“Translating” Contemporary Chinese Art – Curating for the Public Audience Rachel Marsden This paper discusses how the identity of contemporary Chinese art “translates” across different curatorial platforms and sites for display and exhibition. Rather than looking at the traditional curatorial platform, that of the contemporary art exhibition, usually the key focus of an art happening, I am going to focus on its auxiliary, ulterior and alternative curatorial sites used as translational tools – the additional interdisciplinary and participatory events programming, and use of fast-‐ paced online digital technologies. Citing two examples linked to the 8th Shanghai Biennale ‘Rehearsal’, and West Heavens ‘Place-‐Time-‐Play: India-‐China Contemporary Art’ and ‘X-‐positions’, I am going to present new perspectives of “translation” and interpretation, which in turn will aim to encourage new “transcultural”, rather than cross-‐cultural, social relationships, networks and global exchanges between China and the West. This is all in response to a growing, and almost compulsory curatorial responsibility to “translate” contemporary Chinese art for the global public audience’s demands and needs in an accessible format, in this creative and now technological “transcultural” world. Before entering into this “transcultural” world of translation, it is necessary to define and clarify the three key terms that are in use in this paper -‐ translation, “transcultural” and contemporary. Firstly, “translation” is defined within the confines of visual and curatorial practice, as to how an artist, curator or artist-‐ curator presents, understands and interprets contemporary Chinese art in the field
of Western culture and the national and global arenas. Thus, it is interpretation, instinctive value, meaning, concept, context, understanding to mis-‐understanding, history…the list could go on and on. However, it is not a literal or literary translation of language from one to another. Secondly, “transcultural“ is defined as comparing, contrasting and interlinking through physical dialogic experience, factions including the local, national and international, rural and urban, urbicide and urbanisation, Orient and Occident, in the context of post-‐colonialism, geopolitics, bio-‐politics and thus, globalization. It encompasses and extends through different cultures instinctively and emotionally from the heart and mind, leading to reciprocal exchange and possible new means of reflection and representation. Finally, the term “contemporary”, is set simply in a Chinese context, focusing on the period from the 1980s onwards, in relation to the developments after the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, which, as we know, established a new interest and research into non-‐Western art. The 8th Shanghai Biennale defines itself as a ‘rehearsal’ and as a reflective space for performance, production and discursive practice. ‘Rehearsal’ is not only a strategy or a special form of exhibition, it is travelling art, open to all the audience, focusing on the full process of the exhibition and on creativity itself. The claim of the curators is to differentiate, organize and then mobilize through the examination of the venue, narration and social participation -‐ a self-‐performative act by the art world, a wake up call to itself and an attempt at self-‐liberation.1 In my view, it can be seen as a whole piece of “public” art. The first example of this wake-‐up call I am going to examine is West Heavens ‘Place-‐Time-‐Play: India-‐China Contemporary Art’, a periphery exhibition and participatory events programme to the Biennale.
Commissioned by Chang Tzong-‐sung, the idea started whilst pursuing a personal passion, curiosity, issue, begruntlement and dissatisfaction with the current face of Chinese modernity being viewed through the familiar China-‐West and East-‐West relations. Working together with Gao Shiming, one of the co-‐curators of the Biennale, the process began with scholarly research, whilst getting a public consensus among academics, as to what to preserve, what to push forward, what to alter in terms of the idea and concept. The strategy taken, was to start with China and its neighbours, building on other previous investigative and artistic dialogues and projects across the geographical region of Asia. Intended as a curatorial experiment, Indian artists are set in comparison with Chinese artists, and were asked to treat China as a laboratory for testing new ideas and as an object of desire or critique giving the public something visceral to their sense about India.2 The use of non-‐institutional spaces is in an attempt to make the curatorial platform more interesting, which in turn aimed at challenging the artists, taking a step towards an open platform for everyone to use. Furthermore, by exhibiting in limited and restricted spaces, it alters the apertures for presenting and talking about contemporary art. As stated before in relation to the Biennale, here I am not interested in the traditional curatorial platform of the exhibition though it is necessary to speak of its context. I am concerned with its auxiliary, ulterior and alternative sites and translational tools, in this case the summit and lecture series, as well as the associated readers produced in conjunction with the programming. The summit and
lectures were structured curatorially in a sense that they wanted to find a way to affect the Chinese imagination about India. Seen as an intellectual forum, many of the guest speakers and lecturers do not have anything directly to do with the exhibition itself, but are selected specifically due to their similar interests, thus more so by association of national and cultural experience. Chang coined this as ‘a kind of “collaging” that cannot be justified with logic.’3 By bringing thinkers closer to China in different situations, settings, environments and locations, for exchange and engagement, it has and is inviting unknown outcomes of translation including the possibility of mistranslation. Writings and texts were specifically selected and translated, published as readers and where possible distributed at the same time as the associated lecture. Additional speakers were invited to contribute to the events and to engage with the readers. Whether or not they agree or disagree with its content, they have already married into a new cultural exchange. This could be viewed on a basic level as another political, social or cultural investigation of divisions or commonalities as part of human life, which are examined time and time again. In reality, it goes beyond this, where crossing these spheres and cultures is an exercise and example of translating the contemporary, and the curatorial platform becomes a site for generating new knowledge, or “non knowledge”, understandings, or misunderstandings. In turn, this makes it possible to return to issues that we want to solve locally, the issues of finding out about history and how this history can be realigned in a contemporary context so we can engage with our social and cultural reality in a new way in these curatorial platforms.
In a recent interview Chang Tzong-‐sung said, ‘anyone who is interested in engaging with art on this platform, has to traverse different roles, different spaces, and invent the practice itself. What I’ve been doing is in itself partly transcultural, but also by nature transdisciplinary…I see the curatorial platform as a nebulous open space, for the exchange of skills, techniques and knowledge which can be used for local purpose…opening up channels for reviving traditional cultural disciplines and also opening up a feud for cultural practice, where it is about stepping outside and also going backwards.4 Re-‐focusing on the 8th Shanghai Biennale, another planned periphery project was ‘X-‐ positions’ by e-‐space lab, a collaborative group who use commonplace technology, including video streaming, to connect cities and urban contexts worldwide as a curatorial model and site for public cultural exchange. They build diverse networks of association, which are constituted by that association. It was unable to be put into practice, however, I still felt it necessary to speak about it here as it presents the possibilities of what it could have brought to the world of the “transcultural”, during the translation of contemporary Chinese art. To e-‐space lab, the public is not only the audience but also the spaces they use as spaces to create links, to create dialogues, to create exchanges, and must not be seen on a basic level as a form of video conferencing, but instead as a “public” event, much like the Shanghai Biennale as a whole. Continuing their previous projects of bringing new dialogues into galleries, a “public” space, the new project was intended to work as a ‘Biennales dialogue’ -‐ an online conversational exchange and collaboration between artists, curators, designers and architects examining each of
the thematics relating to the 8th Shanghai Biennale, ‘Rehearsal’, and the Liverpool Biennial 2010, ‘Touched’. ‘X-‐positions’ was to take a critical position on commonality between Shanghai and Liverpool and what co-‐founder of e-‐space lab, Philip Courtenay, sees as ‘the local to local, rather than the local to global’5. It was to use artists’ studios as nodal points in both cities, building immediate relationships and cultural exchanges by directly bringing the conceptualising and making phase of contemporary art into new public spaces by hosting live web casts 24-‐7 between contemporary Chinese and UK artists’ studios, a chance to visit them sub-‐virtually. They were to connect what was happening in the studios, the artists’ works and the location outside in the urban fabric, to connect between the private space and public space, also the physical and material nature of the space and how it is managed and used, showing movement and physical interactions, whilst being able to listen to what was being said from either side. The web cameras and links to the studio spaces were to remain live even when the studio spaces were empty. This live streaming was to be shared and placed in accessible spaces for “local to local” public engagement and was not to be seen as an overall event but a conversation as you are able to respond at anytime. However, scheduled events through a Skype connection were to be staged as a further opportunity to more specifically and directly engage and converse. In addition to the video streaming, e-‐space lab uses disparate blogs, a blog for each different project with their own identity, always orientated around the specific users related to the project, rather than the public as a whole, whereas in this case ‘X-‐ positions’ would have had its own acting as another platform for “local to local”
exchange, specific to the Shanghai Biennale and Liverpool Biennial public audiences. During a Skype interview with Courtenay, or you could say cultural exchange, we spoke of the development of the “local to local” art discourse which he felt goes on ‘spontaneously through new media, where if you have connections that are not just about art but about location and space, then you begin to see how every day life connects to art and how the various assumptions about that environment fall away, then you become part of more of an exploring mode rather than a receiving mode. When this doesn’t happen, it becomes one of the big misunderstandings.’6 In this context, it becomes obvious that the sense of exchange and engagement between strangers in new “local to local” public spaces, and in this curatorial platform, makes certain ideas and concepts become unpredictable, bringing to the forefront the capacity for misunderstanding and mistranslation. I question, if and when it does happen, how should this