Brian Holmes – March 2008

Brian Holmes – March 2008

As early as 2007, the slogan of the Olympic Games was everywhere, on brochures, magazines, billboards, light boxes, LED tickers, neon signs, and of course, on the omnipresent urban video screens: One World, One Dream. With all the resources of state-controlled media, Beijing was preparing to claim its place in the pantheon of global cities. This time there would be no denial, no memory of the failed 1993 Olympics bid under the shadow of the “Tiananmen incident.” Already, the hallucinatory congestion of the skyscape makes the prophecy come true. There is only one possible world, only one possible dream: continuous buildings, endless highways, infinite urbanization, a city beyond the limits of the imagination. Huge urban blocks, surging arteries, expanding ring roads, metros, airports, refineries, power plants, bullet trains, a city that devours the countryside, scraping the mountains and the sky. A world city.

How does a society remake itself in a global image? The answer lies in a process of internalization, at once psychological and material. Around the world over the last two decades, since the fateful year of 1989, formerly underdeveloped countries have embarked on an accelerated course of self-makeover, absorbing and adapting industrial techniques, institutional forms, aesthetic styles, mental frameworks. Such transformations have happened before; but unprecedented increases in productive capacity and intensified transnational exchanges make this process different, even compared to the great wave of change that followed World War II. The gravitational shift of wealth accumulation to new centers in East Asia may well bring a metamorphosis of capitalism itself, as the historian Giovanni Arrighi has suggested.1 But in the meantime the transition is disconcerting, tumultuous, violent, marked not only by its tremendous acceleration (“Shenzhen speed”), but also by the particular forms of social control that characterize the present. China’s transformation is becoming the central phenomenon in the emergence of a new, complex and disorienting world society.

Global Individuals

To see the process of makeover in its early stages you can travel by taxi back in time, fifteen years ago, to Beijing World Park on the southwest edges of the capital city. This classic piece of Chinese spectacle culture was opened in the early 1990s, and more recently became the subject of Jia Zhangke’s great film, The World (2005). What’s offered to the gaze is a collection of miniature monuments: the Eiffel tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In an age when travel outside the country was virtually impossible, tourists would come by train to take their weekend tour, and brides would pose for a photo, as they still do today, in front of the gleaming white Sydney Opera. As Jia insists, this is where you can “see the world without ever leaving Beijing.” What’s not mentioned in the film, however, is in many ways the punctum of the whole affair: the identity of the aging and decrepit airliner where Jia’s heroine, Tao, dressed as a stewardess, repels yet more advances from her erstwhile boyfriend Taisheng. This was Deng Xiaoping’s official plane, the one used for his state visits and excursions. So the casual tourist on a weekend in Beijing could experience the fantasy of flying in the personal airplane of the man who literally brought the world to China, in the form of foreign direct investment, the magic key that opened the forbidden cities.







Fifteen years is an eternity at Chinese speeds. Today the Beijing World Park is a sad place left behind by progress, like a bad joke gone stale and flat with age. Rather than rushing here, a visitor from the interior would head in the opposite direction, toward the future that Deng made possible, in the northeast corner of the capital. There you find Beijing’s own full-sized World Trade Center in the brand-new Central Business District, not far from Koolhaas’s CCTV building, rising up like an ideogram of power. The city itself is now the world park, glittering with the stardust of transnational architecture. The current phase of internalization is no longer psychological, but material. Beijing, in many different ways, has become the world.

The experience of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen confirms two things. The first is that the global extension of the Anglo-American technological and organizational toolkit has given rise to a world civilization, what Félix Guattari called “integrated world capitalism.”2 The second is that this overall pattern of world civilization can only be governed and normed at a regional or continental scale, using cultural and political resources that are specific to that scale. The continental scale – whether a nation-state like India or China, or a regional bloc like the Russian Federation or the EU – has become decisive in the world today, because only that scale can fully internalize, but also resist global forces. Resistance, this context, means the attempt to impose different societal norms at the specifically continental level, according to whatever social or political power imperatives have taken hold there. What confronts us then are intersecting realities: something like “transnational capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” An entire political economy lodges in the tension of these intersections. The unanswered question is how those tensions are expressed and elaborated by individuals and smaller groups: how the emergence of a world society is tangled up with the production of new subjectivities.

The word individual signals the micropolitical dimension, where cultural commentary is now typically confined as a celebration of subjective choice. Yet individualism is no way the opposite of globalism. Following sociologists like Ulrich Beck, I’ll be arguing that globalism is inseparable from a process of intensive individualization which is its other face, the flip side of the same basic currency.3 This is the symbolic meaning of the slogan, “One World, One Dream.” When we look at the highly original and highly commodified practices of the creative industries, it is globalism that we are really seeing, in the expression of each singular dream. Global individualism results from the monetization and contractualization of social relations, which is an essential part of the neoliberal economic order. And it is a very exciting thing, involving a break from traditional patterns, new possibilities of thought and sensation, even the literal experience of flying through the air – deterritorialization, in a word. That’s first of all a liberating experience. What you feel in urban China today is an extraordinary productive energy, coursing through the architecture and the bodies of the people. The feeling corresponds to a tremendous achievement: an exit from hunger, stagnation and poverty for hundreds of millions of people, and the invention of a new development path promising equality with the Western nations. But the same social reality has a much crueler side, which few of its proponents care to mention.

This darker side is revealed in Jia Zhangke’s film, when the migrant worker known only as “Little Sister” is fatally wounded by a falling crane at the construction site where he worked at night for higher pay. Dying in the hospital, he can offer nothing more in his last words to Taisheng than a list of the minor debts he incurred in his short life in the capital. The same theme reappears when Taisheng counts the insurance money in front of the grieving relatives, even as the nephew (the only one in the family who can read) signs a waiver of any future claims. Why the insistence on monetization and contractualization? With his depiction of migrant laborers in the world city, Jia tries to break through the generalized ignorance that surrounds the division of labor, to the point where it renders invisible the very relation that builds the city. This unconsciousness, sustained by global individualism, now constitutes a fundamental risk for society at all levels, as the political and environmental contradictions of integrated world capitalism accumulate at an alarming rate. World society develops at the risk of new subjectivities.

The increasingly authoritarian forms of governance that are emerging all over the globe can be conceived as techniques for managing that risk, each time in a specific fashion that is inextricable from a particular social and cultural history. Driven by its quest to hang on to power, and perhaps even more, by its ambition to provide development for the people, the Chinese communist party is at the forefront of this neo-authoritarian governance, offering a specifically continental solution to the problems of insertion into global neoliberalism. It has developed a balance between a strongly normative political system and a wildly expansive economy, with the paradoxical sense of openness that such expansion brings. It is now attempting to deploy the concept of the creative industries, as part of a bid to increase its international and domestic legitimacy, to overcome a longstanding deficit in product innovation and to build a much-needed internal market for the consumption of sophisticated goods and services. According to that concept, the kind of human energy and aspiration that was formerly invested in the transcendent values of the traditional artistic genres, or in the revolutionary experimentation of the avant-gardes, should now be seamlessly merged with audiovisual production, advertising, design, entertainment events, software and video games – in other words, with everything that creates the aesthetic experience of the hyper-mediated city. These are the forms on which the Western consumer paradise is founded. Do they render other realities invisible? By examining the social, economic and monetary underpinnings of the push for a creative China, I want to suggest some of the contradictions that are at work in the country, and some of the ways that the rest of us are implicated in them.

Just a warning before beginning: I’m no Sinologist, and I have no particular authority to pronounce on all these things. What I’m going to offer are some observations and questions for research into a situation that concerns us all: the development of a global division of labor, and indeed, of a global society, which is now coming concretely into being. In any case, the point of cultural critique is never to supply unequivocal answers. Rather it is to spark off a dialogue that can help crack open the one-world dream.

Urban Divide

Clearly there are artists who might be interested in such a dialogue. For a 1996 performance entitled Half White Collar, Half Peasant, Luo Zidan confectioned a double or split exterior, wearing a tattered Mao suit on the right of his body and an impeccable shirt, tie and slacks on the left. He used cosmetics and hairstyling to distinguish a smoothed, whitened face from the pockmarked bronze skin of a country-dweller. This is how he appeared on the city streets of Chengdu in Sichuan province, holding a crisp hundred-yuan note in one hand and what appeared to be a crumpled rag in the other.







As Chen Hongjie has written:

Walking through the area around Chunxi Road in Chengdu, the performer appears both real and illusory in his actions. At the Holiday Inn he uses the peasant’s sleeve to clean the marble at the entrance… In a watch store, the white-collar worker tries on a 2,300,000 RMB diamond studded watch, admiring his reflection. At a KFC restaurant, he happily eats a meal, while the peasant, left with the fries and salad, is confused as to how they should be devoured. The concept of this work expressed the issues of class, and on a deeper level, social roles common to all human society and the roots of the contradictions that inhibit human desire.4

Luo provides a brilliant metaphor of the split personality of contemporary China, with its sparkling new cities and its 800 million impoverished peasants who aspire to live in them. In this way, he points at one of the fundamental traits of what I called “transnational capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” Everybody knows that since the establishment of the Special Economic Zones in the Pearl River Delta area in the early 1980s, China has become the factory of the world. It owes that status to the “China price,” i.e. the lowest asking price on the entire planet for any given category of basic manufactured goods. But the availability of the China price depends in its turn on the capacity of the urban white-collar worker to extract tremendous amounts of underpaid labor from his other half, the peasant arriving to toil in the factories. How do the two figures co-exist within the same city, and perhaps, as Luo suggests, within the same skin?

Their relation has been formalized, since 1949, in the communist version of the hukou or household registration system, which served to immobilize people in their locality of origin. In the revolutionary era, development priorities were focused on the city: social guarantees and advantages were reserved for the urban proletariat, and rural-urban migration was strictly controlled, with occasional tumultuous exceptions during periods of rapid industrial expansion, often followed by forced transfer back to the countryside.5 What’s surprising is the continuity of this policy since the 1980s. Throughout the period of reform, amidst massive and relatively uncontrolled influx to the city, urban hukou remained almost impossible for country-dwellers to obtain. It barred migrants from access to social services and education for their children, and left them subject to arrest and deportation to their residence of origin at the whim of the police, according to the so-called “custody and repatriation” regulations. The paradox is that the very system that denies peasant populations their full urban citizenship is also at the basis of the incredible engine of wealth-production that attracts them to the city in the first place. This paradox has set an entire continent in motion. The 120 million migrants who make up China’s so-called “floating population” are in between the country and the city, crowding at the gates of modern urban life and yet partially excluded from it.

According to statistics whose accuracy is always difficult to verify, in 2008 there were some 30 million migrant workers in the major industrial cities, while the remainder of the floating population wandered between rural provinces. All such mobile individuals are considered displaced, they are not where they should be. The hukou system allows rural labor to play the same role in China that transnational migrant labor does in the European or North American economies, furnishing human fuel to sweatshops and low-end service industries while exerting downward pressure on the wages of more established workers. Recently there has also been a lot of pressure on the state to transform this system, particularly after public outcry in 2003 when a man named Sun Zhigang died inside a Guangzhou police station under the custody and repatriation procedure.6 Meanwhile the government, faced with growing unemployment in the countryside and an inability of smaller towns to generate industry, is projecting the transfer of hundreds of millions of people to the urbanized areas. The stated concern of the officials, however, is that complete abolition of the limits on mobility would result in a chaotic shift of population toward the coastal cities. In fact, the digitalization of up to 80% of the country’s household registration records has made the system into a powerful tool of social control, which is unlikely to be abandoned in the near future.7 The urban/rural divide will not just disappear. To the extent that this particular social relation is implicated in the production of so many of the clothes we wear and the goods we consume, could it be worth knowing about? Are we as foreign to China as we seem? The evolution of the hukou system over the the next ten years may be the most precise barometer for registering the inevitable changes in the class structure, not just of China, but of the world.

It’s intriguing to learn that Luo Zidan did his performance in 1996, just a few years after Deng’s “Southern Excursion” had opened up new development zones, stock markets and the possibility of real-estate speculation, thus creating “the policy basis and market conditions enabling the emergence in China of a class of the newly rich,” as the New Left critic Wang Hui has written.8 While state-owned enterprises were dismembered, giving rise to massive unemployment, Chinese intellectuals engaged in debates over the capacity of civil society to bring about democratic transformation. This was supposed to happen, not through radical change of the system, but instead “through reliance on marketization, the formation of local and intragovernmental interest groups, and the unlocking of traditional resources embedded in such things as clan structures.” What that meant in practice was the proliferation of more-or-less shady business deals at the local level, based on contracts and land-use rights accorded by the government.

However, Wang continues, “the ‘civil society’ that was imagined [by the intellectuals] completely left out the huge working class and rural society, thus not only according perfectly with state policies that had the effect of drastically increasing the polarization between rich and poor, but also cutting off in principle the links between the ongoing progress of democracy and its true social foundations.” The result is that Chinese levels of inequality have dramatically risen, to the point where they now match the highest levels in the developed world: those of the United States.9 Luo dramatized this situation perfectly with a 1997 performance entitled White-Collar Exemplar, which stages a businessman in shirtsleeves and tie, standing at attention on a city street somewhat like an army security guard, but inside a transparent plastic box attached to an oxygen tank so as to hermetically seal him off from any contact with the crowd milling all around.10







When social divides are created with such suddenness, against a backdrop of official egalitarianism and communist rhetoric, then the disconnect between “class issues” and “the contradictions that inhibit human desire” reaches an extreme. Dialogue is only present in its absence, as a gaping psychosocial divide that affects the individual no less than the group. The question asked by Luo’s two performances might finally be this: Does the air conditioning make it impossible for you to feel your other half sweating inside the same skin?

Coastal Networks

Let’s travel from provincial Chengdu to the great industrial center of Chongqing, then through the Three Gorges Dam and down the Yangtze to Shanghai – one of the most exuberant cities in the world. Shanghai was granted the status of Special Economic Zone in 1992. With the growth of its heavy industry, the attraction of its high-tech research centers and the prestige of its brand-new stock exchange, it has outstripped Shenzen to become China’s most productive megalopolis. In 2002 it won the competition to host the 2010 World Expo. As a Canadian consultant explains, “Shanghai wants to be a ‘world class city,’ comparable to New York in finance, London in trade, and Paris in culture. Make no bones about it – Shanghai will achieve its vision by 2025, and is using World Expo 2010 as a stepping stone.”11



Once again, this is a city that wants to remake itself in a global image. But on what basis? Here I want to step back for a moment, and look at some of the infrastructure that underlies China’s status as the world factory. Historically, the city of Shanghai owes its wealth to its position as a port on the Yangtze river, making it an interface between the maritime routes of global trade and the manufacturing capacities of the interior. The port is still tremendously important, as you can see by taking a trip beneath the Huangpu bridge and out to the mouth of the Yangtze. Container transshipment, bulk raw materials, steel, shipbuilding, petrochemicals and navy installations are the most visible. There’s a lot of heavy equipment out there, with an aesthetics of rust that’s fascinating for people from the deindustrializing countries. But more importantly, by venturing out into the Shanghai harbor you begin to grasp the operations of the East Asian network.







What’s going on are intensive exchanges between a series of interlocking seas: the Sea of Okhostk, the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, then onward to India and Australia. These are the historical circuits of China’s ancient tributary system – but also the foundations of a more recent regional economy.12 It was Japan that laid the basis of that economy in the years after World War II, after its industrial sector had been built up again by American investment for the production of Korean war supplies. Drawing on Australian coal and iron ore, Japan was gradually able to increase its steel output until it rivaled that of the USA. In the process it generated a new pattern of coastal production, dependent on shipping rather than on rail or road; and it extended this productive system to the rest of the region, through all kinds of joint-ventures and informal cooperation arrangements.13 This maritime trading pattern ultimately gave rise to what analysts have called the “network power” of East Asia, which has not managed to constitute a formal economic bloc or currency zone like NAFTA and the EU – but which has managed to constitute the new growth center of the world economy.14 In the boom years of the 1970s-80s, Japanese investments and technology helped China to develop new steel-making facilities, including the Baoshan complex in the port of Shanghai. Today that complex has become the largest steel producer on earth.



Again it’s a matter of internalization, this time of fixed capital. Foreign direct investment figures tell the story: Japan and the “Four Tigers” of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong poured $34 billion into China in the year 2005, dwarfing the Western total of $17 billion.15 Of course the figures are difficult to interpret: Hong Kong is the single largest source of FDI ($17.95 billion), but it also serves as an intermediary for others; and most of the money goes into simple manufacturing for export, with no long-term value on the ground. But in domains such as steel-making and ship-building, and more recently in high-end sectors like finance or research and development, China has been using foreign direct investment to build the infrastructure that will eventually allow it to supplant Japan as the major node in the East Asian network. With the support of a vast diaspora, China is regaining its historical place at the center of the East Asian trading system. And it’s doing so along the coastline, in the zones of exchange constituted by an interlocking series of seas.



The distance between the interior and the coast is the distance between a continental system of social control and a maritime network of high-tech production. It’s the distance between the fixity of the land and the fluidity of the sea – the geography of a class divide which has become so great that it threatens to rip China apart. Here we rediscover the scalar tensions that constitute “transnational capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” The geographical divide is now one of the main preoccupations of the Communist party. That’s why they launched the “Go West” campaign in 1999, a drive to attract foreign investment to the interior. The centerpiece of that campaign is the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, and with it, the projected transformation of Chongqing into an industrial colossus that’s supposed to rival Shanghai. This can be seen as a literal attempt to extend the coastal mode of production into the depths of the continental landmass, via the Yangtze river and the hyper-electrified inland sea that is being created by the dam. In that process, anything stable or traditional – any popular identity or “still life,” as Jia Zhangke puts it in his award-winning film – tends to disappear into the flux of the productive network.







