The Pursuit of Publicness:

A Study of Four Chinese Contemporary Art Projects

by

Bo Zheng

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professor Douglas Crimp

Department of Art and Art History

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies

Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester

Rochester, New York

2012

ii  

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents.

iii  

Curriculum Vitae

The author was born in Beijing, China on July 19, 1974. He attended Amherst

College from 1997 to 1999, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1999. He

received a MFA degree in 2006 from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He came

to the University of Rochester in the Fall of 2007 and began graduate studies in

Visual and Cultural Studies. He pursued his research in contemporary art under the

direction of Professor Douglas Crimp and received the Master of Arts degree from

the University of Rochester in 2012.

iv  

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Professor Douglas Crimp, my adviser, for giving me

enormous support over the past six years. He has shown me the true meaning of

intellectual curiosity and kindness. I thank Professors Rachel Haidu and John Osburg

for being on my committee and for giving me advice on this dissertation and beyond.

I also thank Professors Joan Saab, Janet Berlo, and John Michael for their guidance. I

spent the first year of my doctoral studies at Northwestern University. Professors

Sarah Fraser and Hannah Feldman have remained supportive of my career.

VCS has been a second home for me. Marty Collier-Morris and Cathy

Humphrey are always patient and helpful. Sohl Lee has been a dear friend and

intellectual companion. Many ideas in this dissertation were crystallized during our

long conversations. Shota Ogawa, Iskandar Zulkarnain, Daisuke Kawahara, Qian

Hua, Sohl and I formed the “rochester asians meet 4 lunch” group in 2009 and

managed to meet regularly to talk about work and life. Gloria Kim, Yuichiro Kugo,

Genevieve Waller, Lucy Mulroney, Berin Golonu, Alex Alisauskas, and Godfre

Leung all helped me in various ways.

Xiong Wenyun generously accommodated my research. Discussions with

Geng Yan, Zhang Yuling, Zhang Hui, Steven Lee, Wenny Teo, Franziska Koch,

Yang Guang, Dai Zhanglun, Astrid Wege, and Shingyuk Chow advanced my

thinking.

v  

Without the love and support of my family, I would not have been able to

devote six years to doctoral studies. My sister Cai Jing and her husband generously

let me stay in their apartment in Beijing to work on my dissertation. My partner Jiang

Chao has tolerated my bad temper. His presence brings me joy.

vi  

Abstract

This dissertation examines the meaning of publicness and its relationship to

contemporary art through an analysis of four Chinese art projects. The four projects

are Moving Rainbow (1998-2001) by Xiong Wenyun, Village Self-Governance

Documentary Project (2005) by Wu Wenguang, Karibu Islands (2008) by myself,

and Nian (2010) by Ai Weiwei. I demonstrate that these projects share a number of

things in common: (1) the artists and participants acted as citizens and demanded

citizens’ rights; (2) they organized discursive arenas outside the state; (3) they defined

issues of common concern; (4) they mobilized both rational-critical and affective

expressions, and utilized a wide range of media; (5) they fostered stranger relations;

(6) they strove for visibility; (7) they focused on contemporary common action. These

traits together constitute publicness. Publicness not only served as a goal for these

projects, but also constituted a form through which these projects came into being. I

argue that the pursuit of publicness has been one of the critical forces motivating the

development of Chinese contemporary art. In the struggle against totalitarianism,

Chinese artists have combined public and counterpublic strategies and contributed to

larger social movements striving for freedom and justice.

vii  

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Four Basic Ideas 49

Chapter 3 Stranger-Relationality 89

Chapter 4 Visibility 132

Chapter 5 Fantasy 168

Epilogue 204

Bibliography 207

viii  

List of Figures Figure Caption Page 1.1 The first Stars exhibition, Beijing, 1979. 2 1.2 Ma Desheng at the demonstration, October 1979. 2 1.3 The opening of Difference • Gender, June 14, 2009,

Beijing. 4

1.4 Two photographs by Ren Hang were taken down before the opening.

4

1.5 Overview of the public sphere model. 13 1.6 The constituents of publicness. 13 1.7 Huang Rui, The Will, 1979, oil on canvas, 65x80cm. 34 1.8 Huang Rui, The Funeral, 1979, oil on canvas, 65x80cm. 34 1.9 Huang Rui, The Rebirth, 1979, oil on canvas, 65x80cm. 34 1.10 Wang Keping, Silence, 1979, wood, 48cm high. 38 1.11 Wang Keping, The Idol, 1979, wood, 67cm high. 38 1.12 Xiong Wenyun, Moving Rainbow, 1999, photograph,

130x130cm. 42

1.13 Wu Wenguang, Village Self-Governance Documentary Project, 2005, video still.

45

1.14 Bo Zheng, Karibu Islands, discussion held at the Beijing LGBT Cultural Center, July 27, 2008. Image altered to protect the identity of the participants.

47

2.1 Xiong Wenyun, Moving Rainbow, 1999, photograph, 152x111cm.

50

2.2 Xiong’s site-specific experiment, Tibet, May 1998. 52 2.3 A photograph taken by Xiong in Tibet in May 1998. 52 2.4 A photograph of the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, taken by

Xiong in July 1998. 54

2.5 A photographs taken by Xiong on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway in July 1998.

54

2.6 Xiong painting the end of timber carried on a truck, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Sichuan-Tibet Highway, October 1998.

56

2.7 Xiong hanging a piece of cloth in bright yellow on a door, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Sichuan-Tibet Highway, October 1998.

56

ix  

2.8 Xiong talking to drivers, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Que’er Mountain, April 1999.

56

2.9 Xiong convinced a few truck drivers to put the bright-colored tarpaulins on their trucks, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Que’er Mountain, April 1999.

56

2.10 The departure ceremony held in front of Southwest Jiaotong University, September 25, 1999.

58

2.11 The Moving Rainbow motorcade on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, September 1999.

58

2.12 Xiong and participants celebrating their arrival at the base camp of Mount Everest, July 22, 2001.

59

2.13 Yin Xiuzhen, Washing the River, Chengdu, 1995. 63 2.14 Xiong Wenyun, Moving Rainbow, 1999, photograph,

152x111cm. 67

2.15 Commitment cards signed by drivers. 79 2.16 Xiong speaking at a press conference held in

Chengdu, 1999. 81

2.17 Xiong directing drivers, 1999. 81 2.18 Xiong showing me the amount of paperwork involved in

Moving Rainbow, Xiong’s studio, Beijing, August 2010. 85

3.1 Ai Xiaoming, Citizen Investigation, 2010, video stills. 96 3.2 All relationships in China are stabilized according to the

persons’ status in the state pyramid. 106

3.3

Zheng Bo, Untitled, 2008, digital photographs, dimensions variable.

111

3.4 Liu Jiakun, Hu Huishan Memorial, 2009, exterior. 121 3.5 Liu Jiakun, Hu Huishan Memorial, 2009, interior. 121 3.6 Nian concatenates multiple stranger relations into one

work. 125

4.1 Pictures of Wukan election circulated on weibo.com, a popular Chinese twitter site, in February 2012.

133

4.2 Video stills from the Village Self-Governance Documentary Project.

134

4.3 The ten villagers learning to shoot video at Caochangdi Workstation in November 2005.

136

4.4 Stills from A Welfare Council by Nong Ke. 144 4.5 Stills from Land Distribution by Wang Wei. 153

x  

4.6 Shao Yuzhen being interviewed by a foreign journalist. 157 5.1 Stills from Karibu Islands (seven videos). 170 5.2 Stills from Karibu Islands (the Buddha’s life reversed). 173 5.3 The Beijing LGBT Cultural Center. 175 5.4 The first Karibu Islands discussion held at the Beijing

LGBT Cultural Center, May 11, 2008. 176

5.5 “Birth Certificates” filled out by Chunchun (left) and Haishui (right).

186

5.6 Age at birth chosen by the participants. 191

1

Chapter 1

Introduction

On September 27, 1979, an outdoor art exhibition was held in a small park in

central Beijing. (Figure 1.1) It was staged by the Stars group, an informal collective

of young men and women whose artworks transgressed the socialist realism

authorized by the state. The Stars were not full-time artists; many held factory jobs.

After failing to obtain an official venue to show their artworks, they decided to

organize an exhibition in the park next to the National Art Gallery. There were over a

hundred and fifty works – drawings, paintings, prints, and woodcarvings – mostly

hung on the fence between the park and the Museum.1 The artworks were executed in

a wide range of styles not seen in official exhibitions. He Baosen used quick

brushstrokes to render a quotidian scene of commuters on bicycles. Huang Rui

painted the same view of Ruins of Yuanmingyuan three times, using disparate hues to

suggest three different moods. Wang Keping’s woodcarvings featured political satires

and openly criticized state corruption.

The exhibition soon attracted passersby: men and women, young and old, a

few carrying children in their arms. Two days later, the exhibition was removed by

the police. The artists responded with a demonstration on October 1, the thirtieth

anniversary of the People’s Republic, demanding democratic rights and artistic

freedom. (Figure 1.2) After some negotiation mediated by the semiofficial Artists’

                                                                                                               1 Wang Keping, “Xing xing wang shi” (Stars Stories), in The Stars: 10 Years, ed. Chang Tsong-zung (Hong Kong: Hanart 2 Gallery, 1989), 23.

2

Figure 1.1 The first Stars exhibition, Beijing, 1979.

Figure 1.2 Ma Desheng at the demonstration, October 1979.

3

Association, the government allowed the exhibition to continue in November in

Huafang Pavilion in Beihai Park. A year later, in August 1980, the second Stars

exhibition was held inside the National Art Gallery, attracting over eighty thousand

visitors.2

Three decades later, on June 14, 2009, some two hundred people gathered in a

courtyard studio in the suburb of Beijing to celebrate the opening of an art exhibition.

(Figure 1.3) It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. A band was playing in the

courtyard. People wandered in and out of the galleries, looking, chatting, eating, and

drinking. The scene was just like any other opening in Beijing’s thriving art market,

except that the young crowd were mostly wearing t-shirts and jeans, not suits or

dresses. In one gallery, two photographs were missing in a three-work series, with the

frames and labels still hanging on the wall. (Figure 1.4)

It was the first queer-themed art exhibition in China, titled “Difference •

Gender.”3 Sixteen artists presented works. Xu Tengfei’s video transformed a kiss

between two young men into an ink painting sequence. Xi Ya Die used folk paper-

cutting techniques to portray erotic play between men. My video and text work,

Karibu Islands, invited participants to re-imagine their lives on a fictional archipelago

where time travels backwards. The exhibition was organized by Beijing LGBT Center

and Tongyu, the leading lesbian group in the capital. It took the curators more than a

                                                                                                               2 Wang Keping was told by the Gallery staff that “there were over eighty thousand viewers in sixteen days, breaking the Gallery’s previous records.” (The Stars, 34) 3 The full title of the exhibition was “The First Chinese Art Exhibition on Gender Diversity: Difference • Gender.” Hoping to avoid state interference, the organizers chose not to include in the title words like queer or LGBT.

4

Figure 1.3 The opening of Difference • Gender, June 14, 2009, Beijing.

Figure 1.4 Two photographs by Ren Hang were taken down before the opening.

5

year to find a venue willing to host the show. The day before the opening, a man (call

him Mr. X) from the Municipal Security Bureau showed up and questioned co-

curator Yang Guang as to whether the exhibition had proper approvals.4 Yang

claimed that it would be a private event. Mr. X then examined the artworks and

instructed Yang to take down two photographs that contained explicit sexual

imagery.5 When Mr. X left, after casually signing his name in the guestbook, Yang

decided to leave the empty frames on the wall to indicate that the exhibition had been

censored. The opening proceeded smoothly on the following day and the exhibition

was on view for a week, as planned.

The 1979 Stars event has been widely regarded as the first milestone of

“Chinese contemporary art,” a customary term referring to experimental art practices

that, since the late 1970s, have developed largely outside the “official” art system

sponsored by the state. Over the past three decades, Chinese contemporary art has

grown from a small field with only a handful of artists struggling to survive to an

enormous arena with thousands of artists, curators, and dealers producing solo

exhibitions and biennials, art fairs and auctions, both in China and abroad. While the

market – which has grown quickly since the mid-1990s – provides a valuable

platform for many artists to realize their artworks, the state’s unceasing control over

cultural expression and the lack of nongovernmental, nonprofit infrastructure skews

the work severely towards profitable art activities, and poses continuing challenges to

                                                                                                               4 Yang Guang was also the manager of Beijing LGBT Cultural Center from 2008 to 2010. 5 The two photographs were produced by Ren Hang.

6

critical practices. As the aforementioned queer art exhibition suggests, the struggle

initiated by the Stars group thirty years ago is far from over.

What characterizes this struggle? What is the link between the Stars event in

1979 and the queer art exhibition thirty years later? In both instances, the artists and

their allies strove for free expressions, in public, as individual citizens and collectives,

to define and address issues of common concern. Public discourses were generated

through communicative strategies integrating image and text, affect and reason. In

short, what defines this ongoing struggle is the pursuit of publicness.6

It is my view that the pursuit of publicness has been one of the critical forces

motivating the development of Chinese contemporary art. Publicness not only served

as a goal for many artworks and exhibitions, but also constituted a form through

which these projects came into being. In the struggle against totalitarianism, artists

have developed public and counterpublic strategies and contributed to larger social

movements striving for freedom and justice.

The first wave of public pursuit started in the late 1970s and ended abruptly in

1989, when the government violently suppressed the June Fourth Movement. During

this period, most experimental artists and critics worked outside the state system and

the market. The state ignored but tolerated their activities. The market was almost

nonexistent; the only buyers of experimental art were foreign diplomats. Through the

                                                                                                               6 I use “publicness” instead of “publicity” because nowadays “publicity” is commonly used to refer to corporate advertising and media spectacle. In Chinese, “publicness” is rendered as gong gong xing, a word that has gained popularity in cultural criticism since the mid-1990s. To date there is no formal translation for “publicity,” because the industrial production of publicity is still relatively new.

7

formation of art collectives, group exhibitions, and regional and national conferences,

experimental artists and critics built a dynamic public. Though they did not develop

an avowed theory on publicness, they mounted shows and events in whatever venues

they could access – parks, schools, streets, courtyards – and made repeated attempts

to engage friends as well as strangers.7

In the 1990s, Chinese contemporary art made a dramatic turn to the market.

First, after the suppression of the June Fourth Movement, the government tightened

control over media and cultural activities. It became extremely difficult for

independent artists to exhibit in public space. Some artists and critics sought support

from the private sector and found this a viable route of survival and even prosperity.

Some went abroad, gaining the attention of the global art market. Chinese society in

general became increasingly disillusioned with idealism and worshipped material

wealth as the only measure of personal and national progress. After two decades, the

market has firmly established itself as the primary stage for Chinese contemporary

art, with profitability as the ultimate criterion of value.8

                                                                                                               7 For example, the Pond Society in Hangzhou, consisting of Zhang Peili, Geng Jiangyi, and others, posted a set of Taichi drawings on a wall along Luyang Street in 1986; Song Yongping and others organized many “rural art activities” (xiang cun yi shu huo dong) in Shanxi province; a large number of artists in Nanjing staged the multi-year project, “Sunbathing” (shai tai yang), in public parks in the city. 8 Independent curator Pauline Yao recently wrote, “On the surface it would appear that support for contemporary art in China has reached new heights, proven by the influx of art fairs, exhibitions in state-run institutions, and even new forms of government funding. But the spirit that underlies these ventures remains solidly aimed at capital gain, market interests, and the business end of art production, with little, if any evidence of support for activities outside this sphere.” (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/74, accessed Dec. 15, 2010)

8

Below this tide, an undercurrent of public pursuit has been developing since

the late 1990s. A number of artists, myself included, have situated our practice in the

fledging civil society and integrated art and activism. This reemerging pursuit of

publicness in Chinese contemporary art is the topic of this dissertation. Rather than

trying to produce a comprehensive survey – an unrealistic goal given China’s size and

the fact that the movement is still unfolding – I will concentrate on four case studies:

Moving Rainbow (1998-2001), Village Self-Governance Documentary Project

(2005), Karibu Islands (2008), and Nian (2010). These projects address some of the

most important social issues in China today. However, they have received little

attention from Chinese critics, who often lament the rampant force of the market yet

make no effort to look beyond it. This dissertation helps to document the second

wave of public pursuit, which may nudge Chinese contemporary art towards a future

that is not shaped exclusively by the market and the state but also takes root in a

dynamic civil society.

Research on Chinese contemporary art is still in its early stage of

development. Existing literature is dominated by survey texts and exhibition

catalogs;9 only a handful of monographs have been produced.10 Though a few

                                                                                                               9 The key survey texts include Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), Lu Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China (Milan: Charta, 2010), and Hung Wu and Peggy Wang, eds., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 10 Published monographs include Hung Wu, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005), Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2007), and Hsingyuan Tsao and Roger Ames, eds., Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011). Dissertations include Sasha Su-Ling Welland, “Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in

9

Chinese critics have written on the issue of publicness, their writings are largely

hortatory, dominated by theoretical arguments and foreign examples, not attending to

how Chinese artists have pursued publicness in practice.11 This dissertation is the first

in-depth study on the issue of publicness in Chinese contemporary art.12

This dissertation serves a second goal. I will demonstrate that recent

developments in public sphere theory – particularly Michael Warner’s theorization of

publics and counterpublics – contains valuable insights into socially engaged art, and

that publicness can serve as a central notion linking together various key concerns of

socially engaged art. In other words, I hope to reinvigorate the attention to public

sphere theory in current discussions on socially engaged art.

This chapter is divided into five sections. First I will explain what I mean by

publicness. Next I will discuss the relationship between art and the public sphere. I

will then describe China’s state-society relationship to situate my research in the

Chinese historical context. This is followed by a brief analysis of the Stars event.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

China’s Capital,” (UC Santa Cruz, 2006), Fok Siu Har, “Performance Art and the Body in Contemporary China,” (HKU, 2008), and Zhuang Jiayun, “Not Yet Farewell: Postsocialist Performance and Visual Art in Urban China” (UCLA, 2009). 11 For articles, see for example, Li Gongming, “Lun dang dai yi shu zai gong gong ling yu zhong de she hui xue zhuan xiang” (On Contemporary Art’s Sociological Turn in the Public Sphere), in Yi shu xin shi jie, eds. Pi Daojian and Lu Hong (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chu ban she, 2003), 119–31; Gu Chengfeng, “Yi shu gong gong xing yu gong gong xing de wu qu” (On Art’s Publicness and Publicness’s Pitfalls), in Wen yi yan jiu 5 (2004); Zha Changping, “Dang dai yi shu de gong gong xing yu ge ren xing” (Contemporary Art’s Publicness and Individuality), in Yi shu yu she hui, eds. Lu Hong and Sun Zhenhua (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chu ban she, 2005), 224–35. For books, see Weng Jianqing, Gong gong yi shu de guan nian yu qu xiang: Dang dai gong gong yi shu wen hua ji jia zhi yan jiu (Public Art’s Concepts and Tendencies: Research on Contemporary Public Art’s Culture and Value) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2002); Wang Hongyi, Gong gong yi shu gai lun (Introduction to Public Art) (Hangzhou: Zhong guo mei shu xue yuan chu ban she, 2007); and Wang Zhong: Gong gong yi shu gai lun (Introduction to Public Art) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2007). 12 This dissertation only studies the pursuit of publicness in the 2000s. I hope to cover the 1980s and 1990s in future research.

10

Lastly I will provide summaries of the four case studies that constitute the main

chapters.

What is Publicness?

By publicness I mean the properties of the public sphere. According to Jürgen

Habermas, the public sphere is a realm of social life in which citizens assemble to

discuss matters of common concern.13 In the kernel of the public sphere lies the

fundamental idea for democracy – the “rationalization of power through the medium

of public discussion among private individuals.”14 As Miriam Hansen points out, “the

German term Öffentlichkeit encompasses a variety of meanings that elude its English

rendering as ‘public sphere’”: it indicates “a spatial concept, the social sites or arenas

where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated”; it suggests a human

grouping, “the collective body constituted by and in this process, ‘the public’”; and it

denotes “an ideational substance or criterion – ‘glasnost’ or openness – that is

produced both within these sites and in larger, deterritorialized contexts.”15 In The

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas set the scale of analysis

mostly at the national level. Since then, many scholars have treated the public sphere

                                                                                                               13 Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique 3 (1974), 49. 14 Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” 55. 15 Miriam Hansen, “Forward,” in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix, n. 1.

11

as a spatial concept, geographically bounded by national borders.16 Recently, in

Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner made a methodological intervention.

He shifted the perspective from geographical site to human grouping, treating publics

as the main category of his investigation. By doing so, he was able to conduct

analysis on a range of scales: from a group of drag queens gathered in a New Jersey

house posing for each other’s cameras to the imagined public addressed by the diary

of Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s 1984.17 Many Chinese

cultural critics have chosen to focus on the third aspect of Öffentlichkeit, what Hansen

calls the “ideational substance or criterion.” In their writings gonggongxing

(publicness) appears more often than gonggonglingyu (public sphere).18 In my view,

publicness is preferable to public sphere for two reasons. First, similar to Warner’s

publics, publicness deemphasizes the spatial aspect of the public sphere and shifts the

center of attention to discursive practices. Second, it offers the flexibility for us to

discuss public qualities of specific activities even when the public sphere, at the

institutional and national level, is yet to be realized in China.

                                                                                                               16 Many titles reflect this phenomenon, for example, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France” [by Keith Baker, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 181–211], “The Public Sphere in Modern China” [by William Rowe, Modern China 16.3 (1990), 309–329], “Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India” [by U Kalpagam, Journal of Historical Sociology 15.1 (2002), 35-58], etc. 17 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). 18 For example, the anthology in which the Chinese translation of Habermas’s 1964 encyclopedia article on the public sphere first appeared, was titled Wen hua yu gong gong xing (Culture and Publicness). It was edited by literary scholars Wang Hui and Chen Yan’gu, and published in 1998.

12

The functioning of the public sphere depends on not one but many ideas and

conditions. Based on research by Habermas, Warner, and Charles Taylor,19 I have

grouped these ideas and conditions into three categories: social imaginaries,

institutional conditions, and discursive conditions. They are summarized in Figure 1.6

on the next page. The pursuit of publicness consists in the struggle to establish the

social imaginaries, to obtain the institutional conditions, and to create discussions that

adhere to the discursive conditions. The case studies in the following chapters will be

analyzed along these specific dimensions.

According to Taylor, social imaginaries are different from social reality or

explicit social theories. Social imaginaries are “the ways people imagine their social

existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their

fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and

images that underlie these expectations.”20 The public sphere relies on two social

imaginaries: that the people are sovereign and that the public sphere is self-organized.

Prior to the bourgeois revolution, sovereignty did not belong to the people but

to kings and queens who legitimated their rule in the name of a transcendental power.

The public sphere as “a unique realm distinct from the private sphere” did not exist.21

There existed, however, a feudal form of publicity. The monarch displayed himself

                                                                                                               19 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 20 Taylor, A Secular Age, 171. 21 Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” 50.

13

Figure 1.5 Overview of the public sphere model.

Figure 1.6 The constituents of publicness.

14

and represented his power “not for but ‘before’ the people.”22 One of the ideas that

motivated the bourgeois revolution was popular sovereignty. The public sphere gave

an institutional form to this idea. The proliferation of coffee houses and political

clubs, newspapers and critical journals propelled the emergence of a new mode of

social organization. Members of the bourgeoisie – literate, propertied men –

assembled into public bodies and debated issues of general concern. The public

opinion developed in these conversations acquired a rhetorically constituted power

that provided the basis of legitimation for the bourgeois revolution and subsequently

the democratic state. Today the public sphere continues to depend on the social

imaginary that the people are sovereign. Otherwise, people’s views and ideas would

seem private, losing the world-making power of public opinions.

The public sphere is self-organized, meaning that it does not rely on “state

institutions, laws, formal frameworks of citizenship, or preexisting institutions such

as the church.”23 As Peter Hohendahl emphasizes, “The state and the public sphere do

not overlap, as one might suppose from casual language use. Rather they confront one

another as opponents.”24 The public sphere’s extra-state status is crucial. Because it is

conceived as a realm free of coercive power associated with the state, public opinion

emerging from the public sphere can be imagined as “disengaged” and “rational.”25

The state then is compelled to act according to public opinion, at least in theory, thus                                                                                                                22 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 8. 23 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 68. 24 Peter Hohendahl’s note to Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” 49. 25 Taylor, A Secular Age, 135.

15

fulfilling the fundamental premise of democracy. The public sphere is also imagined

to be independent of the market. Although the media – newspapers, television

networks, and the internet – may be operated by for-profit companies, public

conversations circulating on these media cannot be motivated primarily by the profit

logic. The public sphere is important to non-profit organizations and activist groups,

because it is where they can voice opinions to oppose corporate interest and state

violence.

For public conversations to happen, citizens have to enjoy freedom of

expression and access to public space and media. These two institutional conditions

often constitute the most visible battlefront in the pursuit of publicness. They are

more concrete than the social imaginaries and less complex than the discursive

conditions. Prohibition can be direct and effective; protest can be specific and

definable. Claude Lefort argues that the freedom to form and express one’s opinion

does not reduce man to “an isolated monad,” as a famous Marxist critique often used

by totalitarian regimes to justify their disregard for human rights would have it; on the

contrary, it enables a person “to step out of himself and to make contact with others,

through speech, writing and thought.”26 Of the two social imaginaries and two

institutional conditions, the independence of the public sphere and the freedom of

expression pose the most serious challenge to totalitarianism. As Lefort points out,

they are fundamentally incompatible with totalitarianism, because totalitarianism is

                                                                                                               26 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 250.

16

built on the premise that the state “hold[s] the principle of all forms of socialization

and all modes of activity.”27 Therefore, the pursuit of publicness, of which the

struggle for free speech and an autonomous public sphere is an essential component,

constitutes a direct opposition to totalitarian power.

Public discussions may be face-to-face or mediated. Although many of

today’s conversations happen on various media, access to space is still important,

particularly for disadvantaged groups, whose bodily actions are sometimes the only

way to attract media attention. Furthermore, face-to-face conversations enable

nonverbal communication, making empathetic listening more likely to happen. This

may explain why many socially engaged artists continue to focus on creating

situations where strangers can encounter and talk to each other in person. On the

other hand, we have to acknowledge that media play a critical role in contemporary

public life. As John Thompson points out, mediated communication “has created new

forms of publicness which do not share the features of the traditional model.” For

example, mediated communication is not “localized in space and time,” and often

does not take a dialogical form.28 Access to media entails both gaining entry to the

distribution network (e.g., a youtube website) and getting hold of the tool of

production as well as technology (e.g., a video camera and editing software).

Public discussions adhere to a particular set of discursive conditions, different

from those governing private conversations, state announcements, or market

                                                                                                               27 Ibid., 246. 28 John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 244.

17

publicities. Based on his analysis of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas identified

three discursive conditions: public discussions should address matters of common

concern, disregard status and coercive power, and take the form of rational-critical

debate with the ultimate goal of reaching consensus. Oascar Nekt and Alexander

Kluge, Nancy Fraser, and Michael Warner, among others, have argued that in his

historical narrative Habermas overlooked the development of counterpublic spheres,

and as a result, the normative ideals he put forward fail to take counterpublic forms

into account. Counterpublic spheres are, in Fraser’s words, “parallel discursive arenas

where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses,

which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities,

interests, and needs.”29 The working class, women, queer and other minorities have

long constructed counterpublic spheres that employ different organizational forms

and communicative practices than those of the bourgeois public sphere. For example,

Warner shows that glamour was often used as a public-making strategy by queer

groups.30 The communicative practices of counterpublics are not limited to the format

of rational-critical debate prescribed by Habermas, but “open to affective and

expressive dimensions of language.”31 Furthermore, rather than treating identity as a

private matter to be abstracted in the public arena, counterpublics often engage in

embodied, performative struggles. Nonviolent collective actions, such as strikes and

                                                                                                               29 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25 (1990), 67. 30 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 13. 31 Ibid., 58.

18

parades, “bring to bear material force so as to demand attention from elites or the

government,” strengthening rhetorically constituted power.32 Douglas Kellner notes

that Habermas idealized face-to-face interaction and the print media, which “fostered

modes of argumentation characterized by linear rationality, objectivity, and

consensus.”33 On a more theoretical level, Chantal Mouffe argues that the democratic

ideal cannot be fulfilled with Habermas’ “rationalistic and universalistic

perspective.”34 In actuality reason is often used as an excuse for exclusion, leading

not to consensus among different social groups, but instead to antagonistic

categorization, like “us” the reasonable folks versus “them” the unreasonable ones.

Mouffe advocates instead an “agonistic public sphere,” where “potential antagonism

can be transformed into ‘agonism,’ that is, a situation defined by a confrontation

between adversaries” regulated by a set of commonly accepted democratic

procedures.35 In other words, the basis of a democratic public sphere is not consensus

but oppositionality. In fact, struggle appears everywhere in the public sphere. For

example, what constitutes common concern is not predefined but needs to be

contested in the public sphere itself.

In Publics and Counterpublics, Warner identifies several additional formal

features of public address (listed as items 4 to 6 under “Discursive Conditions” in

                                                                                                               32 Craig Calhoun, “The Public Sphere in the Field of Power,” Social Science History 34.3 (2010), 313. 33 Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,” in Perspectives on Habermas, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2000), 275-76. 34 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 17. 35 Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Public Sphere,” in Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 90-91.

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Figure 1.6). A public utterance is always situated in a stream of discourse. We

understand its meaning in relation to its temporality. Taylor notes that the public

sphere is also radically secular in the sense that the validity of any argument does not

depend on “something which transcends contemporary common action.” 36 The

secularity and temporality of public address realizes the public sphere’s self-

organized nature on the pragmatic level. Because public discourse is by definition

open, an indefinite mode of address has to be employed. A listener has to perceive the

speech as addressed to him as well as to others who are strangers linked to him only

by the speech. Utterances form a discourse when they have inter-referential linkages.

Public discourse will cease to exist if it is no longer in circulation or commands no

attention. This is why media visibility is critical in contemporary public struggles.

Lastly, public discourse is performative. “Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public

exist’ but also ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.’ It

then goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists.”37 It actively transforms

social reality.

In summary, the pursuit of publicness is the struggle to construct a particular

form of discursive interaction based on certain social imaginaries and institutional

conditions. It is a complex endeavor. No single factor will suffice to bring about

publicness. This complexity and interconnectedness perhaps explain why it is

difficult for us to conceptualize publicness, and more importantly, to realize it.

                                                                                                               36 Taylor, A Secular Age, 192. 37 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114.

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Socially Engaged Art and Publicness

“For all intents and purposes,” writes Suzanne Lacy in the influential

anthology Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, published in 1995, “the

contemporary activity in public art dates from the establishment of the Arts in Public

Places program at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967 and the subsequent

formation of state and city percent-for-art programs.”38 The term public art quickly

became synonymous with large sculptures placed in outdoor spaces. Although many

artists were creating works very much public in nature – Allan Kaprow’s Happenings,

Hans Haacke’s systems, and Adrian Piper’s performances, for example – they were

excluded from the domain of publicly funded art. In the mid-1990s, a number of

artists and critics, Suzanne Lacy and Rosalyn Deutsche foremost among them, argued

forcefully that the restrictive notion of public art should be expanded. They pointed

out that so-called public space is not necessarily public, and art’s publicness lies more

in its generative discourse than its physical placement. Deutsche contended that

“spatial forms are social structures” and that “any site can be transformed into a

public or, for that mater, a private sphere.”39 A private home in New Jersey would

acquire a sense of publicness when a group of drag queens gathered to photograph

each other. On the other hand, when certain social mechanisms are not in place, so-

called public spaces in downtown San Francisco are nothing more than outdoor

                                                                                                               38 Suzanne Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 21. 39 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Social Text 33 (1992), 53 and 39.

21

cafeterias for corporate employees.40 Deutsche suggested that space should not be

seen as a fixed object, but a realm of “discursive interaction” and “political debate.”41

Similarly, Miwon Kwon argued that “modes of communication” should be

emphasized over “the resulting site of communication.”42

This shift of theoretical perspective has led to a more accurate understanding

of the practice of many artists who for decades have developed “public strategies of

engagement” outside the so-called public art domain.43 These artists take on political

issues directly, integrating art with activism in various social movements. Projects are

not only publicly exhibited, but also publicly produced. Artists do not work for the

default audience – largely white, with financial and cultural capital – but cooperate

with multiple, often marginalized, communities. They design collaborative methods

to involve community members as active participants instead of passive viewers.

