This text is excerpted from a paper first presented at the A4 Museum in Chengdu, China at a talk titled, “Classical Chinese Eco-Aesthetics in 1990’s Chengdu Performance Art,” in 2019. It was further developed and then presented at the Qinghua University Museum, “History of Chinese Eco-Aesthetic Criticism” Conference in 2021.
Tong Wenmin, Wave, Performance Art; Dinawan: Melaysia.
Single Channel Video(Color, Silent, 19’46”)
Classical Chinese eco-aesthetic principles gewu 格物 [investigation of things], qiongli 穷理 [making thorough inquiry],and wuse 物色 [appearances of things], were originally cultivated in Wei Jin Northern and Southern dynasties xuanxue 玄学 [Abstruse School] theory. Eco-aesthetic principles serve as a good lens when examining, analysing, and probing contemporary Chinese art. We will see how these classical eco-aesthetic notions inform our reading of works by three 1990’s Chengdu performance artists; Dai Guangyu, Zhu Gang, and Zhou Bin. [1]
Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and New York provide excellent documentation. (aaa.org.hk). This image shows Betsy Damon, founder of Keepers of the Waters (www.keepersofthewaters.org) and leading organizer of the first two Keepers of the Water performance interventions.
The 1990’s Chengdu Keepers of the Waters performed ecological interventions in Chengdu (1995) & Lhasa (1996). The core of the Keepers consisted in a Chengdu live art collective known as the 719 Artists Alliance, led by US performance artist and water activist, Betsy Damon. The Chengdu installment of Keepers of the Waters took place along the Funan River (today Jinjiang River) in Chengdu city, Sichuan province, China, from Jul 29—Aug 14, 1995.
Collaborators Dai Guangyu and anthropologist Zhu Xiaofeng worked with Betsy Damon to organize this iteration of Keepers of the Waters with artists from Beijing, Chengdu, Tibet, and the United States. A second iteration of Keepers of the Water took place from Aug 18 to Sep 3, 1996 along the Lhasa River in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region. Artists came from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, Tibet, Switzerland, and the United States.
(Left to right) Liu Chengying, Yin Xiaofeng, Dai Guangyu, Zhou Bin, Zha Changping, Zeng Xun, Zhu Gang, Zhang Hua and Chen Mo. Aside from Zha Changping and Chen Mo, both well-known art critics in the Chengdu contemporary art scene since the 90’s, all other persons in this image are Chengdu performance artists.
“Investigation of principles” in Dai Guangyu’s Artwork
Gewu has changed its meaning considerably over the past two millennia of China’s intellectual development. Using gewu in its earlier sense, it refers to how an artist studies, examines, and probes underlying principles of things in the world. It also refers to the study, examination, and exploration of an artist’s creative work. Chengdu performance artist and painter, Dai Guangyu, belongs to a tradition, like Lu Xun, of being a rebel in despair and speaking to the times. Dai Guangyu advocates for a revolution of consciousness, where there is no division between life and art, or artist and scene.
In Long Abandoned Water Standards (Keepers of the Water, 1995), Dai Guangyu sets up a street side pop-up scientific water observation site. He places shallow pans of water in an array of evenly spaced rows and columns. Bottles of water from the river are arranged on a wooden table top in an assortment of colours and grades of pollution, inviting the public to drink. This could be easy to interpret as drawing attention to water conditions, as a comment upon environmental oversight, or lack there of. The artist is investigating the principle of survival, as audience members shy away from drinking the dirty water. The artist then adds another layer of meaning by printing up 8.5” x 11” photographs of people he knows. An original set of prints is tacked up to a large wooden community board providing shade to viewers from the hot summer glare of Chengdu’s sun. A duplicate set is placed one by one in shallow metal pans, face up. Viewers investigate water’s interaction with cultural and social memory, watching faces of loved ones dissolve.
