In the introduction to The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Frank Dikotter tells us that race remains an essential part of Chinese identity.
“‘Chineseness’ is seen primarily as a matter of biological descent, physical appearance and congenital inheritance,” writes the historian of modern China. “Cultural features such as ‘Chinese civilization’ or ‘Confucianism’ are thought to be the product of that imagined biological group: they are secondary and can be changed, reformed or even eradicated.”
I had these words in mind while watching Discovery Channels’ four-part documentary Chineseness: The Rise of Chinese Art — Li Chen (李真 ), Zhang Huan (張洹 ), Yang Chi-hung (楊識宏) and Xu Bing (徐冰) — because under the guise of portraying “Chinese” artists, it has perpetuated, albeit under the rubrics of art, religion and culture, the notion that there is something intrinsic to being Chinese. The documentary is currently being aired throughout Asia.
Photo courtesy of Asia Art Center
BORN CHINESE?
The documentary’s purpose is to expose four artists that Discovery and its producer’s feel are outstanding representatives of “Chineseness,” and in the process uncover what host and narrator Agnes Hsu (徐心眉) says is “the new Chinese consciousness.” It situates the artists within China’s 5000-year history, the implications of which are nostalgic, eternal and nationalistic, but largely fails to show how historical China has had to break with tradition in order to be modern; in Chineseness, too much of the old Chinese consciousness remains.
The artists revel to a greater or lesser extent in the influence “the West” has had on their artistic practice, particularly the theories underlying avant-garde and conceptual art. But one questions the sincerity of Discovery’s enterprise when Yang, who has lived over half his life in the US, says, “Even if you are influenced by Western culture, you are still Chinese,” or when he later remarks in English: “to be born Chinese, or huaren, is something you cannot choose.”
Huaren (華人), often translated as a cultural signifier, is here synonymous with race, something you cannot change because it is something you are born into. “Race” isn’t uttered in the documentary, but as Dikotter reminds us, “racial discourse cannot be reduced to the mere appearance of the word race.” In other words, it is implied through what the artists say and do, and the editorial decisions as what to leave in, and take out. Yang’s utterances are buttressed by the importance that Hsu, who reminds us in the documentary and press blurb that she is a “descendent of” respected Ming Dynasty scholar-bureaucrat Xu Guangqi (徐光啟), places on lineage, a folk notion that the documentary suggests continues to have strong resonance on the identity of these artists.
The point here is that “Chineseness” means different things to different people. In using the term without reference to its broader implications and the fact that Discovery allows huaren to be employed as a racial category (“born Chinese”), perpetuates a form of racialized identity.
(One can imagine, incidentally, the sniggers of derision that would result with a documentary called “Caucasianess.”)
Underlying this is the patronizing manner in which the narrator revises the outdated notion of undeveloped societies living in a state of primitive bliss. Zhang, having spiritualized himself on the narcotic of Tibetan Buddhism, says that this is the antidote for those people — stressed out, overworked, rife with anxiety — moving to and living in China’s big cities. We learn this through the story of “Shanghai girl,” who apparently operates a business of meditation rooms in that city. Hsu, as she moves through these rooms, says that she “sees an earnest desire on the part of these people to seek something missing,” suggesting that they need to look back to “areas development has not reached,” where “people seem most content.” Considering China’s repressive policies towards the Tibetan people and their culture, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the camera pans to a giggling Tibetan child playing on a dirt road or three guffawing monks walking in front of a monastery.
Then again, the life of undeveloped people, we learn in the Xu Bing documentary, isn’t as joyous as the Zhang bits would have us believe. This is particularly apparent when Xu Bing, who Hsu — in one of many hyperbolic statements — gushingly calls “an eco-warrior,” travels to an aboriginal village in Taiwan that has been ravaged by a typhoon to enlighten them about art’s power to heal. Or when we later see Xu Bing in a Kenyan village surrounded by smiling children, teaching them about how to deal with environmental degradation. Yeah, we get the subtext: Chinese artist travels to Aboriginal and African villages to civilize the natives through art.
Equally worrying, especially from a host who claims specialization in art history, is the muddying of the historical record. Why are two artists from Taiwan — Li and Yang — included in a documentary that so clearly celebrates the rise of China and its people (admittedly with the attendant internal social and environmental discord that the documentary shows to accompany that rise)? Discovery doesn’t explicitly state that Taiwan is a territory of China, or vice versa. But it also doesn’t point out that it would have been virtually impossible for Li to evolve as an artist in China, as he himself told me in an interview last year, because the communist authorities there all but eradicated the apprenticeship system — and much else of its culture from the 1950s to the 1970s — on which the creation of Buddhist statuary relies. Only in the past two decades has this sculptural tradition reemerged in China, though under the watchful eye of the communist authorities. It’s all left unsaid, and this silence is presumably the space through which Discovery can sneak its documentary past Chinese censors.
