The Big Trash Debate

“Garbage is not what we cast out, but the prime locus of meaning in our lives: we arrange our existences so as to make room for garbage.”
–Don Delillo, Underworld

So I finally got a comment on this blog by a Mr. A. Gerelle (thank you very much - and my email is mabz@bestweb.net if you wanna talk directly) who alerted me to the debate on China's trash trade that Liu Jianhua's installation at Shanghai Gallery of Art in September incited. Lisa Movius wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal and Shanghai SCRAP scrapped the shit out of it in an overly informed -in the stats dept., under informed- in the art dept. and belligerent in an all around, way. Both of these writings were considered for the piece below which will be published in both Chinese- ARTCO and English -YISHU Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. It is an interesting debate that, either way you look at it, points to a growing global dilemma where we will eventually be enveloped in the trash of our own making.

It's a very long piece, sorry.

Export—Cargo Transit
Mathieu Borysevicz


According to the U.S.-based Clean Air Council, only two manmade structures on earth are large enough to be seen from outer space: the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York. These two structures, merely little grey impressions from a zillion miles away, are perhaps the oddball duo that has come to define an important aspect of our current global condition.

It’s actually surprising that at the current worldwide rate of garbage production, the Fresh Kills Landfill is the only depository visible from the cosmos. In the U.S., the average person creates 4.39 pounds of trash per day and up to fifty-six tons of trash per year. China's city waste production is also increasing dramatically. According to statistics, current annual waste production in China is at 150 million tons and increasing eight to ten percent each year. This cumulative waste storage would cover an area of over 300,000 acres, and, certainly, like Fresh Kills, be big enough to see from the heavens.

The Fresh Kills Landfill closed in late 2001 after specialists looking for signs of human remains used it as a laboratory to sift through the charred ruins of the twin towers. The dump is now the resting place of all that was destroyed during the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster. Fresh Kills has been closed for several years now, but the citizens of the U.S. continue to fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth halfway to the moon. It’s an image that recalls lower Manhattan in the months after 9/11, when monstrous trucks laden with torqued steel became the ultimate caravan, testimony to an insecure world that lay ahead and, behind, modernity, rotting.

It is here, in modernity’s final crescendo, that a new epic has begun, what president Bush calls the New World Order. It is a world that is reconfigured in terms of terrorism, the global market, and the emergence of new economic powers. Yet what we have seen in the wake after 9/11 seems like an endless cycle of diatribe, extremism, consumption, pollution, apathy, spectacle, etc. A world whose ideologies, once containing assorted pretenses to idealism, are now transparently mired in profit margins. China, quickly becoming the world’s largest economy, is at the epicentre of this debacle. A nation that has hastily left its agricultural roots in the dust to join hyper-modernity and its discontents, China is the world’s last hope and biggest threat. It has triumphantly lifted millions out of poverty, entered the World Trade Organization, and will host the upcoming Olympics, all in a remarkably short period of time. Yet many ruptures have been left in the course of China’s rise to stardom. Severe environmental pollution, precarious economics, and an increasingly tenuous class structure have come to plague China and influence its international relations. In the conundrum of globalism, where boundaries between nations are evaporating on the one hand and nationalism is building on the other, China will have to quickly define its aspirations in order to continue its rise. It is here, in China’s ill defined but rapidly changing set of global ambitions, that the artist Liu Jianhua makes his move. In his last two installation projects, Liu Jianhua has confronted China’s role in the global market head on.

At the 2006 Shanghai Biennale, Liu lodged the back end of a big red shipping container into a wall of the gallery. At the other, open end, a landslide of whizzing plastic toys, tools, lights, and electronics pushed out onto the floor and washed up at the viewers’ feet. Yiwu Investigation, as the piece was titled, simply presented the fruits of Yiwu, China’s largest commodity producer and exporter, en masse to the viewer. Liu’s presentation, besides being dazzling—the kind of brilliance that makes the supermarket far more exciting than any art space—was also very pointed. The city of Yiwu is the primary mass-manufacturing base of cheap goods on the planet. Over one thousand containers full of this hodgepodge are exported from Yiwu’s shores daily. They fill up dollar stores, flea markets, and, sooner than later, garbage dumps worldwide. However, Liu Jianhua’s argument is not (yet) about growing landfills. It’s about the dynamic of the world market and, thus, Yiwu’s, as well as China’s, position in it.

The six thousand plus foreign businessmen who live in Yiwu testify to the root of this dynamic. Yiwu’s success is based on the outside world’s insatiable appetite for economical little plastic things. The market boats 320,000 varieties of goods from 1,502 categories. According to the Yiwu International Commodities Fair, there are only 500,000 varieties of goods in the world. So almost everything in the world is produced in Yiwu and then exported to almost all points in the world. Two hundred and twelve countries receive regular shipments of plastic photo frames, lighting ware, hosiery, slippers, handy tools, imitation jewelry, make up, artificial hair, and dry flowers. The U.S. is one of the main recipients of these goods. Chinese-made products have become so ubiquitous in the U.S. that it is not only rare to find items made anywhere else, but it may be next to impossible for Americans to do without them. In Sara Bongiorni’s book A Year Without “Made in China”,” the author’s experiment of trying to live an entire year without any Chinese- made goods ends in near bankruptcy. China’s exportation of cheap products basically allows the poor in developed countries to continue their materialistic pursuits. This is not only an empowering position for China to be in, but also one that puts the country in a constant state of compromise. Ever since China joined the World Trade OrganizationWTO in 2001 and began its spectacular transformation into a trade superpower, the chorus of complaints about its low-priced goods has swelled. China has been blamed for everything from the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., to using unfair trade practices to capture an ever-increasing share of the world market, to high levels of toxicity in Chinese-made Barbie dolls, Polly Pockets, and other playthings that eventually prompted the suicide of a Chinese factory owner. Not only does the world demand cheap goods, but it demands safe and clean ones as well. This is China’s relationship to the rest of the world. It is a relationship mediated by the need for need: the need for economic growth and the need for cheap little plastic things that eventually fill up places like the Fresh Kills Landfill.

Liu’s gesture is one that swipes the manifold arrangements of an increasingly accelerated global market past our eyes. The avalanche of cheap, candy-coloured items that he puts before us comprises the kaleidoscope of consumption, trade imbalances, and late-capital activity that has defined the twenty-first century. It also poses questions of civilization in general; for example, how did we get to this point? How is it that global culture is caught up in a bunch of little, disposable, artificialities? In the Biennale’s exhibition catalogue, Liu’s endeavor as artist is equated to that of sociologist or anthropologist. He displays his fieldwork not as documentation but as artifact. The evidence of China’s increasingly powerful role in the global market bellows out as harvested treasures from a shipping container, anticipating their exported destiny. Liu does not make a complete argument with his work, but he poses an inquiry. What is China’s relationship with the rest of the world? How is this relationship defined?

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure

In September, 2007 when the international art world was descending on Shanghai for the prestigious SHContemporary Art Fair, Liu Jianhua was busy answering the above-mentioned questions with more questions. Whereas Yiwu Investigation showed the front side of China’s exportation equation, Export—Cargo Transit, at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, shows the rear.

Not only does product go out of China, but once used, it often returns. In order to feed its forceful manufacturing sector, China’s recycling industries are some of the most competitive in the world, importing some forty million metric tons of scrap materials annually. It is part of a sixty-five billion dollar industry that employs 50,000 people. To add another twist to international trade imbalances, the U.S.’s biggest export to China is scrap paper, which, reciprocally, often goes back in the form of shoe boxes and other product packaging. It is not unreasonable to assume that many of the products in Yiwu are made with recyclable materials imported from abroad. While there are many benefits to a vibrant recycling industry, with a developing market and vigorous competition come dangerous loopholes that often produce harmful results. In the waste trade lies another complicated global dynamic that echoes colonial exploits of yesteryear. It is here, with site-specific poignancy, that Liu aims to catch our attention.

In an elegant, post-Renaissance building along the historic Bund sits the Shanghai Gallery of Art. Erected in 1916, during the heyday of capitalist expansionism into the far East, the building originally housed international banks. Today, the building embodies Shanghai’s new-found extravagance, a situation often considered a sequel to that turn-of-the-century jazz age. Recently renovated by Michael Graves, Bund No. 3 hosts such luxury stores as Armani and Hugo Boss, as well as Jean Georges Restaurant. On its third floor, in the exalted halls of Three on the Bund’s gallery, Liu Jianhua has installed over ten tons of recyclable foreign waste. Bound in stacks, scattered along the floors, piled under the windows, and pushed tightly into Plexiglas cases that line the atrium, this imported garbage is literally everywhere. Field recordings of shipyards and processing plants play from overhead speakers. A dysfunctional compactor rises from the mess. Plastic medicine bottles, shiny foils, fibres, abstract packaging material, shredded resins, and adhesive backings all congeal to produce one extraordinary allover composition. As in Yiwu Investigation’s wholesale market aesthetic, Liu once again, through the captivating qualities of industrial debris, achieves the dazzle that the fictional domain of the art space usually doesn’t allow for.
In news quotes printed on the walls, another type of garbage is addressed:
“Most of the world's electronic trash, especially old computers, is dumped in China, causing severe environmental problems and illnesses among residents...”
“Britain is shipping a record 1.9 million tons of rubbish eight thousand miles across the world to be dumped in China. . . . Campaigners fear vast amounts of the waste, including potentially lethal chemicals, are ending up in illegal landfill sites instead of being recycled.”
The quotes go on to paint a sinister picture of the electronic trash trade wherein developed countries dump lethal goods on developing countries, wreaking environmental havoc and irreversible health problems:

