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Two Lifeworlds, One Double Question Man
Jaspar LAU Kin Wah
History is like the lake of mahjong. If it can prove that you are a criminal then it also can prove your innocence. If it can prove that you are a rapist, then it also can prove that you are a lover. The tragedy for human being is: that the environment around us cannot prove that we are its rapists. Therefore, we can never become its lovers.
Wu Shanzhuan, Today No Water ― The Power of Ignorance1
In the short space of a few years following the rise of the ‘New Wave of ‘85’ art
movement in China, Wu Shanzhuan had already clearly developed, as art critic Li
Xianting put it, ‘a firm creative grasp of the Chinese cultural climate.’ It is ironic that,
given the exhibition slogan of ‘No U Turn’, ‘China/Avant-garde’, held in Beijing in
February 1989, was turned into a kind of retrospective platform. Wu Shanzhuan,
however, had no interest in exhibiting his past work for the occasion. Instead, on the
opening day of the exhibition, he insisted on setting up a stand right in the lobby of the
gallery where he hawked fresh shrimps trucked in from his hometown of Zhoushan. Not
long thereafter, in the wake of the events at Tien’anmen during the spring and summer of
1989, Wu Shanzhuan departed for the West, and thus disappeared for a time from the
contemporary art scene in mainland China. In the meantime, the term ‘Political Pop’
gained wide currency as a result of the ‘China’s New Art Post-1989’ exhibition (which
opened in Hong Kong in 1993 and subsequently travelled internationally). Wu’s work,
included in the exhibition under the Political Pop label, consequently became trapped
within this identification. While it certainly can be said that Wu’s art helped to inspire the
Political Pop movement, his cultural vision goes far beyond it.
After leaving China, Wu lived briefly in Iceland, subsequently settling in Hamburg,
Germany. Although during this period he was labelled as an ‘overseas Chinese artist’, it
was in fact not long after settling in Europe that he created ‘Red Humour International’; a
conceptual banner that tweaked his previously conceived notions and gave them a global
dimension, creating a comparative understanding between East and West. It was also at
this time that Wu became a close collaborator of the Icelandic artist, Inga Svala
Thórsdóttir. The Western art world, regrettably, was largely unfamiliar with Wu’s
‘deficit’ artistic vision, which was born specifically out of the condition of scarcity
(cultural and material alike) in China. The East’s eagerness to be accepted quickly into
the Western mainstream led many artists to compromise by accommodating the Western
Orientalist perspective, yet a critique of the West has not been thoroughly discussed. As a
result, Wu Shanzhuan’s enlightening vision for both the East and the West suffered from
serious critical neglect. Because of the aura of humour surrounding his work, people
tended to read the ‘exoteric’ rather than the ‘esoteric’ message in his art.
Even from his earliest period, Wu Shanzhuan had a strong tendency to incorporate the
(external) forms of readymade (pre-existing) objects from the non-artistic arena into his
work. This tendency was in large part derived from an appropriation of the philosopher
Karl Popper’s ‘Theory of World 3’, which Wu came into contact with during the period
of intellectual openness that characterised China in the 1980s. From the charged colour
spectrum of red, white and black to the logographic forms of Chinese characters, from
big character posters to the representative objects and behaviours of the ‘Big Yes Big No’
(Da Shi Da Fei) political line, throughout his artmaking Wu tracked the course of
China’s emergence from the crimson sequelae of the Cultural Revolution into the period
of open-market reforms. In particular, Wu used the synthetic language of his red/deficit
characters to characterize the essential deficit of meaning in the ideological rhetoric of
Chinese socialism (bright, big and shining/false, big and empty), and at the same time to
expose the complete inability of officialdom’s petrified policy-making systems to keep
up with the booming myriad self-motivated economic activities during this period.
In 1986 Wu had written a short text entitled ‘A World 3 Theory Concerning the
Expansion of the Territory of Painting’; a crucial document in understanding his artistic
philosophy. In 1994 the artist revisited this text, replacing every mention of the word
‘painting’ with the word ‘art’, thereby reaffirming and expanding the interpretive power
of the text. In Popper’s ‘Theory of World 3’, World 1 refers to the objective world of
material things, World 2 to the subjective world, and World 3 to the world of objective
products of the human mind, which once produced become detached from human
subjectivity and attain an independent existence (hence as if ‘discovered’). Wu
Shanzhuan considers the state of the ‘forms’ imprinted in World 1 by ‘things’ of World 3
to therefore be ‘at large’ (since the otherworldly idea that once lent the object its original
existence is autonomous, its material ‘copy’ in our world cannot be ‘reined’).
In his early works, Wu Shanzhuan regards the logographic forms of Chinese characters as
products of World 3. Relocating them in the concrete Chinese context, they highlight the
deficit of meaning in their usage.2 Like the political propaganda slogans painted on street
walls, the overloading of meaning onto words reduces them instead to pure gestural
signifiers that follow the official political line. This phenomenon is similar to the
situation that existed in communist Eastern Europe, exemplified in an anecdote writer
Václav Havel relates about the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop ‘who placed in his
window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!”.’3 In
Wu Shanzhuan’s work Swearing in Front of the Flag with False Chinese Characters,
1988, the discrepancy between its ‘Big Yes Big No’ rhetoric and the senseless words is
clearly demonstrated. Art historian Boris Groys’ observation of how the artistic practice
of Soviet artists was imbued with a bureaucratic (rather than an individual) language,
finds echo in the ‘rigid forms (for form’s sake)’ of Wu’s work The Meeting.4 Wu’s
stamping of his official chops onto everyday objects and vegetables (such as cabbage), or
the displacement of the temporal and linguistic context of the ‘Today No Water’
notification, both create a kind of détournement (or absurdity).
1 Wu Shanzhuan, ‘Today No Water ― The Power of Ignorance, Chapter 15’, in Please Don’t Move, Esslingen am Neckar, Bahnwärterhaus / Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, 1996, p.43. 2 Though ‘impoverishing’ is one way to allow meaning discrimination for language to function, according to Wilhelm von Humboldt, compared with the Indo-European languages, the Chinese language ‘suffers’ from the linguistic features of ‘phonic poverty’, ‘phonic isolation/monosyllability’. Yet compensation measures have been developed; particularly outstanding is the use of graphic elements of the Chinese script. See Kwan Tze-wan, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt on the Chinese Language’, in Journal of Chinese Linguistics, June 2001, vol. 29, no. 2, pp 169–242. From his early writings, Wu’s understanding of the ‘deficit character’ seemed to have taken these linguistic facts into account as well. 3 Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Living in Truth, London, Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 41.4 Boris Groys, ‘The Russian Novel as a Serial Murderer’, Subjectivity, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000, p. 252.
Wu’s red/deficit characters relates both to aspects of politics and of daily life: these are
very much interrelated because they are both ‘hangovers’ of the planned economy. In his
‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)’ philosophy, Wu turned the language of doctrinism into a
language that ‘promotes daily life’. In this shift, Wu sharply delineated the cultural
(political) factors involved in economic development: for example, seeing how the value
of a Renminbi banknote is guaranteed by the faith in ‘the solidarity of the workers,
farmers and soldiers’, reveals a legitimacy crisis of the reforming political economy.5 The
1988 photos of ‘standing and falling’, ‘borrowing and lending’, ‘buying and selling’ (as a
series) has a deep symbolic significance as an exemplary demonstration of the ethics of
fair trade, and even of good deeds beyond the sole pursuit of commercial interest. While
Political Pop merely juxtaposes political and consumerist symbols side by side on the
canvas, in Wu’s Selling Shrimp, the artist in a sense actualizes an economic activity,
turning the art space into a real market space, hence revealing a far deeper understanding
of one’s own (commoditized) condition.
Socialism was fundamentally a revolutionary proposition put forth in the West as a
response to early capitalism. Consequently, China’s attempt to take a shortcut through the
stages of social development posited by Marx has proved to be a failure. Materialism
ironically created a deficit of material (goods), while idealism turned out to be less than
ideal (as compared with capitalism). The insistence on taking a ‘socialist path with
Chinese characteristics’ in truth constituted a reversion to capitalist society; thus China’s
contemporary time-space displacement has become ever more dramatic. Even though the
Tien’anmen democratic movements of 1989 ended in bloody suppression, in their wake
they helped to bring about a wave of democratic reforms in the socialist countries of
Eastern Europe. It was just at this time that Wu Shanzhuan, with his red/deficit character
artistic worldview, emerged from of the social context of China and walked straight into
the completely alien life of the West. Yet, quite unexpectedly, out of this additional layer
5 For example, in Wu’s ‘A Disaster Starting at the End of the Month: Business Art’, 1989, he wrote: ‘Every person has the right to enjoy the basic income for living promised to him by the nation … and he believes the nation should at least do something to protect him from suffering in the harmful effects of a business crisis.’
of displacement, Wu successfully created the unique double vision of Red Humour
International.
