Huang Jianxin's Cuowei and/as Aesthetic Cognition

What conceptual framework does one use to understand works of art that are made in socialist societies, yet document a popular and massive loss of faith in socialism?

—Paul Pickowicz

There is no need to transfer unwieldy global attitudinizing. A Chinese position, despite its ambiguous implication in Western discourse, can emerge and establish itself as the self-conscious center of a critical practice.

—Jing Wang

As a concrete universal, artistic thinking is best defined initially by the impossibility of translating it into other modes of conceptualization. . . . Breaking with all the bonds its culture provides is the act that initiates the poetic.

—Walter A. Davis

This essay will take as its starting point the general thesis that the work of art represents an originary way of experiencing the world, an artist’s struggle to create a form appropriate to the demands of his or her experience. In keeping with this general principle, I will engage Huang Jianxin’s Cuowei (1987) in a close reading, to induce the various methods through which the film stages subjectivity—at the conscious and especially the unconscious levels—as a series of interrelated conflicts that are intimately linked to the larger sociocultural forces of the moment. This reading demonstrates that an artistic form may embody the complexities of experience in ways that augment, anticipate, or even exceed the theoretical terms or constructs we habitually resort to when confronted with the task of interpretation. Consequently, it should be one of our duties as critics, comparativists, or skeptics of culture, to always remain open to the possibility of theory’s inadequacy in the face of art. ¹

I am not speaking of sacrificing the possibility of interpretation on the (impossible) altar of pure aesthetics. Nor is this seemingly precarious situating of my methodological approach an abandonment of rigorous analysis, a denial of the social and the psychological, or a marginalization of history. In fact, this method is rooted in a notion of the poetic as a form of cognition that incorporates the historic, the socioeconomic, and the psychological, embracing those discourses and standing as their equal. Artistic works should in fact be indispensable in our efforts to formulate, understand, and challenge the theoretical concepts and conclusions of various other explanatory, objective, knowledge-making discourses. Given the reading it warrants, a film such as Cuowei can prove as insightful as these other narratives.

Such insight comes to the fore through the engagement of the artistic text in a rigorous interrogation that goes both ways, giving primacy to the text’s ability to generate the interpretation, and allowing it to interrogate one’s theoretical agenda. Any and all preconceived aspects of one’s approach, even one’s subjectivity, if you will, are scrutinized by the artistic eye. In the case of Cuowei, this two-way hermeneutical engagement yields a unique understanding of the conflicted and experientially dense nature of subjectivity.

The experiential insights of the artistic process have been upheld by thinkers as diverse as Freud, who said “the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious”; ² Marx, who viewed some works of art as “the poetic embodiment of cognitive insight . . . a measure of the emptiness or fullness of human life”; ³ and Liu Zaifu, who discusses “equating the aesthetic with the essence of the human being . . . as that which embodies the level at which the human being understands itself.” ⁴ While theoretical formulations of the concept of artistic knowing are relatively easy to locate, there are few models for translating them into an actual interpretive practice. Furthermore, sustaining such an approach is, to a large extent, an uncharted journey; one’s prior conceptualizations and praxis are always susceptible to emendation, reformulation, cancellation, and contradiction when confronting a new work of art.

As stated above, the key move in comprehending and interpreting art is the engagement of the artistic text, working carefully through it in ways that allow us to arrive at the detailed, complex, and potentially revelatory exploration of experience embodied within. The understanding thereby attained will necessarily be gained at the cost of losing or, rather, sublating (Hegel’s Aufhebung...