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.