What’s presented in Still Life (2007) is the desolation of a landscape that has become purely economic. The transformation is symbolized when the main character, Sanming, has to look at the sketch of the Three Gorges on a ten-yuan note to confirm the beauty, or even the reality, of the mountains in the distance. It’s a classic case of life collapsing into art. What you mostly see in the film, however, is not artistic beauty or its monetary sign, but instead, the ceaseless round of construction, destruction and reconstruction that underlies them, resulting in the devastation of the landscape and those who inhabit it. At the end, after demolishing countless houses whose ruins will be covered by the rising waters of the dam, Sanming leaves to the interior, to work in a coal mine for money to buy back his bride of sixteen years ago who has been indentured into service on the river. But the other women of the story all escape in the opposite direction: Shen Hong, the estranged wife of Sanming’s violent boss; the neighbor woman, who tries to sell him the services of a prostitute; and finally his own elusive daughter, who only appears in a photograph. They all take flight toward the coast, to Guangzhou and Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta, or down the Yangtze to Shanghai.



Jumping into the Sea

You have to wonder: what’s it like to take part in the productive network? How do people internalize all this infrastructure, to become individuals in the contemporary sense – that is, participants in a global process? To describe the experience of leaving socialized security behind, the Chinese of the reform era used the expression “jumping into the sea” (xiahai). After all the studies of neoliberal governmentality, we know what this embrace of entrepreneurial capitalism can mean. As Nikolas Rose explains, it requires people “to conduct themselves with boldness and vigour, to calculate for their own advantage, to drive themselves hard and to accept risks.”16 Similar things hold true in China – but the academics leave out a basic dimension, the splash of the body in the ocean, the shock and pleasure of the new, either because you arrive as a peasant from the country or because the city where you live has changed beyond all recognition. How that transformation feels is the aesthetics of Chinese urbanism.



To get a first taste you can visit the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, an outlandish piece of architecture looking down on People’s Square. It’s got a scale model of the metropolis in the year 2020, with catwalks over the towers of the future. Even better are the interactive exhibits, like a vehicle simulator that lets you drive out the 32.5-kilometer Donghai bridge to the new deepwater port, then turns into a boat when you arrive. The cartographic displays are packed with information and at the same time strangely popular, as though addressing two different publics. A museum like this can serve as a 3-D negotiating table, where transnational elites debate each other’s proposals for urban development. For the VIPs, it’s about calculating the city’s risks and chances, it’s about making the most profitable bid for world-class status in the decade to come. But it’s even more interesting to consider how the museum addresses itself to the newcomers, to the people who will actually have to live and work here. How are they supposed to make the leap to the endlessly transforming universe of Shanghai?



A panoramic video display entitled “Virtual World” invites you to ride and above all to fly through the city, giving you an almost instantaneous introduction to its attractions and facilities, orienting you in a space that is beyond the grasp of ordinary perception, and above all, bringing you up to speed. There is a biopolitical function to this kind of exhibit, and indeed, to all the accelerated, syncopated video displays and computer graphics that one constantly encounters in East Asia. It’s a matter of inserting the body in the new urban sensorium created by advanced production, transportation and consumption technology – science-fiction environments of superhuman scale, which could be totally overwhelming if there were not ways to get used to them, to tame them, to let yourself be energized by them. One recalls the role played by film and photomontage in the process of imagining the mechanized European metropolis, the Großstadt of the early twentieth century; but now it’s digital sense-surround in the Far Eastern megalopolis. And this kind of experience is hardly restricted to museums. In cities where the mirrored skins of skyscrapers morph into immense screens at night, the pulse of neon, and increasingly, of video, becomes a device for the mobilization of millions of people.



How is this mobilization effected? And what is its social significance? Video is the medium used by Yang Zhenzhong, for an ingenious piece called “Spring Story” (2003) carried out with the Shanghai production unit of Siemens Mobile Communications.17 The work is based on the speeches delivered by Deng Xiaoping during his celebrated Southern Excursion in 1992, when the initiator of China’s capitalist turn redefined reform as “the emancipation of the productive forces.” Deng’s verdict of success in the Special Economic Zones of Guangdong province led to the almost immediate opening of Shanghai and other northern cities, and consequently to the installation of thousands of factories and businesses, the employment of millions of people, and the emergence of a consumer economy on the mainland. What Yang did to express this historical transition is to break Deng’s lengthy and complex speech into some 1,500 separate pieces, then film the entire workforce of the Siemens plant as each recites a single phrase, or sometimes even a single word. Each one in isolation from the others, and – by the artist’s own testimony – ignorant or oblivious of the significance of the text, captivated instead by the prospect of appearing on camera, the employees unwittingly collaborate on a supremely unself-conscious portrait of the contemporary division of labor, inside a mobile phone factory which at once symbolizes and effectuates the concrete technological conditions of a flexible, hyperindividualized, “always-on” workforce.







One of the things that this rigorously sustained blurring of faces and subjectivities becomes is a long variation on the virtuoso theme of the “Shanghai haircut,” whose defining characteristic is to never be the same. A distinct personal style now defines the “average” individual, just as it formerly did the artist. But the ultimate enigma for the stylized individual is the overarching power that guides and integrates social cooperation. Through his access to the corporate resources of the Siemens Art Program, Yang was able to choreograph this unlikely performance of Deng’s speech, using a carefully annotated score designed to insure that proper rhythm and intonation were maintained despite the fractional, atomized nature of the actual delivery. One could hardly imagine a more precise metaphor of the contemporary division of labor, in which massively individualized mobility is channeled and orchestrated to fit the needs of those with superior information gathering power and organizational technique. The central question under such a social system is: Who will supply the mobilizing energies to hundreds of millions of free agents? Who will communicate to the communicators?



Outracing the Economy



Here is where the creative industries come in: not the traditional fine arts, nor the modernist cultural industries like cinema and radio, but instead the newly minted and digitized professions that shape the lightweight, complex, ephemeral, ever-changing aesthetic experiences of the hyper-mediated city.18 The professionals who create the advertising, the color schemes, the lighting, the ambiance, the interactive circuits, the interior design, but also the artists and musicians and publics who soak up that light and make those ambiances vibrant and interesting and valuable on the market. Throughout China right now there is a rising buzz around the creative industries, in Beijing as they work for the Games, in Shanghai as they build toward the World Expo, in the Pearl River Delta as they add entire new city centers and cultural facilities to urban production zones trying to upgrade from their former status as the world factory. The interest in this new “new economy” is sustained at the governmental level by a small army of foreign consultants who have come to sell their skills and reinvent themselves in Beijing, and it’s amplified back in the West by professional style magazines like Fast Company, which ran a glitzy special on “China’s New Creative Class” in mid-2007.19 As the name of the magazine would suggest, this kind of culture is produced at high speeds, usually by very young people who can always accelerate to outrace the competition. In that respect it’s like the dot-com boom. As a twenty-five year-old computer programmer confided to labor researcher Andrew Ross: “China is a very crowded world and Shanghai is not a place you can ever relax. Even when I try to relax, I can feel the economy behind me, running up at my back.”20 The art of outracing the economy, of dancing and twirling and glittering just in advance of its leading edges, is what defines the creative industries.







The creative industries discourse (CI) is brand new, since it was only codified by the British cultural ministry’s Creative Industries Task Force in 1998. But it’s also very old, if you date it back to Ronald Reagan’s “Creative Society” speech in the mid-1960s, one of the foundation stones of neoliberal doctrine. During the California state gubernatorial campaign of 1966, Reagan audaciously proposed to replace president Lyndon Johnson’s federal welfare programs with a voluntary mobilization of California’s talented individuals, local governments and innovative businesses. As Hollywood’s Great Communicator explained to the masses: “That is the basis of the Creative Society – government no longer substituting for the people, but recognizing that it cannot possibly match the great potential of the people, and thus, must coordinate the creative energies of the people for the good of the whole.”21 Thirty-two years after that Maoist pronouncement, British culture minister Chris Smith and his functionaries would draw up their famous Creative Industries Mapping Document.22 All they really did was to package and re-export a set of practices that had long characterized the productive hegemony of the USA. Yet they did it at the perfect moment: exactly when digitalization was set to expand the knowledge-based economy from a few advanced OECD countries to the entire world.



CI is both a policy discourse and a promotional rhetoric. It flourishes in financialized economies, driven by speculation on prosumer appetites for aesthetic goods and services. For governments, the aim is to attain higher levels of employment and economic growth, by commodifying and privatizing some of the cultural programs judged necessary for social cohesion. For businesses, it’s a matter of competing in highly profitable sectors where new-style design products, entertainment and IT meet the old-fashioned pay dirt of real-estate. CI has exploded in East Asia since the turn of the millennium. Michael Keane has shown how it emerged as a full-fledged policy discourse in China over a mere two-year period (2004-06). Updating their former emphasis on mass-media spectacles with traditional content, officials now speak of “Cultural and Creative Industries.” The goal is a rise of Chinese products through the global value-chain, from “Made in China” to “Created in China.”23 But the advertising and design professions are also supposed to fuel a surge in the nation’s consumption of its own seemingly boundless productivity – an elusive goal which is considered essential by both the Communist party and American trade representatives.23b The concrete results of all this have been the overnight bloom of “creative clusters” in China’s coastal cities: integrated districts where the multiple arts of human creativity are brought into a theoretically ideal mix on the urban territory.





