Hong Lei: The Past Is the Trace of the Swallow’s Flight
Life’s Rainy Season
At the age of twenty-nine, on the birth of his first child, he decided to abandon life, and put all his efforts into searching for himself. His various hypotheses about himself, too, were born on the day his wife became pregnant. His thoughts were frozen at the moment of sexual intercourse with his wife, or when his fluttering body was brushed by the night breeze. Later, his wife took off her jewelry, unconsciously loosened her clothes, opened her dazed eyes and fell into a deep sleep. His gaze lingered on a small flower on the branch of an ornamental fig tree outside the window, and he had a second conjecture: he felt that his tasteless gaudy life was like the milky liquid excreted from his body, now flowing in his wife’s womb. He imagined that maybe he was in the stomach of this woman sleeping nearby, staring at the fig flower. Later, he would not recognize himself, not knowing where he was from; perhaps he too was a conjecture in a dream of his father. And so he came up with myriads of complex and endless imaginings. The sad cry of the bird at night was his cry and the endless flow of water was his life. In the end, he didn’t know if his conjecturing self was actually real.
The above passage appears at the outset of Hong Lei’s novel Rainy Season (Yuji), which was written in 1992 when he had commenced studies in engraving in the continuing education and teaching assistant program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He had begun writing the novel when he first arrived in Beijing in September of that year and completed it at the beginning of that winter. The novel is difficult to read and does not follow any familiar narrative. Upon the birth of a first child, the protagonist decides to abandon life; he seems to be angered by something, so imagines himself to be in the stomach of the woman sleeping nearby. He also mentions his own father, but he cannot figure out whether his conjecturing self is actually real. It is naïve to attempt to find a story in this novel of a young artist floating in Beijing, unless we remain sensitive only to the flow of the language itself. Ancient Chinese writers tell that there is nothing that can be read, only those traces you discover for yourself or those things you consider ‘traces’ (henji). We seek a type of melancholy beauty, but its actual pursuit can only take place within the rapidly changing relationships of language. Such a mental outlook is also a prerequisite for understanding Hong Lei’s art.
There were reasons why Hong Lei finished his novel in Beijing. Two years earlier, he married and then had a child. However, when he thought about his artistic situation, he felt overwhelmingly melancholy, realizing that his art had gone totally unnoticed. In 1985, he had participated in Jiangsu Youth Art Week in Nanjing, where he exhibited his painting Autumn (Qiu), a work that is reminiscent of Gauguin. Later he went to see an exhibition of impressionist painters in Shanghai and felt that the exhibition in Nanjing was a ‘mess’. Hong Lei then entered a phase in his life that he believes was not worth remembering which lasted until the summer of 1991, when he participated in the Exhibition of Eight (Changzhou and Nanjing), curated by Guan Ce and Jin Feng.[1] But Hong Lei also thought that this exhibition did not help him in any way. For a young artist who had not yet become successful or even received any attention, it was easy to be over-sensitive, but he came to the conclusion that he should be doing his own work independently.[2]
The period from 1985 to 1992 was filled with drama for Hong Lei. Even though he participated in one of the exhibitions of the ’85 Art Movement, he was an unnoticed participant. Unlike Ding Fang’s artistic group, who were making proclamations, giving readings on their philosophy of art and were actually involved in the wave of activities surrounding ‘the emancipation of thinking’, Hong Lei was an unimportant player in the ’85 period with no major role. However, we can see the influence of this period on his works. In a painting of 1985 titled Girl (Nühai), a tone of inner melancholy, obviously unremarked by the artist himself, is combined with Western modern art. It is quite obvious that the details and his line work are related to his earlier training and working environment. He had worked for some years previously at the research center of arts and crafts in Changzhou, where he studied traditional arts and folk art, including calligraphy, embroidery and decorative art production. These experiences were later influences on Hong Lei’s art, and when required, would become part of his artistic experiments. Artists like Henri Rousseau were among Hong Lei’s favorites at this time, and the expressive and dreamlike ambience created in his works shows evidence of his influence. From 1983 to 1987, Hong Lei studied decorative painting in the Nanjing Art Academy’s arts and crafts department. During that period, apart from his participation as a student in Jiangsu Youth Art Week, there was little that was eventful. Hong Lei admits that he never got involved in the ‘85 movement and felt quite lost, being merely a student at one school training to become a teacher at another school, Changzhou Technical Teachers College:
In the period from 1987 to 1990, I had no idea what I should be doing at school. It was a time when I felt lost. I had conflicts about teaching with some of the senior staff. I wanted to teach some of my own ideas, and I had some bad habits like sleeping in, so I didn’t make it to class on time. These were the source of some of the conflicts. For a while I stayed in the dorm, and sketched with the other teachers. Only then did I begin to systematically reflect on questions of art. In order to teach introductory courses, I examined sketches from the Renaissance period. I also really enjoyed Picasso and Cubist works. I did many sketches and would spend entire evenings doing portraits.[3]
In 1989, Hong Lei took his students to Sichuan on a painting field trip. While there, he saw works by Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Ye Yongqing’s mythical sentimental style imbued with the flavor of a different region as well as Zhang Xiaogang’s melancholy works influenced Hong Lei. In his painting of 1989 titled Woman’s Portrait (Nüren xiang), we can see the impact of his Sichuan journey. Hong Lei wanted to paint something different, imbued with elegance, but his brush work bears traces of his copy work with Italian sketches. He smudges the background, and fails to convey the world of dreams we see in Ye Yongqing’s paintings. Nor did he succeed in acquiring, like Zhang Xiaogang, an understanding of space as the realm of ghosts and demons. Hong Lei was unclear about what he wanted to paint. He painted a hallucinatory work of a bird holding an olive branch or the twig of a tree in its beak, clearly inspired by Ye Yongqing’s work. He painted inauspicious sprinting horses against forcefully happy natural backgrounds and skies. On this journey he also travelled to Tibet and Dunhuang, where he became interested in the mysterious mural in the Mogao Grottoes. He said that they gave him a feeling of ‘mysticism’. For Hong Lei, mysticism was not a concept, but, rather, an enticing feeling. After his father’s death in 1984, he felt that life and death were mysterious unfathomable phenomena. He wondered what it is that makes us feel our existence, when the strength of reality that directly influences our lives has gone forever and that feeling cannot be erased from his heart. In 1989, when Hong Lei was feeling this massive loss, he once again found a sense of the mysterious and incredible aspects of the world among Tibetan paintings, religious images and relics. The artist’s earlier experiences gradually became part of his own unique psychological make-up through his study of art. This helped Hong Lei complete several works influenced by Tibetan painting and these contain undefined images, mysterious symbols and the depiction of an ambiguous hell.
