Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World

Ai Weiwei

The last Guggenheim exhibition I saw was Italian Futurism and Art. China after 1989: Theater of the World is a very different show and provides the contemporary-Sino follow-up. While Futurism celebrates technology and modernity, the contemporary moment is beyond celebrating technology–it’s now haunted by it. In both American and Chinese surveillance/police state eras, civil liberties are a joke.

Censored work

Before the show even opened it was strewn in controversy. Bowing to censorship and citing the safety of its visitors, staff and artists in the show, the Guggenheim ultimately decided to censor its own exhibition after receiving a number of violent threats. The three works pulled, which all involve animals, are “Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other,” “Theater of the World” and “A Case Study of Transference.” According to the New York Times, these works were pieces chosen among around 150 works, mostly experimental art and many shocking and intending to challenge authority and use of animals (in video) and to call attention to the violence of humankind. (Protestors marched outside of the museum and managed to gather half a million signatures asking the museum to pull the works).

Zhou Tiehai, “There Came a Mr. Solomon to China” 1994

“Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other,” by artist collective Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (an artist collective I included in my master’s thesis in 2014), features pit bulls on motorized treadmills trying to fight one another, but they cannot touch because they are chained. “A Case Study of Transference” depicts tattooed pigs having sex before a human audience. “Theater of the World,” the signature work of the show, was to feature hundreds of live insects and reptiles under an overhead lamp. This decision makes me angry. While I’m totally pro-animal rights (fuck factory farms, fuck puppy mills, fuck declawing your cat), Sun Yuan and Pen Yu operate in a space that’s supposed to be controversial and it was only a video of their work that was to be shown–documentation that was not meant to send a pro-animal abuse message. This whole body of work is trying to say something about human rights and how we exist in the contemporary moment and the people signing that petition clearly don’t understand the work. It’s this angry hive mentality that can be dangerous–especially when it doesn’t really understand what it’s doing with the power that it doesn’t even realize it has. As much of the criticism against the censorship stated, it’s setting a bad precedent for the art world and for first amendment rights.

Chen Zhen’s “Precipitous Parturition”

That all being said, I really wanted to love this exhibition, but I walked away disappointed. I still got a lot out of it, but it felt like something crucial was missing–perhaps this was the censored works, but it felt more related to the format of the exhibition–which was very conceptional and video heavy. The show was hard to read as a whole and it left me more of an explanation. The most powerful works for me were the works dealing with the Bishan Commune, Ai Weiwei’s works related to the schoolchildren who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and Chen Chieh-jen’s video work “Factory,” depicting the plight of female workers in a clothing factory.

Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Sketchbook)

The Bishan Commune was a social project started by Ou Ning, an artist and activist involved with a transnational rural reform movement. It tacked impending social crises, including the environmental threats in rural townships worldwide. Ou settled in Bishan, a small village in Anhui Province rich in cultural history, and in tandem with curator Zuo Jing created an independent commune (complete with its own currency and passports). With the help of fellow agrarian activists and a local farming community, the worked to advance new models of social, economic, and spiritual well-being through a schedule of social activities centered around buildings for research residencies, a library and bookstore, a learning center, a shop for local products, and communal gathering spaces. The commune existed as an alternative social entity that was relatively independent from the government’s control until 2016, when local authorities forced Ou to evacuate the premises and the Bishan Commune to close. (Information from The Guggenheim’s press release).

Gu Dexin, Plastic Pieces—287

This concept of a commune or a semi-autonomous governance within another, larger, parent municipality is endlessly fascinating. It’s also sort of crazy to think that something like the Bishan Commune existed for a whole seven years within China–where on one hand communists should be very pro-something like this, but in practice just exercise complete control over its citizens. Having just visited Freetown Christiania in Denmark this past June and just having visited Israel (although unfortunately I did not visit a kibbutz), this is always something that’s resonated with me. Am I just looking for some elusive, fictional utopia? Am I looking for a form of escapism? Perhaps.