1933-shanghai-detail



For a compact example, consider the “1933” project now on the rise in Shanghai: the ambitious remodel of a 31,000 sq. meter Art Deco slaughterhouse, transformed into a creative industries center by a private-public partnership between the Axons Concepts Company and the Hongkou government. Architectural form was the key to this project, whose organizational aim is to bring the creative capacities of the human nervous system up to the scale of the megalopolis:



Inside, the neurological influences are apparent. The five-floor concrete structure is supported by solid “flowering” pillars whose stems open out like petals at the point of contact with the ceiling. The funicular central building is linked to a square outer casing by a striking series of sloping concrete pathways and staircases. “This is the brain of the building,” says [Axons manager Paul] Liu. “You can see the inter-linking effect of these original walkways. We can use that to help carry creative energies throughout the whole structure.”24



Projects like this move fast in China. While still unfinished, the building had already hosted the Shanghai Creative Industries Week, November 15-21, 2007. To attract an elite roster of tenants, it’s advertised as a lifestyle paradise of “restaurants, bars, private clubs and cigar lounges,” with an upscale learning sector focused on self-cultivation: “Bookstores and education spaces will include elements such as drama, yoga, sculpture workshops, calligraphy and painting classes, cooking school, tea ceremony courses and Beijing opera appreciation… 1933 will redefine what it means to be a ‘person in full’ by having all the elements to inspire in one location.”25 But it also aims to be a productive facility, with university partnerships and private corporations generating intellectual property for profit – in short, a ready-made version of the “creative city” condensed into a single urban block. The classic question of whether creativity can be managed and produced doesn’t seem to bother the real-estate developers one whit. After all, there is money to be made in this domain – as a reported $3.8 billion of deals at the 2007 Cultural and Creative Industries Expo in Beijing has proven.26



No one can predict what future subjectivities will emerge from the hothouse of China’s new creativity boom. Access to culture is likely to expand immensely, at least for the professionals and the business elites; and the consequences of that expansion may surprise everyone. Artistic invention has been given an operational role in economic development, fulfilling one of the long-held ambitions of the modernist vanguards. But the willingness of governments to use aesthetics as a form of psycho-engineering – and the efforts that corporations have expended, since the time of Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, in the quest to manipulate their clients’ dreams27 – make the dangers all too obvious. Critical interpretations of the new cultural forms, and of the social and political frames in which they create their effects and meanings, will be crucial in opening the imaginary space where people can gain some kind of relative autonomy, some capacity to be their own steersman. But that critique must reach all the way into the images themselves, it must be transformative. The stakes of these new images are tremendous. When state-capitalist power begins manufacturing your dreams, then art becomes the primary process of politics.



The contemporary visual arts do give clues about ethical/political positions in today’s China. But critique and contradiction aren’t exactly the strong points of the creative economy. Amidst the plethora of opening ceremonies and real-estate deals, the artists themselves are outflanked by the functionaries, the galleries and the museums. In the early 1990s, exiles from the Tiananmen movement began exhibiting around the world, opening up the possibility of markets beyond traditional or social-realist painting. A decade later, when those artists had been taken up as a neutralized elder generation in China itself via the explosion of Biennials and Triennials, the critic and curator Gao Minglu diagnosed the entry into a “museum age.” In such an age, he says, the avant-garde way of making meaning – which consisted in transgressively entering the institutions that claimed to embody the highest values of society, then violently breaking away to show their hollowness and insufficiency – has become practically impossible. The multiplication of spaces acts to blur the hierarchies of value, rendering transgression insignificant. As Gao writes:



Today, Chinese avant-garde or experimental artists have gradually lost the consciousness of space that once defined their identity. Their creative spaces, studios, exhibition spaces, galleries and museums have gradually been integrated into one. The art world in China today can be described as a “triumph of systems.” … The external environment for an avant-garde artist no longer exists since the “wall” between the avant-garde artist and the official system is no longer there.28



The most disorienting confirmation of these ideas comes from a stroll through the dream-like spaces of Factory 798 in Beijing’s Dashanzi District, or of its smaller and somewhat more recent clone, Moganshan Lu in Shanghai – or tomorrow, of the thousand-and-one “art factories” that will flower across China. The boom in these spaces is clearly bound up with real-estate speculation, in markets like Shanghai’s where already-inflated properties are said to have doubled in price over the course of 2006. The difference with San Francisco or London is that it’s less about gentrifying a run-down neighborhood, and more about razing an area as soon as it appears valuable, to put up a high-rise complex for gigantic payoffs. For the time being, however, the state seems to have other plans for the art districts, particularly after the meteoric career of Factory 798 and the apparently successful negotiation by the artists, which saved the area from the wrecking balls at the price of turning it into a tourist attraction and upscale lifestyle destination. To judge from that story – which involved evicting one of the earliest art spaces, the Beijing Architecture Studio Enterprise, and opening a Nike-sponsored “Mr. Shoe Museum” in its place – the Olympic state now wants to use the art districts as vitrines for foreign visitors, in order to dispel the idea that free expression is not tolerated in China. And it undoubtedly wants to use them as laboratories as well, in order to see whether design innovations and profitable new consumer environments will really be invented by these Chinese children of Warhol.





liu_bolin



This is not to say that Factory 798 or Moganschan Lu are uninteresting or merely “co-opted” places, far from it. They both represent the kind of cultural infrastructure that makes an artistic gesture or a literary conversation possible, and on that strength they are worth defending. But like it or not, they also bear witness to the capacity of an authoritarian government to control a population by carefully sketching out the open pathways on which it can evolve with apparent freedom. Of course those open pathways have to include some modest critique – which is how the Chinese state is internalizing what currently passes for democracy. When an artist like Liu Bolin sculpts an immense iron fist pressing with all its oppressive weight on the ground, he clearly enacts an anti-authoritarian gesture.29 What’s less clear is where that gesture resonates, what kind of weight it has in the imagination. Fifteen or twenty years ago, such things would not have been tolerated; but they would have had immense symbolic significance. In today’s context of total economic pragmatism no one pays any them mind: the attention is elsewhere, still looking for the perfect fit between the banknote in hand and the beautiful landscape in the distance. What world society cannot find the time or space or concentration to really discuss is the ground we are creating beneath our feet.



Another artist, Liu Wei, has made this missing ground explicit. On June 4, 2005, he took his video camera to Xinhua University in Beijing and asked the passers-by what day it was.30 Most of them simply reply, “June 4th.” When they’re pressed – “But what day is it?” – they avert their gaze and walk swiftly away, covering their faces, shielding themselves from the camera and its questions. What the video shows with painful lucidity is a moment of choked-off speech, so that you literally see the personality of the non-respondent dissolving into the impossibility of saying publicly what everyone knows as an intimate truth: June 4 is the anniversary of the massacre on Tiananmen Square, the birthday of authoritarian neoliberalism.31 After the sequence at the university, Liu Wei goes out to film this ground, its calm, perfect order, without agitation. The historical experience of repression has been internalized as the everyday reality of self-censorship, which remains a palpable force in the lives of an overwhelming majority of the population, including the artists and intellectuals.



mad-2050-design-tiananmen-square-of-the-future

Ma Yansong - MAD 2050 Design, Project for Green Tiananmen



Here is where the ideologues of liberal democracy take up their rhetorical positions, in defence of Western freedom. But I don’t propose to join them. A similar, if less dramatic, internalization of repression occurred in the Western societies after 1968, and in the former Soviet bloc in the course of the 1990s. Today it is the economic imperative, not the state, that commands in detail what should or should not be represented by the creative industries. The result has been a gradual neutralization of ethical and political speech. This gap at the heart of self-expression is now being exported across the earth. What’s missing in all our societies are the psychic and social resources for resistance to the present.