In a 2019 Dai Guangyu interview with our author, the Chengdu performance artist and painter states:
I see natural territories being developed all the time, natural resources being used up, and my heart is really uneasy about it. Of course I’ve got to speak up about this. In the 1995 iteration of the Keepers of the Waters, I finally had a chance. In this artistic intervention, we were concentrating on water as a natural resource, but we were really talking about so much more than that, like the growth and shrinking of life, the future of the earth, moral ethics in this present spectacle-driven society, as well as political situations and social responsibility we were taking on. Was there a way we could help to protect what we all need and share with one another? Was there a better more sustainable way to develop?[2]
Dai Guangyu, Long Forgotten Water Standards, Performance Art,
Keepers of the Water, Chengdu, 1995
Dai Guangyu, Clear Hearing, Performance Art,
Keepers of the Water, Lhasa, 1996
One mode of gewu is ganwu 感物 [mutual interaction between person and thing]. In Clear Hearing, Dai Guangyu starts out his performance artwork on the riverbank of the Lhasa River, kneeling, palm to palm. The artist holds this devoted silence to enter into communion with the river, allowing the sound of the river, feel of the wind, heat of the sun, tastes in his mouth, and the feeling of prayer position to clear his mind and sense of perception. In doing so, we are studying, examining, and exploring the river for underlying principles of the river, such as constancy, fluidity, softness, patience. “Concerning [the five great virtues]. Scholars [should] investigate their profound depths, and ‘extend by analogy’ (tuilei 推类) so as to exhaust the rest.” [4] Zhu Xi quoted one of the Cheng brothers even saying that “having investigated one event exhaustively, it can be extended to the others by ‘analogy.’ ”[5] The artist then decides to look more closely into the nature of water, prostrating himself, then, laying forward so that his upper torse enters and merges with the river’s flow.
Qiongli in Zhu Gang’s Artwork
“A man who is transformed into a thing is one who destroys the heavenly li and exploits human desires.” (Book of Rites)
Zhu Gang’s body of work produced with both the Keepers of the Water and the 719 Artists Alliance was also a praxis of the eco-aesthetic principle gewu. With Zhu Gang, however, we focus more deeply upon the cultivation and practise of gewu virtue ethics in qiongli 穷理 [making thorough inquiry], by exhaustively studying, examining, and exploring both the human social world of culture and the non-human natural/material world. The artist draws connections in his performance between the human and non-human, as well as human and human. The question Zhu Gang asks is the ultimate ethical question—how do we live a true, good, and beautiful life? The beautiful life requires the taming of desire, or guayu 寡欲. Early Confucians, Daoist and Buddhist worldviews converge on an asceticism in art. This piety and asceticism preserves ‘heavenly reason,’ or tianli 天理, for, “a man who is transformed into a thing is one who destroys the heavenly reason and exploits human desire.”
Zhu Gang’s art practice is based on simplicity and minimalism. To isolate variables, he keeps his artwork distanced from art conventions and institutions, producing them himself, arranging simple documentation. Friend and fellow Keeper of the Water, Zhang Hua, has photographed and filmed some of Zhu Gang’s works. Chengdu documentary filmmaker Ma Zhandong has also provided expertise, filming other artworks by Zhu Gang. The artist rarely disseminates his work through channels such as exhibitions or other events organized by either the public or private sector. He performs only on the streets, to random audiences who often know little or nothing about art. His subject is always social, and the artwork is usually idiosyncratically abstract.
In Zhu Gang’s conception, he thinks he is not an “ascetic”, but rather wants to present true existence and a new beginning, cultivating new possibilities that already exist. He believes that Chinese culture has been entangled in many “pseudo-propositions” for a long time. This includes, not least, his own constant questioning of the existence of “art.” To a certain extent, the questions constituting his life quest have to be asked again and again.
Zhu Gang, Curved Walking, Performance Art, Chengdu, China, 2014.
Zhu Gang, Book With No Words Series—Head in Red, Performance Art,
20 Minutes, Xi’an Road in Chengdu, China, 1999.
Zhu Gang, Crossing-through, Performance Art, Chengdu, China, 2009.
