TPTG by Para Site

Martin Wong, First letter home from New York (also I joined The Museum of Modern Art), felt-tip pen on paper, 13 ¾ × 17".

TAIPING TIANGUO A HISTORY OF POSSIBLE ENCOUNTERS

AI WEIWEI, FROG KING KWOK, TEHCHING HSIEH, AND MARTIN WONG IN NEW YORK

TAIPING TIANGUO A HISTORY OF POSSIBLE ENCOUNTERS AI WEIWEI, FROG KING KWOK, TEHCHING HSIEH, AND MARTIN WONG IN NEW YORK Edited by DORYUN CHONG and COSMIN COSTINAȘ

Contents

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

Chronology

Anthony Yung Chinese Artists in New York, 1980s

Ai Weiwei New York Photographs 1983–1993

Xavier Le Roy and Cosmin Costinaș On Tehching Hsieh

Tehching Hsieh One Year Performance

Tang Fu Kuen Re-Looking: Tehching Hsieh

Christina Li and Yung Ma “Don’t know where it all begins or where it all ends”: Reflections on the Lifework of Kwok Mang Ho

106

Mark Dean Johnson “TAIPING TIANGUO”

110

Barry Blinderman Everything Must Go: A Remembrance of Martin Wong

114

Martin Wong Selected Paintings

124

Lydia Yee The Secret World of Martin Wong

128

Anton Vidokle Grand Street

132 139 140 142

Taiping Tianguo Checklist Photography and Copyright Credits Contributors Acknowledgements

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

Why don’t we start at the beginning, with how this exhibition came about. Doryun Chong: The germ of the idea came about in 2010, when I realized that Tehching Hsieh, whose work I was quite familiar with, and Frog King Kwok, who I met in Hong Kong, knew each other well, from when Kwok lived in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. I was thinking about the work of these two artists and the unexpected connections between them. Then I became quite interested in Martin Wong, whose work I had known for a long time but came across again when I moved to New York, and I wondered if Hsieh and Kwok knew Wong, who passed away in 1999. This led me next to Ai Weiwei (probably all of you in the audience know about him, if not so much for his artistic work then, about him as a public figure, as a political activist), who spent his earlier years in New York, before becoming better known in the 1990s. Somehow these four figures of Chinese heritage but from four different places—mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and San Francisco—were all in New York in the heady years of the 1980s and early 1990s. So the question became, “Did they all know one another?” These four people are discussed in art history in completely different ways and contexts. They have almost never been talked about in Cosmin Costinaș:

relation to each other, so for me, it became a question of: “Could there be a possible alternative history of personal connections between them?” That’s what’s suggested in the subtitle of the exhibition, “A History of Possible Encounters.” We called it “Possible Encounters” because in the beginning, and even during the course of organizing the exhibition, we weren’t completely sure if there was a connection between all four of them. The exhibition was really an attempt to do a bit of excavation and write an alternative to established art historical narratives. Sometime soon after, over a dinner conversation, I mentioned to Cosmin that this subject had become a new art historical obsession for me, and said, “One of these days, I’ll find time to do the research, and maybe I’ll write an essay about it.” And Cosmin just stared at me and said, “Why don’t you do an exhibition? And why don’t you do it at Para Site?” That became the second stage of the development of this idea, turning it into an exhibition, followed by several months of collaborative research. There was an element of detective work, because I’m based in New York and Cosmin is in Hong Kong, so there were certain things that he could find out that I couldn’t, and vice versa. And that’s how we put together this exhibition, kind of like a puzzle. Cosmin Costinaș: At the very beginning of the exhibition process we were open to significantly more speculation, and, well, even fiction. In our premise there was a critique of a certain type of academic, art historical approach in exhibition-making. Beyond the context of these artists, and also beyond a discussion on the practice of these artists, this is an exhibition about a method— about the potential of the medium of exhibition-making to write art history. And there are a number of other critiques that are embedded in the show’s narrative, pertaining to the changing realities and geographies of the art world, pertaining to who writes these histories, where and how. These were as important to us as the particular stories of these four individuals. But the exhibition has also evolved from the first premise. In the end it probably turned out more art historically sound than we intended. Because a lot of the speculation actually proved to be, well, substantiated. I think the best example for me is that we had no proof at the beginning that there was any interaction between Martin Wong and any of the other three artists. But when I met Ai Weiwei to discuss the exhibition, he was very touched about the association we were proposing, because Martin was a close friend of his in New York, one of the people 7

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

with whom he had many conversations. Martin did a painting for Ai Weiwei that he still has somewhere. He couldn’t locate it, but apparently it exists. So we were ready to just have a speculative association between these figures, to almost tell a fictional story that would have made sense maybe at a metaphorical level if not at a strictly biographical one. But things actually proved to be more closely knit to each other than we originally imagined. Doryun Chong: Should we talk now about the artists? Cosmin Costinaș: Maybe you can start with Martin. Doryun Chong: The exhibition essentially consists of four sections, each dedicated to an artist, but all somewhat woven together. There is a timeline that we put together to mix biographical data with some other contextualized information. [See “Chronology,” pp. 20–35.] Cosmin Costinaș: The timeline is a new element that was introduced with the second and all subsequent presentations of this exhibition. It offers a general historical, an art historical and a biographical background that we thought was more necessary for the audiences outside of Greater China. [At e-flux, New York, the exhibition also included a map of Lower Manhattan with relevant information on each artist.] Doryun Chong: In a way, Martin Wong is the odd man out here. He is the only native, real American of the four. He was born to parents who were both second-generation Chinese Americans. His mother was born in San Francisco, sent to Guangdong (where her parents had come from) during her adolescence for education, and returned to the US when the Asia-Pacific War intensified in the 1940s. Martin’s father, born and raised in Arizona, where his Chinese father had migrated from San Francisco and met his Mexican wife, served in the US Air Force during World War II and settled in San Francisco after the war, and that’s how he and Martin’s mother met. In this family history, you have the fascinating history of Chinese migrations across the Pacific and within the western part of the United States. Like his mother, Florence, Martin grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He didn’t leave California until he was twenty-eight years old. He was very much of that hippie generation of the 1960s—essentially a San Francisco flower child. In fact, he lived for a number of years in his twenties in a commune in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He was art director, so to speak, for a radical drag performance troupe called “Angels of Light,” which was an offshoot of the Cockettes. 8

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

Installation views: (Left) Para Site, Hong Kong, May 12–August 28, 2012. Photograph by Jims Lam Chi Hang. (Right) SALT, Istanbul, May 8–August 13, 2013. Photograph by Cem Berk Ekenil.

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

With whom he had previously worked as well. Doryun Chong: That’s right. In 1978, he decided he was going to move from San Francisco to New York to become a “serious painter.” He was clearly an artistic child, studied architecture and ceramics and was involved in performance groups and theater, but had never seriously tried his hand at painting. Sweet Oblivion , a very large painting from 1985, shows some of the elements he became very well known for. The red brick tenement buildings, for example, are what you see in the East Village and the Lower East Side, which have seen waves of immigration for decades. In the painting you also see what is alternatively called “hand signals” or “finger spelling” for the hearing impaired. These, along with star constellations, became his signature elements. Within a few years of his arrival in New York in 1978, he found success and earned a reputation in the New York downtown art scene as a very unique kind of figurative painter. He was very sensitive and perceptive to the local environment; this was when New York was devastated in many ways, from poverty and homelessness to drugs. In the East Village and the Lower East Side at the time, you could see these empty lots with demolished buildings, full of refuse. But Wong really embraced this context of the East Village. For him, it wasn’t just a place of devastation. It was full of vitality. This was a time when all kinds of artists who had been previously disenfranchised and marginalized—artists of color, gay and lesbian artists, and graffiti artists—all of them found a home in the East Village. He felt very much at home. In fact, he amassed the largest collection of graffiti art, and when he left New York in the early 1990s, he donated it to the Museum of the City of New York. Recently, the museum organized an exhibition of this collection to great critical acclaim. I mentioned that he was a third-generation Chinese American from San Francisco. Both of his parents were American-born Chinese as well, so he was through and through an American of the 1960s. But there was a certain yearning that he had toward having some sort of connection with his heritage. He had that within his home environment when he was growing up, but he never learned to speak Chinese. He lamented the fact during the time that he lived. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and died in 1999. So he is the only artist in this exhibition that is no longer living. Thankfully, there was a large survey of his work organized by the New Museum in New York, just before his death. And in more recent years, there has been an increasing appreciation of Cosmin Costinaș:

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

his work by a whole new generation of artists and curators. Danh Vo is perhaps the most prominent example. His solo presentation following his winning of the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize was a moving tribute to Martin Wong—an installation of thousands of samples of Americana that Martin had collected during his lifetime. Cosmin Costinaș: Now we jump to the youngest artist in the exhibition, Ai Weiwei. He was born to one of the most important poets of modern China, Ai Qing, a politically influential figure in the early years of the Chinese Communist Party, who was neverthelss purged and forced to relocate to the countryside [during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957] when Weiwei was only a few months old. Weiwei basically spent his childhood and teenage years in several small villages in western China and Inner Mongolia. He returned to Beijing in the late ’70s with his entire family after Mao’s death and the lifting of restrictions for internal deportees. Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy and was colleague of a few members of the stellar Fifth Generation of directors. The first moment he entered an art historical narrative is at the pivotal moment conventionally considered to be the beginning of contemporary art in China. Not so much because of the formal aspect of the art produced then, but because of the position of critique and of institutional discussion around this moment. I refer to the “Stars Exhibition.” In 1979 a group of “unofficial” artists rejected from showing at the China Art Gallery in Beijing decided to install their works in a park at the entrance of this very official institution that, up until that moment, was only showing socialist-realist art. This style had continued in China way longer and more rigidly than in the Soviet Union, even decades after it stopped being the official vocabulary in most of the rest of the Eastern bloc. The exhibition was taken down by the police. The artists staged a demonstration, one of the first street protests in the People’s Republic, which is very interesting, because, you know, it was done by a few artists who were primarily demanding artistic freedom, even if they were also demanding other things, like democracy. The artists were eventually allowed to hold their exhibition at the Huafangzhai in Beihai Park. The next year, they were given permission to hold a second exhibition at the China Art Gallery because the officials thought it would be the final discreditation of the group. However, the exhibition drew 200,000 visitors in its 11

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

two-week run, shattering, in many ways, what had previously been taken for granted in Chinese art. Ai Weiwei participated in this exhibition with several watercolors. We showed reproductions of three of them in the exhibition. The originals were thrown away by his mother while he was in New York. Now, even if these watercolors look terribly conservative, they were definitely part of a very rebellious spirit shared among members of the Stars Group. The manifestation of artistic subjectivity was a way to make a political stand. Choosing one’s language from the canonical history of Western art of the nineteenth and twentieth century was a statement of individualism. And this was regarded by the artists themselves very explicitly as a political gesture. So we’re definitely not showing these reproductions to question Ai Weiwei’s credentials by exposing a conservative moment in his practice. On the contrary, we wanted to stress that he has been coherently connected to different moments of protest and questioning, even if the forms of his art changed through the times. It is important to say that he was a rather marginal member of the Stars Group, and one of the youngest. Soon after the exhibition, he moved to New York to study design and film at Parsons, and dropped out very soon after. In his ten years in New York, he was perhaps the least successful of the four, returning to Beijing in 1993 without having really made a career for himself. And in that sense, as the youngest artist in our show, he is perhaps a bridge between the many previous generations of artists who had to relocate to a center of artistic hegemony to affirm themselves (think anyone from Brâncuși to Nam June Paik) and the new generation who entered a global conversation while remaining based in and/ or actively engaged with their native contexts. But in spite of Ai’s career taking off years after returning to Beijing, there is something of his later self that can be seen in his New York practice. He compulsively took thousands of photographs that he did not actually regard as part of his artistic practice. At the time he seemed more interested in abandoning painting for a sort of conceptual direction, in which we can in fact recognize formal connections to his future work, in elements such as sunflower seeds or clothes hangers. The photographs were, for him, more like a practice of the everyday. I guess he needed to consume this new city and new world that he found himself in. But I think this is, for me, the moment when you can actually see the Ai Weiwei of today, in his incredible sense of history and in his flair of capturing the spirit of the moment. 12

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

Installation views: (Left) The National University of Singapore Museum, September 8 – November 3, 2013. (Right) e-flux, New York, January 28 – March 15, 2014. Photograph by Ray Anastas.

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

This young immigrant arriving in the US speaking poor English and having had very little previous exposure and contact with the world outside China, except in a very diluted way from his father’s library in the countryside, had, nonetheless, the presence of spirit and the intuition to be at the core of some key moments in the history of New York during that decade. He was at some of the first ACT UP protests; he was next to Al Sharpton at demonstrations for African-American rights; he befriended Allen Ginsberg, which is interesting because we can think of Beat as maybe another direct source of inspiration for Ai’s contrarianism; he was there at the anti-gentrification protests in the East Village; he was there at several left-wing demonstrations in New York. In 1989, while another ideologically ambiguous demonstration was happening in China in Tiananmen Square, he was experiencing a different form of upheaval, a different form of political awareness in the US. Then, just before returning to China he took a close-up image of Bill Clinton in the last stages of his first presidential campaign. I think these show very much who he eventually became—the Ai Weiwei of today. Doryun Chong: Just to summarize this ongoing saga of Ai Weiwei, for those of you who are not familiar with him. He was originally selected to design the Olympic stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. It all started when he resigned in protest against the Chinese government’s dismal records in human rights. He continued his activism which resulted in his incarceration in 2011. He still cannot travel outside of China, and despite the ongoing censorship and media repression in China, internet-based discussions about him are still happening. Of course many people are supportive of him; others are very critical. One of the criticisms directed at him from China is that he’s too American, because he’s talking about freedom of expression and civil rights, and these are very “American” ideas. And these Chinese netizens who don’t feel positive about Ai would say something like “If you like America so much, why don’t you go back?” So in that context, it’s really interesting to think about how he spent the first decade and a half of his adult life—truly formative years—in America. So there’s some truth to the idea that perhaps he is a very American figure. But that’s not really what we wanted to suggest here. We were interested in the question of why these four artists of Chinese heritage, from different places, gravitated to New York in 14

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

the 1980s, which wasn’t the prettiest place at the time—again, it was riddled with so many problems. But the city still represented a kind of utopian space for them. The third artist of the exhibition is Tehching Hsieh. Hsieh was originally from Taiwan, a high school dropout who was never formally trained in art. He got a job on one of those giant oil tankers that travelled from Taiwan to Iran and somehow made a stop in Philadelphia. [Hsieh told curator Mami Kataoka that in Osaka, he jumped ship and swam to board another US-bound tanker.] In Philadelphia, he jumped ship, literally. I guess he made some money working on the ship. He had no idea—this is how New York represented this abstract notion of utopia—how far Philadelphia to New York was, which isn’t far, but nobody takes a taxi from Philadelphia to New York, which is what he did. He blew off $150, and this was around 1974 or ’75, so a lot of money. But he made the decision to move to New York and live as an illegal immigrant, which meant that he could only work as a dishwasher or in other menial jobs in New York’s Chinatown. He lived in that status for a number of years, and in fact, he started his first legendary performance in 1978 while he was still illegal. The series of performances I’m talking about is called One Year Performance , and is exactly what the title says—they are performances that take place over a year. The first one was done in 1978, and he did five more until the mid-1980s. In the very first One Year Performance , Hsieh constructed a cage inside his studio. He didn’t leave the cage for a whole year, but he needed help from the community to bring food and take away refuse. The third in the series is pretty self-explanatory. He vowed to not go inside any building or any vehicle for a whole year. The way that his performances are usually talked about describe them as a kind of Herculean, superhuman efforts by a mysterious figure. Hsieh has been a huge inspiration for many performance artists for pioneering a particular kind of endurance. When I heard in Hong Kong, two and a half years ago, that the fourth artist that we are going to talk about, Frog King Kwok, was one of the people that brought him food for the first piece, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head. This Taiwanese immigrant, who had only been in New York for a few years, still illegal, still working around twelve hours a day in menial jobs, was now turning that experience of living and working in the underground economy into an art form, meaning that he had to rely on an informal network of people like himself, which included Frog King Kwok. 15

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

Hsieh’s economic situation improved at some point, and he aquired real estate in New York, becoming, as a matter of fact, Ai Weiwei’s landlord for a while. But the issue you raised is very important: Who was in this community that supported these artists’ lives and work, and also what were the formative experiences during their New York period, both artistic and, maybe more importantly, biographic? And also seeing this from a perspective that includes their pre-New York years and the years after those that are at the core of the show. Regarding the pre-New York years, one of our intentions was to show that each of these four artists had some of the essential aspects of their practice—and for all of them this involved a radical spirit—manifested in one way or another, before they arrived in New York. Because, while New York was hugely formative for all of them, and was a crucial moment in their lives and careers, they were primarily a product of the otherwise very different contexts from which they hailed. Martin had his background in hippie and queer California. Weiwei had his involvement with the Stars Group. With Tehching, the evolution of his practice began in Taiwan from rather generic expressionistic paintings in his early twenties, moving gradually toward abstraction—the last paintings he ever did are essentially large red dots on a white surface. The next logical step was the first performance he ever did: he threw himself from the second story of a building in Taiwan. A kind of Yves Klein—without photomontage—he actually broke his ankles. This was the first gesture he did after abandoning painting and the last gesture he did in Taiwan, because, in a way, his decision to leave Taiwan and move to the States is part of his life-art continuum. From moving toward abstraction, to abandoning painting and moving toward extreme performance, and to finally relocating to the States, Hsieh is, in a way, the most absolute, perfect embodiment of the avant-garde idea. And the Taiwan he left in 1974 was a society that was under a specter of doom. Chiang Kai-shek was dying, the country was forced out of the UN, there was an existential threat looming over. These were times when a radical avant-garde rupture could be imagined. But moving on to Frog King. This unique figure—a heterosexual drag queen of sorts—is an important pioneer in the Hong Kong art scene. Starting from around 1974 in his studio on the outskirts of the city, he began producing work and organizing group shows, Cosmin Costinaș:

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

all in a conceptual language. Throughout the ’70s he was also known as a contrarian figure, as an almost proto-punk character. The work he showed at the opening of the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1977—involving rotting eggs—caused quite a scandal. One of the most significant episodes in his pre-New York years was his performance in Tiananmen Square (a spontaneous performance that would be inconcievable today!) and at the Great Wall of China. This happened, coincidentally, around the first “Stars Exhibition,” and is purportedly the first act of performance art in China. So before moving to the States he had already crafted this identity of a rebellious artist. In New York, like the other artists in the show, he did lots of jobs to support himself: he designed and worked in Chinese restaurants (for a short while working in the same restaurant as Hsieh) and on film sets. He provided artistic direction for a film, including in it some of his own graffiti art, his trademark “Froggies.” His artistic practice has been at the border of performance and installation art, Butoh, and calligraphy, with many of his productions including props and objects he needed to carry out his performances. Perhaps most importantly, in the middle of the ’80s he opened Kwok Art Gallery, which was one of many spaces in New York that formed a nexus of different communities and networks of people. It was a part of what made Soho at the time legendary: it was a space that supported a scene that is very different from that of today’s New York. It was more of a community, a Bohemian family, a system of exchange of ideas, objects, and affect. Tehching showed there. Weiwei hung out with his camera there. So did Martin. That’s the main way we tried to represent Frog King in the exhibition, through that action of supporting a community around him. In a way, his career also benefitted more with his return to Hong Kong. The rapid development of an art scene there created a need and a mechanism for its art history to be written, and Frog King is being recognized as a leading precursor. Doryun Chong: What we wanted to do in the exhibition was both physicalization and speculation of these four different strands, if you will, of contemporary art history. There is contemporary Chinese art history, which has been getting a lot of attention because of the explosive market around Chinese art in the last couple of decades, so China is treated as its own field. Hong Kong, when you look at its art history, having been perhaps a kind of island against the enormous country of China that had been “closed” for many years during the years of Mao, has its own development history. 17

Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinaș

Tehching doesn’t really represent the art history of Taiwan. He’s really a figure that is part of the history of performance art, which is very much New York-centered. Martin is either talked about in terms of the history of New York art in the 1980s, especially the downtown scene, or as part of Asian American art history. This is how art history, or any history is written. It takes a particular angle. While it pays attention to connections between people, it selects and often erases the connections that were there. That’s what we hope to reestablish in this exhibition in an alternative way. I wanted to say a few words about the title in case you were wondering. Taiping Tianguo is literally translated as “heavenly kingdom of great peace.” It was the name of the political entity that was set up by the Taiping uprising in the mid-nineteenth century. The Taiping Rebellion was started by a southern Chinese man, who thought of himself as a messiah, as the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The Qing dynasty at this time had already been greatly weakened by two Opium Wars and by the incursions of the Western powers—the British, French, Germans, Russians, and Americans—and by internal corruption. But in southern China this visionary, I guess, started a kind of new religious movement called “Taiping” and gathered millions and millions of people who had been left destitute by the corrupt Qing Dynasty. And, in fact, the movement pretty much toppled the dynasty, because the rebels essentially took over the southern half of the country. Historically, what happened ultimately is that because they weakened China further, they opened the door to rampant semi-colonization. This historical view in many ways is at the roots of the current Chinese way of looking at the world—this sense of great injustice that had been done to China at the time. But we wanted to think about Taiping Tianguo at least in a couple of different ways, by borrowing this nineteenth-century historical event and term as signifying this combination of chaos and utopia at the same time. And we felt that this is what New York in the ’80s represented for the four artists. They didn’t necessarily know what they were going to find when they got there, but they somehow knew that they had to make this sojourn. In the case for Tehching, it turned out to be more than a sojourn, as he permanently installed himself there. He is very much a New Yorker now. We kind of wanted to connect this Chinese world view that emerged in the nineteenth century (which is very much the foundation of China’s relationship with the rest of the world now) and this one particular moment in art history in New York, which has 18

Taiping New York: A Conversation about Four Artists

really been the center, not just of Western, but of the general art historical narrative since the second half of the twentieth century—but looking at it from a very particular point of view. These four artists, again, artists of color, artists of Chinese heritage who were very much on the periphery at the same time … Can we actually look at their time together in New York, in one decade, and find global implications? Again, they represent much larger stories at this moment. This was the larger ambition that we had in putting together this exhibition. Cosmin Costinaș: This is indeed something I’d like to underline, because there is something fundamentally dated about this exhibition and the time in which this was happening, which is, while very recent, behind a moment of significant change. This is a historical exhibition, not so much because of the artists involved, nor because of the time the artworks were produced, but because the world that is described in the exhibition is over in many ways. That historical period has ended, and we can safely say that we live in a new one. The situation in which artists from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, in this case, but also from anywhere, would aspire to move to a place like New York as a condition to be in the center of the art world, to make a career, to be recognized as proper artists—as “serious artists,” as Martin said—was very much a function of a particular historical moment with a particular kind of hegemonic structure that was in place with New York at the top of this nexus. One can say that the decade we discuss in the show—which is also one that saw the beginning of contemporary art in China— was the last decade in which this was the case. The end of the ’80s/beginning of the ’90s saw the emergence of very different realities. And I would say that this is particularly relevant for this exhibition and for its life. It is very interesting, and somewhat ironic, that the show is generated in Hong Kong and then travels to Istanbul, Singapore, and New York. It is probably the first generation in history that such an itinerary would have been concievable for an art exhibition. And of course these three cities are emblematic for this new world and for this new historical moment in which the hegemonic position of New York has been dislocated and redistributed around other centers in the world. And there is something to be celebrated here, while remaining aware about new manifestations of power and hegemony in our days. The conversation took place at SALT, Istanbul, May 8, 2013, and was edited for this publication. 19