Poor Liu Xiang, you can only feel bad for the guy. After years of being fluffed as China’s gold medal maniac he, ironically enough, pulled his Achilles Heel (held for so long by his metaphorical mother- China) just before the big relay race, throwing the entire nation into a state of psycho-analytical blame game. All over the media today critical and compassionate outpouring posed the questions: are we to blame?, is Liu Xiang a wimp?, should we feel sorry or angry or both? The point is there’s no way any individual can stand so much retarding pressure.
A whole year of over determination in the form $20million USD’s worth of endorsements, one documentary program on the guy after 10 news bleeps, after magazine cover, China’s grand embodiment of Olympic greatness, the man who gave even Yao Ming a run for his money as the face of Chinese athletic aptitude, crumbled.
Cest la vie – For me the anti climax is even more profound – and in The Olympics there seems to be a lot of this – I just watched two gymnasts fall… even though you know these ‘losers’ are going back to a beating from their dad… like Liu Xiang is getting one from the whole populace, the guy who hit it spot on was boring in my mind. The over dog is more interesting when he's the underdog in my mind.
Funny though that these two suspects, Liu and Yao, are from Shanghai- where I am writing this and where the men are known not for their athletic enormity, but instead for being sissies. Shanghai dudes are stereotyped as skinny, glass wearing pussies that carry their girlfriend’s bags, and are the ones in the family that cooks dinner, usually while wearing an apron, and then cleans up. The image of Yao wearing an apron or carrying his girl’s handbag is a curious one indeed. The point of all this is that China is still the undiscovered country, even by its own countrymen. The Olympics is allowing us to explore this terrain but even the Chinese themselves are pulling it out of their traditionally inflected, globalized, late capital arse it together as they go.
Just like me.
Below is the unedited version of an essay that I wrote allegedly for a catalog for a museum show. Museum show it was indeed – The Hammer in LA- but it wasn’t really a catalog. Turned out to be a brochure of sorts. Nice as it was I’d rather have one hard cover catalog than 30 of these flimsy brochures. I mean, whom do you give them to? Anyway since the essay, originally written for a particular audience, that is LAers, I decided to use some referents close to (their Hollywood) homes. I mean, in what other context could you bring Dr. Spock, Nixon and China contemporary art’s animator numero uno, Sun Xun together in one diatribe.
Either way the editors weren’t as seduced as I was by this dexterous display of pluralistic magnetism and cut out the Star Trek part.
pity Below as it appeared prior the slash and burn.
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NEW CHINA, The Undiscovered Country
'The world stripped of anticipation turns cold and grey'.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the sixth and last film based on the Star Trek science fiction television series presents the cast’s final mission together in what is a parable for the end of the Cold War circa 1990. Spock, when he confronts Kirk’s apprehension of dealing with the Klingons, makes an apt reference by quoting what he refers to as a “Vulcan Proverb”, “Only Nixon could go to China”. President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China was the first step in normalizing relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Just as the Federation visits the Klingons and awkwardly toast to their “Undiscovered Country” (a Shakespearian reference to death or an uncertain future) Nixon’s visit marked the first time a U.S. President had set foot in the P.R.C., a nation which considered the U.S. as one of its biggest enemies. This event, prefaced by decades of mutual demonization was an initial step in making these enemies face each other as human beings and helped to alter the anticipation of a world, hitherto mired in the Cold War’s inevitable endgame of nuclear fallout.
Nixon’s visit, albeit significant, left different legacies on either side of the ideological divide. For eight days and nights, American television audiences tuned in to a dazzling parade of images from this undiscovered country, the first that they had seen in over 20 years. Consequently, in the U.S., after decades of Cold War polemics permeated the core of postwar American culture, Nixon’s visit was triumphed as a diplomatic milestone - “The week that changed the world" he self-proclaimed, yet in China where the masses had little access to the pristine seduction of the televised image, Nixon’s visit was allotted a place in history as a brief distraction from domestic hardship and capitalist bashing. The president’s visit referenced by the Vulcans some several hundred, fictitious, light years later further demonstrates the skewed stratification of political memory. Different times, places, politics and perhaps, most importantly, media necessitate the production and consumption of a different history. It is in the contestation of political historicity that Sun Xun constructs his dystopic, multimedia world.
Historical Memory as a Theatre of Class Struggle
Eight years of Cultural Revolution after Nixon’s visit Sun Xun was born in Liaoning province along the north-east coast of China. While most of the country was, once again, in the throes of re-inventing itself - this time along the tenets of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening up policies, which declared “to get rich is glorious”, the new country that Sun grew up in was essentially the same old country. The effects of China’s momentous shift from socialism to capitalism were slow to change the proletariat mold of this peripheral mining county and so Sun was raised in the folds of a historical lapse. Propaganda still blasted from loudspeakers every morning bringing the factory complex where he grew up to attention just as it had done for the past few decades. Uniformed workers shuffling against chimneystacks and fluttering flags colored the environment of Sun’s childhood, as did reams of newspapers that disseminated the same good word of an altogether “New China” still in its infancy. As society was changing quickly the official mode for dealing with it was not. The same party voice propagated the same message but had little resonance in this new context. And so while the scattered visual remnants of totalitarianism planted the seeds for Sun’s work it was this environment of defective historicity that helped to form his work’s allegorical roots.