misunderstanding and mistranslation be used? Courtenay states ‘When you become aware of the problem, or of misunderstanding, you suddenly wake up and begin to think about what the assumptions you are making, about the language, about the art, about the space and situation, then new ideas happen.’7 I think through questioning this misunderstanding and mistranslation, the gaps and voids in between, you realise they hold space for emotional and intellectual thinking, which can be manifested into creativity. On the one hand, the work of the West Heavens programme and ‘X-‐positions’ can be seen as a mere spontaneous cultural comparison, the start of a new moment of hybrid practice. On the other, it can be seen as a juxtaposition of contrasting voices
and public spaces, simultaneously existing as an apposition. As you engage in the exchange and qualities of the two different situations with shared “local to local” commonalities, acting on the newfound information and the possibilities of misunderstandings and mistranslations, it can create a more fluid exchange where creativity can arise and develop. Therefore, it is a case of trying to rethink the “transcultural” curatorial platform as it lies open, whilst considering what interventions can be introduced to the process, and in turn how we deal with the different levels of intellectual machinery and resources, socio-‐investigative tools and instruments used to translate contemporary Chinese art. There is often an underestimation of how much work goes into the examples I have provided, as well as the development and written construction of this paper such as exhibition visits, in person and online interviews, textual socio-‐historical research, transcribing, in addition to the physical “transcultural” exchange. During this final stage of the paper, many questions have become apparent including have I engaged in mistranslation and misunderstanding through the translation process of writing this paper? Are we in a time where there is no modern and no contemporary art, which is not “transcultural”? Is this “transcultural” curatorial platform becoming art in itself? What happens to all this information and how it can be used in the future? These exchanges, encounters, situations and interactions need not be limited to the brief experience of an art exhibition, biennale, art fair or art event. The sense of context and contact can be continued by maintained archiving physically or online, and the development of sustained lasting creative relationships, breeding longevity and permanence into contemporary Chinese art.
One final post-‐paper thought…I sat last night reading Issue 5 of LEAP magazine, which is still in its first year of publication, and remembered how its founder Philip Tinari only last Thursday told me that this issue was the first one to be transported in a shipping container across international waters to the UK, to East London, for its European and thus, global distribution. As I stared at the issue entitled of all things “Notions of Home”, it made me question, is this another “transcultural” curatorial platform and site for translation? And how will the Western public audience translate this? All I do know, as Chang Tsong-‐zung told me at the end of our cultural exchange last week, ‘one has to keep the options open because we are actually working on different territories and on this territory, the territory of contemporary Chinese art the soil is still soft.8 1
Fan Di’an, Li Lei and Gao Shiming, Hua Yi, (2010) ‘What is Rehearsal? A Curatorial Thinking of the 8th Shanghai Biennale’. In (2010) Rehearsal – 2010 Shanghai Biennale (pp. 35-‐36), China: Culture and Art Publishing House. 2
Chang Tsong-‐zung, Personal Interview with Rachel Marsden at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Shanghai, Tuesday 9 November 2010. 3
Chang Tsong-‐zung, Personal Interview with Rachel Marsden at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Shanghai, Tuesday 9 November 2010. 4
Chang Tsong-‐zung, Personal Interview with Rachel Marsden at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Shanghai, Tuesday 9 November 2010. 5
Philip Courtenay (e-‐space lab), Personal Interview by Rachel Marsden on Skype (Shanghai to London), Saturday 13 November 2010. 6
Philip Courtenay (e-‐space lab), Personal Interview by Rachel Marsden on Skype (Shanghai to London), Saturday 13 November 2010. 7
Philip Courtenay (e-‐space lab), Personal Interview by Rachel Marsden on Skype (Shanghai to London), Saturday 13 November 2010. 8
Chang Tsong-‐zung, Personal Interview with Rachel Marsden at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Shanghai, Tuesday 9 November 2010.