They treat “media appearances, classes, exhibitions, discussion groups, public

demonstrations, consultations, and writings” not as peripheral activities, but essential

components of their practice.44

While Lacy and others focused on community-based projects, Deutsche

argued that feminist works, such as those by Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger,

                                                                                                               40 Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, “Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space, and Unproductive Activity,” in What We Want Is Free, ed. Ted Purves (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 21-22. 41 Deutsche, “Art and Public Space,” 39. 42 Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” 2002, http://www.republicart.net/disc/publicum/ kwon01_en.htm, accessed Sept. 11, 2010. Also see, Frazer Ward, “The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity,” October 73 (1995), 71-89. 43 Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” 19. 44 Ibid., 40.

22

also contributed to a deepened understanding of publicness through a critique of

vision. Through an analysis of the 1982 exhibition “Public Vision,”45 Deutsche

demonstrated that artworks illuminating the contingency and precariousness of vision

and subjectivity are consonant with a radical form of democracy based in difference

rather than harmony. As she put it, “vision and sexuality are public matters.”46

Over the past decade, participatory, durational, and multimedia practices,

variously defined as socially engaged art, dialogic art (Grant Kester), or social

practice (Harrell Fletcher), have flourished. Artists work with participants to create

situations that foreground, confront, and sometimes resolve issues in the field of

social relations. Public discussion, rather than remaining outside of the frame only to

be activated in exhibition and criticism, is brought into the frame as part of the

artwork. For example, in spring 2009, Jeremy Deller staged It Is What It Is:

Conversations About Iraq in three American museums and more than ten public sites

around the country.47 He recruited Iraqi refugees, American soldiers, journalists, and

scholars to engage visitors in conversations about the situation in Iraq. The central

feature uniting this diverse field of practice is collaborative discourse development on

issues of common concern. In each project a portion of the public sphere – or more

often a counterpublic sphere – is created.

                                                                                                               45 The exhibition was held at White Columns in New York, July 2-24, 1982. 46 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 315. 47 The project was staged in the New Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. For more details, see http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org/ and http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/408.

23

Theoretical understanding of this field of practice is still in its early stage.

Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art,

published in 2004, remains the most ambitious attempt to date.48 In this heavily

theoretical book, Kester argues against the anti-communication tradition in modern

and postmodern art theory, and proposes a “dialogical aesthetic” that is durational,

intersubjective, and discursive. Much of the debate on socially engaged art since then

has centered on autonomy versus embeddedness and aesthetic quality versus social

efficacy.49 Earlier attention to the relationship between critical art practices and the

public sphere, as exemplified by Lacy and Deutsche’s work, has been neglected. In

this dissertation, I will turn to public sphere theory again, not the original

Habermasian model but one greatly expanded by the writings of Fraser, Taylor, and

Warner, and demonstrate that publicness provides a viable framework to integrate

various key concerns of socially engaged art. Foregrounding publicness as the central

intent of socially engaged art is particularly important in the Chinese context, as the

next section will help make clear.

                                                                                                               48 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 49 Shannon Jackson provides a good summary of recent debates on social practice in Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011). See Chapter 2 “Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art.”

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China’s State-Society Relationship

Since the public sphere is a concept rooted in European history, there has been

much debate about whether it can be applied to studies of China.50 Michael Warner

argues that “the idea of a public has a metacultural dimension” and has been “one of

the defining elements of multiple modernities.” 51 Historical research also

demonstrates that, although an institutionalized realm of public opinion-making has

never been established in China, various social movements since the late Qing have

sought to expand the space for expression and participation outside the state realm. In

this section, I will briefly review the relationship between the state and society from

the late Qing to the Mao era (1949-1976), and then discuss the social conditions of

the reform period (1976-present) that provide the context for my dissertation.52

Several developments in late imperial China were conducive to the rise of a

potential public sphere. Thinkers like Li Zhi (1527-1602), Gu Yanwu (1613-1682),

and Dai Zhen (1724-1777) attempted to negate the long-held condemning attitude

towards self-interest (si), and argued that public well-being lies in “the sum-total of

the harmonized self-interests of all members of the community.”53 The concept of

                                                                                                               50 Xu Jilin provides a good summary of the debate in Qi meng ru he qi si hui sheng: Xian dai Zhongguo zhi shi fen zi de si xiang kun jing (How to Revitalize Enlightenment: The Dilemma for Modern Chinese Intellectuals) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011). See Chapter 3 “Xian dai Zhongguo gong gong ling yu de xing tai, gong neng yu zi wo li jie” (The Contour, Function and Self-Understanding of the Public Sphere in Modern China). 51 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 11. 52 The Qing Dynasty ruled China from 1644 to 1911. It was succeeded by the Republic of China in 1912. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Mao’s rule ended with his death in 1976. Soon after, responding to grassroots demand, Deng Xiaoping and the liberal faction of the Party initiated a program of economic reforms (gai ge kai fang). 53 William Rowe, “The Public Sphere in Modern China,” Modern China 16.3 (1990), 317.

25

“society” gradually emerged as “a distinct political actor counterposed to the state.”54

Growth of commerce and trade led to rapid urbanization in areas like the Yangzi

River Delta. Merchant groups and local elites assumed a more active role in

managing local affairs. 55 At the end of the nineteenth century, independent

newspapers were founded by radical thinkers and stimulated debates in teahouses,

political clubs, and schools.56 After the Xinhai Revolution ended the Qing Dynasty in

1911, lively political discussions occurred among urban residents, in places “ranging

from temple grounds and brothels to public parks and theaters.”57 However, as David

Strand observes, the “urban elites never gathered the strength and will” to

institutionalize “a fully autonomous public sphere.” 58 Throughout the twentieth

century, the burgeoning desire for social autonomy was repeatedly suppressed by

authoritarian regimes. Yuan Shikai’s brief revival of the monarchy in 1915-16, the

White Terror masterminded by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927-28, Mao Zedong’s Anti-

Rightist Movement in 1957-59, and the military crackdown on mass protests in 1989

were just some of the most bloody examples of state violence against critical public

expressions. In light of colonial invasions since the mid-nineteenth century,

individual rights and democracy were always considered less important than, or even

                                                                                                               54 Ibid., 319. 55 See William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984) and Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). 56 See Xu Jilin, “Xian dai Zhongguo gong gong ling yu de xing tai, gong neng yu zi wo li jie.” 57 David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (University of California Press, 1989), 168. 58 Ibid.

26

detrimental to, the preservation of a strong state to mobilize resources to fight for the

nation’s survival.

After the Communist Party gained control of the Mainland in 1949, something

strange happened. According to Marxist theory, the socialization of the means of

production would solve the fundamental problem of capitalism, i.e., the contradiction

between socialized production and private ownership. There would no longer be any

need for the separation between public and private, between the state and the market

and civil society. But in reality, the “people’s democratic dictatorship” quickly

degenerated into the dictatorship of the political elite. Mao assumed the position of a

feudal lord, and displayed himself before the people. 59 The totalitarian state

penetrated all aspects of life, politicizing even the most intimate relationships.60

Routine political studies and periodic campaigns ensured that the people followed the

ideology of the Party. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), radical youths (the

Red Guards) employed communicative practices with seemingly democratic forms:

wall posters, open debates, and self-published newspapers. However, as Yang Guobin

and Craig Calhoun note, most of the Red Guards’ discourse “simply followed the

directions of the political wind on high. When dissenting views did appear, they were

                                                                                                               59 A portrait of Mao was put on the south façade of Tian’anmen (the Gate of Heavenly Peace) in 1949 and has remained there since. 60 See Ezra Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship: The Change in Personal Relations in Communist China,” The China Quarterly 21 (1965), 46-60.

27

typically disguised in orthodox Marxist and Maoist rhetoric, and even so, few authors

of dissent escaped the fate of repression.”61

The Cultural Revolution brought China to the brink of collapse. Soon after

Mao died in 1976, the Communist Party embarked on a new path: Reform and

Opening Up. Over the past three decades the relationship between the state and

society has been a delicate duet. The state has implemented a stream of policies to

foster a market economy. Its primary concern has shifted from ensuring ideological

purity to structuring a business-friendly environment. Political and social stability is

portrayed as a precondition for economic growth, and political reforms are put off

indefinitely. The state continues to restrict citizens’ freedom of expression and

association through censorship, access constraints, and bureaucratic barriers. Control

over public space has tightened over time. Take Beijing for example: Tian’anmen

Square is now fenced; bulletin boards on Beijing University campus have been

removed; hundreds of CCTV cameras are installed in the city center; today the mere

idea of a demonstration is almost unimaginable.62 The state continues to maintain a

firm grip on print and broadcast media. All newspapers and television stations are still

owned and managed by the government. The internet, owing to its decentralized

nature, is more difficult to rein in. Regulations and filtering technologies are

                                                                                                               61 Guobin Yang and Craig Calhoun, “Media, Power, and Protest in China: From the Cultural Revolution to the Internet,” Harvard Asia Pacific Review 9.2 (2008), 12. 62 This is largely due to the fact that the state has been successful in projecting an image of control and willingness to use coercive power. For example, when messages encouraging citizens to gather in Wangfujing, a commercial district in central Beijing, started to circulate on the internet in spring 2011, the state immediately sent hundreds of police to the location and put the entire police system on high alert.

28

combined with increasing online presence of official propaganda organs.63 When soft

measures fail to deter challengers, the state is always willing to resort to the

repressive state apparatus. Sociologist Zhou Xiaozheng recently made the satirical

remark that the government had made a “huge improvement” in 2009 by sentencing

dissident writer Liu Xiaobo to “only” eleven years’ imprisonment, four years shorter

than the term Wei Jingsheng received in 1979.64

On the other hand, Chinese society has gained more autonomy and manifested

increasing expectation for freedom and participation in economic as well as political

and social affairs. There are several contributing factors. The conversion to a market

economy has validated private ownership and enabled the emergence of a private

realm. This in turn leads to a stronger desire for economic rights. The once

homogeneous population has stratified. Serious disparity and injustice has triggered

increasing social dissatisfaction among people occupying the lower strata. The

internet has made it easier for citizens to speak and congregate. More people have

studied and lived abroad and tend to compare China to Western democracies and thus

demand more freedom.                                                                                                                63 See Hu Yong, Zhong sheng xuan hua: wang luo shi dai de ge ren biao da yu gong gong tao lun (The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age) (Nanning: Guangxi shi fan da xue chu ban she, 2008), particularly Chapter 6; Yang Guobin, “Hu lian wang yu Zhongguo gong min she hui” (The Internet and China’s Civil Society), Er shi yi shi ji 114 (2009), 14-25. 64 Zou Xiaozheng is a professor of sociology at Renmin University in Beijing. He made this remark in a talk titled “About China’s Social Problems” on January 23, 2010. See transcript at / http://sunfowl.fyfz.cn/art 704095.htm, accessed Jan. 10, 2011. In 2008 Liu Xiaobo initiated the Charter 08 campaign. A manifesto demanding human rights, democracy, and constitutional reform was circulated among prominent intellectuals and signed by many. Liu was arrested in December 2008. Wei Jingsheng was an active participant in the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1978-79. He was arrested after posting his essay “Democracy or New Dictatorship?” in which he argued that Deng Xiaoping was embarking on another dictatorship after Mao.

29

Social movements before and after 1989 differ significantly. Before the

Tian’anmen movement in 1989, intellectuals and university students were the main

actors pushing for social change. They held face-to-face discussions on campus and

protested in the street. They demanded fundamental change, most importantly

freedom and democracy. After the state suppressed the mass demonstration in 1989

with military force, social movements experienced a metamorphosis. In the mid-

1990s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) appeared and quickly became the

leading force in pushing for social change. Now professionals – lawyers, journalists,

and full-time staff – make up the core of NGOs, and students and young urban

residents serve as volunteers. Rather than directly challenging state power, NGOs

promote environmental protection, provide disaster relief, support migrant labors, and

advocate queer rights. Often facing registration obstacles and harassment from police

or tax bureaus, they work in an “embedded” manner, staging small-scale, non-

confrontational activities to push for gradual improvement. 65 They deliberately

portray their work as “apolitical,” and actively seek media visibility in order to

promote their causes and to make it harder for the government to shut them down.

Calhoun cautions that “there is a strong temptation to leap from the presence

of business institutions, free housing markets, newspapers, and telephones [and now

the internet] to the presumption that civil society prospers and democracy will

                                                                                                               65 See Peter Ho, “Introduction: Embedded Activism and Political Change in a Semi-Authoritarian Context,” in China's Embedded Activism: Opportunities and Constraints of a Social Movement, eds. Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds (London: Routledge, 2008).

30

inevitably follow.”66 The reality in China is a complex scene of stagnation and

progress. There is no “nation-wide demand for political change.”67 The party-state

continues its authoritarian rule. The market grows increasingly powerful, frequently

aligned with the interest of the ruling elite. At the same time, activists are delicately

pushing for incremental social change. These factors form the backdrop for the art

projects that I will discuss in this dissertation.

The next section contains a brief analysis of the Stars event, which is widely

considered the beginning of Chinese contemporary art. The analysis serves two

purposes. First, it gives some evidence to my hypothesis that the pursuit of publicness

has been a motivating force in Chinese contemporary art all along. Of course, much

further work is needed to substantiate this overarching argument. Second, it will help

to bring out the newness of the four art projects realized in the 2000s, which will be

analyzed in the main chapters.

Stars Event Revisited

Almost any book on the history of Chinese contemporary art would include

some account of the Stars event. There is little disagreement among historians on

what the Stars artists were fighting against – they challenged “both aesthetic

convention and political authority” and delivered “an implicit criticism of the status

                                                                                                               66 Craig Calhoun, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 5 (1993), 276. 67 Peter Ho, “Embedded Activism and Political Change,” 1.

31

quo”;68 they “sharply attacked official ideology, … defining an unofficial position”69

– but few writers have articulated what the Stars were fighting for. As Laclau and

Mouffe insisted in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, it is not enough to simply define

an adversary. “One also needs to know for what one is fighting, what kind of society

one wants to establish.”70 Clearly the Stars broke through some old walls, but they did

more than that. They built a new platform, however transient. In this section I will

demonstrate that many of the Stars’ efforts – from the subject matter of artworks to

the rhetorical style of statements, from the temporality of critique to the circulation of

comments – converged towards what I have described as the pursuit of publicness.

Their “unofficial position” can be defined more positively – it was a public position.

Many critics have rightly pointed out that the park where the Stars mounted

their first exhibition on September 27, 1979, was a public space. However, as

stressed earlier, publicness is constituted in a discourse rather than tied to “the nature”

of a space. The discourse of the Stars event was not constructed by the artworks

alone. The artists issued several statements, organized a demonstration, created a

discussion forum using guestbooks, and cooperated with other political and literary

activists. All these activities fused into the event’s discourse.

                                                                                                               68 Gao Minglu, Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 197. 69 Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999), 14–16. 70 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), xix.

32

The Stars event was self-organized. Unlike “professional” artists, the Stars

were not members of state-sponsored artist associations. The viewers, too, were not

organized. They were either passersby or came to see the exhibition after hearing

about it by word of mouth. The usual practice at the time was official exhibitions for

organized viewing. Under the state socialist system, everyone in China had a fixed

identity in the danwei (work unit) structure. Art production and appreciation, like

other aspects of life, was managed collectively. The Stars event, in contrast, was

organized outside the state. People gathered for nothing other than the event itself.

The artists did not know to which danwei the viewers belonged, and the viewers did

not know one another either. The event was open to strangers, producing discursive

interactions among them. It was neither an official function choreographed by the

state nor a private gathering open only to members. It was a public assembly.

In this assembly, the participants behaved as private citizens. Publicness and

privateness exist in a dialectical relationship. As Wang Hui notes, “When artists or

viewers lose their private subjective experiences, art’s publicness is also lost.”71

Between 1949 and 1976, the state attempted to eradiate all private notions: private

properties, religious beliefs, and even subjective expressions. The Communist Party

revived the Confucian ideology of da gong wu si, the annihilation of the private for

the well being of the collective.72 No one was supposed to paint as a private artist, nor

                                                                                                               71 Wang Hui, “Introduction,” Wen hua yu gong gong xing (Culture and Publicness), eds. Wang Hui and Chen Yangu (Beijing: San lian shu dian, 1998), 45. 72 See Chen Ruoshui: “Zhongguo li shi shang de ‘gong’ de gai nian ji qi xian dai bian xing” (The Concept of Publicness in Chinese History and its Modern Variations), in Gong gong xing yu gong min guan (Publicness and Citizenship), ed. Liu Qing (Nanjing: Jiangsu ren min chu ban she, 2006), 3–39.

33

view an artwork as a private viewer. The Stars artists openly challenged this ideology.

In the statement written for the first exhibition, they declared: “We have used our

own eyes to know the world, and our own brushes and awls to participate in it. Our

paintings contain all sorts of expressions, and these expressions speak to our own

individual ideals.”73

The exhibition had no unifying themes. The large number of artworks

encompassed a wide range of mediums, styles, and subject matters. Huang Rui alone

presented three different kinds of works. First, in a series of paintings titled The

Funeral, The Will, and The Rebirth, Huang combined the familiar imagery of

Yuanmingyuan Park with his own imagination. (Figures 1.7-1.9) A set of stone

columns in The Will was transformed into five fingers sprouting up from the ground

in The Funeral and then into human figures holding each other in The Rebirth. Next,

Space was an abstract painting dominated by geometric shapes in various shades of

blue and brown. Thin white curves were drawn on the surface to create a sense of

dynamism. Lastly, there were four single portraits of unidentified individuals. The

sitters were not depicted as engaging in a productive or political activity. They

seemed to be sitting there simply to be painted. Featuring expressive brushstrokes,

vibrant colors, and decorative patterns, these works departed from the socialist-realist

doctrine that had dominated Chinese art since the 1950s. The heterogeneity of Huang

Rui’s portfolio affirmed his identity as an imaginative and expressive individual,

                                                                                                               73 “Di yi jie xing xing mei zhan qian yan” (The Manifesto for the First Stars Exhibition), in The Stars: 10 Years, 73. English translation by Philip Tinari, in Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, eds. Hung Wu and Peggy Wang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7.

34

 

 

Figure 1.7 Huang Rui, The Will, 1979, oil on canvas, 65x80cm.    

 

 

Figure 1.8 Huang Rui, The Funeral, 1979, oil on canvas, 65x80cm.  

 

Figure 1.9 Huang Rui, The Rebirth, 1979, oil on canvas, 65x 80cm.  

 

35

insisting on his right to paint freely. In other words, Huang Rui painted as a private

artist. The lack of any apparent ideological code also allowed the viewers to focus on

the works’ formal aspects – colors, shapes, and rhythms – and to read the human

figures as individuals rather than revolutionary stereotypes. The viewers no longer

needed to speculate what the Party wanted them to say; they could decide whether

they liked the paintings and form their own opinions.

Opinions, if kept only in the mind of each viewer, would not circulate to form

a visible discourse. As it happened, in the later exhibitions, in the Huafang Pavilion in

November 1979 and in the National Art Gallery in August 1980, viewers could write

down their comments in guestbooks.74 In these comments several features can be

identified as public. Firstly, the viewers not only addressed the artists, but also

interacted with one another discursively. One person’s rhetorical question (“Will

[they] be able to sell these paintings in China? What do the Stars count on to shine?”)

was answered by another’s assertion (“Count on the meaning and value of her life to

shine!”). Secondly, while some viewers limited their comments only to the artworks

(“The woodcarvings were better than the paintings”), the majority elevated the

discussion to a higher level. They evaluated the event in terms of its position in the

entire art field (“I have encountered real art [here]; you are indeed the morning

star!!”) or even their impact on the nation (“On you lies the hope of China and

humanity.”) Taylor calls such discursive realms beyond one’s personal and local

                                                                                                               74 “Liang jie xing xing mei zhan guan zhong liu yan” (Visitors’ Comments to Two Stars Exhibitions), in The Stars: 10 Years, 70–72.

36

interests “metatopical.”75 The desire and liberty for citizens to engage in metatopical

debate is a distinct marker of publicness. Lastly, and most importantly, the comments

revealed disagreement. Though most viewers showed appreciation and support, a few

disapproved of the art (“Our society after all is bright. Please don’t use dark, sad

colors to portray her.” “… What impressions have these works left in me? Other than

fear, dejection, despondence … [I don’t] even have the strength to walk down the

stairs …”). The presence of disagreement may seem trivial, but it was a breakthrough

given the historical context. For years, “open discussion” had been dominated by

unanimous concurrence or condemnation, guided by the documents issued by the

Party. One would be cast as an enemy of the state if she dared to differ from the party

line. At the Stars exhibitions, the viewers could disagree with each other, partly

because the exhibitions were seen as self-organized, without the state lurking behind

with its repressive apparatus. Disagreement can be described as “a confrontation

between adversaries,” who attempt to win the debate using reason and affect rather

than force and threat.76 It distinguishes a public discourse from a publicity stunt. It is

the basis of the transformative and world-making potential of the public sphere.

Perhaps to some degree the viewers were emboldened by the artists’ own

courage to differ. Of all the artworks, Wang Keping’s woodcarvings stood out as the

most direct and incisive critique of contemporary politics. The Backbone of Society

depicted a despicable official, whose eyes had no eyeballs, nose had no nostrils,

                                                                                                               75 Taylor, A Secular Age, 194. 76 Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Public Sphere,” 91.

37

mouth had no lips, and crown had no brain. In contrast, Silence portrayed a powerless

citizen. His left eye was banded with crosshatch, yet his right eye remained open.

(Figure 1.10) A stopper was thrust into his mouth as if to prevent him from uttering

any truth. The most daring work was The Idol, an amusing amalgam of the familiar

imagery of Mao Zedong and the Buddha. (Figure 1.11) As Wu Hung describes, “With

one eye open and one eye half closed, the Great Leader seems both a benevolent deity

and a trickster. … The glossy surface of the sculpture adds an unpleasant feeling of

sleaziness.”77 It revealed Wang’s disregard for Mao’s status. He treated Mao not as a

saint but as a historical figure subject to criticism.

The work’s temporal quality was decidedly public. First, by linking Mao to

the Buddha, Wang made explicit the transcendental deification that Mao had

masterminded of his own image. Then, by making Mao behave like a human being

with a crooked look on his face and a mundane hat on his head, Wang brought Mao

back to the secular realm. Second, Wang’s critique of Mao was timely. Mao died in

1976 and the Communist Party did not officially acknowledge his mistakes until 1981.

In 1979 and 1980, many citizens may have been berating Mao in private gatherings,

but few dared to criticize him openly. To make a public expression – through text,

speech, or artwork – means to comment on an issue of temporal relevance and

demands risk-taking. Wang’s critical and humorous works resonated strongly with

the viewers precisely because he dealt with important topics of the time. (In contrast,

criticizing Mao in the 1990s or later would have less temporal relevance to

                                                                                                               77 Wu, Transience, 50.

38

Figure 1.10 Wang Keping, Silence, 1979, wood, 48cm high.

Figure 1.11 Wang Keping, The Idol, 1979, wood, 67cm high.

39

China’s socio-political situation and incur far less risk.) One documentary

photograph taken at the exhibition in 1979 shows a group of young people gathered in

front of Wang’s woodcarvings with hearty smiles on their faces – a rare scene in that

era – as if saying “Yes! Exactly!” In the guestbooks, a textile worker wrote, “Wang

Keping is an artist with a lot of courage. Using his graver, he exposed the reality’s

vileness. Awesome!” Another viewer wrote, “Here, right here, I understood art’s

people-ness [renminxing]. Art is never a synonym for aggrandizing [leaders] or

singing praises!”78

“The people,” renmin in Chinese, appeared frequently in the discourse of the

Stars event. Its active invocation suggests that the social imaginary – the people are

sovereign – was critical to the legitimacy of the Stars’ audacious act. On the second

day of the outdoor exhibition, a group of policemen came to the park and tried to shut

it down. A few viewers objected: “This is a people’s park. Why do you ask us to

leave? We don’t want to leave.” The policemen then declared that qunzhong, the

masses, complained about the artworks. The crowd responded: “We are also the

masses, and we feel this exhibition is good!”79 The police could not win the argument

and left. They then came back at night and confiscated the artworks when no viewers

were around. The Stars artists also called out to the people. By hanging their works in

the park – many works portrayed everyday subjects – the Stars solicited the attention

of the people, embodied by the passerby. Their writings made it more explicit that

                                                                                                               78 “Liang jie xing xing mei zhan guan zhong liu yan,” in The Stars: 10 Years, 70–72. 79 Wang Keping, “Xing xing wang shi,” 24–25.

40

they treated the people as their addressee. When they organized a demonstration on

October 1 to protest against the removal of the outdoor exhibition, they issued “A

Letter to the People.”80 In the statement for the Huangfang Pavilion exhibition one

month later, they wrote, “Seizing this moment of the thirtieth anniversary of the

nation’s founding, we give our harvest back to the land, and to the people.”81 (I will

discuss Lefort’s ideas of “the people in Chapter 2, beginning on page 100.)

The Communist Party had established its legitimacy on two social

imaginaries: the people are sovereign and the Party represented the fundamental

interest of the people. In 1949, the Party succeeded in adding “the people” to the

name of the nation, replacing the Republic of China with the People’s Republic.

Although the institutional mechanisms that the Party implemented were not aligned

with the social imaginaries that it preached, the Party continued to invoke the social

imaginaries in its propaganda. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, the

Party’s credibility had almost evaporated. A few events between 1976 and 1979 – the

arrest of the Gang of Four, the recognition of the grassroots 1976 Tiananmen Incident

as a revolutionary event, and the initial tolerance of the Democracy Wall movement –

reinvigorated the two social imaginaries. The Stars event occurred at this opportune

moment, and was closely linked to concurrent literary and political activism.82 The

                                                                                                               80 The Stars: 10 Years, 19. 81 Ibid., 8, trans. by Philip Tinari, in Primary Documents, 8. Also note that in contrast, the artist statement for the first Nature, Society, and Man exhibition, also held in 1979, contained no explicit address to the people (Primary Documents, 7). 82 See Xiao Xu, ed., Jin tian san shi nian (Thirty Years of Today) (Beijing: Jin tian wen xue za zhi she, 2008) and The Stars: 10 Years.

41

artists were even able to hold the second Stars exhibition in the National Art Gallery

in 1980. The success of the Stars’ effort also reinforced, in however small a way, the

social imaginary that the people are sovereign. But before long, the Party tightened its

control again. Without any significant political reform, institutional conditions

required to realize publicness – guarantees of freedom of expression, access to public

space and media – were quickly taken away. It would take another nine years for

publicly-minded artists to gain access to the National Art Gallery again.83

Chapter Overview

In Chapter 2, I will address four basic ingredients of publicness: issues have to

be defined as matters of common concern; people have to be able to speak critically

about these matters as citizens; their discursive activities need to be self-organized,

meaning outside the state; and lastly, their opinions need to enter media circulation.

Although these four conditions have become normal aspects of social life in Western

democracies, they are still suppressed by China’s current regime to a large extent.

Xiong Wenyun’s Moving Rainbow project serves as the main case study in this

chapter. (Figure 1.12) Between 1998 and 2001, Xiong made six trips to Tibet. Her

initial personal pilgrimages gradually evolved into a large-scale environmental

project, involving more than a hundred truck drivers traveling along the Sichuan-

Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet Highways. Through iconic photographs and performative

                                                                                                               83 I am referring to the China/Avant-Garde exhibition held in February 1989. The publicness of experimental art events throughout the 1980s, including the China/Avant-Garde exhibition, needs to be researched in the future.

42

Figure 1.12 Xiong Wenyun, Moving Rainbow, 1999, photograph, 130x130cm.

events, she drew media attention to the highways’ environmental impact on the

Tibetan plateau. This chapter analyzes how Xiong, as an artist, managed to realize the

four basic conditions of publicness through her art practice. It suggests that direct

engagement with sociopolitical issues in our media age may demand a fundamental

change in the temporality of art practice.

In Chapter 3, I will focus on a central idea of publicness: stranger-relationality

through personal and impersonal address. My particular interest is to show how

participation, a defining strategy in socially engaged art, can help to construct

43

stranger-relationality. To recognize others as strangers we have to accept that they

occupy a position between commonality and unknowability. In China this is

particularly difficult because two powerful forces work against it: the political system

that constantly attempts to organize all members of the society into a massive, stable

structure of national belonging and the economic system that increasingly reduces

relationality to mere market transactions.

The main case study in this chapter is Nian organized by Ai Weiwei. In May

2008, a serious earthquake erupted in Sichuan province. A disproportionate number

of victims were students in primary and secondary schools. It soon came to public

attention that many school buildings in the affected area had been poorly constructed,

and government corruption was at the root of it. The state was unwilling to

investigate the issue. Ai Weiwei and his team, assisted by local volunteers, managed

to compile the names of the students killed in the earthquake. Ai then distributed this

list on the internet, via twitter messages. In spring 2010, he invited people to read the

5,205 names and send the recordings to him online. His team then edited the

recordings into a sound work lasting 3 hours and 41 minutes. Against state

censorship, the sound work has been circulating on the internet. In this chapter, I will

also compare Nian to other artworks on the Sichuan earthquake, like Hu Huishan

Memorial (2009) by architect Liu Jiakun, which did not rely on a participatory

approach.

I argue that Nian constitutes public mourning, something rare in Chinese

history. Mourning has been either private, among family members and friends, or

44

state-sponsored, for political leaders or canonized heroes, though sometimes people

have “usurped state rituals by improvising upon an official script to make it serve

subversive ends.” 84 Nian, like other commemorative projects after the Sichuan

earthquake, was initiated by strangers, for strangers. Mourning constitutes the very

act that establishes stranger-relationality, because to mourn someone is to assume the

existence of an attachment to the loss of that person. In Publics and Counterpublics,

Warner demonstrates that stranger-relationality is achieved through a particular form

of address that is both personal and impersonal. As Warner puts it, “public speech

must be taken in two ways: as addressed to us and as addressed to strangers.”85 For

example, when I hear the victims’ names in Nian, I understand that the work is

addressing me and an indefinite number of people who also encounter it. Warner

limits his analysis to the receiving end of the relationship: the addressee is imagined

to be an indefinite public, but not the addresser. I argue that in Nian, participatory

production – in the form of a large number of online strangers participating in

recording the names – transforms the addresser into a public subject as well. When

one reads the names aloud, one is reading both personally and impersonally. This

expansion of impersonality to the addresser marks a critical difference between Nian

and other artworks that are created by artists alone.

Chapter 4 focuses on the issue of visibility, which is critical to the realization

of publicness. The Village Self-Governance Documentary Project will serve as the

                                                                                                               84 Rubie Watson, “Making Secret Histories: Memory and Mourning in Post-Mao China,” in Memory, History and Opposition Under State Socialism, ed. Rubie Watson (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), 71. 85 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 77.

45

Figure 1.13 Wu Wenguang, Village Self-Governance Documentary Project, 2005, video still.

case study. In 2005, when filmmaker Wu Wenguang was asked to produce a

documentary on village elections, he decided to help villagers document their own

politics themselves. He invited ten villagers from different parts of China to his studio

in Beijing and taught them how to use a video camera. The villagers went home and

captured elections, discussions, disputes, and everyday life. Wu’s team helped them

to edit the footage into ten short videos, which have been screened in film festivals as

well as independent film salons. (Figure 1.13)

In this chapter, visibility will be approached from several angles. First,

Rancière’s notion, the partition of the sensible, points us to the political nature of

rhetorical norms and video technologies. They condition what we can see and hear,

46

but are often assumed to be natural. The videos from the Village Documentary project

help to highlight this issue. Second, I argue that the introduction of the video camera

allows the villagers to assume an insider-outsider identity, and adds a kind of stranger

visibility to rural politics. Third, leveraging Rancière’s insight on radical pedagogy, I

suggest that, as the video camera enables reflexivity, it facilitates self-learning and

cultivates a sense of equality. Lastly, I re-emphasize a point made in Chapter 2, that

visibility depends on circulation. In the case of the Village Documentary project,

limited distribution seriously curtails its efficacy. How to overcome or subvert state

control of media remains a core challenge to the pursuit of publicness.

No public sphere – bourgeois, proletarian, or queer – is established in China.