Floating Cities

The journey ends, not in Shenzhen where the reforms began, but somewhere else, in a floating city. Shiny gold letters flash up on the screen and the music starts playing, repetitious and optimistic, like a lilting Chinese lute plugged into a rhythm box. The first thing you see against the brilliant red ground is a tiny drum kit shrinking rapidly out of sight; but already the viewpoint has receded, the ground becomes a bright red flag cradling a sharp-pointed yellow star – and there’s a panda hovering up in the sky, a Mao-statue foundering out at sea and an over-sized plastic hardhat set down on a bustling ring road. A bicycle wheel spins, a patterned fish flops out of a techno-blue cascade, a city bus circles round in the air and the iconic CCTV building dangles crazily from a crane, high above a rotating mass of skyscrapers looking for all the world like a virtual Hong Kong. A smokestack belches flame at the summit until finally it explodes, billowing smoke and swirling ruins, while the mountain of buildings goes on spinning round and round with the music, and a shopping cart full of buildings and a leftover Buddha never quite finishes sinking into the rippling ocean. The title of this looping video is “RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by Tracy China.” It’s a promotional clip for a 3-D fiction yet to come.32



RMB is, of course, the abbreviation of the Chinese currency, the people’s money or renminbi; and Tracy China is the Second-Life avatar of Cao Fei, busily rendering all enduring clichés of her country into the synthetic landscapes of the latest global village. The video captures the inexorable economic unreality of contemporary China, in a satirical computer-graphics form that evokes both the neon-drenched arcades of Shenzhen, and the endless streams of finance transiting through Hong Kong to the mainland. What better symbol of the future than the dreamland of Second Life, for a country that has gone in a single generation from the extremes of popular socialism to the extremes of popular capitalism?



The paradox of the Chinese development model is written in sheet metal and electric pylons all across the Pearl River Delta. Debt-financed spending by Western households has encouraged foreign investors to build a sprawling factory landscape producing low-end consumer goods that the mass of the local population can still barely afford to purchase. The peasants who work at the plants are crying for better pay, a decent meal on the table and maybe even the right to go shopping – which would ultimately require a higher exchange rate for the RMB and a chance to bring home some of the profit that all this manufacturing has generated. But a rise in the standard of living means the inflation of average wages and the end of the China Price, choking off the export-driven mode of development that has brought so many millions from the country to the city. How to shift to another economy, where the fruits of labor are redistributed internally? How to invent another industry, where the price of progress is not deadly pollution? Here is the riddle that the country’s elites have tried so hard not to answer. The collapse of home equity values and the consequent halt to the credit-card spree in Anglo-Saxon lands has finally opened up the question of the Asian transition, whose answer will give concrete forms to the twenty-first century.



Rem Koolhaas and his Harvard research team first brought news of the Pearl River Delta to the creative classes of the West in the mid-1990s, amid the early stirrings of the new economy. Pasted up on the walls at Documenta X in 1997, texts and images from the PRD promised a new mode of critical research into the transformations of the world system.33 But the global technocracy just goes on recycling the old love-hate relations of the bourgeoisie and its avant-gardes. Today the radical Koolhaas is building not only the Beijing headquarters of China’s CCTV broadcasting conglomerate – the central Communist party control institution – but also the Shenzhen stock exchange, to inflame the investor appetites of the coastal classes. Meanwhile his partner Bruce Mau promotes the spectacular fiction of “massive change” by means of graphic design, without any curb on the ecology of infinite competition.34 If you want to understand the reality of the Pearl River Delta, the concise texts and images of Adrian Blackwell and Xu Jian could be a lot more useful. They diagram the structures of a camp-like “factory territory” based on land leased by village collectives to industrialists, and on dormitories built by individuals to extract rent from migrant workers.35 Following their indications, I traveled to the village of Houting in the Shajing District of Shenzhen. The neoliberal formula of massive change by individual and small-group initiative has functioned perfectly in Southern China. What results is the banality of ordinary sprawl: modern apartments crowded tightly around a decaying village core; austere collective blocks inside the industrial perimeter; simpler factories with guards sleeping at the gate; residual traces of an agricultural life that has vanished into the concrete. As usual, the labor process itself remains completely invisible. The walls that Gao Minglu no longer sees between the artist and the system have sprung up everywhere.



lin-yilin



In 1995, the Guangzhou artist Lin Yilin did a performance entitled “Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road.” The video shows him sheltering from the onrushing traffic behind a temporary wall of breeze blocks, which he displaces brick by brick to make the crossing.36 The scene takes on an incredibly vivid meaning when you see the tremendous sprawl of the southern cities, choked with traffic and polluted, bordering on insanity, but at the same time, gleaming with refinement and luxury. The work could be a metaphor of an entire society moving ahead beneath a shield of overdevelopment that is about to become life-threatening, but that remains the only game in town – the one you’ve got to play to be part of anything. There is a wild lucidity to the best of Chinese art, which asks for a response, for a dialogue, for a critical engagement with the present. As Lin writes on his website, “The rapidly popular art market also brings the trial to the artists. Chinese contemporary artists take the risk to change their isolated status, suddenly to become brand name stars. If Chinese contemporary art cannot develop a particular theory, then ultimately [it will] only be expensive craftwork for this period of history.”37 But Chinese artists are not alone in this reluctance or refusal to develop a theory of their role in world society.



Cao Fei is also from the Pearl River Delta. “RMB City” bears witness to the wild humor and deep disbelief of people who know how easily the dream of contemporary China could disappear into the maw of some unforeseen crisis. What you don’t see in the virtual city is what everyone who lives there knows: the wasted landscapes, the choked horizons, the pollution lying black and sticky on the shore. What you don’t see are the labor revolts, the “mass incidents,” the migrant workers billeted on the peripheries. What you don’t see are the wildly swinging real-estate prices, the continual financial turmoil awaiting a full-fledged crash, or the dependent relations with Americans as consumers of last resort, absorbing floods of products that China itself now pays for by investments in Treasury Bonds looking more worthless every minute. What you don’t see is what everybody knows, what everybody feels in the ground beneath their feet, what nobody can put into an image. The incalculable risk of the twenty-first century. The infinite uncertainty of global individualism.



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Notes

Thanks to all the people who extended their hospitality, insight and support, including Stephen Wright, Ned Rossiter, Gao Minglu, Adrian Blackwell, the Urban China editors, the Walking Cities project, Yang Zhenzhong, Howard Chan, the people at Vitamin Creative Space, Luca Martinazzoli, Anselm Franke, so many others, your help was essential.

Exhibition Openings (March 15): Safety First

The same day Shanghai Gallery of Art opens a painting a show.

Safety First

Opening Time of Exhibition:19:00, 15^th, March 2008

Time of Exhibition: 16^th, March—23^rd, March 2008

Venue of Exhibition: Fei Art Center, 3^rd Floor, No.120 Old Humin Rd.(near Binyang Rd.)

Art Director: Li Xiaofei

Curator: Tang Dixin

Assistant Curator: Kang Xusheng

Translate：Shuishui

Designer: Cao Wei

Technical Support: Mao Yanxin

Special thanks to Mr. Jin Feng for his great help.

Media Support: Art-Ba-Ba

Brief description: this is an experimental exhibition, which may embarrass and confuse both the artists and the spectators. The exhibition tries to proceed with the concept of safety, but perhaps not directly to it. Here maybe the custom mode of thinking is the first thing to be questioned. If our safety truly safe, and if we are doubting or re-recognizing are all focuses we emphasize. The exhibition is organized and curated by some young artists themselves who want to exhibit the so-called creations in this unconventional style of art showing. What we wondered more is how can art be with some uncertain factors?

Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art

Finally someone gets it!

Rewriting Asia
The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art

Ou Ning

Commissioned by Michelle Nicol, Zurich
Translated from Chinese by Yu Hsiao Hwei, Paris

Standing at Antrepo no.3, the main venue of the 10th Istanbul Biennial, looking across the Bosporus Strait forming the boundary between Europe and Asia, I was able to look at Asia for the first time from a European standpoint. My line of sight moved quickly beyond the rows upon rows of buildings on the Asian side of Istanbul, and went onto the map in my mind. It flew rapidly over the territory of Turkey, past Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, got to China where I am from, and finally reached the Korean Peninsula and Japan. All this vast expanse of land that unfolded in my mind’s eye is the so-called “East” for Westerners. It can be subdivided further into the Near East, Middle East and Far East, according to its distance from Europe. For Chinese people like me, even though we are familiar with modern geographical knowledge that has been built up by Europeans through navigation and mapping, we still tend to consider the concept of “the East” as a synonym for China only, while ignoring other Asian countries. It is related to the fact that China has always regarded itself as a great power, the center of the world, but it is also because we haven’t had many opportunities to leave our own land, and to travel to other countries. It is interesting that, for many Europeans, “the East” often means Turkey, the country that is nearest to them; in particular, a city with unique cultures like Istanbul represents the perfect embodiment of “the East” in their imagination. From Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gerard de Nerval to Le Corbusier, they all shared the same fascination (1).

This experiential and cognitive blind spot is due to the limitations of the times. In pre-modern societies, the high costs of and the social standing necessary for long-distance trips made traveling accessible only to a select few; therefore, we were unable to send ourselves to far-flung countries to experience the cultures of Others. In addition to the geographical barriers, obstacles in the form of political systems, languages, cultures and living habits also confined our experiences and knowledge to a rather narrow scope. We have all been tightly stuck in the finite space-time of the local, and have suffered the distances between one another; fortunately, these distances have also safeguarded the differences between countries and regions. Yet now, “all that is solid melts into air” (2), physical distances that were originally thought to be objective and unshakable have been surmounted by the astonishing speed invented in our era (high costs are no longer necessary to attain this speed), new technologies and the internet have started to offer the magic of high-speed compression of time and space, and geographical frontiers have started to disappear. An enormous amount of floating capital has broken through every political rampart and cultural barrier, in search of new places to increase profit in different regions around the world. In the name of eradicating poverty, it tries to get rid of all differences, and is even starting to shake the foundation of national governance, by reducing the political power of a country to “a mere security apparatus” (3). The sense of belonging to a nation-state that people used to have is becoming increasingly weaker as transnational travel and economic and cultural exchanges become more frequent. Nationalism is regarded as a feeling that doesn’t fit the time, while people are starting to construct a new identity based on the city (or more precisely, the district in the city) where they live. This is the era of so-called “globalization”, which we are living in today.

In an era like this, “mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost of coveted values-and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late modern or postmodern times”.(4) This new value and stratifying criterion has been determined by transnational capital which, by nature, tends to be nomadic, because it is the real ruler of this world; it has stirred up the world, and turned its own characteristic (mobility) into a universal principle. Artists are undoubtedly one of the social classes that possess more freedom to move in this era. After the end of the Cold War, the former pattern of competition between groups of nations started to make place for competition between cities. Cities not only compete to host top international events such as the Olympic Games and the World Exposition, but also vie with each other for international capital and tourism with the organization of all sorts of cultural and artistic festivals and exhibitions, and by these, seek to further enhance the economic power of and people’s identification with the city. The proliferation of international art biennials is the epitome of this competition. It has created a great deal of opportunities for transnational travel, and has enabled different cultures to look at each other and to change. For instance, it is because I had been invited to participate in the Istanbul Biennial that, as a result of geographical and cultural displacements, I had the opportunity to get a different viewpoint of, to contemplate Asia in a new light, the place where I am from, the so-called “East” for Westerners.

Undoubtedly, all modern experiences and pedigrees of knowledge that we share today are mainly Western (in particular, European); Asia and other regions haven’t yet played much of a role in the historical process of the construction of global modernity. In the Western-centric eyes, Asia (the East) has always been the far-flung Other, the object of colonization, the cultural imagination of the West at the other end of the earth, and a reference that the West from time to time has recourse to based on its own discursive need. This long-standing attribute of the Other has resulted in Asian anxiety; it was present throughout nearly a century of Asian history, as Asia lived through changes and turbulences from the end of the nineteenth century onwards –the successive collapse of feudal monarchies, the continuous expansion of colonialism, the arduous establishment of modern nation-states, etc. Take the two Eastern empires, China and Turkey, for example, they almost coincided and shared astonishing similarities in the process of looking for their own modernity: the Chinese Qing dynasty and the Turkish Ottoman dynasty fell at about the same time, and Sun Yat-sen and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk emerged at roughly the same moment; both people were firm advocates of westernization, were deeply worried for their chronically weak countries, and in order to learn from the West and to catch up with it, they established a republican regime in their own country. The difference between these two countries is that, in the wave of globalization of today, Turkey is still eager to “leave Asia and join Europe” (5), to throw itself into the embrace of the European Union; on the other hand, after having experienced the collapse of the communist value system around the world, China still adheres to centralization, and is becoming stronger and stronger in the global economic framework with authoritarian capitalism that is proper to Asia.

Asian politicians have also made similar alliance-forming attempts. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), founded in 1967, implemented the ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2003, with the hope of creating the ASEAN economic community, so as to enhance the competitiveness of the region; the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), founded in 1989, is an economic cooperation project that involves even more Asian countries and regions. These alliance-forming efforts reflect the enthusiastic embracing of global economic integration by Asian countries. However, it is a pity that they remain content simply with collaborations in the economic realm, and haven’t gone beyond that to form common “Asian values” on political and cultural levels. Singapore’s former leader Lee Kwan Yew, who is familiar with Western culture, fervently pleaded in favor of the construction of “Asian values”. He believed that this was the only effective way for Asian countries to avoid and resist the risks arising from their integration into the globalization process. However, the “Asian values” formulated by Mr. Lee only concerned such Confucian values as blood relations, family ties, fair hierarchy, the importance of authority, frugality, manners and protocol, etc. Although these values are shared by countries within the Confucian cultural circle, such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc, they fail to embrace Islamic and Hindu values. Due to the fact that Asia represents a rich diversity of races, cultures and religions, that each country is at a different stage of development, and that some countries still hold profound historical grudges against others, Asia has not been able to contend with the West by forming a highly integrated political, economic and cultural community that goes beyond national forms, like the European Union.

In the cultural realm, contemporary Asian art has gradually emerged over the past twenty years, but has largely relied on the predominance of the West, and to a great extent, it has benefited from the prevalence of globalization and multiculturalism in the Western world. In the late eighties and the early nineties of last century, along with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR, the ideological opposition between the two camps came to an end; after having won its final victory, capitalism went further in its advance across the world by speeding up its pace and increasing its intensity, thereby inaugurating the movement of globalization. The political iron curtain having been torn open, not only could Western capital enter the once antagonistic third world countries, but the art of third world countries could also be brought to the West. In 1993, in an article entitled “Clash of Civilizations” published in the American Foreign Affairs quarterly, Samuel P. Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War world, the principal conflicts of global politics would occur between different civilizations, that the Confucian civilization in Asia and the Islamic civilization, in particular, would represent the most serious challenges to Western civilization. This argument has sparked a sense of crisis in Western civilization, and has further helped to turn multiculturalism into the widespread “political correctness” in the West, and the adoption of the cultures of the Other a key strategy for the reconciliation of conflicts between civilizations. France is the first Western country to bring in contemporary Asian art: after the large-scale Le Japon des avant gardes: 1910-1970 show in 1986, the Pompidou Center organized Les magiciens de la terre in 1989 which, other than showing a great number of contemporary African artists, presented works of contemporary Chinese artists for the first time in Europe. From then on, contemporary Asian art has frequently appeared in various important museums and biennials in the West.

In the course of the first post-Cold War decade, the exhibition of contemporary Asian art by the West still followed, to a certain extent, cold war thinking, that is, it preferred works that were ironic about local politics and identified with capitalism and global values, using them as evidence of the victory of the West. After 9/11, when it experienced a lasting sense of shock and fear, the Western world has further adhered to Huntington’s prophetic theory of a clash of civilizations. The strong sense of defeat has magnified the image of the Other coming from the other side of the world; it has never been this clear and near, and is ever-present in all aspects of everyday life. With his Enemy Kitchen project (2006), the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who was born in New York and currently lives and works in Chicago, offered the young generation of America an opportunity to learn Iraqi cooking in a kitchen as a way of making sense of the “enemy” of the country. This work shows that the desire of people to understand other civilizations on the planet is becoming increasingly concrete. In the new millennium, the argument that globalization will inevitably result in cultural convergence is being reconsidered; the concept of “the other” that smacks of egocentrism is greatly losing effectiveness. In the meantime, as the economies of many Asian countries continue to grow, cultural coherence is being strengthened; regional group shows, exchanges and collaborations in contemporary art are becoming more and more frequent; artists of new generations are constantly emerging, and their psychological distance with the West is continually being reduced. All this results in a drastic change in the global art scene.

If “Asian values” remain hung in the balance under the efforts of politicians, what about the attempts made by the artists? In the era of globalization, are they also trying to create an Asian identity in the artistic landscape? Wong Hoy Cheong is a Chinese-Malaysian artist with a strong Asian consciousness. Since 1993, he has created a whole series of works to focus on issues of colonial history, political conflicts, immigrant identity and family traditions in Asian regions. As a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong was born in George Town; his mother tongue is Hokkien, but he received a British colonial education and then went to study in the United States. He speaks Chinese, Malay and English: he is himself a product of Asia’s diverse histories and cultures. Consequently, his early works showed typical traits of “Asian-ness” through the exploration of personal memories and family histories. For the Kwangju Biennale in 2000, his project consisted in collecting a great number of books on Asian history, and after burning them, reforming the pulp into paper tiles to pave the floor in the exhibition space, thus allowing the audience to step on different versions of Asian history and to discern blurred images of those political figures who had once influenced the fate of Asia. The construction of all identities has to rely on history; only history can define who you are, where you are from, and where you are going. In terms of the exploitation and utilization of historical resources, artists are more effective than politicians, because they always speak from a personal position, and place great stress on experiences; consequently, they are more likely to make people identity with them.

