2017
Preface to A Book in Action
I.
The history of modern art is also the history of modern exhibitions. As one of the fundamental symbols of artistic modernity, art exhibitions have gradually formed a unique visual culture in the 20th century, linking multiple semantic fields and living spaces. In recent decades, with the gradual emergence and development of various alternative art spaces and experimental display methods, curatorial practice, as a comprehensive and radical artistic practice, has increasingly demonstrated its potency in cultural mobilization and social sculpture.
The primary site of curating is the museum, a social organ of modernity that preserves history and constantly creates “obsolescence.” The ever-evolving modernity is one that constantly creates the “outdated” and the “expired.” In fact, the very concept of “obsolescence” itself is a product of the modernist ideology. However, the quandary for museums lies not in tackling such obsolescence but in filling the void left by the absent muses, when the world of high art constructed by aesthetics and sensibilities since the 18th century had already collapsed, when the art that had became “modern” began the processes of subjectification, formalization, conceptualization, and politicization. It was within such four “modernizations” that curating has been unfolding itself ever since.
The museum is a space not only for preservation, but also for display, and more importantly, for constructing meaning. The core issue of art history, I believe, with museums as the hub in the 20th century, is the double anxieties of historicism: criticizing art while collecting art, constructing history while dismantling it; both opposing the era and creating it. Curators are not only guardians and preservers of precious objects in museums, but also their destroyers and creators, who constantly invest in, challenge, and criticize the meaning construction of museums, showing us that the so-called history and contemporary times are nothing but quicksand, and that all constructions of historical meaning are just towers constantly built on that quicksand.
The earliest curators were said to be those organizers of aristocratic salons in Europe in the 18th century. In this sense, I am willing to say, half truthfully, that in those “eras without exhibitions” in Chinese history, the organizers of elegant gatherings, the owners of gardens, and even the officials of the Ministry of Rites of the Tang and Song Dynasties who organized national celebrations and social ceremonies, were the curators of the classical world. Joking aside, curators in the modern sense emerged no doubt with the establishment of the museum system. For a long time, curation was only a routine component of museum administration. Not until the 1970s, when Harald Szeemann changed the “Hundred-Day Museum” of documenta 5 at Kassel into the “Hundred-Day Event,” did curating truly begin to express its independent will and energy. It began to be not only deeply involved in the production of art and art history, but also participated in the shaping of social consciousness through its radical actions.
In addition to static “objects” in the museum, there are also “people” who are thinking and moving. After struggle and evolution for half a century, today’s museum has become a place like the Rubik’s cube, where the relationship between the individual “viewer” and the “object” of gaze, that between self and others, that between people and things, and that among people are all presented and entangled. The works in the museum, therefore, are not only objects of gaze, but also the starting point for fantasies and dreams, a mirror that reflects public interactions and social relationships.
Museums can be places for social interaction, debates, flânerie (in the Benjaminian sense), fields of ideological struggle, and even spaces of political negotiation. The key is how to change the spectatorship, which is the fundamental task of curating.
II.
1924, more than 20 Chinese artists living in France, led by Lin Fengmian, Lin Wenzheng, Liu Jipiao and Wang Daizhi, planned the first Chinese art exhibition, “Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Chinese Art,” at the Palais du Rhin in Strasbourg, displaying nearly 500 pieces of Chinese art. This exhibition served as a prologue to the Chinese Pavilion at International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris the following year and became a cultural declaration that inspired the aspirations of the Chinese people in that era. It was through this exhibition that Lin Fengmian and his artistic group entered the vision of Mr. Cai Yuanpei, the pioneer of modern education in China. Four years later, Mr. Cai ardently invited Lin Fengmian to establish the National College of Art (now called the China Academy of Art, i.e. CAA) and serve as its first principal. The history of higher art education in China thus began.
This “Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Chinese Art” can be seen as a “pre-history” of the China Academy of Art, and this history began with the “curating work” of a group of young artists. In that era, exhibitions were organized for “art movements.” Starting from the “Phoebus Society” (later known as the “Art Movement Society”) in 1924, the founders of CAA, Lin Fengmian, Lin Wenzheng, Li Jinfa, and others, have taken as their mission promoting the art movement, “introducing Western art, systematizing Chinese Art, reconciling Chinese and Western art, and creating the art of the times.”
For this group of artistic young people headed by Lin Fengmian, the art academy is not only “set up for academic research” as Mr. Cai Yuanpei said, but also for art movements. During the time under Lin Fengmian’s leading, the National College of Art and the “Art Movement Society” were isomorphic elements of the same system. By the 1930s, members of the “Art Movement Society” had spread all over the country, planning and holding the National Art Exhibitions and the West Lake Expo, becoming an important force in modern Chinese art creation and social enlightenment. Their artistic movement formed the forerunner of the curatorial practices at CAA. As far as contemporary art is concerned, the earliest curatorial activities in China began in the late 1980s, thanks to another art movement, the “’85 New Wave Art Movement.” Promoted by critics and self-initiated by artists, the “curating” in the 1980s and 1990s were particularly simple and direct, without fancy words or arcane theories, but full of passion and energy for action. Nowadays, the art world is full of curators, but most of them are just agents or middlemen of the art consumption mechanism. As exhibition agents, they are not even reasonably aware of their role within the social system.
The time when Chinese contemporary art truly became known to the international art world was in 1993. Two exhibitions in that year laid the foundation for Western discussions of Chinese art and society in the following decade. The first exhibition was “China’s New Art, Post-1989” held at the Government House of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Arts Centre, curated by Chang Tsong-zung and Li Xianting; the second was the “China Avant-Garde” held at Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW, House of World Cultures) in Berlin, with Andreas Schmid who is an alumnus of CAA participated in its curating. And also with the special exhibition “Passage to the East” at the “45th Venice Biennale” that year, Chinese contemporary art made its first official debut on the international stage and attracted much attention.
In this process, “China’s New Art, Post-1989” promoted by Chang Tsong-zung was particularly important. In the West, its influence has spread to all fields of art, politics, market, and ideology; in China, it has created a new era of art and a symbolic representation of contemporary Chinese culture. From 1993 to 1998, this exhibition toured 5 countries and 9 art museums; its catalogue was republished twice and reprinted for several times, with enthusiastic international coverage. As a whole image, “China’s New Art, Post-1989” has appeared in the most important international art exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Biennale, and achieved significant success. The artists included in it have won almost all the accolades of Chinese contemporary art and have been the leaders in the Chinese contemporary art world for a long time. This exhibition was a response to the time, and with its profound social and cultural insights and powerful iconography, it expressed the concerns of the Chinese people in the 1990s and created a mirror for the international community to understand China. As the exhibition spreading around the world, Chinese contemporary art has become a necessary intermediary for the world to understand China. In this sense, “China’s New Art, Post-1989” not only aroused the international art world’s attention to Chinese art, but also triggered a mechanism of cultural interpretation, in which contemporary art has become a face and symptom of politics and culture in the society of China. It is precisely for this reason that it has received such profound attention, and its scope of influence is so large that it far exceeds art itself.
In the 1990s, curators of contemporary art began to assume an increasingly important role on the international art stage. On the one hand, the systematization of art museums and the marketization of art have strengthened the academic power of curators; on the other hand, they have also inspired independent curators to take counteractions under the new environment and new theoretical premises. The rise of large-scale biennales and art festivals around the world, the gallery world’s emphasis on art curating, and the reliance of experimental alternative spaces on curators... all these have contributed to curators’ increasingly important role in the art system. By the end of the 20th century, the century of museums finally created an era of curators.
The curatorial practices in China Academy of Art are quite unique in the world. Never has an art curatorial institution been so deeply involved in cultural political discourse and social thought movements. In 2002, the “Long March Project” curated by Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie took off. At the same time, Xu Jiang, Gao Shiming, Wu Meichun, and others started curating the project “Edge of the Earth.” These two almost simultaneous curatorial projects invariably demonstrated thinking postures and practical approaches that were completely different from the usual curatorial practices at the time — a critical awareness of global cultural politics, the ability to think about history and the field, the cross-disciplinary interaction with the intellectual community, and the stance and posture as action-takers, and more importantly, the determination to promote artistic practice beyond the art world.
In 2003, CAA officially established the first curatorial major in China, and the institution was named “Visual Culture Research Center,” with President Xu Jiang as director of the center, Gao Shiming, Qiu Zhijie, and Chang Tsong-zung as deputy directors, and Lu Jie, Lu Xinghua, and others as research advisors. It can be said that this center is the result of the two curatorial projects: “Long March” and “Edge of the Earth.” With the name “Visual Culture Research Center,” it hopes to explore the visual system and exhibition culture of contemporary society beyond the current field of contemporary art, and then plan and promote curatorial practices from a broader perspective. From the outset, the disciplinary foundations of the curatorial major have been identified as cultural studies, discursive practices, media studies and ideological critique.
In a narrow sense, CAA’s curatorial studies has focused on the issue of “exhibition” from the very beginning. Its purpose is to explore: how does a work of art interact with the physical space and meaning space in which it is located? How do curators participate in the writing of art history through curatorial practices inside and outside the museum? Broadly speaking, exhibition is not only about the display of artworks and the history of exhibitions, but also allows us to reorganize the structural role of exhibition in the process of art history and rethink the social energy of art in different historical periods and different cultural contexts.
