An Architect and a Photographer

Daniel Liebskind and Eugene Richard would not have shared much in common if there were no 9/11. One is an architect who has been a theorist for all his life but suddenly found himself in spotlight and great demands after winning the master plan on World Trade Center; and the other one has long established himself as one of the most respected photojournalists who worked most of his life among the poor, the sick and the neglected. But they both came up with something to remember an event that fundamentally changed the America yet quickly faded into people’s memory. The two recent lectures I attended once again brought those days back to focus: Liebskind inevitably had to talk about his design for WTC and his fight with David Childs, while Eugene Richards spared his own words and showed his eulogy that combined projection of slides and live recording of interviews and funerals. Liebskind’s speech was fast-paced, upbeat and optimistic; Eugene Richards remained somber and mellow through his talk. The two artists could not be more different, but they both relied on sentimentality to move their audiences, reflecting two different ways to confront with losses and tragedies.

It is no accident that both artists ended up making these works. Liebskind first became well-known due to Berlin Jewish museum, and Richards’s most famous early works documented his wife dying of breast cancer. Life seemed to have dealt something very tragic to them from early on and they were destined to spend their whole life to deal with it with art, not just in different mediums but also in styles and motifs.

Making something or anything artistic out of September 11th is a tricky thing in this politically confusing environment. Just as Liebskind’s soaring freedom tower has won both hearts and detractors, Eugene Richards’s new works also gave him a sensationalist reputation (other than some early criticism on his exploiting the un-privileged). Liebskind insisted that the terrorists aimed to attack our freedom and wanted to use his design to manifest the American spirit of freedom (which can also be interpreted as a symbol of imperialism, depending on who you talk to), while Richards avoided the whole politics and focused on grieving, providing no clue why this happened and where we should go from here. Their works are perfect examples in which art can’t please everyone and can not escape politics entirely. It can inspire one group and help them heal, but it can appear trite, cliché or even vulgar for another group.

Two Talented Young Film Makers from Small Countries

American film schools must have done something right, even if American films themselves seemed ultimately iterative and dull these days. The path to success is to come from some small obscure countries without any baggage and learn the required theory and techniques and then go home and make films. Two films I saw this weekend convinced me of this. But of course, other than the ability for cross-culture exchange, the key is the talent. Without that, even the richness of unexplored heritage would go wasted. What also could help is, hm, some dose of gayness. I don’t know whether these two directors are gay or not, but I have reasons to believe so. They tend to think beyond conventions and take their liberty to dive in the complexity of sexualities. And the end result is usually refreshing and thought-provoking.

As a graduate of Chicago Art Institute and from Thailand, Weerasethakul (shortened as Joe) became more widely known when he won a special Jury prize at Cannes for his new film Tropical Malady. But his works have had enough followers through words of mouth way before that. His name becomes equivalent to New Thai Cinema. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which always pays special attention to Asian art, put together a three-day program to feed the converted and the curious. Unfortunately, I only got chance to catch the last show which was also his debut feature film called Mysterious Object at Noon. I walked in the theatre knowing nothing about the film. After first 20 minutes of confusion, I suddenly got the idea and the rest was an exciting and engaging ride. Using unrelated real storytellers from school kids to village elders, the movie slips in and out of the narrated story and blends both reality and fiction into one coherent flow. You can read the film as a deconstructive means to analyze narrative and its social-economical or psychological roots. You can also use it to experience Thailand as a country with lively and diverse culture heritage. Regardless of what you walk away with, the film does not give straight answer about what it is about. Maybe that is also the reason why his films could be so controversial. People either hate them or love them, and there don’t seem to be anyone in between. (Interesting enough, I found out that my friend Mike also blogged on this film and he absolutely hated it. See this link).

Apichatpong showed up after the screening and answered a few of my questions (plus others) with his usual modesty and economy of words. He did not want to explain why and how he made his films and insisted on following his own instinct in all his works. As his films are getting more and more budget and more polished technically, let’s hope he would never get corrupted by studio systems in Thailand or in Hollywood. After all, he is a true avant-garde visual artist in his heart.

While the Apichatpong retrospective was taking place in SOMA, Castro Theater was taken over by the annual Latino Film festival. One of the great things about San Francisco is its all-year-round film festivals where you can find films you won’t see anywhere else. More reasons not to move to the red states! The only flick I caught turned out to be the very outstanding piece from a very young Bolivian film maker named Rodrigo Bellot, who studied films in Cornell and broke into the international scene with this very debut. Presented entirely in split screen, I was slightly annoyed in the first 10 minutes but quickly got over the nuance of constant focus shifts and started to really enjoy the double perspectives. The film did not stop there. The split evolves and becomes a style device which moves freely between contrasting tones and rhythms, between mirrored and echoed images and voices, and between converged and diverged view points. In the end, it becomes a true work of art.

But what I found most interesting are the plots: Five interconnected stories that moved from both high and low classes of Bolivia to Cornell. The backgrounds of the characters could not be more different, but they share things in common: prejudice, global consumerism, identity confusion, and sex driven by something less pure. Bellot presented a panoramic view of a problematic world, where tensions of race, class and sexuality are so palpable and intense while they have to find strange and dangerous outlets in sex acts. This theme is not entirely new due to widely-practiced postmodernism in art, but a fusion of this theme with both South and North America under one critical lens is definitely new.

Both Weerasethakul and Rodrigo were born in 70s and still in the early stage of their careers. Their rising reputation and growing body of works indicate that film-making, as an art form of one hundred year old, is taking new directions in many geographic fronts although there is a uniting philosophical ground underneath. While Apichatpong’s film turns narratives inside out, Rodrigo focuses on manipulation of media images and reveals what is behind. The deconstruction is in full gear and Derrida must be smiling in his new grave.

Two Exhibitions in September: Beyond Geometry and Ed Ruscha

LA county museum of Art is an unpretentious gem hidden at Wilshire Boulevard. Under the glow of Getty it does not get much attention from the public although it has one of the best art collections in the country and frequently mounts impressive special exhibitions. Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1949s-70s, was an ambitious thematic project that sets out to examine the role of simplified form in art from a global point of view. It lumps many post-world war II art movements into one compact space, giving special attention to non-American artists whom have not been widely exhibited in this country, encouraging the audience to find the links and evolutions in such an expansive intercontinental discourse. Starting from early geometric art to concrete and neo-concrete art (some put all these three under post-painterly abstraction as opposed to abstract expressionism), the show becomes the most lively at the op art, kinetic art and American minimalism phases and then somehow ends up confusingly with all the diverse styles of “conceptual art”. With all the unusual forms, sounds, colors and lights and pieces all over the places, the exhibition hall feels like an Exploratorium for an untrained layman. The experience is further discounted due to the cramped space. Since most of these pieces work on the senses and perceptions, a spacious and well-lighted environment is much more preferred (as in Dia Becon). The other problem is the inclusion of the conceptual art. It seems to me that any of the new movements after kinetic art, no matter it is installation, performances or environmental art, as long as it dealt with forms or used serializations, they can all be included here (which they did). They do fit under the theme “Beyond Geometry” here, but somehow the connection with geometry could be quite a stretch. On the positive side, I really enjoyed works from a few South Americans: Lygia Pape, Helio Oiticica, and Jesus Rafael Soto. They may not be as spiritually ground-breaking as minimalism, but they were quite skilled and experimental and left wonderful works that aged better with time.

Ed Ruscha has always been lionized as the icon of pop art from LA. But instead of seeing his works in LA, I caught the large retrospective at New York Whitney one day before the show was closed. Actually the exhibition was divided into two parts. The photographs were shown at the first floor, and the drawings and larger pieces took the entire third floor. However, I found the photography session much more memorable than his more well-known word paintings. Some of his photos, such as all the buildings on Sunset Boulevard or the aerial view of parking lots, were already famous enough to end up in art history books. But it was the more obscure photo books and early photos taken in his Europe trip that caught my eyes. In the photo books Ed Ruscha demonstrated his deadpan humor that was both hilarious and thought-provoking, while in the European photos we could already detect many of the ideas and aesthetics he would develop much further in his future paintings. Even among the word paintings, the works from 60s and 70s, although often in much smaller canvases, give away much more subtlety and tenderness his later and larger paintings don’t have. Their small sizes draw the viewer in so that all the details and shades are observed, yet the linguistic meaning of the word remains mystic and indecipherable since there is not much background to interpret it other than the word’s own meaning. This ambivalence is exactly the trick. In 80s and 90s, Ed Rusha’s paintings got bigger and more colorful and start to resemble the posters more and more. On the first sight they almost look computer-generated by some graphic designers with slick surfaces and block letters of varying sizes. The earlier charm is unfortunately lost.

Motorcycle Diaries

Few books affected me more than Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries in my younger years. The book inspired both wanderlust and an everlasting adoration for Che. It also helped form my own ideology and political judgment when I was still ultimately apolitical. Years passed and the book has been staying on my shelf collecting dust, while I traveled much of South and Central America and felt strangely home in all these remote countries I would never have imagined to set my feet on. I could only say that all these adventures, all these affinities to a vast continent so different from my own, probably started from this small magic book.So when I heard the book was adapted into a movie by Brazilian director Walter Sallers, it became the most waited film of the year for me. I was afraid the movie would destroy all those imaginations built through the years (with backdrop landscapes culled from my own traveling), but a visualization of that enchanting and strenuous journey is also very appealing and exciting (especially with Gael Garcia Bernal in it).

I finally watched the movie with a large group of friends, many of whom with Latin heritages. I walked out of the theatre with mixed feelings. The movie is almost just as good as I expected, yet I found it unsatisfying. Maybe the fault is the medium itself. In order to make a coherent movie, Sallers spent much of the time building up the plot and the characters and even ended the movie with a Hollywood-like triumphant crossing of the Amazon, many of which were not even mentioned in the original book. Sallers also took the liberty to cut and paste the diaries and rearrange the small anecdotes to make the story flow better. I don’t see this as a bad practice, but it certainly altered the existing pace and rhythm of the book. The voice-over is the best Saller can do to convey the tone of the book. Gone are the poetry and the cerebral reflections. But as visual medium, a film can also do what the book can’t do. Unfortunately Salles could only provide some breathtaking landscape without personal feelings. The movie sees what a usual traveler sees. It is not necessarily what Che had seen.

The problem could be that Salles may not be the best person to adapt a road story like this. It is too easy for him to trap us in the same sentimentality he was so good at in his earlier films (Central Stations). Just as the book, the movie has a light and comical air in the beginning but eventually took a somber turn once the protagonists got to Andes, but this turn was rather sudden and the witnessed miseries did not point well to the wakening of Che’s political conscience. The tears were simply too cheaply won. As a book, Motorcycle Diaries was much more than a tour of places or tour of hearts. Even if the movie tried hard to go beyond that, it did not succeed.

As a reference, I went back to reread the chapters in one of the best biography book “Che Guevara: A Revolutional Life”, written by Jon Lee Anderson. Salles clearly took some notes from the same pages since much of the highlights in the movie were all here (but not in the diaries). Two more observations: The final close-up of real-life Alberto (who is well into his 80s) reminds me of “Rabbit Proof Fence”, and the back-and-white stills of the workers and peasants and Indians seemed to come straight from end of “Mango Yellow”, another Brazilian film on working-class people in Recife.