In 1992, after he began studying engraving at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he made a group of lithographs. There was a title for each image in the series, including Picking Up One’s Head Again (Chongxin jianhui ziji de toulu), Dusk Far from the City (Yuanli chengshi de huanghun), Cry (Nahan), and The End of the Century (Shijimo). At a time when Hong Lei was reading a large amount of Western writing, he was also thinking about how to incorporate what he read within his works. He gave specific themes to his works, for example, Picking Up One’s Head Again was explained as ‘cultural restructuring’, Dusk Afar from the City he described as having the theme of ‘material desires far from the city’, and Ladders to the Sky (Tongtian de tizi) had a similar theme. However, the painting A Cry Without Echoes (Meiyou huisheng de haojiao) comes closest to depicting his personal situation. The figure in the print does not represent humanity nor does it represent other people. It only partly explains the artist’s sense of helplessness in the face of an imminent future as well as his surrounding environment. The artist was not satisfied with his situation, and searched for hope. However, when he reflected deep into the night, he felt an inner loss and his tossing and turning only made him feel more helpless in the face of reality. As a record of the artist’s mental life, these stone engravings are, of course, significant. The muscular yet powerless figure in these prints was the artist himself. However, having experienced the ’85 New Wave Art Movement, the problems that arose transcended the individual. In the latter part of the 1980s, different artists had personal views that diverged sharply from the so-called ideal or spiritual perspective. In the summer of 1988, Li Xianting published his article ‘The Age Awaits the Passionate Life of the Grand Soul’ (Shidai qidaizhe dalinghun de shengming jiqing)in the 37th issue of Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao). This essay dealt mostly with the ‘purification of language’ during this period, and Li called on artists to continue paying attention to the meaning of the soul. This was a period when issues were becoming complex, and it was often difficult to differentiate the boundaries in art between ideological conservatism, academism, modernism and the newly emerging post-modernism. Of course, most people’s views on art were a disorderly and complex pastiche of ideas, and this meant that the inception of art was becoming the personal matter of the artist. Summoning the ‘grand soul’ (da linghun) never became an effective slogan, while works like those of the painter Ding Fang that addressed the theme could only present an abstracted soul.[4] Hong Lei at this time was a modernist, but unsure about the most effective artistic language for expressionism. There is no document from this time systematically outlining Hong Lei’s views on the debated question, and he simply kept on working on paper or canvas. We can see in the oil paintings completed in 1993 and 1994 that Hong Lei was confused about his expression.On the one hand, he firmly distanced himself from the material world, blending the results of his reading of Western thought, his early experiences, and his view of reality, into an indefinable and abstract world. On the other, he seems to be resigned and lost in a dark and abstract spiral, but must retain traces of material objects: books, flames, heads and perhaps rocks. But these objects contain hints of his life and existence, and if he loses hold of them then he might not find a resolution of his own problems. Of all the many different murky worlds there might be, Hong Lei clearly affirms his belief in the existence of this world, but we can see the artist locked is in a conflict in his own material and spiritual world. Two paintings completed at the beginning of 1994 reveal his melancholy at this time. On them the artist wrote Hamlet’s words ‘to be or not to be’, clearly referring to his own mood: Who am I? Where am I going? While modernists never tire of this dilemma, in the context of Hong Lei’s own writings during his time of inner turmoil, we realize that Hamlet’s formulation is only the artist’s reiteration of his own everyday life, spiritually and materially. However the artist’s writing at this time was like a narrative poem, and not at all absurd:
This was the last day of the rainy season, and after the thunder and rain, the world was at peace. There was a soft breeze and the tree shadows danced.
Soon, people saw, emerging from the marshes of the Ganges River, a slender sleepwalker with his hair in a mess. His sadness had come to an end, and he could no longer recall his journey floating through some other century. But people remembered, how after the long rainy season, a rosy cloud had drifted in from a distant place, as animated as a bird flying above. Then, above all the villages and counties he passed there were skies of golden sunshine. Finally, the animals were overcome by joy and followed him. There was another sleepwalker six hundred years later, who walked from his own hometown stepping into the streets of Jerusalem, just as dazzling and indistinct. On one occasion he suddenly felt sad and lost, and drifted endlessly, in order to convey the boundlessly lonely grayish sweet scent, but people embraced him with tenderness, but realized that he could not chase away the rosy clouds, and they mistook the sweet scent for sandalwood fragrance. Some storytellers like to use years to record their practice, exaggerating the thickness of the clouds, but he feared that he was the feeble conjecture of people feeling weak. In this way he soon to drifted towards the end of horizon, painlessly, and then disappeared becoming one with the universe. (Rainy Season)
Nevertheless, in the first half of the 1990s Cynical Realism and Political Pop were on the rise, helping to eliminate earlier experiments in essentialism. The New Generation’s abandonment of the probing, cynical-realist strategy of ‘hooliganism’ and the pop artists’ recombination of history and reality all pointed towards one goal: the abandonment of the 1980s’ modernist experiments in essentialism. For most modernists, the cruel events of 1989 did not represent physical oppression, but the ‘disappearance’ of the problem, left as a hanging question. For a long time, people remained silent. In this situation sensitive artists naturally adjusted their artistic strategies. The influence from other artists as well as internal reminders and new languages began to lead to general changes, and one day in 1995, Hong Lei also seemed to undergo a similar transition.
