Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections

7. The Space Between

177 chapter seven The Space Between Cross-Cultural Encounters in Contemporary Chinese Art j e rom e s i l be rg e l d Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (Figure I.1) deprives Chinese written characters of their ordinary linguistic significance, reduces them to their pure image state, and offers a new set of potential meanings derived not from content but from context. His Square Word Calligraphy provides meaning where none is suspected. These are matched by his Reading Landscape, which turns words into images, and his Monkeys Grasp for the Moon, which turns images into words. All of these establish a distinctive space between word and image, thinking and seeing, explicit and implicit, content and context, traditional and modern, Chinese and non-Chinese, politics and aesthetics, humor and seriousness, and never just one or the other of these, and never none.1 Zhang Hongtu operates with a similar sense of ironic humor and seriousness, simultaneously violating and extending the traditionbased values of Dong Qichang, creatively reinterpreting the canonical masters as Dong himself had done but also incorporating Western alternatives as Dong (presumably) had refused to do.2 The game is Dong Qichang’s but played on Zhang Hongtu’s own terms, not just diachronic but now also cross-cultural. The result lies neither here nor there but here and there, a hybrid of two seeming irreconcilables not unlike Xu Bing’s Case Study of Transference (Figure 4.6), or at least like the putative offspring of this animal miscegenation, and like Xu Bing’s Panda Zoo with its painted New Hampshire pigs dressed up as Chinese bears in a mock Chinese landscape setting (Figure 7.1).3 178 jerome silbergeld “Case study of transference” is a pretty fair descriptive term for these two artists, fellow expatriates and fellow New Yorkers, and for all of those—artists or not, diasporic or not—who are part of China’s rapid transit between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries , who recognize the myth of a stable monocultural past and express performatively the alternate reality of their destabilized, figure 7.1. Panda Zoo, Xu Bing, performance and mixed-media installation of bamboo, New Hampshire pigs in masks, and classical Chinese paintings , 1998. (Courtesy of the artist.) The Space Between 179 intercultural trajectory. Other theoretical terms apply equally well to these artists, whether referring to their “liminal” or “third space” or to their being “the other of the other,” or whatever aspect of their condition one wishes to emphasize, not just theoretical , not quite real, not just describing, but a state of constantly becoming. Their condition is as much a challenge to their viewers as it is to themselves, and the function of their art is to make this so, to insist on it. They watch their watchers as much as their watchers watch them. Xu Bing loves to tell of the older scholars spending hours looking for an authentic, if impossibly obscure, character among the many made-up words in his Book from the Sky, and occasionally finding one. Zhang Hongtu, whose landscapes initially disturbed and disappointed Chinese and Western audiences alike, likes to tell how his Last Supper, with its all-Mao all-the-time lineup, its depiction of the Chairman betrayed by the Chairman himself, was sponsored by the United States Senate after Tiananmen as an endorsement of free speech principles, only to be shot down as sacrilegious by a particular liberal Catholic senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy—an anticensorship exhibition censored. Zhang, now censored on two continents, withdrew from the exhibition rather than offer a substitute work, and he was followed by the withdrawal of most of the other original participants , thus scuttling the show and bringing a little bit of authentic Beijing “attitude” to Washington DC. Three weeks after 9/11, I received a call from Zhang Hongtu asking if he could come down to Princeton for a visit. We walked the campus for a couple of hours. Distressed, he told me he hadn’t been able to work since his adoptive hometown was savaged by Moslems —fellow Moslems, since Hongtu’s reason for emigrating to New York was that as a Moslem, he was already fed up by 1982 with being a second-class Chinese in China. Now he was both ashamed of Islamic radicalism and afraid for his Moslem brothers back in China. At one point that afternoon, I asked...