Art exhibition has changed dramatically over the past fifty years. Museums are no longer just warehouses and exhibition halls for artworks. With the powerful intervention of curatorial practice, this traditional habitat of muses is becoming a place where art subverts and regenerates itself - it seems to have transformed into a complex of theaters, cinemas, classrooms, workshops, parliaments, and squares. Similarly, exhibition is no longer just for displaying the museum’s rich collection; it means the unfolding of situations, the construction of publicity, and the production of community. In this sense, the culture of exhibition leads to the politics of exhibition. The so-called “politics of exhibition” concerns not identity politics or multiculturalism governance techniques that control exhibition curating and historical narratives, but rather points to the complex and tangled relationship between labor and work, aura and fetishism, authorship and ownership, objectivity and eventhood, production and consumption.
In the 21st century, Guy Debord’s so-called “spectacle society” has taken on a whole new connotation: through our indispensable mobile phones every moment, as well as Google, Baidu, GPS, Facebook, Twitter, Taobao and Uber... our daily lives are being displayed and consumed in the form of big data and reality shows. In this Internet age or “post-Internet age,” people have escaped from the obvious surveillance of a “Big Brother,” but have fallen into an invisible “panopticon” and a social machine of “full-process backup” and “traceological governance.” In this situation, art is of course no longer just objects in museums, biennales, expositions, and auctions, but importantly, our act of self-liberation from the matrix of consumerism and the path to self-construction. Similarly, “exhibition” is not just the presentation and expression of some ready-made art objects, but also involves the “being” and “presence” of each of us. In this era of being “displayed” with positioning surveillance devices everywhere, how can we re-understand art, art exhibition, and the history of art? How can we regain the initiative through more radical presentations and overcome the reality-show state in which we are presented? Starting from this awareness of the problem, the so-called “politics of exhibition” becomes a biopolitics closely related to our existence.
III.
Classical art history is often divided into “internal art history” and “external art history.” From a curatorial perspective, there is no distinction between internal and external art history, because art history and social history have never been separated. Curatorial practice is an artistic practice as well as a social practice. Curators not only shuttle among the visible, such as artists, audiences, museums, and galleries, but also involve themselves in the invisible, such as art history, media, system, and ideologies. These visible and invisible together constitute the great cycle consisting of art history, museums, mass media and the art market. Curating within this great cycle is to ask: where does the “meaning” of art lie? Where does the “value” of art originate? Where do the “works” and “creation” of art begin and where do they end?
Following this inquiry, we will find that the identity difference between curators and artists is just an illusion. Artist as a title is a social position, and curator just a medium, through which we gain a vision penetrating through the fetishism of works of art, through the individualistic myth of artistic creation, through the social circulation system of art-value-capital, and eventually into the social moment called “art,” the moment when art happens and works. In this sense, curating can be seen as a century’s echo of the “Art Movement Society” of ninety years ago.
It was out of this spirit that in 2010, the curatorial major of the China Academy of Art was reorganized into the “Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought” and incorporated into the newly established School of Intermedia Art. At that time, mainly two reasons were considered: first, at the School of Intermedia Art, students of curatorial studies can come into contact with the best artist teachers such as Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Yao Dajuin, Qiu Zhijie, Mou Sen, and Yang Fudong, and they can also grow up together with their peers artist schoolmates, their thinking and work interweaving and honing with the artists’ practices; second, in this education system, curating and even contemporary art are more or less regarded as a path of social thought. To this end, the institute invited a group of academics and intellectuals such as Chen Jiaying, Chen Kuan-Hsing, Sun Ge, Lu Xinghua, Huang Sunquan, He Zhaotian, Xu Yu and Johan Hartle to participate in teaching. Like artists, they have become comrades and important supporters of the curatorial education at CAA. Under their influence and help, historical contexts, problem awareness, and positionality have become the framework for self-criticism of each student; social perception, historical experience, and realistic feelings have become the most frequently mentioned topics in the institute. Curatorial study and practice has become an intellectual hub connecting contemporary art and social thought, which, through the collision of sensibility and thought, are often transformed into discovery and action.
