Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2016

Nature (ziran) has been a key concept in Chinese art, yet the ‘nature’ celebrated in Chinese shanshui paintings and gardens are already abstract inventions, bearing only tenuous connections with the physical world beyond human habitation and control. This article studies several contemporary ‘landscapes’ that are devoid of conventionally defined nature, including Yang Yongliang and Yao Lu’s deceptively traditional shanshui that are in fact collages of scenes of urban congestion and pollution, Zhan Wang and Zhang Jianjun’s use of industrial materials to manufacture objects that signify ‘nature’ in domestic settings, as well as Miao Xiaochun’s seemingly straightforward portrayals of modern life that employ the compositional principles of shanshui to create sensations of the surreal. Those works have been interpreted as critiques of urbanization and commodification, but the ecological sensibilities they embody, I argue, are meant to undo the binary between nature and culture. Through seductive yet subversive appropriation of the conventional representations of nature, they remove the concept from a ‘transcendental, unified, independent category’ and reveal it as diverse, malleable and intimate, at once subject to and elusive from human interventions. Showing that the physical world becomes visible only through the mediation of metaphors and imagery, this article also stresses the role aesthetics plays in our interactions with the environment.

What does it mean to discuss ‘political ecology’ in art and architecture now in the East Asian context? I investigate this through the historiography of Japan, re-examined in the light of present-day practices of art and architecture. It will consider how alternative notions of ecology, art and architecture there became neglected about 100 years ago in the shadow of the society’s hurried western modernization, and how their resurgence now may cast a new light on our contemporary crisis. Concurrently, it will provide a new theoretical reading of ‘socially engaged art’ that derives from buried intellectual currents of Japan, alternative to dominant Euro-American theories.

Artist collective Yatoo was founded in 1981 on the dry riverbed of Kŭm River near Gongju, South Korea. Yatoo, which means ‘to throw oneself to the wilderness,’ is still active today, but despite the group’s longevity their temporary sculptures and performances outdoors and in natural environments have yet to receive a substantial scholarly attention. This lack of discursive recognition is connected to the challenges posed by the operation of what I call the ‘politics of nature’ in postcolonial Korea – or how discussions of nature in contemporary Korean art often consider ‘nature’ as performing the ‘nation’ or even ‘Eastern metaphysics’, conflating different levels and types of signifiers. Seeing nature as a concept that has been constantly reformulated in its fraught relationship with (neo-)colonial history, this paper situates Yatoo within South Korean art’s historical occupation of nature: namely, the histories of the late 1960s and 70s experimental art in outdoor spaces, the 1970s and 80s politicized ideas of ‘vibrant site (hyŏnjang)’ and ‘residing in wilderness (cheya)’, and monochrome painting called tansaekhwa in the 1970s and its connection with the rhetoric of naturalism (chayŏnjuŭi). The shifts that occurred in Yatoo’s direction during the 1980s and more recently are therefore important because they reflect the contradictions found in the various paradigms and topologies of nature and ecology operating in Korean art. As this case study of Yatoo ultimately reveals, an art historical analysis of art’s relationship with the natural environment (as a physical entity sometimes bound by site-specificity) and discourses of nature (as representation) necessitates an awareness of multiple scales (local and national as much as elemental and universal) and historical (dis)continuities.

This article analyses Li Peifeng’s documentary film Epiphanizer, which contrasts the chaos of post-earthquake reconstruction in Sichuan with local villagers’ dedication to building their tombs (shengji). The author does not attempt to locate solutions for contemporary crisis, because the very act of searching for a solution in fact compresses the space for thinking. Only by rejecting results-oriented actions can we maintain an openness in practice.

This article presents a close analysis of the Korean artist Sangdon Kim’s Rose Island (2009) and Bulgwangdong Totem (2011) within the broader context of a ‘shamanist turn’ in recent contemporary Korean art. As part of a larger project that examines the potential of local shamanist and animist practices to de-colonize the western model of modernity, Kim’s rich body of work foregrounds the agency of matter to reveal the contamination of landscape, a mimetic reconfiguration of alterity, and an anti-monumental model of sculpture. From a series of photographs to electronic images and sculptural objects, Kim’s work highlights the transformative exchange between humans and things to critique the logic of neo-liberal economic development and militarized modernity. Submitting a diverse ecology of images into an endless orbit of circulation, Sangdon Kim’s art offers a lens through which one can view the intersection between contemporary art and politics in South Korea.

In 2009, the reclusive artist Gu Dexin finally bid farewell to the art world after a decades-long career with a sweeping installation that centred on two declarations: ‘we have killed people’ and ‘we can go to heaven’. This work, May 2, 2009, recalls both phases of his career, including his early investment through collaborative projects in diagrammatic abstractions as well as his continuous sculptural practice, which often comprised accumulations of decaying organic matter. This article proposes to understand this final work – and, relatedly, his two bodies of work – as continuous rather than distinct, through the lens of meat as a form of thought, as a relation of predation or nutrition rather than an object. In Gu’s peculiar materialism, butchery functions as analysis and ingestion as synthesis, and then ultimately approaches a kind of rationalism. In this light, I end with a suggestion about the relevance of new strains of speculative materialism for a reappraisal of experimental artistic practices in China from the 1990s on with their philosophical ambitions in mind.

This article makes a comparison between two environmental art projects: ‘Keepers of the Waters’ (1995), a public art festival aiming to raise public awareness about the pollution problems of the main river in Chengdu, and ‘Everyone’s East Lake’ (2010), a public call for art action in response to an incident of commercial development of an important lake in Wuhan. The early strategies and characteristics of environmental activism in China led to the success of the first art project, and the constrains were testified and confronted in the second project. This article will discuss the two projects in detail regarding their political stances, modes of participation and the use of artistic language. I suggest that an emerging ‘political engagement’ mode is more public and empowering than the ‘political innocence’ mode developed in the 1990s.

Using ‘Forest Project’ by contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing as a case study, this article investigates how the ideology of Ziran (the Chinese version of nature) has been promoted through the practice of art at a community and international level. Mainly focusing on the first two editions of the project in Kenya (2008) and Shenzhen (2009), the paper argues that the artist’s approach to the environment of others and his own demonstrates his frustration towards cultural hegemony while drawing attention to the notion of sustainability proposed by Ziran, which is built on an independent and self-generating system.

This article examines the work of contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (蔡国强) and interrogates the function of the nation state in the production, circulation, and exhibition of contemporary art practices. By invoking the work of Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, it also expands Cai’s thematic engagement with China’s environmental crisis in his 2014 exhibition The Ninth Wave (jiu ji lang, 九级浪) at the Power Station of Art to veer away from the Romantic notion of ‘Nature’ to accommodate a more comprehensive understanding of the environment. Meanwhile, in thinking about the labour practices and the institutional context of Cai’s work, it argues that The Ninth Wave in fact perpetuated the erasure of bio and cultural diversities under the homogenizing effects of global capitalism.

This talk was delivered on 22 April 2015 by Naoya Hatakeyama for the occasion of In the Wake, an exhibition of photographs responding to Japan’s triple disasters in 2011 and curated by Anne E. Havinga and Anne Nishimura Morse for the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

This article investigates the role that art photography of in relation to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011. The article focuses on an ethical and moral debate that emerged amongst Japanese photographers who questioned how the disaster and its aftermath can be, or should, be represented in a photograph. At the forefront of this debate was the photographer Naoya Hatakeyama whose personal connection to the region turned him into a quasi spokesperson for his profession. Through a close reading of his photographic works, the article situates post-tsunami photography in relation to wider photographic trends in Japanese visual culture.

This article examines Zhao Liang’s photographic series Beijing Green (2004–07) and Water (2004–08). Both works document environmental degradation in the Chinese capital while making references to the Chinese pictorial tradition: the green and blue hues of Beijing Green are reminiscent of shanshui landscapes, while Water’s carefully controlled compositions and highly saturated colours are reminiscent of early twentieth century flowers and birds paintings. The artist is interested in ephemeral sites, where the natural and the artificial are meshed together forming strangely beautiful patterns. His images of Beijing’s ecological decay are both stunning and deeply disturbing. Pollution is aestheticized in Beijing Green and Water: a fact that has raised substantial criticism. Art historians have condemned the cultivated political quietude of Zhao’s practice. Yet one detects an unmistakable humour in the artist’s two photographic series, a tongue-in-cheek intonation, which distances them from the model of activist art but has nonetheless critical and subversive ends. This article suggests that the target of Zhao’s subtle irony is the state’s discourse around ‘ecological civilization’ (shengtai wenming) – still prominent today – and the official authorities ubiquitous advertisement campaign calling for the beautification of Beijing launched in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

A way to reflect about political ecology in East Asia is to explore the vibrant ecologies that have been created and recreated by two contemporary artists who have worked with non-human animals and called them collaborators: Liang Shaoji (Shanghai, 1945) and Yukinori Yanagi (Fukuoka, 1959). Liang, who has devoted his life to silkworms and Yanagi, who has worked extensively with ants, have both addressed the connections between the tiny (those small insects) and the huge (the entire planet) and thus stressed the relevance of all animal agencies, human or non-human. According to the approach of this special issue, to analyse their works I will rely on animal studies, which offer significant contributions to the study of contemporary art. In this light, I read their artistic proposals as an attempt to raise empathy and to advocate that every being, big or small, deserves the same consideration and is linked to any other; being this a continuum that does not have to be disrupted by barriers, dichotomies, pigeonholes and hierarchies.

This article proposes to understand the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Niigata, Japan through new materialist language of assemblage and agency. To see the festival itself as an agentic assemblage reveals the complex intertwining of material and human agencies − a materially inclusive community − from which art emerges. The article examines the Japanese satoyama landscape of the festival as part of its distributive agency and examines particular festival projects that make visible the entanglement of environmental history and cultural practices.