For his participation in the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Wong Hoy Cheong focused on the historical district of Sulukule in the center of Istanbul. Sulukule is the oldest existent Romany district in the world, gypsies have come here since 1000 AD, and have offered entertainment to this city with music, circus, story-telling, fortune-telling, etc; however, the Romany are now being confronted with the destruction of the district and are being asked to move out. Wong Hoy Cheong gave cameras and camcorders to children of Sulukule and taught them the basics of filming and animation, allowing them to express their memories, knowledge and imagination of this district; by doing so, he has tried to make an appeal for the protection of this district. Sulukule resembles a great deal the Dazhalan district near the Tiananmen Square in Beijing(6): they both have a long history, but gradually fell into oblivion during the process of searching for and development of new spaces of the city, and plunged into decline before turning into slums in the end; now they are going to be entirely wiped off from the landscape. The fate of these historical districts is intertwined with the fight of different interest groups for space to survive in the era of globalization, and implies the clashes between the two cultural forces of convergence and differentiation. The disadvantaged slum population is not only the manifestation of social stratification caused by floating capital, but also a metaphor for the desperate conditions of local cultures in their confrontation with strong global cultures. For those artists who refuse to be reduced to a component of the homogeneous culture of globalization, to stand up for history is the key to the preservation of local differences and the construction of local identities.

Similar efforts are also seen in the works by the Vietnamese artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. For the Yokohama Triennial in 2001, after his original intention to create a cyclo (cycle rickshaw) museum, had been compromised due to a shortage of space, he invited Vietnamese fishermen from Nha Trang to pull cyclos in the water, and made a video film of it for the exhibition. As the oldest and principal means of transport in Vietnam, cyclos embody the life memories of the Vietnamese people. However, they now may have to fight for the right to survive against the global city transportation system that is synonymous with efficiency and order—the image of cyclos moving forward with difficulty under the sea, is “a striking metaphor for struggle and survival” (7). In comparison with the convergence of imagination, the impulse for differentiation they have aroused seems to become reality in a more widespread manner. Objectively speaking, homogeneity is a partial concept of globalization, whereas difference is its essentially profound characteristic. We have already seen that, with the progress of globalization, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, “signaling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate” (8), and that instead of being rejected with contempt and disappearing from the world, nationalism is gaining ground day by day. Although most artists are reluctant to attach a national label to their identity or works, it is hard for them to go beyond their personal growth experiences, historical imprints, and linguistic and thinking sets. Difference is the essence of this world, and cannot be obliterated or altered by any capital-related, political or other man-made force.

Consequently, regardless of its content or subject matter, or the medium it uses, we can always perceive a distinguishable trait of “Asian-ness” in a work by a contemporary Asian artist — this characteristic is sometimes consciously performed by the artist, but sometimes goes beyond his or her intentios. Recently, Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba started a project series entitled “Breathing is Free: 12756.3”. The artist intends to run the physical distance of 12756.3 km, the diameter of the earth, in different parts of the world within a certain period of time, and have the whole process filmed by others. This time, he won’t hire any actors, but “will be the one to move and struggle” (9) himself, to measure and experience the distance of the earth with his own body. In this project, the idea of using the body as an artistic medium is different from that of many Western artists: here, the body is not to be stripped bare or to be displayed, it is not used to challenge taboos, either; instead, it is the vehicle through which the artist aims to train his will, it is the arena where spirit confronts material. This penance-like artistic practice has also been undertaken by other Asian artists: The US-based Taiwan artist Teh-ching Hsieh carried out a series of one-year performances in New York in the seventies and the eighties, for instance, living in a cage for one year, punching a time clock every hour for one year, living outdoors for one year, etc. Chinese artist He Yunchang picked up a rock in a small town called Boulmer on the Northumberland coast in northern England, and carried it all the way around the coast of Great Britain and finally went back to Boulmer to put the rock back in the same place. Besides using the body as a medium, the biggest characteristic of these works is to show meaning through meaningless behavior, showing typical Asian thinking.

Nevertheless, just like the way that political practices have failed to reach unified “Asian values,” the global identity that contemporary Asian art has tried to construct is also fragmentary; even the most brilliant observer is unable to sum up a complete attribute suitable for every Asian country. Maybe we can say that fragmentation is in itself an appropriate image for Asia (like its geography), because as a matter of fact, its diversity fits in with the formula of energy production in the globalization era. No matter which description we use, today’s Asia has certainly opened up a road of modernity that is different from that of the West, and on the negotiating table among global powers, it is no longer an irrelevant other; and people can no longer neglect the voice it has. Asia is no longer the orphan of the world, the progress it has accomplished today cannot be compared with the past: it is the moment to rewrite history.

December 5, 2007

Notes:

(1) In his Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk quotes a great deal of the travel notes on Istanbul of these French writers and poets and their impressions of “the East”. Le Corbusier is the author of Le Voyage d’Orient.

(2) Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

(3) Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, wrote in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique (p4-5, August, 1997): “In the cabaret of globalization, the state performs a striptease, at the end of which it is left wearing the minimum necessary: its powers of repression. With its material base destroyed, its sovereignty and independence abolished, and its political class eradicated, the nation state increasingly becomes a mere security apparatus in the service of the mega-enterprises…”

(4) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences, Chinese translation “quanqiuhua: renlei de houguo”, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 3.

(5) Turkey has submitted an application to join European Union since 1987, but up to today, its candidacy has still not been accepted. The idea of “leaving Asia and joining Europe” had already been put forward by the Japanese Fukuzawa Yukichi during the Meiji period.

(6) The Dazhalan project that Cao Fei and I collaborated on also took part in this Istanbul Biennial. For more on this project, please visit: www.dazhalan-project.org

(7) Jonathan Napack: Vietnam’s Artists Try to Break Free of Their “Velvet Prison”, The International Herald Tribune, June 9, 2005.

(8) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Chinese translation, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 71.

(9) Uda Motoko: Interview with Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, ARTiT, Summer/Fall, 2007

FOTOFEST2008-CHINA

http://www.fotofest.org

FotoFest’s 12th edition of the International Biennial of Photography and Photo-related Art, presents work by 34 Chinese artists, March 7- April 20, 2008 in Houston, Texas. Photography from China 1934-2008 features ten newly commissioned and curated exhibitions, including two recently recovered archives from the 1930s and 1940s. The China programs are a cornerstone of FOTOFEST2008, the six-week. city-wide celebration of photo-based art.

In addition to these exhibitions, FOTOFEST2008 presents a symposium on twentieth century Chinese Photography with Chinese scholars GU Zheng, (Fudan University, Shanghai) and CAO Tai, (Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou) as well as a film program, New Cinema in China, with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Forty Chinese artists and curators will attend FOTOFEST2008, its acclaimed portfolio review for artists; the Fine Print Auction; professional workshops; and the special presentation by Hewlett-Packard (HP) of new printing technology for
art work.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Menil Collection, Houston Center for Photography and the Holocaust Museum Houston are among 100 other organizations presenting exhibitions as part of FOTOFEST2008. Many of their exhibitions continue the China focus and the ancillary subject of Transformations as well as their own independent themes.

Photography from China 1934-2008, FotoFest’s exhibition program for FOTOFEST2008, reveals the diversity of roles and styles that have shaped photographic art over the past 74 years in China.

ETHNOGRAPHY, PHOTOJOURNALISM AND PROPAGANDA, 1934-1975
Reflecting a growing interest by the Chinese in the peoples and politics of China’s western border regions near Tibet, ZHUANG Xueben (1909-1984) began traveling to China’s far-western border regions in 1934. His work from 1934-1939 is one of the earliest and most serious photographic examinations of ethnic minorities in these regions. FOTOFEST2008 is the first time this work is being shown outside of China.

In 1937, at the age of 25, Sha Fei (1912-1950) had himself assigned to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 8th Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Sha Fei photographed combat and training with the Chinese forces allied with CHIANG Kai-shek, against the Japanese. He set up pictorial magazines to publicize the 8th Route Army and its work in rural villages, and he organized a mass media system that became a principal part of the CCP’s propaganda system for the next 20 years, through the 1970s. After Sha Fei’s controversial execution in 1950, his work was blacklisted until the late l980s when his family and colleagues succeeded in rehabilitating his name. FOTOFEST2008 exhibits the newly recovered work of Sha Fei for the first time outside of China.

Editors and photographers trained by Sha Fei during the war became leaders of major CCP pictorial news media and propaganda agencies, using photography as one of the primary media promoting Chairman MAO Zedong’s agenda during The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The exhibition curated by James and Vicky Chen, founders of 798 Gallery, one of Beijing’s most respected photography galleries, shows how photography was choreographed to promote the message of collective solidarity. The exhibit, commissioned by FotoFest, features three photographers working for news publications during The Cultural Revolution: WENG Nai Qiang, XIAO Zuang, and WANG Shi Long.

INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY, 1985-2000
In the mid-1980s, a new generation of Chinese photographers began to produce strong personal bodies of photo-documentary work outside official media and news agencies. The first to gain international prominence was WU Jialin with his work on Yunnan province. A chance discovery of this work by FotoFest co-founder Frederick Baldwin at Marc Riboud’s Paris apartment led to his first exhibition in Western art world at FOTOFEST1996.

Two subsequent generations of photographers continue to develop independent approaches to documentary work. LU Nan’s, interest in the ethics of social interaction, led him to photograph the institutionalization of the mentally ill and underground Catholic communities in China. LI Lang’s early poetic work with the Yi People in central-western China has led to his current work exploring the human imprint on China’s landscape.