An Indistinct Autumn
Once Emperor Huizong rode in a pear-wood boat and traveled through many unusual landscapes. He saw a sculpture standing tall in the water, emitting the fragrance of jasmine, and then the detailed carving of the sculpture suddenly disappeared. He also saw an area of rosy bamboo groves, dispersed among bushes of golden apricot leaves, reflecting each other. He suddenly felt that he had been bewitched by the lake. In reality, his journey on the lake had taken him in circles. He told himself that it really felt like a dream and not a dream of his own, but the dream of a person not yet born. Eight hundred and eighty-two years later, that future dreamer dreamed in the desolate forested garden of a toppled dynasty.
This is an excerpt from Hong Lei’s novel Image of the Auspicious Crane (Ruihe tu), written in 1994 at Yuanmingyuan. Even reading the entire story, it is be difficult to discern the novel’s plot. Yet compared with his previous novel Rainy Season, the sentiments are calmer, and the artist begins to observe the world more calmly – past, and present, external and internal. We can discern how Hong Lei sees himself replicating the experience of Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, eight hundred years ago. He imagines himself to be Huizong, or that the person Huizong imagined is Hong Lei himself. The role is unimportant; the point is that Hong Lei is beginning to search for possibilities in the world of time. In 1994, Hong Lei first became aware of these possibilities after holding a solo exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ gallery in June of the previous year. The exhibition titled Metaphysical Poetics(Xing’ershang Shixue) was later shown in September in the art department of the Nanjing Art College, after he had completed his studies in engraving at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. However, he explains, ‘since I didn’t attend classes on time, and hadn’t completed my teaching duties, I was expelled from my teaching position’. In the spring of 1994, he moved into Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan artists’ village, and it was in this community of liberal artists that he wrote Images of Auspicious Crane. He soon became involved with the Stars Art Culture Center founded by Ding Fang. It is difficult if he produced many pieces of work in that year, because he was working as an editor of Art Trends (Yishu chaoliu)and Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao). Nonetheless, his professional art career began there.
In 1995, Hong Lei saw a number of Song dynasty flower and bird paintings at an exhibition in the Forbidden City. These were originals rather than the prints he had seen in the past, and they led Hong Lei to reflect once again on how time endows common images with mystery. Of course, his reading had provided him with background stories of this art history, but now for him the question was how to re-read and understand them. Seeing the ancient paintings he so loved, Hong Lei adopted a playful attitude and wanted to try to use these ancient paintings to experiment with Duchamp’s method of subversion by subverting traditional Chinese art. He painted several flower and bird paintings referencing Song dynasty works. Painting with oils was completely different from the works of the ancients, and Hong’s birds were already dead, so the flowers served as floral tributes for the deceased animals. In his works composed in the shape of ancient fan paintings, the temperament was different. Nonetheless, the sense of doom that appeared in his other oil paintings and lithographs was preserved by using the same brushstrokes, and specific reasons for the deaths of the bird were provided.
With these experiments, Hong Lei sensed what he had unclearly felt before, but he was not pleased with his work. The expressionist brushwork impeded him expressing what he had intended to created and he soon realized that he didn’t want to only paint expressionist works with thematic changes. He felt inspired, but quickly realized that if his works were not strong they would be considered facsimiles of the original and would lose their emotional value. They would fall into the trap of modernism and lack any new meaning. Moreover, they were not what he truly wanted to present. He then placed chicken bones on his canvases, but he could not identify the underlying idea. Bones are perhaps related to the use by ancient man of skeletons for expression, and skeletons provided the ancients with a way of making an abstraction, and of reflecting on the major questions. However, how could chicken bones, being so fragile, relate to his thinking?
Flipping through art books, Hong Lei kept asking himself what he truly wanted to achieve. This strange psychological reading prompted the searching artist to imagine that he might find what he was looking for in the repertoire of existing images. At the end of the year, he unconsciously sketched Chinese Box (Zhongguo hezi), in which, he recorded his ideas in draft: a crimson lacquer box, green patina, Song dynasty painting, pearls, fragrant makeup, silk, shattered gems, a bird’s broken wings, broken lotuses and so on. These ideas came from the ancients, from his understanding of lacquer painting, from Duchamp, from his own family’s stories, from the heritage of the city with which he was familiar, from history and from the knowledge gleaned through reading. However, the sketch alone could not solve the artist’s problems, and only intensified his complete loss of confidence in painting. If he did not find another medium, his artistic career would have arrived at the precipice.
Hong Lei recalls:
At the beginning of 1996, right after New Year, my heart felt like ashes. After the spring festival, I returned to my hometown, Changzhou. I studied the techniques of the American artist Joseph Cornell, and made some installation-like works. They were all installed impromptu, with the help of my student Dong Wensheng, and we photographed them.[5]
This brought him to the question of the relationship between photographic methods and actual objects, and on what level they are related to art. In Wu Hong’s discussion of Hong Lei’s 1995 work using chicken bones, Hong Lei had stated:
They were glued on with chicken bones. That red hue had certain contours. At the time I saw some oil paintings of Gerhard Richter, with a gray background and indistinguishable texturing. I thought they were great. I had also seen works by famous artists such as Joseph Beuys at a German art exhibition in 1995, and was influenced by them. Photographs I had seen prior to this were conceptually different. I also saw some Dutch architectural photography and thought it was fantastic.[6]
Even though the topics touched on by the artist did not directly deal with this issue, the new ideas he had encountered were constantly subverting his way of thinking. At the beginning he was not aware of the nature of his own art, only that he was interested in photographing his impromptu works and seeing what the outcome would be. But later he realized that the photograph itself was an artwork. Or had he established an inseparable relationship with his own installations? During those years Hong Lei completed several works consisting of photographs of actual objects, and this work allowed him to constantly reflect on the relationship between the actual objects and photography. In terms of the meaning of his work, the artist wished it to be relevant to real society. He said: ‘Of course there is perfume in a photographic studio and if we eat watermelon outdoors then there’s a paper umbrella on the watermelon. I feel that modern culture pervades everything and I am only borrowing from it. At that time, I was basically affirming this society and I had no other means for doing so’. Here Hong Lei is explaining his work with the small umbrella. As the artist’s accumulated memories and psychological baggage were gradually stirred, he wrote:
In fact this series of works was relatively Western in style. It is described as an installation, but it more closely resembles photography. I bought an Italian vase and my wife’s work unit gave me samples of stuffed birds. We borrowed them to pin to the vase. And then there was my mother’s polyester quilt cover, which she also lent me. I wanted the blood to drip directly onto the glass. These things lived in my memory and they also appear in my novels. Some families have these kinds of things, like my grandmother. And I treated them as cultural samples that have come down from posterity. I then applied patina to the draft of the work.[7]
It was during the process of shooting this work that Hong Lei wrote on prints of Images of the Auspicious Crane (Ruihe tu), ‘to be or not to be: that is the question’. If we look through the artist’s work we discover that, in 1995, the artist had once painted an Image of the Auspicious Crane. In comparison with the original, the floating clouds were now not so auspicious. He now depicted the scene of an imminent storm and the flying cranes seemed to be frightened. This was not at all ‘auspicious’. In the second half of 1996, Hong Lei was still concerned by the dilemma of Hamlet, meaning that he had not yet recovered completely from his sense of loss and chaos and was still uncertain about his work. Nonetheless, things were changing. Have returned to Changzhou, he had to earn a living. So he began to fiddle with actual objects and a camera when he had some spare cash, and once again assiduously experimented. In 1997, he realized that ‘it was only through photography that I can present the ideas in my mind, and traditional Chinese art can only be transposed through photography’. He asked Han Lei, living in Shenzhen, to buy him a second-hand Pentax 120 camera.[8] He thought that he was beginning to have the means to realize his gradually clarifying ideas. Then, in the fall, he travelled to Beijing, and shot his first successful series in the Forbidden City, Autumn in the Forbidden City (Zijincheng de qiutian).
