An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World

Esa, are you in touch with Steven Holl for 09 by any chance? D

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/arts/design/25wood.html

The New York Times
August 25, 2008
An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

These are lonely times for Lebbeus Woods.

In the early 1990s this irreverent New York architect produced a
series of dark and moody renderings that made him a cult figure among
students and academics. Foreboding images of bombed-out cities
populated by strange, parasitic structures, they seemed to portray a
world in a perpetual state of war, one in which the architect's task
was to create safe houses for society's outcasts.

Since then Mr. Woods has become his own kind of outcast.

Architecture is big business today. While most of his friends and
colleagues have abandoned their imaginary cities to chase lucrative
commissions, Mr. Woods has shown little interest in building. Instead
he continues to work at a small drafting table in a corner of his
downtown apartment, a solitary, monklike figure churning out
increasingly abstract architectural fantasies, several of which are
on view in the "Dreamland" show at the Museum of Modern Art.

Some question the wisdom of his choices. (They certainly haven't made
him a rich man.) But that he now stands virtually alone underscores a
disturbing shift in the architectural profession during the past
decade or so. By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of
building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-
criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools.

Not so long ago many of the world's greatest architectural talents
behaved as though the actual construction of buildings was beneath
them. During the 1960s firms like Superstudio in Florence, Italy, and
Archigram in London were designing urban visions intended to shake up
the status quo. These projects — walking, mechanized cities and
mirrored megastructures that extended over mountain ranges and across
deserts — were stinging attacks on a professional mainstream that
avant-garde architects believed lacked imaginative energy.

When I was an architecture student in New York in the early 1990s,
the architects my peers and I admired most were famous for losing
competitions, not winning them. For us it simply meant that their
work was too radical, too bold for the cultural establishment.

This was not just youthful idealism. Free of mundane professional
considerations like budgets, clients and zoning laws, these
architects were able to produce works that were aesthetically
inventive and piercing social commentaries. And their designs were
wildly influential, closely studied by younger architects who sought
to apply their ideas in the real world.

Mr. Woods, now 68, was a regular fixture of that scene. In the early
1990s he published a stunning series of renderings that explored the
intersection of architecture and violence. The first of these, the
Berlin Free-Zone project, designed soon after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, was conceived as an illustration of how periods of social
upheaval are also opportunities for creative freedom.

Aggressive machinelike structures — their steel exteriors resembling
military debris — are implanted in the abandoned ruins of buildings
that flank the wall's former death zone. Cramped and oddly shaped,
the interiors were designed to be difficult to inhabit — a strategy
for screening out the typical bourgeois. ("You can't bring your old
habits here," he warned. "If you want to participate, you will have
to reinvent yourself.")

Some critics condemned the design for its coldblooded imagery. But it
also turned cold-war Modernism on its head. In the 1950s American
architects were striving to retool wartime military production for
the construction of a peacetime paradise. One result was the mind-
numbing conformity of suburban subdivisions. Mr. Woods, by
comparison, has never been so utopian. In his drawings society seems
to be coming apart at the seams. His glistening pods, armored against
the surrounding mayhem, are intended as sanctuaries for society's
most vulnerable: outcasts, rebels, heretics and dreamers.

This vision reached its extreme in a series of renderings he created
in 1993 in response to the war in Bosnia. Inspired by sci-fi comics
and full of writhing cables, crumbling buildings and flying shards of
steel, these drawings seem to mock the old Modernist faith in a
utopian future. Their dark, moody atmosphere suggests a world in a
constant struggle for survival.

Things began to change, however, at the end of the last millennium.
High-end architecture was suddenly a valuable commodity. Architects
like Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas, once relegated to the halls
of academia, were suddenly struggling to handle an abundance of new
commissions coming not only from elite cultural institutions but also
from mainstream developers and wealthy corporations.

Mr. Woods, a large, burly man who still likes an occasional
cigarette, doesn't try to hide his disdain for this new reality. "Big
corporations today want to present themselves as benefactors of the
human race," he told me recently, summing up the current state of
affairs. "ExxonMobil runs ads about the ecology now. And architecture
is part of this. It's a business."

It's hard to disagree with the main thrust of his argument: that
architecture has always needed a place that is wholly free of self-
censorship, and that this place does not exist in the often-
contentious exchange between architect and client. Most of us
remember, for example, what happened to Mr. Koolhaas in the 1997
competition for a major expansion to the Museum of Modern Art.
Choosing to ignore the museum's internal politics, he indiscreetly
highlighted the museum's corporate agenda in his design. An enraged
MoMA board instantly dropped him.

The pressure to smooth over anything in a design that might be
perceived as threatening has only increased in recent years, as a lot
of architecture has begun to look like a sophisticated form of
marketing. Architects who once defined themselves as rebels are now
designing luxury residential towers for the super-rich.

The greatest influence of this trend, however, may be on a younger
generation of architects. Reared in an era when there seems to be an
irresistible supply of work, these architects often seem eager to
build at any cost. And their facility with computer software can make
it easy to churn out seductive designs without digging deeply into
hard social truths.

As Mr. Woods put it: "With the triumph of liberal democracy and
laissez-faire capitalism, the conversation came to an end. Everyone
wanted to build, which left less room for certain kinds of
architecture."

Meanwhile, as his peers moved on to bigger, more lucrative
commissions, Mr. Woods's work has become more and more abstract. In
1999 he began working on a series of designs whose fragmented planes
were intended to reflect the seismic shifts that occur during
earthquakes. ("The idea is that it's not nature that creates
catastrophes," he said. "It's man. The renderings were intended to
reflect a new way of thinking about normal geological occurrences.")

