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PART TWO
INFLUENCED BY HOME: CHINA
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Editorial Statement In the attempt to find the elusive place where I belong that’s not called home, I sought to look for artists that knew where that place was for them. By searching and discovering the ways that different artists and designers are influenced by their place of origin, RUDIMENT highlights the comparison and unlikely pairings of different cultures to see how they can influence a designer’s work. In my personal search of what has influenced me the most, it’s hard for me to tell the line between the mixture of cultures and how they interact with
each other. My filter of home is blurred by both my Chinese and Colombian ties. By exploring both of these culture’s through the lens of other artists, I have gained a new understanding of how people always seem to come back to the place they feel that they belong. RUDIMENT represents my collection of discoveries and realization that sometimes, where we feel like we belong lives also in the constraint of our memories and how we perceive our past.
A.WIJAYA
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YUE MINJUN Yue Minjun (1962) is considered one of the most prominent Chinese artists of our time. He was born in the Heilongjiang province, situated in the NorthEast Region of China and belongs to a generation of artists who grew up in the midst of the the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
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The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a decade marked by repression and fear, with education based on idealistic beliefs and principles. Intellectuals were sent to the countryside to work in order to learn about agriculture and production, contributing to the revolution through physical labour. With the death of Mao in 1976 came a period of reform and dramatically reduced repression, which saw an explosion of a new form of art. This emerged amidst many huge social, political and cultural changes, following an art form largely dictated by grandeur
and political propaganda. The ‘80s are well-known for movements including ‘85 New Wave, which saw a surge of young artists breaking free from the recent past with a strong freedom of expression and creativity. The ‘90s, in turn, have been characterised by the emergence of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, and marked the beginning of the appearance of Chinese art internationally. Subsequently, the ‘noughties’ became a decade characterised by commercial success. Each of these factors have contributed to a transformation in the way of thinking and expressing art nowadays. 11
Have these historical, largely outward changes been accompanied by similarly radical, internal changes for you? My experiences, feelings and some things from my cultural past have been essential for my current artistic creation. Furthermore, these experiences have reaffirmed my artistic concepts. In general, the Chinese give the impression that we are calm and peaceful people, nothing eclectic or categorical. I started drawing at the age of 10, and, initially, during that learning process and the visual images of the time I was greatly affected in a different way to He has been considered to belong to the Cynical Realism movement. This came about in response to the tragic consequences of the student and intellectual protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. These resulted in Minjun moving to a colony of artists in Hongmiao, situated in the Chaoyang district won the outskirts of Beijing. In 1993, Minjuin began to use representative self images in his work - capturing himself in a frozen moment of laughter. These faces have since remained in all of his work, becoming an unmistakable sign and trademark of his artistic identity. Laughter manages to lighten tragedy and pain, acting like a remedy against helplessness; like a safeguard against the imposed cruelties of reality on the sanctity of life.Laughter acts as an antidote to our anxieties and concerns, as a symbol of protest.
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how I saw after the 80s. However, if you are an art lover, your interest will grow when you begin to understand why an artist paints in one way or another. Then, your interest grows into a deep curiosity and uses this as a tool to gain further knowledge, with a constant evolution towards personal growth.Although a cultural and artistic system in China exists, with the introduction of foreign art the change was shocking.
What does laughter represent? Laughter is a representation of a state of helplessness, lack of strength and participation, with the absence of our rights that society has imposed on us. In short, life. It makes you feel obsolete, which is why, sometimes, you only have laughter as a revolutionary weapon to fight against cultural and human indifference. The laughter could be a perfect marriage with feelings. If we have the capacity to smile throughout adversity, then our presence will become stronger, tolerant and diverse, both for the artistic culture and for the majority.
How do you hope the public will approach your work? The direction of my work is allegorical between human nature and our own existence. Because I have noticed that, not only in the East or in China, people are constantly facing emotional conflict. I want to show how the individual, through painting, must remain awake, and how we need a greater understanding of the basic concepts of nature and life itself. My work doesn’t try to overly dramatize, and not because of that absence of tragedy. I want to refer to what each person feels by their sur-
roundings, or to the past experience that has been left in them through materialism; this does not liberate the human spirit, it is a pressure that leads to slavery. The direction of my work is allegorical between human nature and our own existence. Because I have noticed that, not only in the East or in China, people are constantly facing emotional conflict. I want to show how the individual, through painting, must remain awake, and how we need a greater understanding of the basic concepts of nature and life itself. My work doesn’t try to overly dramatize, and not because of that absence of tragedy. I want to refer to what each person feels by their surroundings, or to the past experience that has been left in them through materialism; this does not liberate the human spirit, it is a pressure that leads to slavery.