In a 2019 interview, I asked Zhu Gang about avant-garde art in Chengdu and China. He answered:
Most art being produced right now is not in the slightest bit contemporary. Sure, the forms are flashy and new. However, the truth of the matter is that Chinese art has yet to arrive at its own contemporary moment. That is, if you look beyond the external formal elements of the art being made these days, into the actual thinking that informs it; you’ll know what I’m talking about. The biggest changes (the ones we have a hard time acknowledging) are not the formal ones, but the ones within our minds and souls. This is the aesthetic transformation we have achieved.[3]
Wuse in Zhou Bin’s Artwork
In Daoist texts, wuse 物色[appearance of things] refers often to a principle utilized in yangsheng 养生 [cultivation of life], inner alchemy, and the art of fengshui 风水 [spacial geomancy]. In Buddhist texts, wuse isn’t found as a fixed term, but the two characters, wu 物 [nature,] and se 色[phenomena] occur with great frequency throughout important texts such as the Heart Sutra. Se often appears in a binary with kong 空 [emptiness].
As for the Confucian canon, in the “Wuse” 《物色》[Appearance of Things] chapter of Liu Xie’s Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, we read, “The ages have their things, things have their appearances, feeling is moved by things, words are used to express feelings.”[7] Zhou Bin’s work is intensely engaged with things and their processes as well as appearances. In his artwork, the artist strives to experience natural phenomena and forces, closing the distance between subject and object. We get this sense of ‘experience’ as immersion and duration in many of Zhou Bin’s artworks.
When asked which one of his artworks demonstrates the artist’s ‘looking into’ the ‘appearance of things,’ Zhou Bin answered that:
In 2007 at the Guangdong Fine Art Museum, I did an artwork where I stood on the roof of the museum from sunup until sundown. It was a conversation between the sun and my body. In the course of that day, the sun took a huge toll on my body. I was exhausted and my skin got badly burnt. My skin peeled for over two weeks after that. So that artwork was all about the communication between my body and the sun.
Zhou Bin, Chase the Sun, Performance Art,
One Day, Guangdong Museum rooftop, 2007.
In Landscape, from Zhou Bin’s epic 365 Day Performance Project, we see how the artist is playing on the painterly convention of using a canvas. The artist doesn’t paint on the canvas directly, however, but submerges its circular form halfway into a body stagnant water (polluted). Zhou Bin allows nature to ‘paint’ on the canvas through a process of elapsing time and chemical interaction of the canvas and water. He gives nature an ‘agency’ usually only given to human beings.
Zhou Bin, 365 Day Project—Landscape,
Performance Art, 2016.
Zhou Bin, The Trail is a Mystery,
Performance Art (Canvas, Pen, Ant), Beijing, 2010
Celebration: 1/6 Comment on Freedom, Performance Art, 1 hour, Chengdu, 2009.
Organizer: Zhou Bin
Participating Artists: Liu Chengdying, Li Daiguo, Li Kun, Mao Zhu, Wu Chengdian, Zhou Bin
References
[1] This investigation into principles of classical Chinese eco-aesthetics stems from research done at Sichuan University (2009-Present), while also doing research-based curatorial work in Chengdu’s avant-garde sector (2010-Present).
[2] Sophia Kidd’s unpublished interview with Chengdu artist, Dai Guangyu, October 10, 2019.
[3] Sophia Kidd’s unpublished interview with Chengdu artist, Zhu Gang, October 3, 2019.
[4] Stephen Owen, “Wen-hsin tiao-lung,” in Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harard College, 1992, pp. 183-299.
[5] Sophia Kidd’s unpublished interview with Chengdu artist, Zhou Bin, October 2, 2019.
Dr. Sophia Kidd
Dr. Sophia Kidd is Associate Research Fellow at Sichuan University, Visiting Lecturer at Sichuan International Studies University in China and Göttingen University in Germany. She is also an art curator, critic, translator, author and poet. Kidd was born in 1973 and is based currently in the US. Sophia graduated from Sichuan University obtaining an MA and PhD in Classical Chinese Literature. Dr. Kidd has also served as Visiting Lecturer at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. Kidd is co-founder of Yanlu Arts & Culture, publisher of Igneus Press, and Managing Editor for Literature and Modern China (Sichuan University).
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