In an age nearly given over to a belief in the end of ideology (the triumph of the market),
a reiteration of Red Humour International ― calling to mind the Communist Third
International ― doubtlessly demonstrates a kind of untimely humour. But as Li Xianting
said of new Chinese art in his article ‘Departing from National Ideology’ (Zouchu Guojia
Yishi Xingtai), ‘What is political about it is just that it is apolitical’.6 Yet more and more
Western intellectuals point out a reverse concern. Theorist Slavoj Žižek, for example,
queries: ‘What if the political gesture par excellence, at its purest, is precisely the gesture
of separating the Political from the non-Political, of excluding some domains from the
Political?’. 7 In his eyes, ‘the very gesture of stepping out of ideology pulls us back into
it.’8 Exactly because of the displacement that occurs between East and West, the
ideological critique launched in Wu Shanzhuan’s artistic vision of the red/deficit
character remains effective and even timely in a Western context.
The first work Wu produced in the West was Selling Oneself at Large, conceived and
enacted in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1990. In this work, Wu walked to the local black market
with a sign hanging from his neck stating that he was selling himself for the daily market
price (with an additional discount). By positing a human being as a saleable commodity,
the work can be said to be Wu’s first response to a sudden confrontation with full-blown
market economics, which resulted in a ‘wholesale’ personal surrender (especially as
compared to Wu’s later works, which traded labour for earnings). With Selling Oneself at
Large Wu creates a depiction of the extreme contrast between the powerful market
system of the First World and a powerless individual of the Third World (categorized as
‘developing countries’). In the marketplaces of the West, all things become 6 Li Xianting: ‘Departing from National Ideology’ (originally in Chinese), in Der Abschied von der Ideologie: Neue Kunst aus China, Hamburg, Kulturbehoerde Hamburg, 1995, p. 12.7 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the New Left, London, Verso, 2000, p. 95.8 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999, p. 63.
commoditized, and everything wears a price tag; at the most extreme end, even people
are not excepted. As sociologist Georg Simmel suggests, the all-pervasive money ‘is the
equivalent for anything and everything’, measuring each ‘with merciless objectivity’.9
Wu Shanzhuan soon came to realize that nothing better demonstrated Western market
economics and yet was closer to daily life than the consumer heaven of the supermarket.
In his work Red Humour International Supermarket, Wu covered photographs of shelved
products in a particular supermarket with red paint. By marking everything in red, Wu
created a strange space in which a wealth of material goods was contained within uniform
packaging (or perhaps a uniform brand). This space corresponded partly to the East and
the West, but fit into neither. However, instead of viewing it as a third, alternative choice,
this work can rather be viewed as a criticism that aims to kill two birds with one stone.
With the uniform application of red paint, Wu addresses the uniformity imposed by
ideology. As such, he points out that by putting a price tag on all things, the Western
market in fact is no more than another kind of hegemonic system in which market
economics and money are in total command.
Drawing from his experience of using red/deficit characters to highlight the ideological
excesses of Chinese society, Wu Shanzhuan saw a role he could play as an artist working
within the context of a Western society characterized by an abundant material wealth and
a recession of ideological critique. In her Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of
Mass Utopia in East and West, Susan Buck Morse not only characterizes both the
ideological propaganda of socialism and the commercial advertisements of capitalism as
empty promises in which no one believes anymore, but she also attributes the failure of
socialist imagery to the fact that ‘it mirrored the dreamworlds of capitalism too
faithfully.’10 From this perspective, in the absence of a foundation of both popular culture
and a consumer market, the positioning of Chinese Political Pop art as a ‘commodity’
bears more similarity than difference to empty political discourse. 9 See George Simmel (trans. M. Ritter & S. Whimster), ‘Money in Modern Culture’, in Simmel on Culture, London, Sage, 1997, pp 243–55; and George Simmel (trans. D. Frisby), Philosophy of Money, chapter six, section I, pp 429–45.10 Susan Buck-Morse, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2000, p. 207 and back cover.
Conversely, before his departure to the West, Wu Shanzhuan had already embarked on
his ‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)’, and allowed his works to assume the role of commodity (as
in Selling Shrimps). In this way he touched on the political implications of a more
fundamental integration of art and life. If the genealogy of contemporary art really
suggests that Marcel Duchamp paved the separate ways for Joseph Beuys and Andy
Warhol, then Wu Shanzhuan, far more than Political Pop, was in line with Beuys’
counter-reaction to Duchamp’s ‘Golden Touch’ nomination of everyday objects as
‘readymade’ artworks, even though Wu and Thórsdóttir used a statement of the most
banal common sense ― that ‘Most people (owners of things) choose not to be artists’ ―
to refute Beuys’ dictum ‘that “Everybody is an artist”.’
Based in the West, Wu Shanzhuan undertook a re-positioning of his thinking vis-a-vis
Duchamp, inspired in large part by his collaboration with Thórsdóttir. The strategy of
Duchamp — the selection/removal of the readymade (objects not having been produced
by artists) from the realm of everyday life and their insertion into the context of the art
exhibition — is surely a direction precisely contrary to that of Wu Shanzhuan’s ‘Daily-
Life-arts(-ism)’. But if in Selling Shrimps Wu had already appropriated/replicated the
action of a street hawker within the museum space, then the fundamental difference
between the ‘ready-made action’ of his ‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)’ and the readymade of
conceptual art, lies in Wu’s adopting the position of the labourer: the ‘Golden Touch’ of
nominating the readymade carries the suspicion of exploiting the surplus value of the
selected product from the labourer.
Wu Shanzhuan’s counter-reaction to Duchamp ― apart from the emotional complex over
labour ― also lies in Wu’s idea of a kind of ‘Userism’(Shiyong Zhuyi) seeking a ‘reuse of
conceptual art and its things’. Wu challenges the position of Duchamp as a paradigm for
contemporary (nominalist) aesthetics,11 and even further, challenges the ‘purposelessness’
of traditional aesthetics in a way that Duchamp did not. This is not the same thing as
substituting pragmatism for aesthetic value, because Wu Shanzhuan is specifically 11 See Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1996.
focusing on the readymade object as art alone. Rather, it is perhaps more closely
connected to the readymade object as representative of the surplus production of Western
culture, where, as Wu suggests, excessive production of everything is carried out to meet
the projected needs of reparation. In contrast to Wu’s idea of ‘a waste of space’,
concerning the suppression of his selling of shrimps in the Beijing National Art Gallery,
the action of putting an object as a readymade (suspended of usefulness) into the art
museum space could thus be another version of ‘a waste of space’.
In confronting the nominalism brought about by Duchamp’s readymade, in 1992 Wu
Shanzhuan put forward another interesting proposition, which he called ‘a method of
found-objects’ (shidao fa). As the Chinese literally means, Wu recommends that we
‘pick things up’ from the street, and assume that whatever thing we happen to pick up
might be a work of art, and therefore should be delivered to the lost and found. This
whole idea is in fact similar to placing the question of whether the readymade is art
within the context of Popper’s theory of falsification/refutation (a criteria for scientific
knowledge). Within this setting, Wu seemed to propose a ‘différance’ ― a reconciliation
with the readymade ― by allowing the suspension of status: ‘This might/might not be a
work of art’. Yet since there is a very slim chance that these object owners would reclaim
their objects and falsify each of these exemplary objects as non-art, to treat all these
‘found-objects’ from the street as art pokes fun at our contemporary tradition of (faith in)
artistic nominalism.
Wu Shanzhuan also identified other ways that readymade artwork problematizes
traditional aesthetics: for example, in using a mass-produced object as an art object, does
the original work still exist? In Wu’s sketches (also created around 1992) proposing
‘Times Zero’, he borrowed the grand scale of production, in this, the age of mechanical
reproduction, to disperse with the halo (aura) of an original artwork that the readymade,
stamped with the artist’s ‘Golden Touch’, still retained. But while Wu and Thórsdóttir
tried to put Duchamp’s readymade back to use, their endeavours brought about another
kind of question: is usage able to help define an object’s essence, or does the
manipulation of things only reveal our ideology? As Žižek states in his essay ‘Hegel’s
“Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’, the opposing standpoints of ‘ground’ and
‘condition’ mark the line between whether a ‘thing-in-itself’ exists ‘for us’ or ‘for
itself’.12
Popper’s ‘Theory of World 3’ originally presents itself as an epistemological argument
for human freedom. But implicit in Popper’s theory is an area of ambiguity in which the
objects of World 3 can ‘materialize’ as physical objects of World 1. The acceptance of
the readymade in the Western modern and contemporary artistic tradition has further
created a vulnerable point of entry by which the concrete things of World 1 can flow into
World 3, because of their status as art. But instead of an affiliation to the hierarchical
division of ‘superstructure’ and ‘base structure’, in the language of Marxist materialism,
Wu’s discourse in works such as Selling Shrimp, Showing China from Its Best Sides ’95
and Second-hand Water, 1996, rhetorically attends to both the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’
benefit one could gain from his (and Thórsdóttir’s) works. The readymade’s ambiguous
status in the artists’ hands as a thing of both ‘World 1’ and ‘World 3’ exemplifies the
power of human free will (a nominalism, however nihilistic) overturning the determinism
of materialism.
Even though Plato was ironically top of the list in Popper’s vehement attack on the
enemies of an open society, Wu’s interpretation of the idea of the relationship between
World 3 and World 1 (including particularly the understanding that an artwork is no more
than an ‘example’ of Art), invites a comparison to Plato’s two orders of reality; that of
the ‘Eternal Form’ and ‘Secondhand Copy’. Yet Wu’s subversiveness does not lie in a
single-sided proclamation of idealism, but even more in his affinity with George 12 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Hegel’s ”Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, pp 228–29. According to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, the ‘thing-in-itself’ behind the perceivable appearance could only be inferred from experience of phenomena, but are themselves not knowable. One could therefore argue that it is still a postulate concept ‘for us’ rather than purely ‘for itself’. From Wu’s adoption of the World 3 concept, it is not surprising that his ideological critique tracks the relationship between the idea and thing all the way back to ‘thing-in-itself’. Wu and Thórsdóttir’s Thing’s Right(s) exist in two different versions based on different existing texts: one is based on the visa application form of the United States and the other on the Human Rights Declaration of the United Nations. The two versions therefore also address the Realpolitik that gets in the way of the realisation of the idealistic charter of human rights.
Bataille’s critique of materialism as (itself) a form of idealism. The most direct paradox is
that it is only when we have recognized the power of ideas that the Marxist critique of
ideology can stand. From here we can begin to discern how Wu Shanzhuan makes use of
Russell’s Paradox to play with the question of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of ‘things’ and
‘concepts’.13
In the same vein, Wu’s idea of ‘bracketing’ all (readymade) things brings to mind the
‘bracketing’ concept of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’ and
his proclamation ‘To the things themselves!’.14 But as Žižek’s suggested, ‘Let the facts
speak for themselves’, is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology ― the point being,
precisely, that facts never ‘“speak for themselves” but are always made to speak by a
network of discursive devices.’15 Through turning the usual phrase of ‘Wu’s thing’ to
‘Thing’s Wu’ and advocating ‘Others are God’, Wu Shanzhuan seeks to eradicate such
hegemonic ideological concepts as ‘we are the world’ and ‘we are the masters of the
world’, and seeks to restore ‘rights’ to ‘things’.
13 Russell’s paradox, named after philosopher Bernard Russell, comes out of set theory of logic. The paradox addresses the case that a set appears to be a member of itself (if, and only if, it is not a member of itself). Since set theory was inconsistent, no mathematical proof could be trusted completely. (Similarly, concerning scientific knowledge, Popper suggested that despite the fact that we have to accept the view that no statement about the world could be absolutely certain ― causing a fatal blow to Logical Positivism ― falsifibility remains a methodological condition.) Wu’s bracket concept is also a kind of set, which paradoxically emphasises its openness (of everything). As for Wu’s phrase: ‘Is my biggest mistake posing answer before question?’, 1992, other than the paradox involved in structuring the sentence ‘(x) before (y)’, it also brings into view the question of essence and properties common in his later works with Thórsdóttir. 14 Edmund Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ is a modern branch of philosophy that tries to delineate the intuitive foundation and verification of concepts and prior claims, objective contents of consciousness, and ideal meanings against psychologism. Its methodology of ‘phenomenological reduction’ suggested all assumptions regarding the external world be ‘bracketed’ (a suspension of belief), so the intentional consciousness is able to reconstruct one’s view of the world in a systematic, phenomenological way, free from conceptual presuppositions. Wu’s usage of the bracket also carries a sense of ‘abeyance’, but Wu again takes a humorous stand, suggesting that by putting his mind in brackets, ‘his mind (and also the concept) can relax’. It is not a ‘zero-degree’ for reorientation, rather a point-zero for a freedom of mind.15 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, op. cit., p. 64.
