Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art From Different Glocal Positions

March 25 & 26, 2004 – China Art Academy, Hangzhou

Organized by Zhang Peili (Artist and Director of New Media dept., China Art Academy, Hangzhou), Lorenz Helbling (Founder of ShanghART, Shanghai, China), Laura Zhou (Director of ShanghART, Shanghai, China) and Eloisa Haudenschild. All participants toured Zooming into Focus at the Shanghai Art Museum and were then transported via bus to Hangzhou.

Moderated by Hou Hanru (Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, SFAI and Independent Curator) and Pi Li (Independent Curator and Founder, Universal Studio, Beijing) with works shown by Bill Voila (courtesy of Britta Erickson; presented by Eloisa Haudenschild), Wang Gongxin, Qiu Zhijie, Zhang Peili, and Yang Fudong.

Presenters included:
- Fan Di’an (Director, National Art Museum of China) Meeting and Traffic
- Hans Ulrich Obrist (Curator, Paris) The Museum of the Future – Art, Architecture, Science and Technology
- Mami Kataoka (Senior Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo & International Associate Curator, Hayward Gallery, London) New Media as New Experience
- Li Xu (Curator, China) The Relationships Between New Media Art and Museum Systems in China
- Huang Du (Ph.D., China) New Events and Culture Space

- Zhang Zhiyang (Professor, China) Where is the Space for Art in the Era of Technological Globalization?
- Rudolf Stoert (Curator, Germany) Switch Media Project in Thailand
- Gridthiya Gaweewong (Curator, Thailand) Regional Strategies and Global Impacts: A Southeast Asian Perspective
- Hu Fang (Writer, China) Pseudo-Machine of Writing
- Evelyn Jouanno (Curator, France) Under the Earth, There is the Sky
- Martina Koppel-Yang (Art Critic, Germany) The Pingpang Policy of Chinese Contemporary Art
- Zheng Shengtain (Curator & Managing Editor, Yishu Journal, Canada) Non-Local and Non-Mainstream
- Karen Smith (Art Historian, UK) The Future: In Whose Hands?
- Waling Boers (Curator and Founding Director of Buro Friedrich-Berlin and Universal Studios-Beijing) Art Between the State and the Market, A Challenge?

The exhibition’s lead title, Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photograph and Video from the Haudenschild Collection (2003 – 2005), refers to three major concepts quintessential to the exhibition and the symposium: Chinese artists’ use of photographic and video camera to examine the quick transition in their culture, the incredible pace of growth in China’s urban centers, and the current attention being paid to China by the rest of the industrialized world, especially the West. Most of the artists represented in Zooming into Focus live and work in China’s swiftly expanding southern megalopolises and frequently address those issues that directly affect young urbanites – the social impact of burgeoning consumerism, the meteoric rise of youth culture, the threatening loss of identity amidst the city swirl, the persistent sense of time speeding by. Exploring contemporary Chinese art in light of these concerns, the symposium will provoke a fresh perspective on China’s role in the international milieu.

About the Organizers & Moderators

Hou Hanru

Hou Hanru is Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of the Exhibitions and Museum Studies program at SFAI. He was also the moderator for the 2004 symposium in Hangzhou, China Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art From Different Glocal Positions organized in collaboration with the exhibition Zooming into Focus: Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection. A prolific writer and curator, Hou received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Central Institute of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he was trained in art history, with additional work in painting, performance, installation, and architectural research. He is a consultant for several cultural institutions internationally including the Global Advisory Committee of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto, Japan. Described as a significant international voice on cultural difference, Hou is the French correspondent for Flash Art International and a regular contributor to several other journals on contemporary art including Frieze, Art Monthly, Third Text, Art and Asia Pacific, Domus, Atlantica, Texte Zur Kunst, and Tema Celeste. Most recently, Hou was appointed Curator of the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, which will take place from September to November 2007. Other recent curatorial projects include the second Guangzhou Triennale where he co-curated Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization; Go Inside, the 3rd Tirana Biennale (Tirana, Albania, 2005); Out of Sight, organized by the De Appel Foundation (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2005); Nuit Blanche 2004 (Paris, 2004); and A L’Ouest Du Sud De L’Est / A L’Est Du Sud De L’Ouest (Villa Arson, Nice, 2004). Hou is one of the first curators and thinkers to examine postmodern issues of nomadic identity, hybridity, globalized mobility, what he calls “in-betweeness,” and artists living in the diaspora.

Laura Zhou

Laura Zhou is co-director and co-founder of ShanghART in Shanghai, China. The gallery was initiated in 1996 and it has since grown to become one of China’s most influential contemporary art institutions. ShanghART has established itself as a leading gallery representing established figures whilst continuing to support the work of innovative younger artists. As a gallery, producer, supporter, and point of reference ShanghART contributes as a vital resource to the development of contemporary Chinese art. Being recognized for its importance ShanghART became the initial gallery from China participating in major international art fairs like Art Basel and Fiac, Paris. Since its inauguration the gallery has established more than 70 exhibitions, and it enjoys the great respect of being among the 75 international galleries selected in Thames & Hudson publication international Art Galleries that features 75 of the most acclaimed galleries from post-war to post-millennium (2005). ShanghART represents over 40 of China most talented artists working with different media ranging from painting and sculpture to video art and performance. Since its founding, ShanghART has supported multiple, international programs and projects.

Pi Li

Pi Li, born in 1974, has constantly changed his career direction in recent years. He was once the Art Director for the Chinese Contemporary Art Award sponsored by Uli Sigg. He also showed up in the Cannes International Film Festival as the producer of the Chinese movie Shanghai Dream. After over one year of operation, the U Studio (now named Boers-Li Gallery), founded in 2005 with curator Waling Boers, has also changed its direction. Now Pi Li decides to develop whole-heartedly the studio into a commercial gallery, and he has opened up a 100-square-meter affiliated exhibition area beside the main hall to promote the experimental solo exhibitions. The once mixed-orientated U Studio finally begins to transform into a professional gallery. The gallery represents a selective group of internationally operating artists. The gallery program is not media-specific, and includes installation, sculpture, painting, works on paper, audio work, photography, video, film, performance, and digital art. Each year, approximately six major solo exhibitions are organized, along with an irregular number of smaller solo and group exhibitions. Boers-Li emphasizes its support for the production of new and experimental work, utilizing its unique position both at home and abroad to open new pathways for artistic development. The program focuses on new developments in international art, as well as on the changing contemporary positions of established or older-generation artists. In addition, Boers-Li participates in a selection of both Chinese and international art fairs. The program also includes the publication of catalogs, both to accompany major solo exhibitions and to offer retrospectives on our artists. Click here to visit Boers-Li Gallery’s website.

Zhang Peili

Zhang Peili (b. 1957, China) lives and works in Hangzhou. In 1984 he obtained his BA in oil painting from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Today he remains one of China’s foremost video artist and his been shown in galleries throughout the world. He has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Venice Biennale. For a Chinese-born artist who still lives in his hometown, Zhang Peili has been represented in a remarkable number of international exhibitions. In just over two years, his work has been seen in several high-profile Asian-themed group shows–including “Cities on the Move” and “Inside Out: New Chinese Art”–as well as at the Basel art fair and the most recent Sydney and Venice biennials. He also bears the distinction of being the first Chinese artist to have an installation piece collected by MOMA (where he had a project show last summer).

Marking many important milestones, Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection (2003 – 2005) was the first exhibition of its kind in San Diego and Singapore and the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first time the Shanghai Art Museum exhibited works on contemporary Chinese video and photography from a private collection and most importantly, it was the first retrospective exhibition of Chinese photography and video ever held at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

Zooming into Focus investigated the effects of accelerated change in China through the work of the country’s most talented emerging artists. The swift transformation of Chinese culture is reflected in the work of each of these represented artists who comment on contemporary Chinese urban life with intelligence, wit, foreboding and nostalgia.

The works of Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Hong Hao, Hu Jieming, Kan Xuan, Lui Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Tang Maohong, Wang Youshen, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhao Bandi, Zheng Gougu and Zhu Jia were included in this exhibitions. Other artists in the collection include Gu Dexin, Hai Bo, Wang Jin, Zhou Tiehai, Yu Youhan, and Zhao Nengzhi.

Lorenz Helbling and Laura Zhou supported all exhibitions and organized the Hangzhou symposium at the China Art Academy. Shi Yong was responsible for designing the Zooming into Focus catalog and the installation design of Zooming into Focus at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

In addition to the traveling exhibitions, two symposia were held: An International Discourse on New Chinese Video and Photography at the San Diego Museum of Art and Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art from Different Glocal Positions at the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. Participants included Xu Bing, Waling Boers, Fan Di’an, Huang Du, Britta Erickson, Hu Fang, Yang Fudong, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Wang Gogxin, Hou Hanru, Betti-Sue Hertz, Xu Jiang, Evelyne Jouanno, Mami Kataoka, Martina Koppel-Yang, Pi Li, Barbara London, Zhang Peili, Christopher Phillips, Zheng Shengtain, Karen Smith, Rudolf Stoert, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Li Xianyang, Li Xu, Mo Zhelan, and Qiu Zhijie.

The haudenschildGarage launched their residency program in 2003 which invited Chinese artists and curators for the first time to the United States. Shi Yong and Yang Zhenzhong were the first artists in residence and Hou Hanru, Cao Fei, Yong Fudong, Laura Zhou, Lorenz Helbling, Evelyn Jouanno, and Victoria Lu were also invited to the Garage. Both Shi Yong and Yang Zhenzhong produced new works commissioned by the haudenschildGarage while in residence.

It was in 1988 when Zhang Peili realized his 30 X 30, one of the first examples of Chinese video art. 30 X 30, a two hour sequence showing the artist breaking and reassembling a mirror over and over again, with its sobriety and its obvious Chan-Buddhist absurdity – at the time called grey humor – is not only typical of the contemporary Chinese art of the late 1980s, but also shows the main characteristics of early Chinese video art. Fixed camera positions, endlessly drawn out shots, underlying the absurdity and strangeness of the image or performance documented, or again the medium of the video installation, typical of Zhang’s later works, were main features of Chinese video art until the middle of the 1990s.

