The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

MAPPING CONTEMPORANEITY Rong Rong China b.1968 7997 No.1(1) Beijing 1997 Black-and-white photograph Collection: Smart Museum of Art, Chicago RUINS, DEMOLITION, DISTINCTION Pursuit of contemporaneity gives rise to many ruin images in contemporary Asian art. Although modern representations of ruins have a general emphasis on the present, images of war ruins in the early part of the twentieth century served nationalists as negative proofs for a bright future, while 'memory images' of the Cultural Revolution and other human calamities allude to a tragic past in the history of a specific country. 3 In contrast, recent images of urban ruins are remarkable for their lack of any sense of historicity - not only no past and future, but no concept even of the present.• Rong Rong's photograph 1997 No. 1 (1) Beijing, for example, shows part of Beijing in the late 1990s. The scene is terrifying: hundreds of houses were turned into ruins and a whole area in this famously crowded city suddenly became a no-man's-land. What has happened? Where are the residents? The picture offers few clues. What it offers, at the centre of the image, are abandoned illusions: pin-ups posted on a surviving wall of a half-destroyed house. The pictures are torn; but the women in them keep their composure, staring sweetly at the surrounding bricks and dirt with unchanging expressions. This photograph is one of many images in contemporary Chinese art that represent the transformation of the city. A striking aspect of major Chinese cities like Beijing or Shanghai over the past ten years, has been the never-ending destruction and construction. This situation is both the context and the content of Rong Rong's photograph. As a result, the image highlights three characteristics that define the contemporaneity in this type of work: 1. the lack of an apparent political or ideological agenda; 2. the absence or disappearance of the human subject; and 3. a skewed temporal ity and spatiality. While the very act of representing architectural ruins testifies to the artists' fascination with torn and broken forms and the intention to shock and wound, it is by no means clear what is actually wounded besides the buildings themselves. The absence of the human subject implicit in Rong Rong's photograph becomes the central theme of Zhan Wang's series of tortured sculpted figures, which are empty shells without a real body to feel pain. Sometimes Zhan Wang displayed these figures in a ruined bui lding and took photographs. The pictures recall wartime ruins; but the resemblance is deliberately superficial because the figures are mannequins, and even the ruin appears as a stage set under artificial lights. 21