According to the classical text Taiping Huanyu Ji, the ancient town of Anren took his name from the words for “peace” (an) and “benevolence” (ren). This Anren Biennale gives us another opportunity to communicate through the cultural memory of the benevolent. Benedetto Croce once loosely commented that “all history is contemporary history”. As part of the generation who grew up as Western ideas came to the East, whether that fact is or isn’t acknowledged, we are indeed more likely to imagine the associations between the historical Mediterranean and contemporary art. Because of the etymology of the word “art” and its historical relationship with the West, this distinct linear narrative explains how when we cite Croce’s maxim we feel we can readily imagine what took place in 19th century Paris and London, 16th century Florence, 17th century Holland, or 20th century New York. This “inclusivity” encompasses interesting places. From an emotionally logical perspective, we can imagine all artists personally meeting in a place that is contemporary by this definition and which brings together what Gombrich calls those men and women who live on. These things for us now seem distant, unfamiliar and indifferent, but for people placed at the center, these things are linear, as in a movie, with no redundancy. When we discuss the present, we cannot reject discussing the past, which has given rise to history’s perceived subjects and necessarily subjects them to harsh contemporary judgment.
As for the meaning of Anren, the element of “ren” (which we can translate as either “benevolence”, “reciprocity”, or “empathy”) is one of the most important cultural concepts in the entire history of China and East Asia, with which nothing can be compared, with the possible exception of only the “Tao” or “Way”. Confucius said: “If one seeks benevolence one will acquire it”. The concept of “ren” has been hollowed out for us today and, although New Confucianism made some minor progress in recent decades and received some acknowledgment in the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, we cannot see the concept of “ren” making a strong social and cultural recovery any time soon. In the classical Chinese art world, the “concept” was always indispensable. In his “Preface to Painting Landscapes” (Hua Shanshui Xu), Zong Bing wrote:“The sage embodies the Way to reflect the material world; the virtuous man purifies his feelings to savor images. Landscapes provide substance as well as artistic inspiration, and it is in the spirit of Xuanyuan, Yao, Confucius, Guangcheng, Dawei, Xu You, and Gu Zhu that artists travel through the mountains and peaks of ancient legend. We must also acknowledge the pleasure provided by ‘empathy and wisdom’. These are the spirit, the method, and the way of the sage, with whom the virtuous commune; landscapes enchant the Way with form, bringing pleasure to those who have empathy. Is this not the case?
Those who have empathy delight in mountains and the wise delight in waters. The thing that the appreciation of landscapes ultimately embodies is those who have empathy or benevolence. Out of respect for a paradigm of the socio-political ideal personality, art has from the beginning of its development been inextricably tied to the ideal benevolent or empathic personality and its self-expression. One type of art might be different from another type of art but, as the artist Pan Tianshou pointed out, Western art and Eastern art are two mighty peaks that face each other in reciprocity. Naturally, there are differences between Western art whose development relied in the main on free artisans and Eastern art whose mainstay was the literati tradition, but both have confronted, evaded, resisted, and synthesized contemporary art in their own way. Both must necessarily “look beyond” the situational logic of the way they perceive themselves and others to recreate many of their sources. In the location and context of Anren, we still continue to focus on today’s issues and this prompts a fundamental concept: What exactly is this present day in which we find ourselves?
At the end of the 19th century, as part of a cohort of young artists who found themselves without support, Manet and a small group of Impressionists close to him ardently hoped to gain recognition from the French art salons, but time and time again they found themselves rebuked and refused the opportunity to participate. The art colleges of the day were organized as guilds that sought to defend the artisanal traditions from dying out, but were seen by artists in those times of innovation and change as institutions that shackled them. Yet the shackles that once restrained a generation of artists are now openly tossed aside and are on display at the Louvre and various other museums in Paris where conservative artists and the Impressionists they once tried to hold in check are exhibited together. Participants in every cultural world were engaged in a conversation and what was whispered between them came to inform that era of humanistic traditions. Today, we are able to understand the hurricane of radical modernism that swept all before it in the early 20th century, but this does not mean that we are not aware of the seriousness and complexity of contemporary issues, and it doesn’t mean we can give up the critical examination of today’s realities and history that people take for granted. Therefore, the immediate meaning of “today’s yesterday” is to look rationally at history again.
