The China Project

43 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection above Cai Guo-Qiang / China/Japan/ United States b.1957 Project for Extraterrestrials No.10 – Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters February 27, 1993 7:35pm, 15 minutes duration / Gunpowder (600kg) and 2 fuse lines (10 000m each) / 10 000m explosion / Realised at the Gobi desert, west of the Great Wall, Jiayuguan, Gansu Province / Commissioned by P3 art and environment, Tokyo / Photograph: Masanobu Moriyama / Images courtesy: Cai Studio opposite Zhang Huan / China/United States b.1965 To add one meter to an anonymous mountain (still) 1995 DVD, 6 minutes, colour, stereo, open edition / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery To raise the water level in a fishpond (still) 1997 DVD, 6:19 minutes, colour, stereo, open edition / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund During the late 1980s, the Great Wall also attracted the attention of artists from abroad. On 30 March 1988, the performance artists Marina Abramovi´c and Ulay began walking along the Great Wall in a work titled The lovers: The Great Wall walk . Abramovi´c started from the coast of the Yellow Sea in the east and Ulay walked from the Gobi Desert in the west of China. Plans for the walk were made in the early 1980s, but it took a few years to secure funds and obtain permission from Chinese officials. The artists were to spend up to three months walking to meet halfway at a place called Erlang Shan, where they would get married. After 90 days, they met at Erlang Shan, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi Province, where they embraced each other, but rather than getting married, they decided to continue their lives and work separately. 17 The performance was covered by Chinese and foreign media reports, but few artists were aware of the event at the time. 18 Throughout the 1990s, more Chinese artists would also stage performances at the Great Wall, as well as at other key sites in China. Among these artists were Cai Guo-Qiang, who has gained international recognition for his performances, installations and paintings that involve the use of gunpowder. Born 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, Cai studied stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in the early 1980s. Cai became interested in the five elements of fire, water, iron, wood and earth, and started to produce a large number of paintings of gunpowder traces. Many of Cai’s works explore the course of action involved in creation, as well as destruction, and thereby provide a process-based, conceptual approach to art that is similar to Xu’s early works. After 1987, when Cai moved to Japan, he started to produce a series of sketches made for real-time and site-specific art projects; many of which involved large quantities of gunpowder and other inflammable materials. The first of these large projects is titled Project for Extraterrestrials, No. 3 – Meteorite Craters and was performed in the southern French town of Pourrières in 1990. From that moment on, Cai continued to stage his ‘extraterrestrial’ projects at a range of locations across the world. In 1993, Cai moved back to China, where he produced a massive gunpowder work in Gansu Province (north-west China), titled Project for Extraterrestrials, No. 10 – Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters . For this project, Cai ignited a stretch of gunpowder that was laid out over ten kilometres, leading westwards from the last part of the Great Wall. During the second half of the 1990s, more artists conducted performances at the Great Wall. The most significant of these performances is Fen-Ma Liuming walks the Great Wall by Ma Liuming in 1998, at the Great Wall near Gubeikou. The performance features the artist walking a large section of the wall naked, creating a direct physical interaction with the reminiscences of the wall and its natural environment. Starting in 1993, Ma began to work on a series of performances in which he drew attention to the stereotypes of gender that are played out on the body — stereotypes that become ‘meaningless’ next to the typecast of the artistic body. Ma was often mistaken for a woman, due to his long hair and delicate facial features, and decided to use this in his performances. ‘Fen-Ma Liuming’ became an artistic alter ego. Fen , or ‘incense’, is a girl’s name, but it is also a homophonic to the Chinese character for ‘separation’, producing the two separate identities of Ma’s everyday male ego and his artistic female alter ego. Ma Liuming’s performances described a new direction in performance art in China during the 1990s. The development of performance at the turn of the twentieth century happened during a period of rapid economic transition that moved artists far beyond the desire to take part in the development of a national modern culture, which became so prominent during the 1980s. The year 1989 would eventually mark the culmination of the ’85 New Wave movement. After the 1980s, China’s patriarchal values and central party ideologies were confronted by a consumer society in which individual choices of lifestyle led to a struggle to construct new social identities. As a result, artists increasingly approached the body in direct reference to the self, and the human body, or indeed any body, became the primary means for expression. During the 1990s, the ‘high-culture fever’ dissolved into a society of ‘cynical rogues’ and a political pop culture, and the new generation of artists ‘traded in the lofty, idealist platform of the New Wave artists for a ground-level perspective which placed them and their artistic activities directly back in the middle of mundane reality’. 19 This tremendous shift in attitude between artists during the 1980s and their cohorts during the 1990s became synonymous with the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition in February 1989, which was followed by the 4 June 1989 violent military crackdown of mass protests at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere across China.