The concept of death was now steadily conveyed through his dead birds, and his knowledge of history provided him with a unique understanding of the Forbidden City. He realized it was a bearer of power and mysticism, and that it represented the existence of an irresistible force.[9] However, in this grand complex of ancient palaces, what was ordinary life like, for example, for a palace servant? Classical novels contain many tragic stories, but the particular details of these tragedies became blurry over time, even though certain meanings became deeply rooted in the minds of sensitive people. The dead birds decorated with pearls were used to symbolize ‘palace servants’, even though this was not the original intentional. In this way the artist brought historical stories easily to mind through his works, but the artist also succeeded in expressing his unique desolate feelings. No matter what his mental state before shooting, when the photograph revealed itself, the artist realized that he had found what he wanted to express, whether or not it had any particular concrete basis.[10]
In autumn 1996 Hong Lei entered his work in the exhibition New Photography: Conceptual Photography curated by Daozi at the Capital Theatre. Hong Lei’s art had entered a new vigorous period, and following his feelings Hong Lei shot many works of ‘dead birds’ based on Song dynasty paintings in his series titled Song Facsimiles (Fang Song xilie). The images taught him that by only slightly subverting the attitudes of the ancient artists, pertinent questions relevant to life could be reiterated. This series of works gave Hong Lei more confidence. Of course, among his works, the unusual pleasures of China’s ancient artists were also demonstrated, as demonstrated by the scene in Dim Fragrance and Distant View (An xiang shu ying). In order to emphasize the age of the rocks, he used green pigment to depict moss. In these moments, Hong Lei restored the mentality of the ancient artists, except that the birds were already dead. This sort of aesthetic taste would have been unthinkable for the ancient painters.
In his novel Image of the Auspicious Crane he shed some light on this work:
Emperor Huizong later wrote an essay titled Record of my Sighting of the Descent of the Lord Tianzhen to Earth in order to clarify his work, and he inserted many sacred allusions into his record of a lost journey. However, his work had already been unveiled to the world, like a tornado that had ripped a palace to pieces. His descendants wanted to chase after this golden dream, and two hundred years after they escaped to the south, they constructed many mazes there. Today, in Suzhou you can walk through these mazes at any time, but you will never be able to find the emperor’s misty lake.
Hong Lei began to use photography to freely rewrite history, rewriting stories he had read, heard or thought about. He no longer worried about his art not conveying interesting stories. In the second half of the 1990s conceptual art began to emerge in China, and artists used installations, video, performances and even more complex forms to convey their views, and photography became a conduit for new ideas for a number of artists, who used the camera, dark rooms and computers to reconstruct worlds according to their own understanding. They imagined and rewrote historical events, and re-annotated the past and present. Hong Lei became a member of this group, and his own work made it more popular. After participating in the 1997 exhibition, Hong Lei remained determined to use photography as a medium for expressing his views.
Re-making the Historical Landscape
Later, I came to the center of the forest, a wide-open area of grass with a dry pond, a wisp of light mist stretched over a forest of birch trees. At that moment, I saw a white moon in the western sky. I remember that there was no particular reason for me to walk into that forest. I was driven by a kind of attraction, an attraction that hinted at my desire to cry, almost like a sentiment of appreciation. In the morning they were golden, in the afternoon flaming red, and, now, under the moonlight, this view with its stretched out layer of mist hanging in midair is refreshing, it makes me happy. (The Boat of Namgyal Lankhang)
This is also the imaginary vision of Hong Lei in his early years. Then he spoke of the landscape, of colors, and also of the moon that so easily occasions melancholy. These subconscious images began to appear, several years later, transformed in his work. He did not replicate a narrative of words, but replicated the sense conveyed by words, and made use of pre-existing historical landscapes.
