The Chengdu Biennale has recently opened in 2021, November. The exhibition is divided into eight sub-themes and is accompanied by ten parallel exhibitions scattering in the city. The art exhibitions in China in recent years witnessed a gradual increase in female curators and artists (for instance, the exhibition “Stand by Her” held in Shanghai M50 in 2020 was curated and created entirely by women and mostly for women audiences).[1] What kind of perspectives do women curators bring to the contemporary art scene in China? This article answers this question via the lens of Still On (尚在), one of the parallel exhibitions in the Chengdu Biennale.
Still On （尚在）curated by Jasmine Jiang （蒋冰）
As one of the parallel exhibitions in Chengdu Biennale, Still On gathered more than a hundred pieces of works by thirteen artists, presenting their questioning of existence, negotiation with existing media practice, and experiment with photographic medium. As Jiang describes, although the exhibition is centered on photography as the central medium, what she tries to present is how these artists actively engage with the medium, questioning and challenging its inner logic and its contemporary presence/appropriation, rather than simply using the camera as a documentary and literal means of representation. Engaging the photographic medium in versatile ways, via different representational and aesthetic styles. Works expressed the artists’ social observation of Being in Chinese society, which we realize through their thinking and practice.
The title of Still On refers to a status of continuous existence. Being reflective about what Martin Heidegger has called Being-in-the-world, Still On hopes to draw attention to the status of existenz in marginalized class, gender, and social groups in contemporary China and Chinese Diaspora. Not shying away from politics while still surviving under the strict censorship, the curator draws attention to artistic exploration in LGBTQ communities, diasporic autobiography, ethnographic documentary, contemporary visual culture, and ecological care. The exhibition hence invites the audience to critically reflect upon existence in contemporary China and beyond.
Transgender Bodies and Existence
SHUI Can’s (税璨) work interrogates the notion of freedom through the lens of transgender bodies. Appropriating gendered and political symbols and assembling them into a spectacular narrative through collage, Can enables what Dick Hebdige calls “semiotic guérilla warfare”, a term that he borrowed from Umberto Eco to describe the subversive potential to construct counter-hegemonic meanings in cultural appropriation.[2] In his battle initiated on the canvas, Can explores the complex nexus between freedom, society, and individual, asking whether a body can be truly free from its socially defined appearance. Such discussion is reminiscent of Heidegger’s idea of thrownness, which describes Dasein (Being) as being ‘thrown’ into the world, which indicates the arbitrary or unavoidable nature of the body being socially defined.[3] Through artistic exploration, Can debunks the idea of freedom as an external telos and illuminates its nature as a constructed fantasy consumed as an ideological product in neoliberal societies. Authentic freedom, he answers, can only be achieved from an inner balance.[4]
The Distance from Breasts to Bottom (乳房到屁股的距离) (2020), Shui Can
Diaspora and Memories
Inspired by diary filmmaking and home movie, Artist BEI Yu (北屿) combines text and documentary film to explore diasporic existence as Chinese overseas in Sentimental Meeting of Love (你必须要趟过愤怒的河). Letting two parallel, autobiographic narratives in London and in Tokyo unfold in his essay film, he presents to us two people from different parts of China in correspondence, communicating their nostalgia and their confusion about identities. What does “being Chinese” mean for Chinese immigrants? As two strangers from different regions in Greater China encounter in diaspora, how would it redefine “Chineseness” for them? To explore such questions, the artist recalls his childhood memories in Shanghai, where the distinction between locals and outsiders/“East Asian foreigners” and “western foreigners” was often clearly drawn and emphasized. Investigating the subtlety lying in these dialectical relations, the artist intends to delineate how the Self and the Other is formed within such dialectics, with each being the necessary constituent of another.
Sentimental Meeting of Love (你必须要趟过愤怒的河) (2019), Bei Yu
Rural Villages and Demolition
In Shi Shaoping (施少平)’s work The nostalgia that never goes away(永不逝去的乡愁), the artist uses his camera to document daily lives of people in 10 villages and 824 homes in Huang Shan, Anhui. Tracing rural traditions of placing spring festival couplets at the two sides of one’s door, Shi witnesses the gradual disappearance of such tradition, along with the loss of population in the villages and the demolition of houses. As most of the younger generation left the village to seek lives in the cities, the village was left behind. Elders, peasants, and other populations with lower socio-economic class couldn’t work to support a life in the city. As with the era they’ve survived, they are once again left behind by the roaring progress of urbanization and modernization in contemporary China, as it wends its way on the stage of international politics. As old structures crumble and fall, we see history, memory, and tradition also dissipate along the way. Shi’s photographs thus reveal a part of China that is mostly invisible and suffering from an increasing wealth gap. Returning to the work’s title: what are we being nostalgic about? Why will it never goes away? Or does it? As China hastens its pace in urbanization and modernization, villages and the people who live in them seem left behind, rendered invisible. Will they be eventually forgotten? How can they re-enter the horizon?
The Nostalgia that Never Goes Away(永不逝去的乡愁) (2014-2015), Shi Shaoping
In addition to its focus on marginalized groups, this exhibition also explores abstraction as a state of existence, in broader discussion with the photographic medium.