Wang Xizhi said: “If we look later at the present, it will be like looking at the past”. For today’s yesterday, in a China that stresses the contemporary while having a tradition that favored the literatus, we must necessarily look back. For every generation of artists it has been the same; on the one hand they are the keepers of tradition, born with such a consciousness, but on the other hand, they are the critics and promoters of reality. Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi, Castiglione and Wang Zhencheng, were all involuntarily swept into the spirit of this logic. Therefore they often painted places of seclusion, in order to better enter reality. What becomes of benevolence and the love of one’s fellow man, if these are removed from the context of human society? It was from sculpting the embodiment of the personality of the gentleman that the humanistic tradition was born. The ancient Chinese would outline a plum or a leaf of bamboo, but this also far transcended what Western art would describe as “still life” or “nature”.
On the other hand, we should not discuss contemporary art, especially Chinese contemporary art, in isolation, especially in the context of today’s globalization when history should be viewed as a whole and the humanistic tradition should also be seen as a whole. Will Gompertz wrote a book titled 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye, and this title expresses well the rapidity of change. The Chinese view of history is supposed to consider problems in terms of longer units, and from the perspective of history the avant-garde art of the past twenty or thirty years reveals that every period has its own avant-garde but it is eventually likely to become tradition, once history recalibrates itself. In the section devoted to art history titled “The Rhetoric of the Family Tree”, Du Xiyun and Lan Qingwei, as curators of this event, have used this encounter with the history of pre-modern and modern Chinese history set against the background of Anren Ancient Town, to re-examine the path of China’s social development since the late Qing Dynasty from the perspective and mode of art, and to explore the historical origins of current issues, recent traditions, and expectations and speculation regarding the future. Here, an understanding of how different individuals form the endpoint of a cultural lineage, as well as of the unique working methods of different artists and their aesthetic characteristics, forms the focus of the exhibition. Their “rhetoric of the family tree” signifies something transcendental, but this segment of the exhibition conveys to audiences the most recent contemporary traditional voices, artists who will probably endure. However, history that has been re-stated and modified cautiously emerges, as in Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings, even though they were only painted yesterday.
Between the Ancient Town of Anren and Chinese contemporary art there are other close associations. One of the most important sites in the ancient town signaling this is the Liu Manor that provided the setting for the sculptural work Rent Collection Courtyard. In 1972, Harald Szeemann wanted to reproduce and exhibit this work, prompted by his vision that saw leftist art as the newest and most modern art in the world at that time, but his plan came to naught because of the Cultural Revolution then raging. Rent Collection Courtyard was hailed as “an atomic bomb” not only in China at that time, once it entered the international gaze. From this point of view, Rent Collection Courtyard was real contemporary art, and contemporary art that acquired a transnational nature when it first appeared. However, from another perspective, Harald Szeemann’s Rent Collection Courtyard and the Rent Collection Courtyard as seen by Chinese peasants and the work’s creators were almost two utterly different works. In Szeemann’s eyes, Rent Collection Courtyard expressed emotions that are universal and made him cry, but they were not absolutes. In the eyes of Chinese peasants and the work’s creators, Rent Collection Courtyard was absolute, because the viewers had flesh-and-blood ties with the work, like guerrillas and the terrain in which they operate. Does this help us reflect on what is contemporary art? And what is Chinese contemporary art? Can contemporary Chinese art be encapsulated by a leftist superhero narrative? Did the parties involved in the work ever speak out? Did the artists ever leap off the stage of the classical “three unities” to create their own dramatic “distancing effect”? In the surging tide of globalization of the 20th century, did curators acquire too much power, so that in the world we hear only one voice, one sound, and one version of rhetoric?