Neither the social imaginary that people can organize themselves independently of

the state nor the institutional condition that freedom of expression is a guaranteed

right exists. This fundamental distinction between the Chinese political system and

Western democracies leads to a central argument of my dissertation, that in China all

public pursuits are both public and counterpublic, that public and counterpublic

strategies are almost always integrated in Chinese public art. Affective, performative

forms are not in opposition to, but in alignment with, rational-critical argumentation.

The latter functions more as a radical challenge to arbitrary state power than as a

hegemonic, exclusionary mechanism of the bourgeoisie to maintain its ruling

position. The first three case studies will have demonstrated to some degree this

integration of public and counterpublic forms; Chapter 5 will further substantiate this

argument.

47

Figure 1.14 Bo Zheng, Karibu Islands, discussion held at the Beijing LGBT Cultural Center, July 27, 2008.

Image altered to protect the identity of the participants.

Karibu Islands, a project from my own art practice, will serve as the case

study. I started this project in 2004 as a set of experimental videos about an imaginary

place where time travels backwards. In 2008, using the videos as a catalyst for

discussion, I worked with the Beijing LGBT Cultural Center to organize a series of

conversations. Participants, queer and straight, imagined their lives in this

hypothetical place and debated issues of sexuality and progress. (Figure 1.14) My

analysis will center on the documents generated by this project, including the “Karibu

Islands Birth Certificates” filled out by the participants and their discussions.86

                                                                                                               86 Here are a few reasons for writing about my own project. Karibu Islands, like other projects discussed in this dissertation, is not the creation of the artist alone. Its highly participatory nature accommodates partial renouncement of the artist’s authorial position. My role as a theoretically-

48

In Public Sphere and Experience, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge argue that

the proletariat have always engaged in an “unvalorized” creation of fantasy, “as a

necessary compensation for the experience of the alienated labor process.”87 The

transformation of fantasy is critical to the organization of workers’ authentic

experience into a proletarian public sphere. Nekt and Kluge suggest that, “to

transform the experience bound up in fantasy into collective practical emancipation, it

is not sufficient simply to use the fantasy product; rather one must theoretically grasp

the relation of dependency between fantasy and the experience of an alienated

reality.”88 Negt & Kluge’s analysis, though centered on the labor conditions in

postwar Germany, offers many insights to other counterpublics. In this chapter, I will

analyze Karibu Islands discussions to show why the queer and straight participants

responded differently to the hypothesis of time reversal, and how the queer

participants’ voiced their protest against heteronormativity through both direct

criticism and fantasy. I will also suggest that queerness and publicness share similar

relations to time: both negate privileging higher times over common action and

demand what Taylor calls “radical secularity.”89

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

minded analyst in 2011 is different from my role as the artist in 2008. The analysis in this chapter will primarily be about the documents and discussions created by the participants. 87 Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 33. 88 Ibid. 89 Taylor, A Secular Age, 192.

49

Chapter 2

Four Basic Ideas

The photograph is dramatic. (Figure 2.1) Ranges of barren mountains

dominate the composition. Eight trucks, covered with bright-colored tarpaulins, dot

the winding road carved on the slope of the mountain in the foreground. Their toy-

like scale and intense colors emit a sense of joy, defying the seriousness of the sharp

ridges and dense clouds in the background. This photograph, produced at Que’er

Mountain in 1999, came out of the Moving Rainbow project created by artist Xiong

Wenyun. Moving Rainbow is more than a set of photographs. Over a period of three

years, between 1998 and 2001, Xiong realized a series of art experiments along the

highways leading from Qinghai and Sichuan into Tibet, culminating in two large-

scale events that involved not only truck drivers but also environmental activists,

government officials, and journalists. Besides producing photographs of motorcades

forming “moving rainbows,” Xiong and her supporters also organized other activities

to promote environmental protection in the Tibetan region. They distributed leaflets,

set up information displays, and collected signatures. The project contributed to an

emerging discourse on environmentalism at the turn of the millennium.

Moving Rainbow is a well-known project. It was widely reported in public

media at the time, and Xiong received both emotional and financial support from

many other artists and critics. However, since the beginning, its affinity to activism

threatened its reception as art. Xiong recalls that the majority of her friends in the art

50

Figure 2.1 Xiong Wenyun, Moving Rainbow, 1999, photograph, 152x111cm.

world supported the project but considered it “not art.”1 Those few critics who have

included this project in their writings and exhibitions have considered it exclusively

from the perspective of photography or performance art.2 Zhang Li, who assisted

Xiong in 2000 and 2001, is the only critic who has commented on the project’s social

dimensions. In his curatorial statement for the 2008 retrospective exhibition of

                                                                                                               1 See Zhang Yuling, “Xiong Wenyun zai gong zuo” (Xiong Wenyun at Work), unpublished text, 2011. 2 For example, see Lu Hong and Sun Zhenhua, Yi hua de rou shen: Zhongguo xing wei yi shu (Alienated Body: Performance Art in China) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei mei shu chu ban she, 2006), 68-69; Lu Peng, Er shi shi ji Zhongguo yi shu shi (Twentieth Century History of Chinese Art) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009), 244.

51

Moving Rainbow, Zhang writes, “This work integrates contemporary art, social,

historical and cultural analysis, environmental protection, and interaction between the

artist and the public. It is an experimental activity of trans-disciplinary art.”3 In my

view, Moving Rainbow is one of the most important public art projects of the last

decade. Its scale and media impact remain unsurpassed. In addition to its historical

importance as one of the first art projects to connect with emerging environmental

activism, its complex relationship with the state accommodates a nuanced

understanding of publicness in post-socialist China. Therefore, I have chosen it as the

first case study. It will help to reveal several key constituents of publicness: issue

formation, media attention, assertion of citizens’ rights and responsibilities, and self-

organization.

In the next section, I will provide a chronological account of Moving

Rainbow’s evolution, which will serve as a foundation for further analysis.

Six Trips to Tibet

Xiong was born in Sichuan province in 1953. During the Cultural Revolution

(1966-76), at the age of sixteen, she was sent to work in the Aba Tibetan Autonomous

Prefecture.4 In 1979 she entered the Sichuan Art Academy to study traditional

                                                                                                               3 Zhang Li, curatorial statement for the exhibition “Liu dong cai hong shi zhou nian” (The Tenth Anniversary of Moving Rainbow), held at Three Shadows Photography Art Center from June 15 to July 27, 2008. 4 “For seven years, she worked on a farm, painted for local people, studied in a local normal school and taught painting in the school after graduation.” (Chen Jie, “A Rainbow for the Roof of the World,” China Daily, May 19, 2001).

52

Figure 2.2 Xiong’s site-specific experiment, Tibet, May 1998.

Figure 2.3 A photograph taken by Xiong in Tibet in May 1998.

Chinese painting. In 1987 she went to Japan to pursue further training and developed

a passion for color field paintings.

After exhibiting her paintings at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing

in April 1998, Xiong went to Tibet in May. She visited the Samye Monastery and the

Kings’ Tombs in the Shannan area and realized a series of small-scale, site-specific

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experiments. She painted pebbles in bright colors, using the same palette she had

been using in her paintings. (Figure 2.2) Xiong’s work attracted attention from local

residents but did not surprise them. They have long used natural materials – stone,

mud, and even water and wind – to make small replicas of Buddhist statues and

pagodas.5 And bright colors are everywhere to be seen in Tibet, the land closest to the

sun. Among the photographs Xiong took during this trip was one of a garbage dump,

with stacks of Styrofoam lunch boxes, single-use chopsticks, and plastic bags. (Figure

2.3)

Two months later, Xiong went to Tibet again. This time she took a road trip

along the Sichuan-Tibetan Highway for over 1,200 kilometers, traveling from

Chengdu in Sichuan province to Qamdo in the eastern part of Tibet. At Erlang

Mountain, her luggage was stolen. “However,” she wrote, “when we finally reached

Qamdo after a treacherous journey, I felt at peace again.”6 Besides continuing her

painting experiments, she turned her attention to the highway. (Figure 2.4) She

noticed that many trucks coming out of Tibet were carrying timber. During this trip

she also encountered a rainbow, rising above the mountains into the clouded sky.

(Figure 2.5)

When she embarked on her third trip in October 1998, the highway was no

longer just the road leading into Tibet, but had become the site of her focus. In the

two previous trips, Xiong acted more like a keen observer. When she attempted

                                                                                                               5 For example, they would swing a mold in the wind or in a river to produce copies of the Buddha that last only for a moment. 6 Xiong Wenyun, text written for her exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Center in 2008.

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Figure 2.4 A photograph of the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, taken by Xiong in July 1998.

Figure 2.5 A photographs taken by Xiong on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway in July 1998.

artistic experiments, they were small and did not require interaction with other

people. This time, however, she seemed to be more conscious of her identity as an

artist at work. She invited photographer Luo Yongjin to travel with her, so her actions

could be documented. She engaged in two series of works. In one series, she painted

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the visible ends of timber carried on the trucks. (Figure 2.6) Again she used the

rainbow palette: red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, blue, and purple. In another

series, she hung a piece of bright-colored cloth on a door or a window of the shacks

standing next to the highway. (Figure 2.7) To realize these works, she had to talk to

the truck drivers and the people living in the shacks to obtain their approval. On one

occasion, upon seeing the red paint Xiong was applying to the wood carried on his

truck, a driver commented, “yes, they are bleeding.” According to Xiong, this was the

first time that someone connected her actions to environmental issues.

In March 1999, Xiong participated in a group exhibition and showed some

photographs from her trips in Tibet. Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper,

published an article on her work and mentioned its connection to environmental

protection.7 After this exhibition, Xiong decided to continue her project and to make

it visually more dramatic. She made seven waterproof tarpaulins, each in a rainbow

color and large enough to cover the back of a truck. She took them with her to Que’er

Mountain, 4,200 meters above sea level, and convinced a few truck drivers to put the

tarpaulins on their trucks. (Figure 2.9) The first “moving rainbow” thus came into

being. To her surprise, the drivers liked the tarpaulins and wanted to buy them from

her. They told her that her products seemed more durable than those available on the

market and would provide better protection for valuable goods like furs and

cigarettes.

                                                                                                               7 Anonymous, “Xian dai yi shu zuo pin lian zhan: tan tao dang dai chuan mei ru he ying xiang she hui” (Modern Art Group Show: Exploring How Contemporary Media Influence Society), Ta Kung Pao, March 13, 1999.

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Figure 2.6 (left) Xiong painting the end of timber carried on a truck, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Sichuan-Tibet Highway, October 1998. Figure 2.7 (right) Xiong

hanging a piece of cloth in bright yellow on a door, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Sichuan-Tibet Highway, October 1998.

Figure 2.8 (left) Xiong talking to drivers, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Que’er Mountain, April 1999. Figure 2.9 (right) Xiong convinced a few truck drivers to put the bright-colored tarpaulins on their trucks, photographed by Luo Yongjin, Que’er

Mountain, April 1999.

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Emboldened by the media attention she received and the truck drivers’ warm

response, Xiong committed herself to increasing the scale of the rainbow idea. She

sought and obtained support from Southwest Jiaotong University, where she was

teaching as a visiting professor. She also found a team of drivers in Chengdu who

agreed to participate on a planned trip. On September 25, 1999, a departure ceremony

was held in the South Gate Plaza of the University, attended by university officials

and the CEO of a civil engineering firm that contributed some funds. (Figure 2.10)

Fourteen trucks were draped in the colored tarpaulins and left on an eight-day journey

to Qamdo. This trip generated a set of photographs that are the most visually

compelling, like the one described at the beginning of this chapter. Xiong directed the

drivers, while Luo, the photographer, set up the camera at strategic positions, often

far away and on elevated ground, so he could capture panoramic views of the

motorcade moving through the mountainous landscape. (Figure 2.11)

Xiong became more ambitious. She drafted a plan to recruit one thousand

truck drivers “to carry the Moving Rainbow along the Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-

Tibet highways simultaneously into the ‘roof of the world.’”8 She also gave the

project a new name: Beijing-Everest Environmental Protection Activity. For the next

year and half, she devoted herself to seeking support in China and Japan. She

succeeded in building a partnership with two important Chinese environmental NGOs

(China Environmental Culture Promotion Association and Green Earth Volunteers),

                                                                                                               8 Xiong Wenyun, text written for her exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Center in 2008.

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Figure 2.10 The departure ceremony held in front of Southwest Jiaotong University, September 25, 1999.

Figure 2.11 The Moving Rainbow motorcade on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, September 1999.

but failed to secure any major financial sponsorship. After several delays, she decided

to reduce the original scope and finance the project with her own savings and

donations from other individuals. On July 11, 2001, sixty trucks covered in colored

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Figure 2.12 Xiong and participants celebrating their arrival at the base camp of Mount Everest, July 22, 2001.

tarpaulins left Golmud in Qinghai province for Tibet. Two weeks later, a number of

trucks reached the base camp of Mount Everest, 5,400 meters above sea level. (Figure

2.12) A series of events were also held at several stops along the road and later in

Beijing to spread the message of environmental protection. The project was widely

reported, in both local and national media.

In summary, Moving Rainbow evolved gradually as Xiong’s initial personal

pilgrimages to Tibet grew into ever larger participatory events. Xiong did not have a

master plan when she embarked on her first trip to Tibet. She tuned her work

according to what she experienced on the road and how others responded to her

gestures. At the same time, it is clear that the project could evolve because Xiong did

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not content herself with existing forms of art and existing platforms of publicness. In

the next four sections, I will discuss how Xiong defined the highways as a site for

public concern, how she called for and modulated public attention through

photography and media events, and how her identity as a citizen and Moving Rainbow

as a self-organized venture challenged China’s totalitarian system.

Highway as Issue

Publics are formed around issues of common concern. What constitutes

common concern is not predefined but needs to be contested in the public sphere

itself. Xiong was not the first person to define the environmental movement in China,

but through Moving Rainbow, she contributed new and valuable perspectives to the

agenda.

Environmental ideas first appeared in China in the late 1980s. In 1988, New

Observer, an influential magazine at the time, published Xu Gang’s essay, “Loggers,

Wake Up!” After describing the serious extent of illegal logging in China, Xu

concludes,

The human race still doesn’t understand this principle: when they drive forests and other organisms on this planet into trouble, the biggest victim will be the human race itself. The human race has to liberate itself from this selfish mindset and learn to live with [other organisms] in harmony. When the human race treats each tree and each blade of grass with love, each tree and each blade of grass will also treat the human race with love.9

                                                                                                               9 Xu Gang, “Fa mu zhe, xing lai!” (Loggers, Wake Up!), Xin guan cha (New Observer), February 1988. Translation mine.

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Xu’s essay was widely cited and reprinted, casting a significant influence on public

opinion and state policy.10 In 1994, Friends of Nature was established in Beijing as

the first environmental NGO formally registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Its four founders, Liang Congjie, Yang Dongsheng, Liang Xiaoyan, and Wang

Lixiong, were renowned intellectuals. According to sociologist Yang Guobin, “the

development of environmental NGOs took off in the mid-1990s and accelerated

within a few years.”11 The number of organizations increased from twenty-eight in

1996 to sixty-nine in 1999. Many NGOs focused their resources on protecting the

natural environment in the less developed western part of China. For example, to save

the Tibetan antelope, an endangered species on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Friends of

Nature worked on mobilizing public support for anti-poaching efforts between 1998

and 2002. It also submitted proposals to local governments in Yunnan province on

how to save the golden haired monkey.

Moving Rainbow redefined the highways between Tibet and the Han region as

a site of environmental concern. The Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet highways were

both constructed in the 1950s by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Mao

instructed the PLA to “march and pave.”12 Three thousand soldiers lost their lives in

the process. Since then the state discourse has always portrayed the highways as

                                                                                                               10 See Tong Zhifeng, “Li cheng yu te dian: kuai su zhuan xing qi xia de Zhongguo huan bao yun dong” (History and Characteristics: Chinese Environmental Movement in the Era of Rapid Transformation), Li lun yue kan (Theory Monthly), March 2009. 11 Yang Guobin, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China,” The China Quarterly 181 (2005), 50. 12 In Chinese, “yi mian jin jun, yi mian xiu lu.”

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extraordinary achievements in human history, claiming that they have “catalyzed the

historical transformation of the Tibetan social structure, contributed to Tibet’s

unprecedented economic and social development, and strengthened the Motherland’s

border defense and ethnic unity.”13 Although Xiong never explicitly criticized this

official narrative, in practice she challenged its validity. She wrote in 2000,

White trash [disposable containers and plastic bags] along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway is appalling. Trucks on both sides rush by: those going into the mountains are packed with consumer goods; those coming out overloaded with timber. City and nature are two ends of the human axis. This highway and those trucks racing on it are worrying me.14

The highways provide a strategic entry point for inquiry as several issues converge

here. How has economic development affected the region’s environment? What can

be done to implement a more sustainable model of growth? What role can Tibet’s

traditional culture play in defending the environment against the modernizing vision?

Moving Rainbow effectively opened up the space for these questions to be raised, and

redefined the highways as matters of public concern rather than symbols of national

unity and state glory.

Xiong was not the first artist to connect her art practice to environmental

concerns. In 1995, American artist Betsy Damon, together with Chinese artist Dai

Guangyu, organized a large exhibition in Chengdu. Titled Guardians of Water, the

                                                                                                               13 Anonymous, “Qing man tian lu: ji nian chuan qing zang gong lu tong che wu shi zhou nian” (Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Opening of Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet Highways), Lhasa wan bao, Dec. 24, 2004, http://www.china.com.cn/zhuanti2005/txt/2004-12/24/content_5738091.htm, accessed Feb. 8, 2012. 14 Xiong Wenyun, “Dian feng shang de yi shu” (Art on the Mountain Top), unpublished text, 2000.

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Figure 2.13 Yin Xiuzhen, Washing the River, Chengdu, 1995.

event was intended to raise public consciousness about the degradation of Chengdu’s

Funan River. They invited more then twenty artists to create site-specific

installations. Yin Xiuzhen built a small citadel on the riverbank with ice blocks made

of water from the river, and invited local residents to “clean the river.” (Figure 2.13)

Dai soaked a set of photographs of local residents in the river for twenty-four hours to

demonstrate the seriousness of pollution.15 In the next few years, Damon and Dai

organized three more events, in Lhasa and Dujiangyan. What distinguished Moving

                                                                                                               15 See Lu Hong, Yue jie: Zhongguo xian feng yi shu 1979-2004 (Avant-Garde Art in China) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei mei shu chu ban she, 2006), 211.

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Rainbow from other environmental art projects of this period was Xiong’s ability to

expand the scope of existing discussion by bringing a previously unnoticed area into

focus. Furthermore, by identifying the highways as an environmental concern, Xiong

suggested that matters of the environment have to be looked at beyond local and even

regional levels, and be connected to issues of economic development and ethnic

relations. Much of the project’s success has to do with its effectiveness in attracting

media attention, which is the subject of the next section.

Media Attention

According to Michael Warner, attention is both a necessary and a sufficient

condition for someone to become a member of a public. Publics – viewers of a

photograph, readers of a text, listeners of a speech – lack any formal membership

structure. They possess no passport, wear no uniform, and swear no oath. “The

existence of a public is contingent on its members’ activity, however notional or

compromised, and not on its members’ categorical classification, objectively

determined positions in the social structure, or material existence.”16 Lacking any

institutional guarantee, publics “commence with the moment of attention, must

continually predicate renewed attention, and cease to exist when attention is no longer

predicated.”17 At the same time, “a public is constituted through mere attention.”18

Attention functions like an entry ticket; people become members of a public by                                                                                                                16 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 88. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 87.

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simply paying attention to its shared text. Warner argues that understanding attention

as active uptake rather than passive reaction is important. He writes,

Wherever a liberal conception of personality obtains, the moment of uptake that constitutes a public can be seen as an expression of volition on the part of its members. And this fact has enormous consequences. It allows us to understand publics as scenes of self-activity, of historical rather than timeless belonging, and of active participation rather than ascriptive belonging. Under the right conditions, it even allows us to attribute agency to a public, even though that public has no institutional being or concrete manifestation.19

For Warner, “the cognitive quality of that attention is less important than the mere

fact of active uptake.”20

Warner’s arguments all concern the addressee. To develop a complete

understanding of attention, we also have to consider the addresser. Art historian Hans

Belting reminds us that “whenever we see an image, there is also, visibly or invisibly,

a body that proposes it to our attention.”21 All artworks, when displayed, receive

attention from indefinite viewers and create transient publics. But different artworks

beckon different kinds of attention and create different kinds of publics. For example,

the kind of attention called for by a Moving Rainbow photograph is surely not the

same as that by a state-authorized historical painting, like The Founding of the Nation

(1953), which depicts Mao Zedong standing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace on

October 1, 1949 to announce the establishment of the People’s Republic. Perhaps the

                                                                                                               19 Ibid., 89. 20 Ibid., 87. 21 Hans Belting, “Medium, Image corps” and “le lieu des images,” in Pour une anthropologie des images (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), quoted in Daniel Dayan, “Sharing and Showing: Television as Monstration,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625 (2009), 25.

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attention that the viewer gives to The Founding of the Nation, hung centrally in the

giant National Museum situated on the east side of Tian’anmen Square, reveals more

“ascriptive belonging” than “active participation.” A range of factors – who authors

the image, what the image depicts, how the image is displayed, and what discourse

the image participates in – condition the viewers’ uptake. Media scholar Daniel

Dayan has coined the term “monstration” to refer to “the performance that calls for

and modulates attention.”22 Though his research primarily deals with television, the

concept of monstration applies to other media as well. How did Moving Rainbow call

for collective attention through showing, pointing, and performing? As I have written

earlier, Moving Rainbow generated a complex array of objects and events. I will focus

on two categories here: the photographs of the “moving rainbow” motorcades and

the series of events Xiong organized in summer 2001.

Moving Rainbow has been interpreted, both by Xiong herself and by

journalists and critics, as a project promoting environmental protection in Tibet,

particularly concerning the impact of the Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet Highways.

Given this proposition, one might wonder, wouldn’t it be better to show something

like the trash dump Xiong photographed during her first trip to Tibet in May 1998

than the pictures of the trucks covered in rainbow-colored tarpaulins? Unlike

documentary photographs, these “moving rainbow” pictures do not reveal any

environmental problem directly. We know from Xiong’s earlier experiments that

timber was one of the main goods being shipped out of Tibet. In these photographs,

                                                                                                               22 Dayan, “Sharing and Showing: Television as Monstration,” 25.

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Figure 2.14 Xiong Wenyun, Moving Rainbow, 1999, photograph, 152x111cm.

with the trucks covered, we cannot even see what they were carrying. Instead of

pointing to any concrete issue, Xiong employs a symbolic form that originates in

nature and has been imbued with many cultural meanings, almost always evoking

positive emotions. In Tibet, it is believed that rainbows are ladders to gods. Bright,

intense colors certainly attract our eyes, and it seems that Xiong is satisfied with just

that. With these pictures, she draws our attention to the highways, but she refrains

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from giving us a speech. The photographs function like a flag, but not a sermon. With

our attention turned to Tibet, we have to look for more information and decide what

actions to take.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes,

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. … The weirdness of [mass society] resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.23

The “moving rainbow” photographs fulfill the purpose of the table in Arendt’s

metaphor. They provide the common focus for our attention. Xiong acts as the table

provider rather than a speechmaker sitting around the table to confront us. The

photographs are more symbolic than argumentative. Though each picture was taken at

a particular moment in time and space, under distinct weather and lighting conditions,

together they seem timeless. The vehicles, representing a specific phase of human

presence, have been transformed into something otherworldly, like drops of paint

splashed onto the immense landscape. Despite human coordination, chance is at play.

With the road winding through the mountains, it was impossible for Xiong and

photographer Luo to construct the kind of regularity commonly seen in air shows.

                                                                                                               23 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52-53.

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Imperfection makes human effort salient. We are drawn into caring not because of

convincing arguments based on rationality, but because of emotions like joy,

defiance, transience, and immortality.

While the “moving rainbow” photographs achieved a certain quality of

timelessness, the events Xiong organized in late 1999 and summer 2001 were clearly

time-stamped. For example, here is the rundown of the events in 2001, as described

by Xiong:

June 29, 2001 We held the departure ceremony of the “Beijing-Everest

Environmental Protection Activity” at the Beijing-Tibet Building. A ten-car Moving Rainbow motorcade [circled] Beijing’s Third Ring Road.

June 8, 2001 More than ten volunteers, media, and Tibetan Environmental

Protection activists were part of a team that met in Golmud [in Qinghai province]. In the center of Golmud, we organized a large-scale environmental awareness event.

July 11, 2001 Sixty trucks displaying the colored canvases set off from the

Golmud Nanshankou checkpoint along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway, traveling over the Karakorum and Nyenchen Tonglha Mountains toward Lhasa. Along the way, we organized environmental awareness events in places like Amdo.

July 18, 2001 Before the Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet Highways

Memorial in Lhasa, the Moving Rainbow motorcade held a departure ceremony, and the team continued on toward the Everest Base Camp.

July 22, 2001 The Moving Rainbow motorcade traveled through Xigaze,

Lhazi, and Tingri to finally reach the Everest Base Camp, 5,400 meters above sea level.

August 2001 Pictures from the “Moving Rainbow Beijing-Everest

Environmental Protection Activity” are exhibited at the Technology Plaza of Xidan [a major commercial district in

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Beijing]. The exhibition displayed pictures taken by project volunteers.24

Media coverage of these events generated far greater public attention than exhibitions

of the “moving rainbow” photographs in art venues. Between 1998 and 2004, three

years after the project’s completion, photographs of Moving Rainbow only appeared

in one art exhibition. The complete project was not shown in an art space until 2008.

In contrast, Xiong’s activities were reported in newspapers and on television in a

timely fashion. Perhaps this helps to explain why, after summer 1999, Xiong devoted

much of her energy to creating media events. As Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz note,

in contemporary society, media events “are stages that offer the highest degree of

publicness, the highest available amount of collective attention.”25

Xiong did not have full control of the media events. She had to work with two

sponsoring NGOs, local governments, volunteers, and participating journalists to

determine the form and content of these events. Unlike many of her peers, Xiong was

comfortable with this loss of autonomy. The relation between autonomy and

heteronomy has been an issue of intense debate in modern and contemporary art.

Shannon Jackson, in her recent book Social Works: Performing Arts, Supporting

Publics, argues that we have to be mindful of “the contingency of any dividing line

between autonomy and heteronomy, noticing the dependency of each on the

definition of the other, watching as the division between these two terms morphs

                                                                                                               24 Xiong Wenyun, text written for her exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Center in 2008. 25 Dayan, “Sharing and Showing: Television as Monstration,” 23.

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between projects and perspectives.”26 By plunging into negotiations with various

parties, especially the state, Xiong actually was able to enhance her profile as a

citizen with agency. More will be said in the next section. First, let’s take a closer

look at the media discourse generated around these media events.

On April 14, 2001, an article appeared on the lower right hand corner of the

front page of China Women’s News. Titled “Beijing – Mount Everest Will Fly a Ten-

Thousand-Kilometer Rainbow: Producer Ms. Xiong Wenyun Introduces

Environmental Art Project in Beijing,” it described the press conference that Xiong

and her NGO partners held in Beijing the day before, when they announced the series

of events to be performed later that summer. The article had a formal style, filled with

phrases commonly associated with official events. Two days later, the same

newspaper ran a much longer article in its “Women and Society” section, titled

“Xiong Wenyun Paves a Rainbow Road.” It was written in a more personal tone and

told a more textured story. The author traced the development of Xiong’s artistic

experiments up to that point, and articulated how Xiong “understands environmental

protection and participates in it with an artist’s way of thinking.”27 The impending

events provided the occasion for the publication of both articles. In other words, the

event form made Moving Rainbow newsworthy. The fact that Xiong’s devotion was

                                                                                                               26 Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Arts, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 29. 27 Zhang Qi, “Xiong Wenyun pu jiu cai hong zhi lu” (Xiong Wenyun Paves a Rainbow Road), Zhongguo fu nv bao (China Women’s News), April 16, 2001, page 3.

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considered admirable is only part of the reason; it also had to do with the unique

temporality of public discourse.

Warner points out that “a public is the social space created by the reflexive

circulation of discourse” and that “the temporality of circulation is not continuous or

indefinite; it is punctual.”28 The rhythms of publications – daily newspapers, weekly

magazines, seasonal fashions – enable a sense of time and distance in modern society.

Warner writes,

The punctual time of circulation is crucial to the sense that discussion is currently unfolding in a sphere of activity. It is not timeless, like meditation; nor is it without issue, like speculative philosophy. … The more punctual and abbreviated the circulation, and the more discourse indexes the punctuality of its own circulation, the closer a public stands to politics. At longer rhythms or more continuous flows, action becomes harder to imagine. This is the fate of academic publics, a fact very little understood when academics claim by intention or proclamation to be doing politics. In modernity, politics takes much of its character from the temporality of the headline, not the archive.29

What Warner observes above about academic publics also apply to art publics. Art,

like research, operates on a more extended timescale than politics. Artists are not

bound to pressing issues and artworks do not enter into circulation until they are fully

formed and ready to be exhibited. This was precisely the case for Xiong before 1999.

The three trips she made to Tibet were planned by herself and their temporality had

no public relevance. She was concerned with finding spiritual peace in nature, an

issue not deemed a collective urgency. She experimented at her own pace and only

                                                                                                               28 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90 and 95. 29 Ibid., 96-97.

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exhibited the photographs of her performative activities in March 1999. The first

person to write about her work was Wang Nanming, one of the curators for the

exhibition.

The situation changed after summer 1999. As Xiong became more interested

in environmental issues and decided to adopt a more activist approach, the

temporality of the project shifted to a different gear. She was no longer lost in

timeless and meditative experiments, but busied herself with organizing events

according to a specified schedule. Her work became newsworthy because of its

punctuality and its engagement with issues closer to the conventional understanding

of politics. Newspapers started to report on her work, even before its realization.

Articles mentioned not only her ideas on colors and aesthetics but also her views on

the environment. For example, the April 16th article on China Women’s News quoted

Xiong saying,

Coming from the perspective of nature, I oppose urban civilization’s destruction of nature; however, on the road, [I] could also see the power of the human beings who struggle to survive, with body and flesh, in the cruel environment. Car and road are such expressions: they both destroy and nourish. Human existence is also a kind of nature. How should [we] establish some form of reasonable communication between the human race and nature?30

Xiong assumed the role of an activist and social commentator, in addition to that of

visual artist. Zhang Qi, the author of this newspaper article, did not seem to be

troubled by Xiong’s hybrid identity. Zhang’s attitude contrasted with that of many of

                                                                                                               30 Xiong quoted in Zhang Qi, “Xiong Wenyun Paves a Rainbow Road.” Translation mine.

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Xiong’s artist peers. In June 2001, when she faced the difficult situation of not

securing any corporate sponsorship, Xiong sought advice from her friends on whether

she should continue the project. The majority of them held the view that the

impending event would constitute an activist activity but not qualify as art. Their

opinion made Xiong depressed, thinking that “to embark on this journey would mean

a farewell to the art world.”31 For two days Xiong remained sleepless. Eventually she

made up her mind. As Zhang wrote in the article, “if having to choose between being

an artist and being an activist, Xiong chose the latter.”32

The anxiety that Xiong’s friends had about her project was not unfounded. For

one thing, by venturing into the sphere of activism, she changed the temporality of

her practice. This fundamental adjustment would pose a serious threat to art’s value,

which has been built at least partially on the idea that art is timeless. A second

concern was whether Xiong possessed the necessary skills to navigate the field of

activism and politics. While most commentators supported the project’s

environmental message and concentrated on it, a few authors also took the

opportunity to promote the official discourse of ethnic harmony between Han Chinese

and Tibetans. For example, one article appeared on China Daily on August 2, 2001. A

short text was accompanied by five large photographs, whose captions read: “The

‘Moving Rainbow’ propaganda motorcade heads for the Qomolangma,” “Local

people from Anduo Town watch with interest a small exhibition on environmental

                                                                                                               31 Xiong quoted in Zhang Yuling, “Xiong Wenyun at Work.” 32 Zhang Qi, “Xiong Wenyun Paves a Rainbow Road.”

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protection,” “Holy prays: a Tibetan Buddhist monk prays for the volunteers,” “A time

to cheer: volunteers celebrate the Harvest Festival with local Tibetan farmers,” and

“Collective efforts: volunteers and local people pass rocks to try to get the stranded

truck out of the water.”33 For her part, Xiong was not able to – or perhaps not allowed

to – articulate the complex relationship between environmental protection, China’s

nationalism, and Tibet’s history and culture in any media. I am pointing out this

limitation not to delegitimize Moving Rainbow but to suggest that, in their pursuit of

publicness, artists like Xiong have to acquire new skills as their relationship with time

and politics changes.