Sun Xun’s enterprise plies the uncontested surface of politicized truth with artistic means. By tying together the tenets of academic drawing with political cartoons and projecting them into the realms of installation and film, Sun’s multifaceted, imagistic world is manifest as improvisational theatre. His broken narratives, peopled with pedagogues as magicians and infectious insects that plague the world, work on the viewer’s emotional response to fear- fear of the unknown; of the undiscovered country that Shakespeare, Nixon, Spock and each of us cower to. But it is the ambiguous era in which he sets his stories that further mystifies the viewer. Sun’s world lies suspended in anonymous twentieth century eternality; a past riddled with legacies of modernity at its most extremes- a film noir testimony to absolutism. His flickering images crystallize into a gritty, dystopic urban overture to revolution; it is the Industrial Revolution as much as it is the Cultural Revolution. But Sun’s work, muddled in this overlapping and obsolete modernity, idles at the brink of revolution without spilling over. His aim is to scratch the surface of political history, a history continuously conflated into myth, in order to expose the past as being in a state of constantly becoming. His vision is the pregnant pause of mythology in the making.
In post modernism’s “crisis of historicity”, where recorded events are confounded by the pastiche of existing juxtapositions, the resulting collage is the allegorical enterprise of Sun Xun. Perhaps Sun’s suspicion of mediated truth comes with the territory. The China that Sun grew up in was in a constant state of re-invention and denial. Moving hastily from socialist bankruptcy towards economic salvation much of the population hasn’t had the opportunity to fully process the onslaught of novelty that they have, and continue to, experience. The physical, social, and cultural transformations of this New China have created a paradox where nostalgia for the way things were is continually negated by the continually new, and where the ideological imprint left by Mao has yet to be adequately filled. When Sun was still in grade school the “East is Red” changed its tune to “Balls under the Red Flag” as the end of the nineteen eighties saw the shock of yet another China. Taking the May 4th Movement’s (instigators of the twentieth century’s original “New China”) seventy year anniversary as their cue, students occupied Tiananmen Square in effort to reform what they saw as a government out of step with the current needs of society. The outcome of this standoff was yet another New China, which violently crushed individual liberties while simultaneously promoting individual wealth and unbridled consumerism. Today China is intoxicated with its newfound material salvation but has yet to comprehend its recent past, revise its politics or fulfill the spiritual needs of its people. It is in this erratic social transformation that a sense of collective historical amnesia has begun to set in. Sun’s work is an expression of this amnesia.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
A history buff with a tendency to collect anything old in print, Sun Xun was given a bi-lingual, turn-of-the century publication, “The New China”. This book, ironically written by an American during his ten-year stay in the Republic of China , outlines a dogma of how a Chinese should behave in a world that was at the onset of globalization. Originally employed as a tool for cultivating a new sense of Nationalism, this doctrine is hauntingly similar to ones employed later by Mao at the outset of Communist Liberation or the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. It is also similar to ones being employed in the schools of today’s hypermodern China. While the reasons behind the dogma have changed the principals haven’t “Love and honor your country”. Fredric Jameson in writing about Utopia suggests that today's historical situation requires archaeologies of the future and not forecasts of the past. For China this is an apt prescription. Today, in the third major power shift in modern history, whereby America’s twentieth century domination has instigated an accelerating global economy and the rise of “the rest”, China sits at the helm. But the political signposts of today suggest a potentially different future, one in which China remains a country that is still undiscovered. China’s state of indeterminacy is expressed as a country that prepares for a science fiction future while forms of labor exploitation reminiscent of the industrial age still blight it; and with economic socialism left far in the dust, Marx’s, Das Kapital, becomes a bestseller in the nation’s capital . Sun Xun’s works are utterances of the historical schizophrenia that plagues China- a nation that is in a state of incessantly becoming new.
1 ‘The End Of Utopia: Politics And Culture In An Age Of Apathy’ Russell Jacoby quoting Betrold Brecht, Basic Books (May 2, 1999) ‘The Fight for History, 2 A Manifesto’ by Kate Sharpley, a First World War anarchist and anti-war activist which proclaims that the bourgeois institutions of the State's cultural apparatus will always attempt to control and exploit the historical record for their own benefit. 3 “The East is Red- Dongfang Hong”, a Cultural Revolution song that reveres Mao Tsedong by equating him with the sun. “Hongqi Xiade Dan” Cui Jian, “China’s father of Rock and Roll’s” ambiguous yet hugely popular song and album title that describes his generation as eggs (testicles under) laid by the Red Flag of the P.R.C. 4 Movement set off when students and intellectuals rioted in Tiananmen Square on May, 4th 1919 to protest China’s colonial occupiers and the constraints of Confucianism in effort to establish a distinctly, independent Chinese modernity. 5 Gertrude Stein, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1924). First published in Vanity Fair. 6 The New China” written by H. B. Graybill Missionary and Educator in China 1914 7 Fareed Zakaria, Rise of the Rest, NEWSWEEK, May 12, 2008
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