Virginia Review of Asian Studies

Volume 16 (2014): 102-115

Richardson: Bodies of Conflict

BODIES OF CONFLICT: ASIAN CONCEPTUAL ART IN CHINA AND INDIA IN THE 1990S

MARGARET RICHARDSON
CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY

Since the 1980s and 1990s, China and India have worked to position themselves as the world’s new superpowers, rapidly modernizing and opening their borders to more foreign influence and investment. During this period, each country began to adapt varying degrees and forms of capitalism and democracy to their own contexts as their governments enacted policies of economic liberalization, reversing a previously state-centered or socialist economic structure. While their results have varied and their historical experiences are different, China and Indiafollowed a parallel path in the 1980s and 1990s as globalization replaced the East-West dichotomy of the past. Previously posedas the communist foil to democracy and capitalism or the prize of imperialist conquest, both countries have more recently carved out their own strategic positions in relation tothe West whilethey contend with the conflicts that arise as a result of their own brands of modernization. With heterogeneous populations of over one billion people each, these countries face many challenges from within and without.

During this transformative period, artists in both countries worked to negotiate these changes and to realize their place in the new world order. Despite more liberal economic policies, the countries’ social and cultural attitudes remained and in some instances became more conservative and repressive. In China, artists faced censure and persecution, while in India, religious and communal tensions were increasingly commonplace and violent. For many artists concerned with these troubling trends,conceptual art offered a subversive language with which to question the authority of both foreign influence and their own governments, circumvent mass consumerism, expose the unequal power structures in society, and examine and deconstruct national and personal identities as they were being reconfigured under these new circumstances.

Chinese artists Zhang Huan (b. 1965) and Song Dong (b. 1966) and Indian artists Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943) and Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) wereamong the first artists in their respective countries to utilize conceptual art practices. In times of trouble, they all abandoned painting, in which they were academically trained, and began to utilize the body, readymade objects, photography and video to create performances and multi-media installations to suggest their tentative political and social situations and the complexityof contemporary existence. While public policies and nationalist art movements favored the collective and national “good,” often using more traditional media andmore commonly recognizable imagery, these artists found in conceptual art a more allusive means to address the complicated individual experience among the masses.

Conceptual art in American and European art appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s as an alternative to traditional object and craft-centered art production.Early practitioners like American artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) explained it as an art in which “the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work.”[1]Instead of creating a painting or sculpture, conceptual artists presented, often in a straightforward manner, images, actions, and found, as opposed to made, objects in a particular context to arouse ideas. They often employed matter-of-fact text, basic measurement and other systems, performance, and nonconventional materials. Conceptual art quickly became an international phenomenon and continues to be a relevant practice around the world.

While the development of conceptual art practices in China and India did not arise out of the same aesthetic circumstances that led many American and European artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s to deconstruct the meaning and methods of art itself, it did provide a challenge to extant traditions. Unlike academic realism and oil painting, which were introduced by Europeans, conceptual practices were chosen freely by artists because they offered them ways to break with convention and engage their specific experiences more directly without reverting to obsolete traditions or academic practice. Conceptual art by nature allows for more freedom, complexity and ambiguity because it is not a definitive style and lacks the long history and weight of the painting tradition. In repressive contexts, conceptual art also offered a subversive means to critique current political and social systems. Furthermore, the use of performance, installation, language, and the ephemeral to express and provoke contemplation also forms the basis of many Asian artistic, philosophical, and spiritual practices, which adds a distinct character to Asian conceptual art.[2] The Chinese and Indian manifestations are thus the products of the similar political, economic, social and cultural climates that they critique.

Conceptual art in the United States and Europe emerged amidst rapid economic growth and turmoil, the spread of mass consumerism and communication systems, the growing commodification of art and culture, and the social and political upheaval of the Vietnam War-era.[3] Similarly, it appeared in China and India in reaction to conflict, oppressive institutions, and the growth of mass consumer culture and a global economy. In both Asian countries, modernization and globalization brought contradictory modes of existence: free and expanding markets were tempered by governmental crackdowns on personal liberties and a widening gap between the privileged few and the disenfranchised masses while patriotism and internationalism turned into anxiety and xenophobic nationalism as reactionary groups attempted to hold onto rapidly fading traditions. In these contexts, the seemingly clear distinctions between East and West, communism and capitalism, blur in an uneasy mix.