This series of books consists of four volumes, systematically sorting out several practical contexts of CAA’s curatorial practice:
The first volume is Post-Bandung, which sorts out the cultural context of CAA’s curatorial history. Beginning with “Edge of the Earth,” it explores the emergence and migration of contemporary art in the geopolitical structure of Asia; through “Farewell to Post-Colonialism - the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial,” “Rehearsal - the 8th Shanghai Biennale,” up to the establishment of the Inter-Asia School knowledge network , as well as the proposal for the Third World Thinking Movement in the “post-Bandung” era, the book shows how the curatorial research of CAA established its own intellectual coordinates and spiritual dimensions in the discursive criticism of global cultural politics. The second volume, Field of Sensibility, aims to sort out the various methods and paths by which CAA curatorial work goes beyond “art in the art world” to absorb real feelings in field work, and explores how art curatorial practice gets in touch with social consciousness and sense of reality, and how to develop a sense and perspective of history. These two volumes together deal with the task of “perceiving reality.”
The third volume is Returning Possibilities to History, which focuses on analyzing a series of exhibitions from “China’s New Art, Post-1989” to “1985 and 85 Stories: Alternative Thinking of Chinese Avant-Garde” and then to “Three Artworlds.” It explores how CAA curatorial research has participated in the historical discussion and image construction of Chinese contemporary art since the 1990s, and how it has promoted the historical criticism and ideological deconstruction of the “Chinese Contemporary” in recent years. The fourth volume of Future Media/Art, from “Phenomena/Images: Chinese Video Art Exhibition,” the “Post-Sensibility” series to “Future Media/Art Manifesto,” demonstrates the sustained interests and radical experiments of CAA curators since the 1990s in new media, new sites, and new sensibilities. Volumes three and four deal with the task of “Reconstructing the Meaning of the Contemporary.”
Through more than ten years of practice and teaching, the CAA curatorial major has trained over a hundred young curators, artists, and critics, slowly cultivated its understanding of curatorial practice, and formed its unique curatorial approach. On this path, curatorial work can be roughly divided into three aspects:
1) Constructing issues and form question awareness with art works. This kind of issues are at once artistic and social. Curators must learn to unfold art works in social space and construct social narratives with art works.
2) Constructing critical and creative production situations. Art criticism and creation are mutually conditioned: all creation is based on criticism; meanwhile, only creation can transcend political and ethical criticism and become artistic criticism. The deeper level of curating is to construct context, or to construct a curatorial situation. The production and mobilization of art unfolds in this curatorial context.
3) Organizing art movements and promoting social progress. A curator’s highest goal is to make proposals to the society and the time through artistic creation, thereby stimulating social progress. At this level, curating is a social movement of the soul, a social spiritual production, and an action to promote social innovation.
To curate is to construct a situation. In this sense, it is fundamentally social — today, we must first be political before we can be social, just as we must first become an artist before we can truly become a subject. The public actions of curators are not political propaganda or commercial promotion, but to produce spaces of difference and heterogeneity in an integrated and automated society. In this sense, to curate is the anatomical engineering of contemporary society. It is to re-divide the singular society into plural societies, and to transform the gradually homogenized and conceptualized abstract public into heterogeneous ones.
Here, two types of exhibitions should be distinguished: one is to conceive a certain theme, bring the artists’ works into the exhibition, and place them within a ready-made conceptual framework, so that the works can find their places in hierarchical units of themes and sub-themes. The other is to expose the production and social procedures in which the work is completed, to let the work astir and struggle in a dynamic and temporary assemblage, to let feelings surge and the meanings riot. In terms of political philosophy, the former is policy, which is governance, and the latter politics.
To be liberated from the state of policy and to enter the state of politics, curators must not only intervene in the evolution of art production and art history (this evolution is not only superimposed, but also quite illusory), but also participate in the sculpture of the sense of reality and social consciousness through artistic actions. This is “rehearsal,” which is to dismantle and transform the objecthood of works of art with eventhood, and to form the colliding of symbols and desires, thoughts and feelings between the author and the viewer, the individual and the group, to unleash the torrent refracting and reverberating amidst perception, production, and action.
Heidegger reminds us: “We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough.” In Heidegger’s view, the essence of action lies in completion (vollbringen), and completion means unfolding something into the richness of its essence, that is, to produce. Here, action is production, which is to allow consumerist individuals locked in their respective social classes, various historical stages, and various relationship units to rejuvenate their potential for production, to generate a desire for change, and produce the possibilities to re-imagine themselves and the future, and to activate the society, as well as a power of self-renewal and self-liberation.
In this sense, curating is “rehearsal,” which first means absence, repetition, gathering, and carnival. It opens an arena through the connection and action of body and language. In this place, people can obtain the poetry of life and the energy of struggle, and redefine the relationship between self and reality, and “be together without fear” - this is what Jerzy Grotowski called “festival.” Curating as rehearsal is a “book in action.” Everything written in this “book in action” is not about the art of fetishization, but to develop the art of liberation and summon the festival of the future.
December 2017