
Completed: 2008

Overlooking Hangzhou’s celebrated West Lake, the Zhejiang Art Museum (not to be confused with the nearby Zhejiang Provincial Museum) is a classic example of a traditional state institution housed in a new building. Superficially, the museum feels lively with diverse offerings. Buzzing with visitors – especially families and children – it has artworks in abundance and a packed public program schedule. However, the programs take only the most basic elements of exhibitions to engage with. Artworks on display, ranging from contemporary sculpture to literati inks, are numerous but lacking in criticism. Lackluster wall labels offer minimal information, and there is a palpable distance between audiences and artworks – neither are really given the chance to respond appropriately. The top floor holds an exhibition of a mid-20th century Chinese-Parisian painter, presented as artistic martyr, tirelessly representing Chinese creativity overseas, and whose (donated) works have finally returned home. The buildings soaring atrium and continuous succession of rooms distracts from the fact that there isn’t much depth of interaction going on.

The dilemma is the same as in many state museums – ‘too much museum’ is surely better than none at all, even if it is still finding its feet. Government driven museums are limited in their programming, having to conform to rules which allow them to offer much of one thing and none of another. Perhaps over time the measure by which museum and audiences mutually benefit will be revised, creating some space for more genuine exchange.

Clean, crisp lines of the entrance courtyard created by I.M.Pei’s architectural vision for the Suzhou Art Museum
贝聿铭为苏州美术馆所设计的线条干净利落的入口处庭院

JIANGSU

Suzhou Art Museum, Suzhou
Public
Completed: 2006

China’s architectural godfather I.M. Pei accepted the challenge to design the Suzhou museum at the age of 85, in part because of a deep respect for the cultural traditions of his ancestral home region, and a desire to communicate that to China’s youth. Anything he touches holds a particular gravitas, true of these stucco pavilions set off Suzhou’s trinket-filled main street. Avoiding the tendency for public art institutions to grow to unnecessary magnitude, the building is a subtle extension of a Qing-era residence with UNESCO protected gardens. Unfolding around a central lily pond, visitors enter through a courtyard then into a main foyer, filtering through rooms just big enough for large families to congregate in. The objects themselves are antiquities, and feel more exquisite than those found in some of the larger public museums. Each space contains no more than about twenty items. The proportions of the whole complex are intimate, like that of a private home, which is difficult to maintain considering sheer visitor numbers. Bilingual materials are available detailing categories of objects, as well as the architecture and current programs. One wing has been reserved for contemporary projects which respond to works in the museum. This space is rotating and curated, with the first project carried out by Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing and Zhao Wuji in 2006.

Inside the entrance atrium, with Deng Xiaoping waxwork flanked by a Giraffe, Shenzhen Museum
位于中庭的邓小平蜡像和长颈鹿，深圳博物馆，深圳

GUANGDONG

Shenzhen Museum, Shenzhen
Public
Completed: 2008

Shenzhen Museum is ideal for anyone seeking a representative flagship museum. Here, the identity of the city is paramount, with other functions (objects and programming) being secondary. The museum is an extension of a new development with government and legal offices, which is so colossal that it covers an entire city block. With free entry and an unusual ‘bags, no bags, pregnant women’ division of crowds, the queues snake along outside. Inside, an airport-like atrium features a modest Deng Xiaoping waxwork, gazing out over a roped off glass floor map of the Shenzhen new economic zone, flanked by a giraffe and an elephant (courtesy of the nature exhibits). Families crush against the barriers to take photos of or with the diminutive Deng. Shenzhen, often spoken about as ‘a city born thirty years ago’, has much to communicate to visitors about its ancient roots and strategic location. On the second floor, the vast Neolithic section tells the story of Shenzhen’s heroic early ancestors through heavy fiberglass reliefs. Key regional events from the past hundred years are reconstructed and brought swiftly under the wing of a distinctly nationalist agenda. In fact, the museum describes itself openly as carrying out “patriotic education wholeheartedly”. Despite heaving crowds, some of the exhibitions were excellent – including one on Tang dynasty female sculptures. Visitors seemed more preoccupied with photo opportunities than absorbing the content, one group of young girls bottlenecking visitors by mimicking the poses of each Tang lady statuette. Ticket holders understandably want to record their visit and share it, but many seemed to be allowing their camera to do the work, taking only the ‘pose and move on’ approach.