In 1998, Hong Lei began his Chinese Landscape (Zhongguo fengjing)series. He began with the gardens of Suzhou, having brought home photos of the Liu Garden and Zhuozheng Garden in that city. He carefully added the color red to the fake rocks, water, windows, walls and sky in these photographs. Was Hong Lei altering the appearance of history? Was his understanding of nature different from that of ancient artists? The Chinese tradition of garden landscaping was an attempt to bring a boundless nature under control perhaps because, among other reasons, an excessively abstruse nature would be terrifying. In the constantly rebuilt and collapsing gardens, stories unfold, and through visiting these gardens and reading and writing poems about them, as well as through historical records, people come to understand the mysteries of these gardens. Liu Garden, for example, is the memory of the nurturing and nourishing heart, and the names conferred on gardens and their vistas by those who came before us endow the gardens with a sense of elegance. For example, even though the ‘Hidden Jade Mountain Home’ (Hanbi-shanfang) was an inscription provided by the scholar known as the Recluse of Fragrant Zen, Pan Zhongrui, the inscription gives meaning to the building and the space, as well as the surrounding rocks and vegetation, so that ‘this place’ becomes what the name describes. Yet, might we not have other feelings when we walk along corridors joining courts and small paths between planted flowers? Do these environments only record the life stories of cultivated merchants, officials and scholars? On the eastern wall behind the artificial mountains of landscaped rocks south of Mingse Studio, we can see Dong Qichang’s calligraphy with the two characters reading ‘Full Clouds’ (Bao Yun) carved into the brick. This scholar of the Ming Dynasty used these two characters to describe the man-made rockery towering to such a height that it was shrouded with mist and mesmerized the transported visitor. Relying on visual evidence to interpret the rocky outcrop might challenge Dong Qichang’s use of words, but those who know history and literature realize that it encapsulates and explains Dong Qichang’s cultivation of his inner being as well as his art. Indeed, every aspect of Suzhou’s gardens embodies traces of such cultivation, and ancient writers would often use the phrase ‘there are no more beautiful things that the eyes can accept’ to describe the value of these gardens. Yet, all Hong Lei’s views and installations, imbued with their endless praise of these ancient vistas and objects, are only one way of expressing history; they are only the visions of certain ancient personalities who kindly provided visions for those who would live later. The name ‘Liu Garden’ (literally, Remaining Garden) itself suggests that this was a garden preserved by chance from chaos for posterity. Yu Yue wrote at the beginning of his ‘Record of Liu Garden’ (Liuyuan ji), ‘After the great chaos, the flames of war waned, the high platform tilted and the pond was still. Not knowing the mundane world, this garden was luckily left untouched. Was this not the creator intending this garden for worthy men?’ Yu Yue then discussed the beauty of the garden, enjoyed by a solitary visitor.Most ancient writers wrote of history with grief and indignation, but did not probe the reasons for these emotions. Most also praised nature, but never noticed any problems nature might present. This outlook led to self-gratification and detachment from the real world. By editing historical landscapes, Hong Lei was offering another facet of history, without pointing to concrete evidence of serious issues related to these landscapes.
Hong Lei’s understanding of gardens differs according to time and context. Like most artists born in the 1950s and 1960s, he lacked a systematic education in traditional culture. The education he received growing up was that of the revolution and autocracy, a system of knowledge that lacked any connection with traditional culture, but its application of the political concepts of ‘mistakes’ or explanations of ‘correctness’ to shattered and broken walls, old courtyards and hidden dwellings was irrelevant. Linguistically, these things are either ancient and meaningless, or ‘beautiful’ and ‘elegant’. They could be experienced internally as either an annoyance or vicarious enjoyment. Thus Hong Lei said that in his early years he was not interested in gardens and was annoyed by ‘refined beauty’, and the modernist movement of the eighties almost entirely ignored the environment of south China’s Yangtze River region. Even artists like Ding Fang or Zhang Peili, who studied at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou, were also obviously uninterested in this local ancient beauty. In line with the then prevailing view that traditional Chinese painting had come to an end, the landscape of the Jiangnan region lacked any value in contemporary art. However, in the 1990s, the sensibility of artists changed, and some artists again discovered that walking alone in a garden was a ‘true enjoyment’. Today people think differently about things that are old, which signals a suggestion of death or desolation, a momentary warning about time, again opening up again questions about how difficult life is. Such sentiments are different from those of the past, and are perhaps also different from what people will feel in the future. However, Hong Lei felt such sentiments were worth discussing. Stories from the past again surged from his subconscious. As a child, an old person had told him a story about ‘a young girl dressed in white, who sat by a well in his backyard crying. She cried for a long time. By the well there was an apricot tree. Later my grandmother said the tree was chopped down, and the sound of the crying ended’. Such stories wove together gardens, classical literature and Hong Lei’s own dreams, to create a feeling of tragedy. If one accepts today’s life and the meaning of this complex life, then the artist would represent it seriously. Art concepts from the 1980s onwards have influenced Hong Lei. Recalling the process of producing this series, he describes it as follows.
What truly influenced me was American landscape art. It was quite early on when I had these ideas, when I took students to the Zhoushan islands to paint. I read great deal about American and Western art, including landscape art, and I would draw circles in the sea. At Zhoushan I saw many small islands in the ocean, and I thought that painting these islands red might make them attractive. So later, when I shot the Suzhou Garden series, these were ideas I had wanted to express quite early on. The big question was how to express these ideas. The education I received in college had been concerned with beautiful things. But I wanted to show the Suzhou garden as a special ambience with power and depth. I thought that if I proceeded with the methods of landscape art, I would color all the water red, which would be rather powerful. Of course in real life it is impossible to color the water red. So later I shot it, and then added the red color, as though the pond was a pool of blood.[11]
He began to visit the gardens more often and gradually became familiar with different stones in different corners and their scenic features. While imagining stories unfolding historically, he planned how the plot would develop. Sometimes, he imagined himself walking among the spirits in those corridors, among artificial rocks and flower paths. This was an outcome of the artist’s rewriting of the historical landscape. He was especially determined, and would say that those gardens without the red hue were not necessarily more realistic than his own works. On the contrary, he argued that perhaps those ancients living as ghosts in the world below would agree with him. There is beauty, in these gardens, but also tragedy, despair, desolation and even intrigue; all these concepts are a part of history. Among his five works on Suzhou gardens, three are scenes of the Zhuozheng Garden. Hong Lei probably knew that this was a garden built by Wang Xianchen, who had returned home after a failed political career. Wang wanted to cultivate a tranquil mind, and transcend the complexities of politics, to be at peace with his body and soul and cultivate himself in his old age. However, could the master of the garden be satisfied with this? And wasn’t bringing each stone here to this garden and the cultivation of each plant in it also a step in removing the master of the garden from society and placing him in this tranquil place? In fact, the construction of the garden itself was a technique for preserving a complex mind. Hong Lei was certainly aware of the history of these seemingly beautiful gardens, but he was more interested in the blood streaming out through the gaps in the stone. The red hues were surely the handiwork of Hong Lei, but he tells us that people in the past could not see the color red, but that now he was showing them that I am only delineating the historical red that was always there. This series liberated Hong Lei, because he realized that through it he could express what had been difficult to convey using existing images. Therefore, he began to comprehensively and freely use photography and digital technology and embarked on a new period in his career. From 1999 to 2005, he produced Peony Pavilion (Mudan-ting, 1999), I Dreamt of the Late Autumn Pond in the Huizong Reign (Wo meng jianle Huizong shidai de chitang wanqiu, 2000), Yangtze Bridge (Changjiang daqiao, 2003), I Dreamt of Being Lost in the Xiaoxiang Hand Scroll (Wo mengjian wo mishi zaile Xiaoxiang tu tujuan li, 2003) Facsimile of Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colors of Qiao and Hua (Fang Zhao Mengfu Fu Que Hua qiuse tu, 2003), Chinese Landscape: Wind, Water, Fire (Zhongguo fengjing: Feng, shui, huo, 2003) and Facsimile of Auspicious Crane (Fang Ruihe tu, 2004). The artist worked with different sentiments and expressed different points of view, experimenting with what was internally required for each work.