The historical record is equally muddied with Tibet. Rather than broadening the viewers knowledge of the complicated relationship Tibetans have with their Chinese masters, we get blathering about the greatness of Tibetan Buddhism, deeply ironic considering the Communist authorities have done all they can to moderate its influence, or when Discovery contextualizes Tibetan Buddhism in Zhang’s work by interviewing “Aki” (I’m not sure if this is the correct spelling because they don’t show it on screen), “the only person,” Hsu tells us, “to hold a PhD in Tibetan and Buddhist culture.” Yeesh. One presumes, by his strong Chinese accent, that Aki received his degree from a Chinese Communist Party-sanctioned university.
YES, THERE ARE GOOD BITS
The documentary does have many positive bits, particularly in the way it shows how China’s art history continues to exert a profound influence on these contemporary artists, and how art from outside China, particularly modern art, has on their artistic practice.
Discovery is particularly adept at employing the biography of these artists to paint a broader picture of the history of art in China — as well as their creative reinterpretations of it. When discussing Xu’s landscape paintings, for example, Hsu gives us a concise definition of its practice and philosophy:
“Landscape painting has been regarded for centuries as the highest form in Chinese painting. In it, everything is balanced, static and well ordered, with no room for chaos. To master the art, the artist has to practice for many years before the movements become instinctive.”
These words are juxtaposed in a sequence that shows Xu Bing working on an installation from his series Background Story (背後的故事). The front of the roughly 9-meter long and 3-meter tall painting looks like an exact replica of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (富春山居圖) by Yuan Dynasty artist Huang Gongwang (黃公望). The shapes of mountains, trees and clouds are illuminated behind large panels of frosted glass. As the camera pans behind the case, however, a hodge-podge combination of materials that could have been found in a garbage dump — cardboard, wire, cotton, twigs — have been taped onto the glass and hung from string. It’s a brilliant illusion, the sublime virtual and well-ordered landscape on the one side juxtaposed with the chaos of found materials on the other.
With Li, we are given a refresher on Buddhist sculpture in China pre-1949, which was born out of temple rituals and ceremonies. Those who created these sculptures were seen as anonymous craftsmen, laborers who strived to play down their individual carving style — they never signed their work — so as to enable the worshipper to engage directly with the deity. It is this tradition that Li, who received all his training in Taiwan, spent seven years struggling to move beyond before he developed his own sculptural language and signed his first work.
The artists are notable for the ease with which they receive and incorporate the stuff of other cultures, whether European art movements or Tibetan religion, into their art. And with the exception of Li, all artists have lived outside of China — mainly in New York City — and have been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the US.
Yang’s lavishly illustrated Art Trends (現代美術新湖) on Modern European and American art, published in 1987 became, as Zhang tells us, “our bible of modern art,” because up until its publication, and Yang’s subsequent lecture tour, little was known about modern art in China. (Artists in Taiwan, because it was much freer, both then and now, learned about new art movements almost as soon as they appeared. )
Zhang himself left the artistically stifling atmosphere of 1980s China and moved to New York where he was widely praised for his avant-garde performance art. Eight years later, he returned to China and converted to Tibetan Buddhism, the rituals and materials of that country and its religion working their way into his ash paintings and acrylic paintings.
Chineseness makes it abundantly clear that these artists are prolific. Whether the patience required for Zhang (and his team) to collect, sift through and use incense ash collected at temples to paint a large-scale canvas or Xu’s drawing 4,000 indecipherable characters, carving them from wood and then “writing” his epic Book from the Sky, the documentary makes it clear that success in China’s competitive art world requires hard work.
FOREGONE CONCLUSION
By the end of watching the four documentaries, however, the nagging question of why Ai Weiwei (艾未未), among others artists (particularly female artists), wasn’t included, or why the majority of those interviewed had a direct financial stake — curators, gallery owners, collectors — in the promotion of the artists, had pretty much answered itself.
Dikotter tells us that those in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong (and “Asian values” Singapore) have barely begun to face up to the issue of race in public discourse, for the most part living in a world where racialized identities are a product of “the West.”
“Racialized identities and their effect on human rights in East Asia are a serious and potentially explosive issue of the last decade of the 20th century which needs to be fully addressed,” he says.
Judging by Discovery’s documentary — its top-notch production values and earnest desire to expose these four artists to an international audience aside — there is still a long way to go.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS