Art Monthly

‘There is also the West Heavens’: a Chinese-Indian conversation CAROLINE TURNER West Heavens, ‘China’s first major exchange of contemporary art and scholarship with India’, opened in Shanghai in October 2010. The project, a satellite event of the Shanghai Biennale, included an exhibition of the works of thirteen Indian and five Chinese contemporary artists, exchange visits, forums, publications, a website, and lectures by distinguished Indian scholars in conversation with leading Chinese scholars under the title The India China Summit on Social Thought.

The project, one of the most imaginative and interesting cross-cultural dialogues I have encountered in recent years, was the brainchild of Commissioner Chang Tsong-Zung (better known to Australians as Johnson Chang) from Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, and adjunct professor at the prestigious China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Since the early 1980s, he has been a key figure in presenting contemporary Chinese art abroad as well as a notable intellectual force in China. The exhibition, Place.

Time.Play: Contemporary Art from India and China, was curated by Dr Chaitanya Sambrani of the School of Art, Australian National University, one of the most scholarly and imaginative young curators working in the field of contemporary Asian art today.

The title West Heavens, as declared in the short printed Introduction (the catalogue is due out in May): signals the invitation to encounter locations and histories across old and new borders … For China, long before the seismic cultural shift towards the West it had experienced one other profound cultural turn. The Buddhist turn did not

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come with comparable destructive fervour as the past century of revolutions, but its influence was just as farreaching … For China today, after a century of revolutions, it is critical to remind ourselves that in our imagination of the world there is not just the West, but also the West Heavens.

India was known as West Heavens from the Han Dynasty (206BC–220CE). West was the direction that the famous Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang) took in 629 CE seeking the authentic Buddhist texts that would resolve contradictions in the texts then available in China. Xuanzang’s own writings document his monumental pilgrimage until his return to the capital, Chang-an, after twenty-seven years with 657 Sanskrit texts. There is a certain irony in the fact that Buddhism is now a minority religion in India, but some twenty-three percent of the population of officially atheistic China still admit to trusting in Buddha.

The objective of the exhibition is not so much to honour the achievements of Xuanzang or even to evoke the spirit of a time when two great fountainhead cultures could engage in the pursuit of mutual enlightenment united by a Buddhist faith. In reality the project is more about changing the contemporary relationship between the two nations. The Shanghai customs officials however seemed barely responsive to the concept, delaying some works’ inclusion in the exhibition for several days.1 This did not affect the enthusiasm of the mainly Chinese opening night audience or attendances at the first lecture by Sarat Maharaj (curator for Sweden’s forthcoming sixth Göteborg International Biennial 2011) at the Shanghai Art Museum. The works

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P9: RAQS Media Collective, Revolutionary Forces, 2010.

THIS PAGE: 1/ Hu Xiangcheng, Untitled, 2010.

2/ Gulammohammed Sheikh, City: Memories, Dreams, Desire, Statues and Ghosts: Return of Hiuen Tsang, 2010.

3/ Tushar Joag, Riding Rocinante, 2010.

All images are installation views from the exhibition Place.Time.Play: Contemporary Art from India and China, Shanghai, 2010.

Images courtesy the artists.

were displayed in two locations: a busy commercial space next to the Coffee Bean café in Nanjing Road, and a colonial Gothic-inspired chapel and associated building in the grounds of what was formerly the British Consulate, now part of a major redevelopment on the Bund. Shanghai was buzzing in October and early November with the Shanghai Biennale, exhibitions at several new private art museums and the world conferences of ICOM, the International Council of Museums, and CIMAM (ICOM’s Committee of Modern Art). These events attracted many curators including from Australia Jackie Menzies, Marah Braye, Stefano Carboni and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor.

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In the West Heavens website (http://westheavens.net/en/) Chang refers to his project as a ‘curatorial experiment’, a counter to what he clearly sees as too great a focus in China on ‘the West’. The Indian artists were asked to treat China as a ‘laboratory’. The exhibition’s invitation to ‘play’ is extended on the premise that the ludic instinct is a fundamentally life-affirming gesture …’ Sambrani has said in relation to the curatorial theme: ‘I did not want to start making claims about national identity because I think they are limited and too easily susceptible to subversion or hijacked for the purposes of jingoistic proclamations.’ He also noted the need for direct ‘conversations’ between the artists.

What particularly struck me was the intellectual depth and commitment with which the artists took on these conversations. An example and one of the exhibition’s highlights was the highly engaging installation by RAQS Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), an amazing circulating seat (which some visitors used as a children’s ride) on which volunteer actors performed a script written by the artists to conform to their philosophy of ‘telling “ghost stories” hidden deep within the histories of modernity’.

The ludic instinct was certainly evident in Apocalypse: The Coin Polisher by Tallur L.N., an electromagnetic polishing system designed to render coins ‘civilised and well-mannered’ by obliterating all symbols of sovereignty and thereby rendering them valueless; and his Enlightenment Machine, a Heath Robinson-inspired contraption of massive wooden discs rigged up with the foot pedals of a grinding machine, with the alleged purpose of grinding and sharpening the cultural objects of our time, in accordance with the invocation (displayed on a wall text) from the Upanishad: ‘May peace and peace and peace be everywhere’.

There was a distinct element of humour and even more of heroism in Tushar Joag’s performance Riding Rocinante, which involved his riding a motorcycle for fifty-three days from Mumbai to Shanghai, with the clothes he wore on the trip and the disassembled motorcycle serving as an installation, after being washed in the waters of the Yangtze. His journey reversed that of Xuanzang, and also referenced the journey of renunciation that the Buddha took on his horse, Kanthaka, and of course the motorcycle adventure of self-discovery of Che Guevara. Tushar, who has undertaken a number of works related to social issues in India, wished to highlight the plight of those displaced by massive new projects such as the Sardar Sarovar dam in India and Three Gorges dam in China.

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1/Gigi Scaria, No Parallels, 2010 2/ Tallur L.N., Enlightenment Machine, 2010.

3/ Liu Dahong, Travelling Worldwide, 2010.

All images are installation views from the exhibition Place.Time.Play: Contemporary Art from India and China, Shanghai, 2010.

Images courtesy the artists.

This work was a fascinating counterpoint to that of Qiu Zhijie, whose installation was composed of Tibetan Thangka paintings, photographs, video and objects from an extraordinary journey he undertook in 2006-2007 recreating the journey of Nain Singh, a British soldier sent to Tibet to map the region in 1866 (ostensibly to assist British imperial designs on the area). This was the only work not made specifically for the exhibition but fitted the theme exactly.

Travelling from Lhasa to Kathmandu, Qiu re-enacted the journey in reverse, even wearing shackles to mimic Singh’s footsteps of thirty-three inches. The work was a complex exploration of Tibet in imagination and history and could be interpreted on many levels.

The paintings of Liu Dahong are drawn from different historical sources: European through the Russian giant Tolstoy; Indian as seen in the towering figure of Tagore; and Chinese as represented by a ‘mother figure’. He continued to work on the latter painting throughout the exhibition. Hu Xiangcheng created models of symbolic modern buildings from India and China, including Shanghai’s Pearl of the Orient Tower, made from edible sugary materials. But the work raises serious questions of agrarian displacement and future food stability. Anant Joshi’s Musical Chairs also uses cultural icons, in this case architectural monuments from Beijing and Mumbai, to explore questions that the artist describes as ‘stirring up feelings of unease’. And Qiu Anxiong’s cubic ‘globes’ (relating to ancient Chinese and European ideas of a flat world) also evoke different histories and worldviews.

Atul Bhalla’s installation was another impressive exploration of history. He told me he sees the history of humanity in water. He undertook a series of performances (replayed on video screens) in the streets of Shanghai with his ear to the ground listening for water to unearth past histories of rivers and canals lost underneath the sea of concrete. Memories of history are also part of Sonia Khurana’s work. She discovered an old scrapbook where the anonymous young owner had pasted her own photographs

over political images from the Cultural Revolution. There is a poignancy in this private diary that conjures up a very different world from today’s youth engrossed with Facebook.

The pilgrimages that the exhibition celebrated were evoked most impressively by Gulammohammed Sheikh, poet, art historian and one of the most distinguished artists in India. His imposing installation City: Memories, Dreams, Desire, Statues and Ghosts: Return of Hiuen Tsang [Xuanzang] is a monumental phantasmagoria suggesting what the pilgrim might encounter were he to undertake a journey in time mapping the historical onto the contemporary through the tumultuous reality of modern India, including ethnic violence, as in the rapes during the Gujarat riots between Hindus and Muslims of 2002, discreetly but unmistakeably depicted in the centre of the standing painted panels where there is also an image of Mahatma Gandhi .

Nilima Sheikh’s very beautiful and poetic installation Over Land is a fascinating constellation of silk and paper banners hung like scrolls depicting Indian legends and Chinese stories from Kashmir and the Silk Road, inspired by the fluttering offerings on Buddhist prayer-wheels. Her question is the eternal one of who is being spoken to and who is listening in this silent telegraphy of prayer.

The fundamental issue of India-China exchange is perhaps explored most strikingly through the medium of modern technology in two fascinating videos (which were two of the most popular works in the exhibition) by Gigi Scaria, No Parallels and Raise your Hands Those who spoke

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to Him. No Parallels consists of two videos running simultaneously, portraying what might seem remarkable juxtapositions in the lives of the supreme national icons Mahatma Gandhi and Mao Zedong. But the title challenges one to reflect what real parallel there could possibly be between the lives of these two men. In Raise Your Hands Scaria presents four videos, again running simultaneously but in no sequence, giving the recollections of four people whose lives were affected by Mao: a sophisticated photographer, recalling with some detachment his association with the Chairman; a journalist whose devotion to Mao appears to have brought him to the point of nervous breakdown; a woman disciple who carried her dedication to the extent of becoming a National Model Worker; and another woman, who casually expresses her determination never to have done anything of the kind. This constructed cacophony is described as an attempt to construct the image of ‘Mao’ out of the memory of people whose imagination and memory have never been comprehended by written history.

But what it illustrates is how memory is transformed by the very attempt at recollection, and how the act of remembering itself serves as a deconstruction of formal history.

There were also two works not up before I left Shanghai: Hema Upadhyay’s installation of trapped and caged mechanical birds (a commentary, according to the catalogue, on migration and ‘the psychological implications of displacement’), and Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Scala’s meditation on the ‘Butterfrog’ (a fanciful amalgamation of butterfly and frog) shown together with booklets in languages, including Hindi and English, exploring themes of human rights.

This is an impressive exhibition enhanced by the series of lectures by Maharaj, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and other eminent Indian scholars. The commitment and intensity of the young Chinese attending the exhibition and forums demonstrate that real ‘conversation’ is indeed possible between these two superpowers.

This exhibition was designed for China but it crosses more borders than India and China. Sambrani told me he met Johnson Chang while in Hong Kong researching for an Australian Research Council project I coordinated some years ago, ‘Asian Cities and Cultural Change’. The inter-Asian dialogue so successfully achieved in West Heavens emphasises that Australia needs to continue to be part of such dialogues which will shape ideas about art and much more than art in the 21st century. y 1.Sambrani elaborates that the customs hold-up was to do with the release of some of the exhibition crates which eventually arrived at the exhibition venues three hours before the official opening. Hence there was a work-in-progress opening on 22 October, and another a week later.

The West Heavens project took place in Shanghai, 22 October to 20 December, 2010. http://westheavens.net/en/ Caroline Turner is Senior Research Fellow, Research School of Humanities, Australian National University.

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Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 5pm 30–34 Wilson Street Newtown 2042 ph 02 9516 3144 info@wilsonstreetgallery.com.au www.wilsonstreetgallery.com.au

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