Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections

1. Reading and Misreading: Double Entendre in Locally Oriented Logos

1 chapter one Reading and Misreading Double Entendre in Locally Oriented Logos h s i ng y ua n t s ao Is contemporary Chinese art part of contemporary Chinese culture or part of a Western-centered global culture in this era of globalization?1 In the past two decades, prestigious museums and galleries such as the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum have featured works by Chinese artists. Scholars and artists alike from both China and the West (Euro-America) celebrate an ever-booming art industry that now has added a new member to the club. Some Chinese believe that the display of works of artists from China in these exhibitions symbolizes China’s entrance into the world arena of contemporary art—“China going to the world.”2 This celebration of “worldgoing ” assumes that “‘the emerging global culture transcends national boundaries’; or, as prominent writers in the West such as Huntington bluntly state, if a culture can help improve the economic development and living standards of other nations, that culture should be shared by all human societies and be called ‘a shared culture of the human race.’”3 While certain Chinese hold this naïve, apolitical view, the West celebrates the inclusion of art with a strong Chinese appearance as the greatly expanded “global [context] of our time.”4 From a more colonial perspective, this situation proves that Chinese artists work for “the nations of others,”5 a version of self-colonization. In this chapter, I attempt to offer a different reading of the situation through a reexamination of the process of China’s initial 2 hsingy ua n tsao efforts of “world-going” as a means of renewing its culture. In particular , I want to discuss how Chinese artists have applied and still apply their managed selection of Western discourse, rhetoric, and semantic elements in art making (and presenting) as a means of protesting the political control of art in their still officially socialist homeland. As they encounter and participate in the culture of global capitalism they are playing an important role in the ongoing cultural decentralizing or deterritorializing process of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This decentralization of culture has diversified and diluted the relationship between geographical place and cultural experience, allowing the realization of interculturality with strong Chinese cultural presence in the international art scene; and, further, advocates art “work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other.”6 The process of recontextualizing a local cultural iconography in a diversified global environment is more dependent than ever on the network of relationships that closely influence the artists’ daily life experiences. This process of interculturality is particularly evident when the works of Chinese artists interact with the changing cultural background of their audience. The past two to three decades of China’s foray into contemporary art can be seen as comprising two distinct periods based on the different audiences expected for their works: before 1989 the dialogue was mostly an internal attempt at negotiation within a China-defined geo-cultural space. After 1989, cutting-edge artists from China crossed geo-cultural boundaries and faced mainly audiences whose cultural experiences are nonChinese . Their works, based on both Chinese and Western contemporary art discourse, share both Chinese and Western visual elements that are neither Chinese nor Western, because they result from the artists’ borrowing of different cultural presentations, displays , and cultural symbols. For example, Cai Guoqiang’s (蔡国强) trademark traditional brush and ink calligraphy is replaced by traces of burnt gunpowder on paper; rubbings of the flat surfaces of architectural structures are reassembled into installations in Xu Bing’s (徐冰) Ghosts Pounding the Wall (鬼打墙); Chinese characters transformed into unreadable logos are now considered postmodern art as in Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (天书, Figure I.1). In addition to all this, scientific and information technologies have been brought into the traditional realm of Chinese art, transforming them from a local cultural practice to newer forms of art. Xu Bing’s What’s Your Name changes Chinese script into pictorial elements Reading and Misreading 3 to rearrange syllabic units in phonetic languages, or the Romanization of nonphonetic languages. For the first time, with the help of a computer, Chinese calligraphy-like words can be written and read in all...