Artist as Citizen

In all of the newspaper and magazine articles, Xiong was featured

prominently as an artist who, through artistic exploration, developed a personal

conviction about the importance and urgency of environmental protection. She came

across as someone who could think independently and express her opinions publicly.

An article published in 1999 recounts, “When she entered Tibet via the Sichuan-Tibet

Highway, she sensed acutely that modern ‘civilization’ is invading the plateau at an

unfathomable speed. She was convinced that here manmade disasters far outnumber

natural disasters.”34 This statement not only relays Xiong’s environmental message,

                                                                                                               33 Bian Ji, “Driving High for Environment: Mission of ‘Moving Rainbow’ Focuses on Awareness,” China Daily, August 2, 2001, page 10. 34 Mao Shouyu, “Lv ri nv yi shu jia yong se cai bao zhuang chuan zang xian” (Japan-based Female Artist Decorates Sichuan-Tibet Highway with Color), Tian fu zhou mo (Tianfu Weekend), June 25, 1999, page 5.

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but also indicates to the reader that it is legitimate to come to one’s own conclusion

based on one’s own observation. Furthermore, the reader would learn that Xiong was

not content with just sharing her opinion with people around her. She took the

initiative to organize events that had a wide public impact, even when her action

could alienate her in her professional field. The story of Xiong as a publicly-minded

and action-oriented citizen had an exemplary effect that would not be welcomed by

the Chinese state.

A public is an assembly of citizens. Without the notion of rights-bearing

citizenship, the public sphere would be unimaginable. In China, the idea of the citizen

remains an inanimate ideal. As Michael Keane puts it,

In contrast with the Western democratic tradition that emphasizes sovereignty, participation in politics, and civil rights, citizenship in China is seen as a benefit granted by the State to persons born in the People’s Republic. Rights emanating from citizenship are thus framed as economic, social, and cultural benefits. And, rather than empowering the individual, citizenship rights are programmatic. That is, they obligate citizens to participate in social programs linked to nation building.35

Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic, believed that “only with a strong

state and a disciplined population could China modernize.”36 That view was later

inherited by the Communist Party. “The citizen, with its historical legacy of

individual rights, was viewed as antithetical to the socialist goal of mass mobilization,

                                                                                                               35 Michael Keane, “Redefining Chinese citizenship,” Economy and Society 30.1 (2001), 2. 36 Ibid.

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class struggle, and collectivism.” 37 Under Deng Xiaoping’s reform program,

economic rights were separated from political rights. “Citizenship is thus primarily

conceived of in economic and ethical terms.”38 In the 1990s, the state started to

encourage people to claim their rights as consumers and property owners, but

continued to suppress any struggle that demanded political rights. “In the

government’s version of citizenship formation, the new individual citizen is to be

molded, as were the masses decades earlier.”39 Seen in this light, the now pervasive

individualism in the pursuit of material wealth is not so much an expression of

bottom-up desire as a consequence of top-down programming.

Unlike Ai Weiwei, whose work will be discussed in the next chapter, Xiong

never articulated her practice within the theoretical framework of citizenship. Yet by

voicing a perspective that strayed from the official discourse and by taking an

initiative independent of the state, Xiong acted as a citizen with a natural right to

speak on matters of common concern.

By perceiving the environment as a matter of common concern, she also

tacitly challenged the conception of state responsibility. In theory, since the people

are the sovereign of the state, the state and the people are considered two

interchangeable concepts. For example, Article 9 of the Chinese Constitution states,

“Mineral resources, waters, forests, mountains, grassland, unreclaimed land, beaches

and other natural resources are owned by the state, that is, by the whole people, with                                                                                                                37 Ibid., 3. 38 Ibid., 10. 39 Ibid., 5.

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the exception of the forests, mountains, grassland, unreclaimed land and beaches that

are owned by collectives in accordance with the law.”40 Yet without a functioning

representative democracy, the correspondence between the people and the state is

devoid of institutional reality. Individuals in general do not perceive themselves as

having any power to influence state policy. Consequently they regard the

management of collective wellbeing as an exclusive responsibility of the government.

In other words, people are deprived of a sense of both rights and responsibilities.

Claiming public responsibility always implies claiming public right.

Xiong not only assumed the role of a responsible citizen herself, but also

encouraged others to do so. She designed a “Commitment Card” to be signed by

drivers who participated in the project. The following statement was printed on one

side of the card: “I promise not to engage in littering, in illegal logging, in illegal

timber trade, and in poaching wild animals.” On the other side, the name of the

project, “Moving Rainbow Beijing-Everest Environmental Protection Activity” was

printed in both Chinese and Tibetan against a rainbow background. Drivers were

asked to write down their name and other basic information like the plate number of

their truck on the stub of the card, and return it to Xiong. The commitment card had

no legal or administrative power but served only a symbolic function. It was a kind

gesture between Xiong and the drivers, indicating their agreement that all of them

need to take on the responsibility to protect the environment.

                                                                                                               40 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (adopted on December 4, 1982). English version at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html, accessed Feb. 10, 2012.

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Figure 2.15 Commitment cards signed by drivers.

Why did the media always stress Xiong’s identity as a female artist who had

studied and lived in Japan for over a decade? All three factors – working as a

professional artist, being a woman, and possessing overseas experience – contributed

social capital to Xiong’s activist position. The Chinese political system does not

prohibit activism outright, but deters it by making it enormously costly for most

people, socially, financially, and emotionally. In order to survive, one would need to

carve out a democratic enclave within the authoritarian structure. Political scientist

Bruce Gilley has coined the term “democratic enclave” to refer to institutions or well-

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defined spaces in society “where the authoritarian regime’s writ is substantively

limited and is replaced by an adherence to recognizably democratic norms and

procedures.”41 The core feature of a democratic enclave is “an enduring rejection of

authoritarian norms and practices in favor of democratic ones.”42 It is beyond the

scope of this dissertation to determine the extent to which the entire field of Chinese

contemporary art could be considered a democratic enclave. However, there have

been clear moments in the past three decades when artists managed to build zones of

substantial freedom. As I mentioned in the Introduction, the Stars group in 1979 made

a public call for artistic freedom and citizens’ rights. Subsequently a large number of

artists worked together in the 1980s to create a network of production, exhibition, and

publication. They supported one another and exchanged ideas through personal

correspondences and regional and national gatherings. The state largely tolerated their

activities. Over time, experimental art acquired an increasing level of acceptance in

Chinese society as an arena for unconventional ideas and practices. Framing a

sensitive project as an artwork would lower one’s political risk, though never provide

complete immunity. Thus, art constitutes a strategic channel for social entrepreneurs

to test and push the boundary of the civil society. In addition, the traditional

obligation placed on the literati – which include artists – exerts a unique motivating

force in Chinese activism. According to the Confucian ideal, men of great learning

must ensure that their families be regulated, their states be rightly governed, and the

                                                                                                               41 Bruce Gilley, “Democratic enclaves in authoritarian regimes,” Democratization 17:3 (2010), 390. 42 Ibid., 391.

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Figure 2.16 Xiong speaking at a press conference held in Chengdu, 1999.

Figure 2.17 Xiong directing drivers, 1999.

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world be made tranquil and happy.43 Many intellectuals today continue to perceive

social responsibility as part of their moral imperative. Therefore, Xiong’s identity as a

well-educated artist helped to make her commitment to environmentalism seem

reasonable and legitimate.

China Women’s News, published by the All-China Women’s Federation, was

the first national newspaper to report on Xiong’s ambitious event in 2001. A long

article on Xiong was placed under the column “Eminent Women” on April 16. She

clearly stood out in the political arena and on the highways, both dominated by men.

Figures 2.16 and 2.17 are two examples showing her taking center stage among

university officials and truck drivers. The newspaper also reported that Xiong would

work with “local environmental agencies and women’s federations” along the way.44

The All-China Women’s Federation, established in 1949 as a mass organization

supported by the Communist Party, belongs to the peculiar category of government-

organized NGOs.45 It energizes women’s activism while subjecting it to party-state

control. The recognition Xiong received from the Women’s Federation further

enhanced the legitimacy of Moving Rainbow.

                                                                                                               43 See The Great Learning by Confucius. English version available at http://classics.mit.edu/Confucius/learning.html, accessed Feb. 11, 2012. 44 Xu Wei, “Beijing zhu feng jiang piao wan li cai hong: ce hua ren Xiong Wenyun nv shi zai jing jie shao ci xiang yi shu huan bao huo dong” (Beijing – Mount Everest will fly a ten-thousand-kilometer rainbow: producer Ms. Xiong Wenyun introduces this art environmental project in Beijing), China Women’s News, April 14, 2001. 45 See Guobin Yang, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China.”

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Self-Organization

In the process of realizing Moving Rainbow, Xiong received support from

many people and organizations. Photographer Luo Yongjin worked with her for

almost three years, from November 1998 until July 2001, when the project

culminated with a procession to the base camp of Mount Everest. Zhang Li, a young

art critic at the time, helped Xiong with much of the paperwork. When Xiong failed

to find any corporate sponsorship in 2001, many of her artist friends sent her

donations at short notice. The event held in the fall of 1999 was organizationally

sponsored by Southwest Jiaotong University. Two NGOs supported the series of

events in 2001. China Environmental Culture Promotion Association (CECPA), a

government-organized NGO, served as the project’s “managing organization.”46 As

individuals were not – and still are not – allowed to organize public events, Xiong had

to find a registered NGO to act as the nominal organizer. Green Earth Volunteers, an

NGO not formally registered with the government, was instrumental to Moving

Rainbow’s media impact. Its “media salon” program gave Xiong access to a network

of environmentally conscious reporters. Xiong also obtained a formal document

issued by the Environment and Resource Protection Committee of the National

People’s Congress in May 2001, which asked local people’s congresses and

environmental protection agencies to “support and cooperate with” the project.47 Yin

Fatang, a retired general who was stationed in Tibet for many years, wrote a letter to

                                                                                                               46 In Chinese, “zhu ban dan wei.” 47 Document issued by the National People’s Congress, dated May 15, 2001, in Xiong’s personal archive.

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Tibet Autonomous Region’s Vice Party Secretary Danzin. Yin praised Xiong’s

courage and asked Danzin to assist her according to “reasonability and feasibility.”48

The letter proved valuable when Xiong wanted to hold a ceremony for the motorcade

in Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet, in July 2001.

Though external assistance mentioned above was indispensable, ultimately

Moving Rainbow was a project self-organized by Xiong. As one reporter described it

aptly, “Xiong is not only the project’s initiator, producer, and main financial sponsor,

but also the secretary, public relations officer, procurement officer, designer, and so

on.”49 Xiong quickly immersed herself in the unfamiliar territory of environmental

activism, locating resources, building alliances, overcoming visible and invisible

hurdles, and trespassing the conventional boundary of art. She did all these as an

individual artist, without any position in the state, in the market, or in a non-profit

organization.

Warner points out that “a public is a space of discourse organized by nothing

other than discourse itself.”50 A public “must be organized by something other than

the state,” and cannot depend on “state institutions, laws, formal frameworks of

citizenship, or preexisting institutions such as the church.”51 Furthermore, as a space

of discourse, a public has a reflexive reality in that “an addressable object is conjured

                                                                                                               48 Zhang, “Xiong Wenyun at Work.” 49 Zhang, “Xiong Wenyun paves a rainbow road.” 50 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67. 51 Ibid., 68.

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Figure 2.18 Xiong showing me the amount of paperwork involved in Moving Rainbow, Xiong’s studio, Beijing, August 2010.

into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence.”52 In short, a

public is always self-organized.

To be self-organized is not easy. No one can be born into a public, inherit it

from one’s ancestors, or purchase it on the market. On the other hand, precisely

because publics do not depend on pre-existing conditions, they can be imagined as

open, accessible, and world-making. Self-organization is inherently antagonistic to

China’s totalitarian system. The Chinese party-state considers it a fundamental threat

to its rule. As mentioned earlier, Xiong had to ask the government-sponsored CECPA

                                                                                                               52 Ibid., 67.

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to act as the organizer for Moving Rainbow when she wanted to organize events in

public spaces and push her discourse into public media.53 It took her one year to

secure the arrangement that would satisfy the government. The head of CECPA also

had to frame Xiong’s project as something compatible with state policy. In one press

conference, he declared that Moving Rainbow would contribute to Beijing’s Green

Olympic Campaign and the Central Government’s Western Region Development

Strategy.54 In Avant-Garde Art in China, critic Lu Hong writes, “environmental issues

may be the area that [artists] and the state can most easily reach a consensus,

therefore also an area that is relatively safe and secure,” implying that

environmentally focused artworks are not radical enough.55 Yet as Yang Guobin

points out, “the use of non-confrontational method is a strategic choice for

[environmental] organizations at a fledging state of growth, when radical challenges

against the state are out of the question.”56 He further argues that “Environmental

action without explicit political aim may still be political. … This kind of politics

thrives on political ambiguities.”57 Most newspaper articles on Moving Rainbow

made it clear to the reader that Xiong was the real organizer while CECPA only

served as a shepherd organization “as mandated.” Many authors also praised Xiong’s

proactive-ness and perseverance. No one made an overt protest against the totalitarian

                                                                                                               53 I am using “public spaces” and “public media” loosely here because no space or media is really public in China. Spaces and media are all subject to tight control of the state. 54 See Xu, “Beijing – Mount Everest will fly a ten-thousand-kilometer rainbow.” 55 Lu Hong, Avant-Garde Art in China, 216. 56 Yang Guobin, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China,” 55. 57 Ibid.

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system, but there is no doubt that the kind of self-organization embodied by Moving

Rainbow challenged its very foundation.

Conclusion

The analysis of Moving Rainbow has revealed several key ideas in the pursuit

of publicness. First, people have to act as citizens capable of expressing critical

opinions. This is not yet a given condition in China. In Moving Rainbow, Xiong

performed an exemplary function by speaking out in public. Her identity as an artist

helped to reduce the risk associated with citizen action. Second, an issue has to be

defined as a matter of public concern. In China, it often means wrestling the issue

away from the monopoly of state propaganda. This leads to the third point, that the

discursive field has to be self-organized, meaning outside any institutional

framework. In Moving Rainbow, although Xiong received support from NGOs and

individuals linked to the state, the project – consisting of the photographs, the

motorcade processions, and the media events – was not absorbed into any

institution’s organizational structure or discursive paradigm.58 Lastly, an issue has to

generate attention, which nowadays largely depends on media uptake.

The last point suggests that a fundamental shift may have to occur in terms of

the temporality of artistic practice when artists want to engage with sociopolitical

issues directly in mass media. An artwork’s entrance into public circulation is tied to

                                                                                                               58 This is related to the distinction between the public sphere and the civil society, as Craig Calhoun argues in “Civil Society and the Public Sphere” (Public Culture 1993.5, 267-280).

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its acquisition of a punctual quality. Traditionally this has been realized by means of

exhibition. (While paintings do not expire, exhibitions do.) In Moving Rainbow,

Xiong demonstrates that artists can bypass exhibition and create punctual events

directly geared towards mass media. This approach heightens the publicness of an art

project. The shift in temporality may have far-reaching impact on art, affecting its

mode of production and reception, the role of the critic, the basis of art’s value, and

so on. This is an area for future research.

Much of the analysis in this chapter has centered on Xiong’s role as an artist,

an activist, and a citizen. In the next chapter, we will move beyond the artist and look

into how publicness is conjured through participation.

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Chapter 3

Stranger-Relationality

The sound file is played. Silence, for about two seconds. “Cao Zi Yan,” a

female voice emerges, reading a name, pronouncing each character fully. The

recording is so clear that we feel as if she were standing in front of us, reading the

name to us. After a short break of silence, a male voice reads, “Du Xin.” His tone is

just as formal as that of the first reader, but we notice the difference in sound quality.

“Du Xi Peng,” a female voice continues, slow and meditative. We can hear a tail

sound lingering on after each syllable. Perhaps she was recording in an empty room,

in an effort to turn the simple reading into a weighty ritual. “Yu Jing …,” a soft voice

murmurs, and we have trouble making out the last character. It seems that the reader

had pressed the recorder’s stop button too hastily, so the last syllable was truncated.

“He Chuan,” an accented female voice follows. The way she pronounces “Chuan” is

between “Chuan” and “Chuang,” typical of southern Chinese who cannot distinguish

the sound of “-n” from that of “-ng.” By this point, the fact that we are listening to a

sound file assembled from a large number of discrete recordings becomes apparent.

Even though each reading event lasts for only two to three seconds, the difference in

tone, pitch, volume, speed, rhythm, and accent is easily detectable.

Or perhaps it is because we are listening attentively, for we know that the

names belong to the students who were killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. We are

only fifteen seconds into the work. The entire piece runs for 3 hours 41 minutes and

20 seconds. Every student’s name is read, 5,205 of them, one by one. This project,

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titled Nian (in Chinese, it means both to read and to commemorate), was produced by

artist Ai Weiwei in 2010, with the participation of thousands of anonymous readers. It

will serve as the main case study for this chapter.

This chapter is organized into two sections. In the first section, I will briefly

document the activist activities that emerged after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and

addressed the issue of student deaths. Nian was situated within this activism. I will

explain how the activist struggle against totalitarianism centered on the notion of

citizens’ rights, a precondition for the formation of publics. In the second section, I

will analyze Nian in depth, focusing on the notion of stranger-relationality, a key

constituent of publicness. In this section, I will make three comparisons. By

comparing Nian to a state-sponsored newspaper article, I will demonstrate how

stranger-relationality exists outside the state, which organizes people’s relationships

into a stabilized hierarchy. By comparing Nian to the activist campaign Citizen

Investigation (2009-10), also organized by Ai Weiwei, I will point out some of Nian’s

formal features that can be understood as counterpublic. Lastly, by comparing Nian to

Hu Huishan Memorial, a more conventional public art project which also

commemorates the students killed in the earthquake, I will explain how stranger

relations are concatenated in Nian to create something amounting to an expression of

a public, rather than that of an individual artist.

Existing literature has already framed Ai’s activist-artistic practice within the

rhetoric of citizens’ rights. I will add to this line of argument by incorporating Claude

Lefort’s analysis of totalitarianism, which provides a more theoretical articulation of

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the incompatibility between rights and totalitarianism. My more significant

contribution in this chapter lies in the identification of the relational aspect particular

to project Nian. It represents a step beyond Ai’s usual practice of voicing opinions as

a single, courageous individual critical of the state.1 In Nian, Ai helped to conjure

stranger relations into being, made these relations evident through the sound work,

and facilitated the expression of a transient public.

Rights-based Activism

The earthquake on May 12, 2008 was a terrible disaster. Almost seventy

thousand people were killed.2 Millions lost their homes. Several towns around the

epicenter in Wenchuan County were completely destroyed. It was the largest

earthquake in China since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake.

Throughout the rescue effort the central government assumed a leading role.

Premiere Wen Jiabao flew to Sichuan on the same day and set up a command center

in Dujiangyan, the closest city to Wenchuan. Soldiers from the People’s Liberation

Army were quickly mobilized. They took on some of the most difficult tasks,

restoring roads into the affected area and rescuing survivors trapped in collapsed

buildings. Other provincial governments also sent medical teams, resources and funds

to Sichuan. The Chinese government’s quick response and effective coordination won

                                                                                                               1 See Ai Weiwei’s blog (http://www.aiweiweiblog.com/) and Ai Weiwei Speaks, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Penguin, 2011). 2 The final statistics issued by the government stated that 69,227 people were killed in the earthquake, 374,643 injured, and 17,923 missing (http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008-09-25/183514499939s.shtml, accessed June 3, 2011).

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much praise both in China and abroad. The state quickly seized the opportunity and

used the media – largely controlled by the state – to spin the horrible earthquake into

a story of glorification, that of the Chinese Communist Party masterfully leading the

people out of calamity, into a bright future.

One issue haunted the government’s otherwise impeccable image. A few days

after the earthquake, some careful readers, by piecing together various news reports,

pointed out that a large number of collapsed structures were school buildings.3 In the

town of Xiang-e, residents told one reporter that over three hundred students were

killed at Xiang-e Middle School, “more than triple the number killed throughout the

rest of the town.”4 Some parents started to question whether certain school buildings

were poorly constructed and government corruption was the root cause.5 A critical

concern quickly emerged on the internet and in printed media. Several signs,

strengthened by expert opinions, suggested that parents’ suspicion might be

legitimate.6 In multiple locations, while one school fell completely, another school

                                                                                                               3 For example, see Zhou Kezhen’s blog entry, “Xue sheng si de tai duo le – Wenchuan di zhen zai qing ce ji” (Too Many Students Have Died – Some Notes on the Disastrous Condition of Wenchuan Earthquake), dated May 15, 2008, http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=126&do=blog&id=25276, accessed June 3, 2011. Zhou wrote, “For the past several days I have been paying attention to the disastrous situation of Wenchuan Earthquake, feeling heavy with deep grief – because the catastrophe was so serious, and the number of students killed so numerous! Thus [I] have compiled the situation of school disasters according to news reports.” 4 James T. Areddy, “China Stifles Parents’ Complaints about Collapsed Schools,” Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2008, A10. 5 Almost all schools in China are run by the government. Private schools, a recent phenomenon, only exist in large cities where affluent parents can afford to pay higher tuitions. 6 See for example: Zhang Yingguang, Chen Zhongxiaolu, and Yang Binbin, “Xue xiao dao ta yuan yu jian zhu zhi liang guo cha” (School Collapse Due to Overly Poor Construction Quality), Caijing, June 1, 2008, http://www.caijing.com.cn/2008-06-03/100067212.html, accessed June 7, 2011.

93

next to it remained standing. Overall, schools suffered much more damage than

government office buildings in the earthquake area. Industry experts stated that from

photographs alone, they could tell that shoddy construction was involved.

When the issue first came to light, the government promised to conduct a

thorough investigation. One year later, however, the provincial government

announced that “After investigation and verification, until now no case of building

collapse in the earthquake has been found to be caused by problems of construction

quality.”7 Since then, no more reports have been issued by the government, and the

contentious issue has disappeared from public media.

A few activists – Ai Weiwei among them – decided not to let the issue vanish

from public view. Architect Liu Jiakun built a small memorial for Hu Huishan, a

student killed at Juyuan Middle School. Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Sun Yat-Sen

University, went to Sichuan twice in the summer of 2008. She collected videos shot

by local residents and conducted interviews with parents and experts who were

willing to talk to her despite pressure from the government. Risking personal freedom,

she edited the footage into a documentary titled Our Children, and managed to screen

it at several universities in 2009.8 After Our Children, Ai Xiaoming produced three

                                                                                                               7 “Sichuan gong ji 5335 ming xue sheng zai di zhen zhong yu nan huo shi zong” (5335 Students Were Killed or Missing in the Earthquake in Sichuan), Xinhua Net, May 7, 2009, http://news.sina. com.cn/c/2009-05-07/111317764690.shtml, accessed June 3, 2011. 8 She was stopped by border police from going to Hong Kong to attend a film festival on October 16, 2009. See Cao Guoxing, “Bao guang Sichuan dou fu zha xiao she: xue zhe Ai Xiaoming zai shang ‘hei ming dan’” (Academic Ai Xiaoming Blacklisted Again for Exposing Shoddy School Construction in Sichuan), RFI Chinese, Nov. 19, 2009, http://www.rfi.fr/actucn/articles/118/article_16897.asp, accessed June 8, 2011. “To be blacklisted” could mean a range of things in China: one could be barred from leaving the country, speaking publicly, making films, etc.; one could be monitored by plain-

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more videos documenting parents’ ongoing petitions and concerned citizens’

investigations on the one hand, and the rise of state-orchestrated catastrophe tourism

on the other.9

In February 2009, Chengdu-based activist Tan Zuoren posted an open letter

on the internet, calling for the establishment of an independent archive about the

students killed in the earthquake. He asked volunteers to visit the students’ parents, to

“confirm the actual data of each class, each school, each village, each county.” He

also asked volunteers to gather information on responsible officials to help parents

enter their case into the legal system.10 In March, Tan published a report based on his

own investigative work from December 2008 to March 2009.11 Tan was arrested a

few days later on charges of “incitement to subvert state power.” In spring 2010 Tan

was sentenced to five years in prison.12

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

clothed police around the clock (Ai was subject to this treatment before he was eventually detained); one could be under house arrest (for example, Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer and activist, was under house arrest in his village in Shandong province from 2010 to 2012). 9 The three documentaries are Citizen Investigation (Gong min diao cha), Why Are the Flowers So Red (Hua er wei shen me zhe yang hong), and Forgetting Sichuan (Wang chuan). 10 Tan Zuoren, “Guan yu jian li ‘5·12 xue sheng dang an’ de chang yi shu” (A Proposal on the Establishment of May-12 Student Archive), http://www.bullogger.com/blogs/eva5237/archives/288299.aspx, accessed June 8, 2011. 11 Tan was assisted by Xie Yihui. The report, titled “5.12 Sichuan da di zhen sin an xue sheng diao cha bao gao zheng qiu yi jian gao” (Investigative Report on Students Killed in the May-12 Great Sichuan Earthquake, Consultative Version) was published online on May 25, 2009. 12 See Zhang Jieping, “Tan Zuoren an yong liu si yan gai chuan zhen fu bai” (Tan Zuoren Case: Using June-4th to Cover Up Sichuan Earthquake Corruption), Yazhou Zhoukan, Feb. 21, 2010, http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/Content_Archive.cfm?Channel=ag&Path=3118067761/08ag3.cfm, accessed June 8, 2011.

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In spring 2009 Ai Weiwei was also working on compiling information about

the students killed in the earthquake.13 Perhaps Ai’s global prestige as a preeminent

artist protected him from being arrested and allowed him to recruit volunteers to join

his campaign, Citizen Investigation. Ai and his team sent hundreds of requests to

various levels of the government, asking for information related to student deaths.

Their requests were repeatedly turned down. At the same time, more than thirty

volunteers went to Sichuan in person, visited towns where schools had collapsed, and

gathered information directly from local residents. After half a year’s difficult work –

they were frequently detained by local police – they produced a comprehensive list of

5,205 students killed in the earthquake, documenting each student’s name, gender,

date of birth, age at the time of death, school, and class. The internet provided a

critical medium for the investigation to become public. As findings came in from

volunteers working in Sichuan, Ai published them promptly in his well-followed

blogs. He also posted requests sent to various governmental agencies and their formal

but unhelpful replies, petitions filed by affected parents, diaries written by volunteers,

and mobile text messages sent to his team from parents, expressing pain, frustration,

and gratitude.14

                                                                                                               13 Ai Weiwei and Tan Zuoren were doing similar work, but they did not know each other in person. When Tan was arrested, Ai and five volunteers went to Chengdu, hoping to testify on behalf of Tan. In Chengdu Ai was beaten by local police and prevented from going to court. Ai captured the clash on tape and included it in his documentary Lao Ma Ti Hua. See Ai Weiwei’s blog entry, “Reng ran zai lu shang zou” (Still Walking on the Road), posted on Sept. 5, 2009, http://desaigongyuan.appspot.com/blogs/aiweiwei/?p=35911, accessed June 9, 2011. 14 See Ai Weiwei’s blog, http://www.aiweiweiblog.com/, accessed June 9, 2011.

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Figure 3.1 Ai Xiaoming, Citizen Investigation, 2010, video stills.

Nian was produced in spring 2010, on the occasion of the second anniversary

of the earthquake. On April 24, Ai sent out a twitter message, asking people to read

one or a few names from the list of killed students and email the sound file to his

studio. Within a week, around two thousand emails were received and all the names

were read. In the next three months, Ai’s team contacted some participants to re-

record the names to achieve a better sound quality. They then edited individual

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recordings into a single mp3 file and posted it online.15 When announcing the work,

Ai’s team stated,

Nian is a work from twitter friends to the students killed in the Sichuan earthquake, expressing [our] mourning for the passing of innocent lives and anger for [the government’s] covering up of the facts of tofu-dreg [projects]. Respect lives; refuse to forget.16

The sound file was circulated online using different technologies.17

I have recounted the activist activities surrounding the issue of student deaths

because I want to make it clear that Nian was not all Ai Weiwei did, and Ai was not

the only person working on this issue. Though framed mainly as an art project, Nian

was closely linked to other activist activities. In the next section, I will discuss its

difference from Citizen Investigation, a project organized by Ai that was not framed

as art. But before drawing their distinctions, I will first discuss what these activist

activities had in common in their struggle against the state.

Tan Zuoren, Ai Xiaoming, Ai Weiwei and other activists did not consider

their actions to be anything extraordinary. They claimed that what they did was

                                                                                                               15 This process is described in an email sent out to every participant when the project was completed. See http://walk-for-a-while.posterous.com/39295392, accessed June 10, 2011. 16 https://profiles.google.com/xuesheng512/posts/8pUEjETmyLH/%E8%89%BE%E6%9C%AA%E6%9C%AA%E5%B7%A5%E4%BD%9C%E5%AE%A4%E7%8C%AE%E7%BB%99%E5%9B%9B%E5%B7%9D%E5%9C%B0%E9%9C%87%E6%AD%BB#xuesheng512/posts/8pUEjETmyLH, accessed June 14, 2011. Translation mine. Tofu-dreg project (dou fu zha gong cheng) is a common phrase used to describe construction projects of poor quality. 17 It could be played online, downloaded from file storage websites, or obtained via peer-to-peer application emule. I was able to access the file in China in summer 2011. However, in spring 2012, I could no longer access the file without using a VPN service to get around the firewall maintained by the state.

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simply what responsible citizens should do. Tan wrote in his open letter, “Everyone

of us Chinese still possessing some conscience should feel guilty about these children

and shoulder some responsibility.”18 Ai Weiwei stated in an interview, “I always

believe, the responsiveness and transparency of the government in handling public

matters depends on supervision. … If citizens do not ask for accountability, it will

leave space for corruption and the abuse of power.”19 By stressing the ordinariness of

their actions, they provoke the question: if they simply have behaved as citizens, why

did the government react so strongly to their words and activities, to the extent of

putting some of them in jail?

The legality of their actions is grounded in the legitimacy of citizens’ rights,

more specifically, the right of citizens to obtain public information, to express views

on public matters, and to subject government operations to the scrutiny of public

opinion. On the one hand, citizens’ rights, including the right to access public

information and the right of freedom of speech, are clearly stated in Chinese law. On

the other hand, the state routinely installs roadblocks to prevent the realization of

these rights. When it deems it necessary, it suppresses these rights outright. The root

cause of this contradiction lies in the incompatibility of rights with China’s

totalitarian system.

                                                                                                               18 Tan Zuoren, “A Proposal on the Establishment of May-12 Student Archive.” 19 Zhang Jieping, “Chuan zhen gong min diao cha ju jue yi wang” (Sichuan Earthquake: Citizen Investigation Refuses to Forget), Yazhou Zhoukan, Apr. 19, 2009, http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/Content_Archive.cfm?Channel=kk&Path=3625765052/ 15kk1.cfm, accessed June 18, 2011.

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Although the Chinese government has implemented an array of economic

reforms since the late 1970s, politically it has held onto the totalitarian system.

Theoretically, like democracy, totalitarianism is also based on the idea of popular

sovereignty. The Chinese constitution states that “All power in the People's Republic

of China belongs to the people.”20 However, as Claude Lefort points out, for popular

sovereignty to be sustained, “the image of popular sovereignty” has to be “the image

of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public

authority can never claim to appropriate it.”21 Lefort warns,

if the image of the people is actualized, if a party claims to identify with it and to appropriate power under the cover of this identification, then it is the very principle of the distinction between the state and society, the principle of the difference between the norms that govern the various types of relations between individuals, ways of life, beliefs and opinions, which is denied; and, at a deeper level, it is the very principle of a distinction between what belongs to the order of power, to the order of law and to the order of knowledge which is negated. The economic, legal and cultural dimensions are, as it were, interwoven into the political.22

This is precisely what has happened in the People’s Republic. The twin structure of

the party-state, through its identification with the image of the people, acquires

limitless power. It wields power in the name of the people, penetrates every domain

of life, and maintains ultimate control over all forms of activities. Nothing – law,

science, economy, art, sport – can exist outside the state.

                                                                                                               20 Article 2 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, see http://english.peopledaily. om.cn/constitution/constitution.html for English version, accessed June 18, 2011. 21 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 279. 22 Ibid., 279-80.

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In a totalitarian society, the rights of citizens are not natural rights, but rights

granted by the state. The state, itself limitless, can set limits to rights. When Ai

Weiwei and his team asked for information related to student deaths, the government

often rejected their requests by invoking Article 13 of the “Regulations on Open

Government Information.” After specifying the types of information that various

levels of the government should disclose on their own initiative, the Regulations state

in Article 13 that citizens “may, based on the special needs of such matters as their

own production, livelihood and scientific research, also file requests … to obtain

relevant government information.”23 The State Council advises lower governments to

reject requests if deemed unrelated to the applicant’s “special needs” of production,

livelihood, and research.24 Ai was asked to provide material evidence to demonstrate

his “special needs” to obtain the requested information. His argument that “obtaining

accurate information, executing one’s right to know, is a prerequisite for citizens to

make correct judgments and to choose [the right] actions, an indispensable

precondition for survival” was considered inadequate, and no explanation was

given.25 Ai then attempted to file a lawsuit against the government for violating the

                                                                                                               23 “Zhong hua ren min gong he guo zheng fu xin xi gong kai tiao li” (Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information), adopted by the State Council on April 5, 2007, effective May 1, 2008, http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2007-04/24/content_592937.htm, accessed June 20, 2011, translation by the China Law Center, Yale Law School. 24 See article 14 of “Guo wu yuan ban gong ting guan yu shi shi ‘Zhong hua ren min gong he guo xin xi gong kai tiao li’ ruo gan wen ti de yi jian” (Opinions of the General Office of the State Council on Various Issues of Implementing the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information), http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2008-04/30/content_958477.htm, accessed June 20, 2011. 25 Ai Weiwei, “Dui Beichuan xian jian she ju ‘bu chong cai liao tong zhi’ de hui fu” (Response to the Construction Bureau of Beichuan County), Jan. 6, 2010, http://www.aiweiweiblog.com/2010/01/default.aspx, accessed June 9, 2011.

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Regulations, and the court refused to consider his case. The state effectively replaces

the concept of public right with that of private interest. Citizens cannot request

information based on public concerns, but only based on private motives.

Any activity propagating the idea that something lies outside the state poses a

fundamental challenge to totalitarianism. The activists were treated seriously by all

levels of the government not simply because they may discover indisputable evidence

that would pinpoint certain corrupt officials. More importantly, their activities send a

dangerous message: citizens have the right to engage in activities independent of the

state and critical of the state. They suggest that the state’s identification with the

people is not automatic, the power of the state not absolute. As Lefort observes, “the

logic of the system prevents it from accepting any opinion which may be seen as a

sign that social life is external to power, that there is an otherness in the social

sphere.”26 While the activists and the parents pursued the same goal – both groups

demanded thorough investigation of the issue – the parents posed less threat to the

system. They sought help within the existing state apparatus to address their private

grievances. They petitioned higher levels of the government to investigate the issue

and punish lower-level officials. They framed their struggle as privately motivated:

they had lost their children. The activists had no personal connections to the victims,

and they acted outside the state, treating the state as an equal, challenging its absolute

authority.

                                                                                                               26 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 251-52.

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Nian also forms a sharp contrast to the propaganda of the state. Ai Weiwei’s

team – consisting of his assistants and volunteers – posted the sound work on the

internet on May 12, 2010, the second anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake. The

intention of the project was made clear in the last sentence of the accompanying text:

“Respect lives; refuse to forget.” On the same day, what occupied the official media

was not remembrance of those who died in the earthquake but exaltation of the state

itself. The state-run Xinhua News Agency issued a long article titled “Great Strength

to Create Earthly Miracle – Revelations from Wenchuan Earthquake Reconstruction,”

which was carried in most major newspapers and television networks.27 Calling the

speedy reconstruction in the earthquake area an “earthly miracle,” the authors

declared that,

This earthly miracle was created by the strategic maneuvers, decisive actions, and scientific actions of the Party’s Central Committee and the State Council, which galvanized the strength of the entire nation, relied on the enormous advantages of socialism with Chinese characteristics, relied on the selfless devotion of all constructers, especially the Party officials, and relied on the independent, indomitable national spirit.28

The core of this complex statement is that the miracle was created by the Party’s

Central committee and the State Council. A horrible earthquake, possibly worsened

by human mistakes, was transformed into an opportunity to validate the Chinese state

                                                                                                               27 Most newspapers and all television networks are still state-run. 28 http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2010-05/11/c_1290358.htm, accessed June 21, 2011, translation mine. CCTV is the major television network controlled by the central government. For its broadcast of the Xinhua article, see http://space.tv.cctv.com/video/VIDE1273578986808888, accessed June 21, 2011.

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and strengthen the legitimacy of its rule. Inserting itself next to the state’s

glorification campaign, Nian occupied a critical position. Its criticism of the state is

not direct, but implied. It does not name the state as the target of its address. In a

totalitarian society, criticism of the state cannot be explicit, and does not need to be

explicit. Any statement different from the official version, any focus of attention

beyond the official domain, is understood as an expression of criticism of the state, by

both the state and anyone familiar with the operation of totalitarianism.

Stranger-Relationality

Until now no critic, writing in Chinese or English, has analyzed Nian. In fact,

of the literature I have surveyed, only an editorial appearing on July 2011’s Art

Monthly in Australia briefly mentions it. Perhaps this lack of attention is caused by

the fact that Nian has only been circulating online among Chinese internet users. Ai

has not included this work in any of his exhibitions; he has shown instead sculptural

pieces using school backpacks that refer to the students killed in the earthquake.29

Inside China, Ai has a wide following on the internet, but the printed media,

including art journals, have shunned Ai’s work owing to political sensitivity.

Ai’s overall activist-artistic practice has been framed mainly within the

rhetoric of rights. Lee Ambrozy, in the introduction to Ai Weiwei’s Blog, states that

                                                                                                               29 In his 2009 exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, he assembled black and white backpacks into a giant snake crawling on a gallery ceiling. In Munich in 2010, he covered the façade of Haus der Kunst with thousands of backpacks to spell out in Chinese “She lived happily in this world for seven years,” a statement contained in a letter to him from a mother whose daughter was killed in a collapsed school building.

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“ideas and themes significant to [Ai’s] personal philosophy” are “simplicity, official

responsibility, reconciling ‘truth’ with facts, and a commitment to promoting basic

civil rights like freedom of speech.”30 This characterization is consonant with Ai’s

own articulation. In an online interview with users of Tianya, a popular website that

hosts user-generated forums, Ai explained his intention regarding Citizen

Investigation:

Our reasoning behind this investigation is to achieve the very minimal level of respect for the deceased. The most fundamental worth and civil right of any person is their right to their name; this name is the smallest, most basic unit that helps us attest to an individual’s existence. … As citizens, we should shoulder responsibility, ask the questions that should be asked – these are necessary steps in social progress. This was our motivation for launching the Citizen Investigation.31

In other interviews, with Ai Xiaoming in China and with Herta Müller in Germany,

for example, Ai also described his work as a struggle for individual rights against a

totalitarian state.32

Although publicness is essential to Ai’s strategies, in his writings he has not

used public sphere theory to theorize his work.. A few critics, like Lee Ambrozy and

Karen Smith, touched on the issue of publicness, but they have only located

                                                                                                               30 Lee Ambrozy, “Introduction,” in Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), xxvii. 31 Ai Weiwei, “Zuo ke tian ya” (As a Guest on Tianya), posted on his blog on March 24, 2009, http://www.aiweiweiblog.com/2009/03/default.aspx?page=3, accessed Sept. 30, 2011. English translation by Lee Ambrozy, in Ai Weiwei’s Blog, 211. 32 See Ai Weiwei’s blog, http://www.aiweiweiblog.com/2010/08/default.aspx, accessed June 9, 2011.

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publicness in Ai’s avid use of blog and twitter.33 In this section, I will identify an

important constituent of publicness in Nian. It goes beyond the notion of individuals’

rights. It concerns the relations among various parties involved in this participatory

project.

The kind of relationality in Nian is fundamentally different from that

contained in the “Revelations” article issued by state propaganda. In the

“Revelations” article, individuals are always referred to not only by their names but

also by their official positions: Hu Jintao, General Secretary of the Chinese

Communist Party (CCP); Jia Zhengfeng, Baoshan Village Party Secretary; Xu Zhenxi,

Commander of the Shandong Unit of the Reconstruction “Army.” Even an ordinary

villager like Wang Quan has a title-like descriptor: member of Unit 4 of Chaping

Village of Daguan Township. It is as if the official position were forever printed on

the forehead of each and every one. This makes it possible for the reader to quickly

locate each individual in the social totality, organized in the form of a giant pyramid,

with the Party Central Committee and the State Council occupying the peak and

villagers like Wang Quan occupying the bottom. The path between any two persons

in China can be traced in this pyramid. (Figure 3.2) For instance, Wang Quan, the

villager, is linked to Hu Jintao, the General Secretary via layers of Party Secretaries at

                                                                                                               33 Smith has remarked that Ai has turned his blog into a public space as lively as “any church or grand piazza was in High Renaissance Italy.” Quoted in Evan Osnos, “It’s Not Beautiful,” New Yorker, May 24, 2010, online at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos, accessed July 18, 2011.

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Figure 3.2 All relationships in China are stabilized according to the persons’ status in the state pyramid.

village, town, county, and provincial levels. Orders are transmitted downward; on a

few rare occasions petitions are submitted upward. Relationality in this pyramid is

static. The interaction between Xu Zhenxi and Jia Zhengfang is not structured by their

identities as citizens with some shared intention, but framed by their positions

respectively as the Shandong Unit Commander of the Reconstruction “Army” and the

Party Secretary of Baoshan Village. Since in totalitarianism nothing can exist outside

the state, there is no need for any kind of relationality other than that permanently

imprinted in this pyramid. It should be no surprise that this hierarchical system

frequently resorts to a military vocabulary, as in this sentence: “In the process of

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rebuilding the homeland, commandos of party members charge in the front; party

branch committees become battle forts; they are the bravest supporting force in the

reconstruction of the homeland.”34 In fact, many features of the totalitarian society –

consciousness of titles, pyramidal form, a single type of relationality – are also

characteristics of the military.

In Nian three groups of people are present: the students killed in the

earthquake whose names are read, those online participants who perform the reading,

and the listeners of the sound work. The only information contained in the sound file

is the students’ names. We could look up the names in the list published by Citizen

Investigation and obtain some further information. For example, we would learn that

Cao Zi Yan, whose name was read first, was eleven years old at the time of death, a

student of Grade 5 Class 2 in Xinjian Primary School. Of the second group, the

readers, we know nothing except the qualities of their voices. They remain

anonymous, devoid of identities. We can only describe them as readers, derived from

the form of their activity in this particular artwork. Unlike “Party Secretary,” “reader”

is not a permanent title; it is associated only with transient participation. Doubtless

these readers also live in the Chinese hierarchical system, like those individuals

meticulously positioned in the “Reflections” article, but the readers’ status in the state

bears no significance to their relation to the students. The readers and the students are

linked only by the readers’ act of reading. Most likely the readers did not know the

students personally. How should we describe this kind of relationality? It is not

                                                                                                               34 http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2010-05/11/c_1290358_5.htm, accessed June 25, 2011.

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kinship, friendship, comradeship, or partnership. Michael Warner has given it a

peculiar name: stranger-relationality.

With modernity, strangerhood has become a normal feature of social life. “In

modern society, a stranger is not as marvelously exotic as the wandering outsider

would have been to an ancient, medieval, or early-modern town.”35 With the help of

newspapers, television, and now the internet, even if I do not know you personally,

we still share a wide range of common understandings, from pop songs to fashion

trends, from recent events to social imaginaries. On the other hand, to recognize

someone as a stranger is to admit that there is still something unknown in that person.

Strangers make us nervous because we lack any existing framework to structure our

relation to them. To be willing to encounter a stranger is to be willing to discover

potential agreements as well as differences. Stranger-relationality is never given and

always carries risk.

In contemporary China, several forces work against the idea of stranger-

relationality. As discussed earlier, the totalitarian system does not recognize strangers.

A person’s position in the state pyramid casts him into a predefined character with

stringent requirements of performance. Individuality is dissolved. How two persons

should interact, regardless of whether they have known each other for decades or

have just met, is determined by their relative positions in the system. During Mao’s

era (1949-1976), the peak of totalitarianism, people wore the same uniform in the

same blue, spoke the same language extracted from the same Little Red Book,

                                                                                                               35 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 75.

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believed in the same communist dream, worked for the same national plan. The

notion of a stranger, someone who could have different preferences and alternative

thinking, was eliminated. Those few who dared to be “strange” were declared the

enemies of the people. A person’s relation to the state, the so-called organizational

relation (in Chinese, zu zhi guan xi), trumped all other types of relations: friendship,

religious membership, kinship, and sometimes even marriage.36

After the market reform was initiated in the late 1970s, the state started to

allow some freedom and flexibility, mostly in economic affairs. Gradually people

gained mobility in their employment and residence. Economic development enabled

different lifestyles in the material sense. A large portion of the population – urban

residents and rural migrant laborers – untangled themselves from the fixity of the

state pyramid. However, while the state has allowed the market to develop and gain a

certain degree of autonomy, it has rejected calls for political reform. Freedom of

expression and freedom of association are still largely prohibited. Grassroots efforts

to build civil-society organizations are met with constant state suppression. A serious

consequence of this one-sided reform is that, while strangerhood is now firmly

established in urban consciousness, stranger-relationality is predominantly motivated

by interest: would I gain something financially from my interaction with the stranger?

This fixation on money was even evident in the reaction to the earthquake in 2008.

Let me demonstrate with a personal experience. The day after the earthquake, the

                                                                                                               36 See Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship: The Change in Personal Relations in Communist China,” and Thomas Gold, “After Comradeship: Personal Relations in China since the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly 104 (1985), 657-75.

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death toll reached 12,000. I noticed that there was hardly any sign of grief in Beijing.

To express my criticism of the lack of mourning both individually and nationally, I

took two photographs, one on the newsstand in my neighborhood and the other on the

flag pole in Tian’anmen Square, the symbolic center of the country. I digitally turned

the color images into black and white, added a banner in the newsstand image, and

lowered the flag to half-mast in the Tian’anmen image. (Figure 3.3) I emailed these

photographs to my friends. One of them, an editor of a newspaper, posted the images

on her popular blog. Many readers responded to the images furiously, mostly for one

reason, as demonstrated by this comment, “Is formalism [meaning obsessive concern

with form instead of substance] really necessary? One yuan can move people’s hearts

far more than a banner!”37 Warner notes that “one of the defining elements of

modernity … is normative stranger sociability, of a kind that seems to arise only

when the social imaginary is defined not by kinship (as in non-state societies) or by

place (as in state societies until modernity) but by discourse.”38 If people do not have

freedom of expression and cannot participate in discourse freely, the most important

means of modern sociability become unavailable to them. What we are left with is

social apathy, each individual becoming “an isolated monad, withdrawn into

                                                                                                               37 Comment posted on May 16, 2008 by anonymous reader, http://theother.blog.sina.com.cn/comment.php?aid=68&page=1, accessed May 21, 2008. Yuan is the Chinese currency unit. 38 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 299.

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Figure 3.3 Zheng Bo, Untitled, 2008, digital photographs, dimensions variable.

himself,” concerned with only his personal gains.39 Marx’s prediction of the capitalist

nightmare becomes reality in China’s state capitalism.

While loosening its administrative control over citizens, the state increasingly

relies on patriotism to repress difference and maintain social cohesion. In other words,

it tries to reduce strangers to members of a national community. The central myth

propagated by the state is that only as a unified people will we be able to regain

China’s lost glory in the world of nations. The trauma and vulnerability caused by the

                                                                                                               39 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” quoted in Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 245.

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earthquake in 2008 created a precious opportunity for the state to strengthen its

nationalistic agenda. State media frequently portrayed the disaster as a test of the

strength of the Chinese people.40 As discussed earlier, the “Reflections” article issued

by Xinhua News attributed the success of the reconstruction program to the “the

independent, indomitable national spirit.” When I expressed criticism of the lack of

mourning in the capital, many people took my images as an attack on the nation and

the people as a whole. As Jean-Luc Nancy argues, “the thought of community or the

desire for it might well be nothing other than a belated invention that tried to respond

to the harsh reality of modern experience,” of which stranger-relationality is surely a

part.41

The state still cannot comprehend the notion of stranger-relationality. The

following example was taken from the diary of Keke, a volunteer who participated in

Citizen Investigation. While she and two other volunteers were collecting information

in Sichuan, they were taken to a police station and questioned:

The fist question was, what is the relationship between you and Ai Weiwei. I said, just a human-to-human relationship. Plain-clothes A said, you, please be more serious. I said OK.42

                                                                                                               40 See for example, “Wan zhong yi xin, tuo qi sheng ming de xi wang – xian gei ying yong kang ji Wenchuan di zhen zai hai de Zhongguo ren min” (Ten Thousand People with One Mind, Holding up the Hope of Life – To the Courageous Chinese People Fighting against the Wenchuan Earthquake Disaster), Xinhua Net, May 25, 2008, http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2008-05/25/content_8252092.htm, accessed April 27, 2012. 41 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 10. 42 Keke’s diary on June 20, 2009, http://www.aiweiweiblog.com/2009/06/default.aspx, accessed June 15, 2011.

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The plain-clothes policeman considered “a human-to-human relationship” something

akin to a joke. It seems that to him interpersonal relationships have to be named,

somewhat permanent, and probably framed by social institutions. Perhaps in his logic,

since Ai Weiwei and the volunteers were engaged in a project critical of the state,

they must have established an organization against the state. While the state cannot

tolerate transient relationships within it and have a constant desire to stabilize them

into memberships, it also projects its own image into the civil society and expects

activities in the civil society to be centrally organized as well.

In Nian, stranger-relationality was established through the act of mourning.

Traditionally mourning occurs only among family members and friends. It depends

on a preexisting kinship or friendship and marks the end of such a relationship. So-

called public mourning is always orchestrated by the state, mostly for political leaders

and state-recognized heroes, like soldiers killed in combat. After the earthquake in

2008, the government for the first time set a date for national mourning for civilians

killed in the disaster. Nian initiated a different kind of mourning: it was not based on

private attachment, not organized by the state, and not for a collective body.

Connections were established between individual readers and individual students. By

recognizing the loss, mourning marked the beginning of a relationship rather than the

end of it. Though the resulting work can be understood as a commemoration of the

entire group of killed students, the specificity of each act of mourning is sustained

through the identification of the student’s name and the texture of the reader’s voice.

Nian constitutes public mourning also in the sense that the readers engaged in making

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their expressions public. It was different from a parent reading his child’s name at

home. The readers understood that their recordings would be posted on the internet,

to be listened to by indefinite strangers. The act of addressing an unknown public of

listeners carried a higher level of risk than private mourning.43

Commemoration-as-protest is a long established strategy of popular struggle

in China. However, historically, people veiled their protest in mourning well-liked

state leaders like Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang.44 Nian is unprecedented in that a

group of ordinary people mourned for another group of ordinary people. They no

longer sought legitimacy by aligning themselves with benign political figures. In

other words, they went outside the state to voice their criticism. Previously mourning,

in itself, did not pose a threat to the state; it was the political demand coupled with the

act of mourning that challenged the status quo. The state would probably have

welcomed the mourning of Hu Yaobang in 1989 if students had not organized

subsequent demonstrations and demanded freedom and democracy. In Nian, the act

of mourning itself is already a threat to the state because stranger-relationality is

fundamentally incompatible with the state’s inherent need to stabilize social relations.

In Nian, stranger-relationality characterizes two other groups of relations in

addition to those between the readers and the students. First, the relationship between

the readers and Ai Weiwei’s team, which served as the project’s initiator, coordinator,

                                                                                                               43 Going public always involves taking risk. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 120. 44 The large-scale mourning of Zhou Enlai in spring 1976 provided an opportunity for many people to express their disillusionment with the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The mourning of Hu Yaobang in 1989 marked the beginning of the student movement later named the June Fourth Movement.

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and editor, was also based on the readers’ participation alone, without any external

structural support. This relationship began when a reader paid attention to the twitter

message sent out by Ai (and forwarded by others). It was extended when the reader

made her recording and sent it to Ai’s team. It ended when she received an email

from Ai’s team, informing her of the completion of the sound work and thanking her

for her participation. She did not join any membership or receive any reward. The

relationship was transient and situated within the project only. Second, when

someone listens to the sound work, she also enters into a relationship with strangers:

the students, the readers, and Ai’s team. She comes into contact with them without

knowing them. This relationship too lacks permanence or institutional basis. The

listener can choose to end the relationship at any time by clicking the stop button. No

matter how many times she listens to the mp3 file, she does not become a friend, a

relative, or a colleague. She remains a stranger to those in the work as they do to her,

though a connection has been established by her mere act of listening.

In the Chinese context, stranger-relationality might be called citizen-

relationality. As discussed earlier, in the modern world strangers are not completely

strange to one another because they share a wide range of common understandings.

For activists, the notion of a citizen endowed with rights should be one of the

fundamental principles underlying this shared horizon. Compared to stranger-

relationality, citizen-relationality makes it even clearer that this is something between

persons with equal rights, not determined by their status, class, gender, or other

differential criteria. Citizen-relationality can only be formed outside the totalitarian

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state, thus constituting a challenge to totalitarianism. Warner states that “a public is a

relation among strangers.”45 We might rephrase this statement as “a public is a

relation among citizens.” Interestingly “citizen” is translated as “gong min,” which

literally means public person. The link between the notion of publicness and the

concept of citizen is already present in Chinese on the etymological level.

Both Citizen Investigation and Nian focused on the issue of student deaths in

the Sichuan earthquake, advancing a counter-discourse antagonistic to the propaganda

of the state, which aimed to erase the tragic issue from public memory and to direct

public attention to the accomplishment of the state in the rescue and reconstruction

efforts. The difference between these two projects is not simply that one was activism

while the other was framed as art, but that, compared to Citizen Investigation, Nian

took on a more counterpublic form. The goal of Citizen Investigation was to collect

accurate information. The process of investigation was filled with emotions – sadness

in interviews with parents, anger in confrontations with police – but the final output

was presented in a form that excluded these emotions and stressed objectivity. Names

of the killed students were sent out in twitter messages; an excel file containing

additional information (gender, birthdate, age at death, school, and class) was

circulated online. Nian, on the other hand, was produced in the medium of sound

rather than text. Affective dimensions of the human voice were captured and

preserved. The concatenation of over five thousand individual recordings into a linear

sound work defied any statistical analysis that was afforded by the tabular form of the

                                                                                                               45 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 74.

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excel file produced in Citizen Investigation. In Nian, mourning, a ritual practice with

a history prior to modernity, constituted the main strategy. At the same time, the

internet served as the primary platform for communication, from the initial

announcement made by Ai Weiwei, to the transmission of recordings from

participants to Ai’s team, to the circulation of the resulting sound work.

Warner argues that the oppositional character of a counterpublic is not “a

function of its content alone.”46 Counterpublics not only “invent and circulate

counterdiscourses,” as observed by Nancy Fraser,47 but also mobilize different speech

genres, modes of address, and mediums of communication. In the bourgeois public

sphere, rational-critical debate is considered the most appropriate form of discourse

because it enables the conception that expressions are “propositionally

summarizable.”48 It allows opinions to be transposed “from local acts of reading or

scenes of speech to a general horizon of public opinion,” acquiring a “volitional

agency” to “deliberate and then decide.”49 In this process, “the poetic or textual

qualities of any utterance are disregarded in favor of sense.”50 Counterpublics often

cannot afford this kind of abstraction. Imagine, in the case of Nian, if we were to strip

away all of the poetic-expressive qualities of personal recordings, the sound work

would be reduced to nothing but a cold, accentless narration of the students’ names. It                                                                                                                46 Ibid., 118. 47 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 123. 48 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 115. 49 Ibid., 115-16. 50 Ibid., 115.

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would lose its oppositional flavor, becoming identical to a standard broadcast of the

state, just as the aforementioned “Reflections” article was delivered by CCTV’s

robot-like anchors.51 The sound work cannot be summarized, re-stated, or transferred

to another medium such as printed text. We tend to treat the voice as if it were only

“the material support of bringing about meaning” and that “the voice itself is like the

Wittgensteinian ladder to be discarded when we have successfully climbed to the top

– that is, when we have made our ascent to the peak of meaning.”52 Yet it is clear that

the significance of Nian lies in the materiality of the voice. The voice is not a ladder

that we can discard because it is both the ladder and the goal. As Mladen Dolar notes,

“voices are the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of

subjectivity.”53 As each name is read, we can perceive the distinct quality of the

reader’s voice, its accent, pace, timbre, pitch, resonance, cadence, and so on.54 “The

voice is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable.” 55 Thus we

understand each reading as something personal. In Aristotle’s words, voice is a sound

“of what has soul in it.”56 The linkage between voice and soul also points to a

traditional ritual in China. Jiaohun, calling out the name of a deceased person or a

                                                                                                               51 CCTV stands for China Central Television, the network directly controlled by the central government. Adopting the standard format of CCTV News could be perceived as satirical if the form is made salient, as in Zhang Peili’s 1992 video work, Water: Standard Version from the Ci Hai Dictionary (Shui: ci hai biao zhun ban), for example. 52 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 15. 53 Ibid., 14. 54 See the beginning of this chapter for a description of the sound file. 55 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 22. 56 Aristotle, De anima, 420b 6, quoted in ibid., 24.

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sick child so that her lost soul could return to the body, has long been practiced in

many parts of China.57

While the form of the work alludes to Chinese traditional culture, its

production relied on recent technologies. The internet as a platform was strategic for

the creation of Nian because, among existing media, it offers the highest possibility to

evade state censorship, to engage strangers, and to mobilize a critical discourse.

Furthermore, unlike traditional media, the internet allows different formats – text,

image, sound, video – to be carried on the same platform. In particular, it has greatly

reduced the cost of transmitting and circulating non-textual materials, thus benefitting

counterpublic forms of expression. The network’s distributed architecture is

essentially antithetical to the hierarchical organization of the state. In most situations

information is spread laterally, from a user to his social network, rather than vertically,

from a higher level official to his subordinates.58 Ai’s team could receive over two

thousand recordings within a week because people re-posted Ai’s original message in

different websites, greatly extending its reach. Once the final work was posted online,

it was quickly duplicated via peer-to-peer download. The replication of the file

ensured its accessibility against impending state censorship.

I want to emphasize that I do not mean to suggest that counterpublic forms of

expression are necessarily better than public forms of discourse-making. In fact Nian

was made possible by the very output of Citizen Investigation. The two projects

                                                                                                               57 See Jiang Shaoyun, Zhongguo li su mi xin (China’s Ritual Practices and Superstitions) (Tianjin: Bo hai wan chu ban gong si, 1989), 166. 58 For a description of the internet situation in China, see Hu Yong, The Rising Cacophony.

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complemented each other and strengthened the cause. In recent years critical thinkers

in the West have devoted much attention to the antagonism between publics and

counterpublics. In China, the situation is different, since we do not yet have an

established bourgeois public order. The totalitarian state remains the hegemonic

power, against which activists often integrate public and counterpublic forms in

formulating a counter-discourse. I will discuss this integration further in the chapters

that follow.

Nian was not the only art project that addressed the issue of student deaths.

Next I will compare it to anther art project, Hu Huishan Memorial, to explain how

Nian differed from the more conventional model of public art.

Hu Huishan Memorial was built by the studio of architect Liu Jiakun, a well-

known designer in Sichuan, in spring 2009.59 Situated in the compound of Jianchuan

Museum Cluster,60 surrounded by trees, the Memorial is a small brick house in the

shape of a single tent, similar to those used for temporary shelter after the earthquake.

It was dedicated to Hu Huishan, a student killed at Juyuan Middle School, who “had

dreamed to be a writer.”61 Liu Jiakun met Hu’s parents when he went to Juyuan two

weeks after the earthquake and was deeply moved by their sorrow and love for their

                                                                                                               59 For complete project data, see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_49e53b730100ebvm.html, accessed July 5, 2011. 60 Jianchuan Museum Cluster is a large private museum established by real estate developer Fan Jianchuan in Anren, Sichuan. 61 Liu Jiakun’s blog, quoted by architectural critic Zhu Tao, at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/ blog_49e53b730100ebvm.html, accessed June 30, 2011.

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Figure 3.4 Liu Jiakun, Hu Huishan Memorial, 2009, exterior.

Figure 3.5 Liu Jiakun, Hu Huishan Memorial, 2009, interior.

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daughter.62 Liu’s proposal to build a small memorial for Hu was received by the

parents with gratitude. The finished structure contains a simple room with the interior

painted pink, Hu’s favorite color. A few items that she had used – a book bag, two

badminton rackets, some notebooks – along with her photographs and various

certificates were displayed on the wall. The room is well lit, with a skylight bringing

in natural light. The project has been widely reported in the Chinese media. Liu

received a nomination for a special award in the 2010 China Architecture Media

Awards. However, the local government has forbidden the memorial to be open to the

public.

Hu Huishan Memorial conforms to the conventional model of public art.

Materialized in a sculptural form, placed in an open space, it communicates with the

public in a visual language that can be easily understood. The memorial serves as a

sign pointing to Hu’s life, which in turn stands in for the entire issue of student deaths

in the earthquake. Though images of the project can be reproduced, the physical work

remains a unique object with a known author. Its perceived publicness is mostly an

effect of its intention and exhibition. From the moment of its conception, the work

has been endowed with a public intention. The subject matter is associated with an

issue of public concern rather than private contemplation. The work is meant to be

exhibited publicly, to indefinite strangers rather than private collectors.

                                                                                                               62 Liu wrote in his blog, “As I recall now, it was Liu Li’s [the mother] detailed thoughtfulness in keeping her daughter’s umbilical cord and deciduous teeth as well as Hu Ming’s [the father] toughness and pride that moved me.” Ibid., translation by Lin Fanyu.

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While Hu Huishan Memorial foregrounds the individual relationship between

Liu Jiakun and Hu Huishan, Nian encapsulates thousands of stranger relationships

between the readers and the students. It is difficult to determine Nian’s authorship. Ai

Weiwei initiated the project, his team took charge of coordination and editing, and

about two thousand people, who remain anonymous, sent in their recordings. One

might argue that Hu Huishan Memorial too was not created by Liu Jiakun alone.

Three architects working in Liu’s studio, a structural engineer, and a number of

construction workers were involved in the process. However, there is one critical

distinction. In the Memorial project, only Liu’s participation was motivated by

stranger sociability. Other people’s involvement was due to employment or

contractual relationships. Their primary identities were as professionals with certified

skills rather than citizens with rights. In contrast, in Nian, stranger-relationality

underlay Ai’s creative effort as well as the anonymous readers’ participation. Even if

we manage to find out those participants’ names and professions, we would still

perceive them, within the context of Nian, primarily as citizens who mourned for

strangers as a way to express their critical concerns.

Hu Huishan Memorial is a single expression by a single citizen. Nian, on the

other hand, is a collection of multiple expressions by multiple citizens. Warner points

out that “not texts themselves create publics, but the concatenation of texts through

time.”63 He adds, “between discourse that comes before and the discourse that comes

after one must postulate some kind of link. And the link has a social character; it is

                                                                                                               63 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90.

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not mere consecutiveness in time but an interaction.”64 The meaning of Hu Huishan

Memorial lies in its relation to the entire discourse concerning the issue of student

deaths in the earthquake. Imagine someone visiting the memorial but learning nothing

else on the issue both before and after the visit. He would not be able to comprehend

the critical position taken by the author; most likely he would perceive the work as an

open display of personal attachment, devoid of any further meaning. We can grasp

the critical intention of Hu Huishan Memorial only if we recognize its association

with a stream of arguments – the positions taken by the government, the petitions

made by the parents, the investigations conducted by the activists – and its relative

position to these arguments.

Our interpretation of Nian also depends on our awareness of other arguments.

However, concatenation is already present within Nian and adds an important

dimension to our experience of the work. When we hear the first student’s name read

aloud, “Cao Zi Yan,” we understand the reader’s act as an expression of mourning.

When we hear the second name, “Du Xin,” we understand this event as an expression

of mourning and as an expression of agreement, the second reader concurring with

the first one. The sense of endorsement builds up as more names are read by more

individuals. This is achieved through linear editing. Both space and time are

compressed to assemble distributed recordings into a chain of linked events, with

regularized rhythm. The short intervals of silence between the recordings, though

seemingly insignificant, signal the beginning and end of each utterance, allowing us

                                                                                                               64 Ibid.

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Figure 3.6 Nian concatenates multiple stranger relations into one work.

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to perceive concatenation. The aggregation of a large number of like-minded acts,

coupled with the fact that the readers are anonymous and apparently belong to no

particular interest group, transposes Nian into something close to an expression of a

public. A public is a group of individuals linked only by their transient participation

in a discursive arena. Both scale and strangerhood are important attributes of a public;

they are indicators of its openness. In Nian, the magnitude of participation made it

unlikely that the participants were united by any particular self-interest. Their

anonymity ensured that they remain strangers to one another and to any potential

audience who join the public temporarily by listening to the sound work.

In Nian, the role of the artist was fundamentally different from that of the

artist in a more conventional work like Hu Huishan Memorial. In Memorial, the

primary task of the artist was to craft a powerful object to express his own critical

response to the issue. In Nian, the artist concerned himself with creating not an object

to represent his individual opinion, but a discursive space for other people – strangers,

citizens – to make their expressions public. Some participants may already have

formed their judgment on the issue of student deaths before their involvement; what

the project enabled them to accomplish was the transformation of private opinions

into public expressions. Risk is always involved in making things public. The artist

had to calibrate the level of risk to achieve criticality on one hand, and to ensure

safety for the participants on the other. He did not devote himself to documenting his

personal encounter with strangers but to building a platform for other citizens to forge

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relationships with strangers, and furthermore, to make such stranger-relationality

visible.

Nian constituted a challenge to the state not only because it refused to forget

about the students killed in the Sichuan earthquake; it mounted this disagreement by

creating a public of strangers to mourn for the students. It was not a single artist’s

defiant gesture, but a concatenation of discrete oral performances that foregrounded

stranger-relationality. Its publicness is central to its contestation of state power.

In many ways, Nian is similar to the American project the NAMES Project

AIDS Memorial Quilt. Both used public mourning as a strategy to protest against

silence and suppression. Both centered on making public the names of the victims

whose deaths were caused at least partially by government inaction. Initiated by

Cleve Jones in San Francisco in 1985, the NAMES Project achieved a landmark

breakthrough in 1987 when 1,920 handcrafted panels, each three-by-six-feet, were

displayed on the National Mall in Washington D.C. during the National March on

Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. In Charles Morris’ words, the event

“constituted an extraordinary rhetorical turn, a reversal and transformation” of the

meaning of AIDS in the US.65 The project is ongoing. There are now more than

46,000 panels bearing more than 91,000 names.66

                                                                                                               65 Charles Morris, “Introduction: The Mourning After,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10.4 (2007), 560. 66 For more details of the NAMES project, please see Cleve Jones, Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000) and Charles Morris, ed., Remembering the AIDS Quilt (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011).

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In addition to visual display, the NAMES project also has an oral component.

Whenever the AIDS Quilt is shown, the names of those individuals whose lives the

panels pay tribute to are also read aloud in a ritualized ceremony. According to Cleve

Jones, this is what happened on Oct. 11, 1987 when the Quilt was unfolded on the

National Mall:

As dawn became day, thousands of people lined the perimeter and I stepped slowly to the podium in the shadow of the Jefferson Memorial. I have almost no memory of walking to the podium, no words to describe the emotion flooding my heart as I read those twenty-four names, each so precious and containing in a few syllables entire lives. I began with Marvin Feldman. It was extremely difficult to speak slowly and deliberately, pausing between each name, and my voice began breaking down at the end of the list. Other readers were Art Agnos, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Blake, Lily Tomlin, Harvey Fierstein, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Joseph Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, ended his list of names with a tribute to “my dear friend and colleague Michael Bennett.”67

In this description we notice an important difference between the NAMES project and

Nian. Those who went up to the podium to read the names in 1987 were prominent

figures: activists, artists, and politicians. Their participation in the reading event was

arranged by the organizer. Their connection to those being mourned cannot be

characterized as stranger-relationality. Instead, emphasis was placed on personal

relations, like the friendships between Jones and Feldman (Jones called him “my

closest friend in the world”68), Papp and Bennett. In this sense, the NAMES project

approaches publicness via a different route. As Peter Hawkins observed, “by over

                                                                                                               67 Cleve Jones, “The First Displays: D.C. and S.F., 1987,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10.4 (2007), 588. 68 Cleve Jones, “Power of the AIDS Quilt: Comforting, Consoling and Convincing,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 2001.

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dramatizing intimacy, by taking small gestures of domestic grief and multiplying

them into the thousands, the Quilt makes a spectacular demonstration of the feminist

dictum: the personal is political.”69 This is most evident in the making of the panels.

As Carole Blair and Michel Neil note,

A remarkably high percentage of the AIDS Quilt panels … assert the identity of their subjects in terms of personal, rather than public, relationships. Quilt panel makers often sign the panels. Many mark the individual by familial or social role – lover, father, son, brother, child, friend, husband, wife, sister. Some bear messages to the deceased, such as “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.”70

Douglas Crimp has pointed out that the political efficacy of the NAMES project lies in

its integration of “the private mourning ritual of a person or group involved in making

a panel” and “the collective mourning ritual of visiting the quilt to share that

experience with others.”71 When describing his own response to the AIDS Quilt,

Crimp emphasized relations other than close friendships:

Seeing a panel bearing the name of Michel Foucault, who was an intellectual idol, whose writings I had depended on for much of my own work, and who had agreed to be a reader of my dissertation less than a year before he died – seeing that panel had less emotional impact on me than seeing, every now and then, a name I recognized as that of someone I’d only dimly known, or known about. It was those moments that most brought home to me the full extent of my own loss – not my good friends Craig, Dan, Hector, René, Robert …, whose loss I had directly experienced, but others who, because I didn’t know

                                                                                                               69 Peter Hawkins, “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), 777. 70 Carole Blair and Michel Neil, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10.4 (2007), 608-09. 71 Douglas Crimp, “The Spectacle of Mourning,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 197.

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them well enough, I hadn’t event known had died. In other words, I had lost not just the center of my world but its periphery, too. Reflecting on these feelings, I remember at the time saying to friends that it was the symbols of the ordinariness of human lives that made the quilt such a profoundly moving experience.72

Crimp’s account of his experience focuses on the relations between himself and those

deceased, not the relations between the panel makers and those being mourned. In

contrast, when I described my response to Nian at the beginning of this chapter, I paid

as much attention to the names of the students killed in the earthquake as to those

anonymous participants who read the names. This distinction again points to the

unusual relationality constructed in Nian. The relations between the readers and the

students were not private relations of lovers, friends, or families, but public relations

of strangers as citizens. While the NAMES Project made private mourning public,

Nian emphasized public mourning throughout. In this sense, Nian stands in

opposition to some recent American projects, like the Oklahoma City National

Memorial, that have made public mourning more private. At the Oklahoma City

National Memorial, “only family members are allowed access to the area called the

‘field of chairs,’ where each of the 168 stone and glass chairs names one of the

individuals killed in the bomb blast.”73 This design privileges familial relations over

all other kinds of relations, reinforcing an archaic notion of the private, and

                                                                                                               72 Ibid., 195. 73 Blair and Neil, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration,” 618.

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prioritizimg the private over the public. In Blair and Neil’s words, this is a “rather

troubling” development.

On April 3, 2011 Ai Weiwei, along with four of his staff, was detained by the

Chinese government. Although the state claimed that Ai was being investigated for

economic crimes, it was clear to most observers that he was yet another victim of the

crackdown on activists. Since early spring dozens of civil rights lawyers, dissident

writers, and performance artists have been arrested throughout China. This campaign

seemed to be triggered by the democratic protests in the Middle East and the

increasing domestic discontent caused by steep inflation. Ai’s arrest attracted global

attention; foreign politicians as well as artists petitioned vigorously for his freedom.

Ai was finally released on June 22.

It is difficult to pin down any specific project that precipitated Ai’s detention.

He has worked on many sensitive issues, from cultural censorship to AIDS patients’

rights. Ai has always operated within the current legal framework, using laws

instituted by the state to counter the state’s own corruption. His detention is a clear

indication that the state considers his critical, public endeavors a serious threat. He

has not only demanded his own rights as a citizen, but also urged others to do the

same. It is projects like Citizen Investigation and Nian that worry the state because

they help to build relations, however transient, among those who act as citizens.

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Chapter 4

Visibility

On February 1, 2012, Wukan, a small village in Guangdong province,

captured many people’s attention on Chinese social media. Over five thousand

villagers went to the local primary school to cast their ballots. They had kicked out

the village’s former party secretary, who was deemed corrupt by many but managed

to hold on to his power for decades, and initiated a self-organized election. This

election was the result of an extended battle that the villagers fought with the state.

Over a period of six months, they staged protests, fended off police interventions, and

leveraged foreign media and Chinese social media to broadcast their cause. The state

finally gave in to their request after an eleven-day confrontation between the villagers

and armed police in December. Yang Semao, one of the protest leaders, told the New

York Times, “I’m proud to see the passion for democracy among my fellow villagers.

From now on, it’s unlikely that anyone will dare rig an election in Wukan.”1

Pictures of the Wukan election circulated widely on the internet. They

instantly reminded me of the videos from the Village Self-Governance Documentary

Project, organized by Wu Wenguang (born 1956) in late 2005.2 Those videos

introduced me to scenes of a village election for the first time. Wu’s project

                                                                                                               1 Andrew Jacobs, “Residents Vote in Chinese Village at Center of Protest,” New York Times, Feb. 1, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/world/asia/residents-vote-in-chinese-village-at-center-of-protest.html, accessed Feb. 2, 2012. 2 The project’s name in Chinese is “Cun min zi zhi ying xiang ji hua.”

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Figure 4.1 Pictures of Wukan election circulated on weibo.com, a popular Chinese twitter site, in February 2012.

fascinated me because, unlike most public art projects of the past decade, it focused

on rural China, where over half of the Chinese population still reside today. How does

the rural figure in the pursuit of publicness? How should we understand the Village

Documentary project, framed as art, in relation to political activities often considered

more “real,” like the protest and election in Wukan?

This chapter is organized into four sections. First, I will describe how the

Village Documentary project was developed, and provide a brief account of the

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Figure 4.2 Video stills from the Village Self-Governance Documentary Project.

history of village elections in China. Next, I will describe the videos and argue that

their bounded clarity constitutes a form of counterpublic expression. I will then

analyze how the digital video (DV) camera introduced visibility to village life, and

how those who gained access to the DV camera were affected by it. Lastly, I will

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explore how these videos were screened and distributed, in order to highlight the

importance of circulation in the pursuit of publicness.

Village Self-Governance

In 2005, the EU-China Training Program on Village Governance, a joint

project established in 2001 by the European Union and the Chinese Government,

approached documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang and asked him to produce a

feature-length documentary on the topic of village self-governance.3 Wu proposed an

alternative plan: he would help ten villagers to document their own village politics.

Wu told a reporter, “After all, it’s better to have ten more people making

documentaries than doing it alone.”4 In September, Wu placed a call for proposals in

several newspapers, including the popular Southern Weekly. Out of the forty

applications received, Wu selected ten, taking into consideration proposal quality as

well as gender, age, and geographical distribution. The ten villagers, two of them

women, were living in nine different provinces, and their ages ranged from 24 to 59.

In early November, they traveled by train from their villages to Beijing and attended a

three-day workshop at Caochangdi Workstation, Wu’s studio and home. They learned

how to operate a basic DV camera and discussed their ideas with Wu. At the end of

                                                                                                               3 The EU-China Training Programme on Village Governance ran from 2001 to 2006. Under this program, over 280 workshops were conducted on village elections and transparency in village affairs. See “Democracy Program ‘a Success’ in Rural Areas,” China Daily, Apr. 6, 2006, http://www.china.org.cn/english/government/164775.htm, accessed Feb. 18, 2012. 4 Zhou Wenhan, “DV jing tou dui zhun cun min zi zhi jin cheng” (DV Lens Focusing on the Progress of Villager Self-Governance), Xin jing bao (The Beijing News), Sept. 7, 2005, http://news.sina.com.cn/o/2005-09-07/09576882668s.shtml, accessed Mar. 17, 2009. Translation mine.

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Figure 4.3 The ten villagers learning to shoot video at Caochangdi Workstation in November 2005.

the workshop, each villager received a DV camera, a tripod, and ten blank video tapes.

They returned home and shot footage for two weeks. They then went back to

Caochangdi Workstation, and Wu’s assistants sat down with them to edit the

materials into ten short videos, each about ten minutes in length. The project

generated immediate interest both in China and abroad. The compilation of the videos

was accepted to several international film festivals. Much to Wu’s surprise, two

programs of China Central Television (CCTV), the monolithic network run by the

state, also decided to broadcast the videos in spring 2006.5

                                                                                                               5 The videos were shown in “Fa zhi shi jie” (Legal Vision) on Channel 12 and “Guo shi DV” (National DV) on the Education Channel (Zhongguo jiao yu dian shi tai).

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The project did not end there. Four of the ten villagers – Shao Yuzhen, Zhang

Huancai, Wang Wei, and Jia Zhitan – have continued to use their DV cameras to

capture village life, and have learned to edit their own videos at Caochangdi

Workstation. Each has produced one feature-length documentary every year since

2007.

My analysis in this chapter will primarily concern the ten short videos

produced in 2005. They have circulated far more widely than the subsequent feature-

length documentaries. Unlike the latter, which are credited to individual authors, the

ten short videos have always been shown together as the output of a collective project.

Furthermore, for our purpose of understanding the project’s publicness, the villagers’

initial taking up of video-making is more critical than their ongoing engagement.

The Village Documentary project was not the first participatory image-making

project in China. In 1991, supported by the Ford Foundation, the organizers of

PhotoVoice gave cameras to 53 women in Yunnan province to document their own

lives so that their stories could influence the local government’s procreation and

health policy. In 2001, as part of the Sustainable Future Scenarios For Chinese

Settlements project, villagers in Jiangjiazhai (Shaanxi province), Beisuzha (Hebei

province), and Wanyuan (Yunnan province) learned DV skills and produced three

documentaries dealing with a wide range of topics, including women’s rights and

sustainable growth. Several other projects, mostly in the area of environmental

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protection, also involved media-based participation. 6 What sets the Village

Documentary project apart is its direct engagement with village democracy, a topic

considered more sensitive than environmental protection in China. Furthermore,

framed as an artwork, it has generated a far wider media reach than previous projects,

which were usually framed as research or NGO activities.

The Village Documentary project was scheduled to coincide with nationwide

village elections in 2005. In 1980, 85 families in Hezhai village in Guangxi province

got together and decided to elect their own local village council by ballot. This was an

unprecedented move. Two years later, the central government decided to roll out

direct elections at the village level, the lowest administrative tier of the Chinese state.

In 1987 the National People’s Congress passed the Provisional Organic Law on

Village Committees and made village elections mandatory every three years. The law

was refined in 1998. By 2005 almost all village councils in China were elected

directly by villagers. Researchers’ views on the effectiveness of village elections

range from celebratory to highly critical. For example, sociologist Bruce Gilley

believes that village governments in China constitute a democratic enclave. He writes,

“village elections are institutionalized, democratic, irreversible, and at odds with the

norms of the regime itself concerning direct competitive elections.”7 Political scientist

Tan Qingshan disagrees. In his opinion, village elections have remained “largely

                                                                                                               6 See Han Hong, “Can yu shi ying xiang yu can yu shi chuan bo” (Participatory Image-Making and Participatory Communication), Xin wen da xue (Journalism Quarterly) 2007.4, http://academic.mediachina.net/article.php?id=5464, accessed Aug. 6, 2009. 7 Bruce Gilley, “Democratic Enclaves in Authoritarian Regimes,” Democratization 17.3 (2010), 391.

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irrelevant to effective village self-government,” due to “the dysfunctional village

governance structure, township re-assertiveness over villages, and the village dual

leadership factor.”8 Part of the difficulty in forming a comprehensive view of village

governance is the sheer scale of the problem. There are more than 620,000 villages in

China and they vary greatly in size, kinship structure, economic development level,

literacy, political tradition, and so on. In Rural Democracy in China: The Role of

Village Elections, He Baogang, a leading scholar in this field, writes,

Rural China is often the subject of incongruous and paradoxical descriptions that range from peasant rebellions, daily resistance, rampant corruption, social disorder, kinship fighting, “dark force” in village politics, and extreme poverty, through rapid economic development, increasing wealth and prosperity, and surprisingly, deepening democratization processes. Each depiction contains a partial truth individually or even collectively.9

Although the ten villages covered by the Village Documentary project amount to only

a tiny fraction of China’s countryside, the stories shown in the videos reveal the kind

of complexity described by He. The videos’ topics range from a village meeting on

the distribution of a poverty relief fund to an election nullified because of unbalanced

representation, from a portrait of a village head self-branded as a rebel to the

resolution of a dispute on the ownership of a quarry. The videos are not in-depth case

studies conducted by sociologists or political scientists. And they do not encompass

the whole range of village politics. They contain no organized protests, like what

                                                                                                               8 Tan Qingshan, “Why Village Election Has Not Much Improved Village Governance,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 15 (2010), 153. 9 He Baogang, Rural Democracy in China: The Role of Village Elections (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.

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occurred in Wukan recently, nor experiments of deliberative democracy, like the

participatory budget meetings conducted in Zeguo in Zhejiang province.10 They

provide only a glimpse of Chinese rural politics. The significance of the project lies

as much in its demonstrative value – that the introduction of visibility is crucial to

empowering villagers – as in the actual stories that the ten authors managed to capture

and tell.

Partition of Visibility

In early May 2006, the villagers’ videos were screened at Caochangdi

Workstation and an award ceremony was held. According to one Chinese reporter,

A foreigner excitedly asked the villagers, through this project, what has changed in the way they think. The reply from the granny who got the first prize [Shao Yuzhen] was excellent: “Not much difference; the DV camera is like my eyes.” Another peasant brother’s answer was even better: “My status in the village has clearly gone up; folks think I have become a reporter.”11

How should we understand Shao’s claim that the DV camera is like her eyes? And

what does it mean that the other villager has acquired the status of a reporter? In this

section, besides articulating the change that the project has brought to the lives of the

villagers in the ten participating villages, I will also analyze how the project affected

village politics and urban viewers like me. Central to my discussion is the notion of

                                                                                                               10 See Sean Gray, “Wenling City Deliberative Poll,” 2009, http://participedia.net/cases/wenling-city-deliberative-poll, accessed Feb. 20, 2012. 11 Wu Dongyan, “Ou meng bang Zhongguo ‘cun min zi zhi’” (EU Helps China’s ‘Village Self-Governance’), May 30, 2006, ftchinese.com, assessed from http://www.chinareform.org.cn/cirdbbs/dispbbs.asp?boardid=6&id=94242, Feb. 15, 2012.

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visibility, understood visually as presentation and reception, and politically as

representation and recognition. I will rely on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of

subjectivity formation – what he terms “subjectification” – and identify the link

between this concept and the notion of reflexivity in Warner’s theorization of publics.

In his 1996 article, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Rancière begins with the

following definition of politics:

Thesis 1. Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity), not the other way around.12

In other words, politics is the struggle for recognition as a political subject. The

exercise of power – the counting of “actual groups defined by differences in birth, by

different functions, locations, and interests” – does not constitute politics but belongs

to what Rancière calls “the police.”13 Politics, according to this formulation, is

motivated by the fundamental principle of equality, “specifically opposed to the

police.”14 In his differentiation of politics from the police, we can already locate a

connection to the notion of publicness. As Warner notes, “the existence of a public is

contingent on its members’ activity, however notional or compromised, and not on its

members’ categorical classification, objectively determined position in social

                                                                                                               12 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event 5.3 (2001), http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html, accessed Feb. 21, 2012. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

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structure, or material existence.”15 Publics are political precisely because of their lack

of institutional permanence and disregard for status. Furthermore, since publics lie

outside the field of the police, they do not connect to the exercise of power directly.

In Thesis 7, Rancière states that the police is primarily “a partition of the

sensible,” a partition between “what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard

from the inaudible.”16 The partition can be realized by brute force, as illustrated by

the police command, “Move along! There is nothing to see here!” But more often, it

is ingrained in cultural practices that determine the boundaries of meaning, rationality,

and ethics. As Oliver Davis notes,

to say that the sans-part [those ‘without a share’ in the political community] are excluded from the socio-political order is that when they try to voice their grievances there is a tendency for their speech not to be heard as rational argument. … This does not just mean that these complaints are understood then disregarded, but rather, in a more fundamental sense, that they are not heard as meaning-bearing language.17

Politics, in its opposition to the police, is “first and foremost an intervention upon the

visible and the sayable.”18 Subjectification is precisely the process in which those yet

to be counted as political subjects struggle to become visible and audible – in other

words, to become recognized. This is linked to two aspects of publicness: access to

the public sphere, and a normative mode of public speech. By insisting that public

speech adhere to the rational-critical form, the bourgeois public sphere has been able                                                                                                                15 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 88. 16 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” 17 Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 90-91. 18 Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.”

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to legitimize its exclusion of those who do not speak in this way. Therefore, it is

essential for counterpublics to reconfigure the partition between speech and noise,

between text and doodle, between meaning and nonsense.

When I watched the videos from the Village Documentary project for the first

time, at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2006, I was both excited and

frustrated. The opportunity to see villagers participating in elections, arguing in

meetings, and gossiping in bedrooms was precious. Although more than half of the

Chinese population still live in the countryside, rural life is underrepresented in the

Chinese mediascape. Furthermore, rural life is often considered apolitical. Villagers

are portrayed as uneducated and simple-minded folks, unable to speak, to write, and

to reason. They exist but are invisible, having no existence as a real part of society.

Ironically the fact that direct elections are only implemented at the village level and

that urban residents have no access to such democratic processes is hardly known.

The Village Documentary project enabled villagers to appear as political

subjects on screen. In the first video, Nong Ke, a 59-year-old farmer from Dujie

village in Guangxi province, captured how the residents of a neighboring village

determined the distribution of 10,000 yuan that they had received from the county

government. More than a hundred villagers – men and women, young and old –

gathered in an open place. Some had brought small stools while others sat on rocks or

stood. A piece of cloth bearing the name of the meeting was tied to a clump of

bamboo. After the village head briefed the crowd, they engaged in a lively discussion.

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Figure 4.4 Stills from A Welfare Council by Nong Ke.

They then decided to put the matter to a vote. Names of potential recipients were

chalked up on a blackboard. Empty bowls were placed under the names. Each villager

was given five beans to place into five bowls of his or her choice. Voting proceeded

quickly and twenty families were chosen according to the result. Each would receive

500 yuan. The process appeared to be open, fair, and efficient. (In 2010, when I

needed to engage gallery visitors in a simple vote, I incorporated this beans-and-

bowls method into my own art project.)

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While watching the videos in 2006 I also felt anxious. Out of the ten videos, I

could only understand the dialects in three of them. And even in these three, I had to

rely on subtitles from time to time. Shao Yuzhen’s video was the easiest for me to

follow because she was from a suburb of Beijing. Since I had learned to associate

political address with Mandarin, the literary and official form of Chinese based on the

Beijing dialect, characters in Shao’s video seemed more articulate and politically

savvy. Zhang Huancai’s video, A Nullified Election, made me acutely aware of my

own tendency to correlate political subjectivity with speech capability. The video

began with Zhang trying to engage a few fellow villagers in a conversation about the

impending village election. The other villagers, however, seemed more curious about

the camera he was holding. A few boys approached the lens and shouted, “Monster!

This is the monster in the magic world!” A female voice was heard offscreen. “All

village comrades, please pay attention. I will broadcast and propagate again the

arrangement set by the county government on the sixth village committee elections.”

It was the village party secretary broadcasting via the loud speaker system installed

along the road. She spoke slowly and clearly, in complete sentences with proper

grammar. Onscreen a few women were washing clothes in a creek. Their

conversations were made inaudible by the loud broadcast. The party secretary’s

speech also showed up onscreen as subtitles, making it effortless for me to follow.

Later that evening, a meeting was held in a classroom at the local primary school. The

village party secretary, along with a few officials from the county, sat behind a long

table in the front of the room, facing a crowd of villagers. The only woman in the

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room was the village party secretary. Her hair was clipped short. She spoke first, and

then the county officials addressed the crowd in turn. Even though the officials all

spoke in the local dialect, I was able to understand them with the aid of subtitles.

When the video cut to the villagers sitting in the back of the room, I could see that

some of them were chatting, but it was impossible for me to figure out what they

were saying. Their words were not transcribed on the screen. After the officials

finished giving speeches, voting proceeded. Ballots were counted, and the party

secretary announced the results. By this time, most of the villagers were standing in

the room. Suddenly someone offscreen shouted, “East Village has an official, then

West Village must also have an official.” Other villagers chimed in,

“If West Village does not have an official, if things come up and West Village does not comply, then no solution.” “If the village head is re-swapped, the village must be divided.” “Even in constructing this building, West Village people did not have a share.” “One did not even vote for oneself, and still raise opinions here.”19

These four statements appeared onscreen as subtitles in succession, but it was clear

that several villagers were talking simultaneously and passionately, and not

everything they uttered was transcribed into subtitles. A county official wearing a

                                                                                                               19 According to He Baogang, “The word ‘village’ (cun) has two meanings in Chinese: either a natural village or hamlet composed of residents who live together (ziran cun) or an administrative rural area (xingzheng cun).” (Rural Democracy in China, 2) Shijiazhai Village – the subject of this video – is an administrative region composed of two natural villages, East Village and West Village.

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nice black coat intervened, “Considering the interest of people in West Village, how

about [we] also identify one or two officials from West Village?” The matter was left

unsettled.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt notes that Aristotle defined men –

citizens of the polis – as “living beings capable of speech.”20 Rancière’s notion, the

partition of the sensible, suggests that we continue to divide people into two camps:

those capable of speech, thus eligible to participate in public discussions, and those

incapable, thus ineligible. Similarly, Warner points out that the unity of the dominant

public “depends on a hierarchy of faculties that allows some activities to count as

public or general, while others are thought to be merely personal, private, or

particular.”21 When I watched Zhang’s video for the first time, I was able to

understand everything that the officials said, but only a small proportion of the

villagers’ words. My reflex was to blame my lack of comprehension on the villagers:

they chatted in small groups in the back of the room, instead of speaking aloud as the

party secretary did; and when they finally spoke up, they talked at the same time,

giving me – and the person doing subtitles – a difficult time. It seemed reasonable to

hold the villagers accountable for not being able to conduct public speech in a

reasonable form. It only occurred to me later that my inability to understand them is

not so much biological as social, and that my frustration implicated me as one willing

participant in the policing of the hierarchy of faculties. In this hierarchy, subtitles, as

                                                                                                               20 Arendt, The Human Condition, 27. 21 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 117.

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texts, are given far more attention than sound. Formal vocabulary, clear pronunciation,

turn taking, and impersonal address are considered properly public, whereas cursing,

muttering, speaking all at once, and personal address are deemed inappropriate.

Video, often considered just a technology, is produced and consumed

according to this partition of the sensible. For example, subtitles are designed to work

well with turn taking, since if only one person is speaking at any time, we will have

no trouble figuring out who is responsible for that line of text placed on the bottom of

the screen. We have become so reliant on subtitling that it is not uncommon for us to

read the subtitles even when we can understand the language spoken in the video. We

rarely question what has changed when spoken dialogue is transformed into text. We

seem to value what is said more than how it is said. We expect to understand

everything in a video by watching it once, in a linear fashion from start to finish. If

many people were speaking at the same time, we would not demand multiple subtitles,

nor would we rewind and re-watch the segment, a practice well accommodated by the

technology; instead, we would blame those “fools” for not conforming to a “proper”

way of speaking.

Overlapping speech is not unique to Zhang Huancai’s segment. In one scene

in the video produced by Fu Jiachong (from Jiguan village in Henan province), two

village committee members engaged a few senior villagers in a discussion about the

local school building. Onscreen we see two elders talking passionately at the same

time. The one closer to the camera has extended both arms forward, indicating the

severity of the problem with the gap between his hands. The other villager in the back

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has raised his right arm, pointing a finger to the problem in midair. No one in the

room seemed to be bothered by these two men’s simultaneous speech. However, only

the words shouted by the villager in the front appeared onscreen as subtitles. Should

we criticize villagers for not talking in turn, or should we understand their duets and

choruses as expressions of excitement, concern, and anger? Should we educate them

so that they can speak properly, or should we abandon the notion that public speech

has to be rational and disengaged? Should we invent technologies to accommodate

social practices, or should we mold social practices to meet the constraints of

technologies? Village Documentary project made these questions salient.

Insider/Outsider

In the last section, I focused on how the partition of the sensible is realized

through an alignment between rhetorical norms and video technologies. In this

section, I will turn to the material impact of the DV camera. Zhang Huancai’s video

reveals that, whereas the village party secretary could broadcast her message on the

loud-speaker system, the villagers could not; whereas the officials could determine

the spatial layout and sit comfortably in the front of the room, the villagers had to

settle for the back; whereas the officials could determine the agenda of the meeting

and allocate more time to their spiels, the villagers had to wait until the end of the

meeting to express their dissatisfaction. The introduction of the DV camera has a

material impact on the village’s media infrastructure. Although its effect is not

immediately visible in the video produced by Zhang, his fellow villagers seemed to

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grasp the machine’s potential instinctively. When Zhang told one middle-aged

woman on the street that he was “shooting television,” she warned him, “Don’t you

dare show it recklessly!”

The literal translation of the woman’s warning is “Don’t you dare release [it]

recklessly to the outside!”22 She seemed to suggest that to screen the video captured

by the little machine would be like letting the genie out of the bottle, bringing change

to the village in an unforeseeable fashion. “The outside” in her statement could be

interpreted in two ways. First, it could refer to the outside of a privileged space that is

not accessible to all. For instance, showing what happened in the classroom to

villagers who were not invited to the meeting may give rise to many questions: Why

wasn’t I told about the meeting? Why didn’t they let more villagers from West

Village attend the meeting so there could have been a balanced vote? Why did that

person blame people of West Village for not contributing to the school project? The

video would in effect undermine the control maintained by the village and county

officials. In Rancière’s vocabulary, “the outside” is external to the partition

maintained by the police. Second, “the outside” could refer to the world outside the

village. The video could be screened in other villages, in the provincial capital, in

Beijing, or even abroad. It would subject the way of life in this village to the gaze of

strangers. In other words, the video’s potential is to engender stranger-visibility. As

discussed in the last chapter, stranger-relationality is a defining feature of publicness

in the modern era. It may be established through face-to-face encounters, but more

                                                                                                               22 In Chinese, ni ke bug an wang wai luan fang chu lai.

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often it is realized through media. The video produced by Zhang links his village to

the outside world. Once the video is out there, no one could control the exact contours

of its audience. Neither the village party secretary nor the villagers could prevent

someone like me – who had not even heard of Shijiazhai before – from watching the

video, analyzing it, and connecting it to some theoretical ideas on democracy

proposed by a French philosopher. I may not be able to go to the village and try to

influence its politics directly, but no one could predict the effect of my writing, and

that of other texts triggered by the video. Village politics in China have long been

shaped by two forces: one from within, largely structured by kinship and tradition,

and one from above, exerted by the higher levels of government. Post-Mao economic

reform has brought a third force, the profit motive, into the dynamic. Cultivating a

discourse on village life in the emerging public sphere may introduce a public force to

village politics. The Village Documentary project suggests that video, with its

potential for stranger-visibility, could bring a new mode of address to the countryside.

When people speak about matters of common concern, they have to address potential

strangers in addition to those present. This is precisely what has happened in the

Wukan incident described at the beginning of this chapter.

The ten villagers who participated in the Village Documentary project acted as

both insiders and outsiders in regard to their villages. As insiders, even with the DV

camera in hand, their identity as video-makers was secondary to their identity as

locals. Yet by partaking in the project and traveling between their villages and Beijing,

they were also made aware that the viewership of their output would be more than

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their families and neighbors. The DV camera encouraged them to observe their

villages attentively.

For example, in Wang Wei’s video, titled Land Distribution, two kinds of

scenes are mixed together. In about half of the shots, Wang guides the viewer around

his village, Guanyinsi Wangjiacun in Shandong province. The viewer is taken to see

the stone slab bearing the village’s name, the village’s most fertile piece of land, and

the compound where the village committee, the clinic, and the women’s activity room

are housed. “The office doors are closed,” Wang says in voice-over. “This is the

village’s clinic. But the doctor is not here; he conducts business at home now.” The

video cuts to the locked door, with two panes of glass missing. “The glass has been

broken for a long time. It was broken by someone during SARS, never repaired

since.” The camera then turns to a gap in the wall enclosing the compound. Wang

informs the viewer that the breach has been there for two years, and someone was

able to enter the compound earlier that spring to steal the flour sent to the village by

the Civil Affairs Bureau for poverty relief. His dissatisfaction with the decrepit

condition of the village’s collective infrastructure is obvious. Wang delivers his

commentary – informative and critical – not in the local dialect, but in perfect

Mandarin. The village tour is intercut with a second set of scenes, in which Wang

interacts with his fellow villagers. He talks to two women, one of them identified as

“Sheng Bo’s wife,” as they sit on a large heated bed, legs covered in quilts, doing

needlework. They tell him that they voted for the current village head because the

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Figure 4.5 Stills from Land Distribution by Wang Wei.

village head had promised to divide the village’s land. Wang then goes to talk with

the village head and his deputy about land division. The conversations take place in

their homes, and on each occasion, the official is seen sitting on a bed and leaning

against a pile of quilts. Their relaxed posture and casual language befit the close

relationship between them and Wang, as the village only has about 440 residents.

Wang participates in these discussions earnestly, speaking in the local dialect,

providing no more commentary to the potential viewer.

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Wang’s accent-switching makes his insider-outsider duality salient.

Furthermore, those scenes in which he appears as an engaged discussant are always

shot indoors and framed tightly, suggesting intimacy, whereas those in which he

assumes the role of a guide talking to the viewer are shot outdoors and framed widely.

The rapid alternation of these two kinds of shots seems to suggest that Wang is

actively merging an insider’s interested participation with an outsider’s critical

observation.

Making things public requires not only technology and infrastructure but also

agents like Wang who can connect the inside with the outside. There are still too few

such agents who can push rural politics onto discursive platforms, which exist mostly

in urban media. Over 200 million farmers work as migrant labors in cities and

suburban factories. Often their children are left behind in the village and cared for by

the grandparents. Although migrant laborers usually keep close ties with their

families, sending money back to relatives and traveling home during the Chinese

New Year, they are unable to maintain political ties to their villages, not to mention

developing discursive connections between the countryside and their city dwellings.

One video in the Village Documentary project highlights this problem. Yin Chujian, a

26-year-old villager working in Jiahua city in Zhejiang province, interviewed a few

friends also working in the city, asking them if they had gone back to the village to

participate in recent elections. Some of these young men and women had become

successful shop owners in the city, selling computer software or providing

photography services. Their unanimous answer was “no.” When pressed to give a

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reason, they replied, “No one informed me that I should vote,” “I’m too busy,” or

“Elections have nothing to do with me anyway.” Politically they have become

complete outsiders to their village.

The insider-outsider identity acquired by the ten participants in the Village

Documentary project can also be related to the notion of the stranger. The DV camera

symbolized their connection to the world outside their villages. This connection

allowed them to see themselves as no longer completely immersed in a closed

structure. They acquired the freedom to look at their villages as if they were standing

outside temporarily. As media scholar Wang Yiman notes, “For them, obtaining and

then learning to use a DV camera is empowering. They not only gained the ability to

record detailed everyday happenings in their villages, but also learned to be more

perceptive, to defamiliarize routine, to capture mundane details now viewed afresh.”23

To become a stranger is not to turn into an alien. Unlike the young migrant workers in

Yin Chujian’s video who have become detached from their village, Wang Wei and

other video authors only became more curious and concerned. Perhaps they have long

possessed inquisitive minds, but only with the DV camera in hand could they

transform themselves into avowed strangers.

                                                                                                               23 Wang Yiman, “‘I Am One of Them’ and ‘They Are My Actors’: Performing, Witnessing, and DV Image-Making in Plebian China,” in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement, eds. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 224.

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Reflexivity and Rupture

In addition to examining their own surroundings, the villagers also directed

their cameras to the outside world when opportunities arose. Shao Yuzhen, the 55-

year-old villager from the suburb of Beijing, has developed a habit of carrying the

DV camera with her all the time. In a video posted online, we see her being

interviewed by a foreign journalist at a European film festival.24 While the journalist

captures her on video, she is seen with her own DV camera turned on and filming the

journalist. “After getting this machine,” her right hand pointing and touching the

camera perched on her left hand, she says, “since [I] started shooting, I’ve walked

outside, outside of my village.” Asked if the machine has empowered her, she replies,

“Yes, through learning I’ve gained more confidence.” She repeats the Chinese word

for “confidence” twice to make sure it is pronounced clearly. The camera held

steadily in her hands substantiates her statement. The returned gaze of her camera

seems to claim that she is entitled to treat the interview as an opportunity for her to

capture the foreign journalist on her tape, to be viewed later by her friends back in the

village, as much as the journalist is entitled to film her. The mutual filming confirms

an equality of visibility, and an equality of intelligence.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière proposes a theory of radical equality

based on the pedagogical experiment of Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840), an exiled French

schoolteacher who managed to guide his Flemish students to acquire French on their

                                                                                                               24 “Interview de Shao Yuzhen,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5lYcq0jbo, accessed Feb. 10, 2012.

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Figure 4.6 Shao Yuzhen being interviewed by a foreign journalist.

own. Because Jacotot and his students had no common language – Jacotot did not

know Flemish – he could not resort to the conventional method of transmitting

knowledge by explanation. Instead, he gave the students copies of a bilingual edition

of Télémaque, a 24-volume novel by Fénelon, and asked them to “learn the French

text with the help of the translation.”25 To his astonishment, he discovered later that

the students, “left to themselves,” managed to write critical essays in French “as well

                                                                                                               25 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2.

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as many French could have done!”26 From Jacotot’s story Rancière extracts a critical

lesson for emancipation:

What stultifies the common people is not the lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence. … Essentially, what an emancipated person can do is be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself.27

He believes that “the equality of intelligence is the common bond of humanity, the

necessary and sufficient condition for a society of men to exist.”28

Pedagogy is also central to the Village Documentary project. The villagers had

to learn how to use a DV camera, a machine that most of them had never seen before.

Perhaps time constraints, like Jacotot’s inability to speak Flemish, played a

productive role. The villagers only spent three days at Wu Wenguang’s Caochangdi

Workstation, so Wu had very little time to train them as professionals and had to

leave them on their own to figure out how to produce videos according to their

villages’ specific situations. For Wu, helping the villagers to acquire technical skills

was considered less important than helping them to feel confident, to see their video-

making as legitimate. He always addressed them as villager-authors.29 Though widely

respected as the foundational figure in China’s independent documentary field, Wu

was willing to learn from the ten participants as they were from him. He made it clear

                                                                                                               26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 68. 28 Ibid., 73. 29 In Chinese, cun min zuo zhe.

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to them that while he knows more about documentary filmmaking, they know more

about village life. He wrote in his diary on November 6, 2005,

The film screened on the last night of the Villager-Authors Workshop was Before the Flood, a documentary lasting two and half hours, without voice-over, without music. … In the ensuing discussion, [the village-authors] talked eagerly and passionately. When the young professional directors saw this video, they focused more on its aesthetics and documentary techniques. The villager-authors, on the other hand, associated [the film] with their own feelings and experiences. The first thing Nong Ke said was, those being flooded are us poor folks. … Sitting among these villagers who previously could have been the subjects of my camera, now jointly in charge of the lens, [I] learned a lot.30

As one commentator wrote online, “Wu Wenguang’s greatness lies in the fact that he

treats peasants as equals, so he can come up with a pioneering approach – to let

peasants take charge of the mirror.”31

“The mirror” in the comment above, presumably referring to the DV camera

or the practice of video-making, is an apt metaphor. The mirror allows us to perform

– like putting on make-up, moving the body, or rehearsing a speech – and to confirm

that we are capable of performing. It creates a feedback loop; it allows reflexivity.

According to Rancière, Jacotot’s success lies in the fact that his students were forced

into pretending that they were already intellectual equals to their master, and they

were able to verify the equality in the pedagogical encounter. As Davis articulates,

“political subjectivation resembles acting because both involve the ruse of pretending

                                                                                                               30 Wu Wenguang, “Gong zuo ri ji” (Working Diary), Nov. 6, 2005, http://www.ccdworkstation.com/ videosvillageprojectworknote.html, accessed Aug. 7, 2010. 31 Anonymous comment left on Wang Zheng’s blog on Aug. 5, 2007, http://wangcheng.blshe.com/post/2932/49225, accessed Aug. 5, 2009, translation mine.

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you are something you are not in order to become it: for the sans-part this means

pretending you are already equal participants in the political process from which in

fact, by virtue of the ‘wrong’ of the miscount, you are excluded.”32 This idea that

something can only become true if it is first pretended is also central to the notion of

publics. A public can only exist reflexively. “Its reality lies in just this reflexivity by

which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very

discourse that gives it existence.”33 One has to pretend to be speaking to a public in

order to conjure that very public into being. As Warner writes vividly, “Run it up the

flagpole, and see who salutes. Put on a show, and see who shows up.”34 Publics, like

radical equality, can only be realized performatively and poetically.

From a technical point of view, the DV camera encapsulates the idea of

reflexivity. A fundamental difference between the film camera and the DV camera is

that the latter permits instant verification. It houses both the lens and the screen,

allowing the holder to watch the video and show it to others right after the video is

captured. The rapid uptake of the DV camera cannot simply be attributed to its low

cost. It enables autodidactic learning by providing immediate feedback, much like the

mirror or the bilingual edition of Télémaque. It installs confidence into its user.

Moreover, when deployed collectively, it facilitates a kind of political verification:

Are you going to realize the promise you have made before the election – to us and

on tape – that you would redistribute the land? Were the delegates present at the                                                                                                                32 Davis, Jacques Rancière, 86. 33 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67. 34 Ibid., 114.

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meeting last night representative of the village population? Was the election process

fair and transparent?

To pretend and to perform, one has to create a rupture from what has become

the norm and the routine. For the ten villagers, the opportunity to go to Beijing and to

return with a DV camera constituted only the prelude to a rupture. The critical

moment occurred when they turned on the camera to capture an election, a meeting, a

dispute, or even just a piece of gossip. They became filmmakers by pretending to be

filmmakers. They became political subjects by pretending to have the rights to look

and to be seen, to speak and to be heard. Rupture is bound to cause anxiety, unease,

or even suppression. Wu and the ten villagers have consistently downplayed the

criticality of their joint venture. Wu claimed that he was only helping villagers to

capture their quotidian experience, and that the project had no political aim. When

Shao Yuzhen was asked by her fellow villagers why she was holding a video camera,

she replied, “just for fun.”

Wu and the villagers chose to engage in tacit transformations rather than

open protests. The strategy is not to articulate the political thinking behind their

actions, and even to deny their political intention when asked. Adapted to the

authoritarian situation in China, this rhetorical method itself is political. For example,

in August 2011, when residents in Dalian, a costal city in Liaoning province, wanted

to protest against a toxic chemical plant, they organized a “group stroll.” There is no

doubt that both the residents and the government understood the event as a protest –

more than ten thousand people “strolled” along the same street on a Sunday afternoon

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– but the word game made it more difficult for the government to prevent the

message from spreading on social media and to crack down on the organizers.

Pragmatic stutter is preferred to idealistic eloquence.

Wu Wenguang and Ai Weiwei are neighbors; both live in Caochangdi

village in the northern suburb of Beijing. Both are politically-minded, but have taken

two very different approaches in practice. Ai has often worked on sensitive issues,

adopted confrontational strategies, and voiced sharp criticism of the Chinese state.

For a while his family background and his fame in the West seemed to have protected

him from the kind of harsh treatment that many civil rights activists have suffered,35

but his 81-day detention in the spring of 2011 has seriously limited his ability to work

in China. This may appear to be a strong argument that the quiet, pragmatic, and

gradual approach taken by Wu and many other activists working in China today is

more effective than the direct, articulated, and radical approach favored by Ai and Liu

Xiaobo, who was sentenced to prison in 2009 for drafting the pro-democracy

manifesto, Charter 08. However, as Cui Weiping, a literary scholar who has

translated many East-European writings on the civil society into Chinese, reminds us,

“The officials think of us as moderates because of them [the radicals]. They are the

reason we are not in prison. For this alone we are grateful.”36

                                                                                                               35 His father, Ai Qing, was a poet canonized by the Communist Party. 36 Cui Weiping, quoted in Zha Jianying, “Enemy of the State,” New Yorker, Apr. 23, 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/23/070423fa_fact_zha, accessed Mar. 2, 2012.

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Circulation

In Disagreement, Rancière argues that when, at a trial in 1832, the socialist

revolutionary Auguste Blanqui gave “proletarian” as his profession and announced

that “it is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off their labor and who

are deprived of political rights,” it was a watershed moment because it exposed “the

founding wrong of politics, … the difference between an inegalitarian distribution of

social bodies and the equality of speaking beings.”37 Rancière’s analysis focuses

exclusively on this particular incident, and makes no mention of the chain of events

both before and after. As Warner notes, “no single text can create a public.”38

Blanqui’s speech had to enter circulation, maintain its argumentative force, and form

concatenations with other speeches through inter-referencing.39 The notion of the

proletarian did endure for more than a century. It traveled to China in the beginning

of the twentieth century and only started to fade out of circulation in the late 1970s. In

the West, when Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge wrote Public Sphere and

Experience in 1972, “proletarian” was still the best word to express their idea of a

counterpublic.40

In our highly mediated world, a speech can hardly be considered public

without wide circulation. In Chapter 2, I discussed how Xiong Wenyun utilized the

                                                                                                               37 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 37-39. 38 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90. 39 See Charles Taylor, “Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1992, http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Taylor93.pdf, accessed Oct. 30, 2010. 40 Negt and Kluge, The Public Sphere and Experience.

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format of media events to enable the Moving Rainbow project to enter mass media.

For the Village Documentary project, the circulation issue might seem

straightforward – video is a medium designed for multiplication. Yet it has been

difficult for the villagers’ videos to enter distribution, thus seriously limiting the

project’s publicness.

According to Wang Yiman, when Wu Wenguang conceived the project in

2005, he intended the villagers’ videos to “introduce China’s rural situation to an

international as well as an urban domestic public.”41 Right after the videos were

edited in December 2005, Wu sent the compilation of videos to film festivals in Hong

Kong, Singapore, and Europe, and scheduled a screening tour at four American

universities.42 In spring 2006, the videos were also shown in Beijing twice, first at an

international conference organized by the project’s sponsor, the EU-China Training

Program on Village Governance, and then at Cherry Lane Movies, an independent

film club. When I watched the videos in Beijing in spring 2008, it was also organized

by a film club. The event took place at a nice restaurant on a weekday afternoon.

About twenty people showed up, most of them students from universities nearby. Wu

attended the event and answered questions after the screening. Such film salons have

become the main channel – and often the only channel – for independent films to be

seen and discussed in Beijing. Participants are usually young, well-educated, and

                                                                                                               41 Wang Yiman, “‘I Am One of Them’ and ‘They Are My Actors’: Performing, Witnessing, and DV Image-Making in Plebian China,” 223. 42 See Caochangdi Workstation website, http://www.ccdworkstation.com/english/Public%20Screenings%20and%20Exhibitions%20and%20the%20Viewers%20intro.html, accessed Feb. 18, 2012.

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interested in the arts. The Village Documentary project has only been included in one

art exhibition in Beijing.43 The videos have never circulated on the internet, nor in the

pirated DVD market. Consequently, the project’s discursive reach has been limited to

a small portion of the capital’s academic and art community. This is caused by both

the state’s tenacious control on media and Wu’s low-key approach.

Media scholar Han Hong faults the project on two fronts: it failed to generate

participation on a larger scale, and the videos were never shown in the villages where

the ten authors live.44 Yet two villagers, Shao Yuzhen and Wang Wei, have both

indicated that, after their participation in this project, their fellow villagers started to

see them as reporters. Shao told a journalist in 2006, “folks believe that you are a

reporter, and come to you for many things.”45 This suggests that others in the village

have become aware of Shao’s video-making and understood the potential public

pressure that her videos might bring to their matters of concern. On the other hand,

the videos’ limited circulation means that they can never achieve the kind of media

impact assumed by the villagers. Among the ten participants, Wang Wei was the most

idealistic in the beginning, confessing in his video that he had come back to his

village in Shandong province after serving in the army for three years because he

wanted to “do something,” for instance, to help alleviate poverty. In 2010, I witnessed

him crying at a workshop at Caochangdi Workstation. He had become discouraged;

                                                                                                               43 It was included in Grassroots Humanism (Di ceng ren wen), curated by Wang Lin, in December 2007. The exhibition took place in Songzhuang, a remote artist village in the eastern suburb of Beijing. 44 Han Hong, “Participatory Image-Making and Participatory Communication.” 45 Shao Yuzhen quoted in Li Hongyu, “Cun min zi zhi, cun min zi pai” (Villager Self-Governance, Villager Self-Filmmaking), Nan fang zhou mo (Southern Weekly), May 11, 2006.

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the videos he had been making could not change his village to the extent that he had

hoped. Perhaps he has to push his work into wider circulation, both inside and outside

his village, so that his videos do not appear as single texts with a very short life span,

but connect with other utterances to form live discourses, to gain enough scale to

exert pressure on policies and other social institutions. But there is a second, and

perhaps more fundamental issue. Warner suggests that publics acquire agency only

through their “imaginary coupling with the state,” when they “enter the temporality of

politics and adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse.”46

But this is problematic for counterpublics, because it means that they will have to

leave behind the kind of performatives that make them counterpublic in the first place.

It may be the case, as Craig Calhoun suggests, that more radical struggles – social

movements, strikes, threats of armed insurrection – are needed to connect

counterpublics with the larger field of power.47

Wu Wenguang seems more patient than Wang Wei. Perhaps three decades of

working as an independent documentary filmmaker have given him enough time to

understand the relation between art and social change. He understands that the social

impact of art is real, but bounded. Since the Village Documentary project, Wu has

focused primarily on participatory video-making, turning Caochangdi Workstation

into a center where individuals, young and old, professional and amateur, come to

attend workshops, critique each other’s works, and show their videos in annual

                                                                                                               46 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 124. 47 See Craig Calhoun, “The Public Sphere in the Field of Power,” Social Science History 34.3 (2010), 301-335.

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festivals. More importantly, the participants go back to their cities, towns, and

villages to capture stories excluded from official view. Since 2010, he has been

working on the Memory project, building up an oral history archive on Mao-era

political movements, including the Land Reform (1950-52), the Great Leap Forward

(1958-60), the Great Famine (1959-61), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). These

periods remain taboo subjects in printed and visual media. Wu has also started to

utilize the internet, uploading interview transcripts onto a blog and distributing short

texts and images via twitter.48 However, videos still cannot circulate online. The

struggle for visibility continues.

The public sphere is not yet an institutionalized reality in China. In our pursuit

of publicness, we have to ask ourselves: what kind of publicness we want? Should we

strive for one “universal” kind of publicness admitting only rational-critical dialogue,

or strive for a pluralistic conception where alternative forms of expression are seen

not as threats but as assets? The Village Documentary project serves as a powerful

reminder that the rural should not be left behind, as it can provide a fertile ground for

public practice to flourish, and to challenge and inspire the urban.

                                                                                                               48 The URL for the blog is http://blog.sina.com.cn/ccdworkstation, and for the Chinese twitter page: http://weibo.com/u/2181292250.

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Chapter 5

Fantasy

I often think of publics as clouds. No one can deny the existence of clouds –

we have all seen them – but no one can pin down the exact contour of a cloud either.

Like clouds, publics are dynamic systems, constantly in flux. They form, develop,

merge, dissipate, and occasionally transform into storms. If clouds are created when

certain meteorological conditions are conducive, publics are created when certain

social conditions are present. Some of these social conditions, such as freedom of

speech and association, can be clearly stated and indeed are often written into the

legal code, while others largely depend on tacit understandings collectively held by a

large portion of the population. In fact, many aspects of publicness discussed in the

previous chapters belong to this latter category. For example, those who encounter

Nian may not be able to articulate that the work’s publicness lies in its aggregation of

stranger relations, but they can probably sense that the project is different from both

state mourning and private mourning because its numerous participants do not seem

to belong to any particular organization or to be connected personally to the students

killed in the earthquake. Charles Taylor, among others, has argued that much of our

social world is built on widely-held tacit understandings. He calls them social

imaginaries.

If social imaginaries are tacitly held, how can we locate them? And

furthermore, how can we attempt to change them? These questions are especially

important for counterpublics as the latter are often prohibited from equal

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participation in social life because of prejudices motivated by deep-seated but

unarticulated ideas and images. In this chapter, I will propose fantasy – more

specifically, counterpublic fantasy – as an avenue to approach social imaginaries.

Karibu Islands, a project from my own art practice, will serve as the case study. It

may be unusual for an artist to write about his or her own work, but this project’s

highly participatory nature means that it is as much about what the participants did on

the stage as about how I set up the stage. The analysis in this chapter will center on

the discussions and documents produced by the participants.

This chapter is organized into five sections. I will first describe the

development of Karibu Islands and its relation to Beijing’s queer movement. This is

followed by some theoretical ideas on social imaginaries and fantasy. I will then

analyze how a number of participants in the Karibu Islands discussions used fantasy

to reveal and criticize current social imaginaries. Next, I will discuss the notion of

radical secularity, which underlies both queerness and publicness. In the last section, I

will describe the form that this project took when it was exhibited in the 3rd

Guangzhou Triennial, and explore the relation between participation and exhibition.

Karibu Islands and the Beijing LGBT Cultural Center

Karibu Islands began as a series of experimental videos that Perry Ling and I

created in the fall of 2004. I was an MFA student at the Chinese University in Hong

Kong and Perry was an undergraduate student. We decided to create a joint work to

be shown at the foyer of the University’s main lecture theater. Unlike most exhibition

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Figure 5.1 Stills from Karibu Islands (seven videos).

venues, the foyer was not a white box. On the wall facing the entrance hung a large

sculpture made of ten pieces of black marble, with a golden line cutting across. We

had no idea who created the piece and why it was there, but since it was impossible

for us to remove it, we had to incorporate it into our work. The sculpture looked like a

group of islands to us, and we soon settled on the idea of creating a work about this

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hypothetical archipelago. “What if time there flowed in the opposite direction to

ours?” we asked. This time-reversal hypothesis became the bedrock of the project.

We created seven short videos, using both new and appropriated footage. The

first video functions as an introduction and features the slogan “Karibu Islands – The

Vanguard of Human Civilization.” The names of the ten islands – Flower Flask, Void

Shape, Lifting Moon, Double Shadow, No Solution, Single Body, Temporary To,

Necessary And, Singing Return, and Shadow Zero – are extracted from the famous

poem, Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon, by Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai (701-762).1

The second video is composed of fifteen reversed movie clips, assembled in an anti-

chronological order, including a Filipino maid rushing past the main post office in

Hong Kong (2004), Yamaguchi Momoe running backwards in clogs (1977), captain

                                                                                                               1 The poem reads,

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.

No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,

and facing my shadow makes friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,

and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,

I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;

I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we are together and happy. Drunk,

we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree

and meet again in Star River distances.

花间一壶酒

独酌无相亲

举杯邀明月

对影成三人

月既不解饮

影徒随我身

暂伴月将影

行乐须及春

我歌月徘徊

我舞影零乱

醒时同交欢

醉后各分散

永结无情游

相期邈云汉

Two characters are taken from each of the first ten lines of the poem to form a name. I have underlined the chosen characters in the Chinese text above. English translation from The Selected Poems of Li Po, trans. David Hinton (New York: New Directions, 1996), 43.

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Bowman jogging backwards in the space station (1968), two European men trekking

along the Alps (1938), and a train leaving La Ciotat (1895). The next video concocts

a disease called Time Split Syndrome (TSS), a sickness afflicting those traveling

between two time systems. This is followed by an advertisement for Karibu Islands

Railway, an announcement prohibiting any timepieces onboard, and a trailer for a

new mystery film. The last video contains a monologue. A tomboyish woman

wearing a sports jacket sits behind a long desk, reading a letter to her parents: “I’ve

been here in Karibu Islands for half a year. I’m living well. You don’t need to worry.”

She then tells them about “the strange things” in Karibu Islands: computers are

becoming ever slower; kids are fascinated with a new way of communication –

talking to their friends face-to-face. “When you see me in the future, maybe you’ll

feel that I’ve become a bit lazy. … But people here also say that I lack motivation.

Anyway, you don’t need to be sad, because I think, I think I want to stay here.

Staying here is good. It’s just that I’m a bit missing you.”

The following year, I appended to this set of video sketches a reworked

documentary of three historical figures transposed to Karibu Islands: John F.

Kennedy, Andy Warhol, and the Buddha. As time is reversed on Karibu Islands, the

life process would be opposite to that in our world. People would come to life in

many different ways. Kennedy would be born when a bullet flies out of his head;

Buddha would awake from his meditation. Some would recover from serious illness;

some would appear in a battlefield. People would grow younger, go to work, attend

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Figure 5.2 Stills from Karibu Islands (the Buddha’s life reversed).

school, and turn into babies. All would die in the same manner, by crawling into a

mother’s womb.

Unlike science fiction, the videos we created were not intended to construct a

time-reversed world based on a coherent set of assumptions. The materials were

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culled from various sources, both Chinese and foreign, both old and contemporary.

The tone of the videos was suggestive and reflective, rather than objective and

logical. One could easily spot gaps and even contradictions in the hypothesis, like

how a human body could exist there in the first place. We implied that Karibu Islands

may be the exact mirror image of our world, so our history is reenacted there in the

reverse order, but we did not rule out the possibility that what happens on Karibu

Islands could be entirely unrelated to what happens in our world. In short, we did not

supply a cohesive picture to be consumed, but left much space for the viewer to

question and to amend.

In spring 2008, I was living in Beijing and decided to develop the project

further by situating it within the local queer community. I was no longer interested in

making videos alone in my studio; I wanted to organize discussions where people

could come together to brainstorm about Karibu Islands. For the first two months I

tried to recruit participants through gay websites, like boyair.com, but made little

progress. Just when I was losing hope for the project, I learned through an activist

friend working in an AIDS NGO that a new organization – the Beijing LGBT

Cultural Center – had been founded. For more than a decade, queers in Beijing had

been able to chat online, cruise in parks, and dance in nightclubs, but up to that point

there had been no place for people to hold meetings, discuss politics, and watch films.

The Center was a critical step for the queer community to expand from private

computers to public discussions, from intimates to strangers, from night to day.

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Figure 5.3 The Beijing LGBT Cultural Center.

The Beijing LGBT Cultural Center was set up by three organizations: HIV-

AIDS advocacy group Aizhixing, lesbian coalition Tongyu, and information

clearinghouse Aibai.2 Located in an apartment duplex in a high-rise residential

building near Beijing’s West Railway Station, the Center started to operate in April

2008. It was the first non-commercial space for queer gatherings. Much like

                                                                                                               2 Aizhixing is the leading HIV-AIDS NGO in China. Established in 1995, the group relies on funding from overseas foundations, such as the Open Society Institute. Tongyu’s formal name is Beijing Tongyu Lesbian Community Working Group. It was founded in January 2005. Aibai distributes Chinese language materials, including news and legal information, to the LGBT community. Founded in 1999, its website is http://www.aibai.com/.

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Figure 5.4 The first Karibu Islands discussion held at the Beijing LGBT Cultural Center, May 11, 2008.

Caochangdi Workstation – Wu Wenguang’s private home turned into a training

center, a performance stage, and a library – the Center belonged to the category of

public spaces with private looks. The location was discreet. There was so sign in the

lobby or in the hallway. One had to know its exact address before visiting. But once

inside, one would be greeted with rainbow flags, queer magazines, and a homey

atmosphere. The Center’s inaugural manager was a young man named Yang Guang.

Yang had just graduated with a philosophy degree from Nanjing University. He was

enthusiastic, hardworking, and passionate about both queer and cultural activism. We

immediately bonded and valued each other’s work. With support from Yang and a

number of volunteers, I was able to organize three discussions at the Center in May,

July, and August.

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The first discussion was attended by eleven gay men in their 20s and 30s. The

session started with them watching the videos about Karibu Islands, made by Perry

and me in 2004 and 2005. Next, each participant was given a “Karibu Islands Birth

Certificate” to fill out. (These certificates will be analyzed in the third section.) The

group then reassembled, examining the certificates and discussing the choices that

people had made. The next two sessions were attended by nine lesbians and thirteen

straight people, respectively. They followed the same format as the first session,

except that a documentary video of the previous discussion(s) was also screened so

that the group was able to see what the previous group(s) had discussed.

The project in its documentary form was exhibited later that year in the Third

Guangzhou Triennial. It was the first time that an art project with an explicitly queer

theme was included in a national exhibition in China.

Social Imaginaries and Fantasy

Media scholar John Thompson, building on French theorists Cornelius

Castoriadis and Claude Lefort’s work, states that “the imaginary element of the

social-historical world” has to be freed “from the confines of a crude materialism.”3

This is particularly pertinent to China since a crude version of Marxism has

dominated the political discourse for over half a century. The Mao-ear idea that the

ideological superstructure is causally determined by the economic base has only been

                                                                                                               3 John Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary: An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort,” Theory and Society 11.5 (1982), 659.

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reinforced by the reform era’s fervid focus on GDP growth. The argument that

political and social changes have to follow economic buildup is not only championed

by the government but also genuinely embraced by many citizens.

In L'Institution imaginaire de la société, published in 1975, Castoriadis argues

that social institutions are shaped by “the imaginary of the society or period

concerned.” He writes,

This element, which endows the functionality of each institutional system with its specific orientation, which over-determines the choice and connections of symbolic networks, which creates for each historical period its singular way of living, seeing and making its own existence, its world and its relations to it, this originary structuring, this central signifier-signified, source of what is each time given as indisputable and indisputed sense, support of the articulations and distinctions of what matters and of what does not, origin of the augmented being of the individual or collective objects of practical, affective and intellectual investment – this element is nothing other than the imaginary of the society or period concerned.4

More recently, Charles Taylor has argued that much of our social life is guided by our

“implicit grasp of social space.”5 Such understandings are largely “unstructured and

inarticulate,” and are carried in “images, stories, legends, etc.”6 He calls them the

social imaginaries. He writes,

What I’m trying to get at with this term is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking rather of the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how

                                                                                                               4 Cornelius Castoriadis, L'Institution imaginaire de la societe (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 203, quoted in Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary,” 664. 5 Taylor, A Secular Age, 173. 6 Ibid., 171-73.

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things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.7

Taylor compares social imaginaries to our implicit understanding of a familiar

environment: we do not need to resort to a map to orient ourselves if we know the

place well. Similarly, in most social situations, we do not need to consult rules and

theories in order to know what to do or why certain actions make sense. Taylor points

out that our ability to grasp “the background which makes sense of any given act” is

much more complex than it might seem.8 For example, for those who participated in

the Karibu Islands discussions to make sense of their act, they would need to have

some idea of the time and space that they occupied, the kind of language and

interaction appropriate to the assembly, and the relation between them and the wider

world – how they stood in relation to queer situations in the past, to current

mainstream values in China, and to queer movements abroad.

Social imaginaries are both descriptive and normative. They are tied to what

actually happens around us, and to what we think should happen. For example, my

understanding of what constitutes a discussion is derived from past experiences and

observations, and this knowledge, together with what I think discussions should look

like, will guide how I will organize a discussion in the future. Thus, social

imaginaries are constantly revisited, consolidated, and modified. They seem to

occupy the intermediate layer between avowed theories and practices. In contrast to                                                                                                                7 Ibid., 171. 8 Ibid., 174.

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theories, social imaginaries often do not crystallize into rational-critical discourse but

remain as rough pictures, intimately linked to affects. Rancière’s notion of the

partition of the sensible, discussed in the last chapter, can also be understood in

relation to social imaginaries. What we can see and hear is determined not only by

our physical capacities but also by what we consider seeable and hearable. Yet often

we are not aware of the decisive role played by our normative framework. In other

words, we tend to imagine that our social world is a purely physical and material

place rather than an interplay between practices and imaginaries. Urbanization and

mediatization have placed a great demand on our abilities to imagine our social

world. Processes are extended over ever further distances, involving more individuals

who are strangers to one another. It is impossible for anyone to witness in person how

the market transacts, how the state governs, or how public opinion emerges. We have

to rely on the imaginary to prevent our modern world from collapsing.

For the institutionalized public sphere to exist, or for any specific public or

counterpublic to be conjured, we need a wide range of social imaginaries. Warner

argues that

a great deal must be postulated in order for [publics] to work in the world: not only the material conditions of a circulating medium, but also corresponding reading or consuming practices as well as the sort of social imaginary in which stranger-sociability could become ordinary, valuable, and in some ways normative. … This constitutive and normative environment of strangerhood is more, too, than an objectively describable Gesellschaft; it requires our constant imagining.9

                                                                                                               9 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 76 and 105.

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Anyone who is making a public utterance has to postulate an impersonal addressee

and project a space of circulation. However, perhaps because we have much difficulty

in imagining the indefinite, “the circulation of public discourse is consistently

imagined … as dialogue or discussion among already present interlocutors” rather

than “multigeneric circulation.”10 Warner acknowledges that this way of imagining

publics is constitutive, because it allows us to attribute agency to publics, but he is

also wary of the impairment of this “misrecognition.”11 He writes,

The modern hierarchy of faculties and its imagination of the social are mutually implying. … The critical discourse of the public corresponds as sovereign to the superintending power of the state, so the dimensions of language singled out in the ideology of rational-critical discussion acquire prestige and power. Publics more overtly oriented in their self-understandings to the poetic-expressive dimensions of language, including artistic publics and many counterpublics, lack the power to transpose themselves to the generality of the state.12

Warner’s critique applies to Western democracies where the correspondence between

“the critical discourse of the public” and “the superintending power of the state” is

well established. This is not yet the case in China. The idea that the public sphere lies

outside of the state and public discourse possesses sovereign power is far from a

firmly established and commonly shared imaginary. The party-state is believed to be

omnipotent. When challenging state power, ordinary people often have to resort to

performative and even violent acts, ranging from veiled ironies and incessant                                                                                                                10 Ibid., 115. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 116.

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complaints to self-immolation. Rational-critical discourse in China does not enjoy the

hegemonic status as it does in the West. Yet Warner’s critique is relevant to us in the

sense that we have to ask ourselves whether we want to replicate the existing model

in the West, where public sovereignty is coupled with the normative status of

rational-critical debate, or we want to strive for a different model. The case studies I

have discussed so far – Moving Rainbow, Nian, and the Village Documentary project

– suggest that at least in the limited space of an art project, it is possible to express

critical concerns with non-textual media, to accommodate various ways of dialogue,

and to integrate reason with affect.

How are social imaginaries transformed? One route is through revolution. As

Taylor notes, during revolutionary times, “what is originally just an idealization

grows into a complex imaginary through being taken up and associated with social

practices, in part traditional ones, but often transformed by the contact.”13 The 1949

revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party is a good example. A large set of

social imaginaries, from equality to etiquette, was rapidly changed within a short

period. This kind of transformation assumes the primacy of theory, not to say

violence, and infiltrates society in a top-down manner. Oskar Negt and Alexander

Kluge, in Public Sphere and Experience, published in 1972, hint at a different route.

They suggest that counterpublic fantasy possesses the potential to unsettle the

dominance of the bourgeois public sphere. Their approach is a sharp departure from

traditional Marxist theory, which favors revolution and material struggles, and

                                                                                                               13 Taylor, A Secular Age, 175.

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dovetails with Castoriadis’s emphasis on the importance of the imaginary. They

write,

In all previous history, living labor has, along with the surplus value extracted from it, produced something else – fantasy. The latter has many layers and develops as a necessary compensation for the experiences of the alienated labor process. The intolerability of his real situation creates in the worker a defense mechanism that protects the ego from the distresses an alienated reality imposes. Since living, dialectical experience would not be able to tolerate this reality, the latter's oppressive dimension is taken up into fantasy, where the nightmare quality of reality is absented.14

Though fantasy constitutes “an unconscious practical criticism of alienation,” it

largely remains at the level of the individual, detached from the general social

production process. At the same time, it faces the risk of being adulterated as “the

consciousness industry tries to develop techniques to reincorporate fantasy in

domesticated form.”15 To turn individual fantasy into collective emancipation, the

proletariat has to perform some kind of integrative work. Negt and Kluge suggest that

“an analysis in the social and historical sense” is needed to re-appropriate the

repressed portion of the proletarian experience. This kind of analysis cannot be

conducted via language alone; it needs to “embrace all mimetic, cultural, and social

relationships as means of expression.”16 Furthermore, while the bourgeois class can

organize their interests into separate private and public spheres, the workers’ interests

can only be organized “if they enter into a life-context, in other words, into a

                                                                                                               14 Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 32-33. 15 Ibid., 36. 16 Ibid., 37, n. 58.

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proletarian public sphere.”17 In short, individual fantasies have to be synthesized

publicly into “counter-productions.”18 Negt & Kluge’s analysis deals exclusively with

the proletarian situation in advanced capitalism, yet the transformative potential it

locates in the proletarian fantasy is applicable to other counterpublics. In the next

section, I will analyze how the queer participants in the Karibu Islands discussions

expressed criticism of the existing social imaginaries through dialogues prompted by

fantasy. Their ideas constitute the first step towards queer counter-productions.

Karibu Islands Discussions

In the last section, I discussed two theoretical concepts, social imaginary and

fantasy. Although both are related to our creative faculty, they do not refer to the

same phenomenon. As Warner notes, “All public addressees have some social basis.

Their imaginary character is never merely a matter of private fantasy.”19 Social

imaginaries are normative in the sense that we expect things to happen in a certain

way. Of course, things may not always happen in the way we want, but our

expectations have to be met in many, if not most, situations. In contrast, we do not

expect fantasies to be easily realized. Another important distinction is that social

imaginaries are common understandings, collectively held, and reinforced by social

                                                                                                               17 Ibid., 38. 18 Miriam Hansen, “Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge’s The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years Later,” Public Culture 5.2 (1993), 204. 19 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 74.

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institutions, whereas fantasies remain largely private, and are often suppressed by

social institutions.

In this section, I will analyze the “Karibu Islands Birth Certificates” filled out

by the participants and their subsequent discussions. The participants were asked to

imagine their lives in a fictional place with an impossible premise: because time in

Karibu Islands flows in the opposite direction to that in our world, life processes,

along with social processes, are reversed. The “Birth Certificate” includes seven

sections and twenty-three items. It asks the participant to describe his or her

biological condition at birth (age, height, weight, health condition), identity (gender,

sexuality, mannerism, openness about sexual orientation), family (partner, children –

as time is reversed, children might be born before parents), asset condition, wisdom

condition, values and beliefs (definition for success, signs of social progress, desired

career), and life plans. The discussions were precipitated by the videos and the

questions raised in the “Birth Certificate.” As mentioned earlier, the videos screened

at the beginning of each session do not supply a watertight, comprehensive system of

knowledge about Karibu Islands, but rather a collage of evocative ideas. Many

assumptions made in the videos cannot be explained by logical deduction. The

participants could interpret the lifeworld in Karibu Islands either as a mirror image of

our lifeword, or as something totally unrelated. Consequently they could project

either social imaginaries or fantasies, or a mixture of both onto their fictional lives in

Karibu Islands. Furthermore, the videos and the “Birth Certificate” touched on a wide

range of issues, ranging from personal life choices to social values. They prompted

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the participants to consider sexuality not as an isolated issue but one embedded in the

larger social context where human desires, economic transactions, and political

ideologies are intertwined.

My primary goal in this analysis is to suggest that fantasies can be a

productive tool for revealing, critiquing, and potentially transforming social

imaginaries. But before I proceed to the main task, it has to be noted that the relation

Figure 5.5 “Birth Certificates” filled out by Chunchun (left) and Haishui (right).

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between social imaginaries and fantasies is not unidirectional. To a large extent,

fantasies are bounded by existing social imaginaries. Our collective understandings

can be so strong that it is difficult for us to stray from the prescribed path even when

we find ourselves in a purely hypothetical exercise. For example, when asked about

their desired career on Karibu Islands, many participants expressed a romantic

outlook: “painter, reporter, dancer, NGO worker, or globetrotting photographer,”

“grave keeper,” “organism,” “independent writer,” “public being,” etc. Yet when

asked to describe the assets in their possession at birth, their answers were not far

from the kind of expectations pervasive in Chinese society today: “middle-class,”

“ten million,” “house, cash, gold,” “ten million (savings) and a small house,” “a

normal home, must have two bedrooms; a decent amount of savings, in fixed-term

account; abilities to make money,” etc. This suggests that the middle-class lifestyle

has deeply penetrated the Chinese social imaginary, queer and straight alike. The

words of Maizi, a young lesbian, captured the dominant attitude: “If one wants to find

happiness, an economic base is a must. If two people just sit across from each other

munching manto [plane steamed bun], they will not be happy. So [we] have to make

enough money, and then we can enjoy life.” Of course, not everyone was susceptible

to the tenacious grip of the middle-class ideal. For example, two people wrote

“nothing.” Yang Guang, the Cultural Center manager, interpreted asset not as

something material but experiential. He wrote, “rich in experience, but mostly

forgotten.”

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The atmosphere was notably different between the first two sessions, attended

by gay men and lesbians, and the last one, attended by self-identified straight people.

The queer discussants in the first two sessions smiled a lot, joked around, and seemed

to enjoy the opportunity to share their fantasies with one another even though they

had just met. They were curious about how others shaped their fictional characters in

Karibu Islands, and engaged in animated conversations to understand the reason

behind different choices. In contrast, after filling out the Birth Certificates, the

straight group showed little interest in one another’s answers and plunged directly

into an extended debate on whether homosexuality should be accepted in China, not

Karibu Islands. There was a significant amount of anxiety and frustration, mocking

laughter and raised voices. After about half an hour, one participant tried to interject,

“Are we here to discuss issues about homosexuality, or about temporality?” The

group paused for a few seconds, and then a young man started complaining about his

gay colleague again, so the debate on homosexuality continued.

It seemed easy for the queer participants to imagine themselves living in a

hypothetical place. The great majority assumed that Karibu Islands would be a better

place than contemporary China, although no one, except Bai Yongbing, a lesbian

activist, was able to provide a sound explanation for this optimistic outlook. (More

about Bai’s reasoning below.) Among the eleven gay participants, five envisaged that

they would have children when they were born on Karibu Islands; seven out of the

nine lesbians imagined the same. This is far from the reality in China today. Although

no law prohibits queer adoption, the Central Government has stated clearly that even

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queer foreigners cannot adopt children in China: “According to China’s traditional

ethics and customs, homosexual behaviors are against public ethics and are not

accepted by the society. Based on the Adoption Law’s requirement that adoption

should not violate public ethics, foreign homosexuals cannot adopt children in

China.” 20 Local queers could try to overcome this obstacle through personal

connections or fake heterosexual marriages, but they would have to face enormous

risk as well as social pressure. Three participants, two gay men and one lesbian,

stated that they would have multiple partners at birth. Their answers went against

both the law and the dominant attitude within the queer community, where a one-to-

one romantic relationship is considered the only path to happy life. It seems that

Karibu Islands allowed the queer participants to articulate their expectations, desires,

and fantasies. Lian, a gay man who was working as a human resources manager in

real life, stated that he would like to be a dancer in Karibu Islands. To the question

“the first thing you want to do after birth,” he wrote, “drink a sip of water; breathe in

a mouthful of air; travel around the world on foot.” In his life plan, he stated that he

would travel around the world for a second time between age 52 and 36, after having

spent the first three decades planting a garden and learning to play piano and to

dance. When someone asked him why he would travel around the world twice, he

replied, “not everything has to be logical.” He added, “[the Certificate] represents an

ideal state for society and for myself. I believe there are many things that I cannot

achieve … but this is my ideal.” Yang Guang was the only one who believed that

                                                                                                               20 http://www.gov.cn/banshi/2005-10/12/content_76246.htm, accessed Feb. 11, 2012, translation mine.

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Karibu Islands would be “a place of horror” because “you will be born knowing

everything that will happen to you, so it’s like you are dead already – Karibu Islands

is a place where death awaits.” Yet unlike the straight participants in the third session

who largely avoided talking about Karibu Islands, Yang was fully engaged in

contemplating this dystopia. He pointed out that the only good thing about knowing

one’s life in advance is that one would be more likely to find inner peace.

The queer participants spoke primarily in the first person singular and plural.

They were immersed in imagining their own lives in Karibu Islands, and paid little

attention to who else might be there. Although most of them were strangers to one

another, their differences were subservient to a collective sense of hope and joy as if

they were newly acquainted companions about to board a cruise to a queer paradise.

Their optimism about Karibu Islands also spilled over occasionally to a future China.

When Wenfeng, a gay man in his 30s, explained why he set 2018 as the birth year for

his fictional self, he did not talk about Karibu Islands but China instead: “Now is

2008. After ten years of efforts, I think the Chinese government should have

developed a correct attitude towards the queer issue. Many countries have embraced

homosexuality. After ten years, [China] should have no problem. The social

atmosphere then will be one of tolerance.” Negt & Kluge note that fantasies tend to

“turn around and face up to real situations” once “they have reached a certain distance

from reality.”21 Fantasies will remain segregated from reality only if “they are

                                                                                                               21 Negt & Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 36.

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deliberately organized and confined there by a valorization interest.”22 Even when the

queer participants made no explicit mention of China, their fantasies nonetheless have

to be understood in relation to China’s current social imaginaries, which always were

present in the background. Therefore, when River indicated “harmony decorated with

opposition” as signs of social progress at Karibu Islands, or when Justin wrote

“democracy, freedom, tolerance, and plurality,” their remarks constituted critiques of

the state’s position, that harmony and stability trump all other values.

Figure 5.6 Age at birth chosen by the participants.

The straight participants showed little interest in traveling to Karibu Islands to

examine China’s reality at a distance. Perhaps most of them did not find the premise

of time reversal intriguing, or they simply lacked an appetite for fantasy in general. In

their “Birth Certificates,” even in areas unrelated to sexuality, their answers were less

diverse than those of the queer participants (see Figure 5.6 for an example). In their

discussion, they talked less in the first person, about their own choices and ideas, than                                                                                                                22 Ibid.

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in the third person, about “the homosexuals.” The center of their concern was not

Karibu Islands, but China and the future of humanity. The mere existence of queer

people seemed to disturb some discussants, whose reactions ranged from discomfort

to a strong urge to police.

The majority of the straight participants held the view that the general attitude

towards homosexuality in China would not change significantly in the foreseeable

future. Eddy, a stylish young man in his 20s, admitted apologetically that he still

found homosexuals “a bit” difficult to accept. When asked if time reversal – and

being born old – would make any difference, he said no. A girl concurred, her eyes

scanning left and right, as if trying to look for some clues to why one might think

otherwise. Another girl jumped in, “Perhaps we would still live that many years, and

we don’t think that we would see much change in our lifetime. Most people would

still hold the same opinion as now.” Eddy added, “Those who agree will see some

change, but those who disagree will not.” Hu Yushan, a recent graduate with a degree

in philosophy, tried to intervene: “Time matters in the way that, as you grow older,

time will make you wiser; you will become more tolerant towards things in life.”

Zhang Zhong, a marshal arts trainer, interrupted Hu and said, “Wisdom is hypocrisy;

tolerance is frustration.” He went on to claim that too much tolerance would lead to

overindulgence, “just like what has happened in the West.” Among the discussants,

he was the most vocal opponent of homosexuality, adamantly defending his position

against alternative views. His central argument was that the survival of the human

species requires reproduction, which can only be achieved through heterosexual

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relationships. He framed his position as “scientific, natural, and inevitable.”

Supported by a number of other discussants, his view was representative of the

mainstream values in China today. In an online survey participated in by nearly

180,000 people in the summer of 2011, 75% selected “homosexuals are disgusting,

not acceptable.”23 Many comments left on the survey page expressed the kind of

reasoning articulated by Zhang. For example, one person wrote, “You call such ills

‘lifestyles.’ If you all go on to become homosexuals, the responsibility of human

reproduction will fall upon people like us. You use various excuses to avoid the

human responsibility and obligation. The expansion of the homosexual crowd will

ultimately lead to the extinction of mankind!”24 The idea that reproduction is an

obligation to be fulfilled by every individual still reigns supreme in the Chinese social

imaginary.

While Karibu Islands presented an opportunity for the queer participants to

fantasize, it constituted a challenge to many straight participants’ worldview. Negt

and Kluge’s observation that the proletarian has always channeled part of their

unfulfilled desires into fantasy finds its parallel in the queer situation. Queer people

learn at an early age – from personal experiences and mass media – that it is taboo to

talk about one’s desire for the same sex. If a straight boy fancies a girl, he is

considered a coward if he takes no action; but if a boy expresses his liking to another

boy, he will be cursed and condemned. Largely deprived of role models and

                                                                                                               23 Online survey conducted by ifeng.com, August 5, 2011, http://survey.news.ifeng.com/ result.php?surveyId=12894, accessed March 27, 2012. 24 Ibid.

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blueprints for life, a queer person has to invent a large portion of her life through

fantasy. As Judith Butler notes, “Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and

others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere,

and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.”25

Karibu Islands provided an opportunity for the queer participants to share

their fantasies, but not all of the queer participants showed the same level of optimism.

For example, Chunchun and Haishui, both gay men in their 30s, were remarkably

different in their conception of personal lives and collective destinies. In his “Birth

Certificate,” Chunchun describes his fictional self as a gay man born in 2050, at the

age of 73, with high cholesterol and heart disease, living with an adopted child but no

partner. He would keep his sexual orientation “a secret” and only disclose it to his

close friends. Haishui, in contrast, imagines his fictional self as a gay man born in

2080, at the age of 100, healthy and strong, with two children and multiple male

partners. He would be “completely free and completely open” about his sexual

orientation. In group discussion, against the majority, Chunchun insisted that Chinese

people’s attitude towards homosexuality would not change “in a hundred years.”

Interestingly, among the participants, Chunchun was the only one working full-time

as an activist. He was in charge of coordinating volunteers for Aizhixing, the largest

HIV-AIDS NGO in Beijing. At the same time, he was managing several dozens of

gay groups via QQ, the most popular online instant-messaging platform, and

organizing weekend trips for their members. I joined a hiking trip organized by him

                                                                                                               25 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29.

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in April 2008. Ten people showed up. We climbed a small hill next to the famous

Fragrant Hill in the western suburb. Littered with trash, the small hill was not scenic

but free.26 We all brought our own food. After we reached the peak, there was nothing

to do, so we sat down on a large piece of rock and started chatting. When someone

found out that I was 33 years old, he asked me if I were married, meaning married to

a woman. Surprised by the question, I asked other people’s opinion on marriage.

Everyone said he was planning to get married. One person declared that he would

marry a girl, let her give birth to two children, and then divorce her. I thought since

Chunchun was an activist, he might be against the idea of a heterosexual marriage.

But he said he too would marry in the near future. Because he was reaching 30 and

still unmarried, his parents, living in a small village in Shandong province, were

facing enormous pressure from relatives and fellow villagers. Going to the market

was becoming a dread for them. Of the ten people present, I was the only one from

Beijing. The others all came from the countryside and were working in Beijing in

manual or service jobs. They had little hope of leading a gay life in the long run. Seen

against his likely future in reality, Chunchun’s decision to let his fictional character

on Karibu Islands to live alone – not married to a woman – was already a bold fantasy.

Queer Temporality and Radical Secularity

As one lesbian participant noted, the biggest pressure for queer people in

China comes from the institution of the family. Everyone is expected to get married

                                                                                                               26 A ticket to the Fragrant Hill park would cost 10 yuan, about $1.5.

196

and have children by a certain age. Parents are usually the most adamant enforcers,

considering their children’s compliance to the “natural” order their own

responsibility and ultimate evaluation of their parenthood. They make inquiries,

arrange dates, and even devise threats. Other people – relatives, colleagues, friends,

and sometimes strangers – chip in, helping parents to inquire, coax, persuade, or

coerce. The pressure to conform is usually much greater in the countryside than in

cities, and may vary depending on a range of factors like class, education, and family

structure. Several forces weave together to make this institution almost untouchable.

The famous saying of Mencius – “There are three things which are unfilial, and to

have no posterity is the greatest of them”27 – is one of the most robust Confucian

ideas that have remained in the popular consciousness, never purged by the political

campaigns during the Mao era or the economic transformations since the late 1970s.

In fact, economic growth only seems to have strengthened it. Progress is taken as a

proven fact, and the future is always brighter than the past. So why wouldn’t you

want to procreate so that the bright future can be enjoyed by your heirs? At the same

time, family is still the most important institution for resource sharing and crisis relief.

It is not unusual for parents to give money to their adult children so they can buy an

apartment or afford a comfortable living. On the other hand, children are expected to

take care of their elderly parents and pay for their medical bills towards the end of

their life. The lack of adequate social welfare reinforces the mindset that family is the

                                                                                                               27 Mencius, The Works of Mencius, trans. James Legge (New York: Clarendon, 1895), online at http://nothingistic.org/library/mencius/, accessed March 31, 2012.

197

most reliable line of support, if not the only one. Lee Edelman’s notion, “reproductive

futurism,”28 is applicable to the Chinese situation.

In the second Karibu Islands discussion, attended by nine lesbians, Bai

Yongbing raised one idea: as people on Karibu Islands are not created through

heterosexual intercourse and their critical link to their parents is not birth but death –

one climbs into the womb of one’s mother to die – it may be the case that sexual

orientation would no longer matter there. Her inference about Karibu Islands can be

understood as a criticism of the hegemonic status attributed to procreation, futurity,

and heterosexuality in our society. As Edelman points out, “what makes queerness

intolerable” in our society is “a nonteleological negativity that refuses the leavening

of piety and with it the dollop of sweetness afforded by messianic hope.”29 Queerness

opens up the possibility to refute the life process prescribed as normal. As mentioned

earlier, the straight participants showed a surprising concentration in their imagined

age at birth on Karibu Islands, which can be read as their desired longevity in this life:

ten out of twelve people chose between 80 and 100 years old. Their consensus points

to the fact that our society “creates longevity as the most desirable future” and

“applauds the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances).”30 A number of the

queer participants gave their fictional selves considerably shorter lives; half of the

                                                                                                               28 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 29 Lee Edelman et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2-3 (2007), 195. 30 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4.

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lesbians chose under 60. While the desire for longevity could be easily translated

under the time reversal hypothesis, the normative attitudes towards children were

more difficult to transfer to Karibu Islands. Would parents replace children as the

hope of future, the ultimate redemption of toil and sacrifice? No one, queer or straight,

was able to imagine such a scenario, perhaps because time reversal had caused

procreation to vanish from view. This may be one of the reasons why the queer

participants enthusiastically imagined their lives on Karibu Islands, whereas the

straight participants expressed anxiety and annoyance.

Queer temporality challenges reproductive futurism by focusing on this life,

here and now. In this sense, queerness shares one important feature with publicness:

both negate previous conceptions that societies are founded on a transcendent time.

As Taylor notes,

The public sphere is an association which is constituted by nothing outside of the common action we carry out in it: coming to a common mind, where possible, through the exchange of ideas. Its existence as an association is just our acting together in this way. This common action is not made possible by a framework which needs to be established in some action-transcendent dimension: either by an act of God, or in a Great Chain, or by a law which comes down to us since time out of mind.31

Taylor calls this unprecedented aspect of the public sphere “radical secularity.”

Because publics are not sustained by any external framework, they can only act in the

present tense. He further suggests that this secular understanding “allows us to

imagine society ‘horizontally,’ unrelated to any ‘high points,’ where the ordinary

                                                                                                               31 Taylor, A Secular Age, 192.

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sequence of events touches higher time.”32 In China, traces of transcendent principles

can still be detected in our conception of time and society. For example, in recent

years, “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” has become a prominent

discourse in official propaganda. The Chinese nation is imagined not as a people

organized by our common action in secular time, but as a transcendent entity

traveling through time to realize a preexisting destiny. The obsession with marriage

and children, mentioned earlier, functions in a similar way, only at a smaller scale.

Families – more precisely, clans – are pictured not as temporary associations with a

limited lifespan but as immortal beings carrying historical lineage into eternity. While

“the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” often is used to contain publicness by

trumping disagreement with the seemingly natural mandate, chuan zong jie dai – to

carry on the clan by continuing the generations – serves to suppress queerness by

pressuring everyone to conform to a lifestyle founded on reproductive futurism. In

their demand for radical secularity, the quest for queer freedom and the pursuit of

publicness converge.

Participation in Exhibition

When Karibu Islands was shown in the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in

September 2008, it was installed in an empty apartment in a high-rise residential

building in the suburb of Guangzhou. I liked the fact that the exhibition space was

similar to the Beijing LGBT Cultural Center, also located in a high-rise residential

                                                                                                               32 Ibid., 209.

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building. The apartment had two rooms in sequence, allowing me to create a temporal

order in the viewing experience. When visitors approached the apartment from the

dark hallway, they would be greeted with a simple graphite drawing, a map of Karibu

Islands, spotlit from above. In the first room, the set of video sketches on Karibu

Islands were being played on a flat-screen television placed on the far end of a low

table. People could sit around the table comfortably on thick straw pads. On the

tabletop there were stacks of empty “Karibu Islands Birth Certificates” for people to

fill out. Entering the second room, they could sit down to watch the documentaries of

the discussions previously held in Beijing, or walk around the room to look at the

birth certificates hanging on two walls. Furthermore, they could add their own

certificates to the display. The two-step experience encouraged visitors to imagine

their own lives in a reversed time-world before encountering the imaginations of the

queer and straight participants in the Beijing discussions. My hope was that, by

spending a little effort to reflect on one one’s own life first, one would treat the

choices of others with more care and curiosity.

In participatory projects like the ones discussed in this dissertation, the

artwork interacts with two groups of people: the participants who take part in the

creation of the artwork, and the viewers who encounter the finished work when it is

exhibited. In this dissertation I have focused on the participants – the truck drivers in

Moving Rainbow, the readers in Nian, the villager filmmakers in Village

Documentary Project, and the discussants in Karibu Islands – and demonstrated how

publicness is realized through their participation. Certainly the exhibition of artworks

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also gives rise to publicness. I have not dealt with publicness through exhibition

because it is widely assumed. Habermas points out that the establishment of public

museums was critical to the cultivation of a bourgeois subjectivity, “a consciousness

functionally adapted to the institutions of the public sphere in the world of letters.”33

While public display establishes objects of common attention, the core of publicness

lies in criticism: strangers engage each other in critical discussions about art.

However, as Fraser Ward argues, the art museum has been “haunted” by

representative publicity since the very beginning.34 Artworks are displayed to impress

visitors, much like the emperor used the royal collections to impress visitors to the

court. In China, during the Mao era, art predominantly served as a form of

propaganda, generating publicity for the party line. Expressing views alternative to

official interpretations was a risky business and could easily result in political

prosecution. As mentioned in the Introduction, an important element of the Stars

exhibitions’ publicness is the provision of guestbooks for visitors to write down their

opinions. For the first time in decades, people could engage in debates about art

openly. However, it would be wrong to assume that since then art criticism has

become an established practice. Exhibitions do not automatically lead to critical

discussions. Today, although visiting an art exhibition is no longer a collective

experience orchestrated by the state, it has transformed into a private experience,

much like consumption of commodities. One contemplates the artwork alone,

                                                                                                               33 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 51. 34 Fraser Ward, “The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity,” October 73 (Sumer 1995), 76.

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conversing only with one’s companions. The existence of strangers in the same space

causes not interaction but a sense of annoyance. Few people participate in any form

of public debate, whether face-to-face or via media.

How can we extend participation into the exhibition space? Can we create

stranger relations and visibility among museum visitors? These were the questions I

wanted to address in designing the form of Karibu Islands for the Guangzhou

Triennial. The final installation consisted of not only the videos and birth certificates,

but also a spatial and temporal experience that encouraged visitors to interact with the

work. In fact, interaction was the artwork’s ultimate form. Objects in different

mediums – drawing, video, and text – functioned as props for the interactive process.

During the discussions held in Beijing, I was present and facilitated the flow of

activities. Without my presence or a facilitator onsite, the interactive process had to

seem intuitive and relied on the experiential design. The casual atmosphere was

deliberate, helping to dilute the awe associated with art exhibitions. The apartment

space, the low table, and the straw pads were important because they invited people to

slow down, feel comfortable, and participate in the work. Stranger relations were

established not by dialogue but by the juxtaposition of birth certificates. The

exhibition of Karibu Islands also marked the first occasion that queer issues were

openly addressed in a national art event, contributing to queer visibility.

Many socially engaged artists have moved away from the museum and

situated their practice in sites more directly linked to issues of concern. However,

museums and exhibitions remain indispensible to the sustainment of public life. The

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focus of this dissertation has been on how publicness is created through participatory

art-making. How publicness can be strengthened in the exhibition space is not fully

explored. In recent years, the Chinese state has started to invest enormous financial

capital in building up national and provincial museums. Thus it is urgent for us to turn

to museums and exhibitions and treat them as a critical ground for the pursuit of

publicness.

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Epilogue

In this dissertation, I have studied four recent art projects in China to

understand what publicness entails and how it has been realized by the artists and

their collaborators in the past decade. I have focused on select aspects of these

projects in individual chapters, but in fact, they share a number of things in common:

(1) the artists and participants acted as citizens and demanded citizens’ rights; (2)

they organized discursive arenas outside the state; (3) they defined issues of common

concern; (4) they mobilized both rational-critical and affective expressions, and

utilized a wide range of media, including image, text, sound, and video; (5) they

fostered stranger relations; (6) they strove for media visibility; (7) they focused on

contemporary common action. These traits together constitute publicness.

There is much left to be done. We need to look both into the past and into the

future. In terms of the past, I have only touched on the Stars event (1979-80). The

1980s was a period of tremendous experimentation and risk-taking. Art activities

blossomed all over China, not limited to a few megacities. Recently much work has

been done to compile the primary documents from this decade, preparing the ground

for more in-depth studies.1 A keyword that artists and critics used during this period

was feiguanfang, meaning “unofficial.” Linking up the publicness framework with

the wide range of feiguanfang activities of the 1980s will be productive for both.

                                                                                                               1 For example, Fei Dawei, ed. ’85 xin chao dang an (’85 New Wave Archive) (Shanghai: Shi ji wen jing, 2007), Hung Wu and Peggy Wang, eds., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), and Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990, Asia Art Archive (http://www.china1980s.org/tc/Default.aspx).

205

Chinese experimental art in the 1990s was characterized by a market turn. The rise of

the market since the mid-1990s has profoundly changed both China as a whole and

the so-called Chinese contemporary art field. In this dissertation, I have not dealt with

the relationship between publicness and China’s particular form of market economy,

and the global art market. Perhaps global market success has been one of the factors

that allow Ai Weiwei to challenge the Chinese state in a way unparalleled by other

Chinese artists. More importantly, the market is a space for strangers to meet and

interact. A study of the 1990s may provide insights on how markets, both national

and international, have been leveraged by artists in their pursuit of publicness. Going

back even further, we can juxtapose recent efforts with the avant-garde movements of

the 1920s and 1930s, when art’s relation to society was fervently debated and

fundamentally reconfigured.2 We can also contrast the notion of publicness in

contemporary art to the idea of art-serving-the-people in the Mao era. Such a

comparison will likely sharpen our understanding of publicness, and help us avoid the

pitfalls of collectivism.

Looking into the future, I sense three major challenges. First, it seems that the

almighty party-state is not going away any time soon. How far can we push

publicness within China’s totalitarian system? Will we soon reach the limit, thus

having to decide whether to escalate to some political form beyond publicness?

Second, we need to think more about the changing media landscape. Currently the

                                                                                                               2 Tang Xiaobing’s book, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), studies the relationship between art and society in the 1930s, but does not adequately deal with the issue of publicness in this period.

206

state’s control of mass media seriously limits the effectiveness of our efforts. Of the

four case studies in this dissertation, Xiong Wenyun’s Moving Rainbow generated the

greatest media impact for several reasons: its environmental message was deemed

less threatening by the state; Xiong skillfully worked with activists, journalists, and

supportive officials, and created events geared towards media; she persisted over

time, gradually expanding the scope of the project and its media reach. Yet to a large

extent, her use of media was conventional. Ai Weiwei was quick to tap into the

potential of the internet, but when he became the target of state control, his online

presence in China rapidly diminished. Tactical media remains an underexplored area

in Chinese contemporary art. Third, as mentioned at the end of Chapter 2, when

artists move away from the production-exhibition model and engage with

sociopolitical issues directly in the mass media, a fundamental shift may have to

occur in the temporality of artistic practice. This can only happen if we develop better

theoretical models as well as support infrastructures.

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