What is the future of your work? Given the different influences during my life, such as the Cultural Revolution or the time of the reform and opening. I have come to understand that it is my own traditional culture. I have related many of my works to the maze, which is integral to traditional culture; trying to express a feeling of confusion, loss and internal questioning that is in harmony with pain.
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CHI PENG Chi Peng (1981) was born at the beginning of China’s one child policy - a scheme aimed to reduce birth rates in order to monitor the population growth of the country. Themes of loneliness, escapism, adolescence and sexual identity evolve from a fear of failure prevalent in his generation.
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Chi Peng himself has said of the artwork of the past ten years: “A process of finding myself. Before I felt confused, wanted to run, but in the end it ended up in my own self.” Self-reflection is a key to understanding his work. The mirror images in Consubstantiality express this in the most direct manner. It is a kind of self-love, but is also related to self-searching. “In the subconscious, you can suddenly find that another You lives in this world, and you want to find him. In actual fact, he is very close to you and can clearly let you see another part of yourself.” Chi Peng’s work also contains much critical afterthought on society, politics and tradition. But what separates him from older generations of artists is that this thought starts from the individual’s point of view, not that
ture’s hegemony in China is also the subject of the Monkey King’s challenge. The work is infused with fearless spirit and societal criticism. Mood Is Never Better than Memory – February, an apparently saccharine work, actually contains something else, an absence of choice. The traditional Chinese family view forces many homosexuals to marry in order to accommodate their parents’ wish for grandchildren to carry the line further. In this respect, Chi Peng also experiences great pressure. In conversation with him, he told me that he and his boyfriend were considering adopting a child. His parents say “It doesn’t matter to us how you live, as long as you can give us a grandson”. In the picture, an
“It doesn’t matter to us how you live, as long as you can give us a grandson” of a generation or collective. This individuality and artistic expression is more directly affecting, and represents the potential of the new generation of artists. In Journey to the West – Now-ing, Chi Peng transforms himself, in the shape of the Monkey King Sun Wukong (an incarnation of the “problem child” and rebel), into King Kong. He stands with his back turned to the viewer (standing with the viewer), weapon in hand, ready for battle. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, leading to the Forbidden City, symbolizes traditional culture and political power. The gorilla that lies on this very symbol of China might be from a Hollywood movie. The influence of Western cul-
elderly couple is seen further down on the jetty, and at some distance – the distance between generations? – two men calmly walking with a child. I personally think that if they have adopted the child out of choice and not to satisfy their parents’ wishes, it could be a depiction of a Chinese homosexual Garden of Eden. Chi Peng’s photographs, often several meters long, refuse any beginning or end of the visual narrative. In terms of subject matter, they could not be more timely. In his work, the separation between cyberspace and living reality is already a relic of the past. Paranoid agitation and egomaniacal self-referentiality characterize the artist’s alter egos that multiplied like a clone and mutated into a flying humanoid fly across urban landscapes.
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The series Sprinting Forward (2004) shows locations easily identified by those familiar with Beijing, like the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where Chi Peng himself was a student, or the glass façade of the Hyatt. Apollo in Transit (2005) shows the wall of the Forbidden City. While in Mirage (2005) the dragonfly-like hybrids fly towards the special economic zone Shenzhen, in the series East-West (2005) they have already arrived in the West, as clearly shown by the Brandenburg Gate. Using the same montage technique he uses to maneuver this cast of figures into his pictures, Chi Peng also employs additional fantastical elements. For example, the running figure in Apollo in Transit is distorted into huge raindrops. Red airplanes accompany the runners in Sprinting Forward. Like film stills, Chi Peng’s photographs capture
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moments of the highest psychological tension, physical exertion, or arousal. It is never about exposing the represented figure—after all, it is the artist himself. The naked body rather functions as a surface for projection. Chi Peng’s photographic works show movements of seeking with an unknown goal. An expression of this diagnosis of (not only) Chinese life reality is made with great intensity: man here is a restless lone fighter, even love relationships become a public act of self-adulation, as unmistakably demonstrated in the series I fuck me (2006). Chi Peng is one of the youngest contemporary Chinese artists. The influence of his teacher at the Central Academy, the artist Miao Xiaochun (born in 1964), is very clear. Miao Xiaochun’s early digital photographs also feature the recurring format of the traditional Chinese scroll.
