Dinu Li by louise clements

Dinu Li Selected Works 2009—2010

Published in 2010 by: QUAD Publishing, Market Place, Cathedral Quarter, Derby, DE1 3AS Copyright © Dinu Li For this edition copyright © QUAD Publishing Photography copyright © Dinu Li Texts copyright © Louise Clements, Carol Yinghua Lu and Katie Hill The publisher has made every effort to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made, we ask copyright holders to contact the publisher. ISBN 0-9553538-4-X ISBN 978-0-9553538-4-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright holders and of the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This catalogue is not intended to be used for authentication or related purposes. Derby QUAD Limited accepts no liability for any errors or omissions that the catalogue may inadvertently contain. Printed by Evolutionprint, Sheffield, United Kingdom Design by James Corazzo / jamescorazzo.co.uk Distributed by: QUAD Publishing +44(0)1332 290 606 info@derbyquad.co.uk derbyquad.co.uk

Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is Mystery, 2010 2 Digital C-Type print

Preface

1. Alex Comfort, The Song of Lazarus, pub. Viking Press, 1945

Remember the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.1 Dinu Li’s practice spans video, photography and installation to explore the essence of culture, how it evolves and its physical manifestation in the everyday. For the past eight years, he has travelled extensively throughout the Middle Kingdom to investigate the cultural developments of contemporary Chinese society. Despite such a broad theme, Li utilises a range of strategies – including performance, animation and found materials – to capture a sense of immediacy and intimacy. This publication accompanies Li’s solo exhibition at quad, bringing together selected works from 2009—2010, including a new commission Crescendo, and essays by Carol Yinghua Lu and Katie Hill. Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is Mystery, is the title for a series of colour photographs in which we encounter a cityscape of trees illuminated by red lighting. The source of light has been deliberately avoided in Li’s depictions, leaving us to ponder on its effect on the surrounding environment. Red bathes the trees and liminal spaces around, with an all pervading wash. There are a number of ways to understand the significance of this colour. For many, it reads as communist influence; of a politics so ubiquitous even the landscape participates as an omnipresent force. To others it denotes the red light zone of the city concerned with immorality and vice. Further to this, the colour red in China symbolises bravery, passion and nationhood. It is the economy of signs that allows us to understand all of these things simultaneously – Li leads us to neither one but all of these readings and more.

2. Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, pub. Routledge, 1980

3. Yevegeny Zamyatin, WE, pub. Jonathan Cape, 1924

difficulty of individualism in the face of an all-pervading ideology. A despot may constrain his slaves by iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly, by the chains of their own ideas; it is at this stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain. This link is even more strongly formed in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away at bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas. They can only tighten still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the soundest of empires.2 In his new work Crescendo, Li explores dissent and engages people literally in an anonymous exposure of corruption. Conceived as a flash mob style intervention in public space, Li supports a group of individuals to participate in an act of momentary heresy. In a place where opportunities are scarce, competition is high, materialism is fashionable and individualism is a treacherous endeavour, this is a heroic act. Perhaps small moments of anarchy are the only ways to find a route to break free from generations of stifling social control – as portrayed in WE, by Yevegeny Zamyatin, a novel that takes the conformative aspects of modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion. Depicting a state that believes free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that people should be controlled with mathematical precision, where having a soul or imagination are ailments to be cured. Everybody has to go mad, everybody must absolutely go mad, and as soon as possible! This is crucial I know it is. Total irrationality is the only escape! 3

A concern in Li’s work is his examination of the space between utopia and dystopia in relation to the books Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (published in 1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949). It is his attempt to identify and question the systems that act as mediators in our daily lives, the things that control the mass and affect the individual. Foucault sums up the

A thread that runs throughout all Li’s works is the fusion and contradictions oscillating between social commentary and whimsical fantasies. Family Village, a video installation involving animation, a river journey through a deep bamboo forest and the sound of children’s chanting, fuses a world of political ideologies against the backdrop of fantastical imagination. Utopias are built on the necessity to completely emancipate a community from tradition, habit and the causation of its past – the notion of

4. The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin) Lyrics by Laurie Anderson, 1989

5. Hans Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn Sheed & Ward, 1989

home… This contradiction is constantly reiterated in the pursuit of progress, or urbanisation, sanctioned by regeneration strategies. It is a de-prioritisation of the individual, history and heritage, in the supply and demand of the future now. Thousands of people from China each year migrate to the cities and beyond to find work, but as the ancient Chinese saying goes – even leaves return to their roots. What can you do if your home has been demolished and your family, culture and community fractured and relocated? Where do you go, when even the geography has changed? She said: What is history? And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future. He said: History is a pile of debris. And the angel wants to go back and fix things. To repair the things that have been broken. But there is a storm blowing from Paradise. And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future. And this storm, this storm is called progress.4 Like a conduit, Dinu Li’s work has the ability to communicate, to share and express, allowing us to participate in ideas and emotions. Inherently, those encounters become part of our own personal history, enriching our experience and adopted in our memory. Hans Gadamer argued in Truth and Method that people have a historically effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein)5 and that our thinking is affected by the particular histories and cultures that shaped them. Therefore interpreting an artwork involves a fusion of horizons where the viewer navigates the ways that the works history connects with their own background. Whether concerned with politics, family history or journeys, readings of Li’s works transcend cultural boundaries, enabling a kind of collective experience. Despite our dislocated biographies we cannot help but become connected for a moment, where we become enveloped in another’s world, that in turn becomes part of ours. Louise Clements, artistic director, QUAD, Derby

(Top and bottom) Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is Mystery, 2010 Digital C-Type print

Portraits of the Great Distance —On Dinu Li’s Work The great distance between Dinu Li and his native country feels ever-present in his attempts to overcome it in many of his works. His parents’ escape from China during the political turbulence of the mid 1950s and his childhood experience of immigration from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom in 1973, remains a significant feature of his artistic persona. Personal history forms a crucial point of departure for Li’s practice and our understanding of his work. The geographical distance between China and Li’s adopted homeland the uk can be covered easily today by catching a plane. Indeed, Li flies to China frequently to research and produce works. However, there is another distance, one that cannot be measured physically, as it exists in the form of metaphor; seemingly ever greater by contrast. Li’s devoted desire to reduce and eventually bridge the distance between China and the uk has motivated and energised many of his projects. It is difficult to tell whether the real aim of his work is to deal with and rely on his longing to bridge the gap, or to understand the history and culture of his motherland. Perhaps it is more personal need than professional aim that has led Li to focus his artistic thinking and practice on sentiments about China, the life his parents left behind and the life that he would have experienced if his parents had remained in their native country. Li is fascinated both by his parents’ exile to the West and the life of his uncle’s family in China. His personal need to bridge the distance has lent great momentum to some of his recent projects, particularly his publication The Mother of All Journeys (2007) and the trilogy of films whose titles are based on the three meanings of the Chinese word for ‘country’.

Family Village, 2009 Installation view, ArtSway’s New Forest Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2009

For The Mother of All Journeys, Li embarked with his mother on an extensive journey between China, Hong Kong and the uk to photograph sites of her memories. The visits are catalogued in a book, in which they are accompanied by his mother’s fragmented recollections of family stories. Two kinds of images alternate in

The Mother of All Journeys, 2007, C-Type print

the publication: old photographs from family albums and poignant images of empty places, interior scenes, landscapes and environments. The emptiness of these locations invokes more of an absence than a presence, a disconnection rather than an engagement, a distance rather than an intimacy. There is little affinity between Li and the subjects that he depicts; he gives a strained, formal quality to the places that evoke strong personal recollections for his mother. As a consequence of his parents’ intermittent travels, Li was distanced irrevocably from Chinese culture and China itself; both his curiosity and the detached temperament of his documentations stem from such a distance.

the English translations of ‘Zu Guo’, ‘Jia Yuan’ and ‘Guo Jia’, the three Chinese meanings for the word ‘country’. While the titles of these works suggest longing for belonging, the two completed projects Ancestral Nation and Family Village explored events and social occasions.

