Interviewer：Paul Gladston, the University of Nottingham

Date：21/12/2007

Place: P1 Coffee house, XuJiaHui, Shanghai

Translated and transcribed by: Sujing XU

PG= Paul Gladston       ST= Song Tao              JW=Ji Weiyu

PG:  How did you meet and why did you start working together?

ST & JW: We have known each other since school，in 1998; almost ten years. We started working together since 2004. 

PG: How did your artistic collaboration come about?

JW: I was in the UK from 2000 to 2004. After I came back, we said we could do something together just for fun, but after a while, we started working together.

ST: To be more precise, he (Ji Weiyu) actually started using cameras when he was in junior school, at the age of 14. I started using them when I was about 20. The first camera I used was the one he lent to me before he went to the UK. I played with it when I had nothing to do. Later on, I bought my own cameras. 

We didn’t see each other for two years after he went to Britain. He was in Britain, and I was in Shanghai. He took a lot of photos about London, and I took a lot of photos about Shanghai. We decided to exchange our photos through MSN to know how each other was getting on. We didn’t really discuss much about cameras. One day, 1st of June, 2004, he came back to Shanghai. The next day we visited each other because we were good friends and we took photos together, just for fun. We spent two weeks taking photos and two weeks to develop those photos and edited our first album “The Beginning of Summer”. All the photos were about the two of us and our surroundings. 

JW: The reason we just spent one month together is that I went back to the UK again after one month. 

ST: Yes, he went to the UK again on July 2nd 2004. 

PG: Why do you call yourselves ‘Birdhead’?

ST & JW: Do you want the standard answer or joking way?

PG: Give any answer you would like to give.

ST & JW: The standard answer is that when we tried to build a new document to put all these photos in we looked into the desktop of our computer; we typed randomly and two Chinese characters came out, which were ‘Bird’ and ‘Head’. So we just took this name. Besides, the sound of the two characters in Shanghai dialect sounds special. 

PG: A lot of your work is about Shanghai and its local culture. These things are clearly very important to you both. Could you say something about the relationship between your work and your love of Shanghai and its local cultural identities?

ST& JW: As Shanghaianese, we do have a kind of local cultural identity. It can be shown from our work. We were born and brought up here in Shanghai. We feel very happy living in this place. Some people like moving a lot. Some people, like us, feel happy just to be in Shanghai. I’d like to give you an example: I heard that the best Long Jing Tea in Hangzhou is made from these leaves that are grown on a particular hill near the West Lake where it is shrouded by the mist during the rainy season. If you moved these trees to London, they might survive, but the leaves grown there wouldn’t be the same as the leaves grown in Hangzhou and the tea would taste differently. This example shows that particular land grows particular stuff.  This is the same for people. 

ST& JW: We use cameras to express our feelings. They are tools that we use to tell stories and express our feelings.

PG: Who is the audience for your work?

ST& JW: We think most audience groups would be people of our age in Shanghai.

PG: What about those who are not at your age, and don’t live in Shanghai?

ST& JW: We don’t care.

PG: You don’t care at all?

ST& JW: We don’t care. They may care about us, but we don’t care about them. Ha ha.

PG: What sort of relationship do you think audiences in places other than Shanghai have with your work?

JW: Well, though we just take photos of Shanghai, a lot of galleries abroad invite us to do exhibitions. If they invite us to go, it shows they understand what we are doing and they can appreciate what kind of feelings we’d like to express. 

ST: Yeah, Shanghai is very important. However, when we take photos of Shanghai, we actually digest something and what is shown in these photos is something of our understanding of Shanghai; they actually become Birdhead’s photos and are Birdhead’s world.  If these photos are connected as a ‘world’ we are the centre of this world; Shanghai is also part of our world. This process of moving from the city of Shanghai to the world of Birdhead is very interesting. When viewers read this world different viewers would have different interpretations due to their cultural, national, identity differences. Some may misinterpret our work or feel that it is difficult to interpret. But still there’ll be something different coming out. No matter if they accept our work or not - it’s not in our control to care about whether they accept it or not. 

PG: So you are happy for individual viewers to interpret your work in their own way?

ST& JW: No, we wouldn’t object.

PG: The way you work reminds me in some ways of the ‘punk’ art of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Britain and the US. Your work is highly improvised and self contained; you resist any straightforward interpretation of your work; and you don’t always want to be wholly cooperative. Where does this kind of attitude come from in the context of contemporary China?  

ST: Well, the attitude I have now, which is very happy and satisfied, is not something I have all the time. You would notice the differences between the work I did seven or eight years ago, when I was at about 20, and the work I made in recent years. My earlier stuff was quite dark - seemed to be very rebellious - which might be because of my age or even the hormone thing. At that time, I was quite ‘punk’, which I understood as being quite rebellious and not satisfied with my surroundings. Gradually I got bored with this kind of negative attitude. And this kind of ‘punk’ attitude reached its peak and suddenly I changed to another attitude. I realised only when you tried to accept something or have a better attitude towards life you could do something different. I started to like my life and trying to be creative. I started doing some work which was different from the work I used to do. I think it’s useless to resist all the time. Instead, only when you try to accept something first things or situations can be changed. It might sound very Chinese.

