So I am not going to make a truckload of excuses as to why I haven’t blogged here in a while. You all are very busy people- albeit with an occasional Facebook habit that wastes much of your precious time- and you know that it’s hard to do what you want to do in the face of all that you must do to maintain what you have. But here I am, a momentary lapse in responsibility and writing again. This lapse is due in part to the infinite variables of CMYK– i.e., I am sitting at the printer’s in some bumfuck, paved-over corner of Shanghai sucking ink fumes as I wait to approve another page in my ongoing Learning from Hangzhou epic. YESSIREE still beating that dead horse so late in the game… six years down the road - Ouch –I must say it all looks super fantastic – you know one of those books that jumps off the shelf and humps your leg! The making of an urban theory/photo archive legend for sure. Keep your eyes peeled for this beauty in August. Don’t let them fool ya - It’s more significant than ever. Even Rob Venturi’s office keeps emailing about the release dates.
Before I get going- I'd like to add that this blog along with all Blogger.com blogs have been blocked in China for at least 3 months (as has youtube and a host of other public access sites- but oddly enough my favorite porn sites are fully accessible)... so once again I'm a renegade blogger behind enemy lines shooting from the hip (but somehow can't upload images...) damn, Does it get sexier than this?
Ahem
So as I sit here dying of boredom and bad lighting I wrote a catalog essay for Dong Wensheng’s exhibition at the Iberia Center in Beijing, which is not a not for profit whether or not they say it is. I mean it’s hard to tell, like most of these spaces, where the money comes and where it goes… All’s I know is that they’re trying to save most of it on my writer’s fee and accommodations.
Dong Wensheng lives in Changzhou and all along writers and critics placed his work in that Southern city’s rich, Jiangnan cultural context. He wanted to be placed in an international context like most megalomaniac artist types do (only kidding Dong is a reserved, thoughtful dude trying to do his very best) so he hired me- big nose and all-to find that international soft spot for his oeuvre to call home… but lemme tell its hard to do when Taihu Stones and pagodas appear in every piece. Just the same his work has a certain gothic sensibility and, if you read my essay below, will find has references to some very classical Western motifs… which at this point in time belongs as much to Dong’s as it does me as it does some pea farmer in Columbia.
So I went to Changzhou to see Dong, his studio and chat about what it is that he’s doing and why… Criticism (if it even should be called that) is a service industry for a visual system whose self-confidence wrests on the written word … not that anyone besides the artist himself will ever really read those words anyway. Nonetheless, I have attached what I have written below for your reading pleasure.
I’ve actually been meaning to go to Changzhou for about 3 years now because the city is not only home to Dong but to Hong Lei as well. According to the two of them there is no one else worth visiting in the city – that is- there are no other artists in this city of 4million… except if you count the old farts who paint traditional Chinese paintings… then you’d probably count at least 100,000 or so because that’s the kind of town Changzhou is- people are proud of their cultural roots- I mean, even if they did bulldoze over every building that had an ounce of authenticity and erect a bunch of big blue boxes in their place, they still love that old time, follow the master-flower and bird stuff.
Hong Lei is an old friend- stretching back to’95 when he lived in Beijing for a stint to escape his wife for a while and ran into me one rainy night at Han Lei’s Alienation opening in Ritan park. Hong Lei is one of the pioneers of the conceptual photography movement in the mid/late 90’s employing conceptual strategies to classical themes. He was (one of) the first to use the circular print technique to emulate the Chinese flower and bird painting tradition. But Hong’s birds were almost all dead, laying in pools of blood, crushed, strangled by pearl necklaces, deserted dead birdies. Like Dong (who was a student of Hong Lei’s) Hong’s work is most usually and accurately framed in the Southern classical aesthetic and tradition that is called Jiangnan (lit. south of the river – greater regional Hangzhou where the capital moved in the late Qing Dynasty after the Mongols bombarded the hell out of Kaifeng). Hong Lei himself plays up his literati affections, sometimes a little too much – text messaging in complicated characters, practicing calligraphy, growing bamboo, reading ancient poetry and drinking copious amounts of tea. Besides all that he’s just another shaved head, black Tshirt wearing Chinese artist.