Interior exhibition and museum view at the Hexiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen
内部场景和展览，何香凝美术馆，深圳

Hexiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen
Public
Completed: 1997

This museum takes on an interesting responsibility in the region, having opened in 1997 – the same year as the Hong Kong handover back to mainland China. The museum runs two close, but not directly linked agendas. The first is Shenzhen’s key vicinity to Hong Kong and the straits regions, just as He Xiangning herself (the museum’s adopted figurehead), a painter & scholar who operated fluidly between the national and communist regimes. Secondly, with these regions now providing a much greater public resource post-handover, the museum has deftly appointed a string of capable curators, including Feng Boyi, Hou Hanru and Pi Li to lead their contemporary section. These exhibitions act as an extension of the institution, and hold significant value. Shows such as “Local Futures” in 2013 and “Conforming to Vicinity: A Cross-strait Four-region Artistic Exchange Project” this year tackled pertinent issues of regional identity, consolidation, the Chinese diaspora and urban development.

Shenzhen OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, located within converted former factories, in the sprawling ‘Overseas Chinese Town’ development
坐落在华侨城改造的工厂之间的OCT当代艺术中心（OCAT）

OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Shenzhen
Public
Completed: 2004

A substantial degree of confusion surrounds the OCAT (OCT Contemporary Art Terminal) in Shenzhen, due in part to clunky naming and the enormous ‘OCT – Overseas Chinese Town’ development in Shenzhen’s Futian district where it is located. The OCT area is split across a major boulevard and houses a hospital, schools, a Walmart, a theme park and a Hospitality Training University, among other things. The rise of the mixed use development has marked much of China’s urban change, as has the ‘factory district turned arts hub’ formula. OCAT uses decommissioned 1980s furniture factories, and fanning out from it is the OCT Loft area, containing numerous small galleries, art spaces, cafés and residencies. Clusters like this provide important platforms for art communities; however, they are nearly impossible to navigate in a specific sense. There is more idle wandering and general appreciation than dedicated engagement, which is problematic. The risk, also, is that ‘culture’ is diluted, merely absorbed into a location or district. A kiosk owner next to it had “never heard of the art museum”, while another man replied that it was “all around” without a hint or irony. OCAT Terminal does in fact take the lead, hosting major exhibitions, such as the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, now in its eighth year. It also works under the auspices of the He Xiangning Art Museum across the road, extending the contemporary practice and reach of China’s second state-run, modern art museum.

View from the Guangdong Museum entrance, with Zaha Hadid’s “double pebble” opera house and the Children’s Palace visible in Zhujiang new town, Guangzhou
广东省博物馆入口，广州

Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou
Public
Completed: 2010

The Guangdong Museum attracted much attention upon its opening in 2010, and draws close to 10,000 visitors daily. These numbers indicate the readiness for southern China’s public to lay claim to their own institution, without the difficulty of traveling across the border to Hong Kong. Dominating one corner of Guangzhou’s substantial Zhujiang new town development, it is part of urban rejuvenation efforts ahead of the 2010 Asian Games, which in turn brought ready-made crowds of visitors for these new cultural enterprises.

Designed by Hong Kong’s Rocco Design Architects, the museum was created to be a beacon of art and history in the region. Inside, the disconnection between content and building is palpable – it feels like a treasure box built prior to knowledge of its treasure. The permanent collection items are displayed on rotation, and corners of the museum are devoted to natural history, Chinese medicine and wood carving. Heavyweight museum ‘genres’ are represented, but collectively, the museum lacks vision. Traveling shows such as ‘The Etruscans’, and ‘Tribal Art of North America’ were special but dry, with audiences drifting from object to object. This is not to overlook Guangdong Museum’s efforts to connect with global curators and ideas. They hosted the world’s first International Asian Art Curator forum in 2013. It does appear to be difficult, though, for new museums in China to eschew conventional, even conservative modes of presentation. This may need to be revised if new generations of hyper-stimulated, media-savvy visitors are expected to be inspired by museum offerings.