This is me and my atrocious Chinese (not to mention the wackjob hairdo) explaining Zhang Dali's new, very hard to sell, series of Bronzes, "Man and Beast" in ddmWarehouse's booth at the SH Contemporary Fair. The lengthier written English version which has little to do with the work and more to do with a convoluted notion of power ... without mentioning Foucault is below.
That's Yanyao in the photo- He's ddm's backbone who is somtimes distracted by his responsibities for a very cool place to view experimental video (not only) in China- artmofile.com He's also running the renegade Yunan Documentary Festival at Zendai Museum next week.
“Oppressive government is more cruel than a tiger”
- Confucius
From about 2000 to 1500 B.C., a people known as the Xia dominated the northern regions of China. The Xia worshiped the snake, a creature that appears in some of the oldest Chinese myths. Eventually, the snake changed into the dragon, which became one of the most enduring symbols of Chinese culture and mythology. It was said that Confucius himself was born under the guard of two dragons. Like the Chinese zodiac calendar, which measures time in a cycle marked by 12 distinct animals, the dragon is an amalgamation of many entities. This mythical beast dons the head of camel, the eyes of a demon, the ears of a cow, the horns of a stag, the neck of a snake, claws of an eagle and so on. While in Christian mythology the dragon was equated with Satan or war, in China the dragon was equated with generosity, good fortune and also the supreme divinity of the emperor. The connection between the dragon and the emperor was so great that some emperors claimed to have descended from dragons and were said to posses tails. Anyone other than the emperor who used the sign of the Imperial Dragon, with its signature five claws, was immediately put to death. This fantastical national symbol, on the one hand representing benevolence, on the other hand represents the deep-rooted social/political hierarchy of Chinese civilization.
While Confucius felt that tyranny is more ferocious than a tiger he was also under the belief that the legitimacy of a ruler comes from his birth. The Emperor is the ‘son of heaven’ no matter what happens. It is only when the Emperor starts to act unknowingly that a new ‘son of heaven’ will rise and take over. Commoners are not allowed to rebel because they possess no divinity and their actions would break the Confucian Order of Rites. This is antithetical to the West’s idea of a social contract, a theory formulated by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes believed that the King and his subjects enter into a contract through which the people give the mandate of governance to the monarch. Once the King has breached the contract it is justifiable for the people to rebel. But for the common man, ignorant of alternative ideologies and subject to a strict system, the option for rebellion doesn’t exist. Confucian ethics, tradition, and history have molded man into a subject that is eternally obedient to the powers above him.
Power structures have changed over the years but the hierarchy remains. Where once the emperor ruled supreme, now other ideologies are in the mix. Money, government, religion, bureaucracy, corporations and markets have spawned irreversible structures that are far more powerful than individuals. Man has inevitably become the beast of burden to the systems he has created around himself.
Mathieu Borysevicz 8/07
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