CONCEPTUAL AND STAGED WORK - NEW PHOTO, 1993-1998
In 1996, two Beijing artists, RongRong and LIU Zheng founded the influential New Photo magazine, an independent, underground publication that circulated in Beijing’s art circles. The magazine signaled a burgeoning Chinese interest in photography as a medium of contemporary art and marked an important turning point in the development of contemporary photography in China. FOTOFEST2008 presents this new exhibition for the first time outside of China, with 15 artists published in New Photo magazine. The exhibit is curated by ZHANG Li and organized by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
in Beijing.

CONCEPTUAL AND STAGED WORK - CURRENT PERSPECTIVES, 1998-2008
Individual shows of 11 current, multi-disciplinary Chinese artists address issues of identity, memory, spirituality, gender, urbanism, and the complex relationships between the present and the past in contemporary China. Designed as a series of one-person exhibitions, these shows feature BAI Yiluo, CANG Xin, CHENG Lingyang, XING Danwen, LIU Lijie, LIU Ren, SUN Guojuan, WANG Chuan, WU Gaozhong, YAO Lu, and ZENG Han.

For more details on FOTOFEST2008 exhibitions and other programs please visit http://www.fotofest.org

Press contacts:
Vinod Hopson – 713.223.5522 x26, press3@fotofest.org
Janice Van Dyke Walden – 713.223.5522 x12, janice@vandykewalden.com

An interview with Cao Fei

Interview: Oyama Hitomi
Thanks to Tokyo Gallery + BTAP

As China undergoes a process of rapid, radical urbanization and
modernization, a young artist born and raised in the dynamic urban
center of Guangzhou is building a stellar career on the international
art scene. So what part have Cao Fei's upbringing and environment
played in developing a talent that has now propelled her all the way
to the Venice Biennale?

-- Last year was a busy one for you wasn't it? You shifted your base
to Beijing, but surely you can't have spent much time there?

Indeed: Guangzhou, Taipei, Hong Kong, Korea, New York, the
Netherlands...I've been all over the place, both in China and
overseas.

-- May we start today perhaps by hearing about your background, the
kind of environment you were raised in, that sort of thing. 1978, the
year you were born, is the year China started taking steps to reform
and open up its economy. What were the first works of art you ever
encountered?

Both my parents are sculptors, so I suppose the first art I
encountered was their sculptures. My mother was an art school
instructor, and we lived in a faculty apartment on campus. While I
never received anything in the way of special art education from my
parents, I did mix a lot with art students, and I guess you could say
art has been a familiar part of life for me from a young age. Perhaps
I was born with a feeling for it.

-- What sort of things did you have around you apart from your
parents' sculptures?

When I was elementary school age, comics my parents bought for me, and
on TV, I often watched Japanese cartoons.

-- Do you remember the titles of any?

In comics it was things like Tintin, in cartoons the likes of Astro
Boy and Dragon Ball. The cartoons I wanted to watch on TV clashed with
the news, which my father wanted to watch, so we were always fighting
(laughs).

Manga, anime and MTV influences

-- What about later? Being in Guangzhou, you must have had access to a
lot of news and information from Hong Kong, or from further afield via
Hong Kong.

I started getting interested in pop culture at around age 12 or 13, I
think. I was crazy about breakdancing, pop music and MTV, learned
dancing from dancers behind my parents' backs, would dress up to look
18, put on lipstick and take my sister's ID card to get into discos.
Of course my parents knew none of this.

-- Knowing what you're like now I can well imagine (laughs). What kind
of pop music was popular in China back then?

Michael Jackson, Hong Kong pop idols, that sort of thing. Back then,
while it wasn't like these days, when we take being able to travel
freely for granted, if you were prepared to pay a certain amount you
could travel to Hong Kong for leisure. I went there a lot with my
parents and two older sisters. There I used to watch MTV, which you
couldn't see on the mainland, at the homes of Hong Kong acquaintances.

-- What did your parents think of their daughter's obsession with pop culture?

People of my parents' generation threw themselves into their work
after the country started to open up, trying to claw back some of the
time taken from them earlier by politics, so they were not especially
bothered about me. Which means I pretty much did what I liked, without
any parental interference.

-- What sort of student were you at high school? I seem to remember
that's when you first became involved in theater.

Yes, I used to enter the school's annual drama contest with some
classmates, and because I was studying dance, I'd mix dance with all
kinds of music and produce these comedy musical-type affairs with
hardly any lines. For some reason these went down really well, and
always had everyone in stitches (laughs). It was totally different in
style to the traditional plays that had been presented previously, and
we'd win every year.

-- Now why doesn't that surprise me... You then went to university,
where you produced your first work on digital video. How did you
become interested in filmic media?

Once I was at university, I started to encounter a lot more serious,
real art. At first I was mad about Hong Kong independent cinema, and
influenced by it in 1999 I shot the digital video Imbalance 257. At
the time there were still few DV works in China, and I was just
filming whatever took my fancy.

-- What artists were you influenced by around that time?

Discovering the work of Terayama Shuji, still the artist-filmmaker I
respect the most, was a big thing for me. I first saw one of his films
in 1999, being presented with great fanfare at a Hong Kong art space.
Throw Away Your Books, Go Out into the Streets!, Grass Labyrinth,
Death in the Country (aka: "Pastoral Hide and Seek"), Farewell Ark...I
just found them all utterly surreal. I was also impressed by the
posters hedesigned, his poetry and such.

In terms of other Japanese artists, in Yoko Ono I sense status and
courage as a woman, something tough and independent. Then there's
Kusama Yayoi, and her novels. When I finished Numa ni mayoite (Lost in
Swampland) I think it was, I felt as if my whole body had been set
free. Her writing is so sexual, so powerful and liberated. It
stimulated me, motivated me as an artist.

Connecting completely different things

-- When did you first meet Ou Ning?

That was also in '99. Imbalance 257 was finished and there was a
screening in a bookstore; I mentioned it to a friend of my sister's,
who said he had a friend who liked films so he'd invite him along. So
Ou Ning, who was living in Shenzhen at the time, got on a train and
came to see my work. He then went on to feature Imbalance 257 in a
movie magazine he launched, and from 2000 to 2003, he ran a film
society that we worked in together. I saw an awful lot of videos and
films there: Chinese independent cinema, and Western films.

-- Then you started actively collaborating didn't you? On films like
San Yuan Li (2003), The Dazhalan-Project and PRD Anti-Heroes (2005),
all dealing chiefly with China's cities and its people.

My interest in cities is probably largely due to working with Ou Ning.
You could say Ou Ning taught me how to connect with real society
through art. I too am very interested in people and social issues, for
example the incredible upheaval developing nations undergo on the path
to modernity. The kind of upheaval that China in particular is so
obviously experiencing right now.

As part of the Siemens Arts Program, in which each year a different
artist is commissioned for an art project, I ran a six-month project
called What are you doing here? (2006), in which I teamed with workers
at a lightbulb factory in Foshan, Guangdong Province. Up until then
artists in the program had simply presented their work, and I'd always
believed that did little to alter the relationship between art and the
workers. If you're going to embark on something like this, I figured,
surely it makes sense to get the workers involved as well. First I got
them to answer 50 questions, for example, "Do you like the work gear
you wear now?" and "What makes life enjoyable to you?" Then I got them
started by running workshops to help us get to know each other. I
offered some ideas, but left them to do all the planning and the
practical work.

Some built installations using the light-bulbs they made, while others
who liked ballet for example or the peacock dance (a Chinese folk
dance) gave performances next to the workbenches where they usually
worked. After the project was finished, I was gratified when someone
said to me, "Life itself is art, isn't it?" The theme was "Your utopia
is our utopia", and the things they aspire to, are indeed the same
things we all want.

-- But some people look at Hip Hop and Cosplayers and see them as
simply jumping on the latest bandwagon.

For me art is not about forming an image of a thing and making that
into an artwork, or producing something no one else has ever seen, but
searching for connections in the gaps between things that are
completely different. In Hip Hop for example, when ordinary people and
pop music are connected, a sort of wondrous chemical reaction is
generated. Artists on the whole tend to be introverted people whose
work emerges from the "individual". But I'm more of an extrovert. I
want to see what happens when I connect with different pop culture all
over the world. A bridge between art and pop culture: that's what I
want to be.

-- In your Un-Cosplayers performance and photo series for the Beijing
Tokyo Art Projects (BTAP) last year you connected the general public
with cosplay.

The bodies of the public are "real" but cosplay per se is "hyperreal",
so I suppose I connected reality and hyperreality. The word "cosplay"
itself is now internationally recognized, so I imagine people will
think cosplay = anime = fad, but the desire to wear the clothing of
someone totally different to oneself and take on that persona -
whether it be a figure from mythology, or an imaginary character - is
something humans have harbored throughout history. So cosplay in
itself is not my objective.

Originally printed in ART iT 15 Spring/Summer 2007