Both artists work with their own alter egos as protagonists. While Miao Xiaochun emphasized that his photographs are not manipulated afterwards, but rather montages of numerous single shots, for Chi Peng the real urban space becomes a backdrop for a fictional plot. In his new, still unfinished series Journey to the West (2007), Chi Peng positions the entire scene in virtual space. A mountain landscape extends over more than six meters. The lumpy rock formations seem almost to float in a sea of fog. In spite of the artificiality of the arrangement, every expert of Chinese landscape painting will notice how precisely Chi Peng adheres to the formal guidelines of the genre in Hua Guo Mountain. For example, there is no clear perspective. The endless size of the mountain, only shown in part, is suggested by the fog. Indeed, Chi Peng’s Hua Guo Mountain refers back to the Song dynasty masterpiece The Light Snow in the Fishing Village by Wang Shen (1048–1104). But this is just one dimension of Hua Guo Mountain. The tiny monkeys that
populate this mountain landscape are reminiscent of a scene in a fantasy film. Precisely this association and the overall title of the photo series Journey to the West activate an entire spectrum of layers of meaning for the Chinese beholder. There is a reference to the story of the journey by the monk Xuan Zang in the seventh century AD, who went to India to study the teachings of Buddhism and bring his knowledge back to China. According to legend, a flying monkey became the monk’s traveling companion, living through countless adventures with him. This material was adapted in a fantastic novel in the sixteenth century, which in turn has been taken up by countless TV-movies and films. In such mediated forms, Journey to the West takes part in the Chinese cultural heritage across the generations. The question about what is original about Chinese contemporary art, so often posed in the West, is answered in many ways by works like Hua Guo Mountain: it is the immense space for reflection that is translated and made current in the work of artists like Chi Peng.
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XIANG JING Xiang Jing (1968) born in Beijing, China has a unique perspective to view the transformation in contemporary Chinese art. Xiang’s artwork reveals the insecurity through which the misty nature of the modern human character and life itself are accentuated and reified.
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Born and raised in Beijing, Ms. Xiang grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and entered the Beijing Fine Art Academy in the mid-1980s, a time when, she says, the shift from collective to individual thought became her generation’s defining feature. She sprang to international prominence in 2007 with ‘Naked Beyond Skin,’ a series of vulnerable, lifelike bronze or fiberglass sculptures of imperfectly shaped, melancholic women. She has in recent years shifted focus from the female form to the disconcertingly flexible acrobats in ‘Mortals’ and docile
creatures in ‘Otherworld.’ I was born in 1968. I was sandwiched between the collectivism of my parents’ generation and the hyper-individualism of now. The defining factor for my generation was that we began to express things from an individual perspective. The importance of the personal became an anchor for us. Art is my fate. In the short term there are still exhibitions to deal with, but I would like to have a rest or at least slow down. And I would like to try something new in the future, not just in the form of sculpture. Let’s see what will happen. 23
Are there experiences to which you continually return in your work? I was born in 1968. I was sandwiched between the collectivism of my parents’ generation and the hyper-individualism of now. The defining factor for my generation was that we began to express things from an individual perspective. The importance of the personal became an anchor for us.
always have this property of drama and trauma in my work. No matter how great or happy things seem, I feel insecure in it. I make an effort to avoid the term “feminism.” People always want to call my work feminist. But all the theories behind feminism are Western: There was never a feminist movement in China. It’s a really important discussion, but even a long explanation can’t help foreigners understand that concept.
Growing up during the Why did you decide to Cultural Revolution, call your most recent you said people today “can’t understand collection “Will Things the background, the Ever Get Better”? emotions between these In China, people live for today and don’t people.” do you feel ask about tomorrow. They are intensely focused on the present. Throughout nostalgic for the past? Chinese history, the way things have been structured is that if you lack something, you just ask for it and hope it will be immediately resolved. There is a “presentism” here rather than a projection into the future. I’m interested in what this question means in relation to now. It’s a very Chinese question, this non-abstract sense of the future. The possibility of moving forward creates change in the present.