PG: Isn’t that a kind of passive indifference?

JW: Well, we are not indifferent. We care about how other people look at our work, but we wouldn’t teach them how to look. 

PG: In the West ‘indifference’ is really difficult for a lot of people in the cultural mainstream to handle; people just not caring either way. But you are not saying that, you are saying something else.

JW: For me, I’m indifferent to politics. How other people judge us and the attitudes towards politics are two different things. To politics, I’m indifferent, as for others’ views, it’s none of my business. 

ST: After the first exhibition, we received some feedback from galleries: some viewers said ‘we could do something like that’. Well, they are right. Some viewers may be able to do something like what we do, but why don’t they try to do it. Well, we were happy actually when we heard this kind of comment. This is something we’d like to hear. 

PG: The show at Biz Art, “Welcome to the World of Bird Head Again” – didn’t it have a different title in Chinese?

ST: No, the same. 

PG: I thought it had a different title.

ST & JW: The name of our exhibition in 2005 was ‘Welcome to the World of Birdhead’. This year (2007) the name of the exhibition was ‘Welcome to the World of Birdhead Again’. The name of our next exhibition will be ‘Welcome Again to Come to the World of Birdhead’. Haha.

PG: One of the things that interested me about that show was that you didn’t seem to be trying too hard to impress people with your skill as photographers. You also didn’t seem to be trying to reach out to a non-Chinese audience by, for example, using clichéd images of China. Was that a deliberate strategy in relation to that particular show, or is that a self-conscious aspect of your work in general? 

JW: Not really. The reason we like Shanghai is that we can do the kind of exhibitions we’d like to do. Our main intention to do exhibitions is for fun. However, we wouldn’t refuse money. If our work can be sold at a good price we would be very happy as well because we could buy more stuff we like. 

ST: Well, how to say? It seems to be unique too that our work can’t be sold and other artists’ work is sold. Haha.

JW: Well, we think our work also pleases the taste of the audience. 

PG: I spoke to Yang Fudong about a week ago, and one thing he is very clear about is that he wants to make work that is very well crafted. That doesn’t seem so important to you.

ST: There are good and bad examples of well-made works. Yang Fudong’s well-made work definitely is much better than others. No matter if you try to make work that is very well-made, or you try to make work that is not so well-made, there are some criteria in this field that can be used to judge if they are good or bad works. Though there are many artists who try to make well-made work, Yang Fudong is the top and the best.

PG: What I find interesting about a lot of your work together is that you don’t appear to feel the need to show how technically skilled you are as photographers.

JW: Do you mean we don’t really show our techniques directly or obviously? Actually, this question comes back to the previous question. We can’t really make the work like the way Yang Fudong does. We have techniques, but we don’t think it’s necessary to show the audience our techniques all the time. I think it also has something to do with our experiences or personalities. 

PG: There’s a video of the opening of the exhibition ‘Welcome to the World of Bird Head Again’ where you get the viewers to mount the show themselves. Was this a deliberate strategy to try to break down barriers between you and the audience and even between your work and everyday life in Shanghai?

ST : The reason we showed the exhibition like that - let the audience themselves pick up the photos they liked - is something we have thought about. There are two ways of showing photos. One is to put all of the photos in frames and hang them up. The other way is just like when we look at photo albums at home. We look at each photo from page to page and it’s so close to you. We think the second way will draw the audience closer. And it would save us a lot to time to think about what kind of frames to pick up and how to hang them. Haha. 

About your interpretation, I agree. We would like to give something to the audience. 

PG: A lot of Chinese artists I have interviewed talk about aesthetic feeling in relation to their work. Do you have a particular view about the audience’s relationship to your work in terms of the way they feel, or a kind of aesthetic feeling which you think your audience might have?

ST&JW: To this point, we wouldn’t compromise: we just make something we think is good and follow our own judgement of what is beautiful or follow our own aesthetic feeling. We don’t really guess the needs or aesthetic tendency of the viewers. When we do exhibitions, we just want to make the viewers happy, that’s it. 

PG: Why is aesthetic feeling so important to you?

ST&JW: Of course it’s very important as artists. 

PG: The reason I asked is because aesthetics, particularly beauty, is now something of a suspect term in Western discourses about art.  In the West we would tend to put a big question mark after, or inverted commas around the question of aesthetics. 

ST&JW: By making beautiful work, do you mean making the work follow the form of contemporary art, or follow public views towards the form of art?

ST&JW: We think it’s a kind of physiological need that we don’t want to make ugly stuff and so we try to emphasise aesthetic feelings or to make the work beautiful.

PG: In the West we tend to subordinate aesthetic feeling to the question of the function of art. The primary question is always: what critical function does the work have? This is even when aesthetics are involved. It seems to me that one of the more obvious differences between Western and Chinese contemporary art is that in China artists often seek to downplay or even deny any critical function for their work in favour of its aesthetic value. Do you think that’s the case?

