|
From Six Mile Village to Three Shadows Studio
Wu Hung
A few years ago when I began writing Rong Rong’s East Village, I wanted to discuss three things. While each of the three had its own distinct scope and theme, all were inseparable from understanding contemporary experimental art in China and the artists who practiced it. The first task was to interpret specific works of art, particularly to unearth the most interesting ones and explore their depths, as this is the basis of understanding any art or artist. The second task was to document and restore the artists’ living and working environment at that time, mainly by consolidating fragmentary information of their lived experience, emotion, and desire into a coherent picture. The third was to place these works and artists into the larger framework of contemporary Chinese urban, social, and cultural space. What was Rong Rong’s East Village? Why did he gather with other artists from far-flung reaches of the country in this small village on the periphery of Beijing, filled with garbage and industrial waste? What connection did they have to this place? What would be the fate of the East Village? Why did it disappear without a trace, leaving not even a broken brick or shattered tile to mark its presence? When I looked at the pictures of Rong Rong’s East Village and asked these questions, I hoped to understand—and indeed did gradually come to understand—not only the artistic nature of each photograph and the life experience of the photographer who made them, but also the fate of a city, the intimacy and struggle with which people inhabit their environments, and the uncontrollable tragedy of history.
Photographs of Liulitun (literally, Six Mile Village) by Rong Rong and inri might be considered a continuation of Rong Rong’s East Village. The earliest works here were created shortly after the East Village artist community was disbanded, and Rong Rong moved to the nearby village of Liulitun in 1995. Writing this brief essay, I am still thinking of the three perspectives mentioned above: artworks, the artist, the city. As time passes by, Liulitun leads us step-by-step through the last years of the twentieth century, and on into the twenty-first. We see how Rong Rong’s lens and life gradually evolve, and how Beijing’s merciless expansion—that massive wheel of destruction and reconstruction—keeps on turning. At the dawn of the century, a Japanese girl who speaks with her eyes enters into this strange, small courtyard; she is inri. From this point on, she and Rong Rong and Liulitun find meaning in a soundless dialogue. Two years later, the wheel of destruction encroaches, finally crushing Liulitun. When their courtyard was turned into a pile of bricks, Rong Rong and Inri held a private funeral atop the ruins, holding fresh white flowers in their hands.
I first met Rong Rong in Liulitun. It was the summer of 1997, when I was preparing the exhibition Transience: Experimental Chinese Art at the End of the 20th Century. One major goal of this exhibition was to shift the focus of the introductory research then being done on Chinese contemporary art from collectivity to individuality. As I saw it, this transition was of utmost importance for the exhibitions of this art then being mounted abroad, because for most foreign critics and viewers at that time, Chinese contemporary art, regardless of whether it was called “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “unofficial,” or “underground,” was unfailingly seen as a collective political behavior, meaningless outside the context of the post-Cultural Revolution political environment inside China or the post-Cold War international situation. Transience sought rather to portray Chinese contemporary art as a collection of individual artistic voices. This individuality, of course, was not isolated or absolute, because these artists did indeed face similar political, social, and artistic questions. But they were “experimental artists” precisely because each one reacted differently to a set of common questions and problems, resulting in creation and innovation in terms of form, style, and visual language. This idea of individuality became the center of the exhibition and the theme of its catalogue. For the catalogue, I wrote twenty-two short essays exploring the work of individual artists; the material for these articles came from my interviews with the artists as well as their notes, writings, plans, and drawings. I did some of these interviews at the Overseas Chinese Hotel (the place where I most liked to stay when I came back to China in those years), but I also felt it important to see the artists in the spaces where they lived and worked. And that is why I went to visit Rong Rong in Liulitun.
Even after many years, I remember that visit like it was yesterday. Rong Rong described to me the rough location of Liulitun over the phone, outside the Third Ring Road, close to the Fourth Ring then under construction. He would wait for me by the roadside. With this in mind I hired a cab and had it drive straight east along Agricultural Exhibition Center South Road. The road was newly constructed: flat, broad, empty. The cab passed the Second Ring, then the Third, as the tall buildings grew scarcer. Workers were erecting traffic lights and electric poles along the street; sluggish pedestrians waddled across. The cab suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, when the driver turned around and said, “No way to go on, no more road.” I got out and looked around, and indeed things were as he said. The road ended under my feet, the pavement stopped, in front of me only bright green cropland. For just an instant I forgot where I was: I have never had another experience like this—no matter what the road, it always leads somewhere. There are no roads to nowhere. I felt absentminded, as if in a dream I had wandered to the edge of the world, where going one step forward would mean falling off a cliff. Snapping out of it, I asked the driver to turn the car around and drive slowly back. Less than a hundred meters back, Rong Rong was standing by the side of the road, his long hair blowing in the wind. I mumbled to myself, “Liulitun, the end of Beijing, the end of the world.”
This feeling of being at the end of the world grew deeper as the afternoon went on. Rong Rong led me off the empty road, down a bumpy dirt road into a little village, and finally to his small courtyard. In those five minutes I was taken back to days twenty or thirty years before, back into the recesses of my familiar, endless, eternally recurring past. No one knows how old this past is: humble brick and tile homes, faded latticework, deep shadows under overhanging eaves, the rising and falling chirp of cicadas at high noon. It is as if these have always been and always will be. But in 1997, this feeling of safety and permanence was but an illusion. As soon as I saw Rong Rong’s work, I immediately realized that for him, the quiet laziness and exhaustion of Liulitun were full of crisis. Yet like the eye of a storm, the tranquility at the heart of this crisis had made the artist’s nerves all the more sensitive, observing every drop of the present amidst this anxious state of waiting, listening in silence to the clamor moving in from afar. Thus this feeling of timelessness, this state of meaninglessness—the humble homes and faded latticework, the eaves and their shadows, the chirping noontime cicadas—was endowed with a biting sense of time, a special significance.
That day Rong Rong showed me his series Untitled, which I have since referred to as “ruin pictures.” This name has several meanings for me. On one level, “ruin pictures” expresses the ascendance and scale of demolition in Beijing. In these pictures, tiled buildings and courtyard dwellings have been transformed into desolate, dilapidated piles. The former occupants have moved on, and the images retain the tranquility of a cemetery. But on another level, these photographs also represent “ruined image”: the central image in each picture is a leftover poster amidst the rubble, often faded portraits of glamorous movie stars. Another related group of works frees the theme of ruin images from the realities of architecture altogether: these are images displayed in public settings, faded and damaged by the bright sun. I have already written of these works in articles and books, but here I would like to add one more point: these works marked the beginning of Rong Rong’s “Liulitun Moment.” They are photos about the fate of buildings like the then still-undemolished one in which he lived, and about the fundamental fragility of the image itself. Unlike the collective nature of the “East Village Moment,” this “Liulitun Moment” belonged to an independent artist. For Rong Rong, this independence is reflected in meditations about death, tragedy, and limitation.
I would visit Liulitun many more times, going to see Rong Rong’s new work and that of the other artists living in that courtyard. Although at times one could still feel the echoes of the earlier East Village—gatherings of friends eating and drinking together, debating the world, the occasional performance by one artist or another—still the atmosphere of that courtyard grew ever quieter and more closed. Little by little it became the living and working space of a single artist, filled with the secrets and ambiguities of a private life. The ivy on the gate grew thicker, the sounds of cars and people outside seemed to grow more and more remote. “Ruins” remained a theme in Rong Rong’s photography, but each new work grew in refinement and size, as their content likewise grew more romantic and theatrical. He had always liked to photograph himself, and was now filling the twin roles of director and actor. Some of these new photographs were hand colored, bearing traces of their author’s participation in the post-production process. These changes resulted in the series Wedding Veil and Ghost Village.
|