I feel insecure in this fast-changing world, and I try to conquer this feeling through my art. It comes from my experience of growing up in China. It was traumatic. I’ve experienced enough of the external world. It’s already changed enough for four lifetimes. As a result, I
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There’s been a vast change in the way that people communicate. Take the idea of being in a relationship. Previously, if you weren’t in the same place, you might be able to send a letter once a month. The time lag intensified the emotions. This has given way to instantaneous contact. I don’t necessarily pine for the past. I just want to find a point to stand, where things haven’t changed within this vast change. Art is my fate. In the short term there are still exhibitions to deal with, but I would like to have a rest or at least slow down. And I would like to try something new in the future, not just in the form of sculpture. Let’s see what will happen.
“I used to create my creation in a book and a thing built in my own mind. I suddenly realized that this reality is so wonderful and brutal, full of unpredictable and unpredictable. The power of control, barbarism to a state of complete ignorance, and so lively, so impactful, but I have not yet thought about how to transform into something related to work. I have many friends who say that children go abroad immediately. I said that they should stay in China for half a year or a year, let him go around and let him see what China is all about. Because you don’t know what real China is like in big cities. I sometimes go to a second- and thirdtier city, at least visually very powerful. All the hardships that China has experienced today and all the suffering is a powerful thing for creators and actually a great benefit, you think about it,
of course, now the whole world is in trouble. In China , it is not exciting, it is shocking all day long. Things are also very good, this thing is too powerful. Contemporary art was born with a rebellious gene, and it gained a power in rebellion. But when I move forward, I think it needs to keep opening the gates of construction. This is a way to grow. Just rebelling is not growing. When you look at He Yong, when he debuts, you see his kind of life tension, the passion that smashes everything, that is called true rebellion, but then? You look at Dou Wei again, including Cui Jian, no matter how much, has been trying to construct, and can come up with something new after many years. I think this is the real growth, and this growth process can bring a complete feeling of life.”
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XU BING Xu Bing (1955) born in Chongqing, China has created works that challenge the meaning of language and what we see. After the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 his recent work came under scrutiny as it was seen as a critique of the Chinese government.
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Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China, in 1955 and grew up in Beijing. After spending two years working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, he enrolled in 1977 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where his studies focused on drawing and printmaking.
the written word as a primary vehicle of communication. In 1990 Xu Bing moved to the United States where his work has continued to focus on written language. In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for “his originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particuHe gained international reclarly in printmaking and ognition in the late 1980s with calligraphy.� Book from the Sky, a monumental installation composed His work has been exhibited of books and scrolls printed in China, Japan, Australia, with what appear to be tradi- the United States, and all tional Chinese characters. over Europe. In 2008 Xu Bing was appointed vice president The texts are illegible, howof the Central Academy of ever, because all the characters Fine Arts in Beijing. He now were invented by the artist, divides his time between Beiexposing the unreliability of jing and New York. 29
What do you think has been the biggest change in the way you make and think about the art you produce? As an artist, I still feel I am the same. My interest in expressing contemporary life has remained the same. What has changed, and this is relevant to why my work has changed, is community, society, and culture. My art is always speaking to contemporary life, so my art has changed as contemporary life has changed. An artist is always adapting what he wants to express as the world around him changes. I first encountered Andy Warhol through images in a magazine showing three silk screenprints, each depicting the same portrait image of Mrs Jackie Kennedy. What
intrigued me was the use of repetition in printmaking. I was interested in why Andy Warhol would create three identical prints. I don’t think I would say he directly influenced my work, but I was struck by the repetition, and I then wrote a paper on the study of repetition. Seeing his work influenced me to explore the subject of repetition, and to intellectualise it. I was interested in Andy Warhol’s investigation into the relationship between fine art and contemporary culture. One of the key characteristics of contemporary culture is the use of duplicates.
