Senses of Place on a Multi-Channeled Globe

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“How can I break the rules of how art history is written?” asks Guggenheim curator Xiaoyu Weng, the critical mind behind Tales of Our Time on view at the Guggenheim through March 10, 2017. The exhibition is a striking, and for many, surprising selection of contemporary art from China. Considering U.S. surveys of contemporary art from China have been organized primarily by institutions capitalizing upon preconceived notions of “Chinese-ness” or Orientalism in general, the Western imagination has largely been shaped thus. For Weng however, Tales of Our Time does not claim to be nearly so ambitious, let alone provide the answers to the show’s proposed questions on how to imagine place and culture differently. “Culture should have a much broader definition than we think about it in traditional terms,” she emphasizes.

 

In this way, Tales of Our Time does what past exhibitions fundamentally have not, that is: allow the fractured idea of place and culture in a neurotic epoch of neoliberal global capitalism and virtual networks, to piece itself together through the works themselves. Rather than constructing another monolithic lens for the scrutinizing and characterizing “China”, the selection includes a generation of artists, born between the 70’s-80’s, challenging conventional narratives of place through the various contexts of modern Taipei, Hong Kong, the Mongolian grasslands, the South China Sea, and beyond. Though the participating artists have all had experiences abroad, their works most critically investigate the complex idea of geopolitics via locality. While rejecting detached experience, theory, or concept, each project specially commissioned for the Guggenheim remains deeply local in terms of engaging particular lived environments. As the title Tales of Our Time suggests by its riff on Lu Xun’s 1936 novel gushi xinbian, rather than rewriting historical narratives, these artists weave together moments of past, present, future, fantasy, reality, absurdity, humor, and the uncanny. Like the father of modern Chinese literature’s juxtapositions in the language of standardized classics versus vernacular diary, the exhibition responds in various ways to the brutality of tradition, and the sometimes irreconcilable binaries of modernity. In the seminal text Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, author Lucy Lippard writes, “space defines landscape, where space combined with memory defines place.” If Tales of Our Time as an exhibition space defines specific landscapes through screened and projected simulations, these works should prompt us to ultimately navigate our own ideas of place, through our own memories and worldviews.

According to Taipei-based artist ChiaEn Jao, locality existed before the globalization of media, established through relations to other places, histories, political, and economic structures. Personal understanding of place is thus ultimately rooted in one’s unique experiences, rather than media re-representations of place. Yet in our current cultural fabric, worldview and local view are increasingly mediated by the digital, technological, and machine, rather than kinesthetically, or even sensuously. Analogously for artists, media seems an increasingly natural choice of medium and process; medium as a way of expression rather than vice versa.

For the artist Kan Xuan, her phone camera becomes an extension in the exploration of place. Resembling oversized Instagram squares, the travel documentations of the artist are displayed on 16-channel video. Each flickering screen captures thirty to fifty still shots of one location at almost the same angle; a distant farmer meanders through a field in snapshots before disappearing off the landscape, a bird flies off filtered pixel while the shaking of the artist’s hand is subtly masked by the stop-motion capture of various sprawling vistas and ruins along the Mongolian grasslands. It was among the countless ancient town sites on that border, where traditional settled farming culture of the South meets nomadic culture of the North, that Xuan discovered that like many, the one she was searching for no longer existed, as if wiped clean off the map. In the words of Herman Melville, “it is not down on any map; true places never are”, walking the land led the artist to the town of Kū Lüè Er next door. Interestingly enough, Kū Lüè Er, a place which previously did not yield results on Google search, now does, allowing spectators on the other side of the globe to surveil these lost sites through multi-channel video.

 

Tsung Kin-Wah’s immersive projection In the End is the Word is a visual acceleration of Chinese and Japanese disputes over clogged waters surrounding the Diaoyu or Senkaku Islands. Conflict rapidly unfolds as warships are sent out to clash at sea. The black and white grainy battle is as much an image of the future, as it is the present, as well as the tumultuous past between two nation-states. The work does not posit time as a streamlined progression, rather all events occur simultaneously within the same pool. “In the end, it’s always about spirituality and death,” the artist concludes, alluding to biblical verse as well as the Buddhist concept of samsara, which describes the eternal experience of suffering in the material world. History becomes a perpetual cycle from which human civilization cannot escape. “On many levels, the thinking of time in relationship to culture is really interesting to look to for alternative explanations, instead of a set of philosophies that are based on Western etymology. I think the classic idea of the future in relationship to the past is in crisis” adds Weng. At the end of the loop, an outpour of words emerge from the scene, obliterating the ships while bathing the room in illuminated text. Among them, a line streaks by, “BLIND TO WHAT HAS PASSED, DEAF TO WHAT IS WARNED.”

Of the screen-based projects, Zhou Tao’s parallel cinema installation is perhaps the most unhurried in duration. Visitors must share a similar sense, as groups and individuals alike sit silently in the dark upon the concave floor, as if perched upon a shallow curve in the ground, watching two opposite scenes unfold. Unlike the sudden flash-flood narrative in Tsang Kin Wah’s video, Zhou’s two-channel Land of the Throat unfolds steadily, revealing real-time, yet surreal footage of a post-landslide site in the city of Shenzhen. When the original hill served as a dump for waste from various construction projects collapsed, it buried everything in its trajectory under manufacturing debris. After surveying the area day and night with camera in tow, Zhou found the Chinese metaphor “land of the throat” to be an apt title for the resulting work, which ruminates on the strategic exploitation of the earth, a place that is vital, yet vulnerable. It is here that science-fiction, documentary film, field study, shanshui, machine and human life ultimately come together to form a tale of urgency. And as Zhou suggests, science-fiction has already become a part of the brutal reality around us.

In addressing the specificity of locality, Tales of Our Time critically explores today’s territories, boundaries, and even utopias with candid nuance. And if the essential function of utopia as “no place” is first a critique of what is present, the idea of “China” too, is presented here, as a cue for questioning and reinvention. As political temperatures and water levels ever-rise across our shared globe hurtling through an unknown universe and future, any savvy visitor to this exhibition should be prompted to ask, how is this relevant now? What are, and will be, the tales of our time, not only in the context of nation-state or the art world, but also in this world?