THE BROOKLYN RAIL

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
Asia Society
July 2004

*Qiu Zhijie, "Tattoo 1" (1997), Chromogenic print. ©Qiu Zhijie. Collection Smart Museum of Art, Chicago.*

The rise of a body-based sub-genre in 1970s American performance art, put forth by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Nauman, Karen Finley, and Chris Burden, corresponded with an economic collapse that witnessed a plummeting stock market, unheard of inflation, and a gas shortage. These artists responded with performative actions emphasizing ownership of the individual body, with the willingness to employ the corporeal as an arena for political battle. In 1990s China, systematic changes far exceeded what 1970s America experienced, and it is fascinating to see how young Chinese artists in Asia Society’s Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China likewise turn to their own bodies as an artmaking statement expressive of a broad range of emotions, none more visceral than an obvious yearning for the freedom of an individual voice.

Asia Society’s half of Between Past and Future features quite a bit more photo than video, and while the show is separated into two categories, you’d almost never notice since it’s installed and integrated so seamlessly. Organized into four thematic headings, "History and Memory" and "Reimagining the Body" are at Asia Society while "People and Place" and "Performing the Self" appear at the International Center for Photography. Curators Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips write in their catalogue essay that photo and video became the preferred mediums for young Chinese artists beginning in the early and mid-nineties, obviously because of the novelty of new media, but also because of the ability of those media to document performance in action, and more often than not, these performance actions either involve inflicting pain on the author’s body or spreading the self-consciousness of individualism like a gospel.

Qiu Zhijie’s two "Tattoo" photos (1994) are masochistic acts of negation. Both feature the artist standing stone-faced against a stark white wall, one with hundreds of thumbtacks apparently sticking into both the wall and Qiu’s skin, the other with a massive bu, or ‘no’, character painted on his torso and spilling onto the wall behind him. The diptych-like pairing of the two photos suggests a conceptual conflation between masochism and social disobedience, an idea articulated more overtly in Rong Rong’s work. Rong’s 1994 photo "East Village, Beijing, No. 34" depicts the artist Zhuang Huan (also included in Between Past and Future and a integral part of Beijing’s East Village bohemian artist culture) hanging from the ceiling of his studio by chains while blood drips from his neck onto a hotplate, apparently producing the horrid stench of frying blood. Especially in work by the East Village artists, there’s clearly no shying away from taboo sexuality in the show, and artists like Rong and Zhuang tend to produce a degree of confusion in the blatant mixing of sexuality and violence. Does sex equal violence? Is violence sexy? Is the liberation of self-imposed violence expressive of a new individualism among young Chinese hostile to the Maoist notion of society as a collective? Zhuang’s hanging, and the subsequent spreading the gesture via smell to anyone in proximity, smacks of the youthful rebellion in the form of self-directed violence that pervades Between Past and Future. But there is no conclusion, just an action captured in a small photograph that stands as a mini-manifesto for much of the show.

Ma Liuming’s "Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall" (1998) poignantly addresses Chinese history with a contemporary slant, as the artist neatly inserts himself into the story with a video of a performance and a series of documentary photographs. Ma’s project was to walk the great wall naked (wearing lipstick) until his feet bled. The effeminate-looking Ma is shown carefully applying lipstick and disrobing before beginning his walk, documented with quiet intensity on video. Like Zhuang in the Rong photo, Ma sheds his blood as a purging gesture, a purifying act and another powerfully manifesto-like statement of the coming of the new, and the need for China to integrate its past peacefully with the inevitable changes of the future.

The waif-like figure of Ma, the epitome of androgynous bohemian, is the ideal symbolism for the tension between the grandiose recent past of a society built on collectivism and future generations with global influences unthinkable to their parents. The accelerated pace of economic development in China is clearly the source of incredible optimism, tension, and confusion in a society that changed, and continues to change, very suddenly. China is very much a part of global diplomacy because of its revelation as a real economic beacon. Also, it will certainly have more access to oil reserves in the future to fuel continued growth—a fascinating subplot. Miao Xiaochun’s photo "Opera" (2003) encapsulates the transitional nature of contemporary China with a quiet elegance. The photo is a huge, multi-paneled C-print of a pit with monkeys frozen in motion, surrounded by an elevated circular platform from which the crowd can peer in. Some of the monkeys hide amongst the rocks, some cuddle babies and groom each other, one’s face is stuck into a bright blue Pepsi cup. The globalization/westernization connotations of the Pepsi monkey are pretty obvious, and a photo of the monkeys alone would have been a nice one-liner. But scanning the people around the perimeter of the viewing area, the eye inevitably lands on a centralized figure that obviously stands apart from the crowd because of his outfit—the stately robes of a Chinese scholar. The figure is actually a realistic sculpture of the artist made upon his return from a four-year study program in Germany, when he found his homeland completely different from the country he had left. The tension of watching vs. being watched in the photo extends to China’s place in the global pecking order right now. China is being watched, and the Asia Society artists are making explosively powerful art about this era of transition in which they’re engaged with their country’s politics, history, and culture, not as a choice but as an obvious necessity.
—Nick Stillman