Body
In Luo Li’s (罗隶) works of experimentation with digital images, the artist attempts to delineate image politics and its alienation of the body. Temperature presents a series of digital images that features representation of close-ups of the body (often female’s body) with color gradients indicating the varied body’s temperature. The body, in his images, is always in motion, and always obscure and distant, residing in the estranged media. Through the means of digital images, the artist intends to reflect on how the digital representation of the body constructs and alters our perception of it, including how we understand sex, how we feel, how we exist, and how do we understand the relationship between our body and another person’s body. It challenges us to rethink the “reality” that the body envisions itself in, and to reflect on the visual exploitation and distortion of body representation in visual culture today. As the body moves through his digital images, the artist thus intends to present and address a status of the body being flexible, moving, not fixed in the images but in constant destruction, reconstruction, and redefinition. What he is suggesting is a way to utilize the body as a weapon, a site of rebellion, where the body can reveal the power and violence imposed upon it, struggling to realize its own independence through experience, movement, and rejection.
Temperature 温度 No.14 and No. 196 (2019), Luo Li
Industrial Ruins and Natural Decay
Moving beyond human existence, in Yu Pengbo ’s 于鹏波 work Remains 山阿 and Relics 今非, the artist calls for our attention to decaying industrial ruin and reflection upon human technological advancement. In his photographs, Yu juxtaposes the glacier ruins from the Quaternary glaciation 山阿 and the ruins of a textile factory from 1920s in Qing Dao, China 今非. While traces on the glacier ruins were formed in an extended time frame beyond human imagination, the ruins of the textile factory witnesses the hasty process of modernizing an entire civilization in just a century. Evocative of emergence, climax, dying down, and being eventualy covered over in natural stains and mold. Such opposition to speed thus acts as a critique of the human-centric view of technological advancement as a mere justification for exploitating natural resources in pursuit of speed and progress.
Remains(山阿) (2021), Yu Pengbo
Relics (今非) (2019), Yu Pengbo
Female curators in Chinese contemporary art
When being asked about what it is like being a female curator in China, Jiang answers that she doesn’t like to put emphasis on her female identity during work. “Many women artists in China still encounter the challenge of ‘sustainability’.” She says, “Their work could be stunning but their career is often like a flower that blossoms for a very short period, as they are under the obligation of returning to their family and children.”[5]
It is notable that no female artists were featured in this exhibition, while male artists occupy an overwhelming majority in the Chengdu Biennale. In the following paragraphs, this article introduces four noteworthy female photographers in contemporary China.
- Pixy Liao (also known as Yijun Liao 廖逸君) (http://www.pixyliao.com/)
Pixy Liao is exemplary of a new generation of female artists who negotiate with femininity and cultural identity through exploration in self-portrait and photography. She is mostly known for her photography series Experimental Relationship, in which she stages self-portrait with her younger Japanese boyfriend, Moro, to explore gender roles, power dynamics, and sexuality in a romantic relationship. Her series has been shown in various international venues, including the Fotografiska, Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, Asia Society, and National Gallery of Australia.
- Luo Yang (罗洋) (http://www.luoyangphoto.com)
A leading figure in contemporary Chinese photography, Luo is best known for her photographs of young Chinese women. In her series Girls (2008-2017), her lens offers a sincere representation of young Chinese girls’ vulnerability, tenacity, and their unrevealed lives through candid portraits. The series has gained international acclaim and has toured in exhibitions around the world, including a ten-year retrospective exhibition “GIRLS” in Bangkok and Paris curated by Moonduckling. Luo has since photographed marginalized communities such as genderfluid and transgender adolescents and youth in China and beyond.
- O Zhang (张鸥) (http://www.ozhang.com)
Born in 1976 in China, Zhang is largely inspired creatively by the 1980s, a tumultuous time when China just ended the ten-year Cultural Revolution and was under the impact of growing global capitalism, the proliferation of mass media, significant discrepancies between the wealth and the poor, and a growth of subcultures in music, fashion, and art influenced by the West. Appropriating slogans and visual symbols from Cultural Revolution and combining them with pop cultures in 80s and 90s, Zhang’s photographs often situate the young Chinese females as the subject, projecting their gazes directly towards the camera. Her works thus initiate a critical discussion of the contemporary China entangled with its socialist history, the western gazes, and the young females’ position within.
- Liang Xiu (良秀) (http://www.plus3gallery.com/en/product-21022-82402.html)
In 2017, as just a 22-year-old and having picked up a camera just one year before, Liang Xiu has won the Three Shadows Photography Award, one of the most prestigious photography awards in China. Born in 1995 in a remote village in Shandong Province, Liang’s early life experience drives the creativity in her photography works. Exploring her femininity and lesbian identity in her performative self-portraits and engaging with philosophic and Buddhist terms in her essays, she investigates the source of her sufferings in the marginalized environment. By confronting the audience’s voyeuristic eye with provocative, sometimes violent, dark images, Liang’s photographs raises questions about economic disparity, sexual expressions of female and LGBTQ communities, and systemic repression of marginalized groups in Chinese villages.
[1] See Zhang Wanqing, “Art Exhibition by Women, for Women Held in Shanghai”. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006378/art-exhibition-by-women%2C-for-women-held-in-shanghai
[2] Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). The concept “semiotic guérilla warfare” is borrowed from Umberto Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare” (1997).
[3] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927).
[4] “Skin Specimen”: Participating works by Artist Shui Can in 2021 Chengdu Biennale, special parallel exhibition Still On (尚在).https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/I2rZ23ptMttsv6GnUxZJCw
[5] According to a private interview with Jiang Bing conducted by Lynette Shen.
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