Just as Beuys founded a political party for animals, Wu promotes the rights of things. As
he states in ‘What are Thing’s Right(s)?’: ‘We believe that our understanding
(knowledge) of things allows us to use things any way we choose, forgetting that we
ourselves are also things ... ’.16 Only when we human beings are also ‘things’ are we then
made to relinquish the power to legislate for things as advocated by a human-centric
viewpoint. As Wu further writes, ‘idealism leads to the inequality of things’, ‘materialism
leads to the inequality of humans themselves.’17 ‘Thing’s Right(s)’ points us in the
direction of metaphorologist Hans Blumenberg’s idea of ‘de-anthropo-centrism’. Yet
whether Wu is wholeheartedly advancing modernity’s paradigmatic shift from ‘natural
rights’ to ‘human rights’ ― prioritizing ‘rights’ over ‘good’ [natural right] ― as
philosopher Leo Strauss diagnosed, is ambiguously open.
The self-legitimation of the enlightenment of modernity inevitably has to face its own
groundlessness. As self-reflective as Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology is in querying
common sense, exposing the hidden strategies (systems/forms) of domination and
granting resistance protected by democracy, it inevitably has to face the dilemma that the
sociologist also exists within society. Philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice
(typifying the modern priority of ‘rights’ over ‘good’), despite its formulation of ‘the veil
of ignorance’, has to admit its underlying adherence to the values of a liberal democratic
society in the end.18 Even though human beings and things seem to have struck a formal
equality, the discussion however turns full circle. The kind of rationality imbedded in
formal democracy is very similar to the monetary unit in market exchange (over non-16 Wu Shanzhuan’s manuscript, ‘Thing’s Right(s)’, 20 March 1992.17 ibid.18 In John Rawls’ theory about social justice, the philosopher proposed a hypothetical situation (‘the original position’) in which rational agents are placed under ‘the veil of ignorance’ (not knowing facts about themselves, so that no interest or bias is possible) to opt for different social principles. Despite its huge impact in reintroducing contractualism to modern political philosophy, Rawls finally had to admit this supposedly a-historical, impartial and pure proceduralist setting still assumed an image of the agent under the western liberal tradition. Wu’s statement of ‘power of ignorance’, is more a mockery of the dictum of ‘knowledge is power’, which sometimes placed too much faith in the power of abstract argument, as in Rawls’ case. By applying the phrase to the over-abundance of unskilled labour in mainland China, Wu is humouring the supposedly more ‘advanced’ ‘knowledge society’, which is flushed with cheap goods produced by cheap Chinese labour.
equivalence of contents), as well as to the communist totalitarianism that tried to
eradicate all difference of individualities in opting for idealistic formal equality. Žižek
even goes so far as to question whether the concept of ‘Otherness’ is only after all a kind
of abstract (redemptive) messianic promise.19
As Žižek has suggested, there is always a tension between formal democracy and its
concrete contents, while all the various ‘new social movements’, such as
environmentalism, feminism and pacifism, aim at challenging the traditional boundary
between the public and the private of formal democracy, putting forward the so-called
‘third way’. Wu and Thórsdóttir’s series such as Birds Before Peace (starting around
1992), Thing’s Right(s) and Second-hand Water (beginning around 1993) can be viewed
as an extension of the spirit behind the equal-rights movements of Western society.20 On
the other hand, the left-over mythology of the ‘national Thing’ (Guojia-wu), in claiming
its protection over a certain ‘way of life’, works against international solidarity with ‘the
other’;21 and this fact becomes a target in the interchangeability between Wu’s works
Kissing the Flag, 1995, and Kissing the Plant, 1995, or in the audience participation in
Buy Your Own Star into the Flag, 1995, revealing the ideology of the State in China.
Wu’s comparative cultural insights on East and West highlight the revenge of history,
constantly catching us with surprising paradoxes. In the case of the West, according to
sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, not only are conservatism and Socialism both just
variant versions in liberalism’s ideological family, but the celebration of the 1989
collapse of Communism as the final triumph of liberalism is a total misperception.
Borrowing his argument, these same events, quite to the contrary, represent ‘not the final
success of liberalism as an ideology, but the decisive undermining of the ability of liberal
ideology to continue its historic role’, marking our definite entry into the world ‘after
liberalism’.22 In the conclusion to his book on the contemporary Chinese arts scene,
mainland critic Lu Peng cited, alongside illustrations of Wu’s Speed of Democracy series, 19 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Preface: Burning the Bridges’, in The Zizek Reader, op. cit., p. ix.20 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Formal Democracy and Its Discontents,’ in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1991, pp 154–69.21 ibid, pp 165–6.
the claim of George Soros (the high-profile financier who is also a student of Karl
Popper) that market fundamentalism is now posing an even greater threat to open society
than any previous totalitarianism: this is surely no mere coincidence.
Back in China, the displacement in social historical evolution is even more bizarre, as it
is the Communist party (which theoretically aimed to abolish all private ownership) that
is currently hurrying to pass a law to protect private ownership in order to secure
capitalists’ investments: the Chinese title for this law, wu-quan-fa, is literally separated
from Wu’s ‘Thing’s Right(s)’ (wu-quan) by only the addition of the word for ‘law’ (fa).
What Wu and Thórsdóttir tried to achieve with Thing’s Right(s) is an equality between all
things: thus, despite similar wording, these separate proposals on ‘thing’ rights represent
two completely different relations between the subject and object. If Thing’s Right(s)
reflects another additional right of Western surplus society, then Wu’s word play in
overturning the Western invention of ‘copyright’ in protecting intellectual property to
that of ‘the right to copy’, addresses the harsh reality (without much concern as to
fairness) of the global economy currently faced by developing countries.
The Big Passport performance, 1990, undertaken by Wu Shanzhuan soon after his arrival
in the West, or the proposed Yellow Flying project, 1995, that he, Wang Guangyi and
others came up with (travelling around the world using only transit visas), may provide
evidence for what one mainland critic has suggested; that the art circle was among the
first to touch upon the problems of globalization and localization in China. Yet what is
even more important is not the question of who was chronologically first, but the depth of
those insights already captured in Wu’s thinking. Wu’s Today No Water series of
paintings (beginning in 1995), far from being one-dimensional, as they may appear at
first, represent a kind of mirror image that is at once flat and multi-dimensional, as if
reflecting the impossible compression of concrete content into formal democracy (an
entrenchment of its (il)logic rather than succumbing to the totalitarian single-point
perspective). In traditional dialectical logic (as of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel), the
continuous contradiction and higher synthesis resulted in a kind of pyramid model. Wu 22 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Introduction’, After Liberalism?, New York, The New Press, 1995, p. 3.
Shanzhuan countered this mindset and proposed a reverse method of suggesting
‘example(s)’ that not only reversed the pyramid, but opened up its base (perspective) to
the infinite.
In the years immediately before and after 1989, Wu Shanzhuan crossed a space-time
continuum that was cultural and social, as well as physical, experiencing ‘the speed of
democracy’. On the basis of his Today No Water, which summarized his observations of
the state of Chinese society, Wu came up with the phrase of ‘Today Water Pipe is Under
Reparation’ in characterizing the reformism of the West. The notification with an
explanatory ‘reason’ reveals both a kind of rationalization, as well as a high respect of the
rights of the others, contrasting with the anomie of its Chinese version. By borrowing a
simple metaphor, Wu Shanzhuan pinpoints the cynical reason(s) and ideologies at work
in the societies of the East and the West. Wu’s blend proves the existence of alternative
ways to avoid running into the simple oppositional stance of internationalism
(westernization) and nationalism. Perhaps after Marxism’s three phases of social
evolution, the cultural philosophy of Wu Shanzhuan looks into the future with a motto of
‘Today More Water Pipes are Needed!’. If understanding that the true enemy of open
society is nothing but the sclerosis of democracy itself, Wu Shanzhuan has given us a
homeopathic prescription: ‘Just Add It!’.
21 January 2005, Hong Kong, first draft
25 April 2005, edit-ed version
Translated by Valerie C. Doran.