The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

MAPPING CONTEMPORANEITY New types of urban spaces generate new art. Urban development in China, for example, has pushed experimental artists to the city's peripheries. Although such movement is a common experience of struggling artists around the world, the specificity of a particular place inspires specific works. Some of the most compelling performance projects in contemporary Chinese art were produced in the so-called Chinese East Village, a tumbled-down residential district on Beijing's east fringe. From 1993 to 1994, a group of immigrant artists from the provinces founded a community there. They were attracted to this garbage-filled place by its cheap housing as well as its ugliness, and conceived moving into the Village as a form of voluntary self-exile. Deriving inspiration from the Village's 'hellishness' in contrast to 'heavenly' downtown Beijing, they identified themselves with the place in their works. It is in this spirit that Zhang Huan performed his now infamous 12 square meters 1994 covering his naked torso with a foul-smelling substance to attract hundreds of flies, he sat motionless for an hour in the Village's dirtiest public toilet. These examples make it clear that any attempt for contemporaneity in art is intrinsically intertwined with the artist's identity. Although this is a common phenomenon in contemporary art in general, the issue of identity is again given extraordinary urgency in the fast changing Asian art world. Experimental artists are obsessed with depicting themselves, but a prevailing tendency is to deny explicit self-display. What is fascinating about these works is a voluntary ambiguity in self-imaging. Taken together, numerous images of self– distortion and self-defacing demonstrate an important feature of postmodern society, broadly defined, in which the traditional view of a fully integrated and unique individuality is increasingly compromised, replaced by a fragmented self that has no predetermined social or cultural significance. We find strong parallels between these images and the counter-monument, anti-monument, and ruin representations discussed above, but what is deconstructed and reconstructed here is not an external reality, but the 'self' as an internal existence. Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Professor; Director, Centre for the Art of East Asia; and Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, USA. He has curated a number of exhibitions and published widely on Chinese historical and contemporary art. Tsang Tsou-Choi (the 'King of Kowloon') adding a calligraphic inscription to a public utility structure on the border of Victoria Park, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong 27 September 1996 Photograph: David Clarke Zhang Huan China b.1965 12 square meters 1994 Performance, 31 May 1994 Dashan Village, Beijing, China Endnotes See Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992, p.47. 2 Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg. Object into Monument [exhibition catalogue], Pasadena Art Museum, California, 1971, p.59. 3 See Wu Hung, 'Ruins, Fragmentation, and the Chinese Modern/Postmodern', in (ed ) Gao Minglu, Inside Out: New Chinese Art, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998. pp.59-66. 4 For the concept of historicity, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol.3, trans. K. Blarney and D. Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985, pp.60- 98. 5 Private communication with the artist. 6 'Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Heri Dono in Helsinki, 1999', in Chinese-art.com Contemporary Art Magazine, vol.2, issue 6, 1999, www.chinese-art.com 7 David Clarke, Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization, Reaktion Books, London, 2001 , p.48. 27