I Dreamt of a Late Autumn Pond of Huizong’s Reign was photographed by the artist in the autumn of that year at the heritage site of Yancheng, near Changzhou, that dated back to the Spring and Autumn period, and he completed it using computer digitalization. The lyric poetry of the dream, the waning lotus leaves, the dead ducks and pigeons, and the water of imponderable depth were all related to the past and time, and its belonging to life. What did a pond in late autumn look like during the reign of Emperor Huizong? With no visual information, the artist suggests that we look at his dreams, and so who can say this is not a true view?
The content of I Dreamt of Being Lost in the Xiaoxiang Hand Scroll is also a dream. On this occasion, the artist borrowed Dong Yuan’s Xiaoxiang scroll as the blueprint for his visual editing. Hong Lei’s hazy dream scene is visually related to Dong Yuan’s known work, but the figures in the water and on the boat are very close to our contemporary conceptions. In this free collage composition, we can choose our own explanation of the images, such as Hong Lei’s replacement of the fishermen in the original work with completely functionless nude bodies surrounded by bubbles.
Facsimile of Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colors of Qiao and Hua is different from the previous two works. In this work, Hong Lei replaces the gentle and soft Mount Hua in the original painting with an industrial coal hill, and uses another industrial construct to represent Mount Qiao. Natural objects in the original painting are all replaced with industrial products and settings in Hong Lei’s work. Following the artist’s transpositions, history and time become the actual themes. The once naturally generated mists and clouds are today’s industrial pollution, an inescapable aspect of today’s environment. This comparison hinges on many aspects of photography, imagery, history and reality.
In the works titled Peony Pavilion, Chinese Landscape: Wind, Water, Fire and Facsimile of Auspicious Crane, Hong Lei has interestingly provided dramatic details, elements that relate only to nature – wind, water, fire and even thunder. Hong Lei wanted to show that these scenes happened in the past, and that dangerous and irreversible experiences are a necessary part of life. The natural phenomenon of death remains, of course, a constant motif. However, the danger signaled in Facsimile of the Auspicious Crane does not simply come from nature, but from social reality, from the unspeakable game of power:
It is meaningless to observe the universe in its entirety, according to Hong Lei, because the universe has no observer who transcends time and space. After eliminating the creator of all things, in the evolution of the universe, even after the Big Bang, the world exists only as a constant, in your understanding of time. It is like moving from this planet to another, and you ride in the boat of Namgyal Lankhang. This might all seem rather fantastic, but we cannot escape from this time and place. (The Boat of Namgyal Lankhang).
From 1999 to 2005, Hong Lei was also photographing landscapes that were more commonplace, and in this series of works he tried to avoid superficial drama. In terms of expression, this series was closer rather than farther from tradition, and he attempted to invoke the ancient injunction to ‘convey without effort’ (shen er buzuo). In composition, these black and white works readily suggest the vignettes (xiaopin) of the Southern Song period, simple yet elegant; in terms of a tone, they are closer to the tranquil and lucid taste of the traditional Chinese scholar. The artist describes them:
I thought about these works from two aspects. One is in terms of traditional things, which comes from my imagination. The other perspective is that of contemporary art. Aesthetically speaking, they are rather simple and are intended to make the empty soul emptier.
From my earliest works to my digital photography, although one cannot say they are against tradition, they all include a critique of tradition. However, the new direction no longer includes this critical attitude, but is abstracted from tradition, perpetuating it while following it.[12]
According to the artist’s plan, this project began in the spring of 2000 and it comprised rather ordinary black and white photographs of landscapes, which he would continue to compile for twenty years. This timeframe suggests a Zen-like project.