Last year the architect Steven Holl, a close friend, hired him to
design a pavilion for a housing complex in Chengdu, China. A towering
composition of crisscrossing bridges and ramps, the project is the
closest Mr. Woods has come to real architecture: a dense Piranesian
space in which people can climb to peer out at the urban sprawl of
the new China.

"I'm not interested in living in a fantasy world," Mr. Woods told me.
"All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But
what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of
conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived
by a different set of rules."

Paradox of Political Art- a text by Dyske Suematsu recommended by a new media curator in Beijing

Paradox of Political Art

Political artworks have always been problematic for me, especially those with a hierarchical structure of morals or ethics. Aside from the fact that they are visual, they demonstrate no difference from the verbal discourses of various social and political organizations. Since the art world is a small, exclusive community, one cannot help but to question the effectiveness of such political evangelism. I also would like to discuss below the validity of artist as a political position. Political art as a conceptual art movement was born in the late 60's, and continued on strongly into the 90's. It probably reached its height in 1993 when Whitney Museum had its "political biennial." After that, there was a backlash to political correctness. Then, 9-11 came. Politics is once again in vogue. Perhaps this is only my own perception, but the Internet as a medium seems to encourage production of political art. The Internet is both global and democratic in nature, which are qualities pertinent to today's international politics. Whatever the reason, this new boom in political art seems to be happening mostly around the digital art world. Conceptual artists like Hans Haacke whose practices were called "institutional critique" dealt mostly with politics as it related to art. They made us aware of the political implications of viewing art. Their concerns were with the politics of art, not with politics proper. In this sense, their art can be seen as self-criticism, not political evangelism. At some point in history, this pertinence to art was lost, and political art as a conceptual art movement was reduced to being a mere tool for propaganda. The most apparent problem I see with today's political art is its deterministic nature. Art often raises salient questions, but when a political artwork is morally motivated, its questions become moral directives disguised as questions. That is, they are rhetorical questions. As such, there is a right way and a wrong way to look at it. A correct answer is always already provided for you by the artist. The questions and the discussions it provokes either support the answer or refute it. And, the value of the work is contingent on its dialectical outcome. From the point of view of the audience, the experience of such political art resembles that of reading an op-ed column in a newspaper. The less apparent but more problematic aspect of political art is its lack of attention to the political implications of being a political artist. A person whose political arguments are predicated on his ethical superiority is ethically obligated to prove his superiority, avoiding at all cost any gestures or statements that can be misleading. In politics, if a compromise between parties X and Y were to be made on moral grounds of X, and if both parties were to respect the principle of equal rights, then it follows that X is obligated to morally satisfy Y throughout the process. For instance, if the recent war on Iraq was waged on moral grounds by the Bush administration, they are obligated to demonstrate their moral integrity to his opponents. Awarding lucrative contracts to Halliburton, for instance, is disrespectful in that it is blatantly misleading, and makes the auditing of their moral grounds impossible. By the same token, if artists were to criticize governments and private institutions on moral grounds, they are obligated to demonstrate that their motives are not promotions of their own careers as artists, but their own beliefs in the cause. Being an artist is a business like any other business. It would be unfair to simply assume that artists are in a privileged position that escapes social and political criticism. Artists cannot be exempted from the suspicion of having impure motives. If artists are not required to prove the integrity of their motives, why should anyone else be? If we were to speculate hidden motives of government institutions and private corporations, it is only fair that we also speculate the hidden motives of the artists who criticize them. In this sense, Sue Coe, for instance, would have better served her cause by contributing anonymously to organizations like PETA in order to avoid suspicion that she is motivated by promotion of her own career as an artist. This in turn should make her work more effective. Politics is rarely motivated by a single factor. Professed motives are inextricably contaminated by ulterior motives, and they are further contaminated by the compromises forced upon them by certain predicaments and the powers that be. However, the general tendency of political art is to ignore this irreversible and unavoidable contamination, and to delimit the underlying moral implications in order to hierarchically oppose one another. This operation of moral purification is rarely applied to their own practices as artists. When asked about the effectiveness of their pursuits in the real world, or their problematic position as artists preaching to the converted in the art world, or commodifying of political activism to make a living, or exploitation of moral appeals for self-promotion, they allow themselves the compromise that they criticize in others, because they realize the impossibility of purity in their own predicaments. Another question I have with political art is its effectiveness. By taking positions as artists, they necessarily distance themselves from the real nitty-gritty of politics. To politicians, some op-ed columnists are like backseat drivers who have never driven a car before. They speak only from a theoretical and ideological point of view without ever having to get their hands dirty. From the position of politicians who cope with the difficulties of the real world politics, their criticism is unfair and inevitably one-dimensional. It is fair for the politicians to ask: If the columnists' political ideologies are their motives, then wouldn't it make more sense for them to directly participate in the political process, rather than to sit back and criticize those who do? The same question can be extended to political artists who make art against war, against unethical corporations, against invasion of privacy, and so on. What is interesting is not so much the content, but why they choose to use art as a platform for their fights, even when they face obvious proofs of its ineffectiveness, or even when they are shown a more effective alternative. But, sadly, this question is rarely addressed, and is seldom welcomed as a debate. The last issue I would like to raise is the tendency of political artists to place a priority on their status as artists over their political cause. A long-term problem with terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Hamas is that they tend to preserve their own existence beyond their professed objectives. Especially between Israel and Palestine, terrorism has been incorporated into the normal functioning of their political and economic structures, so much so that sudden extinction of terrorism would probably create power vacuums and chaos in that region. In this type of environment, preservation of their power, status, and identity takes precedence over their ideological cause, which in turn will perpetuate terrorism forever. Ironically enough, their enemy, or the opposing ideology, becomes a necessary constituent of their own identities. This is a political problem that exists also in political art. Their identities as artists take precedence over their cause. Their motives are made impure by their own insistence to be recognized as artists. The opposing ideologies they criticize as immoral or unethical are always already parts of necessary constituents of their own identities as artists. The more they insist on their status as artists, as opposed to as anonymous members of our society motivated by the cause, the more they contribute to perpetuating the very problem they hope to solve. Our democracy is founded on a principle that we are born with equal rights. Much of political art violates this principle by leveraging the perceived cultural authority of art and of an artist. A political opinion expressed by an artist appears more authoritative than one expressed by an anonymous citizen. Political artists are, therefore, tempted to express their opinions as artists, rather than as anonymous citizens, but the idea of democracy is to level this type of inequality so that one citizen's opinion is no more authoritative than that of any other. This is the basis of the argument used by those who criticize Hollywood celebrities for publicly expressing their political opinions. To respect the principles of our democracy, celebrities must not be confused with politicians who were elected to represent our political voices. Naturally, this is also a matter of degree. There is no definitive point in a scale of fame where voicing of political opinions would be considered a violation of our democratic principle. However, if your primary motive is a political cause, being directly involved in our political system, rather than being an artist, would be fairer to the public, unless, of course, you disagree with the fundamental principles of our democracy. Dyske Suematsu - April 7, 2004

China Won’t Lend Artworks to Asia Society Exhibition

The New York Times

August 20, 2008

China Won't Lend Artworks to Asia Society Exhibition

By ROBIN POGREBIN

China has reversed its decision to lend Asia Society nearly 100 objects from Chinese museums for an exhibition that focuses on revolutionary Chinese art from the 1950s through the '70s, scheduled to open on Sept. 5 in Manhattan, the society's president said.

The Chinese Ministry of Culture had originally agreed to allow the society to borrow works for the show, "Art and China's Revolution," promoted as among the first comprehensive exhibitions devoted to that era and one that will examine the effects of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution on artists and art production in China.

Despite the Chinese government's decision, Asia Society has decided to proceed with the show by seeking loans from private collectors.

The approach of the Olympics seemed to have been the deal breaker. "Initially, they said, 'Any loans you want; no problem,' " said Vishakha N. Desai, the society's president. "The closer it got to the Olympics, they changed their policy."

"It has more to do with China's desire and aspiration to be seen in a new light," Ms. Desai added. "This is a time for celebration. They don't want to be reminded of a difficult past."

"To some extent, it's better," she said. "We don't want ever to be seen as being sanctioned by the government."

Asia Society was informed of the ministry's decision in January, but tried over the last several months to convince the Chinese government to reconsider. "We were working to get at least some of them," said Melissa Chiu, the society's museum director and a leading authority on Chinese contemporary art. "It's now apparent that they won't come. We had to think long and hard about whether to proceed. We made the decision to go forward."

When the ministry refused to lend the artworks, Ms. Chiu said, she appealed for help to China's consulate general in New York. "They said they would see what they could do, but we should see about postponing the show until after the Olympics," she recalled. "I said we couldn't do that."

Zhong Laizhao, China's cultural consul, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had not suggested that Asia Society delay its show, but had advised Ms. Chiu to deal with China directly. "How can I help her?" he asked. "I really don't know this case."

The legacy of Mao is complicated, Asia Society officials say, and the Cultural Revolution remains a taboo topic, along with what some refer to as the three T's: Tibet, Tiananmen Square and Taiwan.

The exhibition, which will run through Jan. 11, covers the three decades after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It will include large-scale oil paintings, ink paintings, sculptures, drawings, artist sketchbooks, woodblock prints, posters and objects from everyday life, many never before shown in the United States.

Ms. Chiu organized the exhibition with Zheng Shengtian, who was an artist and teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) during the period covered by the show. Critical of the Red Guards for their violence and destruction of cultural artifacts in 1966, Mr. Zheng was imprisoned in a detention center on campus, called a cowshed, where he and other established artists and teachers were forced to participate in self-criticism sessions.

"Even though this is a period many would prefer to forget, it is nevertheless one that produced a visual culture that continues to permeate contemporary Chinese art," Mr. Zheng said in a news release.

One section of the exhibition addresses artists who went against the prevailing style, including Pan Tianshou, Lin Fengmian, Zhao Yannian, Li Keran and Shi Lu, some of whom were persecuted and called "black artists."

The show also includes works by a younger generation of contemporary artists, like Xu Bing, Chen Danqing and Zhang Hongtu, who attribute many of their artistic influences to their years spent in the countryside as part of their "re-education."

Mao started the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge China of its bourgeoise elements and to advance class struggle. The revolution also represented Mao's effort to regain control of the Communist Party from his rivals Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping after the Great Leap Forward. The conflict eventually devolved into a decade-long period of power struggles and political instability.

During the revolution, art was often used as propaganda to deliver a political message to a mass audience. Older artists sometimes adopted revolutionary themes; many others had their works destroyed and were persecuted. At the same time, some younger artists aspired to have their paintings become "model works," mass-produced in posters and newspapers. The Asia Society exhibition seeks to capture the varied artistic ramifications of this political turmoil.

"It is a project that you couldn't stage in China," Ms. Chiu said. "It sheds light on a period of time that is now seeming to be forgotten."

Picasso China Tour cancelled indefinitely

so this text is no longer relevant.

04/14/2008)

The 2008 Picasso China Tour will open at Shanghai Exhibition Center
on July 5 and will run until August 22, Eastday.com reported today.

The exhibition will feature more than 100 pieces of Picasso's oil
paintings, sketches and sculptures. A dozen pieces kept by Picasso's
family will also make their world debut at the exhibition, the report
has said.

The exhibition will cover masterpieces from Picasso's various periods
and mainly focus on the cubism portraits and self-portraits of
Picasso's paintings. Oil paintings may account for forty percent the
exhibit.

Chinese Culture Promotion Society, the organizing committee of the
Shanghai Art Fair, a Denmark-based exhibition giant and Shanghai
Media Group will jointly operate the exhibition under the approval of
the Ministry of Culture.

The organizer will invite scholars from home and abroad to give
seminars on the art of Picasso and forums on the exchange between
oriental and western art during the forty-seven-day exhibition.

A SIGG JOKE

The reason for Pollack's response is the following strange article.

A SIGG JOKE by Charlie Finch

In 1898, the Empress Dowager of China announced, "As newspapers only
serve to excite the masses to subvert the present order of things and
the editors concerned are composed of the dregs of the literary
classes, we hereby command the entire suppression of all newspapers
published within the Empire, while the editors connected with them
are to be arrested and punished with the utmost rigors of the law."

Not much has changed. Last week, following a March concert in
Shanghai at which the singer (and wife of Matthew Barney) Bjork
shouted "Tibet! Tibet!", the Chinese government announced its
intention to suppress any performer whose expression denigrated "the
nationality of China." One of the few honest and outspoken Chinese
artists, Huang Yong Ping, calls for the cancellation of the Olympics
in the current number of the Art Newspaper. In that same issue,
collector Ian Charles Stewart, based in Beijing, sums up Chinese
contemporary in these words, "Most work here exhibits little content
or attitude beyond, perhaps, comments on conspicuous consumption and
the occasional one-liner visual gag. . . . The lack of a truly
perceptive, self-analytical and self-critical art movement is also
evidence of a willingness to not rock the boat when things are going
so well."

I have argued in Artnet Magazine that the production and marketing of
Chinese contemporary art is a deliberate attempt of the Chinese
government, in the person of the Chinese Army ex-officers who run the
state's corporate art machine, to homogenize the brutality of the
Beijing dictatorship towards Greater China and the wider world [see
"Fear Strikes Out," Apr. 18, 2008, and "China Dollars," Oct. 18,
2007]. In the current issue of ArtAsiaPacific, Uli Sigg, former Swiss
ambassador to China and North Korea, attacks, in a self-penned piece,
my call for collectors not to buy Chinese art as a protest against
China's continued suppression of true expression.

Mr. Sigg asks if we should boycott art produced in America during the
Bush Administration. Well, if said art was wholly financed by the
government and consisted of innocuous paeans to the greatness of
America, of course we should. A prominent collector of Chinese
contemporary himself, Mr. Sigg is perhaps worried that the value of
his holdings might decrease if the Chinese Communist Party were
challenged by true artistic freedom. He ignores the fact that China
has no freedom of speech or assembly, no trial by jury, no habeas
corpus. The Chinese government continues to suppress its dissidents,
poets and politically active artists, laughing all the way to the
bank at Mr. Sigg and his collector running dogs.

The Chinese government has also done body scans of 100,000 Falun Gong
detainees -- of their "harvestable organs" only. Abortion in China is
not a "choice," it is forced on women who wish to bear more than one
child. And for you pet lovers, China is also exterminating stray cats
in Beijing in preparation for the Olympics. This is a totalitarian
society which no more deserves the Olympics than Nazi Germany did in
1936. The fact that U.S businesses, athletes and media patronize it
is a disgrace. Hitler had his sympathizers in the West, as well.
Switzerland accommodated Hitler, Mr. Sigg. I suggest you lift your
head out of your Chinese collection and breathe the air of freedom,
for a change.

CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula
(Smart Art Press).

Uli Sigg debate

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/pollock/pollock7-28-08.asp

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
by Barbara Pollack

To the Editor:

In his most recent rant in Artnet Magazine, your correspondent
Charlie Finch extends his call for a boycott of Chinese artists to
include an attack the art collector Uli Sigg, former Swiss ambassador
to China, North Korea and Mongolia [see "A Sigg Joke," July 23,
2008], who took issue with Finch in the pages of this month's Art
Asia Pacific Magazine. Finch suggests that Chinese artists serve the
propaganda interests of the Chinese government, and that Ulli Sigg
has an interest in furthering these goals.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Uli Sigg has never been an
apologist for the Chinese government. In his diplomatic capacity and
before that in his business dealings in China, Sigg has been a
pioneer in negotiating with Chinese officials to bring their
attitudes towards business and the arts more in line with
international practices. I know for a fact that Sigg has often
operated behind the scenes to rescue artists from the threat of
censorship. He also has invested his own money in the Chinese
Contemporary Art Awards, the only such prize in China to pay
recognition to developments in contemporary art.

Finch's suggestion that Sigg may have done all this to protect the
value of his art holdings is ludicrous. Sigg has been assembling his
collection of over 2,000 works of Chinese contemporary art since the
late-1980s, traveling to China and supporting artists at a time when
most were threatened and many were jailed by the Chinese government.
He has never sold a single work and, as far as I know, has no plans
to sell his collection. Instead, he plans to donate his art holdings
to an institution in China -- though he himself admits that the
government would have to change substantially in its attitude towards
contemporary art to accept many of the works tht he owns.

Finch suggests that the Chinese art world is somehow an extension of
the Chinese government, but in fact censorship still exists in
Chinese art circles and Chinese museums are still vastly underfunded.
I have been engaged in research on this issue for a decade and have
visited China numerous times and have seen no evidence that
contemporary art is used as a propaganda tool for the government in
China. Although Poly Group, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate and
the privatized wing of the People's Liberation Army, invests $100
million in art each year, these funds are primarily used for
repatriating antiquities -- a fact that Sotheby's or Christie's can
confirm -- not for buying or promoting contemporary art.

