Asian Young Curator 2: “Imagery and Imagination – Uneasy trip to China”

A Belgian friend asked me for travel tips in China, places that are remote, untouched, “authentically Chinese”. It’s difficult, as I haven’t been such a traveler in my own country. Most travels I’ve done are through imagery and the imagination built upon it. And it’s also hard to identify what is “authentically Chinese” today. I guess the friend would definitely turn away from McDonald, 711, or gigantic malls, but if those form a great part of Chinese people’s daily life, can you say it’s not authentic?

China has long been removed from the exotic destinations of world travelers, photographers, filmmakers, etc, but it keeps seizing the eyes for the modern spectacles it’s generating: polarities coexist in every social aspect, as does ideology and the imagination which forms it (Louis Althusser, 1971). As the famous cat theory goes, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice” stated by the pragmatic CCP leader Deng Xiaoping who opened China’s doors in 1978: What simply works is working in China. Blood and sweat factories, ghost towns, replica cities…all the spectacles that stun and provoke outside viewers, are coated with a certain extent of Chinese easiness and playfulness, “it has been worse”, “it will be better.” We are in a fleeting state that everything could be termed and justified as Chinese characteristics, so are the spectacles upon which we have mixed emotions. As Guy Debord incisively pointed out, “reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real.”

While it might still be debatable if our current epoch is the Anthropocene (“when human activities in many ways outcompeting natural processes”, Paul J. Crutzen, 2000), several of its symptoms can be found in the Chinese landscape. The Three Gorges Dam, the so-called biggest construction since the Great Wall, has resulted in vast ecological changes and disasters which are still yet to be discovered. More massive man-transform-nature projects were conducted in the country during its socialism building period (1950s-70s). Imagine if Google Maps was invented in the 60s, you could have caught this scene by dragging the mouse in random Chinese cities and villages: an anonymous Chinese would be melting his own cooking pot in the backyard furnace to produce steel to contribute to the government’s fanatical campaign to leap into the socialist state. Half a century later, a filmmaker used Google Earth and discovered the relics of those periods, giant Cultural Revolution slogans made as flight navigation markers on the bleak Gobi desert in China’s far west. (Big Character by Ju Anqi)

While those large-scale characters are almost only visible to drones and satellites, what’s more evidential in average Chinese daily life is the drastic social-economic change in the last 20 years, since the government applied market economy, or some would say partial capitalism. The smell and taste of overproduction and consumption are literally in the air, in the water. One evidence is just outside my window: the southern town where my family migrated to from sand-blasted northern China was named after a poem praising its scenery, Clear Creek, and it had lived up to the name until my childhood. After less than 17 years, it’s not even clearly a creak, rather one of the drains for the fading “Made in China” world factories.

If the cityscape and pollution are more homogenous globally, how are the inhabitants different and unique from everywhere else? Simply looking at people’s faces and gestures, which is a method Antonioni applied in his documentary Chung Kuo (1972) amid the Cultural Revolution years. Though the crew had restricted access and admitted “not to pretend to understand China”, the opening sequence already revealed so much: the timid and restricted curiosity, mannered ignorance and calm, regulated actions, all of which is an excellent capturing of “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” (Louis Althusser, 1971).

If you cast a look today in any random Chinese streets, the facial expressions and gestures vary greatly from 40 years ago. There are no longer unified codes for behaving and dressing, causality and contentment are common. The traceable new phenomenon would be smartphones and the faces they cling to. Their gait obscured by digital screens, all performance rendered virtual. The largest populated entity in the world is producing the greatest amount of imagery, among which a great deal is “lovelessness” (Aldous Huxley, 1945). The massive imagery and the spectacles which are interrelated is again making allusion to our reality and the imagination based ideology, thus revealing the intangible social relationships.

The imagery I choose here are conscious ones for me, following the idea of a virtual Chinese trip: from imprinted landscape (Big Character) to a city and its people and the spectacles they inherited and re-imagined (China Concerto); from the facial and body gestures of the imagery over transitional years (Recycled), to the new era of commodities as potential souvenirs (BBR1 No.1 of Blossom Bud Restrainer); and along the trip, swapping dark myth-like anecdotes (Magician Party and Dead Crow); last but not least, we will “meet the locals”(Four Cowards).

The goal of the trip is not to draw a picture of China, but to map the distance away from it.

Bibliography:
Althusser, L. (1970). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Retrieved 2016, from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000, May). The “Anthropocene”. Global Changes News Letter (41), pp. 17-18.

Debord, G. (1967). Society of the Spectacle. Retrieved 2016, from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Huxley, A. (1947). The Perennial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus.