“WUZHI: 1985-2008 Geng Jianyi Solo Exhibition”
Minsheng Art Museum (Shigang 1st Road, Changning, Shanghai, China). Sep 08 – Oct 12 2012.
Power Station of Art (Lane 20, Huayuangang Lu, Near Miaojiang Lu, Huangpu district). Oct 1 2012 – Mar 31 2013.
Paul Gladston and Ge Si Di in conversation about the 2012 Shanghai Biennale and Geng Jianyi’s Retrospective at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
Location: Paul Gladston’s office at the University of Nottingham. Early autumn sunshine plays over motes of dust filling the air near a collection of desiccated houseplants. Gladston wipes distractedly at a teacup stain on his desk. Ge inspects the bookshelves. E-mail chimes accumulate.
Paul Gladston: How was your recent visit to Shanghai? I’m very interested to hear your view of events surrounding this year’s Biennale.
Ge Si Di: Well, there’s clearly vaulting ambition in terms of the Biennale’s relocation to massive venues at the 2010 Expo site as well as the inclusion of international pavilions representing cities around the world. The VIP opening of the Biennale at the new Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, which is situated in a decommissioned power station on the Puxi side of the Huangpu river, was certainly spectacular — not just in terms of the scale of the building and the number and range of works on show, but also the now ubiquitous “techno” party at the end of the evening. It’s a brave new world…but, for me, a completely overblown one. I know we are supposed to respect post-colonialist injunctions against seeing non-Western contemporary art initiatives such as this as secondary and belated. However, it did come across, rightly or wrongly, as an attempt to reproduce sublime conditions of display we have become all too familiar with at venues such as Tate Modern and the Venice Biennale.
PG: There are various social engagement and outreach activities attached to the Biennale this time around. Surely, that’s a step forward?
GSD: As you know, I’m skeptical about the now-established tendency towards curatorial social work; for me it sets up all sorts of unexamined ideological contradictions and constraints. It certainly doesn’t square well with the up-market VIP opening party thrown by the Biennale’s organizers. It would be interesting to do some research on the actual impact of social outreach activities attached to art exhibitions such as the Biennale. It’s also reduced the role of the artist to that of a bit player ― that seems controlling and restrictive to me. As far as the Biennale is concerned there’s no critical edge. All of the curatorial statements about “reactivation” and “energy exchange” are just too vague to be critically meaningful. We live in distinctly uncritical times that privilege abstract notions of trans-national interaction and exchange over negation and contretemps. It’s an internationalized revisiting of the worst excesses of the 1960s counter-culture. Added to that, there’s always a deadening effect surrounding big public shows in China. We can’t overlook localized constraints on critical expression within the PRC and the necessary complicity of any public exhibition with governmental authority. In the case of the Shanghai Biennale the nature of the enterprise is just too complicit with authoritarian displays of size and power ― the historical use of sublimity within China to engender feelings of moral supplication to power ― not to mention state-directed real estate value transfer. The Biennale reproduces the form of an international “survey” show in line with examples set in Westernized contexts, but without the possibility of any significant critical or social content. That’s not an outcome confined to China these days. As a result, the work on show is instantaneously recuperated. The Biennale should have attempted to do something distinct both thematically and in terms of its presentation, and therefore far more telling in social/critical terms. But perhaps, given the circumstances, it simply can’t do that.
A momentary silence settles on the room. Ge fingers a copy of Brian Eno’s A Year — with Swollen Appendices. Gladston responds reluctantly to an e-mail about changes to student assessment.
PG: Did you see anything in Shanghai that caught your eye?
GSD: Yes, I did; Geng Jianyi’s retrospective exhibition at the Minsheng Art Museum. It’s a selective overview of Geng’s work since he first came to prominence within the PRC as a member of the ’85 New Wave during the 1980s. There are some glaring omissions, notably the artist’s so-called “rationalist” paintings of the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, it’s a welcome showcase of the work of an artist who, up to now, hasn’t received the public attention he deserves. The production values of the show are lacking by international standards, as one has come to expect within China. But that’s the actualité there and it sits well with the work…it allows the work to retain a certain vitality and spontaneity.
PG: Geng has a desultory view of his own work and status. He’s shown very little in recent years. I never expected to see a retrospective of Geng’s work during his lifetime. I think I’m right in saying that Geng has been dangerously ill of late.
GSD: Yes, he has, with the escalating effects of a long-term hepatic condition. Although I believe he’s now recovering after a life-saving operation. Under those circumstances the retrospective has the unsettling status of a near-posthumous event. Given Geng’s often bleak sense of humour, I’m sure he finds that highly amusing. The final piece in the show incorporates a bed from an intensive care ward. It suggests that it’s not just Geng, but his work that has been brought back from the brink. There are some lost or destroyed works that have been recreated especially for the show. One of the best is entitled “Trembling with Fear” (1989), which consists of a series of small wall-mounted metal boxes, each of which has a cast of a human tooth or teeth attached to it. In one case, teeth are attached by a wire that vibrates intermittently and noisily. In spite of its modest scale, the work gives rise to extraordinary feelings of annoyance and anxiety. It’s also hilarious ― a perversely vicious variation on Jasper Johns’ “The Critic Smiles” (1969). Perhaps it’s also how one feels as a protester standing in front of a tank.
PG: Geng has been a brinkman throughout his career, always playing at and across the edges of things. He uses conspicuously disjunctive techniques that undermine any attempt to arrive at settled meaning. This extends to any fixed interpretation of his work. He is persistently “elusive and vague,” to borrow from Laozi.
GSD: Indeed. A good example in the Minsheng show is the paper installation “Reading Manner” (2000). It’s a book whose otherwise blank pages have been marked and therefore given significance as a text by the red ink-stained fingerprints of an indeterminate number of “readers.” As such, it can be understood to invert and problematize the conventional opposition between the author as producer and reader as consumer. Another example is a video work entitled “The Direction of Vision” (1996), which presents a series of close-up shots of the constantly blinking eye of a duck. Towards the end of one sequence the duck’s eye begins to close and then dim, suggesting that the animal has been subjected to a lethal act of violence somewhere off-screen. From a Western point of view ― with its deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian restrictions on all visible acts of bodily sacrifice ― the apparent death of the duck is undeniably chilling and repellent. However, the same work takes on another less obviously transgressive meaning if considered in relation to the immediate conditions of its production and reception within China at the end of the 1990s, where there was still widespread acceptance of public acts of violence against animals in the preparation of food. As its title suggests, “The Direction of Vision” can therefore be interpreted as a performative demonstration of the unresolvable contradictions inherent in any generalizing de-contextualized attempt to uphold one cultural perspective over another. Setting high theory aside for a moment, it’s also a telling engagement with the inevitability of the passage between life and death. In the Minsheng show, “The Direction of Vision” comes towards the end of the run of works and is placed near the intensive care bed. It has real poignancy, not just in relation to Geng’s situation, but the human condition we all live with. The paradoxical status of that condition clearly isn’t lost on Geng. Maybe the duck didn’t die. Maybe it’s a non-sequitur ― a category mistake. Nevertheless, the aesthetic effect is penetrating. Like many of other works by Geng, it constitutes a focus for extended meditation on the fugitive nature of lived experience.
PG: Still…
GSD: Given contemporary Chinese art’s historical indebtedness to the prior example of Western modernism and postmodernism, it is, of course, possible to interpret Geng’s uncompromising resistance to authoritative meaning as a supplement to the comparably problematic activities of the Western avant-gardes and post avant-gardes. But we should also acknowledge a relationship with the persistent traces of traditional Chinese thought and practice. Consider, for example, Geng’s stated interest in the use of paradoxical epigrams (gong’an, or koan in Japanese) historically associated with Chan (Zen) Buddhism as a source of illumination.
PG: That old cliché — an alignment between deconstruction and Chan/Zen Buddhism. Historically, non-rationalist dialectical thinking has been used within China as a way of suggesting the possibility of harmonious reciprocation between otherwise opposed states of being as part of some higher metaphysical state of unity or consciousness. In contrast, the ostensibly comparable deconstructive conception of différance is understood to point towards the fundamental instability of categorical meanings both in terms of conceptual difference and totality.
GSD: It could, of course, be argued that the historical and still-durable tendency towards non-rationalist metaphysics within Chinese cultural contexts is very much open to problematization through close deconstructive analysis. However, as Geng’s video installation “The Direction of Vision” indicates, to do so would require an inescapably problematic imposition of historically located Westernized cultural values. What remains, therefore, is a seemingly unresolvable impasse: one in which we are forced to shuttle endlessly between one interpretative perspective — that sees non-rationalist dialectical thought as fundamentally deconstructive — and another that sees it as the basis for some sort of cosmic unity.
PG: At the same time, it is possible to argue with reference to Jacques Derrida’s radical collage-text “Glas” that this juxtaposition of apparently opposed cultural perspectives also holds out the prospect of a critical polylogue of Western and Chinese cultural meanings and values — one that opens up those identities to one another while internally dividing and questioning the authority of both. In following this line of argument, it is no longer possible to interpret Geng’s work convincingly from the point of view of some sort of synthetic alignment between existing Western and Chinese theoretical/practical models, or, for that matter, in an ontologically essentialist manner from the point of view of one or the other. Instead, Geng’s work emerges as the locus for a dynamic, non-essential interpretative interaction between multiple, already hybrid, cultural points of view that, among other things, insists on the capacity of a non-rationalistic dialectics to point both towards provisional states of reciprocity and persistent states of difference.
GSD: In acknowledging this dynamic state of interaction it will also have become necessary to diverge, despite their ostensible appropriateness, from an uncritical stance toward the currently fashionable conceptions of cultural hybridity and “Third-Space,” since the undeniable allegiances of those conceptions to Western(ized) post-structuralism are in the “final analysis” just too culturally loaded to map securely onto the rather less certain intersection of cultural traces that mark Geng’s work….
PG: I see you’ve already given this some thought.
GSD: Well, whatever the theoretical prognosis, Geng’s show is a cut above the Biennale in my view. It demonstrates, for those with the patience to see, that there is the possibility of a critical art in China: one that avoids recuperation by being persistently oblique.
Gladston looks out of the window into the quad. Hordes of students stream through. The light begins to diminish.