Can you speak to your interest in language and characters, whether coded or obscure? On one hand, my interest in language and characters starts at a very early age. My mom used to work in the library of Beijing University. When she left for a meeting, sometimes I would be left in the library. And I enjoyed those moments when I was immersed in books despite whether I can read them or not. On the other hand, one unique thing of Chinese language is that they are hieroglyphs. Visually, each word is actually an image. Language is one of the most basic elements in every culture in human history. To study language is to study the root of the thoughts of human beings. In addition to obscuring boundaries between different languages and different forms
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of visual communication, Xu Bing’s protean inventions embody an essential insight into the nature of art objects and how they come into being. In describing this phenomenon, Xu Bing has cited a precept in Sunzi’s Art of War: ‘make a noise in the east, attack in the west’. The material substance of the work of art – ‘the noise in the east’ — is like a strategic feint that facilitates ‘the attack in the west’ — the production in the viewer’s mind of a flash of insight or feeling that is the artist’s ultimate goal. But these dual elements, material and immaterial, the ‘noise’ and the ‘attack’, exist and are perceived at the same time, and this duality or simultaneity is also an essential property of a work of art.
A Book from the Sky receives approval, even from official critics, who declare its blending of the ancient and the new as an important advance in Chinese art. In February 1989, Xu Bing’s piece is included in the government-sanctioned group exhibition at Beijing’s National Museum. Four months later, the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square begins a period of political retrenchment. The Chinese press criticizes the avant-garde movement for its “bourgeois liberalism.” Critics single out A Book from the Sky, whose meaninglessness, they believe, may hide subversive intent.A member of the Ministry of Culture delivers a severe reprimand. He likens the piece’s ambiguity to a character in an old Chinese folk tale who wanders aimlessly, searching for his way home like a “ghost pounding on walls.” As Xu Bing later admits, “The reason why people have so many reactions to A Book from the Sky is because
it didn’t say anything.” Xu Bing is placed under surveillance. Through challenging common preconceptions, Book from the Sky forces the viewer to re-evaluate ideas about the authority of language. As part of cultural reform, the Maoist government simplified written Chinese, whilst also diverging from the subtlety and delicacy of its traditional use in their propaganda slogans, which were direct and aggressive. By creating a written world of nonsense in the guise of an age-old authority, he recreates his own sense of confusion when growing up through changes to language, by which he lived in two worlds, creating Maoist propaganda slogans at school, and being taught the traditional scholastic canon by his historian father at home. Kai Yin-Lo comments on this by observing that, “while well versed in tradition, and in the culture and mores of the Communist regime, Xu Bing also poses cerebral and representational challenges to their validity and values.”
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AI WEIWEI Ai Weiwei (1957) born in Beijing, China is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, photographer, designer, and most importantly as a critic of the Chinese government and communist control of society.
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His life seems steeped in “befores” and “afters.” Before the modern era, he says, China’s culture had a kind of “total condition, with philosophy, aesthetics, moral understanding and craftsmanship.” In ancient China, art could become very powerful. “It’s not just a decoration or one idea, but rather a total high model which art can carry out.” He finds a similar and transcendent unity of vision in the work of one of his favorite artists, van Gogh: “The art was a belief that expressed his views of the universe, how it should be His more immediate before, however, is not ancient China but the totalitarian culture into which he was born. Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, ran afoul of the regime in the late ’50s and he and his family were sent to a labor camp. He spent five years cleaning toilets (Ai Qing was exonerated in 1978). To Ai Weiwei, there
was also another, less personal kind of emptiness about the China of before. “There were almost no cars on the street,” he said. “No private cars, only embassy cars. You could walk in the middle of the street. It was very slow, very quiet and very gray. There were not so many expressions on human faces. After the Cultural Revolution, muscles were still not built up to laugh or show emotion. When you saw a little bit of color—like a yellow umbrella in the rain—it was quite shocking. The society was all gray, and a little bit blue.” In 1981, when it became possible for Chinese citizens to travel abroad, Ai made his way to New York. His first glimpse of the city came on a plane in the early evening. “It looked like a bowl of diamonds,” he said. It was not the city’s material wealth that attracted him, however, but its dazzling freedom of action and speech. 35
But Ai’s interest in design and architecture has less to do with being a conventional architect than with rebuilding—and redesigning—China itself. Returning to China in 1993, when his father fell ill, he was discouraged by two new forms of oppression: fashion and cronyism. “Deng Xiaoping encouraged people to get rich,” he said, adding that those who succeeded did so through their affiliation with the Communist Party.
are now a kind of state religion. The CCTV tower in Beijing, designed by the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is regarded with great national pride; the Chinese were horrified when a fire swept through an annex and a nearby hotel during construction. Ai’s response? “I think if the CCTV building really burns down it would be the modern landmark of Beijing. It can represent a huge empire of ambition burning down.”