Incidentally, as I am also finishing reading Garcia Marquez’s General in Labyrinth, I can not help but compare Che to Simon Bolivar. Both were ferocious fighters, poets, avid readers, and rigorous intellectuals. Both grew up in privileged families and traveled widely. Both died young and fought the whole life for a united America but failed miserably in the end, and both became martyrs to inspire millions to follow. Heroic and tragic, Che and Bolivar are unique to South America, to its tumultuous history and continuous struggling, to its melodramatic culture sensibilities and sentimentality, to its need for hopes, dreams, and optimism. As today’s extreme capitalism continues to divide the world into rich and poor and exhaust the world’s natural resources, we have more reasons to challenge the status quo and seek alternative solutions for a better and fairer society. Che would always to be the symbol of this idealism and this selfless search of the truth. The violence he resorted to has proved to be futile and unwise, but his high spirit and combatant energy would live on. As I stood outside the theatre and looked around and saw all those young inquisitive faces, I felt I was one of them.

Urban Illusionist: Yang Yong

Since YangYong burst into the scene in 1999, she has been hailed as one of the major symbol for the new art trend coming from the south. Still in her twenties, her works have already been well exhibited around the world, with solo shows in Asia, US, and Europe. The success of YangYong raised two critical questions: Judged from a more universal point of view, are her works real breakthroughs in the contemporary photography? How is she positioned in the current Chinese avant-garde movement?

More than one critic described her style as Nan Goldin’s, which I would dispute. Nan Goldin often uses snapshot method to catch people in the middle of the act, or barely out of the act for a brief pose. She would often use harsh flashlight to emphasize the raw emotional state of the wounded characters, and the effect is often intimate and disturbing. YangYong, on the other hand, is clearly in much more control. She used both her friends and the strangers to stage the scenes, asking them to act out either under her guidance or improvise. She often changes the camera angle and reconfigures her group of characters to convey a sense of change and mobility. Also, she is very meticulous about the background and the lighting, using mostly natural light to construct an alienated, intensely-color-saturated urban jungle where her characters seem random, lost, distant and melancholy. YangYong appears to be much more a film maker than photographer, which came as no surprise since she was first a video artist before focusing on photography. You can clearly see some of Wong KarWai in her. Her training in painting also influenced her significantly, giving these images superb color, lighting, and sculpture-like compositions.

Therefore there is really nothing technically innovative about YangYong, but her images are fresh and beautiful. The other methods, such as staging, performance and serialization, are also very popular among Chinese art photographers, but YangYong is among the few who are able to produce the most poetic and unforgettable works. She quickly caught the attention of the international art world partly due to her subject matters, which are often beautiful prostitutes in a commercialized ever-changing Chinese city. In the end, foreigners also see exactly what they want to see, and her success comes from a perfect fusion of her talent and the particular need of market and history.

Two European Classics

Two representative works from two recent retrospectives made into SF's Castro theatre in September. They were Ingma Bergman's Fanny & Alexander and Visconti's Leopard. Roxie, a few blocks down in the heart of Mission, also presented a BBC documentary on Visconti to time with Castro's offering on European masters. After watching all three films, I started to understand why the baby boomer critics miss those heydays of cinema back in late fifties and sixties, when Italian masters, French new wave, and Ingma Bergman were making ground-breaking films one after another, pushing boundaries on many fronts -- all are the reasons to lament on the bleak state of current cinema.

Both Bergman and Visconti are not the typical stylists who populate today's art houses, although they each developed quite distinguished styles and forms to support their own cinematic visions. They principle achievements lie on the higher intellectual grounds, raising questions and providing insights for a wide spectrum of issues that concern psychology, philosophy, politics, religion and history. But behind all these large themes, these films never deviate far from their own life. Both Fanny&Alexander and Leopard are probably the most autographical films they made. They continuing successes and timeless qualities only prove that true art only comes out of one's heart. Their powers to move and to inspire are often stamped with the art-maker's own memories and feelings, which, on the other hand, also compelled them to make these films.

So, when both films were shown side by side, the commonality can be easily summarized. They are both historical dramas set merely 50 years apart, with sumptuous interior settings and aristocratic families as the main sujects. Both Bergman and Visconti were so fascinated with family tragedies and they went back again and again to to their own life to dig out tormented characters. The BBC film traced it all back to Visconti's attachment to his mother in an unhappy marrige, while Bergman biographers wrote in details and tried hard to map real family members to his cinema characters. Both men used their films to resolve their problems with God: while Visconti was interested in immortality, Bergam was more concerned with the moral issues. If Visconti wanted his God for eternal peace, Bergman defied its doctrines and wanted humanity to shine all through. Leopard is such a historical epic that zooms in on one family from a much larger social political perspective. F&A instead used character sketches to zoom out, reflecting the values and revealing the class tensions of the time. In the end, it is a much more personal film.The BBC film on Visconti focused on the relationship between his films and his own life, spending very little time to mention other Italian film makers and how his works might be influenced by the others. It became very clear that each of Visconti's film showed a side of him: The "bitchy queen" in "Senso", the erotic attraction to Nazi in "The damned", the aristocratic upbringing from "Leopard", the hidden SM theme in "Rocco & his Brothers', etc etc. 

I first read the script of F&A in high school. The world seen from a child's eye enchanted me, although that world could not be more different from my own at the time. The last scene in the antique shop is one of the best scenes I have ever seen, with magic and visual wonders abound. Leopard was also one of the very first foreign films showed in China after the Cultural Revolution, partly due to the fame of Alain Delon. Watching both of them in the same month is a feast on my own nostalgia.

Time of Fantasies: Aniu

I have wanted to write something since I first saw Aniu’s works, but I feel words are not enough to describe them. Most of the art photographers these days tend to have a clear agenda in their mind before they shoot their works, and an expert critic can usually identify the photographer’s intent or influences. Aniu’s works are something else. They seemed to follow a unique visual instinct, editing and extracting the most ordinary scenes into something quite dark and mysterious. The mood is always melancholy, the dodging and burning are prevalent, the colors are often de-saturated, and the meaning seems unfathomable. But together these images speak loudly for themselves.

The following is the small article he wrote to when he published a group of photos in a major Chinese photo magazine. Somehow the poetry of his writing gets lost in my attempt of translating this essay. I hope Aniu, if he ever read this, would forgive me.

I always know, behind the skyscrapers and all these colorful spectrum of people, there hide secrets that can’t be explained – These secrets exit in the alleyway, under a small tree, or behind the flicking expressions of people’s faces. They are also truths. For a long time I searched between the bustling city and the neglected corners, between two kinds of truths.Until one day I came to the beach on east side of this city. Dark clouds had covered the sky and made everything look grey. A tailless fish was washed up to my side by the waves. The body was bloated and had turned white since it had been soaked in the water for a long time. Where did it come from? Why was its tail missing? What ended its life? Was it the hungry sailor or sharp blades of some propeller? Was its misfortune connected to our own life?

Many days later, the fish appeared again in front of me as in the photo I took. The same question came back and it suddenly occurred to me that behind this image there is the river of visual fantasies.

It carries plots and fleeting moments, just as very small wave has buried a surreal past, every glistening ripple reflects the city’s vulgar desires, and every sinking sand can tell a story of sadness.

I slow down my pace, lower down my voices, trying to start a dialogue with them and listening to their sighs and smiles. Now I am standing on the side of the river and looking out. The river is wide with many crisscrossing tributaries. The real and the unreal can not be distinguished. I know that I cannot add anything to that, since “every river will eventually find its own direction”.

Photo SF, Chinese Artist Network, and Wang Ning De

Before I stopped by Photo San Francisco this Saturday I did not exactly know what I should expect. Hosted by Stephan Cohen gallery and sponsored by 60 galleries and dealers from US and Europe, it was one of the largest such exhibitions in the West Coast. Not to my surprise, I found most works familiar, beautifully framed, and rather boring. There were plenty of works signed with famous but dead names, and it was not unusual to find several different prints from the same negative. San Francisco celebrity artists, such as Michael Kenna, Todd Hiddo and Richard Misrach, dotted a number of the booths. After all, this was a trade show where only “safe”, established, and highly decorative works were appreciated or aimed to be put through transactions. No one takes risks, and most of the attendees probably do not have a taste for edgier and more experimental works. For myself, I hardly learned anything new and quickly forgot most of the images that flashed through my eyes.

However, I did have one good discovery. At one of the booths I found Chinese Artist Network, a newly-formed and loosely-connected Bay Area group which helps to promote photographers of Chinese origins. I have long wondered that such a group might exist, and finding them is almost like finding an adopted home.

They only hang a few works in the booth, but one definitely caught my eyes. It showed two Chinese men in Mao suits standing and dozing off in the backdrop of sky and clouds. The makeup they wore made them look like carders in revolutionary Peking operas. Abby Chen, a lady who sat in the booth, mentioned to me that the photographer, Wang Ning-De, was one of her favorites. I browsed through a zine-like brochure on the desk and got a quick glimpse of a whole body of works from Wang. Somehow these images stuck to my mind.

The internet did not give me more information about Wang other than the short bio listed in the CAN’s website. The same website also showed ten photos of his, which more or less came from the same series. They showed various characters, solo or in group, dozing off against various backgrounds. The moods they created vary too: Some are disturbing, some are cute and humorous. But they invariably give very ambiguous meanings and metaphors. Why are they sleeping in these unlikely situations? What are they dreaming? Or, in one image, you would wonder whether the kid lying on the ground is sleeping or actually dead. Whoever sees these pictures will inevitably face the questions of interpretations. The pictures are obviously staged with great efforts, but the intention is never clear.

Sleepy human figures are not new in Chinese modern art. Fang Lijun, a major player from early nineties, painted a huge yawning face in the heyday of Cynical Realism movement. Several other painters also took the same approach, rendering typicalized Chinese faces with or without expressions, as a way of self-mockery or defiance of the fast-changing realities. Wang’s sleeping figures seem to have taken a cue from that period, but they evolved and expanded the limit of the cynicism. He introduced child nudity, art history reference (the dancing children greatly resembles Matisse’s famous work) and more narrative structures into these images, while all of them form a complete self-referential visual system where time seems to be frozen, sleeping is the norm of existence, and humankind are ever more isolated even if they are in groups. These images somehow depict a space between reality and dreams, and audience can further decipher and decide for themselves what stories they tell and what mood they can convey. The mystery is beyond the words.

Black-White Song Village (Hei Bai Song Zhuang) - Zhao Tie Lin

The Chinese avant-garde art movement in the last two decades is probably one of the most unique events in the art history that deserves some attention of the future historians. It is still unclear whether this movement would leave behind any significant works that would be long remembered, but study of this unusual phenomenon would shed some light on some very basic questions about art: Why do people make art, sometimes against all odds and out of all kinds of madness? What is the function or role of art in a society that is rapidly transforming itself? How does art survive and move from fringe to the center?

Zhao TieLing’s new book, Black-White Song Village, is not an ambitious project to set about to answer these big questions. Instead it focused on daily life of a dozen free-lance artists who live and work in a rural village on the outskirt of Beijing, which has also been compared to early SoHo in New York or Montmartre in Paris. The village is not the first congregated living environment for Chinese artists. As early as 1990, YuanMingYuan Painter’s village was once made quite famous due to over-exposure to media. The artists in that village were eventually dispersed when the district government decided to clean up the neighborhood. Quite a number of them moved further away from Beijing and settled in Song Village. Over the time the village grew in reputation and became a magnate for artists of all kinds, some of whom have already been well established internationally, while most of others are struggling and little known.

Zhao selected a range of characters and devoted one chapter to each of them. Mixing dialogues with black-white snapshots, he used the usual photojournalistic format. The style of the dialogues runs from casual chitchatting to serious conversation on art. The photo shots are usually candid and intimate. The featured artists, often seen from the back and at a low angle with light lit behind, rarely stared straight into camera and did not seem to even notice the camera’s presence. If they did happen to look at the camera, they appeared slightly coy. Zhao must have got to know them fairly well in order to shoot at such a close distance. The artists were chosen not by their success but by how well they represent certain group or certain hierarchy in the village. They often had more interesting stories to tell, although some of them seemed to waster their time away in the village because it offered an isolated utopia where irresponsibility and craziness could be tolerated. Zhao’s intention is quite clear: He wants to give a more comprehensive view with their most private moments. Observant but not intrusive, these pictures give no embellishment of such kind of bohemian life but shows the unpretentious and the unforgiving sides.

Zhao was trained as a computer scientist but had a true passion for photo-journalism. After a few years in Computer Science Institute in Beijing, he gave up on science and devoted himself full-time to photography when he was well into his 40s. In the early 90s this could be seen as unusually rebellious and might have raised many eyebrows. From mid 90s, he published a series of books on marginal characters of the society: prostitutes, migrant workers, artists, people who exist outside the official system. It is a very rich and provocative vintage point: As China reformed itself from state-controlled socialism into a market driven free economy, more and more people left the land and old work units and ventured into migration without the official system to fall back on. Zhao wanted to document these changes and capture all the human dramas, both tragic and comical, with his lenses. By exposing the life of the poorest and most marginal characters, he also aimed to educate the prejudiced mainstream readers and hopefully bring changes to the system.

But with Black-White Song Village, Zhao hit a homerun since the material itself was highly relevant for his own artistic endeavors. His specialties, or his signature themes, are still there: The liveliest parts of the book are the anecdotes and life stories, narrated by the artists themselves. Their personalities and the hardships they encountered came well through the interviews. While letting the artists talked about their own ideas and strategies, Zhao also peppered his questions with his own thoughts on art and practice of art. He knew well that both the artists and himself faced the same questions : How can one maintain his atristic integrity while surviving in this market-oriented society? How does one pursue his/her individual freedom and financial success while remaining socially responsible? How far can one go in terms of self-promotion and making his/her works known? The answers are not so simple, and there may never be good answers.

As China continues to change and move forward, its internal art market is also slowly developing itself and the government also started to organize exhibitions and reform the art schools. Gone are the days when avant-garde artists had no other means to survive other than selling works outside China. Zhao’s first-hand sketches froze a particular time moment at a particular location, and his efforts would prove invaluable in the near future when the art scene could be entirely different from what is now. After all, the initial growth is often painful and slow and the pioneers often have a lot to pay.

Staging is Fun - Wang QingSong

Staged photography is all the rage now, and it is getting bigger and more expensive. Gregory Grewdson is probably one of the most prominent photographers specialized in this genre, using expensive equipments, a large crew and even Hollywood celebrities to create dark, surrealistic and suburbia epics. 

Jeff Wall, the Canadian who started this whole thing 20 years ago, stick to his more political themes, subtle but no less poignant. The Chinese artists apparently do not want to be left behind either: Wang QingSong, a photographer from Beijing and the brightest rising star, is taking New York art scene by a storm. Not only did New York Times use one of his images on last week’s magazine, it also dedicated an article about him on this Sunday’s art session, presenting it as a hard proof that Chinese modern art is catching up. Currently his works can be seen at his first New York solo show (Salon 94) and at the upcoming exhibition at ICP and Asia Society.

So what are all these buzzes about and why are the foreign curators so enthusiastic about him? I clicked through his website with these questions in my mind. I am usually a bit suspicious on Chinese artists who earned their fames in the West. Due to lack of official support in China and driven by greed, Chinese artists have a weakness to take shortcuts and cater to whatever the foreign art market wants. Some of them cashed out, while majority of them produced mediocre art and lost their true sense of creativity.

Regardless of any type of criticism, Wang’s images are definitely very impressive. They are very large prints (the longest is 31feet), eye-popping, colorful and story-telling. Any museum goer would be immediately drawn in by their sheer sizes, and he or she would not move away quickly because there are a lot to see and a lot to decipher. For western eyes, they can be both familiar and strange to look at. You may recognize Manet and Botticelli, you may know some Chinese famous paintings being referred but you won’t know which. The themes are inevitably both exotic and universal. To some degree this is the kind of modern Chinese art you expect to see (postmodernism practised using Chinese art tradition), but on the other hand, there are enough surprises to keep you engaged. The line between Western art and Chinese art is deliberately blurred here, and the visual and intellectual pleasures are abounded.

But Wang is not entirely original in his approaches. The lavish setting, the theatric posing and vibrant colors can be found in David La Chapella and Pierra et Gilles. The political pop and irony on commercialism have been overdone in the early to mid 90s by Wang Guanyi and a few others. The famila battle scenes were once staged by Paul Smith and Jeff Wall. The stitching of the scenes with help of photoshop to create long scrolls was probably first tried by Sam Taylor-Wood in her Five Revolutionary Seconds, and referring art history and famous paintings in staged photography is once specialty of Jeff Wall. But Wang is still the first one who combined all of above in his images, who borrowed Chinese art (both classic and revolutionary) so freely and in the end he formed his own particular vernacular to create visual wonders as well as a very dry but witty sense of humor to critique the absurdity of modern life (and the art world). Wang is very self-conscious. He can mock exactly what he intends to be.

My Visual Diary - Wang Xiao Hui

Chinese female artists, whom once went aboard and established themselves, would always rush back home and publish autobiographies, which typically feature success stories of conquering the West and tons of photographs of themselves schmoozing with foreign dignitaries. The Chinese saying, “returning home with all the glories”, applies perfectly well here: They have a lot to tell to their own people after all the loneliness, struggling and humiliations. After all, they succeeded in the West, and for Chinese people whose inferior complex still lingers after a colonial past, that means a bigger success than what can be achieved home.

Wang Xiao Hui’s “My Visual Diary” was first published in 2001 but has been printed more than ten times since then. I got a copy in Changsha this February, a month after I came cross her photobook “Close to Eyes” back in San Francisco. In the international art circuit, Chinese photographers are still rare species, and it is more unusual to have a published collection from prestigious art publishing house. My interest in her was thus elevated to the degree that I not only finished her book in a few days but also googled her and checked out most of her latest works. Wang is not a household name in the photography world, but her status is on the rise. Even if she may be still the second-tier artist in the scene, her success is an interesting phenomenon that deserves some analysis.

Unfortunately the book’s boastfulness almost distracts a reader from understanding her art. It babbles on like a psychiatrist’s patient who suffers self-esteem problems and relies on other people’s complements to feel good about herself. But the book serves its purpose for teenage girls who are not so exposed to photography but want so desperately to become an artist. It opens eyes for the more provincial and the less traveled. But for serious artists in-the-knows, even though the book helps give a roadmap on how Wang arrives at where she is now, it is not so artistically inspiring.

Wang came out of age in eighties and was one of very first batch of architecture college students after Cultural Revolution. She continued her graduate study in Germany under an official scholarship but her interest in photography and a few unexpected incidents pushed her to a completely different career path. From her own account, Wang showed artistic gift from an early age but it did not blossom until she got to Germany. The extensive traveling, the very nurturing environment supported by her husband and her friends, the unique position as the first few Chinese female artists in post-Cold-War Germany, and two rather tragic events that took place when she just started out as an artist (which includes a suicide and a fatal car accident of her husband), all contributed to her maturing into a true artist. Wang, like other prominent Chinese artists who gained their international fames in the nineties (such as Xu Bing, Cai GuoQiang, etc), belong to the same generation who went through much of their childhood and teenage years in Cultural Revolution and in a rather isolated society. All the new art movements developed in the West since the end of the World War II dazzled and stimulated them during their first few years of self-exiles. Driven by a sense of mission, they experimented and tried to adopt the new aesthetic strategies and combine them with various Chinese elements and traditions. Wang is not particularly so keen on making modern Chinese art. The Chinese influence in her photography is rather subtle and minor. But she does know how to ride on the curiosity of the West and take full advantage of their interest in her and her works. She takes it as her mission to represent well-educated, elegant and talented Chinese females. But in the meantime she still holds much of the traditional values from the past and feels awkward to cross any gender, political or sexuality boundaries. A few of her figurative works and her film “Shattered Moon” all expressed her own frustrations in her pseudo-feminist quandaries. 

Wang’s photography can be roughly separated into three phases. In her early days, from late 80s to early 90s, she was basically a good photographer. Self-taught and with a natural eye for composition and visual metaphors, she did mostly commercial photo projects. For much of the 90s she traveled more, shot films and her best works were portraits and human figures, in which she often used tricky lighting and long exposures, with focuses on eyes and human forms. From late 90s on, she discovered large color prints (which indisputably had put German photography in the center of attention) and started to make huge prints with abstract patterns. Abstraction is far from being new in photography. Generations of photographers have been using macro lenses to shoot floral or surface close-ups and render them into abstract expressionism. But the sheer sizes of the new abstract photography have made them much more impressive to look at. Wang was clearly inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe and Wolfgang Tillman and made her floral shots very sensual and decorative. There is something very consistent in all the stuff Wang did. They are always very beautiful and flawlessly composed, but for the price of good looks they lack spontaneity and wit, and sometimes even degenerate into clichés. Compared to other German photographers such as Thomas Struth and Andrew Gursky, Wang’s photography is short of intellectual substances.The most exciting contemporary Chinese photography still comes from China itself. The latest exhibitions on YangYong, Shao YiYong and Mu Chen at Goedhuis gallery, have shown very diverse set of visual language and potent political urgency. After all the postmodernism experiments and imitation in the late nineties, Chinese photographers have collectively made a quantum leap into the new century and pushed their individual styles much further than where they started. The art curators have taken the note and just started to organize shows and exhibitions to promote and showcase their works. The upcoming exhibition on Chinese photography and Video works at Asia Society and ICP New York would be an exciting and ground-breaking event to see true modern Chinese photography.

Taking Roots (Zha Gen) -- Han Dong

NanJing has always been an ideal place to produce writers. As the ancient capital for a few dynasties, it lacks no history and culture heritage. Situated close to Shanghai but still far enough, it gives itself enough metropolitan atmosphere but with much slower pace. In mid 80s there arose two very influential poetry groups: The one from ChenDu was called “MangHan”(Mucho Guys), and the other, from NanJing, was named “Ta Men” (They). Both groups made splashes with manifestos and reading gatherings and claimed to be antithesis of an earlier poetry movement called “Misty Group”. But by late 80s both groups had dissolved and most of the members went different directions. One of the major players, Han Dong, dappled into fiction-writing and stayed on the periphery of the poetry scene for a number of years. But his most famous poem, “About the Big Goose Pagoda”, remains the representative work from that period and has been quoted again and again:

About the Big Goose Pagoda
What else can we know
We climb up
And look at the scenery around
Then we come down
Big Goose Pagoda is a famous and the best-preserved Buddhist temple complex built around AD 600 in XiAn. Han Dong borrowed its historical meaning to tell readers that the world was neither as meaningful as was told nor as absurd as it seemed. It exists within your own perspective but also quite independent of you. Han Dong is an expert in revealing profound thoughts using the plainest language. He speaks with a cool and slightly detached manner, while his metaphors are masked between the most commonly-used words. An impatient reader may find them plain and banal, but once he gets it, he would feel the stir and occasionally certain enlightenment.

Han Dong’s debut novel, “Taking Roots”, was not published until 2003, when he was well into his 40s. It attracted more media coverage than any of his poetry works and won him the fiction prize of the second Chinese Literature Communication Awards (hosted by two major newspapers). In a time when most writers are focusing their attention on the contemporary and fast-changing China, Hang Dong chose to base his first novel on a particular period of Cultural Revolution, which has been an unpopular subject since the earlier “Wound Literature” period (late 70s to mid 80s). He dug out details from that period as well as many forgotten political terms coined up in the Cultural Revolution and gave a chronology of a sent-down family living in the rural northern JiangSu Province. Han repeatedly denied that the book was autobiographical, but by comparing the writer’s own life with what is described in the book, it is easy to believe that he used many of the real events and real characters he encountered. Although most of the book was told from someone who seemed to know everything about the family yet had nothing to do with them, the real point of view is from the grandson, who observed the six years of countryside life with fascination, fear and horror. In the very end, the book summarized the impact of the six years on the grandson, which, from my view, could be read as Han’s own:

The Tao family spent no more than six years in SanYu. After than Little Tao went to ShanDong for the college and only returned to NanJing for the summers. After graduation he was sent to another city and worked there for twenty years. Six years is neither big nor small proportion of his life, but LittleTao never dreamed of his home in NanJing, nor the blue-tiled-house in the HongZe county, or the HongWu Street 69 before the family were sent down. In the forty years, from south to north, for east to west, little Tao had been to many places, lived under many different roofs and had many different homes. But in his dream, there is only one home, which is the house in the SanYu village, with mud walls and tiles, built by his father from the scratch…...maybe that is the meaning of “taking roots”?

Han Dong went to great lengths to describe those six years, from the very first day how the family managed to adapt to the rural life, to the very end how they left the village with one deceased grandfather and terminally-ill father. Every story, every character, no matter how absurd they seemed, or how painful they could be, was always told without judgment or heavy charge of emotions, but always with plenty of details and senses of humor. The novel resembles his poetry, sharing similar narrative strategies and general atmosphere. As a novel, and especially as a semi-autographic novel, it planted more emotional punches than his poetry, but it still followed the anti-climax rule, narrating the most heart-wrenching scenes with disciplines and minimal words. If compared to Western writers, Raymond Carver may call to mind, whose pared-down and “dirty-realist” style probably had some influence on Han.

Much has been written about Cultural Revolution from several separate generations of writers. Depending on their age and experience, each wrote their works from different angles and under different motifs. Collectively they give a paranormal picture of a very unusual period of history in which lives of all social classes in every corner of China were changed or affected. Han’s “Taking Roots” filled one of the many gaps in this genre of writing. The depiction of a whole spectrum of characters explained Han’s own ambition to use this book to keep historical records for a bygone past. He embedded larger events in ordinary people’s life and showed both human resilience and human weakness. Yet, his sentiment is rather personal, his nostalgia is quite detectable, and the point of view never goes beyond Tao family. Han also aimed to use this book to come to terms with a childhood that changed him forever. In the end it should be read as literature instead of a history book.

Want to be Westernized? Bring on the Booze !

While reading Paul Bowles' travelogue in Turkey I came across the following paragraph:

Cannabis sativa and its derivative are strictly prohibited in Turkey, and the natural correlative of this proscription is that alcohol, far from being frowned upon as it is in other Muslim lands, is freely drunk...since the psychological effects of the two substances are diametrically opposed to each other. Alcohol blurs the personality by loosening inhibitions. The drinker feels, temporarily at least, a sense of participation. Kif abolishes no inhibitions; on the contrary it reinforces them, pushes the individual further back into the recesses of his own isolated personality, pledging him to contemplation and inaction. It is expected that there should be a close relationship between the culture of a given society and the means used by its members to achieve release and euphoria. For Judaism and Christianity the means has always been alcohol; for Islam it has been hashish. The first is dynamic in its effects, the other static. If a nation wishes however mistakenly, to westernize itself, first it gives up hashish. The rest will follow...

Bowles was definitely not the first one to compare alcohol and hashish. In the history of Marijuana, as early as in the 16th century, a poet from Baghdad, Mohammed Ebn Soleiman Foruli, wrote a well-known epic poem named Benk u Bode, which dealt allegorically with a dialectical battle between wine and hashish. And, even in the Castro crowd, there is a clear separation between the bar-hoppers (who consume alcohol in large quantities), the club druggies, and the stoners who prefer smoking pots and staying home. Any of them would give you the reason why they prefer one to the other. But Bowles could still be the first who associated the substance usage with cultures and westernization. If his theory holds true, does that mean the bar-hoppers are aggressive happy social butterflies, while the potheads are introspective and isolated from each other? And by further deduction according to Bowles, the bar-hoppers should be more “dynamic” in their personality and more “westernized” and thus holding some competitive advantage in this western society; and the potheads would be “static”, can’t cope with the change and would be left behind like the aged hippies. Then I am also wondering how we categorize the speed freaks and ecstasy addicts. They show enormous energy, openness and love when they are on. Does that mean they are more "westernized" than all the others?

There is a bit a truth in Bowles' assessment, but by close inspection, we see flaws in his logic. Bowles forgot that substance or alcohol always creates the illusions, which are elusive and don’t always relate to reality. Just like socially-inept person using alcohol to break the ice, a high-strung one may seek pot to calm down and relax. The effects are temporary, and they won’t change the personalities that easily (although sometimes they do). It is too simplistic to explain the culture differences by the usage of substances. On the contrary, why one drug is more popular in one society than in the others has complicated historical and cultural roots. The popularity of certain substance is the consequence instead of the cause. We can find many examples: the persistant chewing of qat in Yemen, the once ubiquitous opium dens in China, their rises and falls do not necessarily time with the westernization but actually act the otherwise.

Although Bowles lived in Morocco for his entire adult life and based almost all of his writings in third-world countries, he was a colonialist in his heart. As a sharp observer and an avid traveler, he was fascinated with “the other” and probably took a few lovers from the locals he encountered. But he remained critical of these cultures, which he constantly compared to the West and found them uncivilized, hostile and sometimes incomprehensible. The fear and distrust of Islam lies in the collective consciousness of the western mind, and Bowles was no exception.

Goodbye Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming Liang

Tsai, newly awarded with Medal of Honor by French government, is probably unknown outside film festival circuit. The slow pace and depressing themes have made his films not quite accessible for mainstream audiences. Even in Taiwan, he has trouble raising money for his new projects regardless of how critically acclaimed his previous films are.

His very first debut in 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, set the color and tone for all the following films he made. Working with the same actors and actresses and with loosely connected but largely different plots and settings, he created a bleak and oppressive world where his protagonists yearned for connections in vain and often set out for actions that only led to self-destruction and disappointment. 

Goodbye Dragon Inn is showing in this year's international film festival and it made me crave for a drink after it was over. All the signature styles of Tsai are here: Excruciatingly long shots, scarce dialogues, the desolate and dilapidated urban setting, heavy shadows and blinking lights. Even the tropical torrential rain, his favorite metaphoric subject, was pouring through the film. Loneliness, alienation, repression, the words that have been used to describe all his other films, fit perfectly well here. Beyond all that is the same nostalgia. The nostalgia is more explicit than ever: Dragon Inn, a popular martial-art film made in 60s, was showing through the film in the background. It represents a lost past, a death of cinema, an era when heroes and fairy tales still existed.

Gay subplots appeared frequently in Tsai's films. In Vive l'amour, in one scene the main character lied underneath the bed and was ultimately turned on while his object of desire was having sex with a woman. In The River, a father went to a bathhouse only to find out he almost had sex with his own son in the dark. Goodbye Dragon Inn also has one of the most intense and comical gay cruising scenes in cinema. But I heard Tsai himself is not gay. He is fascinated with gay sex probably because it gives him the best plot devices to portrait repressed desires and despairs for human intimacy.

All of Tsai's films can be seen as various explorations of the same theme. He never seems to succumb to the pressure of commercial films and stubbornly stick to his own vision and interpretation of the modern world. In the end, he finds himself a true artist who is revealing and continues to reveal the stark reality of modernization.

Belle and Sebastian

On one of the rare sunny summer afternoons in 1998 I came across an album named “Boys with Arab Straps” in Tower Records sample stations. I don’t remember whether it was the name or the album cover that caught my attention, but the curiosity of the moment led to my longest commitment to a band. The songs were catchy and moody, and the lyrics were witty and poetic, fitting perfectly well with my own sense of being on that day: Life is full of youthful adventures and excitements, with a hint of melancholy and nostalgia hovering on the horizon.

Over the six years I collected almost every album they released in North America. In the meantime they rose from an obscure Glasgow-based indie band to something much bigger, becoming kind of cult band for certain demographic section who deviate from more mainstream taste. It even made into the list of the music junkies in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. On the other hand, I found myself listening to them less and less, and the last album in 2002, a soundtrack written for Todd Solenz’s film of the same name, was largely uninspiring and forgettable. Just when I thought they would disappear without a trace like so many others, I found their latest album in my neighborhood music store. This time I had to ask the opinions of the staff who had an all-knowing look. Was it just as good as their old stuff? Yes, he said. But definitely a happier one.

Strangely enough, I do find myself liking this album a lot, even if it is slicker, more sugary and pop than any of their previous works. One of my favorite, Sleep On a Sunbeam, has lyrics like this:

Think about a new destinationIf you think you need inspirationRoll out the map and mark it with a pinI will follow every directionJust lace up your shoes while I’m fetching a sleeping bag, a tent...Another summer’s passing byAll I need is somewhere I feel the grass beneath my feetA walk on sand, a fire I can warm my handsMy joy will be complete

What happened to me? What was gripping on me and making me so high whenever I hummed these lines? Is this the sign of me still holding on to a belief when everything is still possible and life still holds infinite possibilities? Or, is it just the travel bug affecting me?So when Belle and Sebastian came to town and performed in Warfield last night, Diego got me a ticket so that I could see them live for the first time. It was a soldout show, proving its continuing popularity. The crowd was mostly white or Asian, comfortable middle-class kids who think they are cool and smart and rebellious. The vintage and retro style were everywhere, a step up from grunge and punk and a couple of years from becoming bobos. This same crowd would feed on bands like Nick Drake, Rilo Kely, White Stripes, Neutral Milk Hotel or Postal Services, and ironically they are all my favorite bands -- maybe I am just a make-believer among this groovy bunch, trying to make up for my missing part as a disenchanted but sophisticated American youth.

There was no surprise from the performance. Stuart Murdoch, the lead singer, was charismatic and funny and stayed as the soul of the band. Since so many different kinds of instruments were used, the stage seemed to be more densely populated than usual. The best moment came when four audience, all Berkeley-looking girls, jumped onto the stage and played weird percusion instruments while dancing for a very cheerful song. Your spirit was lifted, but your soul got barely touched.

I guess I would keep on playing Dear Catastrophe Waitress whenever I need to be cheered up. But I would probably grow out of it someday soon.