Since 1988, fifteen years have passed, and video art in China today is as pluralistic and colorful as Chinese society. Next to Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, Wang Jianwei, Chen Shaoxiong, Hu Jieming, Li Yongbing, Liang Juhui, Song Dong, Qiu Zhijie, Wu Wenguang, Xu Tan, Yan Lei, Zhu Jia, and Feng Mengbo belong to a first group of artists working with video and new media in China. Zhang, once pioneer, is today the head of the first multi media art department at a Chinese academy, the New Media Art Center of the China Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou. Zhang Peili’s style, once experimental, today rather tends to be academic, still showing the quest to create a kind of universal visual language and to set aesthetic and technical standards.

The emergence of this kind of academism within the field of the relatively young Chinese video art guarantees the backing necessary for experimentally working younger generations. Since the mid-1990s, with more easily accessible technical equipment and information, video has become a major form of expression of young Chinese artists. A young generation primarily experimenting with video, film, and other new media has emerged in the urban centers, in particular in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. These young artists, mainly born in the 1960s and 1970s – for example Cao Fei, Jiang Zhi, Jin Jiangbo, Lu Chunsheng, Shi Yong, Weng Fen, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zheng Guogu and others – not only gained immediate recognition in the Chinese art scene but also garnered success on an international level rather quickly. Since the late 1990s video and multi media art works of Chinese artists have been selected for numerous international video festivals and have been presented at high-profile exhibitions, such as the documenta X in Kassel in 1997 (Feng Mengbo, Wang Jianwei) or the documenta XI (2002) (Feng Mengbo,Yang Fudong) or again the 50th Venice Biennial (2003) (Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Gu Dexin, Jiang Zhi, Liang Juhui, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Peili, Zhu Jia).

The Haudenschild Collection is the first collection focusing on Chinese photography and video art, thus giving witness to the importance of these media. The present exhibition features video works from the collection by artists born in the 1960s and 1970s and working in the Southern Chinese urban centers Shanghai and Guangzhou. Certainly, this generation’s enormous interest in the medium video cannot merely be ascribed to the increasing accessibility of technical equipment and know-how. Having grown to maturity in a society in rapid transition, where the fleetness of change makes an individual’s life’s perspective appear totally unpredictable and where omnipresent media play major roles in determining the perception of what is real and what is imaginary, video (and photography alike) might be a most adequate and direct medium not only to capture the overwhelming changes of personal life, urban environment, and of society, but also to convey the feelings of uncertainty and vagueness felt by the majority of the young generation. Yang Fudong describes these feelings as a distance to life that is evident in the videos and films of his contemporaries on a conceptual and on an aesthetic level. Alienation and perception are major themes, and the wish to grasp reality and take hold of this ever-changing life, is at the origin of the quest to integrate art into life, or to consider art a “by-product of life”. On an aesthetic level this distance generates a kind of poetic melancholic mood and humor typical of this generation of artists.

Yang Fudong (1971) graduated from the China Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou and moved to Shanghai in 1998. The so-called literati short films, as well as the Chinese cinema of the 1920s/1930s and the Yuefen-style typical of the Shanghai petit bourgeoisie of the early 20th century are important references for Yang. His strongly narrative videos, films, and photographic series can be read as allegories of the alienated city-dwellers’ lives. The narratives enfold sometimes in high-rise apartment and office-buildings, the typical environment of the new middle-class Chinese of the metropolis, the so-called “white-collar” (bailing), like for example in “City Lights” (“Chengshi zhi guang”) and “Honey” (“Mi”) – both part of the present exhibition – sometimes in a dreamlike setting reminiscent of traditional Chinese gardens and the Chinese literati landscape, like for example in “Su Xiaoxiao” (2001), “Tonight’s Moon” (2000), and “Liulan” (2003). “City Lights” (2000, 6 minutes, color) recounts the life of such a white-collar, performing his prescribed every-day ritual, sometimes feeling like standing besides himself and being left alone with his solitary but ready-made dreams of a modern life. The stereotype of him holding and passing on an umbrella occurs throughout the video. “Honey” (2003, color), evocative of some ominous spy-story, similarly is set in some apartment and backyard of high-rise buildings in the metropolis. The image of a young mundane girl moving from one place to another, or in the company of blankly gazing, discreet men in Mao-suits appears throughout the video. Close-ups of her body and dress might hint to the nature of relationship between the protagonists. But the story Yang recounts never gets explicit, only suggesting the possibility of their interaction through the creation of a never fulfilled suspense. Even though Yang Fudong’s works have a strong narrative component their message is never clear. Yang rather creates a filament of allusive images, underscored by sound and text, letting the viewer alone with a multitude of ambiguous insinuations that he calls “abstract imagery”. According to Yang, “abstract imagery” can convey the inexplicit feelings of the individual and engender a transformation of perception.

The transformation of perception is also a concern of Shanghai-based Yang Zhenzhong. Yang (1968) who graduated from the oil painting department of the China Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou in 1993, started working with video and photography in 1995. His approach is rather metaphorical than narrative. His videos often start from witty ideas, using the repetition of images and the rhythmic coordination of sound, language and image. “922 Rice Corns” (“922 ke mi”, 2000, 8 min., color) plays with the interaction of the image of a cock and a chicken pecking grains of rice and the sound of a male and female voice counting the number of pecked grains. “Let’s Puff” (“Wo chui”, 2003, Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennial) similarly starts from the interplay of two images: a young woman puffing and a busy street. Every time the woman is puffing, the image of the street moves away from the viewer. The rhythm of the traffic and the angle of perception are altered with the rhythm of the woman’s breath. Yang’s often playful videos could be called visual reflections. Individual perception and experience, as for example in his “I Will Die” (“Wo hui si de”, 2000), are the starting point for the transformation of perception, as Yang points out: “Sometimes I feel that if you deal with individual experience on a certain level it becomes universal experience. “That’s not to say I think theory is of no importance, actually art is also not that important, they are all the by-products of life.”

Guangzhou-based Chen Shaoxiong (1962) who graduated from the Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy is one of the pioneers of Chinese video art. With him, the concept to lead art back into life, or to consider art a by-product of life takes a more radical and subversive stance. As with other artists of the Cantonese avant-garde, for him the creation of an allusive imagery is less important. Being a member of the Big Tail Elephants Working Group (Daweixiang gongzuo xiaozu), called “urban guerrilla” by Hou Hanru , Chen searches a direct interaction with his urban environment. The perception of reality again is the artist’s concern. Chen’s early videos of performances, such as “Five Hours” (1993), as well as his “Sight-Adjusters” (1996), installations with split-screen videos, and his “Streets” (1997- today), a series of three-dimensional photo collages, tend to reveal perception as a conceptual construct depending on outer conditions, such as the rapidly changing urban environment. “Figure Anti-Terrorism” (“Huayang fankong”, 2003, Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennial), which is part of the present exhibition, is Chen Shaoxiong’s answer to the global anti-terrorism campaign. The computer-generated video installation consists of a chessboard – the figures are airplanes and buildings – and two video projections that show high-rise buildings in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou using different tricks to avoid the impact of approaching airplanes. Chen’s work is not only a witty comment on current events, but also a reflection on how the perception of the urban environment changed after September 11. On a more general level, Chen’s work explores how the real-time mediation of a real event that had formerly only been thinkable as imaginary redefined the limits of perception. Within these newly defined limits, video can act as an expansion of reality.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The subject of this symposium is ‘Predicting the future of art – local perspectives on globalization.’ I am not an optimist to talk about the subject. Honestly, every keyword included in the subject ‘predicting, art, future, globalization and local perspective’ has made me nervous, and I do not know how to take a stand.

‘Art’ appears to be the subject word, but ‘globalization’ is the headword. ‘Local perspective’ is simply in response (answer) to the possessive headword. Only when you are aware of the relations among those three words, it is then possible to offer ‘prediction’ about the ‘future’ of ‘art.’

In the subject, what does ‘globalization’ imply? Does it mean ‘the future of art being globalized’ or ‘the future art in a globalized context?’ The two implications share one thing in common, that is, we need, first of all, to make sure what ‘globalization’ refers to.

Globalization is an index concept that emerged toward the end of last century with the advent of the networked information era. It originally refers to the ‘technology’ on a normalized scale. The so-called ‘global integration of technology’ or ‘globalization of technology’ serves as an index rating the degree of global penetration of technology. Technology has its own scale and space. For example, oxcarts, motorcars, rockets are the most apparent indicators that extend time and space. Among water-powered mills, steam engines, nuclear power stations, the first two were recognized by Karl Marx as material evidence of the social evolution theory of historical materialism stating that productivity determines the relations of production. Scrolls and bamboo slips – movable-type printing, digital images are viewed today as measures of civilization which retell the evolution of means to deliver historical and cultural information. All these different forms of technologies have their own scale of time and space. The time and space where they exist or which they measure differ completely. That explains why Martin Heidegger made those odd statements about technology and space such as ‘the world worlds’ and ‘the scale scales.’ Obviously, only in an era of satellite TV, networked information, and automobiles and airplanes, it is possible that the globe shrinks to a ‘global village.’

The prevalence of technology has generated commercial profits which have promoted ‘technology’ to a leading position in relation to ’science.’ Much of today “science” is in fact played out by technology, which is spurred by profits. In essence, it is driven by ‘desires.’ The alliance between technology and desire, therefore, constitutes the foundation or essential requirement of modernity: technology and desire are means of self-fulfilment for one another. ‘Technology as desire’ or ‘desire as technology’ expresses the same idea.

‘Desire’ is a sensibility that drives and consumes, while ‘technology’ is simply the sensible fulfillment of ‘driving-production-consumption.’ Naturally, this demands technology to be ’sensible’ or ‘artistic.’ In theoretical terms, it is ‘the disappearance of the boundary between life and art,’ or ‘the modern romanticism’ which ’saves human nature by making technology artistic in an age of technology.’

For example, globalization of technology comes with a uniformity or homogeneity in life style, making the quality of desire homogeneous. Computers, networked information, videos, rock’n'roll, automobiles, McDonalds, fashion models and beauty pageants have become the symbols of modernity of a nation or a city. Under such symbols, everything can be shown on the stage, from personal privacy to election campaigns. ‘To show’ is to make desire a technology that is artistically presentable. Art is returned straight to stimulative sensibility or sensible stimulation.

Technology has also been extended in meaning. Technology derived from natural science or based on the level of skill and precision required in daily work should be the original meaning of technology. In ancient times, the word ‘technique’ was used more frequently until replaced with the word ‘technology’ which weighs more on science. Then it kept extending into the realm of means to all ends, where measures, procedures, modes all became part of technology. Eventually it ended up as a way of thinking that takes in utility and utilitarian. Everything is ‘calculated’ or ‘measured.’ In this sense, we may say, almost without any exaggeration, that a modern person is a ‘person of technology.’ Under the assumption of this kind of extension of meaning, it appears natural that art will be globalized along with the globalization of technology. Is it true that today’s dream fabricators in Hollywood are leading the trend of globalization of the film industry?