Changzhou is one hour and 15min south of Shanghai by fast train. It lies between Suzhou and Nanjing, two distinctly Chinese cities that are known for their history and/or charm. But the whole Yangtze River Delta to which these cities belong, is an accelerated organism, urbanizing at 40% annually. The entire hour+ ride was paralleled by continual construction out both sides of the window: bridges, buildings and factories slowly engulfing what was once fertile farmland. Inside the train a couple on my left was wavering between sucking on some XLarge Fantas and pushing mayonnaise steeped, KFC sandwiches into their faces. On my right a young man was giggling along to an episode of Friends on his laptop. I sat there reading about Jiangnan culture and trying to figure out where the hell am I? Where the hell am I going? Where the hell have we been?
I was going to Changzhou to see both Dong and Hong. Hong, being the elder, insisted that I spend most of my time hanging in his studio, which was fine for me and for Dong too because we were both dreading the dire task of trying to be intelligent enough to figure out what his art what about. Hong’s studio was in a three-story villa (an independent western style house that, situated in a complex with other such houses, very much resembles any Southern California suburb) but Hong’s studio only occupied the ground floor, leaving the palatial upper floors empty. Even after renovating the entire house, complete with cast iron bathtubs and tiles imported from Spain, the man chose to leave the upstairs vacant... Anyway as I was getting high on all the red tea that Hong Lei was pouring and listening to a story about a semi famous writer friend of theirs that went mad and attempted suicide twice- the 2nd time she had second thoughts, hanging there on the noose, and proceeded to use her cigarette lighter to burn the rope and her face along with it and now she’s scarred for life- I noticed that Hong Lei had a Zhou Chunya print, slipped down and slightly warping out of the frame, and little dog sculpture which sat next to a miniature Duchamp bicycle wheel and a small Taihu stone on a long shelf. The conversation about the writer continued – she was once at a party wearing a black armband to commemorate her mother’s death. When asked how her mom died it turned out her father beat her to death with a hammer. It turns out that semi-famous writer woman bedded a bunch of famous Sichuanese painters whose names and record-breaking auction prices will not be mentioned.
Later that night at dinner we were accompanied by a surprise guest- a new acquaintance/friend of Dong’s who he met during his opening at in Beijing. The friend was a lawyer who consulted large companies during the day and practiced human rights in his spare time. He was enthralled with the contemporary art world and wanted to join along in the fun. He made a special trip to Changzhou to discuss his master plan with Dong and, inadvertently, us- The idea was that he was going to commemorate the fate of Yang Jiia who has become a hero for human rights in China. The official story is a bit convoluted. After being detained and allegedly beaten by cops for riding an unlicensed bike Yang went on a stabbing spree leaving 6 cops killed and four wounded. Somehow he has become the poster boy for police injustice in China.
Anyway our lawyer friend thought that if made a plexiglass sculpture of himself kneeled down like a prisoner in custody, and place this sculpture in front of the police station in which all of the above atrocities occurred, that somehow it would affect change in police tactics and civilian awareness. We –Dong, Hong and myself- all uniformly agreed that lawyers should have a surfeit of other, more compelling, devices up their sleeves than this very fart of an art idea. As the conversation continued art seemed more and more impotent in the face of stark social/political realities, but this guy’s enthusiasm for making a sculpture- an inanimate hunk piece of plastic- was astounding. Frustrated artists abound while the pleased ones persevere in vain.
That night Dong and I stayed up late in interview mode: why, what, who, etc. Drinking way too much tea for a good night’s sleep and way too many details for an essay that I already knew what I would write. Then we went to eat again, which is the usual nightlife custom.
The next day, while Dong and I waited for Hong to get his ass out of bed, we stopped in one of the last remaining Qing dynasty gardens in Changzhou. Albeit a bit dilapidated and unkempt, the place brought you into a zone far from the fluorescents and KTVkids that peopled the eatery were in last night. In one of the rooms of the courtyard homes flanking this garden was a Guardian Auction office run by a friend of Dong’s. They had just had a bunch of auction items on exhibition from the Ullens collection, mostly classical pieces -which came as a surprise to me that Guy and Miriam had the foresight to collect (and then subsequently auction) classic Chinese works. Apparently classic Chinese is a difficult field not because of the high stakes but because of the huge number of fakes that circulate the market. Apparently half the stuff out there is bogus. Anyway the moral of the story is that there are auctioneers everywhere, even in Changzhou.
Dong Wensheng: Corporeal Archeologies
Mathieu Borysevicz
Not yet originally published in a slightly edited form in Iberia Center’s Dong Wensheng Catalog; Yishu Journal July 2009; Contemporary Art Magazine, Shanghai
An artist’s body of work is like an ongoing conversation between the artist and himself, his interests and the world. Each piece is an utterance in a sequence of descriptive allusions. As time goes on and the conversation evolves, old territory is retraced and rendered new. Dong Wensheng’s conversation is continually expanding and retracting like a chest cavity sucking in and exhaling the air of life. Yet the gist of the conversation is one that the eavesdropper can deduce only from subtle and evasive clues. The conversation wavers between the poles of local tradition and universality, between nature and man’s desire to possess it, between past and future. His speech is borrowed from a myriad of periods and places: the idiosyncrasies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its biological experimentation, shares metaphorical space with medieval alchemy, an imaginary future, and the profound rift between southern Song dynasty and contemporary China, poised at the brink of globalized hypermodernity. It is Dong’s dubious relationship with the past—at once sentimental and resentful—that gives vitality to this conversation, to his work. Whether he chooses to set his work in a time long ago or in an apocalyptic future, Dong’s works, with their enigmatic arrangements and characters, carry a sense of prophecy, posing unsolvable riddles for the viewer like soberly reconfigured Tarot cards.
Time
In the sculptural work ID Verification Needed (2009), a headless figure, part plaster and part skin, is sitting with his arms resting on his knees. The suggestion seems to be that an archeological dig in the future unearthed twenty-first century man and his body has been recomposed based on its shattered remains. It is an allegory that imagines post-historical humanity reassembling its own recently exhumed swatches of skin. This work is positioned far ahead on the timeline, in the future looking back towards the present, as if it were an omen, inevitability, or anticipated sense of déjà vu. Entwined in Dong’s elliptical sense of history is a decelerated, suspended notion of time. All of his works are moments, fragments in a long, perhaps infinite, narrative. Figures sit turned away from us as if they are in a state of eternal deliberation; a crocodile is suspended in a booby trap that will never be lowered; skulls doubling as planters grow fresh weeds, little by painfully little. The works are like meditations, zones in which the viewer is invited to enter, contemplate, and cease contemplating. Perhaps this sense of slow motion is born out of the southern somnolence that is particular to the Jiangnan region Dong calls home. Perhaps it is the artist’s way of making us pay attention, a way of distracting us from our exceedingly information-saturated environments and getting us to ruminate on the prospect that time itself may no longer be a viable system.
Writing
Yet throughout Dong’s work the mark of time is inscribed as a way to remind us that life is inclusive; it is not always about the new and now but equally about the past. Our hopes and dreams indiscriminately mix with memories and experiences. Dong’s recurring motif of the tattooed man is one means through which time becomes figuratively written in his works. Perched on boats in rivers, ruminating in ancient gardens, and sitting together in conference, the illustrated backs of these stout men stare out at the viewer as illegible, iconographic maps. These men are not only emblazoned with marks of social identification—the misfit, the derelict, the criminal—but their bodies are tablets inscribed with forgotten historical legacies. Just as in his earliest photographic experimentations, the artist photographed the limbs of teenagers, self-afflicted with scars, here, body writing is used as a carefully conceived nuance that expresses both personal psychology and communal myth. In Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Illustrated Man, one man’s tattoos metamorphose into stories that probe the psychological effects of technology. In Dong’s world, the tattoo is an added subtext to an already perplexing story, often pitching forgotten but still-relevant legends to a modern audience.
Stone
The Taihu stone is another reoccurring motif in Dong’s oeuvre, and, like the tattoo, manifests time’s imprint upon an object. Long exposure to Lake Taihu (Jiangsu province) currents has sculpted an infinite maze of tunnels and indentations onto these solid masses. The resulting beautiful and complex forms have made these stones a muse to many throughout history. The Taihu stone is also Dong’s muse. Held in a skeletal hand, enclosing a meditative man in a garden, floating abandoned on a boat or on the back of a tortoise, the stone makes appearances in Dong’s images like a character in a play. Seen straightforwardly, the stones symbolize traditional Chinese culture with its artistic aspirations fixated on the intricate beauty of nature. However, in Dong’s compositions the implication is unclear. Rather than celebrate the aesthetics of this rich heritage, they seem to bemoan its historical weight, even accuse it of hampering ideological advancements. In a Lonely Rock (photograph, 2006), a vast lake frames the Taihu stone as it floats aimlessly aboard a wooden boat. It is a dream space anchored by the traditional connotations of this cultural icon. But look again far into the distance, and modern civilization, in the form of a telephone transmission tower, pokes gently into the clouds. In a similar composition based on the Hieronymous Bosch drawing Ship of Fools, a head surrounded by rocks floats on an ancient boat. In this composition the ship drifts forward, seemingly lost, without a sense of purpose. Aboard the ship the bodiless passenger is impotent, incapable of exercising control over his destiny. Bosch’s Ship of Fools was a playful work, showing the ship’s oblivious passengers en route to the “paradise of fools,” but Dong’s ship seems to have taken equal inspiration from Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, which claims that these ships were used as primitive concentration camps to dispose of people with mental disorders. Dong’s vessel floats endlessly from port to port, a human head locked out at sea bounded by the confines of tradition and his own confounded expectations.
