Future perfection

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Dale Hudson

FUTURE PERFECT: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART AND THE QUESTION OF THE ARCHIVE CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ITHACA, NEW YORK

SEPTEMBER 23-24, 2005

Cornell University recently hosted Future Perfect: Contemporary Chinese Art and the Question of the Archive, an international workshop on art and curating organized by Thomas Hahn, curator of Cornell's Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia, and Timothy Murray, curator of Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. One of the largest gatherings in North America of Chinese artists and curators, the workshop inaugurated the Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art at Cornell, the first of many planned collaborations with the Dongtai Academy of Arts in Beijing, China. Notably absent at Future Perfect was Wen himself, who was denied a visa to attend the event by the United States government.

Artists contributed about 80 percent of the Wen Pulin Archive's documents. The digitization of the more than 400 analog videotapes, photographs, and other objects that document performances, installations, arts events, artist interviews, and studio tours in the Wen Pulin Archive marks a significant movement away from acquisition and curatorial practices based on connoisseurship and U.S. custodianship toward new conceptual models of collaboration and immediate access. Murray, who curated "Contact Zones" (1999) in Mexico City and "INFOS 2000 Net Art Contest" (2001) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, along with numerous Net art exhibitions, conceives digital communication as a means to interrogate and re-conceptualize centuries-old paradigms within the museum-gallery matrix. "The result," he explains, "has tended to result in an emphasis on concepts, ideas, and collaborations rather than on products, collections, value, and status."

Employing the newly legalized individual use of camcorders, which were once symbols of government surveillance, Wen began his video documentation of avant-garde art in 1985 when he graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. According to Yang Shin-Yi, who assists Wen in the direction of the Dongtai Academy, many of the artists documented by Wen not only produced art that rejected officially sanctioned artistic practice but also violated a law requiring them to return to their place of birth upon graduation from their study in Beijing. Working illegally and without state support, "migrant artists" (as Wen calls them) embody a rejection of the state.

As many of the artists present at the workshop attested, it was not uncommon for police to close exhibitions, installations, and performances shortly after they had opened. While censorship of the arts is not unique to China, Wen's archive documents a period in Chinese history of enormous political and social change in terms of the relationship of China's political leaders to its artists. (The National Gallery in Beijing opened the "China/Avant Garde" exhibition in 1989; a few months later, students were massacred at Tiananmen Square.) Wen completed his documentation of Chinese avant-garde art in 2000, when the Shanghai Art Museum organized its first biennale of contemporary art--that is, the date of the avant-garde's absorption into official art.

Among the new generation of curators present at the workshop, Gao Minglu of the University of Pittsburgh examined the political implications in his presentation "Curating 'The Wall,'" tracing ways that social, cultural, and gender boundaries within consciousness are formed and informed by space as it is intersected by physical structures, including the Great Wall and Tiananmen Gate, as well as the innumerable walls erected under rapid urbanization. Yang discussed ways that creating and organizing spaces for art production (studios) often spills over into creating and organizing spaces for art exhibition and archiving due to governmental constraints.

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Often ambivalent to, and rightfully suspicious of, the "Chinese art fad" in western art galleries that tends to exclude work by diasporic artists, the artists at Future Perfect described pressures within the international market that shape Chinese contemporary art, such as the preference for installations over painting and sculpture. Since the government periodically classifies installations, along with pornographic and political works, as "forbidden," more conventional art forms provide a means to articulate political positions that may not register when the works are evaluated according to western criteria. Lin Yan's work, for example, mediates between the traditional medium of ink and paper, which dates to first century C.E., and the western-inflected, unofficial work of three generations of avant-garde artists, including women artists, in her family.

Future Perfect also raised important questions about ways that western conceptions of time and space are reconfigured and recreated in response to new technologies and shifting political climates. One of Feng Mengbo's video game-inspired works includes images of the artist's son playing with toys paired with images from propaganda films by Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl that evoke the ever-present and uncomfortable proximity of historical events. Other artists presenting documents of their past work included Chen Lingyang, Chen Xiaowen, Du Zhenjun, and Xu Bing.