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[AUDIO LOGO] ELLEN AVRIL: Good evening. My name is Ellen Avril. I'm the chief curator and the Judith H. Stoikov curator of Asian art here at the Johnson Museum. Welcome to the 2023 Stoikov lecture on Asian art.
Supported by an endowment established in 2011 by Dr. Judith Stoikov, Cornell class of 1963, the Johnson Museum has annually invited distinguished scholars of Asian art to deliver a public lecture at the museum. We are especially grateful to Judith, a member of the museum's advisory Council, for the many ways that her tremendous generosity has benefited the Johnson Museum's art collection, exhibitions, and programs, including the symposium that will take place tomorrow in conjunction with our current exhibition, Between Performance and Documentation-- Contemporary Photography and Video from China. Judith is here with us tonight with her husband, Dick, so please join me in thanking her.
[APPLAUSE]
Between Performance and Documentation-- Contemporary Photography and Video from China was guest curated by Nancy p. Lin, Klarman postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies here at Cornell, and supported by a gift endowed in memory of Elizabeth Miller Francis class of 1947, the Richard Sukenik class of 1959 Endowment for Photography, the Ames Exhibition Endowment, the Russell and Diana Hawkins Exhibition Fund, and the Jan Abrams Exhibition Endowment. This exhibition features videos, photographs, and artist publications of performance art from the 1990s to the present as well as conceptual photography, new media, and artificial intelligence, revealing the multifaceted history of contemporary performance photography and video in China while showcasing emerging artists who continue to push the boundaries of performance and mediation in radically new ways.
We are grateful to the exhibition lenders, including Dr. Michael I. Jacobs, Cornell M.D. Class of 1977, the Smart Museum of Art and Professor Wu Hung, and the Cornell Library's Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant Garde Art. We thank artists Xing Danwen, Song Dong, Ma Qiusha, Tao Hui, Miao Ying, Pixy Liao, and Chen Qiulin for lending their artworks. And special thanks to artist Lin Yilin for creating an exciting new work performed with local volunteers at the museum earlier this evening.
[APPLAUSE]
And now, guest curator Nancy Lin will introduce this year's Stoikov lecturer, who is Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago and an adjunct curator at the Smart Museum of Art. He is joining us remotely from Beijing. Nancy?
NANCY LIN: Good evening, everybody, and thank you so much for attending tonight's keynote lecture. My name is Nancy Lin. I'm a Klarman postdoctoral fellow and an incoming assistant professor in the Art History Department here at Cornell. It is my great pleasure to introduce Professor Wu Hung, who is not only a seminal figure in the field of Chinese art history, but also a dear mentor to me. I'm so very grateful to him for joining us live from Beijing today.
Professor Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is also the founder and director of the Center for the Art of East Asia and special advisor to the Provost for the Arts in Asia. As a scholar, he has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art and has experimented with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives. His publications include-- and I give you only a small selection-- Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture, The Double Screen-- Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting, A Story of Ruins-- Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, Contemporary Chinese art-- a History. And yes, he did write the textbook on this, Spatial Dunhuang. And apropos the topic of his talk today, Zooming In-- Histories of Photography in China.
Professor Wu is also a renowned international curator and has organized more than 50 exhibitions in the United States, China, and other countries. These include groundbreaking early exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art at the Smart Museum, such as Transience from 1999, Canceled Exhibiting Experimental Art in China from 2000, and The Art of Mu Xin-- Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes from 2002, as well as Between Past and Future-- New Photography and Video from China in 2004, in conjunction with Christopher Phillips, who will also be joining us for the symposium tomorrow, and more recently, The Allure of Matter-- Material Art from China.
An elected member of the American Academy of Art and Science and the American Philosophical Society, Professor Wu has received many awards for his publications, exhibitions, and academic services, including Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Chicago, Distinguished Scholar Award from the College of Art Association, an honorary degree in Arts from Harvard University, and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from the College Art Association. In the spring of 2019, he delivered the 68th annual A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which resulted in the publication Chinese Art and Dynastic Time. The full list of Professor Wu's accolades and achievements will probably keep us here all night, so I'll stop here and ask you all to please join me in welcoming Professor Wu Hung.
[APPLAUSE]
WU HUNG: Thank you, Nancy. Can you hear me?
NANCY LIN: Yes.
WU HUNG: Yes. Thank you, Nancy, for this very long, detailed introduction. I deeply appreciate. I also want to thank Cornell University for inviting me to give this prestigious lecture. I understand the funder is among the audience. I also want to express my thanks.
I apologize for not being able to join you in person, but I'm very happy to have a chance to speak to you from Beijing. And I'm on leave this year, so I stay here conducting research and writing books.
Today, I want to provide basically an introduction to contemporary Chinese photography, especially its beginning stage from 1970s to the early 2000s because I feel such an introduction may prepare you to better appreciate the exhibition now you have, a wonderful exhibition. I saw some pictures, really lively, energetic, including many, many new works. But my talk will focus on the early period of this rather long history of Chinese photography and other forms. I will focus on photography because of the limited time.
Now let me shift to share my screen with you. So the title of my talk is "Contemporary Chinese photography and Contemporary China." So this title implies that we have to take a contextual view to think about Chinese photography because it emerged and developed in a particular context.
So I may make a very bold statement that photography became art again in China in late '70s and 1980s, I say this because this visual form or visual technology had largely been reduced to a propaganda tool during the first 30 years of the People's Republic, that is from 1949 to 1979, especially during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. So the four pictures you see here on the screen are all produced during the Cultural Revolution. We do not know their authors. They were basically taken by journalists in official magazines controlled by the party, so they are heavily political, endorsing the Cultural Revolution.
But it was the photography was reconnected with individual expression after the Cultural Revolution was over. The year of 1976 saw the emergence of the first group of amateur photographers, who formed an underground network compiling their private records of a suppressed political movement for public circulation. So this was the first instance when these amateur, unofficial photographers began to produce works for public circulation. Before this movement, probably some people produce pictures for themselves or a small group of people. But this was the first instance photography played a very important role in a public event.
This movement, or the mass mourning for prime minister Zhou Enlai in 1976, was the first large-scale spontaneous public demonstration in Beijing after the founding of the People's Republic. Towards the mid 1970s, Zhou Enlai had become the last remaining hope for many Chinese, who saw him as the only person able to save China from the disasters that the Cultural Revolution had inflicted upon the country. With Zhou's death in January 1976, this hope seems to have vanished.
Even worse, the extreme leftist leaders of the Cultural Revolution prohibited people from mourning him. So all the anxieties, frustration, disillusion, and anguish that had troubled Beijing residents for years merged into a shared feeling of grief from which a grassroots movement began to take shape. So this is the background of this independent photography.
So the pictures we see on the screen are two examples. The first, the top one, showing a person chanting a poem written by himself condemning the leaders of Cultural Revolution, the lower one, actually, the people, young people singing the songs together. So after this movement, all these photographs had to be concealed. So this group of people, they formed the independent group. They concealed the negatives and secretly printed them and made a book for circulation.
Three years later, there was another important event. The first unofficial photo club in post-Cultural Revolution China emerged in 1979 and organized its first exhibition in Beijing. It is called April Photographic Society [INAUDIBLE] and the exhibition is entitled Nature, Society, Human, [INAUDIBLE]. You can see in the top picture.
I want to emphasize the importance of this title because you see that it emphasize nature, human or humanism, and society instead of revolution, class struggle, those concept popular during the Cultural Revolution. So even the title offer totally entirely different view.
So the lower picture shows the interior of the very narrow exhibition hall located in Beijing. So you can see the exhibition was crowded by 100 people who rushed there to see those photographs. So this exhibition attracted a huge audience hungry for images outside the previous official media. I can show you some examples.
So on the surface, these pictures are very mild, you can see even a little bit crimped. But actually, they have a very deep implications. Especially at that time, if you put these pictures in 1979, they really evoke a lot of shared feelings.
The top one showing two old ladies put their ears against a wall, listening to the echoes. This wall is called the Echoing Wall in Beijing. So it's a very subtle picture. What they are listening, we don't really know, but some voice from the past, from the inside of the self.
But the lower picture is more political in nature. So the photographer put the camera, maybe herself as well, inside the cage in a zoo, together with these few monkeys. So the visitors to the zoo then viewed from the inside. They stayed outside. So there is a play inside or outside. And the cage certainly has a political implications there, who's inside, who's outside, who's with animal, who's viewing whom, these kind of issues.
Maybe two more examples. The left one, we can say, is a record of daily life showing the young people secretly smoking in a public toilet, a place probably people couldn't find them. Then the right one is very interesting. The right one actually is the poster of the exhibition, the second version of the exhibition.
So you can see the pictures featured in the poster, they show different styles. So there are abstraction, there are some journalistic photos. So you can see the variety of styles now reemerged or emerged in China.
So this was in 1979 and 1980. And then the 1980s witnessed a delayed introduction of the major schools, the masters of Western photography from before World War II. So this Western photography was basically disappeared in China during the Cultural Revolution. There was no introduction to major schools of Western photography.
People didn't know anything, know nothing about major photographers in the West outside China. So during the 1980s this knowledge was reintroduced to China. So here, even from the right picture, we can see the beginning of this introduction. So the techniques, as well as the social and artistic aspirations of this Western photography, including some major American photographers, influenced a generation of young Chinese photographers.
The first goal in the 1980s was to regain photography's credibility as a record of real social events and human lives. The result was a sustained documentary movement from the 1980s to early 1990s, which produced many, many works with a strong political agenda either exploring the dark side of society, including poverty, deprivation, social stratification, and the political injustice, or glorifying idealized, timeless, Chinese civilization unspoiled by Communist ideology.
[INAUDIBLE]. So during this movement, there are thousands of pictures were created. Many local clubs were organized. So there is a wide range of styles and many different subjects.
Two major trend, one is to reflect the current events. For example, in these few pictures we can see the juxtaposition of these fashionable models and the old man. And here, thousands, thousands people are staying under some banner, banner also introducing these new fashion because China was experiencing this open period or reform period in the 1980s.
So others really bring back the individual image or some kind of snapshots in daily life. Poverty and people's life became really a subject, like the top one showing old lady in her home. But on the wall, actually, those are posters of movies or Hong Kong models. And the lower one, lower picture by Yuan Dongping showing this mental hospital, and that also became a popular photography subject.
So you can see that is 1980s. We can trace the inspiration to international photography. Those pictures now were available to young Chinese photographers. So they use this model, absorbed knowledge, and use this model to capture pictures in China. So that was 1980s.
And from this movement emerged some daring photographers, who really made some wonderful pictures as individual expressions. Among them was Zhang Haier. So this is about another trend of the movement. It's showing these age-old Chinese civilization. Seems that photographers were rediscovering this civilization unspoiled by the Cultural Revolution, so a lot of pictures about countryside, about the people's activities, taking an anthropological approach.
Here is a pictures, two pictures, by Zhang Haier, I just mentioned. He was from Canton, not far from Hong Kong, so he made some daring photographs towards the end of 1980s. The left one is one of a group of portrait of then the urban prostitutes, so the series called "The Bad Girl."
And the right one is a very powerful self portrait in which Mr. Zhang is screaming towards the audience. The feeling is very grim, you can see. So these are really very, very strong pictures from the 1980s.
This initial process, basically, during the 1980s, which Chinese critics have termed a photographic new wave, [CHINESE] photographic new wave, basically, the '80s movement. This process lasted about a decade and laid the ground for a new generation of photographers to undertake wide-ranging artistic experiments beyond the realism and the symbolism.
So during the '80s there was a strong feeling of realism, journalistic photograph, or a symbolism, like the pictures about the old Chinese civilization we just saw. But during the '90s, there was an urge to go beyond these two trends to conduct, undertake wide-range experiments. So from the early and mid '90s, photography became linked to an ongoing experimental art movement employed by avant-garde artists to record performances and staged scenes.
So during this period, mainly in 1990s, there emerged art movement, avant-garde movement we call the experimental art. So photography became part of it. The experimental photography emerged.
So here are some images. I will actually turn return to them. I just want to mention a little bit. The top right one, actually, they are all associated with this group of artists, the community in so-called East Village. These pictures were taken during the mid 1990s.
The photographer in the upper right picture is Xing Danwen. I understand that she's visiting Cornell at this moment. So she took some of this earliest, these kind of experimental photographs.
And the other, the left one is by another photographer in the community named Rong Rong. And the lower one, actually, there's a debate about authorship, but anyway it records a group performance, you can see, on the top of a mountain in Beijing.
So these works introduce a new brand of image making often referred to by Chinese artists and critics as experimental photography, [CHINESE]. It grew into a broad trend from the 1990s to early 2000 and it continues. Its lighting development over some 20 years was characterized by nonstop reinvention, abundant production, multifaceted experimentation, and the cross-fertilization with other art forms.
While experimental photographers find inspiration in performance, installation, and multimedia art, painters, performers, and installation artists have routinely employed photography in their work, sometimes even reinventing themselves as full-time photographers. As a result, photography played a central role in contemporary Chinese art at large because of its openness to new visual technologies, such as digital imaging, because it most effectively challenged the conventional boundaries between fiction and reality, art and commerce, objects and subject, thereby inspiring and permeating various kinds of art experiments in China.
So here I just want to emphasize the photography, or we say experimental photography, played a role which is bigger than photography itself because it really was the center of this much larger movement we called experimental art. So it's really provide a means as well as inspiration, technology for the artists to make a different kinds of project. So here I don't have time to introduce this work.
You see the style is very different, the subject is very different from this-- the middle is Mr. Zhang Huan. He wrote inscriptions with ink on his face, then finally disappeared. His image disappeared. There are many, many others. I will discuss some of them later.
But here, a biggest question is, what is exactly this experimental photography? I use this term several times already, but we should ask what is exactly experimental photography as understood in the Chinese context because experimental, this term, is not new. Even in Western art history, "experimental" was used to refer to certain technique, technical innovation, or other things. But this term "experimental photography" had a particular meaning in Chinese context.
Like experimental art, experimental photography is a specific historical phenomenon defined by a set of factors, among which the artist's social and professional identity is a major one. So there are some pictures. Just you have to imagine the context around the 1990s, early 2000. This group of artists belonged to a particular sector in Chinese art and their works were staged in particular places.
Like this very controversial work, we must say, by Xu Zhen was shown in an official exhibition in 2000 in Shanghai. Only very limited people were able to see it, and mainly artists and their friends and curators. So there were many these kind of exhibitions around that time. So through showing these pictures in a particular place to a particular audience, the artist gradually established their social identity, artistic persona.
And here are two pictures also from that period, the left one by Wang Wei showing basically a group of young men somehow struggling underwater. So she made a very large transparencies of these pictures and installed them in light boxes on the floor and in this very narrow corridor. So the audience to the exhibition had to walk on these light boxes, on the faces of these struggling young men. So in a way, the audience were forced to become or to experience these kind of repressing force. So actually, some audience just refused to walk through.
And the picture on the right showing this artist Jin Feng, it's a performance piece but also very clever photographic piece. So starting from the upper left corner, so we see his portrait first and he starts to write a text on a piece of glass in front of him. Now, this text actually is a kind of autobiography. It's, again, a form of self-representation.
But this text grows longer and longer, so then covered himself, blurred his image, and finally cover his face. So it's a kind of dilemma between-- it's about self-expression. Same time, you express yourself, but expression also blur your personality or image. It's a very interesting work.
Chronologically, this kind of photography first emerged in the 1980s and '90s, but only became a major trend during the early to mid 1990s. So again, gave you a little bit background. Before this moment, photography in China had basically developed and within the general field is a kind of official field known as Chinese photography, called the Chinese photography or [CHINESE].
So there were these officially sponsored journals, photographic journals, so they called Chinese photography. So this is the large field of photography in China. So that was the background. And this field was constituted various art institutions, including schools and the research institutes, the publishers and the galleries, and the various associations of Chinese photographers organized on different levels of the state administrative system. This field, the general field of photography, was therefore official or unofficial in nature.
We have to understand, in China there was and still there is this a very general field supported by the government. There thousands, thousands photographers working in this system. So in the '90s, this system also existed, but this situation underwent a fundamental change in the early and mid 90s when young photographers organized communities and the activities outside the institutions of the so-called Chinese photography.
These young people owed their independent status to a large extent to their educational and professional background. Some of them were self-taught photographers who collaborated with the experimental artists working with different mediums. Others were initially avant-garde painters and graphic artists, but later abandoned brushes and paints for cameras.
In either case, these young people, young photographers had few ties with the mainstream photography, but constitute a subgroup within the camp of experimental artists. As a proof of their new identity, these photographers often lived and worked together with the avant-garde artists and show their works almost exclusively in unofficial experimental art exhibitions during the '90s. So during the '90s, we see the emerge of this official field-- it's not just a few people-- official field as a part of this experimental art.
A landmark event in the development of experimental photography was the establishment of the East Village, I mentioned earlier, a community of experimental painters, performers, and installation artists and photographers on the East fringe of Beijing. Here is a picture by photographer Rong Rong.
Actually, you see these Beijing [INAUDIBLE] or Peking East Village. Actually, this name was invented by this group of artists, of course, in reference to New York's East Village. The village itself is called the [INAUDIBLE], but now this village has disappeared has been absorbed into this growing Beijing. But in 1994, this image was occupied by this group of avant-garde artists and they used as a base for their activities.
Most of these artists came from the provinces-- that's one picture. I will talk later. Maybe I will go later-- who moved into this tumbledown village from 1993 to 1994 for its cheap housing. That's the first reason, because it was so cheap.
But soon they discovered their common interests and began to conduct collaborative art projects. They also discovered, as they also developed a close tie to this place, to this environment, a polluted place filled with garbage and industrial waste, as they consider moving their act of self-exile. So they find a close connection with the place.
The place was so poor, so dirty. It's basically a waste station and they also view themselves as a kind of exiled artists, so it's also outside the normal society. So many of their pictures are showing this kind of connection with the environment and many performance was also designed to foreground this environment.
So most important, the most crucial significance of the East Village community lies in its formation of a close alliance of performing artists and photographers who inspired each other's work and served as each other's models and audience. Many memorable photographs from this period, such as [INAUDIBLE] and Rong Rong's records of an avant-garde performance by Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Tongqiang, and others directly resulted from this alliance.
Now I'll show you some pictures that is a very important performance piece by Zhang Huan. He basically stayed in a public loo for 40 minutes and covered by flies in the loo. So you can feel this environment right in the dirty countryside and he really subject himself to this environment, very calm staying there for 40 minutes, and you endure this unbelievable hot weather and the polluted air and the flies.
And here is another performance by Zhang Huan called the "65 Kilograms." Basically, he hung himself on the ceiling with chains and the doctor is drawing blood from his body, and Rong Rong take some picture. And we earlier saw them when taking picture of Ma Youming, another major performance artist in the village. And here is another project by Ma Youming. He created this artistic persona called Fen-Ma Liuming, so walking on the Great Wall naked.
And here is a picture of Cang Xin's performance. He made many, many these masks from his own face and he invited people, friends to a party. People just walk on the mask and destroy them. And the person in the picture actually is Ma Youming, and he used Cang Xin's face to cover his own face. OK, so that's just a few pictures, and I'm sure Xing Danwen can show more examples to you if you'd like to see.
Then another very important event or appearance of new type of experimental art publications around the mid '90s and these publications further declared the independence of experimental photography at the time. So because of these publications, those works became widely available to readers, audience in China and beyond. Among these publications, the most daring one was this series consisting of three volumes. I understand they are in your exhibition.
The first one, the left one, is called the "Book With a Black Cover," "Heipi Shu," a private volume publishing in 1994. Actually, these volumes have no title, so we call them a book with a black cover, book with a white cover, just simply because it's a description rather than the title. The book are titleless.
So the first volume is the most important because it appeared in 1994, very early. It introduced a new generation of experimental Chinese artists to the world. So from these books, actually, the whole world, including curators in the West, discovered this young Chinese avant-garde artist.
Significantly, the volume feature photography, photography as the most important medium of experimental art. So readers found in the in this volume the earliest reproductions of East Village performance photographs and as well as a whole group we call the conceptual photography, conceptual photography works by Zhang Peili, [INAUDIBLE], Ai Weiwei, and others. It's a very important work.
Actually, the lower picture, you can see vaguely some smiling young girls. This title is "Copying a Poster for 25 Times." Basically, the artist Zhang Peili used a Xerox machine to copy the Revolutionary poster for 25 times. That is the result, so alluding to the fading memory of history and the distance with the Cultural Revolution.
Avant-garde serials then appeared as avant-garde serials dedicated exclusively to photography, which appeared in 1996. That's represented by new photos [INAUDIBLE]. This series is also shown in your exhibition.
Lacking both the money for printing and license for public distribution, its two editors, Liu Zheng and Rong Rong, resorted to high quality photocopying to produce only 20 to 30 copies for each issue. The first issue of New Photo bore a preface entitled, "About New Photography," which defined this art, the new photography, in terms of not content or style, but of the artist's individuality and alternative identity.
So first, they defined this so-called New Photo based on identity. This definition changed a year later, however, a very interesting twist. As the two-sentence long introduction to the third issue declared, one concept in Chinese photography, it is as if a window suddenly opens in a room that has been sealed for years, we can now breathe comfortably and we now reach a new meaning of new photography. So these statement reflected an important change at the time. That's the late 1990s or early 2000, when experimental Chinese photography came to be equaled with a conceptual photography.
Until then, experimental photographers identified their art mainly through negation. It was by divorcing themselves from mainstream photography that they established their alternative position. But now they also defined experimental photography as an art form with its own intrinsic logic and purpose, which they found in the idea of conceptual art. So this was a very important change because this domestic movement was linked to international art movement. So we know that 1990 was also a moment when global contemporary art became a major trend, so these local phenomena happening in China actually were part of this broad global trend.
No longer interested in capturing meaningful moments in life, as an early documentary photography had often attempted, this new generation of conceptual photographers tried to construct various kind of images to foreground certain concept and tried hard to control the situation within which their work were viewed. These are very interesting photographs from that period.
I mentioned a little bit the picture to the right. It's a self-portrait by artist Qiu Zhijie. So he actually painted this Chinese character, which meaning "no," partly on his body and partly on the background, on the white wall behind him. But when the picture is taken like this, the character become like a united into a single character called "no," his body actually disappeared conceptually because the body actually is sandwiched between inside this work. I hope you can see it because the part of this character is on his body and part is actually behind him on the wall.
Many of these works basically construct a situation and involved performance. This emphasis on concept and display led to a wide range of constructed images. The situation can be compared with the American conceptual photography of the 1970s and '80s.
Taking place 20 years later, however, a replay of this history in 1990s China produced a very different result. Backed by postmodern theories and utilizing state of art technologies, experimental Chinese photography also more actively interacted with other art forms, including performance, installations, sculpture, site-specific art, advertisement, and the photography itself is a totally intermediate work becoming. And transforming pre-existing images into photographic representations, towards the late '90s and early 2000, more and more artists created objects or scenes as the subject of photographs. I'm going to show some works.
So these are all create a scene for photography. Artist Hong Lei created the work to the left based on this masterpiece, the smaller picture to the right. The masterpiece was by Liang Kai, a Song dynasty artist representing the Buddha coming out of the mountains from the meditation. So in original work, the Buddha is very calm. He already realized the Tao, is already achieved this transcendence.
But in Hong Lei's recreation, you see this actor or this staged Buddha has totally encountered a very troubled world represented by a dead bird. The lower right corner, you see the bird is killed with the blood on the snow ground. So it's really alluding to this troubled world full of violence, war. And the Buddha coming out of a mountain encounter this chaotic world, is startled by it, so capture this.
So that's just one example. Also communicating with traditional art, that's a new phenomenon. Here is another example. Artist Wang Qingsong made this a very important piece of photography called "Lao Li's Night Entertainment," based on another masterpiece from 10th century that use this Mr. Li Xiangting, very famous critic, curator in China with his friend, using them to replace those figures in the original painting.
Liu Zheng's representation and this kind of huge pictures in galleries, we see this kind of work from late 1990s to 2000. So we may consider these type of constructed photographs, photography itself, a performance not only because it involves the actual performance and the displays elaborate technical showmanship, but also because it takes theatricality as a major point of departure. So all the images I showed you earlier, these few, these really, you can see vividly this emphasis on theatricality, including this last one.
The interesting visual effect became increasingly strong after 1997. If earlier conceptual photographers still enhance the conceptual quality of their works through repressing visual attractiveness, visitors to exhibitions of Chinese photography from the late '90s onward were often overpowered by the works' startling size and bold images, which not only rely on new images technologies, but more importantly reveal the photographers penchant for such technologies. To students of experimental Chinese photography and experimental Chinese art in general, this twofold interest in performance and technology is extremely important because it reveals the obsessive pursuit for [CHINESE] or contemporaneity.
So here we encounter this very important term in Chinese art and Chinese photography, but just contemporaneity and what is exactly this contemporaneity. So basically, this is a long story and a complex issue, but I want to suggest toward the end of this talk, here are contemporaneity doesn't really simply pertain to what is here and now, but should be understood as an intentional artistic construct that asserts a particular historicity for itself. So basically, all these works try to construct a contemporaneity in 1990s or 2000 China.
To make their works contemporary, experimental artists of the 1990s, 2000 most critically reflected upon the conditions and the limitations of the present and conducted numerous experiments to transform the present, a common sense of time, place into individualized references, languages, and points of view. So we see here individualized reference to this personal view to this transformation. In fact, these works can be properly understood only when we associate them with China's social transformation, rapid globalization, and the artist's vision for themselves in a changing world. Some major themes of these works include history and memory, individuality and self, and changing urban environment.
So I just quickly use 3 to 5 minutes to show you some examples, some major themes in this contemporary moment. So first is the representation of urban transformation because in the '90s and the 2000s, major Chinese cities were all transformed, from traditional cities to this modern metropolis. So many old houses were destroyed, so these urban ruins become a very important theme.
So here we see two pictures. The lower right image shows some Chinese characters written on these will be demolished houses called the "Chai," means just to be demolished. Ron's work, he tried to find the pictures left in these half-demolished houses. And in Xiuzhen's work installation, she collected all these tiles from the destroyed traditional houses and put photographs on the tiles showing the scenes before the destruction of the houses.
Zhang Dali's picture showing the half-demolished houses with his own images, and through his image, we can see the glorious image of the palace, old palace. So some part of the tradition was preserved and some part of tradition, the vernacular kind, was wiped out. So then the new urban scene was also represented by Wen Feng and other artists, so this girl sitting on the wall really between these two times and spaces, past and future.
History and memory is another very important theme, so the pictures juxtaposing this young group of young girl, took a picture of themselves during the Cultural Revolution, and the photographer Hai Bao found these girls in 2000, so 25 years later, and took another photograph of these people. Sheng Qi's work, that's his own hand. You see it's mutilated and with picture of his mother and Mao.
And Yin Xiuzhen's photograph is her own portrait cut in the shape of shoe soles put in the shoes. I interviewed her. I said, why do you put your own image into your shoes? She said, to her, this space inside the shoes is the most personal, most intimate.
So a performance piece-- the artist Zheng Lianjie stage his family photo in front of him and, once again, in the Tiananmen Square many years later. And the personal history all become very important. The memory of the Cultural Revolution, you see the gestures in this new experimental photographs mimicking these old photographs, so it's create this echo, almost.
So a brief conclusion. I know the time is up. Basically, all these examples are closely related to the sweeping social changes and economic development in China in the 1990s to 2000. But these changes, these social changes, economic development were internalized as intrinsic features, qualities, and visual effects of a specific art project.
This leads us back to a proposal that I made earlier in this talk, that contemporaneity in contemporary Chinese photography must be realized, recognized as a particular artistic and theoretical construct which self-consciously reflects upon the conditions and the limitations of the present. Now I can further propose that contemporaneity as such results from the artist's internalization of complex contextual factors, not just simply reflecting, documenting these social changes, but through their internalization of these contextual factors, to locate contemporaneity in Chinese photography is therefore to discover the logic of such internalization. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
NANCY LIN: So thank you so much, Professor Wu Hung, for your lecture this evening. I believe you're open to taking a few questions from our audience?
WU HUNG: Definitely. Yeah.
NANCY LIN: Yes. So there's a mic that being passed around, a question over here in the front.
AUDIENCE: First of all, I want to thank you so much for this amazing lecture. I really personally like your book called [INAUDIBLE], especially the chapter [INAUDIBLE]. And also, for this lecture, my first question would be, for the concept of contemporaneity you mentioned, is this a concept that needs to be constantly updated? If so, what's the contemporaneity right now of China at this moment?
And also, my second question is about curatorial side because I'm currently in a curatorial practicum class. We mainly focus on the anti-colonization and also more understanding from Indigenous community, but as a Chinese student, also really passionate about promoting Chinese art under this society. I'm wondering how to position in China under this framework and how to promote contemporary art under this new trend. Thank you so much.
WU HUNG: Thank you very much for these very important questions. I feel all questions are very important and not so easy to answer. The first one is really about the current state of Chinese art and how do we use the concept of contemporaneity to connect this art, to understand this art. This is actually a very large issue. I actually don't have a really good answer for it. Because right now I'm in Beijing, I've been to, Hong Kong, Suzhou recently to see some shows and actually also curated some exhibitions.
One of my focus was exactly to discover this kind of self-conscious thinking or construction of contemporaneity because not just commercial, not just making some popular pictures, but to involve this artists' self-reflection on the social change, on the common issues of the present, which I call the contemporaneity. It's not anything. It's contemporary, it's a contemporaneity in art.
So I have to say that I'm very confused because right now, as you can understand, you know that is there are many, many commercial galleries, many, many art fairs, just like any other place in the world. So on the surface, you don't really immediately find the works very challenging or you often don't find the connections with real social issues. There are certainly some ideas, concept, or some kind of common keywords here and there, just this deep connection with the artist's personal life and with the real social issues, not just global issue, also Chinese issues.
I haven't found many. I cannot say no. Some works are very interesting, I found. They tried to connect a traditional art form and the current, more like a new technology, like a digital or whatever, so actually very interesting, but more like aestheticized or on the culture memory, that side, not so much about the reality.
So I think my answer to you just it's a matter we have to look around and we cannot really just find the answer right away. It's a matter of research and close observation and thinking on our own part, so probably also talk to artists. That's another way to understand their thinking.
I did some interviews this time with [INAUDIBLE]. I talked to Song Dong, who's visiting Cornell at the moment. And I saw their new work, all very interesting. But for me, it's a large research project, so I have to keep thinking about it.
But your second question-- I know you ask more than two questions, but the second one I remember very clearly, just how do we really promote, quote unquote, Chinese art or Chinese culture in this global space. I feel definitely it's very important. But for me, based on my experience, I feel the best way to promote Chinese culture is to establish links with the outside spaces, with different countries, the different nations, different people. It's not to see Chinese culture as a kind of isolated, independent entity.
So if we can create more links, like your exhibition right now is doing because it connect this Chinese art photography, video art with the audience in America, Cornell, in Ithaca and other places, I feel it's really the best way to promote Chinese art and culture. Yeah.
NANCY LIN: Any other questions from our audience? All right. Well, thank you so much, Professor Wu, and thank you all for joining us this evening.
Tomorrow our symposium will continue here in the Wing Lecture Room at 10;00 AM and we welcome you all to join us. But let's give round of applause to Professor Wu Hung.
WU HUNG: Thank you so much. Thank you for coming.
NANCY LIN: Thank you.
Wu Hung is a leading art historian and contemporary art critic and curator. At this symposium keynote lecture, he explores the developmental logic of “new photography” in China after the Cultural Revolution in a twofold sense: while the shifting focuses, styles and technology characterize a series of interconnected movements or stages, they also indicate the country’s deepening globalization and commercialization.
This lecture was presented as the annual Stoikov Lecture on Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, funded by a generous gift from Judith Stoikov, Class of 1963, and held as part of a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition “Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China,” curated by Nancy P. Lin, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, and Ellen Avril, chief curator and the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, Cornell University (August 26–December 17, 2023).
An elected member of the American Academy of Art and Science and the American Philosophic Society, Wu Hung is the founder and director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. He has received the Distinguished Teaching Award (2008) and Distinguished Scholar Award (2018) from the College of Art Association (CAA), an Honorary Degree in Arts from Harvard University (2019), and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from CAA (2022).