The problem with any single narrative is that it can never reveal the truth about something, because the truth is inevitably depicted – and not depicted - as in Rashōmon, and as in the theater. The international section of the First Anren Biennale “Today’s Yesterday”, titled Sichuan: Drama and History, curated by Marco Scotini, focuses on the relationship between drama and history. In the same way that the imaginary background of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan written in 1940 did not coincide of course with the real Sichuan, Rent Collection Courtyard also did not. Marco Scotini takes this as a starting point, and has chosen the “Sichuan story” as the narrative topic for the international section of the exhibition. The Good Person of Szechuan and Rent Collection Courtyard are two works of art that relate stories that took place in Sichuan and seemingly construct a dialogue between two cultures, permeated by the historical context of the past and the present, but the two works would seem fictional one to the other and their relationships are necessarily convoluted and difficult to distinguish, like the rapid changes of lianpu face masks in Sichuan Opera. As we all know, the great German dramatist Brecht never travelled to China, but he was deeply influenced by Chinese culture. Theatrical expression effected through stock character types, as exemplified in the Chinese tradition of significant facial makeup (lianpu), is a core element in The Good Person of Szechuan and Rent Collection Courtyard, and it is something also exemplified in Scotini’s exhibition theme. In Brecht’s work, in order to perform a good deed the “good person” of the play’s title, Shen Te must disguise herself as her cousin, Shui Ta, and as she hesitates between faces signifying good and evil, her face changes in a way that evokes the lianpu changes that are a feature of Sichuan Opera performances; Rent Collection Courtyard, on the other hand, comprises sculptures that present a panorama of helpless peasants paying rent, under the heel of oppressive landlords, and of their gradual awakening, transformation, and subsequent revolt. Around these elements, the exhibition invites artists from China and abroad to participate in discussions that explore the elements of the deconstruction created by these “dramas”: the audience, the curtain, the performers (including puppetry and shadow puppet theater), costumes and stage sets, text, music and other aspects, the works’ formation and social contexts, as well as the history they reflect. Through a demonstration of dramatic language, the curator will show how The Good Person of Szechuan presents Brecht’s viewpoint and how it is only when the world appears not only in the way determined to present the narrative that we can expect it to expose its original face. In the space the curator even arranges a real “context” for audience dialogue and participation, so that the exhibition itself becomes an actual stage that enables performance and dialogue of the contemporary.
If we can say that Mark Scotini further explores Yuan Dynasty history through layers of the drama, some artists and curators come closer to constructing it. For example, one artist participating in the exhibition is already familiar with performance. Chen Danqing has for many years not only produced “Details” (Jubu), but also has been involved in the creation of a series titled “Painting Books” (Hua Shu). This series uses books to record illusory seriousness. Chen Danqing is a serious artist in the field of easel painting, who has long been engaged in a public debate using the integrity of works to challenge the editing of curators. Focusing on book scrolls, he has constructed his own private cultural memory. His “Painting Books” series is both spatial and temporal. As books, they are temporal and are an encoding of past experience, but as paintings, they are spatial and are a visual illusion created through the ritual of visual concentration. In this series, the object of staring is memory, whether or not it exists or not, and whether it is a memory of the past or the future; this is a continuous immersion in phenomenological structures. They are an illusion of illusion, books in paintings and paintings in books, like the mirrors children find fascinating, and this mutual referencing gives rise to endless changes. This system almost becomes a metaphor of the humanistic tradition; since time immemorial, all art has served as mirror, just as if they were the latest thing and the best art in their day. And all art is always at a particular point in time, or becomes from a certain perspective, a mirror for others in a narrative.
Therefore, continuing to keep to a formula rather than setting up a curatorial mode based on a deep understanding of the particularity of artworks and artists will increasingly make people feel extremely anxious and confused. Just as in the metaphor used as the title of the section, “Crossroads” curated by Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding, we are at a crossroads in our confusion and we will always be wandering at these or those crossroads. Do we select a mirror, or do we become the mirror of others? This is a sequence of endless reflections, which will eventually interweave time and space, becoming components of contemporary art and the phenomenon of human culture as a whole. Now, the question is do they stem not only from one single narrative, or do they cut into another narrative? We might further ask, why this is the case, rather than that? In other words, the Biennale was forced to move forward in making choices, rather than creating. Because all major sites in the ancient town were closely integrated, the various divisions of the Biennale all had to be given symbolic value. From the Brecht site, we can clearly through to Liu’s Manor, and everything seems to be just within walking distance. If historic images and layers of information were interrelated, the distinction between divisions of the Biennale would no longer be meaningful. Many choices, refinement of those choices, and comparative research were required for this to become a 21st century exhibition.
In Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Garden of Forking Paths, the “time fork” means that if time can be a series of nodes in space; then what emerges will be network of different types of interactive time, times which, in the nove,l “approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries”, in confrontation with Newtonian linear time, and in this network, people can make a selection from an infinity of selectable options. Curators now face an impossible task: making a selection from all possible selections, they will subside into a corner. The section of the exhibition titled “A Future that Never Returns” presents a virtual perspective from the future in search of memory states, obsessions, and the historical maze created by contemporary writing. The Exhibition takes as its foundation the humanistic history of the 20th century and beyond, which gave rise to the Biennale and its unique location, and the thread of temporal and spatial nodes initiated by the spread to the East of Western ideas and their intimate relationship with the modernization of China, making “time” a keyword in contemporary art discussions. How do we view history and modern and contemporary China in the present, and how do we understand history and time against this background? In the contemporary moment, how can our writing belong to the history of the future? In understanding our common and specific spatio-temporal, how do we move towards more individual contemporary art creation? How do these things suggest we are observing contemporary Chinese reality and a specimen of local history? Hints and clues regarding all these questions are included in the exhibition.
Although Liu Jie and Lü Jing curated “A Future that Never Returns” to provide a perspective and attitude regarding the “future”, the future has never been part of history or of those past sites over which the stars have never been extinguished. So a concept might be one thing, but the relationship between our imagination and history is another, and one cannot run across historical barriers. Some young artists who disregard history seem to be creating history, but history belongs itself, and it cannot be dismissed. Confronting the “future”, we often hear the echo of other times, however, you are a reflection of your own times -- and that is with the relationship with the past which artists consciously and unconsciously present.
Whether we understand time from the perspective of parallel universes and use the future to reverse the present, or use the knowledge of genealogy or of the theatrical expression of masking, the spirit of Anren as a place suggests that we, as curators of the 21st century that is before us, can also enjoy “benevolence” in the 21st century. If the curator is an indispensable substitute for authority, then the curator today must assume responsibilities -- respecting and loving others, and every piece of work, so that every choice made in the capacity of curator (despite the contradictory conflicts with which they are intertwined) is prompted by empathy and respect. Only by so doing is the curator able to become a real bridge in the world of conversation and to perceive, comprehend, and reveal a curatorial path that shows us the unexpected and what is not readily perceivable, but to make selections among unlimited choices.
In the ninth year of the Yonghe reign, in the guichou year, at the beginning of spring, they came to the secluded spring in the forest, on a day when the sky was clear and the breeze was pleasant and everyone focused on writing poems and prose that captured the sentiment of the moment. Someone proposed that the 37 poems written that day be recorded in a volume and in an instant 37 paths to enlightenment were documented. On that day sixteen people failed to write a poem, for which they were punished by having to drink three cups of wine. They were: Vice Minister Xie Gui; General Bian Di; Wang Xianzhi; the officers Yang Mo, Yang Qiumao, Kong Zhi, and Liu Mi; the officials Yu Gu, Cao Laoyi, and Bo Houmian; the retired officials Cen Linghua, Xie Teng, Ren Zhi, Lü Ji, Lü Ben, and Cao Li. They formed the 38th [path of enlightenment].
Comparing this with curation, I would sometimes prefer to endure the punishment of three cups. It now seems that many things of the present and of the past have never changed in the slightest:
When we document the people of our times, we record what they narrated. While generations differ and events are not the same, what rouses emotions is the same. Those who will come later and survey the present will also respond to what is refined.
Let this be my preface!
Thursday 24 August 2017
Translated by Bruce Gordon Doar