Dreamt and Represented
The Great Khan said, ‘You can sit down’. Those below sat down, stiff and upright. ‘Are you a poet? If the great men do not record it in writing, then the world will lose its color’. The officials agreed, eyes staring at the quivering beard of the sleeping Khan, an old man about to depart from this world. ‘I want you to praise my accomplishments and my person. I am the master of the world, my father was also the Great Khan, and today I am the Great Khan. Death is upon me, and my children will govern the land I leave them’. (Hong Lei, Genghis Khan)
Among Hong Lei’s earlier paintings we already see human figures, and a concern with the human body was a focus of the modernism of the 1980s. Experience and history gave the artists of that generation a different attitude towards emperors, chairmen, leaders or fathers, quite unlike the prevailing attitude today of mockery and nonchalance. In 1998, while thinking about the expressive function of photographs, Hong Lei also produced works with human figures. At first, he searched through works of art history. His Facsimile of Liang Kai’s Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain (Fang Liang Kai Shijia chu shan tu,1998) was a photographic facsimile of the Zen monk Liang Kai’s painting. Thus, the term ‘facsimile’ (fang) became a point of focus, but how relevant it was to Liang Kai’s art is debatable. Nevertheless, Hong Lei respected Liang Kai’s refusal to ever work in a studio. Hong Lei complained that art historians had neglected research on Liang Kai, and that perhaps scholars had overlooked Liang Kai’s inner Zen view that only the void was important. This was the period when Hong Lei was producing his works with dead birds. While utilizing images passed down through history, Hong Lei retained his passion for the dramatic. As he put it:
Of course, I am evaluating this person in my mind. I felt this was a photograph that would shock people. It had to be dramatic, strongly dramatic. The facial expression of the actor and that of the original work had to correspond. Even though the composition is basically the same, Sakyamuni himself is different.[13]
In order to enrich the dramatic element, he chose a young man of the Zhuang minority, an ethnic group known for their stocky strength, to serve as his model cum actor, and made him up with an oddly shocking expression. The drama brought about by this expression was obviously diametrically different from Liang Kai’s transcendental subject. However, it was congruent with Hong Lei’s own understanding of real people and suited his intention to make this person correspond with the historical Sakyamuni. Who is the subject in this composition? To what do the dried branches and desolate scene on the mountain allude? If we only pay slight attention, we see the dead bird inserted by the artist, and so we know why the expression on Sakyamuni registers shock. Hong Lei said that ‘the first thing Sakyamuni saw on emerging from the mountains was a dead bird. It was a very simple idea at the time’. Like borrowing from Dong Yuan’s landscape, Hong Lei borrowed Liang Kai’s painting of Sakyamuni, but the form was, of course, unimportant. Nevertheless, the title, historical background and the basic layout of the composition force us to ask: What does the artist want to tell us? Is he only saying that he completed a work in imitation of Liang Kai’s painting?
Among his figurative works, we can list the following, I Dream of Being Murdered by My Father While Roaming in Lang Garden (Wo mengjian wo zai langyuan aoyou shi bei wo fuqin shasi, 2000), I am the Apsara (Wo shi feitian, 2001), I Dreamt in My Last Life I Was a Carbon Copy of a Woman (Wo mengjian wode qianshi shi ge nüren de fuben, 2003), Facsimile of a Facsimile of Ladies Beating Newly Woven Silk (Fang Daolian tu fuben, 2004),and I Dreamt of Being Suspended and Listening to Huizong Playing the Qin with Chairman Mao (Wo mengjian wo bei dao gua zhe he Mao zhuxi yiqi ting Huizong fu qin, 2004).
The topic of I Dreamt of Being Murdered by My Father While Roaming in Lang Garden makes us uneasy. The theme derives from the artist’s constant reflection on and fear of death. Dreams are a recurring physical experience, even if they partake of death. They are also lyrical, because the artist can witness his own death, and analyze the reasons for his death. We do not know how familiar Hong Lei is with Freud, but in this work we can see that even after the death of Hong Lei’s father, he continued to be subject to his father’s threats and manipulations. This mental reality reflected his father’s impact on him from his early years. Ruan Hao’s painting Female Immortals of Lang Garden (Langyuan nüxian tu) was originally based on poetic imagery; the immortals frolic where they live, without concern and without death. However, Hong Lei decided to re-cast the heaven of Ruan Hao’s Lang Garden as a hell. His dreams and concerns are killed off by his father as he roams Lang Garden. The actual background is that ideas and behavior today are very different from the rules set by his father’s generation. Perhaps Western thinking has completely shattered the rigidity and rules of autocracy. The mental gap between the two generations cannot be easily bridged, and Hong Lei senses the conflict between knowing that he ought to respect his father’s generation yet disagreeing with their concepts. This became a source of prolonged resentment. Hong Lei tells us:
I have never seen the original of The Immortals of Lang Garden. I have only seen it in art books, but I felt it had a special sense of theater. The painting itself is unclear, which I thought interesting and so I took it as my inspiration. Of course, the question of how I would go about producing this work required a great deal of thought. In the end, I decided to place myself at the center of this story, focusing mainly on my relationship with my father. He was a communist cadre, and he subconsciously exerted a lot of pressure on me. If he were still alive, I am sure that he would not approve of my current lifestyle.
Hong Lei did not care about Ruan Hao’s impression of the Lang Garden, nor did he care for most of the information Ruan Hao sought to convey. When Lang Garden appeared in the artist’s imagination, this realm of the immortals had already been transformed into the artist’s own design of a beautiful hell. Ghosts, either of murderers or those are murdering, drift through the work. Myriads of stars are blinking and there are chilling waves of lights, an ambience of cold and darkness that is not at all the meaning Ruan Hao had in mind. Hong Lei said his interest in the supernatural was influenced by the female Japanese photographer, Mariko Mori, but dreams have been part of Hong Lei’s creative world since the beginning, and he has often chosen means of expression that suit his world of dreams. Hong Lei’s view of the universe is literary, because the myriads of stars can awaken the mysteriousness in his mind, although this view is rather different from that expressed in I Dreamt of Aliens Landing in Zhejiang (Wo mengjian waixingren denglu Zhejiang de huajuan, 2005) completed several years later.
I Dreamt of being Suspended and Listening to Huizong Playing the Qin with Chairman Mao is a facsimile of the Song dynasty Emperor Huizong’s work Listening to the Qin (Ting qin tu). Here Hong Lei makes use of a classical painting but also brings in personal issues and politics. Hong Lei’s hypothesis is based on his knowledge of Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, the tradition of listening to the qin, palace politics, the history of Mao Zedong and political history since 1949. Thus, the artist presents a collage including himself and Mao Zedong in the composition, providing the act in Listening to the Qin with a completely different dramatic scenario. There are many ways of looking at the work, but the atomic bomb exploding in the far distance while Mao sits calmly and listens delineates the implications of this work.Another official’s chair is empty, signifying that the artist himself is being suspended. But being suspended upside down is almost symbolic of death. The title of the work preserves the sentimental impression of Listening to Qin, yet being suspended makes the originally calm scene highly problematic. Hong Lei retains the stone from Taihu Lake in the original work, but the transformed color blue that he gives to Emperor Huizong’s original rock tends to inauspiciousness and, by juxtaposing Ming dynasty furniture and an ancient qin, the artist signals that the contradictions are not just ideological and political. His historical complexity also encompasses the contradiction and conflict between contemporary culture and traditional civilization. In its historical imagery, existing objects, organization, appropriation, editing and illogical augmentation, Hong Lei expresses his own mental complexity. Those with no historical knowledge might have difficulty understanding the work, but the new sense and method that sustain the work are perhaps even more important.