It is only fitting that Li, who was born in Hong Kong and has never lived in Mainland China, made a highly personal effort to travel with his mother. His impression of China was formed based on the stories and memories of his parents, rather than from his own experience:

The Mother of All Journeys, 2007, Family archive

1. In Conversation Teresa Gleadowe and Dinu Li, p.29, Family Village, published in 2009 by The Arts Institute at Bournemouth in association with ArtSway

I guess that pivotal moment when my parents chose to leave China and my uncle decided to stay plays an important part in my life or at least in the way I think about the world. That’s been a very significant story, etched into my memory, and whenever I go on visits to China I do find myself observing my relatives quite obsessively. This is partly to see how they do things, but partly because of this feeling of melancholy due to a distance placed upon us by something that was once beyond our control.1

Ancestral Nation (video still), 2007, Three channel dvd installation with sound 4 min 30 sec (loop) Variable dimension

Ancestral Nation was a three-part dvd installation that juxtaposed recordings of a state-run ritual, staged in Confucius’ birthplace of Qufu in Shandong province to mark his birthday, and those of thousands of people hanging around and waiting in throngs outside the main square of Guangzhou railway station. The great multitude of people portrayed in this work has pre-configured the relationship that Li could have had with these two settings, outside of which he remained a curious, distant and unengaged observer. Whatever was on view, whether orchestrated as in Qufu or unorganised as outside the railway station, it became phenomenal and at the same time referential to the idea of an inherited and subliminal background to what it meant to be Chinese. The orderliness of the celebration in Qufu and the immensity and commotion of the crowds in Guangzhou appeared to be compatible and identifiable with each other in Li’s representation. Both exuded impressive formal attractions.

The distance between China and the uk is less physical than emotional for Li, as he reconstructs what he has learned about China from his parents and books. He portrays a contemporary Chinese society and culture as witnessed and experienced on his visits and through his own research. The trilogy of works, Ancestral Nation (2007), Family Village (2009) and Nation Family (upcoming) are works in which Li tries to articulate his own observations of, and reflections on, today’s China. The titles are

Family Village, the latest production of Li’s trilogy on ‘country’, was the result of his empirical research, which was based on a chance reading of a news article written in 2005. The article told of a Dorset town planner who sent a Christmas card to his counterpart in Chengdu, China. The cover of the card depicted a watercolour image of Dorchester, which fascinated the local planners to such an extent that it became the reference point and model for a new development in Chengdu named ‘British Town’. The irrational appeal of something viewed from such an enormous distance, both physically and symbolically, was so strong to the Chengdu planners that it led them to a hugely important public decision. The absurdity of the event was defied by the creation and

existence of the development itself, which resisted easy categorisation and typical reasoning.

2. Notes from Dinu Li on Selected Works 2009—2010, sent by email to the author on 8 May 2010.

Arrangements were made for me to film at Chengdu’s ‘Dorchester’, but there was a day when I was refused access by a security guard (his superior hadn’t warned him about me). He said he couldn’t possibly let me through the gates, in case I was a British architect, coming all the way from the UK to spy on Chinese architectural styles, so I could go home and build a replica.2 ‘Distance’ took on a new dimension for Li as a result of his choice to focus on this event. It solicited misinterpretation and idealisation, but opened up room for free-association, imagination, ambitions and exchanges. In a six-minute loop, the song ‘Pure Imagination’ from the Hollywood production Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is chanted by a group of Chinese children, who translated the lyrics from English to Chinese, linked and paced the collages – of interwoven images of a beautiful Sichuan bamboo forest and picture-postcard scenes of Dorchester – with animation of a boy on a raft drifting along a river. Li depicts the boy, who was originally a heroic comic-book character, as someone going off on his daily task to collect bamboo and being surprised/angered/ delighted/saddened every time he returns home. The seductive quality of the video, with repetition of stunning images and children’s chanting punctuated only by the boy’s subtly changing moods, reveals the ease and freedom that Li has acquired by the distance between him, his motherland and his family history. The impossibility of such a distance and his incessant crusades to transcend it generate a massive space of negotiation and reinventions for his work. If the distance is insurmountable, Li has proven that he is prepared to be equally invincible and unwavering in his determination and pursuits of embracing the distance. Carol Yinghua Lu is an art critic and curator based in Beijing.

Family Village (video still), 2009 Single channel dvd installation with sound 5 min 57 sec (loop), 1.5 m circular projection disk

(Above and right) Family Village (video still), 2009 Single channel dvd installation with sound 5 min 57 sec (loop), 1.5 m circular projection disk

Crescendo (2010) Dinu Li’s film-performance-event on Shenzhen’s metro The meaning of place, time and space is ever-present in Dinu Li’s work. Photographs of a deserted classroom in the Communist era, a dense bamboo forest, a ragged map of China by a tv set in a shabby English room – many works create images in which China is a key site of memory, change and identity. Li’s recent work has focused on journeys of one sort or another, or on a series of episodes taking place at certain times in certain places. In The Mother of All Journeys, a photographic memoir, Li collaborated with his own mother, poignantly creating a personal and historical narrative through a series of evocative visual images and words. In his new film Crescendo, another journey takes place, in a brief passage on a metro from one stop to the next. In this piece, Li moves from pure image to a staged performance, filmed in real time and space in the confines of a metro carriage in Shenzhen, southern China, on an ordinary day.

Secret Shadows, 2002 C-Type print

The film is composed in two parts. It begins with long close-up shots, moving across the screen of black and white stills from old Chinese films during the Mao years, in which staged emotions on actors’ faces fill the screen, against a continuous buzz of background sound: voices in harmony, humming one note which gradually builds up momentum. In these dramatic facial images, emotions are displayed to portray the text of ideology in the Communist structure of representation. The long shot not only serves as historical memory, but also bears on the literal screening of emotion, bringing the idea of surface to the fore, in which the ‘real’ cannot be grasped but can only be staged. The slow vision captures a mood alongside the growing sound, contrasting sharply with what follows.

simply sit looking bored in the routine of urban transportation. The majority of people look young. Finally a small scrabble erupts as accusations of corruption between a group of people are expressed out loud. Fingers are pointed, voices raised, ‘you, no you – you are corrupt!’ Then, a realisation: ‘why are you filming, what are you filming?’ Panic strikes at the idea of being seen within a scene: what might go on record on this ordinary journey from one stop to the next? A moralistic voice in the kerfuffle pipes up: ‘You are not allowed to cause trouble on the metro.’ Representation lies somewhere between truth and deception, suspended between the real and the constructed. The metro interior is a resonant site in contemporary culture. The horror of scenes of death and destruction wrought in recent years by bombs catching the commuter unawares in Moscow, Madrid and London, places us all in that fearful space. Any unusual occurrence can cause a sense of deep unease. Here, in the enclosed space of the metro, a snapshot of ordinary life is interrupted by the momentary voicing of a kind of suppressed taboo. The disturbance is confusing and quick, lasting only seconds. With it comes an array of emotions: anxiety, fear, anger, bewilderment. There is a sense, in this brief intervention, of the presence of surveillance and policing, regulations and boundaries not to be crossed. The ordinary becomes tinged with repression, obedience, control. In effect, everyday repression – what we are not allowed to do, say, think – is frighteningly ordinary.

Suddenly, a handheld camera moves through the inside of a modern metro train, weaving in and out of passengers who lean against the sides, sit with mobile phones held to their ears or

In this brief rich piece of work, we are taken on a long metaphorical journey in a very short space of time. The aesthetic distance of a clear communist idealism in grainy black and white, is contrasted with a messy confusing present, which is modern, even efficient and yet lacks the means to express. In Li’s works, strange juxtapositions often occur, as pairing of images reveals a paradoxical identity unified within a united frame. This work, split in two, enables the depth of Communist experience to be revealed in the everyday now, as a gentle representation of a darker reality of being left unrepresented. Both politics and psychology come into play, through the surface of a screen,

18 Crescendo (video still), 2010 Single channel dvd installation with sound 7 min (loop), Variable dimension

separating us from a representation of the real. The pattern of response by the passengers on the margins of the performance is predictable, regular, and repetitious. During his last stay in China, Li witnessed a private ritual carried out by a small group of people, involving burning paper in the middle of a faceless highway on the outskirts of Guangzhou – a traditional mourning ritual normally used at funerals to carry worldly possessions of the dead to go with them into the afterlife. This unusual ritual was an act of remembrance to mark the loss of those people’s homes, obliterated in that place by the building of the road. Li took this action as a point of departure for the work, as the scene caught his eye and moved him to investigate. The irony was that the destruction of identity through state power brought people together in their common loss, so that state control activated collective memorial, mobilisation and motivation.

2001: A Space Odyssey (film still)

Crescendo is also inspired by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film spanning the time of human existence in which, after a certain moment following the Big Bang, when our notion of time comes into being, an unforeseen monolith disturbs the apes out of their sleep, at which point the ever-changing process of human evolution begins. The reading in Li’s work is open to interpretation. Perhaps the monolith is the spectre of corruption itself in the form of an alien presence, resulting from a utopian vision that ultimately stirs individuals to act. Both these sites of recognition – the traditional ritual on a highway and Kubrick’s film about the pathos of human development, lie behind Li’s work. Yet they remain crucial elements informing his practice and intellectual stance entailing observation, communication and participation as well as a concern to document historical ‘truth’.

humiliating and desperate circumstances. For many of the middle classes, once capital is acknowledged as part of the process of modernisation, the private comes into view. Now, the possibility of personal life has emerged after twenty years of ‘reform’. There is of course no clear picture of what constitutes China in all its complexity. The confusion of images often leaves us grasping for meaning. From the elaborate high-tech spectacle of the Olympic ceremony, to internet pictures of the artist Ai Weiwei nursing his injured head after an incident of police brutality. We move from high glory to deep shame in a matter of moments. In between these examples of the national and the counter-national, many go about their daily lives, commuting to work in the vast urbanised centres. The distance between uk-based Dinu Li and his subject China, is not so great. As a member of the complex society forming the Chinese diaspora, Li’s family links with the country and culture are by no means tenuous or simply historical, but living and real. Family members – parents, aunts, cousins – slip in and out of Li’s conversations, as their lives, paralleled with and part of his own, throw into relief the different experience between one place and the next, across common identities going back in time.

The predicament of contemporary China even now, is such that for many, being clean and having a roof over one’s head is still something you can be thankful for. The dispossessed are still visible at every turn, begging in crutches on bridges, in

In inserting himself into the performance as one of the players in his film, Li fulfils a need to be on the inside in an act of identification. His family fell victim to the Communist victory in China in 1949. Split at the outset of the People’s Republic of China, family members dispersed into two separate, difficult worlds. One, the harsh struggle of ‘starting again’, as his father left for Hong Kong where you had to work your way up from scratch, a thankless labour with few rewards (and later to England). The other, a world of political exile, semi-imprisonment, and punishment for having material possessions and personal ‘wealth’ or simply property, cast as ‘landlord class’. Li’s mother’s home was destroyed, his aunt suffered from her position as a head teacher, a cousin was sent to Hainan, a wild island off the south coast, where there was little habitation. The hidden site, then, of the expanse of grey tarmac on the road outside

Guangzhou, where homes, or lives were destroyed or severely disrupted, provides a link to the site of Li’s unknown family home. Forcibly removed and obliterated at an earlier moment in history, within the lifetime of his parents, the family state of being was shattered and changed irrevocably. In a twist of historical fate, different histories emerged. Political culture takes decades of practice to instil. The clean relatively orderly metro carriage is but one aspect of modern convenient living. This performance entails a display of the endgame of idealism in the shape of its Other: corruption, the dogged failure of political culture to function on trust, regulation, fairness and ultimately humanity. In this film, split by the historical and the present, a longer view, the slow close-ups of a clearly framed ideology – remind us of an earlier moment when sides were taken, during which one side lost, one side won. Between the stops, the brief commotion happens, a disturbance disrupting time and space. The monolith remains, but, we the apes are stirred and the very act of agitation opens up the possibility of change. As a child born in Hong Kong out of the experience of political exile, Li the artist inherently understands the meaning of immanent change, but where that change leads us, we cannot know. Li’s China will always be a problematic one, complicated by his state of semi-belonging. Embodying the surreal juxtaposition of the domination of dogma alongside the experience of grappling with the everyday, Crescendo encapsulates China’s bizarre duality, echoing the duality of Li’s own. Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art, University of Westminster, London

Crescendo (video still), 2010 Single channel dvd installation with sound 7 min (loop), Variable dimension

(Above and right) Crescendo (video still), 2010 Single channel dvd installation with sound 7 min (loop), Variable dimension

Crescendo (video still), 2010 26 Single channel dvd installation with sound 7 min (loop), Variable dimension

Acknowledgements

Lothar Albrecht Danielle Arnaud Neno Belchev Peter Bonnell Adam Buss Dominique Chiu Louise Clements James Corazzo Alfredo Cramerotti David Dean Kim Burgess-Driver Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya Simon Groom Katie Hill Per Huttner Wang Jing Davina Lee Jack Lewis Fang Lihua Sarah Liu Carol Yinghua Lu Nikie Marston Ben McCabe

Pete Moser Christian Roellin Josepha Sanna Mark Segal Luo Siying Ben Spiller Zheng Wensheng Xi Wingtao Peter Wobser Phoebe Wong Hu Xiangqian Huang Xiaopeng Chen Yuehua Li Yusha Huang Zhuan

Dinu Li is an ArtSway Associate, funded by The Leverhulme Trust