Throughout Dong’s series of Taihu stone images, an internal narrative emerges whereby the stone’s cyclical trajectory—wrested from nature and returned back again—is traced. In the image A Day of No Significance (photograph, 2008), hands thrust a rock above the surface of a lake as if it were a sacrificial offering to humanity. Elsewhere the rocks are objects of human fascination, study, obsession; they even become surrogates for the human mind (Allergy Patient, sculpture, 2009 sticking out in place of a cranium and grey matter. In Dong’s video The Moment of Stone Sinking (2007) the Taihu stone travels aboard a boat, which the weight of it, eventually sinks both the boat and stone. The stone plummets to the bed of the lake, returning to the natural surroundings from which it was taken, like a caged animal released into the forest.
Dong’s latest video, Turtle’s Road to Homeland (2009) seems as if it is a sequel to The Moment of Stone Sinking. In this mesmerizing video the stone reemerges from the depths of the water, this time carried on the back of a small turtle. The turtle struggles out of the water and onto the shore as if at the end of a long journey. Yet the journey isn’t over and perhaps never will be. The turtle looks in vain for a place to rest its weary legs, passing through countryside and then the constructs of civilization, all along bearing the weight of the stone. The video recalls Sisyphus, the Greek god condemned to a lifetime of carrying a stone up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. In Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, the futile, endlessly repeated task symbolizes modern man's search for meaning in the face of an unintelligible, mechanized world. Dong’s video evokes a similar connotation. As the turtle passes through the grim, almost apocalyptic, surroundings, it stops to rest against the backdrop of the space shuttle taking off in the distance. Here, the space shuttle represents an accelerated future while the turtle, bearing the weight of traditional culture, can no longer move. This juxtaposition, perhaps a cryptic nod to the folktale “The Turtle and the Hare,” pronounces both disillusionment with the state of the world and reckless abandonment of tradition.
Garden/Grave
Dong’s ambiguous relationship with classical culture was established early on in his photographic works, which often saw figures situated in the Ming dynasty gardens of Changzhou. He used these gardens, customarily considered miniaturized and idealized universes, as backdrops for his surrealist narratives. In the current work, Dong abandons his role as director and directly enters that of gardener, cultivating his own small patch out of human remains. Part biological experimentation, part mysticism, these works speak to a time long ago when the pursuit of scientific knowledge employed methods that were at once magical, horrific, and barbarian. In the photographic works Yidam (2007) and A Study of The Phenomenology of Spirit (2008), unearthed skeletons are reburied by fresh overgrowth. Here the artist directly shows us evidence of corporeal inevitability while simultaneously pointing at life’s cyclical nature. Just as Yorick’s skull, accidentally dug up in the graveyard, arouses memories and a morbid preoccupation with death in Hamlet, the skull in Dong’s work frequently prompts the eternal question of life after biological death.
In another work the artist, taking inspiration from an antique death mask found in a flea market, sculpted a “death face.” Traditionally, the mask is meant to immortalize the appearance of its owner as the body decomposes, yet Dong’s frighteningly realistic depiction is served on a platter and overgrown with weeds. Allusion to John the Baptist’s severed head and a preoccupation with metaphysics are combined in this almost gothic presentation. John the Baptist’s head is referenced frequently throughout Western classical art, signifying his martyrdom and the absurd abuse of power that killed him. But in No World View for the Face (photograph, 2008) the head is anonymous, the signification unknown, prompting the viewer to construct an independent narrative that inevitably mirrors his/her own mortality.
This mirroring is something that Dong exceeds at. Each work acts as a mirror intended for the viewer to examine. Like Ophelia in Hamlet watching flowers drop into the water in which she will drown herself (or Dong’s video Jingzhe, 2003, where a noose of flowers is delicately constructed for the same purpose), the mirror, like the conversation, has many elliptical connotations.