In point of fact, U.S. artists receive far greater funding from the
U.S. government than Chinese artists receive at home. Notably, U.S.
tax structure allows for donations to the arts, a situation that does
not exist in China.

Finch and I may agree on the politics of China or the problems facing
this rapidly growing nation (though I would never compare China to
Nazi Germany). But Chinese artists represent a pocket of resistance
within China, as can be seen in the many artworks by Chinese artists
that document the country's problems. If this critique is less
visible in the Chinese art now selling for millions of dollars at
auction -- well, that may have more to do with the "new Orientalism"
of western collectors, whose taste hardly reflects the full spectrum
of the Chinese art scene.

Finch is entitled to call for a boycott of the Beijing Games. But
when he throws Chinese contemporary art into his argument, he is
going after the wrong segment of Chinese society. That contemporary
art has been able to flourish in China may show that that country is
far more complex and more forward-thinking than Finch would like to
believe.

-- Barbara Pollack

Charlie Finch replies: Polycorp's role in the Chinese contemporary
art market is well known to insiders, and has been reported by
Bloomberg. As for Chinese government censorship, Bloomberg reported
late last week that the Chinese government had postponed two shows,
one of 35 Warhol portraits of athletes and another of paintings of
Chinese Communist leaders, as being "inappropriate for the Olympics."

Apologists for China art and its central controllers have been the
beneficiaries of perquisites and other incentives from the Chinese
government precisely because they can be used as propaganda tools.
One can only think of the journalists like Walter Duranty of the New
York Times and others who toured Stalin's Potemkin villages during
the 1930s and returned with glowing reports of paradise on earth.

BARBARA POLLACK received the Andy Warhol Creative Capital arts
writers grant to research the issue of censorship of the visual arts
in China. She is writing a book about the development of the art
scene in China.

CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula
(Smart Art Press).

Zhang Yimou: Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up

August 8, 2008

Gritty Renegade Now Directs China's Close-Up

By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING — For much of the past quarter century, the Chinese director Zhang Yimou made films that showcased his country's struggle against poverty, war and political misrule to the outside world — films that Chinese, for the most part, never saw.

Time and again, Mr. Zhang's terse, gritty epics were banned by government censors for portraying China's ugly side. When he won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, the authorities stopped him from attending. Up for an Oscar one year, officials lobbied to have his film withdrawn from the competition.

But when the Olympics kick off Friday at China's new National Stadium, with President Hu Jintao of China, President Bush and other world leaders in attendance and perhaps one billion people watching live on television, Mr. Zhang will preside over the opening ceremonies.

Nearly two years in the making, his spectacle is intended to present China's new face to the world with stagecraft and pyrotechnics that organizers boast have no equal in the history of the Games. Whether or not it succeeds, it will underscore one reality of a rising China: many leading artists now work with, or at least not against, the ruling Communist Party.

Rising nationalism and pride in China's emergence as an economic power, and robust state support for artists who steer clear of political defiance, have transformed China's cultural landscape since the early part of this decade. Today, directors, writers and painters who seek to expose the darker side of authoritarian rule not only enrage the censors, but also often find themselves shut out of the lucrative market for Chinese art, books and film. Many of those who find less political outlets for their talent, on the other hand, can get rich.

"People really are selling their talent in a way that can make them money," said Ai Weiwei, an internationally recognized artist based in Beijing. "They really know that if they work with the government, they'll benefit."

The opening ceremonies will represent a particularly momentous conversion for Mr. Zhang, whose experience during the horrors of Mao's Cultural Revolution appeared to inform several of his internationally acclaimed — and domestically banned — films, including "Ju Dou" and "To Live."

Mr. Zhang said in a recent interview that he never had political aims. His supporters say it is the Communist Party that has become more sophisticated, seeking to harness the country's top talent and embrace a broader notion of national culture.

But critics accuse Mr. Zhang of making a pact with a political leadership that has a long record of restricting artistic freedom, playing the role of favored court artist — a kind of Chinese Leni Riefenstahl, creating beautiful backdrops for iron-fisted rulers.

"He went from being this renegade making films that were banned and an eyesore for the Chinese government to kind of being the pet of the government, in some people's eyes," said Michael Berry, who teaches contemporary Chinese culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's almost a complete turnaround from his early days."

Other artists, including a few who fled into exile after the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989, now seem to be searching for ways to partner with Beijing as well.

The Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun and the celebrated pianist Lang Lang perform for the country's leaders at Beijing's new National Theater and serve as cultural ambassadors overseas. Xu Bing, a painter and calligrapher whose work in the 1980s was viewed as subversive, is now a vice president at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts. He recently created a huge installation piece for the new Chinese Embassy in Washington.

Few artists, though, have embraced the government the way Mr. Zhang has. He has served as an artistic adviser to Beijing, promoted the nation's image abroad and produced a short film to help China win the right to host the 2008 Olympics. He is now a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body.

Beijing's Turnaround

Beijing, in turn, has promoted Mr. Zhang, giving his recent films favorable opening dates that bolster box office returns. The country's film authorities allowed one of his recent movies to open at the Great Hall of the People. Cultural authorities even lobbied Hollywood executives to get his big-budget martial arts film, "Hero," an Oscar.

Some Chinese critics panned "Hero" as an implicit homage to authoritarian rule. While it did not win an Oscar, it became one of the highest grossing foreign films in the American market.

Its success gave rise to the rapid commercialization — and depoliticization — of Chinese art. China's cultural landscape is now filled with big-budget historical dramas, multimillion dollar art auctions, government-backed opera and dance extravaganzas, and bold new state-financed entertainment venues that suggest a melding of art, culture, power and national pride.