“Because processing this e-waste tends to employ very basic technology, large amounts of dangerous materials end up getting released into the environment. Environmental inspections have shown that the town of Guiyu has no potable water. More than eighty percent of the town's children are suffering from lead poisoning. . . . .”
The quotes are nauseating. Not only is this waste coming from so-called developed nations, but these are nations that have all signed the Basel Convention—a pact of wealthier nations that agrees to stop exporting garbage to poorer nations. The convention is proving difficult to enforce. “The waste is illegal, but somehow,” the artist fumes, “it evades customs agents on both sides.”
In his introductory essay, curator Cao Weijun equates the situation with a form of neo-colonialization. “Liu’s use of foreign rubbish has everything to do with the literal translation of ‘foreign,’ which [in Chinese] suggests colonialization and Chinese history.” This aspect is surely heightened by the site of the gallery itself, a structure that once banked the profits of Western businesses in Asia and that today represents the pinnacle of luxury à la Western name brands. The fact that southern Guangdong, where much of the trash trade occurs (and where the installation materials originate), is the same territory that once hosted the Opium Wars also helps to embellish the colonial picture. But to portray this situation entirely as a return of past exploits is denying China’s own tenuous struggle with economic development. Cao goes on to expound the dilemma as a cause for self-reflection. “While investigating the colonizer’s crime, to what extent is it necessary to review ourselves? From being colonized to self-colonization, from feeling the pain of the lack of our own spirit and cultural identity to deriving pleasure by consuming the colonizer’s food and money, this has been the spiritual journey for the individuals and also the whole nation” According to government statistics, China itself disposes of at least five million television sets, five million computers, and tens of millions of cell phones every year. Many of these, like foreign rubbish, once stripped of valuable materials, are discarded along riverbanks, polluting the earth and groundwater. While the global market for foreign scrap is dominated by China, it is in China that businesses looking to increase earnings violate safety regulations at the expense of their own country’s environment and health. But no one escapes this dilemma free of blame. Complicity stretches to both sides of the global divide. While Liu’s gesture is an open platform for co-existing debates, it once again raises the same fundamental questions. How did we get here, besieged by all this garbage?
Liu’s action is based in a world of art. But does such a discourse, in an arena of luxury and fiction, have any real capacity to affect change, and to what extent? Garbage, as political provocateur, has often found its way into the art world. As early as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it has served as an avant-garde destabilizer of the fine arts, bridging low culture with high culture and constituting one of the fundamental tenets of postmodernity. Marcel Duchamp was of course the main instigator, presenting trash with negligible transformation to a bewildered public. Robert Rauschenberg exploited its beauty as a means of formal expression. Arman sliced it, diced it, and sometimes bronzed it as a way to demonstrate against the useless waste of "unfashionable" items in the consumption-driven society of the 1960s and 70s. Allan Kaprow had his used tire installations, and David Hammons had his bottle caps, which copied folk artists from all over the world whose only materials were recycled ones. Certainly throughout Export—Cargo Transit, one cannot help but be reminded of Barry Le Va’s early scatter pieces. But perhaps more aligned with where this article is going is “The Social Mirror,” a twelve-ton, twenty-eight-foot long New York City Department of Sanitation collection truck reconfigured with mirrored panels. This piece, by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, was a highlight of the inaugural New York City Art Parade in 1983, and is a permanent, mobile public art work that continues to mirror our garbage-spewing society.
But for Liu Jianhua’s garbage, the most interesting thing that ties itself back to the art world is its newly contextualized status as a consumable luxury item. In containers marked Art Export, the stuffed trash prepares itself for repatriation back to its Western origins. This is part of Liu’s program, to see this foreign refuse re-enter the global market as a Chinese high-art commodity. Like much of China’s trade balance with the rest of the world, the country’s contemporary art market has been, almost exclusively, an export business. Since the early 1980’s, the primary patronage for Chinese avant-garde art has been from collectors and venues outside of China. This has of course affected its the development of Chinese contemporary art in many ways. Countless accusations have been made that wWestern patronage and palates helped to produce work that catered to Western tastes. Today, record Chinese art market performances have bewildered even the most seasoned of speculators. Some attribute this market phenomenon to a growing Chinese collectorship. Here, in this erratic market transformation, Liu also takes a stab. He aims to tie the market of “foreign trash” to the market for valuable, Chinese high-art collectables, therefore adding one more loop to the cycles of global commerce. His exhibition couldn’t have come at a better time. SHContemporary Art fFair brought collectors and gallerists from across the globe to Shanghai, willing to consume, some times, it seems, blindly, the next mainland craze; —in this instance, piles of trash.