In China, 1976 and 1989 are Janus-faced markers in recent history looking wearily into a troubled past and hopefully into an uncertain future. The former date marksthe death of Mao Zedong, the end to the disastrous decade-long Cultural Revolution, and the beginning of a new era of economic reform and artistic experimentation. The latter date saw an end to the progressive democratic movement that culminated and was crushed in Tiananmen Square on June 4 and the beginning of a conflicted era of capitalist socialism and social oppression.By the 1990s,China teetered between two contradictory ideologies—a capitalist system, which offered freedom and accessibility, and a communist government, which wanted to continue to control and measure out freedom in manageable doses. Psychologically, this antagonistic predicament placed artists in a precarious position;in public, urban centersprogressed and modernized while in the shadows, the individual was alienated and under surveillance.[4]

Under these conditions, artists working in China in the 1990s chose various paths. Some responded to the contradictions of consumerism and a repressive political climate with ambivalent pop art tactics, blending slick, colorful advertisements with political propaganda and cynical comments on the present condition.[5] Others withdrew, eschewing overt political involvement, working outside official institutions, and reacting both to their disenfranchisement as well as their more commercially successful pop peers with an art that was unmarketable, uncollectible, and difficult, which parallels similar developments in earlier conceptual art. It is in this private realm that we find some of the most provocative expressions in Chinese contemporary art for that time.[6]

Children during the Cultural Revolution, young art students by the early 1980s, and leaders of an underground avant-garde in the 1990s, Zhang Huan and Song Dong have spent their lives sandwiched between moments of oppression and tentative freedom. They were inspired by pre-Tiananmen Square avant-garde efforts, which linked the absurdity and iconoclasm of Dada and punk to the quiet wisdom of Buddhism and Daoism, and these same ideas had influenced many earlier conceptual artists as well.Their ephemeral performances monumentalize and make extraordinary mundane tasks like sitting, walking, writing, or breathing that leave little trace or change. Using their bodies, they explore the conflicts that characterize contemporary existence in China.

Explaining his decision to do performance art, Zhang Huan says it is directly related to his personal experience of conflict with his environment.[7] At the time, his surroundings were the destitute villages that encircled and formed the outskirts of rapidly developing Beijing where other poor artists and migrant workers collected.[8] Living conditions were deplorable but cheap here and the area was somewhat distanced from authorities providing Zhang and his colleagues a bit of freedom and free materials from the city’s garbage dump.

The garbage dumps and public toilets that sat on the fringe of his village provided the context for one of Zhang’s most disturbingly provocative performances of 1994.[9] In one of these filthy latrines, he sat nude for an hour on the backless stool, posture erect and visage unphased, his body slathered with honey and fish oil, which attracted the hoard of flies that frequented this wretched place. He concluded the event by walking slowly into a polluted fishing pond until the flies floated to a calm surface. A few acquaintances witnessed and documented this solitary act, and it was simply named Twelve Square Meters connoting the literal space inside the latrine.[10]Conceived to reflect the everyday struggles of the invisible masses living in sight of, but just beyond, Beijing’s progress, this work is a disturbing but powerful statement about the consequences of progress and confirms Zhang’s and other individuals’ alienation from society. More simply, the work starkly exposes the plight of the poor and the conditions in which they eek out a meager existence.

To Raise the Level of the Water also highlights the daily struggles and perseverance of the ordinary people by actually including them in the work. In 1997, Zhang recruited 46 migrant laborers between the ages of five and sixty to walk into a pond outside Beijing and perform the title. Deliberately choreographed, they surrounded the pond, silently moved to the center of it in a line, and then dispersed as Zhang walked to the center of the group with a young boy on his shoulders.[11] In this mesmerizing work, Zhang moved beyond the individual to the collective, from society to nature, expanding his exploration of one’s place in the world. Instead of suffering, what is highlighted here is the potential of the collective to organize and affect change, however slight and fleeting. Away from the filth and disruption of the city, it also suggests the direct connection humans have to nature and a reverence for its ultimate authority. Unlike the city, the pond outside is calm and serene.

Taken together, these two works define the tone of Zhang Huan’s early performance work in China. Poised between tension and release, grunge angst and pensive meditation, they evoke shock, disgust, and confusion, recalling the shocking conceptual body art in the 1970s of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Marina Abramovic.[12] Similarly, Zhang’s performance emphasized endurance and bodily harm made in near privacy with a limited audience and presented in a matter-of fact manner with a straightforward title. As such, viewers experience the event conceptually, as opposed to physically or sensually, and remotely through documentary photographs as if to reflect the alienation of the individual experience. At the same time, these works also recall Buddhist rituals and beliefs in the enlightening potential of asceticism and meditation. Zhang admits he was a fan of both Buddhist chants and the aptly-named Seattle grunge band, Nirvana when these works were made,[13]thus reflecting the conflicted position of the Chinese people, caught between old and new, east and west, complacency and chaos, the collective and the individual, transcendence and materialism.

In the broader context of China, these works arealso acts of rebellion thattransgress many boundaries between the public and private, propriety and perversion. Construed as sexual and perverted, the naked body is shocking and forbidden in the Chinese public domain.[14] Furthermore, the allusion to bodily functions adds another layer of privacy and abjection. The nude body simultaneously threatens social order and is threatened by it. Exploring the boundary between public and private realms is particularly pertinent in light of recent Chinese history in which one was forced, in essence, to live a double life--present an acceptable front outside while continue to practice that which was valuable but forbidden in secret. That the nude body is put into challenging situations is also significant, as it suggests the body’s resiliency to endure. In an oppressive political climate where the individual is pitted against a much larger adversary, be it foreign influence, the government, the media, or society at large, the body and the mind are the only things over which an individual has complete control. Apart from death, they cannot be taken away and they ultimately determine how one responds to the world. In this context, nudity is at once subversive and vulnerable, but it is also the most direct way of experiencing the world.[15]

Beyond political protest, Zhang explains that these everyday experiences, made extreme, reveal the human condition and it is in conflict with them that he becomes conscious of himself.[16] In this way, Zhang’s actions are more than physical feats of strength; they are metaphysical tests that tap into a central tenet of Buddhism—that all life is suffering which is the ultimate reality of existence.[17] In fact, the awareness of this reality is the key to enlightenment and ultimate freedom. Realizing he cannot physically change his environment, he instead focuses on his response to it, and while his actions may seem disturbing, futile and fatalistic, they in fact reflect an acceptance of the nature of life and a means to deal with the world of suffering. He uses his personal struggle to make us more aware of this human condition.

Like Zhang’s work, there is an element of futility in Song Dong’s actions as well, but also like Zhang, Song perseveres in spite of conflict asserting his even stronger will to challenge insurmountable odds the only way he can. Approximately seven years after the democratic demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were crushed by government forces, Song returned to the scene on the eve of a new year in 1996. His lone figure formed a silhouette in the vast empty space of Tiananmen Square as he lay face down in subzero temperatures and breathed on the cold ground for forty minutes. A thin layer of ice formed and dispersed before morning. He then visited a frozen lake in Beijing’s old quarter and breathed onto the ice to no affect.[18]Simply titled Breathing, Song’s work poetically demonstrates the difficulty to make lasting change in the domineering shadow of governments, society, history, nature and the actual space itself.

Song maintains this spirit of quiet defiance in Water Diary.[19] Everyday since 1995, he dips his brush in water and writes his thoughts, hopes, and frustrations on a black stone. As a boy, Song practiced calligraphy in the same manner because his family could not afford pen and paper.[20] Beyond these practical concerns, this act is a powerful statement about personal freedom. Since his words evaporate, Song is able to unload his thoughts without fear of discovery, offense or reprisal. During the Cultural Revolution, words were used to teach as well as denounce and discredit; one could be censored, jailed, or worse for the words he or shesaid or wrote. Paper diaries were confiscated and destroyed. Song leaves nothing to critique or censor nor does he produce more waste to add to consumer society. Pragmatic and meditative, his diary records an expression that is completely private and free.

Disturbing and emotive, these works by Song and Zhang were rightly viewed by the authorities that censored and drove them underground as threatening to social order. However, these subversive works are not overtly political. With ordinary actions, straightforward titles, and spiritual undertones, these works suggest ambivalence rather than activism. Significant in a country oppressed by its institutions, these artists avoid the didacticism and propaganda of socialist realism, refusing to suggest allegiance to any ideology. At the same time, they are indifferent to art world approval and reject rampant consumerism, reactingagainst the irony and complicity of pop art with works that are ambiguous, difficult, andsometimes painfully private. As such, they parallel earlier conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Under similar duress, their radical methods offered Song and Zhang a way to exist, endure, and express themselves as artists in an uncompromising, repressive environment, for it is the context in which they were conceived and performed that lends weight to their meanings.

However, all that remains of these fleeting moments are the photographs and videos Zhang and Song shot to simply document the events. Mere traces, they are the only way we as viewers can know the experience; we must use our imaginations to conceive the actions, conditions, and the way the performers might have felt. Unlike them, our bodies are remote from the physical experience; we only have our eyes and our minds. As fragments of the original events, the photographs are powerful conceptual objects that both document the events as information and provoke further contemplation. In other words, the photos allow the audience to go beyond the physical events. Like earlier ephemeral work, there is a lack of information in the documentation that forces the viewer to become more conceptually involved with the work, implicating the viewer by placing him or her at the center of theconceptual conflict.