philip tinari

This essay was published in “Fused Magazine,” the publication accompanying the exhibition China Power Station: Part 1, organized by the Serpentine Gallery and the Astrup-Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and mounted at the Battersea Power Station, London, October 2006.

In a sarcastic memo to former Harvard president Larry Summers reprinted in the book Content, Rem Koolhaas suggests that Harvard should divert the Charles to bring its Allston acquisitions onto the right side of the river, placing at the center of the newly reclaimed land a laboratory for the study of power, which he sees as the university’s distinct province and guiding principle. Here, on another iconic strip beside another river, we have a space for the study of what the curators have termed China Power.

The fundamental problematic of any exhibition of Chinese contemporary art at present is almost ontological: what kind of power relations are involved in the framing of a display tied to the existence and presumed articulating power of a nation-state, particularly one with such an expansive and expanding role in the current world-system? Two years ago, at the moment of the Pompidou survey “Alors, la Chine” and the ICP/Asia Society photo and video show “Between Past and Future,” this question seemed almost unresolvable: how could one organize an exhibition of contemporary art from China without a compromising acceptance of “national allegory,” an interpretive modality Jameson forthrightly articulated in his “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” an argument based not incidentally on a reading of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.”

The tone of these exhibitions was inevitably one of superiority masked in fear; Yan Lei’s proposal to make the emblem of the Pompidou show a painting of himself being painted by a Chinese street painter situated forever outside the museum’s inside-out structure seemed then compelling, if for the last time. There was a wall there, and that it was to keep the Chinese barbarians out still seemed a plausible reading. For its part, the Pompidou did what was expected: instead of the Yan Lei painting, a Weng Fen image of a schoolgirl peering out over the Shenzhen skyline was chosen to symbolize the grouping of works inside. Even as recently as 2005, when Uli Sigg’s collection-show extravaganza in Bern followed on the heels of the Chinese museums edition of Art Basel Conversations, these kinds of geopolitical triangulations remained in play. Sigg memorably posed a set of questions in writing to each of his participating artists, most to the effect of “How does being Chinese affect your work?” Xu Zhen offered the only compelling response, asking Sigg “How does being Swiss affect your collecting?”

This recent history makes the curator’s job difficult: is an exhibition framed as a China exhibition not always already doomed to socio-political generalization and cliché? If not, then what are the urgencies that justify or demand a nation-based grouping? One year ago, this same group of curators produced “Uncertain States of America,” an exhibition that turned national allegory onto the no-longer First World, doing to young American artists what had long been done to their Chinese peers. And the current exhibition, which is actually a series of exhibitions, and which has been organized in a manner that echoes curatorial praxis in the mainland (guided by the constant last-minute urgencies of what Hou Hanru has called “post-planning”), goes further. If the specter of Chineseness continues to haunt, perhaps in the caverns of Battersea it will have space to stretch and flow.

A new system is emerging which remains for now in the pre-manifesto moment. The Nineties buzzwords of globalization—those spoken out of fear as well as hope—are becoming the axiomatic realities of this no longer brand new century. The problematic is no longer the postcolonial one, of inside and out, east and west, but a global one in which power speaks subtly, if absolutely, and one must remain mindful of all possible possibilities if one hopes to make it out alive. The best artists featured in this exhibition have been hinting at this emergent system for a decade.

Gu Dexin is one of these. Indeed Gu Dexin’s entire career might be read as an oblique commentary on prevailing systems. As an outsider painter in the 1980s, he created, between shifts at a plastics factory, a lexicon of strange pink creatures and hunks of raw meat. His earliest installations, piles of wasted plastics begun in 1984 and apotheosized in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Museum in 1989, gave rise to his installation practice, which stands as a reluctant symbol through all the China survey shows of the 1990s. Invited to Paris for Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre in May of 1989, Gu Dexin boarded his first international flight on the day the protesters began to fill Tian’anmen Square, stopping in Dubai to refuel as international jet traffic was then not allowed above the USSR. (He returned to Beijing on May 29, days before the end of the 80s.) Shortly thereafter, Gu Dexin made his second European appearance, creating another installation of blowtorched plastics in another London power station. This was 1990, and he did not return once to London in the intervening sixteen years. Throughout this long era, Gu’s refusal to narrate—epitomized by his inviolable convention of naming works simply by their date of completion—has become his own kind of power, providing a model to a generation of younger artists, many of them presented here, seeking a path out of geopolitical tokenism.

Another is Ai Weiwei, whose yet unexhibited video work on the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council and its vaunted visit to Beijing in May 2006 will stand as a most poignant and polemical stab at the nascent realities of a re-balancing system. Eighty dignitaries, comprising MoMA’s global network as framed in the era of postwar American emergence, parade across the artist’s grey brick stage-set courtyard and into his well-reviewed living space, their movements documented with entomological precision by a set of five surveillance cameras hidden beneath shrubs and behind grates. One camera angle shows only the Councillors’ shoes: here the loafers of a Japanese industrialist, there the pumps of a German duchess. Another captures their torsos as they gaze upon a studio shelf, which on that sunny afternoon held the Neolithic vases covered in industrial paints that would soon make their way onto the cover of the September New York Sotheby’s catalogue. Is the implicit violence of surveillance a tool of the underdog or the overlord? Is the ritual pilgrimage to the House of Ai—now an unavoidable stop on every foreign art-world itinerary of any renown—a gesture of respect or condescension, an exploration or an imposition? How should this unique instantiation of the guest-host relationship be read? The answers to these questions may indeed be unproductive; what seems to matter more is the fundamental statement Ai Weiwei makes in deciding to pull this almost childish trick. In so doing, he lays plain the unease at the heart of the system as it stands, where everyone is watching everyone without letting on.

The MoMA visit, awaited for years with Godot-like anticipation, came and went, teaching Beijing finally the stupidity of hoping for any exogenous saviour; this monumentalizing portrait may stand as the most vivid record of the moment the city’s art scene began to feel a real confidence in itself. Paired with his popular blog (here exhibited as an interactive slideshow), which functions as an open mechanism of surveillance and self-surveillance recording the artist’s every social interaction, the MoMA work becomes, like this exhibition itself, a study in power: who has it, where they keep it, how they choose to use it.