To support this view as evidenced by ‘new media visual art’ that relies heavily on new technologies, there is another cognitive ‘principle of sufficient reason’ which argues that: Globalization does not equal conformity. As long as it is not conforming, ‘national art’ will not be harmed. In fact, new technology such as ‘visual media’ only offers a common platform of expression for national art. Form is separated from content. It is merely the container or package of content. If the content is national, a globalized or even conforming form makes no difference. Rather, it is a must for national art to step out of tradition, to move into modernity, and to join in the global cultural exchange in a globalized trend.

We are revisiting an old issue. That globalization does not equal conformity has extended the specific concept of ‘globalization of technology, ‘ which, in its original sense, should mean ‘globalization’ is ‘conformed’ by technology. This is determined by the inherent nature of technology, as illustrated before. What really holds up the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ of globalization is the dualism of ‘form and content’.

It looks like a ’sure thing.’ I would like, first of all, to raise a question: Why the ‘West’ represents the ‘world’ and the ‘non-West’ is confined to the ‘national?’ This type of mindset is nothing but the product of the ‘modern expansion’ of Western technological supremacy. It has crept into the surface level of our consciousness to set up an assumption that predetermines a ‘hierarchical scheme of superior over inferior’ and compels us to accept it. In fact, the Japanese, who believe that they are quasi-Westerners, have made little attempt to conceal the idea.

This made me recall a 1953 conversation between Heidegger and Tezuka, a professor from the Tokyo Imperial University. Heidegger doubted the possibility of interpreting Japanese art with Western concepts as attempted by Kuki Shuzo. Tezuka strongly agreed with Heidegger in his criticism of the ‘metaphysical nature of Western concepts.’ On the other hand, however, he was puzzled by the inability to explicitly explain Oriental art for Western people to appreciate it. He also stated that, in movie guru Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, ‘the Japanese world was eventually caught in the object range of photography, and was purposely manipulated for the art of photography.’ ‘If I heard correctly,’ Heidegger asked, ‘you are trying to say that the products of technological aesthetics of the film industry do not fit into East Asia at all.’ The Japanese professor replied, ‘This is exactly what I thought. The fact of photography has driven our world into your so-called object realm. The objectification of film has been an outcome of the ever expanding Europeanization process.’ In other words, ‘The Japanese world appears to be European, or American.’ (see Heidegger’s A Dialogue on Language, from the Selected Works of Heidegger (Volume B), compiled by Sun Zhouxing, Shanghai Sanlian Publishing, 1996, p. 1021)

Some fifty years have passed. This dialogue, however, could be happening today almost exactly in the same way as it was then. The only change necessary is to put ‘world being Americanized,’ or, to be self-deceptive, ‘being globalized’ in place of ‘world being Europeanized.’

What Heidegger meant to convey was that the conceptual system of Western technology reasoning was, by nature, technological. To Westerners, it was not even artistic by nature. Rather, it tore down the nature of art, let alone Oriental art. In today’s world where people are accustomed to all forms of ‘technology,’ who cares about the ethos of art! As long as an inspiration is presented with the state-of-art technology and achieves the greatest sensational effect and creates the highest exchange value, it is successful as an ‘art’ piece!

Two hundred years ago, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel defined beauty as ‘a manifestation of the idea in sensuous form.’ I would like to restate this by saying that ‘art is a manifestation of technology in sensuous form.’ This should sound elegant and refined.

Or, more baldly, we can say: ‘Art is a sexual manifestation of technology.’ I am not quite sure if this could serve as a prediction as to the ‘globalization of future art’ or ‘future art in a globalized context.’

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have no intention to disrespect art, just as I have no intention to disrespect a flower when I say ‘the flower is yellow.’ Today, art is linked to ‘technology-desire’ at one end, and to ‘populace-money’ at the other. For something as splendid as art, I have not gone insane to the extent that I would dare to disrespect it.

While defining beauty as ‘a manifestation of the idea in sensuous form,’ Hegel concludes that beauty tends to disappear after passing through its three forms: symbolic, classic and romantic. An enigma about the perishablity of art was left for succeeding generations to resolve.

Today, it is true that art as ‘a manifestation of the idea in sensuous form’ has vanished into art as ‘a manifestation of technology in sensuous form.’ This is a fact as clear as daylight. The only thing left for people to do is to comment on it: Is it ‘good’ or ‘not good,’ ‘progressing’ or ‘backsliding.’ If the existence of art will disappear eventually, what is the purpose of making value judgments about its current function as the ‘packaging’ of technology?

I need to pause for a while to reflect on an issue: Modern romanticists expected not long ago that art could be used to save human nature in the age of technology. Why all of sudden is art resigned to be a ’servant-girl’ or an ‘apparel’ of technology? Did we make a mistake in judgment or logic? Even if some kind of art, or a branch of art or a section of art has gone down the road of ’sexual manifestation of technology,’ we may not jump to the conclusion that all kinds of art, or art per se or art of the forever future will inevitably take the same road.

Prior to any conclusions being drawn about the future of art, it is better to revisit the modern nature of technology and the true relationship between technology and art.

Technology is a process of implementing the scientific way of thinking as part of technological reasoning. In a very laconic way, Heidegger once epitomized technology as ‘the world as a picture.’ The world was first incorporated into a ’sectional view’ which can be produced, and then it was ‘reproduced’ as a world based on the view. Therefore, this age of technology is called the ‘Age of the World Picture’ (Zeit des Weltbild).

The German phrase ‘Im Bilde sein’ (be in the picture) means ‘to be in the know, to be ready, or to be prepared for something.’ And, the ‘Age of the World Picture’ indicates that the world as the entirety of existence is grasped as a picture, and placed in an objective process to be understood and reproduced.

Although the ‘picture’ is a ‘composed view’ for reproducing the world with specified purpose, production process, testing measures and security systems, it is visible after all. It needs to appear aesthetically pleasing, in order to re-enter the circulation process to realize its exchange value. Even if corporate or business behaviors from R&D to production such as planning, design, manufacturing, sale and consumption are still in progress or unfinished, they are in fact already completed in the ‘composed view’ which is clearly presented at a glance. Naturally there will be unexpected accidents which in principle must be excluded, either as errors or updates. This is the logic of ‘inevitability’ in the age of technology or the age of the world picture. Heidegger refers it as ‘two dimensional’ logic.

Who can assert that this process is not used in the production and consumption of ‘artistic pictures?’

Picturizing this age of technology or grasping the world as a picture is not limited to the straight technical level, but also applies to people’s way of existence, their way of perception, thinking, and expression, before penetrating into various spheres, primarily political, artistic and religious spheres.

Everyone knows why Hollywood is called ‘the dream factory?’ What cannot be produced in a factory that can manufacture dreams? The operation of the Hollywood dream factory symbolizes and foretells that the life of the entire human race has been grasped as a ‘pattern’ or ‘picture,’ and each pattern can be broken down into elements for easier composition and assembly and for quantity production. Such pattern elements as violence, sex, extravagant luxury, duplicity and abnormality sell well, don’t they?

What about politics? The life of the human race is first historicized, and then the history is rationalized as a ‘theory of progress,’ which is further labeled as historical idealism and historical materialism, or democratic progression under the principle of equity or freedom, or ‘eternal recurrence’ under the principle of ‘the will to power.’ We have lived through the ‘theory of progress’ under historical materialism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, however, the historical conclusion seems to be proved that the spirit of freedom finally prevails. It is said that the United States, in which God dwells, is the brightest beacon of the freedom spirit in this world. The United States unarguably becomes the chief of the global city-state federation, who decides between ‘the civilized and the barbarian’ and ‘the bright and the dark,’ and on the security borders of the world and who are ‘rogue nations’ or ‘axes of evil’ or ‘terrorists’ that must be punished or attacked. All these decisions are made beneath the most glorious flag of ‘freedom, democracy and justice.’ The way the politics work is determined by the foundation of political philosophy, the power of wisdom and force, which decides the value hierarchy. Being globalized, technology is the condensed manifestation of this power of wisdom and force. Is there any other logic that reasons more clear-cut and inevitably?

If the present and future of globalization are and have to be so, what kind of energy does ‘local perspective’ have to shake the world?

Not long ago in Europe, seven intellectuals including Juergen Habermas, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty published a statement to voice a different opinion by calling on intellectuals throughout the world to unite against the American hegemony and for an overall revival of Europe. As a reader, I wrote Today’s Illegally-enthroned New Chief of the Global City-state Federation (see Open Times, Issue 5, 2003) to express my own different opinion.

To sum up, globalization of technology should be a concept requiring introspective reflection. In particular, the concept of technology itself requires reflection. Even if technology is actually globalized, it does not give us a basis to make a judgment call or reach the conclusion that politics, art, religion must all be globalized. Unlike technology, politics, art and religion cannot satisfy the indicative requirements of global or universal applicability. If they could, globalization of politics would mean the globalization of American-style democracy, globalization of art would mean the globalization of American-style Hollywood art, globalization of religion would mean the globalization of Christianity, and so on. The universal applicability of the ‘utility’ of technology would become the universal applicability of ‘power’ in the general sense. In other words, the principle of ‘power worship’ would prevail. As a result, it would lead to, at least by logic, the conclusion that the most powerful nation in today’s world, the United States, should be the ‘monarchical ruler’ of the world.

In fact, we never doubt the appropriateness of this way of thinking to which we are accustomed: The Western modes of reasoning, technological reasoning and the culture it supports are, of course, ‘universally applicable,’ while non-Western cultures can only be regarded as local cultures which are ’specific’ and ‘ethnic.’ At most, we can comfort ourselves by declaring, ‘the more ethnic it is, the more universal it is.’ The sentence has two layers of meaning. First, as a non-substitutable type, anything ethnic stands as a unique ’special case’ in the world, such as the Parthenon Temple in Athens, the Pyramids in Egypt, and the Great Wall or Terracotta Warriors in China. Second, anything ethnic that is appreciated everywhere also includes, in addition to scientific and technical inventions, things like religious teachings of Judaism, the philosophical works of the Ancient Greeks and the wise sayings of the Chinese. So long as you believe in them, these ethnic contents perhaps can at least be accepted by the world as a ‘pattern of existence’ for adoption and selection, such as tea and ink paintings from China, wine and Impressionist paintings from France, sushi and ukiyo from Japan. All these cultures were originally equal. Due to the later-developed superiority of Western technology, however, a seriously skewed view has emerged: Anything Western is universal, whereas anything non-Western is specific. With this kind of mindset, we are for certain predetermined to view and think from an inferior perspective – ‘the local perspective,’ even before we start thinking.

In philosophy, the issue involves the ever-existing worldwide quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns and its underlying quarrel between the Gods. So-called Orientalism is, in essence, an Oriental perspective determined by the West, and a resentful expression of the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns and its underlying quarrel between the Gods. We have taken and followed it as a fashionable idea. It is not part of the subject under our discussion, but it has to be part of the background of our discussion. As we all should know, this is what globalization as an indicator of universal applicability, both temporal and spatial, is (or may be) all about.

Let us return to our subject of art. The similarities between ‘globalization of technology’ and ‘globalization of art’ have been discussed. I would rather look at them as partially similar, if I can differentiate the dissimilarities between them that are not overlapping or identical.

Now, we must focus on their dissimilarities that are not overlapping or identical.

The fundamental distinction between art and technology is that they do not exist on the same ‘plane.’ If they did, it would be impossible for art to escape from the logical net of technological inevitability. Even if the ‘plane’ ruptures and forms ravines, valleys or rivers, technology would offer all possible ‘ferry’ connections (logical reasoning) to keep the ‘plane’ connected and extended.

Fortunately, politics, art and religion do not, by nature, exist on the same ‘plane’ with technology. In other words, the spaces of politics, art and religion are not covered by the ‘plane’ of technology.

The questions now are: where does the space of art exist? What effect does the space of art exert on the plane of technology?

Where does the space of art exist? In Art and Space, Heidegger describes space in his usual visual way:

1. A space means accommodation-placement and congregation-shelter, while spatialization means exploration which involves ‘Ereignis’ or appropriation. This kind of appropriation always displays a double character, which is open and closed at the same time.

2. Spatialization opens up a place which is constantly in a changing and divided state: either welcoming the human’s fate as ‘a return home,’ or being left desolated as ‘not returnable’ or indifferent toward being homeless or domiciled.

3. Finally the space leaves room for a deity, which is quite hesitant. As ‘one God’ stands out, ‘many Gods’ flee away; as ‘many Gods’ stand out, ‘one God’ flees away. It has been long since this deity has hesitated or strayed. (see Heidegger’s Art and Space, from the Selected Works of Heidegger (Volume A), compiled by Sun Zhouxing, Shanghai Sanlian Publishing, 1996, p. 484) These three points are my selected rewording. the first point describes the attributes of space. The second point explains the relationship between the state of space and human beings. In the third point, ‘deity’ has already referred to the status of ‘many Gods’ behind cultures in a worldwide context. If ‘one God’ is given prominence, where should ‘many Gods’ of other cultures be placed? If ‘many Gods’ are given favor by returning ‘one God’ to ‘many Gods,’ how can the real, invisible spirit of God be manifested? Without this manifestation, will ‘many Gods’ be entangled in an everlasting dispute?

(Please note that the God here does not specifically refer to the Jehovah of Judaism, or the Jesus of Christianity or the Allah of Islam. I have to state that my explanation is not what Heidegger originally meant. It is rather my own derivative comments. In his minds, the ‘God’ and ‘many Gods’ may only be compared in the context of the Hebrews and Greeks. He may not sense the worldwide hesitation in recognizing that each ‘God’ behind each ethnic culture is part of ‘many Gods.’ There is no ‘one God,’ or, in reality, ‘one God’ stands for ‘many Gods.’ In religious form, ‘many Gods’ can be seen in a sense as ‘the hiding of God,’ which are idolized to represent the need of national interest. In a post-religious era, what is revealed through catastrophes is the approaching by ‘many Gods’ to their own boundaries to listen to the call of the ‘Invisible God’ and take the road of religious neutralization.)

Heidegger specifically differentiates the space of art and the space of technology.

He stated that the ever expanding technology and technology reasoning have nurtured a concept, which looks at the ‘manageable and usable’ space as the only real space. Human beings are dwelling in this increasingly ‘demanding’ space of technology. In response to this idea, Heidegger points out the availability of other spaces, such as ‘the space of art’ and ‘the space of daily action and interaction.’ Citing sculpture as an example, he describes the three-layered space presented in sculpture:

the space of the imitated object;

the space of the sculptured shape;

the space existing as a ‘void’ internal or external of the sculpture.

‘Are these three spaces, unified in their interplay, always simply a derivative of some physical or technological space?’ Heidegger asked. (Ibid p. 483.)

I would like to present it in a different way.

‘The space of the imitated object’ can be called ‘the space of nature,’ referring to the ‘imitated form of the object.’ It is not the ‘object,’ nor just the ‘imitation’ per se. Rather, it is an established ‘interplay.’

‘The space of the sculptured shape can be called ‘the space of shape’ or ‘the space of inner shape,’ referring to the ‘interplay’ of artistic factors related to sculptural art itself.

‘The space existing as a void’ internal or external of the sculpture’ can be called ‘the space of freedom,’ primarily referring to the ‘interplay,’ other than the above-mentioned, with ‘implication of sensitivity’ or ’sensitivity and implication,’ including the self revelatory ‘game of hearing’ in relation to the transcendent ‘realm of deity.’

To be frank, each layer of space only opens to perceptive beings. As for the flow of perception, it totally depends on personal fate, as initially illustrated by Heidegger in terms of the ‘attributes,’ ’state’ and ‘deity’ of space.

Anyone who is perceptive to films and videos should have no difficulty in perceiving Heidegger’s theory of space. Let us take Heroes directed by Zhang Yimou as an example:

The sword is a metaphor of ‘war’ and ‘the will to power.’

Incidents involving the sword space of nature

Self-manifestation of the sword space of shape

The art of swordplay space of freedom

Where shall we draw the boundaries of the realm of the art of swordplay? Along the line of vassal feudalism such as the six warring states including Yan and Zhao (‘many Gods’), or along the line of unified monarchy ruled by a heavenly son such as Qin (‘one God’), or along the line of ‘the invisible void’ (the ‘Invisible God’ that neutralizes many Gods The invisible governs the visible, and the causeless tells the truth of everything.’ This is my local perspective)? It all depends on how far the fate of perceivers could, or be allowed to, go. Someone’s fate might be superior to others, but within a specific environment or historical context, people might have no choice, but have to do what they have to do. As an individual, one could be detached from reality. As a nation and a country, one sometimes has to face the very basic choice between existence and non-existence, for example, the Anti-Japanese War that China had to fight.

Can today’s world accept and worship one of the ‘many Gods’ as the ‘one God?’

If not, does it suggest that the discord between ‘many Gods’ will go on forever?

Or, alternatively, will they take the ultimate revelation of the ‘invisible deity’ by going down the road of neutralization?

The three-layered space opened by the art of swordplay definitely implies more leeway. Whether people gave negative opinions of the film Heroes as they viewed the first Emperor of Qin as today’s ‘dictator’ or applauded the film for their belief that today’s ‘reunification’ is China’s ultimate destiny, they might have confined the space of art the film should have.

Similarly, in today’s world, any country, nation or culture can only be one of the ‘many Gods.’ All three great monotheisms are simply part of ‘many Gods.’ To end the conflicting situation caused by the discord between ‘many Gods,’ the solution cannot be obtained by some nation believing that they have the power to make people worship ‘one God.’ A neutralized solution that keeps the world ‘in harmony but not uniformity’ is only possible if each of us walk to our own boundaries to listen to the revelation of the ‘Invisible God’ in a self-disciplined way.

This is called ‘penetrating its height and brilliance to follow the course of the actualization of the Mean.’

In China’s space of art, there exists, of course, the realm ‘penetrating its height and brilliance’ to reach the way of Heaven. It should be able to meet the other ‘many Gods’ at its boundary and exist ‘in harmony but not uniformity.’

What effect does the space of art exert on the plane of technology?

If we let the inevitability of technology get its way, the ‘demanding’ space of the world will be driven to a dead end.

A German professor once told a story: An automobile traveling on a highway somehow resembles the way modern people live. The driver is a natural scientist that controls the destiny of today’s human race. The highway represents the direction toward which the modern technology is accelerating. The entire human race is riding in the automobile as passengers. The question now is who should sit next to the natural scientist that is behind the wheel.

The professor thought the person should be a philosopher. I would like to make a small change and add the process of ‘election.’

A theologist? No. He subjects the ultimate destiny of human race to the last judgment of God, who is not in control now. A politician? No. Today’s politician relies on the speed and power provided by science and technology. He is too anxious to be the number one in the race to establish unilateralism worshipped by the entire human race.

The only ones left are an artist (including philosopher of art) and a philosopher (including philosopher of politics).

As long as the artist is not into ’sexual manifestation of technology’ and the philosopher not into metaphysics, it is better if they can blend together.

What if they do blend?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We may have no better alternatives for the time being, except to keep reminding ourselves.

Video art, though an exotic genre of art, is not merely a consequence of following the trail of western society. The emergence of video art in China or its acceptance by Chinese artists found a happy medium only after certain cultural conditions had fallen into place. Therefore, before we go into the topic of Chinese contemporary video art, I believe it is more necessary and meaningful to review the process of how video art appeared in China.

The emergence of video art was first symbolized as an objection to the realistic creative methodology of utilitarianism. The peculiar fate of the Chinese nation in the last century has forced the Chinese society to view art in a way of utilitarianism (for example, the concept of content determining form and art for the sake of politics). Such thoughts were established at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art by Mao Tse-tung in 1942, which were then maintained as the guidelines for the arts. The emergence of Chinese contemporary art initially challenged the guideline. During the 1980s, the work done by Chinese contemporary artists overturned the emphasis on the “socialist realism” of ideological propaganda. Specifically, what they were overturning was not a kind of artistic style; rather it was the cultural authority that this style represented. Therefore, the Chinese contemporary artists nearly repeated the overall art history of the west society within the decade. During the process, the style of conceptual art such as installation, performance and etc began to appear. The political events of 1989 caused artists to realize that within their society there was a power that, at least temporarily, could not be contested, and that they really did not have the ability to carry out their own artistic convictions. Thus, low morale, cynicism and malaise began to spread.

On one hand, due to the change of political climate at that time, the style of concept art was animadverted as decadent. All the channels to introduce western concept art were blocked; on the other hand, due to the long existence and education of social realism in China, artists began to take advantage of their familiar painting style to satirize the society in a tedious, boring and ridiculous way. They also adopted the popular commercial symbols to amuse the ruling ideology and formed cynical realism and political bop. Compared with 80s, no matter from the angle of cultural aspiration or the artists’ exploring directions, the early 90s was a time of withdrawing. While the cynical realism and political bop, though conservative to some degree regained a different fate in the 90s.

Viewed from the angle of economy, 90s was a decade that Chinese market gradually opened to the west. In the past decade, numerous multi-national enterprises set up thousands of representative offices or branches in China. While the opening of China’s market appeared rather slow if compared with the wishes of western investors, multi national enterprises were still willing to spend great amount of money to operate their representative offices in China. People employed by such representative offices with little work to do, foreign ambassadors residing in Beijing and officious journalists from foreign media together formed the channel of the communication between Chinese contemporary art and its international counterpart. As a result of Chinese nationalization process in the last century, there was no economically independent middle class in China. Therefore, there was no chance for the art sustaining power to survive. The fanciers full of political discriminations formed the unique channel between the Chinese contemporary art and the outside world. China as the last socialist country began to draw interests from curious art tourists and collectors.

Driven by commercial interests, galleries in the west began to go through such channels to introduce and sell Chinese contemporary art to the outside world. Such non-professional channels enabled Chinese art represented by cynicism and political pop to frequently appear in the west. In 1993, Chinese contemporary art, which features political bop and cynical realism, first revealed in Venice Biennial, which brought Chinese contemporary artists great amount of economic income and chances of international exhibition. In terms of the West, this form of artistic style, which ultimately points towards non-western ideology, established the label and standard for Chinese contemporary art, and initiated the process of cultural understanding and sharing on these foundations. The success of cynical and political art encouraged even more young Chinese artists to embrace the status-giving image of “ political dissidents”.

If in the past the artists had sensed the danger of art being controlled by politics, then now the cynical realism and political pop would make young artists feel that framed paintings, driven by commercial interests, would be imposed by the west post colonialism. Both above mentioned are based on the old style art medium and creative methodology (realism-utilitarianism). Under such background, the Chinese artists began to introduce and experiment on video art. Young artists desired to find a new art medium which will not be commercialized by west galleries and also poses a strong contrast to the official art. The medium will not only allow the existence of personalized feelings and languages but also be easy to use, spread and communicate. Under such circumstances, video art became their choice.

In terms of young artists, the time perceived from the video art leads more deep experience than the traditional medium. The experience will enable the works a strength beyond the literal description, i.e. video, unlike realism paintings, will not be fully interpreted in words. It requires audiences’ real experience in a certain period of time. Meanwhile, the interaction of video installation will invite physical involvement during the appreciation process. In 1996, china held its first exhibition of video art named “ Phenomenon and image”. The title could be translated as “ Phenomenon and image” while in Chinese, the title has more meanings. Video means reflection and image indicates response. The reason why young artists chose video as the medium is that the video art embodies “reflection” which is rather deeper and closer to the nature of art than traditional paintings. The curator of the exhibition and video artist Qiu Zhijie wrote in the preface, “the falsehood of historical determinism is to consider human being as a simple perceptive object, while man not only perceive and sense, but also imagines and takes actions to practice.” Obviously the equation is as follows:

Traditional media= reaction= virtual individual = perception= unilateral
Video =reflection= real individual= perception, imagination, action= interactive

In 1989, a German professor was invited to Chinese Central Academy of Fine art to give lectures. He brought 8-hour video art information, which included Gary Hill, Bill Violla and Matthew Barney. Works of those artists enlightened the two-generation artists like Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie to access to the complete video art information and realize the possibility of this medium, whereas they chose different ways. Zhang Peili is known as one of the early experimentalists of the Chinese contemporary art and also the first Chinese video artist. In 1989, he completed his first works. Generally speaking, Chinese artists in 80s were mostly concerned with grand narration of society and culture, which made them to apply the language style of logic and conceptualism. To be simple, Zhang’s early works was greatly influenced by Gary Hill and his genre. Such orientation was even more distinctive in his famous works “ uncertain pleasure”. They were going all out to distinguish video art with mass TV programs. Therefore he denied the existence of any traditional measures, sound effects or even the figuration of TV to appear in his works. Zhang’s style influenced many artists, for example, Zhu Jia’s bound video camera on a wheel to conduct shots; Han Xuan and Yang Zhenzhong’s repetition of the daily life. Similar while different to Zhang is one artist named Wang Gongxin, who resided in New York for a decade and was greatly influenced by Violla. The magnification of life subtlety resulted in unconventional experiences. Such means undoubtedly generated many works with strong visual impact. It is perhaps due to the different origin of Chinese and foreign video art. The origin of west video art originated from their rebellions to the system while in China the art derived from concerns on media.

Just because of that, younger Chinese artists consider them as “standard video art” or “insipid tradition”. Representative video artist Qiu Zhijie has been concerned about the possibility of video technology and the aesthetic value it brings. For him, the route that Zhang followed was to worship the west video art as classics, while on the other hand he ignored the possibility that the new, inexpensive equipment and techniques have brought.

For Qiu, the reasons why the early video art appeared insipid, on one hand is due to their anti-system belief, on the other hand due to financial and technical reasons. Therefore in the second Video art exhibition in 1997, the curator Wu Meichun wrote: ”the problem we are facing is not what the video art is, rather what we can do with video. It is still early to define the video art. Though it appears that a standard video art is coming into being, but it destined to be weary during its shaping. Video with an innate media is full of challenges, which is powerful and inexpensive. It is private and easy to duplicate and spread: it is both intuitive and imaginative. Under the instruction of such thoughts, video art began to appear three new development directions, such as documentary, narrative and interactive.

Documentary

In the mid-90s, the movie circle in China launched a large-scale campaign of “New Documentary Movement”. Director represented by Wu Wenguang emphasize the absence of photographer during shoot, and try to exhibit the real state of the objective revealed. Chinese New Documentary Movement is regarded as resistance to the grand narration of the governmental TV programs since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Such orientation leads them no improvement in the documentary language and method. To be strict, what they created is “real documentary” rather than “New documentary”. While this movement interflowed with the video art in the art circle and combined a “new documentary art” beyond documentary. Wang Jianwei is the unique pioneer in this aspect. In his “Living Elsewhere”, he traced the life of four farmers in an unfinished villa, and disclosed that the function of the villa was never fulfilled. In his works, Wang created a very “nonprofessional” documentary in which some of the images stand still for as long as 8 minutes. While for him, all those are quite necessary because his works is to conduct review of phenomena rather than simple record.

Narrative

As the self-questioning of the video art, narration is brought about as an element. Video techniques enabled video art to share many achievements with the movie aesthetics—all the time disposal measures adopted by classical movies is applicable to video. Moreover, the time disposal in the video has more flexibility with the help of digital measures: various digital stunts created various relationships of time dimensions and greatly enriched the tradition movie language. The involvement of three-dimensioned animation makes every whim possible to become a visual reality. All these endowed many possibilities for younger artists. Representative artists in this field includes Yang Fudong, Jiang Zhi and etc. From these artists, they received more influence from movie aesthetics than the video art tradition. And moreover, they are seeking more chances to shoot film. While from them, we can see a possibility of applying video to conduct personal writings.

Interaction

Interaction actually derived from suspect to video art. Will video art finally be devoured by movie aesthetics and insipid tradition? Will Digital technology bring new aesthetic values except better image quality and convenience? Questioned by that, video installation was emphasized by artists as a “right time, right place” art. Because besides the attribution of video installation and video itself, it also includes the peculiarity of the installation more than the sum of the two. Telecasting of Multi-layer monitors or various reflected images distributed in pre-designed structures have formed a three-dimensional dramatic structure. The Chinese video art will develop into two distinguished video installations, which will focus on interior knowledge and interior experience respectively.

Video installations focused on interior knowledge will appear in a specific scene. The video image will have some semantic connection with property and also the images will produce meanings. The property can be used to stand out the topic. For example, Wang Gongxin’s “Cradle” and Wang Jianwei’s “Screen”. In Wang’s “baby talk”, different facial expressions are revealed when playing with the baby. All the milk flows out from the mouth of the image and then circulates from other places. In the video installation ”Screen”, Wang discussed the cultural relationship of secret and disclosure and the truth. It is more like a visual version of “knowledge archaeology”. The indication of the two works are both wavering between vague and clear. The spot visual, audio and kinaesthesia experience sometimes transcend the original enactment of the author to complex and profuse imagination. Video installation focused on interior experience sometimes calculated the trace of the audiences’ physical movement in the interior structure of the installation, such as Qiu Zhijie’s “the present tense” and Chen Shaoxiong’s “Sight Adjustor”. Such works is based on anthropo-engineering, waiting the approaching of audiences from a certain location and route. Audiences’ bodies were pre-designed as a factor that will influence the installation composition and spot scene itself. The phenomena world established when the audiences are passing by was evoked as an interior experience rather than exterior knowledge.

Video installation brings interaction to the agenda and artists try to ascertain the possibility of the video art through the pursuit of interaction. While that is more like a bitter choice. The more you seek for interaction, the more you suspect the spaces that the video art is able to provide. Therefore many artists began to seek for other interactive mode beyond the video installation. Artists focused on interior experience began to abandon video art and hope to seek the possibilities provided by new technology. More technical and more interactive multi media art then appeared.

Artists focused on knowledge try to seek spot and social interaction by breaking the media. In 1999, Wu Ershan together with installation artists, jazz singers, and modern dancers completed “evolved knight”. If Wu Ershan’s involvement was not spontaneous but incidental, Wang Jianwei adopted a more active manner. He invited video artist, puppet players and performance artists to complete the play “Screen” derived from. In this works, the overall stage was a magnificent interactive work synchronized video, installation and performance.

Through the development of video art in china, we can see that a new era is approaching. The west video art originated from their rebellion to the system while in china the video art derived from their concern on media. The professionalising of video art was strengthened in the west society since the involvement of foundations since 1968. In the west, people isolated video art with movie, TV and photography and brought it to galleries. It leaded to the combination of video and installation. During this process, video art turned from criticism of informational culture to the combination of social thoughts, which in return bring the validity of the video art itself.

It is the duty of video art to criticize the informational culture while that is not all. Personalized manual contemporary art cannot dialogize the commercialized informational media substantially and nor can it rein it. Judging through video art practice before 1968, we will see clearly that the relationship of video art and mass media is like that of a strong fly and a fly flap. Chinese artists like all the other artists in the word begin to realize that they can only find their own territories and manners beyond the scope of the mass media. Pursuit of interaction is a forever dream of contemporary art. While we also witness that during the pursuit of interaction, like all the other artists around the world, some of Chinese artists lost their confidence on the media and finally abandon the media itself and turned to multimedia art, which is more technical and more interactive. Here, I am not saying that I object the emergence and existence of multimedia art, on the contrary, I am so confident about the future of the multimedia. While the reality of Chinese video art makes me ponder: The video art turned from criticism of information culture to the combination with the social thoughts in order to assure the validity of the video art itself. Is it the time to connect video art with movie, TV, photography and a lot more? For Chinese video art, it may be the time to choose. Do we value the video as one kind of media or one kind of culture? Because different choice will result in evolution and multi-polarity, the two completely different results.

My perspective on the future of Chinese art in either the local or global context has been directly informed by my experience as a foreigner living in China, within the local context, for the last eleven years. The conclusions I will offer are thus drawn from the rather odd position of being non-Chinese, with unapologetically western values, yet pointedly with the complexities of the local situation in mind. On one hand, by being an outsider present in China and directly involved with its contemporary art circles, I have had an unobstructed insight into the challenges that have, and continue to face Chinese artists in the global context. On the other, this role of “foreign witness” afforded an unbiased position from which to appreciate the significance of what is happening locally, in China, now.

The title of this symposium “Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art From Different “Global” Positions” sets up a daunting proposition: the subject is huge and certainly demands a commensurate vision. To date, the evolution of contemporary Chinese art has been dogged by small, complex issues of both global and local origin that have exerted disproportionate impacts. Where it takes time for sleeping dogs to be let lie completely, what does the impact of these issues indicate for the future?

To look at the future does first require an examination of the past. In terms of China, the past has been clearly divided between “global” and “local”: the situation in one being a catalyst for activities and responses in the other. Here again, to look to the future demands an analysis of these variant environments. The intersecting, interaction and even repulsion between the “global” and the “local” has been chaotic. As time passes, it will of course diminish in importance. But that is the future, and we have first to consider how the past has resulted in the present climate.

In regard of contemporary art from China, to date, the global and the local arenas could hardly be spoken of in the same breath. When the New Art Movement emerged in the mid 1980s, these arenas existed in apposition to each other, were diametrically opposed in many ways, and, at times, almost unreconcilable. Until very recently, this remained the case. Who, or what, is responsible and why? In regard of the big picture, the short answer is the China situation, specifically the socio-political history, against what that history, specifically the latter communist era, represented to the outside world.

On a more microcosmic level, within the sphere of contemporary art in China, the stimuli and standards governing the New Art Movement and all it spawned were in turn governed by the ambitions and the goals that the artists chose to formulate for themselves. Where the local situation was culturally restrictive, these goals were much in line with perceived global agendas. Initially, through the 1980s as Deng Xiaoping’s policy of opening and reform got underway, the primary goal was, to paraphrase Mao, to have the best of the West and be better. Artists felt this applied to art as much as any system of economics or social reform. It was a concern inherited by succeeding generations, which although might not subsequently be associated with a Maoist ideal, was certainly invoked to make China as culturally cool as any other first-world nation.

The 1980s were bewildering times, full of uncontainable excitement and then, in 1989, a monumental depression. Yet, even though the moment in which the art world in China morphed into a movement came at the tail end of an era characterised by political division and limited cultural understanding, by the early 1990s, there was almost a rush of grand-scale “China” exhibitions abroad. Each proclaimed itself a comprehensive survey of developments to date and was presented in a manner that paralleled an anthropological discovery. As one journalist puts it, this approach was “… probably the way one can best disarm the unpredictable fantasies that people in any country may harbour concerning others speaking unknown languages and living thousands of miles away” .

The “tail” end of this era proved to be very long: the journalist in question was, in fact, speaking of “Alors, La Chine?” shown at the Pompidou Centre in 2003, which in launching the year of Frano-Sino cultural exchange was required to both disarm and give credence to the fantasies – or reservations – the local population might have about contemporary China. In the event, it merely highlighted how little these had unchanged from the previous decade.

However, initially abroad, this approach was a necessary means of inciting global interest. On the whole, it was born of genuine interest too on the part of curators and host venues. The universal problem was how to broaden the curatorial interest by selling new Chinese art to the public. The assumed prejudices of China’s political regime against the rapidly changing socio-economic advancement offered exactly the right kind of exotic allure. It is hard to imagine how interest in the art could have been captured and sustained so effectively without the especial nature of the local socio-political and economic situation in China: hence the diametric opposition – East/China against West/First World – which was invoked as so intriguing a conundrum.

This symposium then, comes at an interesting moment. To have attempted a discussion of the future for contemporary art from China even five years ago would have revealed the limited nature of its existence in China and its global profile. First is that fact of the conference being held in China. We are here not only because of an exhibition, but to celebrate an exhibition of contemporary photography and video art: one that is taking place in the Shanghai Art Museum. It is also an opportunity to grasp just how different the work in the exhibition is from the approaches and styles which prevailed ten years ago, or even those which were present in the works created for the first show of video art, here in Hangzhou, at the National Academy in 1996.

Although numerous independent events have been held in China since the mid 1980s, contemporary art only began to nudge the public consciousness in 2000, with the Third International Shanghai Biennale. To date, this art has been almost entirely nurtured and supported by a non-Chinese audience outside of China. This was not without its problems. But until recently, without serious opportunities to speak to a local audience in a culturally-specific local language, the work produced by China’s avant-gardists was honed towards a global consciousness in form and vocabulary.

This brings us to the first of those “small, complex issues” that have shaped attitudes and practices amongst China’s avant-garde art community. As has been heard in recent years from numerous local critics, all too often this art was further accorded just enough oriental and/or political exotica to fulfill rather than to disarm all those unpredictable fantasies about China. The result is that where western critics were not convinced of the work’s individuality or style, critical discourse, so important for lending credibility to the work, to validating it for audiences and keeping it in the public consciousness, was restricted. A point I will come back to in a moment.

First to take a more positive stance, today, with particular regard to the local context, the situation is quite different, and thus suggests great possibilities for the future. To discuss the future in regard of China, however, is abstract at best, and encourages circumspect projections the only tangible basis of which lies in the past and the present. As just indicated, the present is already far different from the kind of projections that could be made in the 1990s, but in looking to the future from the present, we are being asked to speculate on possible scenarios over which even the artists have limited control. Locally, much of the future’s brightness depends upon political and economic currents; more depends upon achieving broader levels of cultural education and awareness among the urban populaces. In the global context, the situation is complicated by the fact that interest has proved subject to trends and hype and, in terms of museums and the market, attendance figures and profit margins. Each of these elements will affect the future for Chinese art outside China.

Even so, given the enormous changes that have taken place within China through the last decade, and the equally significant changes in western attitudes towards China, then surely, at least for the time being, we can anticipate the future for China’s contemporary art to be very bright indeed. Especially the future of the art locally, in China. Logically, in boosting local confidence, the fact of a vibrant local scene should also serve to bolster and sustain the future globally, and foster a profounder aesthetic engagement, as we are already beginning to see. Increasingly, from the late 1990s, there has been a move away from the emphasis upon “China” as a theme. Increasingly, curators are looking to what individual artists offer in terms of personal expression and aesthetics, and how these contribute to international shows that ostensibly bring together the voices of varying “locales” to explore “global” issues.

As might already be clear from the gist of my argument, seen through the prism of China’s dramatic rise through the last twenty years, there is much to be excited about in terms of culture. This period of opening and reform saw the emergence of the avant-garde – the New Art Movement, which will celebrate a twentieth anniversary next year – and its protracted struggle to become the dynamic scene that exists today. Here, under a debilitating cloak of invisibility, it managed to evince a high degree of activity, albeit confined to the tight circles of the art world. In particular, since the late 1990s, artists and curators have produced an enormous number of events in non-art spaces, public places and myriad disused buildings in urban areas. (A comprehensive list of these activities can be found in the catalogue of the First Guangzhou Triennial.)

More recently, in terms of the State, we are beginning to see the slack in the cultural sphere that was allowed to form through the Deng era being taken up by the introduction of real hardware. New art schools are being built, museums are being refurbished, the government is providing some degree of support and, more importantly, demonstrating a quiet awareness where it counts – at the top – that culture is vital to the credibility China wishes to attain as a holistic nation amongst the leading global powers. Here, the quality of the future is inalienably tied to the experience that is being accrued now, and how that feeds into an appropriate local system and infrastructure. A number of foundations have already been laid: biennials in Shanghai, Chengdu and Beijing; a major public art biennial in Shenzhen; a triennial in Guangzhou. All these cities now own independent art spaces and a number of commercial galleries that operate within greater and lesser spheres of influence and success. Increased media coverage across a range of magazines, published in the big cities, is also encouraging a flourishing proletarian audience interest, per force contained within small pockets of urban society. In addition, urban residential architectural projects like Soho New Town in Beijing are taking works of art by contemporary artists into the public arena. Contemporary art, thus, has the beginning of a tangible profile within the current cultural framework in China. When compared with the public face of ten years ago, the significance of this should not be underestimated.

So, to return to the future for a moment, my initial conclusion was simple: contemporary Chinese art is assured a future by virtue of the good future that seems certain for China in the wake of its continued economic development and deepening reforms. This brings us back to the issue of global and local, and the rift between the two, if for no other reason than because it still exists. Yes, it will diminish with time, but parties on both sides of the East-West divide need to consciously re-examine their thinking if they are going to make it go away entirely. We know that this “rift” owes its origins to the local political context and certain historical hegemony on the part of the global community. Let’s take a specific example: Through the twenty years since 1985, when the New Art Movement began, the China-outside world situation encouraged contemporary artists to take on an enormous range of ideas from the West. If discussing this process from a western perspective about western artists nothing could be more natural than for artists of each new generation to devour, absorb, dissect and reinterpret what has gone before. In broad terms this is exactly what the Chinese avant-garde did.

The results proved enormously successful – like those of the Political Pop school and the Cynical Realists. It is interesting to note that there was little interest in styles of art that seemed to come too close to those established by western artists. Here, by example, Zhang Xiaogang’s early Expressionist / magic realism work is almost unknown, whilst his “Big Family” paintings have subsequently become the most recognised motifs of contemporary art from China. Such were the aesthetic dilemmas that recognition and, importantly, commercial success abroad mitigated. But as China changes apace, so has the style and content of the art being produced. As suggested previously, outside of the acceptance awarded to a handful of individual bodies of work from China, international critical acclaim still clings fast to reservations as to the originality and authenticity of the work. Within the global context, contemporary art from China still contends with a number of non-art issues that if not addressed – or laid to rest – set the future in a delicate balance. The first is to challenge received impressions of China.

Initial interest in contemporary art from China clearly had political overtones. It was fed by the political conflict that was inured in the Cold War, and its conclusion: in simple terms, bye-bye Red Square, hello Tiananmen. The insistent facts of political events and the interpretations of them served to inform cultural outlooks: why else was the cause of the Chinese avant-garde embraced with such enthusiasm by the US media, making the cover of the New York Times, and several issues of Time magazine and Newsweek? when all US artists know how difficult it is to be featured in such mass market publications. With human rights on the agenda, Chinese artists were seized upon as the obvious champions of the individual and freedom of expression. This was a separate issue to “selling” the art as an exhibit to audiences.

One example is demonstrated by the headlines accorded Andrew Solomon’s 1992 article in the New York Times magazine : On the cover was what is now Fang Lijun’s most recognised painting – largely due to the publicity it garnered courtesy of the New York Times magazine. Ascribed to the image was the line: The Howl that Could Free China.

It is one of many instances where the art was applied to politicised ends, clearly intended to manipulate the impression of China politically that readers took away with them. A howl of presumed pain, issued forth by these artists, and yet even the editor could not ignore the fact that this “howl” was a yawn: a fact that was noted as a tongue-in-cheek aside.

This of itself might be easily forgiven as an efficient means of grabbing reader attention, but the article was titled: Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China. The word art, being bracketed, was clearly relegated to the status of an aside. I make this point not as a criticism –an act of na？ve petulance given the benefit that such publicity engendered overall – but to illustrate a situation as it pertains to Chinese artists attempting to engage with the West. It was exactly this kind of reporting that prompted the artists to adopt a deliberate “playing the West at its own game” strategy in making art: drawn into a game of political posturing that was more about restoring national pride than producing good art.

And this wariness in foreign attitudes towards “Chinese avant-garde” artists is not a thing of the past: The frustration it inflicts was reaffirmed recently when Wang Jianwei returned to China following a six-week residency in the US. For every one question he was asked about his work, twenty were posed in regard of the political situation in China, of freedom, repression and censorship. This illustrates that which western audiences have been encouraged to extract from an engagement with Chinese art. In broader terms, it invokes the question of the role art is there to serve: An interesting study would be to ask local artists, curators, museum directors, gallerists and the public-at-large what purpose they believe art serves. Especially artists: Why they make art and who they believe should see it. Is it an expression of national heritage and patriotic alliance? Or simply creative expression informed by a cultural framework but that does not seek or need to illustrate that situation?

This issue is particularly relevant as China builds a system for art within the local cultural framework where one did not exist before. Naturally, and unavoidably to date, much of the thinking about this has taken its lead from the West, but does that mean that the western system can be suitably applied to the China situation? The answer is that it does not. Here, at a challenging juncture within the western system as time-honoured institutions struggle to adapt to the new formats and mediums of contemporary art, China actually has an opportunity to circumvent the immovable structure of “the museum” and its burden of historical role in public life, and create a cultural intermediary relevant to the immediate local context. There will always be a role for a museum as a repository of art, but in a society that lacks the funding to achieve multiple significant collections, there is a justification for rethinking the approach.

All these issues are paradoxical. There is no right answer and no road map that might be followed to arrive at one. That should be the most exciting part about the entire future. Rem Koolhaas recently said: “The future of China is the most compelling conundrum; its outcome affects all of us, a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental …” Ornamental is an interesting choice of word. It points to historical contingencies and manages to suggest that “a position of resistance” indeed says more about naivete of the external global arena concerning the local world of China, and where its future significance lies. This throws up a big challenge to Chinese artists in terms of their “glocal” future. On one hand, as China shrugs off its mantle of Cold War opponent and moves towards becoming a major power, the art has been able to effect a distance from politics per se, which overshadowed perceptions of it in the early 1990s. On the other, the diminishing of “China” as its own self-contained and –explanatory cache is being replaced by the growing need for compelling art that goes beyond superficial self-referencing, and extols deeper, more fundamental human issues: local context made global.

The second point of significance, therefore, is for artists to place more emphasis and energy on their own personal agendas, without any thought to context other than their own.

In recent years, artists of both the early and younger generations have grown up in a more liberal atmosphere, have demonstrated that they have a lot to say, and about their own situation. Interestingly, as they have done so, the bulk of the China iconography, the Chinoiserie, has receded from the art. But, in this regard, the change in timbre of the interpretations of contemporary Chinese art abroad is proving a double-edged sword. Without the “Chinese” motifs a large segment of the foreign audience finds it difficult to locate some of the better examples of contemporary art from China within the context of a current Mainland culture or cultural scene, or to perceive it as being distinctive from their own. Where audiences can’t “read” the linguistic vernacular, accusations of imitation arise.

Going back and forth over possible future scenarios, long term as much as short term, global, but particularly local, it is clear that any discussion about the future is only really served by exploring the needs of the local community now, and the best means via which to address them. On the whole, China’s recent prosperity has been good for contemporary Chinese art. In practical terms, it has. Yet the initial impetus among the artists to create in a “contemporary” fashion did not arise within prosperous circumstances. In fact, when the New Art Movement emerged in the mid 1980s, the economic circumstances of China’s avant-garde artists were nothing less than dire. This did not prevent the leading artists of the New Art Movement from producing substantial and enduring works under the idealistic banner of “art for art’s sake” and wrestling with enormously complex – and often unresolvable issues.

In the 1990s, against the tide of foreign interest, many Chinese artists saw their impoverished circumstances inverted beyond their wildest expectations. Naturally, prosperity was of enormous benefit to all concerned, for it was instrumental in sustaining the artists’ practice when they and their art went unacknowledged in their locality. But now we can see the benefits of local economic growth on the art scene and the system in general, does this mean that a good economy is good for the future of Chinese art? Money certainly greases the wheels of society; opening and reform and economic development have oiled cultural awareness. But when all flows so smoothly, where do artists go to get an edge in their work?

One only has to look to BritArt to witness the effects of too much prosperity, business and hype on creative innovation. This is particularly relevant to China where so many younger artists have, in recent years, taken their lead from Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin etc. Increasingly, the ways in which Chinese artists choose to express themselves do not always conform to the structure and vocabulary of western constructs. If Chinese art is to have its own tangible future, then artists should not feel coerced into conformity. Equally, vacuous, shocking or superficial dalliances with western models and “China” motifs should be written off as extravagant or frivolous distractions. Especially where they do not further human experience, in a global or local sense, or challenge the emotions, rational thoughts, and general experience we have of the world in whatever small or seemingly insignificant a way.

So what is the right balance? Artists previously dedicated so many years to the global environment, but now it is the local context that currently has more allure, and possibilities. What shape is the local cultural framework in now to act as a seedbed for the future? Certainly in the wake of reform and opening, in recent years, “now” has offered artists a rich array of seductive subjects and topics: socio-political change; consumerism; consumption; indulgence; sexual roles and identity; corruption; youth culture; status and personal space. If artists are truly exploring such subjects in relation to China, their art should speak clearest to a local audience? As foreign people come to know more about China, this art will certainly speak to them too, just as western art has “spoken” to local Chinese artists.

Globally, Chinese art excites because China excites: there are few more exciting places in the world than Hong Kong yet creatively its artists struggle to maintain a dialogue with the international art world, a dialogue which came to China’s contemporary artists so effortlessly. But this is not something artists can afford to be complacent about. The question is how to address this intelligently? How to go beyond the constraints of verbal language, beyond East-West, Trend-Fashion? With a pressing need for open dialogue and communication, much of the future depends upon the agendas that are set now, today.

Previously I suggested that artists have little control over that future. In broad global and local terms they don’t, but they do have a monopoly over the type of work they create. When they have got that right, no one will ever have reason to put brackets around their art again. The question of the future, global or local, really hinges on how they proceed, to what ends and on whose terms? Perhaps, by putting the past behind them and focusing their energies on building upon what is plausibly the most dynamic present position any “glocal” context we could name.

Part 1: The Museum as Paradox

In trying to imagine the future of the museum we cannot ignore the past history of museums and exhibition practices except at great peril. For museums have always been paradoxical things: at once solid, immobile, historically rooted, preoccupied with the seemingly moribund acts of collection and preservation, and in the best of circumstances (as a handful of visionary curators and museum directors have shown us over the decades), potential laboratories for experimentation, bastions for reflection and change, loci of dynamic memory, and vital archives for the future. Looking closely at the paradoxes of this institution-which also means countering the prevalent amnesia about museum and exhibition history-allows us to reconnect the museum’s possible futures to its past at the threshold of the present.

My own interest in art and artists has developed hand in hand with an interest in the experimental history of museums. I often mention Alexander Dorner, and I think his example bears repeating- and repeating again-not only because his writing inspired my own interest in art and exhibitions, but because Dorner’s work at Hannover Museum in the 1920s suggests that from the very beginning, museums of modern and contemporary art (they did not bear that name then, but the Hannover Museum did already show the work of living artists) were places where radical experimentation was possible, even central. Dorner invented radical display features for the museum, collaborated with artists such as El Lissitsky and Malevich on exhibition rooms, and also developed extremely innovative models for mobile exhibitions and exhibitions of facsimiles. The fact that he envisioned the museum as a place where artists intervened and re-thought the displays was radical for its time. He defined the museum in terms of the process possible within it; he saw it as laboratory, as a “Kraftwerk,” and emphasized in his writings The Way Beyond Art that he intended to dynamize the traditionally static museum and to transform the supposedly “neutral” white cube in order to help construct a more heterogeneous space.