Like Mr. Zhang, the director Feng Xiaogang said he tired of battling censors long ago and switched to making more entertaining films that could deliver box-office riches. Chen Kaige, another prominent director with a history of provocative and rebellious films, has also been embraced by Beijing, which a few years ago allowed him use of one of the country's most important government buildings for the premiere of his big-budget film "The Promise."

"Now, the government wants directors to promote the country's economic development," said Wu Tianming, a well-known producer and director. "And the directors need money and fame and they can earn even more money with government support."

For months, Mr. Zhang and his crew have been closeted in a secure Olympics compound, preparing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. The three-and-a-half-hour show is still shrouded in secrecy, though some highlights have been leaked. Mr. Zhang will use more than 15,000 performers and fireworks by the renowned artist Cai Guoqiang. Acrobats will dance through the air as in Mr. Zhang's martial arts films. Lang Lang will headline a program that will include dance performances and the Peking Opera.

To help create China's cultural moment, Mr. Zhang initially tapped Steven Spielberg to work as artistic adviser on the opening ceremonies.

But under pressure to sever ties because of China's role in Sudan, Mr. Spielberg resigned in February, saying that his conscience troubled him and that China should do more to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The resignation was an embarrassment for China and Mr. Zhang, and it served to demonstrate the kind of pressures that artists in the West can come under when they work for the government. In China, though, Mr. Zhang sidestepped the matter with what has become his standard line, "I have no interest in politics."

A Troubled History

Politics, in the past, was not easy to dodge.

Mr. Zhang's father, an accountant, had served as an officer in the Nationalist army fighting the Communists during the country's protracted civil war. His uncle fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan. Mr. Zhang grew up in northern Shaanxi Province in the 1950s on the wrong side of history.

The family's problems intensified when the Cultural Revolution got under way in 1966, touching off a decade-long period of political madness. Mr. Zhang's home was ransacked and his father was labeled a "double counter-revolutionary."

At 18, he was sent to labor in the countryside, tilling fields with peasants. Mr. Zhang recalled a youth filled with despair in a 2005 interview with Mr. Berry of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Most enemies of the people during that time fell into the category of the 'five bad elements,' " he said. "Well, people like me were called 'the worst element.' So those 10 years, from 1966 until 1976, I lived under the shadow of tragedy and hopelessness."

In 1971, though, he was assigned to work as a machine technician at the No. 8 Cotton Mill in Xianyang, in Shaanxi Province. It was there that he fell in love with art and photography.

"He showed no interest in politics," said Lei Peiyun, who worked with Mr. Zhang in the factory's propaganda department. "But he once told me that people are shackled by politics."

With Mao's death in 1976, Mr. Zhang gained admission to China's only film school, the Beijing Film Academy. Initially he made his mark as a cinematographer, working on "Yellow Earth," the 1984 film of a classmate, Chen Kaige.

But he soon began making his own films. In visually striking features like "Red Sorghum," "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern," he explored the country's feudalist past, the plight of women and the conflicted lives of the Chinese people.

"At that time the whole culture was destroyed," said Mr. Wu, the producer and director who helped finance several of Mr. Zhang's early films. "They tasted the ugliness but less of the beauty."

Although his early films won critical acclaim in the West, they were often banned in China as dark and even poisonous.

Some officials even accused him of pandering to Western tastes by stereotyping the Chinese character, an accusation he strongly denied. Others viewed his films as veiled critiques of the leadership, buried in the subtext of films set in pre-revolutionary China.

Wang Bin, his longtime literary adviser, said this happened in 1989 during preparation for shooting "Ju Dou," the tale of a woman forced into an arranged marriage with an impotent old textile mill owner.

That summer, after the military fired on pro-democracy activists occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Mr. Zhang and some co-workers ventured outside and witnessed the aftermath of the killings.

"We saw burned vehicles, bloody students," Mr. Wang recalled. "I don't want to say much now. But we spent the whole night sleepless. Because of that event, I trusted Zhang Yimou. I felt he cared for his nation."

Distraught by what they saw, Mr. Wang said Mr. Zhang and the staff altered the screenplay, and the film's final scene.

"At the end of the film, Ju Dou has a huge fire, and that represents our emotion," he said. "That is June 4."

He was bolder when he made the film "To Live," which traces one family's tragic journey over the course of four decades, ending with the Cultural Revolution, a subject that to this day remains taboo.

Colleagues said Mr. Zhang's team submitted a fake script to the censors for pre-approval, promising to make a film about China's bright future, and then secretly began filming "To Live."

When the film was released to critical acclaim overseas, government censors were infuriated. Mr. Zhang was banned for five years from making films in China with foreign funds.

It was the last time he seriously challenged government censors.

The threat that he could be barred from making movies altogether, had a profound — if never fully articulated — effect on Mr. Zhang, said Zhang Zhenyan, his longtime production manager, who is no relation.

A New Approach

The director began toying with new and less provocative genres — a gangster film, tear-jerkers and a tender tale of a village teacher who, with the help of a benevolent state television boss, rescues a lost student.

Then in 2001, after the hit film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," by the Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, Mr. Zhang's work became commercial on a grand scale. He made three big-budget martial arts films that broke box office records in China.

Critics said he had sold out to Hollywood. Mr. Zhang defended his new taste as international and modern. In an interview late last year, he said, "China has stepped into a new era, an era of consumption and entertainment," adding, "You can condemn it if you like, but it is a trend of globalization."

"Hero" told the story of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang, who was known for burning books, burying intellectuals and unifying China through brutal means. Some critics accused Mr. Zhang of pandering to Beijing with a story that seemed to glorify an all-powerful state that preserves unity and stability.

Government officials praised the film, calling it "a new starting point to China's new century."

And before the film was even released to the public, the government submitted it as the nation's official foreign-language Oscar nominee in 2002 (the state selects just one film each year) and then lobbied Hollywood executives for it to win, according to film industry executives.