The official quietly got up from the ground, facing the Great Khan with respect. A servant began to read a poem, which was in the fashionable style of regulated verse, in which lines correspond with beautiful cadences, creating high and low waves and a sense of being within the lines. The official read until his mouth and tongue were dry and his eyes blurry, and then he stopped. The Great Khan opened his eyes wide and said, ‘This is an unprecedented historical poem, it accepted me, accepted the world, and hundreds of years later, people will recite your poem and forget about Genghis Khan’. With that the Great Khan entered an eternal sleep. The official left without making any noise, tears clouding his eyes and revealing his feelings. He stepped outside, and saw a giant star rush towards him. Before he could emit a cry, a spear flew from the hand of the khan’s beloved sixteen year old concubine and pierced his throat. (Genghis Khan)
In Hong Lei’s recent works inspired by the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grave, titled Qi xian, he summarizes all his earlier photographic experimentation: drawing literary allusions from the past, using existing objects, expanding his digital technology, appropriating fashion composition, imitating historical legends and hypothesizing historical questions. It would be naïve to attempt to assess Hong Lei’s evaluation of the historical Seven Worthies. They are only a historical and literary construct, regardless of what is written in historical texts, and regardless of the research and analysis conducted by experts. In reality, the most appropriate approach is simply to apply one’s own interpretation to the Seven Worthies. Basic common sense dictates that we take from the Seven Worthies what is useful to us. Is it the atmosphere of creative freedom in the bamboo grove or the subversion of thought? The amount of wine they drank or their libertine behavior? Or is it something else? Or are they all unimportant in the end? We see a hidden cruelty in Hong Lei’s new Seven Worthies. Dangers lurk, and there is a dramatic world transcending men and women, despair and lost eyes, strange poses and appearances, the limits of imagination, the artist’s dreams and representations. All these derive from the artist’s imagination and reflection, from his sudden enlightenment and his long term infatuation with particular issues. He applies his own linguistic forms to the works, and it is sufficient to know that the work is by Hong Lei.
I titled an earlier essay I wrote about Hong Lei’s previous works, ‘The Past Can Only Be Mourned’ (Wangshi zhi kan’ai). From Hong Lei’s work, I realize that there is a common characteristic among people who ‘mourn the past’. This sense of melancholy nostalgia derives from the ancients. The living can laugh and smile yet, as soon as they think about life, they suddenly feel remorse. When the swallow flies away, people are concerned to find to find its trail, but however hard one searches, there is nothing left. Looking into the sky, there is only its gradually fading mournful cry. This is why sorrow pervades the dreams and life of Hong Lei.
30 March 2007
Notes:
[1]At the time, Guan Ce was one of the most active artists in Nanjing. Together with several of his friends – Ding Fang, Yang Zhilin, Shen Qin, Cao Xiaodong, Cai Xiaogang, Xu Lei, Xu Yihui, Yang Yingsheng, he organized a surrealist group called Red: Journey (Hongse: Lü) in the June following Jiangsu Youth Art Week. Because of his sensitivity with material, he was an outstanding artist.
[2]He said ‘that the exhibition left me with deep impressions about social relationships, as a result of all the squabbling. Guan Ce and Jin Feng were an alliance and wanted us to be their companions, so that they could distort the publicity. At the time I did not realize this and, because at gatherings they would deliberately or seemingly inadvertently attack or belittle me, I felt quite insignificant and later did not get along with them. But it was precisely because of my collaboration with them that I began to start on my own work’. From: ‘Where Are We Coming From? Where Are We Heading? Interview with Hong Lei’ (Cong hechu lai? Xiang hechu qu? Hong Lei fangtan ji).
[3]Ibid.
[4]In December 1998, Li Xianting wrote notes discussing an essay by Ding Fang titled ‘Strength, Tragedy and Heroism: The Symbolic Expressionist Artist Ding Fang’ (Liliang, beiju yu yingxiongzhuyi: Xiangzheng biaoxianzhuyi huajia Ding Fang) published in the inaugural issue of Art Trends in 1991. In this historical piece, Li Xianting criticized his own view on Ding Fang. He explained that, even though in 1991 he had expressed different views on Ding Fang’s work than he held in the past, he still maintained his belief that Ding Fang was a key artist in the ’85 art movement, the reason being that ‘I was hoping for the birth of a historical rhapsody of tragedy in art’. Li’s notes reveal some psychological signs of the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s. Li Xianting discussed his doubts regarding the ‘grand soul’ (da linghun) in the work of Ding Fang and changed his view on the source of passion revealed in Ding Fang’s art.
[5]Chronology (Nianpu).
[6]‘Where Are We Coming From? Where Are We Heading? Interview with Hong Lei’ (Cong hechu lai? Xiang hechu qu? Hong Lei fangtan ji).
[7]Chronology (Nianpu).
[8]Ibid.
[9]When Hong Lei spoke of the process in shooting these works, he said ‘they were shot during the return of Hong Kong, in October 1997. The handover of Hong Kong was relevant to central power of China, and it was best to shoot in Tiananmen. But it was impossible, so I chose the Forbidden City. At the time it went smoothly. No one disturbed me and I shot them at wall corners’. See: ‘Where Are We Coming From? Where Are We Heading? Interview with Hong Lei’ (Cong hechu lai? Xiang hechu qu? Hong Lei fangtan ji).
[10]‘This matched my later reading of Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng)and Plum in a Golden Vase (Jinping mei), but it was later on. I had no idea why I felt that way at the time. Perhaps they were memories from childhood. But I have never seen the Perhaps they were my imagination’. Ibid.
[11]Ibid.
[12]Ibid.
[13]Ibid.
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar