SHARPNESS OF THE SENSES: THE SUBTLE POLITICS OF HU XIAOYUAN

It’s a mysterious image – a simple white rectangle projected on to the wall. At first nothing seems to happen, the eye roves around in search of a focus. Then a soft curved shadow appears in the left corner and gradually moves across the image. The shadow is slight – something that we would not normally pay attention to.

Nearby a video screen faces the wall, only the reflected light on the wall indicating its presence. The documentation of it reveals the mechanics of the piece: the naked artist shuffling along a white surface with a large board strapped to her back. This installation, titled See 2012, is typical of the way artist Hu Xiaoyuan uses labour-intensive processes and technologies to produce inscrutable and sometimes absurd effects, resisting interpretation.

Hu is a young Chinese artist whose work I encountered on a recent visit to Beijing. In contrast to the chaotic and crowded city, her studio on the outskirts is a quiet haven and the works that she makes there deliberately obtuse. According to curators at the Rockbund Art Museum her works “are not outrageously spectacular, neither politically involved nor bodily theatrical.” (Xiaoyan in conversation, 2013: np) Such works differ from Chinese art of recent decades in that they avoid blatant party-political iconography – no Chairman Mao, no red stars, no little red books or (pop) Cultural Revolution references. 

In the late 1980s and throughout the 90s Mao’s image, along with other propagandistic images, became a prominent part of the Chinese contemporary art boom, especially that which became most well-known in the West – for example the major exhibition Mao Goes Pop: China post-1989 (presented in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993). During this period artists such as Yu Minjin and Zhang Xiaogang established reputations with images of revolutionary regalia and its intersection with capitalism: workers in uniform, marching patriots and other tropes of Chinese propagandistic art born out of Mao’s 1942 Ya’nan talks on art and literature. In the now famous speech, he asserted that the arts must be in the service of the revolution, always subordinate to a greater political purpose.

In his essay Mao Crazy Jed Perl critiques the use of Maoist iconography by arguing that it fetishizes and thus glorifies the Cultural Revolution (Perl, 2008: np). Using the example of Charles Saatchi’s collection catalogue The Revolution Continues: New Art from China he describes one contemporary Chinese work as “an American-supermarket-meets Cultural-Revolution moment.” (Perl, 2008: np)

Perl makes a valid point and his description neatly captures the flavor and problematic ethics of much recent Chinese art. However, there are many artists working with this imagery for diverse reasons that are not always immediately apparent. Chinese people are essentially forbidden from making anti-government statements under a complicated and partially unspoken system of censorship. As Ian Buruma and Philip Gourevitch point out, the Chinese Government has effectively banned politics which has the perverse effect of making everything political (Buruma and Gourevitch, 2013: np). As a result many artists from the period are seen (correctly or not) as dissidents and their work is often understood to be covertly or ironically critiquing the government through the appropriation of official imagery.

As many commentators have observed, Western curators and collectors have tended to favour art that appropriates Communist propaganda imagery. Contemporary Chinese artists are thus subject to a double political bind; on one side to satisfy the demands of their government, on the other to fulfil the image of dissidence that structures Western reception of Chinese art.

On my recent visit to China, however, I encountered artists who adopt more abstract, material or performative strategies, folding these histories in to a highly personal iconography. Hu Xiaoyuan is one of those artists. Her work Those Times I 2006, for example, references the subtle presence of party politics in her life by stitching her communist youth league card between layers of silk, along with personal items belonging to her mother and grandmother. This work is not apolitical but neither does it foreground the imagery that has played such a prominent role in Chinese art of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Hu’s recent work Wood 2012 consists of pieces of timber that lean against a wall in a white room. They are cut to varying lengths and are of different widths and grains. However, like See there is more to the work than first appears: each piece has a taut translucent silk skin that has been stretched over the timber’s surface and pinned at the back. This skin has a timber-grain traced across it in ink, imitating the material it covers. A companion piece Wood/Double uses the same processes but with timber laid flat on the floor. This echoes Carl Andre’s Minimalist floor pieces – flat squares made up of metal tiles – and yet operates entirely differently. While people can walk across Andre’s works, the silk stretched across Hu’s work renders it too fragile to be touched. Chinese ink and silk have been used for centuries in both calligraphy and landscape painting and while her treatment of them is unconventional their presence references these traditions.

Such work is not overtly political. Yet despite the artist’s elusive intentions, we can draw from or indeed impose meaning upon her methods and materials.

While much contemporary Chinese art is constructed in factories or otherwise outsourced, Hu chooses to work with objects retrieved from the construction sites of Beijing, dragging them into her studio where she transforms them into totems of quiet contemplation through her arduous processes. (Hu Xiaoyuan, 2012: 32) This is not a straightforward rejection of manufacturing or artists employing others to make their works. Rather it is a complex engagement with interrelated themes of redundancy and waste.

Artists across the globe meditate upon these themes, but for me Hu’s work is inextricable from its Beijing context. Often referred to as ‘the world’s factory’, China produces a significant portion of the planet’s toys, clothes, electronics and other consumables but as well as making a business out of waste management, processing and recycling an enormous amount of waste imported from Western countries like the UK every year. Salvagers comb the streets of Beijing for refuse, participating in an endless cycle of destruction and production.

I see Hu Xiaoyuan’s re-use of materials as a comment upon her location (perhaps speaking to issues relating to the environment and the global distribution of labour). In a work titled Alike very much 2010 -11 she deploys useless and soiled materials from her own home. This piece is made from toilet paper (in China this is often not flushed down the toilet because it interferes with plumbing) and baking powder compacted into a square cake and baked in her brand new oven. Hu made it when she realised that she had not used her new oven since it was installed.

These works suggest an attempt to still the frenetic cycle of exchange, reappropriation and reinvention. Although she doesn’t state this herself, I understand these works as in part a response to living in a hyper-energetic city like Beijing. In her famous essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag said of her own (American) culture: “Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.” She goes on to say that “What is important now is to recover our senses. […] Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” (Sontag, 1990: 3-14) It is to a visible extent true of fast-modernizing China. To me Hu’s work seems to restore this ‘sharpness’.

Whereas earlier generations of artists wrestled with propagandistic imagery head on, demarcating their political context with their imagery, many artists working now fold these references into non-representational forms if they include them at all. Li Shurui is another young Beijing-based artist whose work draws on images of LED lighting and street signs to create abstract yet rhythmic colour fields. Her colleague Liang Yuanwei also works with repetitive colour patterns, but using layers of oil paint to portray the floral designs drawn from old fabrics – a distinctly feminine aesthetic that recalls earlier female artist, and a pioneer in the art movement Stars, Li Shuang. The more established artist Liu Jianhua, meanwhile, has increasingly turned to more meditative imagery. Among his recent works is Blank Paper Series 2009 – a sequence of porcelain sheets designed to look like blank paper on the wall. The work appears simple but suggests open-endedness and possibility.

These works collectively represent a paradox; they avoid political and pop-cultural imagery and in so doing become politically charged. The artists in this essay are reluctant to invest their work with overt meaning, thereby resisting the didactic structure of propaganda that has dominated official visual culture in China since the 1942 Ya’nan talks, as well as the West’s hunger for dissident art. In Against interpretation, Sontag asserts that interpretation “violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme ... a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation.” (Sontag, 1990. 3 - 14) Likewise, Hu Xiaoyuan’s avoidance of overt signposting is as important as the meaning one can glean from the materials and processes she has used. As she herself says of the relationship between intention and interpretation, “Sometimes they intersect; other times, they don't touch at all.” (Xiaoyuan, 2012: np)

Cited references

Hu Xiaoyuan quoted in A Conversation between the Curatorial Division of the Rockbund Art Museum (RCD) and the artist Hu Xiaoyuan (HXY) in correspondence with the artist 10/12/13, np

Hu Xiaoyuan quoted in Hu Xiaoyuan 2010-2012, Beijing: Beijing Commune. p 32

Perl, Jed ‘Mao Crazy’ in The New Republic, July 9 2008, accessed on 08/11/13 from http://www.newrepublic.com/article/mao-crazy np

Buruma, Ian and Gourevitch, Philip, Out loud: Liao Yiwu’s life in excile, New Yorker podcast June 24 2013, accessed from on 12/11/13 from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/06/out-loud-ian-buruma-philip-gourevitch-liao-yiwu.html

Sontag, Susan ‘Against Interpretation’ Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1990, p 3-14. 

First published in ArtAsiaPacific issue 88 May/June 2014, pp 71-73