A letter Mr. Zhang wrote in late 2002 to Miramax Films, which had acquired rights to "Hero," hints at his new influence.

Annoyed by the editing of the film, Mr. Zhang told his American backers, "If you insist on doing nothing to support the film but keep on delaying and cutting down the movie, and eventually destroying it, I cannot imagine how the Chinese government and the whole Chinese population will think of you and Miramax."

He added: "I truly believe no one could stop their anger! You will be hurting not only me, but also the whole Chinese population."

A Cultural Hero

There were other perks. His production of the opera "Turandot" was staged in the Forbidden City, a national landmark. Beijing nominated his last three films for the foreign-language Oscar, even though "Curse of the Golden Flower" opened last year to poor reviews.

And then the top honor: he was named artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympic Committee and later won the competition to serve as impresario of Olympic ceremonies.

"The government made him a cultural hero of China," Chen Xihe, a professor of film at Shanghai University, said in an interview last year. "Why would he continue to make movies that challenge the political system?"

Mr. Zhang dismissed the suggestion that there were political motivations behind his work, and he said the Olympics were a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that any Chinese would be foolish to pass up.

"For a century, this is the most important time for the Chinese to host all of guests coming from all over the world," he said in an interview. "I took this job, to a great extent, because I wanted to do something for the Chinese people."

Friends said his stewardship of the opening ceremonies was the ultimate reward for a man who spent so many years was on the outside, once tarred as an enemy of the state.

"Although he started with no interest in politics," said Bai Yuguo, a longtime friend, "he's now at the center of China."

China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge

The New York Times

July 30, 2008

China's Female Artists Quietly Emerge

By HOLLAND COTTER

BEIJING — On a February day in 1989, a young woman walked into a show at the National Gallery of Art here, whipped out a pellet gun and fired two shots into a mirrored sculpture in an exhibition called "China/Avant-Garde." Police officers swarmed into the museum. The show, the country's first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for days.

The woman, Xiao Lu, is an artist. The sculpture she fired on was her own, or rather a collaborative piece she had made with another artist, Tang Song, her boyfriend at the time. Why she did what she did was not immediately clear, but this didn't matter.

She had set off a symbolic explosion.

The international press saw a rebellion story. China's political and cultural vanguard claimed a hero. The government reacted as if attacked. The renowned art critic Li Xianting has described the incident as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square crackdown four months later. Whatever the truth, Ms. Xiao made the history books. She was a star.

She is the first and last Chinese female artist so far to achieve that status. Contemporary art in China is a man's world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.

The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.

Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts, and few are represented by prestigious galleries. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be long.

If any woman qualifies as a power artist on the current male model, Lin Tianmiao probably comes closest. She was born in 1961, and like many artists of her generation who were raised during the Cultural Revolution but came of age professionally in its rocky aftermath, she had a difficult start.

In the mid-1990s, with money scarce, censors watchful and no gallery or market structure in place, she and her husband, the conceptual artist Wang Gongxin, lived and worked in cramped Beijing apartments where they mounted one-night shows that doubled as rent parties.

Ms. Lin's work reflected these hand-to-mouth conditions. It was made from used household utensils — teapots, woks, scissors, vegetable choppers — that she laboriously wrapped in layers of cheap white cotton thread to create inventories of domestic life that looked both threatening and precious.

With the market boom, her career took off, and her work grew in scale and formal polish. Her floor-to-ceiling installations of self-portrait photographs anchored by braids of white yarn are fixtures in international shows. She and Mr. Wang live in one of Beijing's many gated high-rises designed for urban professionals; their joint studio is an antiques-filled farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, where, with a small staff of seamstresses, Ms. Lin produces ghostly — and expensive-looking — soft sculptures swelling with egg- and breast-shaped forms in pristine white silk.

Critics have noted affinities in her art to the "women's work" aesthetic of certain Western feminists. Ms. Lin, who lived in New York City during the late 1980s, would not disagree. And she acknowledges that women are treated like second-class citizens in China — like "inactive thinkers," as she puts it. Yet she is cautious about applying the term feminist to herself or her work. Why? The concept is too Western. It is too vague. China is not ready for feminism. China has its own brand of feminism. You hear variations on these reasons often, just as you do in the West.

Making the Past Portable

Yin Xuizhen is Ms. Lin's near-contemporary. Both are of the "apartment art" generation and worked with homely, personal materials. For a 1995 installation, Ms. Yin unraveled the woolen yarn from secondhand men's and women's sweaters and used it to knit new sweaters that merged the genders. She sealed her own clothes, including items dating to childhood, in a suitcase, as if to preserve the past and make it portable. She also began gathering architectural scraps from the streets of her native Beijing, as if to document and memorialize a city being destroyed around her.

The threat of destruction pervades her recent large-scale work too, though now the implications are global. For a continuing piece called "Fashion Terrorism," she created a miniature airport baggage claim with mysterious parcels stalled on a carousel. They may hold the possessions of immigrants in transit; they may hold weapons. We cannot know.

She, like Ms. Lin, is married to an artist, Song Dong, a video maker and conceptualist with a strong international reputation. In fact, a fair number of successful female artists in China are halves of art-world couples.

No artist in China has a more powerful spouse than Lu Qing does. She is married to the artist-architect Ai Weiwei, who was a consultant on the design for the 2008 Olympic Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest. Yet it's hard to think of an artist whose work is more different from his.

Mr. Ai is a conceptualist who specializes in controversy and confrontation. For one piece he smashed ancient Chinese pots. For another he disassembled antique furniture to make it unusable. On the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he photographed a young woman standing in front of Mao's portrait in the square and provocatively flipping up her skirt.

Ms. Lu was the woman in that picture. But her art is the opposite of exhibitionistic. Since 2000 she has made a single new work annually. At the beginning of each year she buys a bolt of fine silk 82 feet long. Over the next 12 months, using a brush and acrylic paint, she marks its surface with tight grid patterns. The results look like a cross between Agnes Martin's grid drawings and traditional Chinese scroll painting, historically a man's medium.

Some years she fills the cloth. Other years, when she can bring herself to work only sporadically, she leaves it half empty. At least one year, she painted nothing. But completion in any ordinary sense is not the goal. Whatever state the roll is in at year's end, that is its finished state. She packs it away and buys a new bolt.

This is private, at-home work. "I don't think what I'm doing is art," Ms. Lu said. "In fact, it makes me forget what art is about." Like Ms. Lin's early wrappings and Ms. Yin's knitting, this is art as performance and meditation.

Few if any of China's lionized male artists are doing work as slow, private and hermetic. And by no means all women are.

In the 1990s the photographer Xing Danwen, born in 1967, documented the rough-and-tumble life of artists in the fringe squatter settlement here called the East Village. Her 1995 photographic series "Born With the Cultural Revolution" examined the status of her generation of women: heirs of a Maoist principle of gender equality now living in a market economy that undermines that equality. And the work did so with a complexity that makes Mr. Ai's Tiananmen picture look like a one-liner.

Beyond Women's Issues

What has been gained and lost in the transition between old and new ways of social thinking, between collectivism and individualism, is the subject of her recent "Urban Fiction" series. Here Ms. Xing digitally inserts miniature vignettes of domestic violence and isolation into photographs she has taken of tabletop models of Beijing high-rises. The original architectural models were made by real estate developers to sell new apartments like the spacious but unpalatial one that Ms. Xing lives in. Many of the tiny figures in her narratives have her face.

Clearly art by women in China is not confined to "women's issues," like family and home. Much of the art is about excavating a personal past and bringing it into the present, and about examining that present and how women are living it.

In 2000 Cui Xiuwen used a hidden camera to film a group of women, most of them prostitutes, talking, applying makeup, calling clients and counting cash in the bathroom of a Beijing karaoke bar. The video, titled "Lady's Room," was censored when it appeared in the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial, presumably because it presents realities — women as active agents in consumer eroticism — that contradict a spectrum of cultural ideals about gender, from a view of the sexes existing in harmonious balance to one of women as subservient. As the artist herself says of the video, "You can feel that it is a situation before a battle."

More recently, Ms. Cui, who is in her late 30s, has produced highly finished photographs and paintings of adolescent girls dressed in uniforms of the Young Pioneers, a youth organization in China. Sometimes bruised and bloodied, the girls pose in what looks like the Forbidden City. And most recently, she has made pictures of older girls floating like somnambulant angels above Beijing rooftops. The theme of childhood and maternity recur almost obsessively, as they do in Ms. Lin's new sculpture.

Xiong Wenyun, born in 1953, is on a different track. She has a cramped studio in the 798 District, a once-hot art neighborhood now overrun by second-tier galleries and tourists, but her best-known work, the 1998 photographic series "Moving Rainbow," was shot far from Beijing and its art world.

For this project she traveled a bleak logging road that runs through westernmost China into Tibet. She photographed people she encountered, many of them residents of remote mountain villages, and talked to them about commercial development that threatened their way of life. She also took photographs of truck caravans and of shacklike truck stops that lined the route, after adorning both with fabric hangings keyed to the colors of Tibetan prayer flags.

A Different Role Model

Since Ms. Xiong finished her project, China has improved the trucking road and added a mountain tunnel to make Tibet more accessible to Chinese settlers and tourists. It has also prohibited logging in the region. As a result, the caravans and many of the truck stops that Ms. Xiong turned into temporary art installations are gone; her documents are what remains of them.

Ms. Xiong is well aware that "Moving Rainbow," with its blend of activism, anthropology and abstraction, is an anomaly in new Chinese art, much of which, in addition to being only obliquely political, is product-oriented and studio-bound.

Not all of it is, though. A much-noticed young artist, Li Shurui, born in 1981, began her career while still an undergraduate with an ambitious outdoor installation. It consisted of a long line of fabric cubes that stretched across a lake in a remote part of Yunnan Province inhabited by a matriarchal ethnic minority.

Although she has since become best known for her paintings — air-brushed, semi-abstract images of music club interiors executed in a pleasing internationalist mode — she stood out in a recent gallery group show for an installation work that suggested a cross between a Minimalist environment illuminated by fluorescent lights and an open elevator stuck between floors. Some people spoke of savvy references to certain Western art; others noted a vague resemblance to the shot-up sculpture that caused so much fuss in 1989.

A few years ago Ms. Xiao revealed that the primary motivation behind the shooting had not been aesthetic or political, after all, but emotional. She was expressing anguish over her relationship with Mr. Tang, which was going sour. What she was firing at was not the sculpture per se, which was made from two telephone booths and titled "Dialogue," but at her own image in its reflective surface.

For some people the significance of her action was diminished with that revelation, although to anyone viewing it through a Western feminist eye — meaning with the understanding that the personal is political — its significance increased.

As for feminism, Ms. Li, who is married to the painter Chen Jie, acknowledges the force of male chauvinism in the art world, both in China and elsewhere. But, she says, she is still too young, still too much in the stage of discovering herself, to figure out whether she considers herself a feminist or not.

It may say something about her present and future thinking, though, that when asked to name a cultural role model, she pointed neither to other artists nor to contemporary politics, but to the deep past: to the seventh-century ruler Wu Zetian, who through a combination of brains, beauty, unsparing ambition and tenacious hard work, became China's first and only empress.