Beautiful Violence : War, Peace, Globalization

Qin Yufen and Beautiful Violence

Qin Yufen (b. 1954), a Chinese woman artist based in Berlin, Germany, created a gigantic installation, Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli), at the Mattress Factory, a museum of contemporary art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of the exhibition "Visual Sound" in 2001 (see color plate 20). The work consists of 5.75 miles of barbed wire configured in loops. Multicolored party balloons are attached to the wire. Small speakers suspended from the ceiling play fragments of traditional Chinese flute music and the electronically altered noise of balloons rubbing together through an eight-channel audio system. Accompanying the installation is a verbal text—memoirs written by Qin Yufen and hung on the wall. Qin composed reminiscences of her childhood during the socialist years in China when she stayed at the Mattress Factory as a resident artist in February and March 2001. The beginning of the memoirs is translated into English, framed, and posted on the wall at the site of the installation. It reads as follows:

One essential element of the composition of Beautiful Violence—text—serves as a long distance lens shot, focused on my early youth in China from 1954–1970. The nationalism that was advocated at the time, the theory of just wars that was pursued, and large and small political campaigns that were carried out in China rationalized violence. This made a kind of virus of rationalized violence which infiltrates our way of thinking through daily life, and becomes our unchangeable principles when evaluating things. Under the "red" ideology, each of us becomes the carrier of the virus in varying degrees. The written part of this artwork uses the experience of a child's life to analyze the Chinese model of this phenomenon of viral infection.

Today, in democratic and non-democratic countries alike, violence is on the rise between states, between nationalities, as well as in daily life. Particularly in Germany where I live, violent incidents of neo-Nazism take place one after the other, which shocks me. My work, Beautiful Violence, is a reaction from myself as an artist to what I would call "black" violence. It is not just anger, resistance and worry; more importantly, it is an exploration of the origin and root of this kind of violence. In contrast to "black" violence, "beautiful" violence is the virus of rationalized violence that spreads all over society today. It invades our life through ideology, news media, public education as well as entertainment and consumption in a way that we are not easily aware of. Our infected way of thinking has caused our attitudes and opinions to give black violence space to expand.

The work Beautiful Violence questions the social system and the reliability of our way of thinking. It provides us with a point of entry for thinking, and lets us oppose violence from a more fundamental perspective.¹

In Qin's own words, a central theme of this work is the "theory of just wars" (zhengyi de zhanzheng lun), which advocates "rationalized violence," the use of brute force against people. Qin first speaks of the "red ideology" of rationalized violence symptomatic of the Mao years in China as she experienced and witnessed in her youth. Yet more broadly, she brings up the issue of "black violence," which has become a global phenomenon, including violent incidents against ethnic minorities in Germany and Europe. In these instances, rationalized violence is often tied to what she calls "nationalism" (minzu zhuyi).

A visitor to the exhibit is immediately awestruck by the sheer size of the installation. The piece occupies an entire room on the third floor of the Mattress Factory. The audience is dwarfed by the immensity of more than five miles of barbed wire in coils. It is impossible for the viewers to take in the entire piece from a single perspective. They must walk around the installation to see the details. The colossal size of the...