“I could see so many luxury cars, but there was no justice or fairness in this society. Far from it.” New consumer goods such as tape recorders brought fresh voices and music into a moribund culture. But rather than struggle to create independent identities, Ai said, young people instead settled into a new, easy and fashion-driven conformity. “People listened to sentimental Taiwanese pop music. Levi’s blue jeans came in very early. People were seeking to be identified with a certain kind of style, which saves a lot of talking.”
Ai’s resistance to all forms of control— capitalist and communist—manifests itself in one poignant way. He refuses to listen to music. He associates music with the propaganda of the old days and prefers the silent spaces of independent thought. “When I was growing up, we were forced to listen to only Communist music. I think that left a bad impression. I have many musician friends, but I never listen to music.” He blames the Chinese educational system for failing to generate any grand or open-ended sense of possibility either for individuals or the society as a whole. “Education should teach you to think, but they just want to control everyone’s mind.” What the regime is most afraid of, he says, is “free discussion.”
Ai responded to the new China with scabrous satire, challenging its puritanical and conformist character by regularly showcasing a rude and boisterous individuality. He published a photograph of himself in which he is shown naked, leaping ludicrously into the air, while holding something over his genitals. The photo caption—“Grass mud horse covering the middle”—sounds in spoken Chinese like a coarse jest about mothers and the Central Committee. He formed a corporation called “Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd.” He mocked the Olympic Games, which, in China,
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What is the role of government in his work? According to Ai, governments cannot hide forever from what he calls “principles” and “the true argument.” He decries the loss of religion, aesthetic feeling and moral judgment, arguing that “this is a large space that needs to be occupied.” To occupy that space, Ai continues to dream of social transformation, and he devises actions and works that evoke worlds of possibility. For the 2007 Documentary—a famous exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany— Ai contributed two pieces. One was a monumental sculpture called Template, a chaotic Babel of doors and windows from ruined Ming and Qing dynasty houses. These doors and windows from the past seemed to lead nowhere until, oddly enough, a storm knocked down the sculpture. His second contribution
was a work of “social sculpture” called Fairytale, for which he brought 1,001 people from China—chosen through an open blog invitation—to Documenta. He designed their clothes, luggage and a place for them to stay. But he did not point them in any particular direction. On this unlikely trip through the woods, the Chinese pilgrims might find for themselves a new and magical world. They too might discover, as Ai did when he went to New York, “a bowl of diamonds.” Sunflower Seeds, his most celebrated work, yields similar questions. The painting of so many individual seeds is a slightly mad tour de force. But the scale of the work, which is at once tiny and vast—raindrop and ocean— seems no crazier than a “Made in China” consumer society and its bottomless desires.
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We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures — from whom and with whom we evolved — seems a mockery. Their ways are not our ways. We seem set among them as among lifelike props for a tragedy — or a broad 38
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lampoon — on a thrust rock stage. It doesn’t seem to be here that we belong, here where space is curved, the earth is round, we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge. It is strange here, not quite warm enough, or too warm, too leafy, or inedible, or windy, or dead. It is not, frankly, the sort of home for people one would have thought of — although I lack the fancy to imagine another.
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“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner” occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people’s sense
of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard
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without soil. A hurricaneborn mangrove island may bring its own soil to the sea. But other mangrove trees make their own soil—and their own islands—from scratch. The tiny seedling, afloat, is on its way. Bacteria thrive on organic broth; amphipods swarm. These creatures grow and die at the tree’s wet feet. The soil thickens, accumulating rainwater, leaf rot, seashells, and guano; the island spreads. 48
If survival is an art, then mangroves are artists of the beautiful: not only that they exist at all— smooth-barked, glossyleaved, thickets of lapped mystery—but that they can and do exist as floating islands, as trees upright and loose, alive and homeless on the water. Trees floating on rivers are less amazing than trees floating on the poisonous sea. A tree cannot live in salt. Nor can a tree live