Collaboration was one of the things Dorner already understood as vital to the museum decades ago. “We cannot,” as he wrote in The Way Beyond Art, “understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we do not have a look at other fields of modern life. “His lesson has not much been heeded in an epoch when the exterior spectacularity of museums (what has been called the “Bilbao effect”) too often overrides an attention to the more subtle interior complexity of an exhibition. This interior complexity is the result of different elements, one of them being the openness to collaboration.

One of the most important possibilities for the museum today is to think about how bridges can be made between fields of knowledge. There is a great deal of potential, for example, that could be exploited by linking art institutions at universities with other fields and other institutions of learning and research- including science, architecture, design, etc. Museums for their part could invite people from various disciplines to take on an active role in the museum’s production of cultural meaning. The enduring impact of Jean-François Lyotard’s exhibition, Les Immateriaux, is a perfect example of the potential that lies in such unexpected curatorial ventures. As another way to collaborate, the museum could work more actively with artists to develop exhibitions, programs, permanent displays, and other museum structures. Some of the most far reaching and experimental of exhibitions of all time were organized by artists, including Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Marcel Duchamp, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, or architects such as Frederic Kielser, Mies van der Rohe or Lilly Reich. Dorner saw this potential in the 1920s. More recently, inspired curators and museum directors including Willem Sandberg, Pontus Hulten, Walter Hopps or Johannes Cladders worked closely with artists at a moment when museums were otherwise increasingly disconnected from the actual producers of culture. These curators developed collaborative artistic projects, but also pushed the exhibition’s form, and made sure that their respective institutions collected some of the most difficult or thought-provoking works of their contemporary period.

To return to the notion of the museum as paradox that I began with, let me mention that another way in which museums can attend to the interior complexity of exhibitions is to incorporate the possibility of change at the very heart of the institution. The museum has indeed been long defined by its monumental immobility and by its historical roots, but the late visionary architect and urbanist Cedric Price (from whom I learned much about redefining the museum) offered another possibility for the institutions of culture. In his Fun Palace project from 1961, he responded to the necessity of preventing institutions from sitting permanently and concretely in place. He proposed a building that would, by definition, not last forever-it would disappear after a limited life span of ten to twenty years. But more than simply disappearing, it was to be a flexible structure in a large mechanistic shipyard which, according to changing situations, would be continuously built from above. Radical in its implications, Price’s proposed Fun Palace was a building that could be responsive, it could be altered whilst it is occupied. Price’s ideas envision a new kind of cultural centre for the twenty-first century, one that utilizes uncertainty and conscious incompleteness. Installation view of Cities on the Move at the Vienna Secession, 1997. Photo credit: Margherita Spiluttini. Courtesy of the Vienna Secession Museums should consider Price’s urgent message and conceive their exhibitions as complex, dynamic learning systems with feedback loops, so as to renounce the paralyzing homogeneity of exhibition master plans. An exhibition thus might be under permanent construction.

Price was extremely present in the concept that I developed with Hou Hanru for Cities on the Move. Rather than producing a transportable, repeatable exhibition-as-product, we thought of the exhibition as a process, as a laboratory. The result was what you could call a three-year ongoing dialogue in the form of a traveling show. The show would not only change in every city it went to but it learned from every city in which it took place. The show became a procedure of sedimentation: building up in layers with each edition. It thus resisted the too common tendency to either send a show to travel exactly the same way no matter its context or, conversely, to put up a show and then erase it with a tabula rasa once it is over. Here, there was never a fixed artist list, fixed exhibition architecture, or fixed number or kind of works, so that each version of the show reflected something of the new situation (cultural, institutional, geographic, social) in which it was presented. And, little by little, very interesting things started to occur which go beyond the scope of the display of finished works. Artists involved in the various editions started to collaborate with other artists. Many projects were triggered that existed beyond the exhibition itself. And the exhibition in this sense truly became “on the move.” I mention this project just briefly here to underline the lesson Cities on the Move learned from Cedric Price, which also suggests the radical potential of the museum: to, in destabilizing itself from within, inspire new artistic practices from without.

To envision the museum of the twenty-first century, we thus must urge it to be less stable, more open, more collaborative, and less definitive in its articulation of history. We must use different models and allow disparate conditions to co-exist so that it can, as Price so eloquently said, “thrive through both protection and exposure.”

Part 2: The Museum Becoming A Program

I think a key is the need for several representations of the knowledge, such that when the system is stuck (using one representation) it can jump to use another. — Marvin Minsky in an interview with David G. Stork, published in Hal’s Legacy, 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997)

One Way or Another, We Are Going to Live in a Fluid Universe
When I try to sum up what, above all else, I have learned from grappling with the sprawling prolixities of Philippe Parreno’s artwork, what I come up with is that his thought and practice are precisely impossible to summarize, a resistance to this very act. Perhaps, then, the best way to introduce Parreno’s exhibition Alien Seasons at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (ARC), which I co-curated with Laurence Bosse and Angeline Scherf, is to reflect on its process, to make it as transparent as possible. Therefore, this introduction echoes conversations I had with Philippe Parreno, and even if it tries somehow to contextualize different fragments of these conversations, it does so in a way that approximates a notebook exercise rather than a comprehensive writing practice.

Mulholland Drive/Pop-Up Books
In a recent interview, David Lynch said that the only thing he was sure about with Mulholland Drive was that the film would start with an image of the road sign, “Mulholland Drive,” under the headlights, and then that a series of small stories would be linked together. So he had no idea of where the film was headed. “Well, that’s exactly where I am now,” explained Parreno in the early stages of organizing the exhibition: “I would like this exhibition to be also a set of small bifurcations that will create in the end a kind of narrative cloud.”1 Parreno’s starting point-this road sign-was the idea that the exhibition would stem from a book (like in a Walt Disney movie, it always starts with a picture of a book, then you enter into the page and the animation begins); an exhibition as a pop-up book. This first implies that the book is the precise place of the monographic, and then, on a practical level, that the exhibition would evolve out of, and exist almost only on paper. The press invite, the poster, the catalogue, and probably even the space itself will be on paper. For Parreno, the idea of the exhibition as a pop-up book seemed to have the potential to resist the habitual stable framework of the monographic / retrospective exhibition and, more specifically, the potential to resist the possibility of apprehending his own practice as a definable resolution. During the preparation of this exhibition, Parreno sought an experimental model which could offer multiple takes on his work, trigger a variety of links between different issues, and reflect (not summarize) his non-linear practice.

The Chain is Beautiful
“The images are no longer beautiful, but chains are.” This somehow cryptic, yet succinct, statement-which also popped up during our conversations-was another possible starting point Philippe Parreno, Alien Seasons, 2002, installation at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Courtesy of the artist on which this monographic exhibition could have been built. In Parenno’s artistic vocabulary, the chain is the dynamic structure that leads to the production of forms. It is the process that, for example, in the making of a project (be it a film, a building, or an exhibition), links pre-production to production to post-production. All too often, the narrative is narrowed down to one of these sequences, Parreno explains, “however sense and narrative come from the whole series of events that occur in, and even in-between, these sequences. Sense and narrative come from the whole continuum of the chain.”

A film does not only tell a story. It is part of a story. Perhaps this is all too obvious but why is it that we cannot find novels inspired by films? We only find novels based on film scenarios, which is completely different. Through this example, Parreno expresses his extreme suspicion toward the idea of the scenario as an object (which can, in some cases, be turned into a book), but also toward how we apprehend images as objects, as the sole and ultimate result of the production process. “I don’t believe in a projective model,” Parreno explains. Does everything always start with a scenario and end up as an object?

In this retrospective exhibition, the different objects Parenno has previously produced are not on display and can only be seen in the book. In some ways, there are no objects left. Though, with the metaphor of the chain, it is also possible to rearticulate or to connect the different projects produced since the early nineties with current ones. From Réflexion sur le Mont Analogue, a project based on René Daumal’s book, the film rights of which have been temporarily acquired by Parreno, to El Sueno de una cosa, a one-minute film shot in the North Pole as part of a pseudo-scientific expedition, most of Parreno’s projects or propositions address these issues in different ways, through different angles and hypotheses: Bruno Latour speaks about experimental anthropological expeditions of uncertainty.

An Infinite Conversation
Through collaboration, Parreno seems to have found a means for rendering the chains of production and moments of irresolution more visible, more legible. “The projects I am interested in are those that brim over,” he explains, “either because they contain many more ideas than forms, or many more forms than ideas. These are moments of irresolution, moments of imbalance that continue to fascinate me. In fact, I am much more interested in proceedings than in resolutions.” For this Philippe Parreno, Alien Seasons, 2002, installation at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Courtesy of the artist exhibition, Parreno decided that he wanted to trigger such a proceeding by working with someone he has never worked with before, and without any pre-established idea of what might come out of the encounter. He chose to work with Jaron Lanier, who is considered to have coined the concept of virtual reality. Even if the outcome of this procedure as it pertains to the exhibition is still not clear at the moment the catalogue goes to print, Lanier and Parreno rapidly found common ground for discussion in the conflict between resolution and irresolution of images. (PP “Noresolution.” JL “Yeah. Resolution is an idiot’s game.”).2

“One of the things I do,” Lanier first said after accepting Parreno’s proposition to collaborate, “is work with neuroscientists by inventing computer models for how the brain works. Usually the work takes a long time, and it is very hard to point to anything specific. However, in the last few years there have been extraordinary advances, such that we are now pretty sure we have come up with a computer model of how visual memory works.We think we understand the signals that neurons exchange for creating a new visual memory as well as for recognizing something seen from an old memory.”3 And, incidentally, during this first conversation they had, Lanier even produced a statement which corresponds to the loose conceptual structure, or narrative cloud, Parreno was aiming for during the initial preparations for this exhibition: virtual worlds are shared. Virtual worlds are the first kind of reality that is both very malleable, and very flexible, like a dream, but also shared by other people. That is what is so special about it. So, if we had this ability to quickly create what exists in a virtual world, we could also have the potential for a new form of communication. I like to call this form of communication “post-symbolic.” This means that instead of trading symbols that refer to things or evoke things, you would actually make the things. Instead of using the word house or museum, you could just suddenly make one. You could imagine this form of communication having some of the qualities of a dream, in that it might be fantastical, moving through many places and through many associations. But, at the same time, it would have conversational elements, with multiple people contributing, a back and forth quality and a collaborative continuity. And obviously it would be under human control, so would not involve the loss of control like a dream, but would be guided more like a conversation.

——-
Notes
1 All Parreno quotes from interviews between the author and the artist from 1999 to 2004.
2 From conversation recorded by the author.
3 From interview with the author.