ST&JW: In China, there are several types. Some work tends to have a more political function; some work often uses Chinese labels or symbols to attract buyers, which they do just for the purposes of the market. While our work, it tends to be more life-philosophical orientated. We love life and we would like to show our feelings.

PG: I agree with that. It’s just a kind of tendency, not an absolute cultural division. 

ST: I think there are several types of artists no matter if it’s in America or Europe. 

PG: Do you resist discussions about the political or critical significance of your work because you have concerns about the possible consequences, or is it because you want to separate your work deliberately from the political sphere as some sort of stratagem?

JW: No, not really. I don’t know about other artists, but for myself, I have no interests in politics at all. I just can’t do any of these kinds of work. It’s not because I’m afraid of the possible results or whatever. 

ST: To be clear, we’re not so inspired by the politically oriented field.

PG: Nevertheless, do you think there is some scope for a critical function in relation to contemporary Chinese art? 

ST: I think no matter if it’s in China or in the West, there are several types of artists. Some of them tend to be more politically critical, some are not. In the West, there are not so many restrictions on politically critical work. While in China…it’s not as open as in the West. You could do it, but there’s a danger that you might be put into prison.

PG: Contemporary Chinese art has been heavily influenced by the Western avant-gardes and post avant-gardes. One thing that we in the West now habitually associate with avant-garde art is the theory and practice of deconstruction. Do you see your own work as being deconstructive? To what extent do you think those Western definitions would apply to your work? And if not, what else applies, other than my Westernised jargon? 

ST: I have heard of Dada, deconstruction etc. I learned a bit when I studied art history. However, we don’t really like to use these terms or definitions to label our work.

JW: I don’t know these terms at all. 

ST: I’ve got a question: what were the intentions of these Dadaists and avant-garde artists when they first did the work the way they did?

PG: That’s actually a very complicated question, because a critical understanding of what Dada, or avant-garde artists were trying to do has changed over time. I’ll give you an example: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. It was interpreted in a particular way when it was made in 1917. Actually it was seen at the time as a way of extending the boundaries of what might be considered as art, or what might even be considered as beautiful. By the time you get to the 1950s there’s a notion that the work isn’t simply about extending the boundaries of art, but it’s a kind of anti-art. It’s a way of extending the boundaries of art by - in a sense - being outside of art, or being some kind of transgressive or radical other to art. And by the time we get to the 1970s, or 1980s, that’s when people started talking widely about deconstruction in relation to works like Fountain. Deconstruction isn’t about extending or transgressing boundaries, or just being opposed to something. It’s actually about suspending the conceptual boundaries which define the differences between things, between art and non-art. But at the same time it’s not about saying that art and non-art can be exactly the same thing. You’ve got art and non-art - two differing states - but the boundaries between them have been revealed as uncertain – it’s no longer quite clear where one ends and the other begins. Both are culturally mediated and unstable categories. That’s a very simplistic description. 

ST: To us, to be direct, we just think of the relationship between the hunter and the rabbit. We, as artists, are hunters and the viewers are rabbits. We would just think how to use the best approach to show the audience our work and to build the relationship between the viewers and the work. 

PG: Can you think of a way of talking about your work in terms of traditional Chinese thinking or Chinese philosophy, or Chinese aesthetics? Is there a way of using traditional Chinese discourse to talk about your work, rather than my Western way of doing it? 

ST & JW: Our work is like Chinese painting. More like freehand brushwork, rather than painting realistically. 

ST: Our work is misinterpreted by viewers too. It’s very normal. 

PG: When we talked about breaking or unsettling the boundary – the subject-object relationship - between the viewer and the work of art, isn’t that open to interpretation in terms of traditional Chinese aesthetics? 

ST: Some of our previous works are different, which are just like changing from ‘beer’ to ‘whiskey’. I don’t know if you have seen our installation, which has ten iron suitcases.

PG: Yes I have. But the point I’m getting at here is that your work can be interpreted as having been influenced both by the deconstructive strategies of the Western avant-gardes and post avant-gardes and traditional Chinese aesthetics. It’s not just your work, but also other Chinese artists. You seem to move between different kinds of aesthetic positions. You seem to find it relatively easy to do that; sometimes you might tend towards a more traditional Chinese aesthetic, and sometimes you tend more towards what would be recognised as Western way of doing things. The point is that you can never really be pinned down completely to one or the other.

ST: Yes, the key point is, let’s look at the model of our newest piece of work (a photo framework), the real size is tens times bigger. It is something from daily life. We used the same idea in a work made in 2005, which was about some iron suitcases, which was also inspired by daily life. We put some photos in those iron suitcases. Those photos were taken by us and contained our feeling, our passion. The photo frameworks and the suitcases are like covers, which were made in a formal way, and were used to catch the eye of the viewers. These photos we took can be very normal and it seems you can find them easily in daily life. However, all of them reveal how much we love and enjoy our life. 

PG: Another way that I would interpret your work is that it invokes what it feels like to live in a city - a kind of immersive bodily experience, something you feel with your body. Is that the relationship you are trying to get at? What it feels like, to be in the city of Shanghai; what it feels like through your body and the relationship between your body and city.

ST: I’m touched by your comment; very happy. It’s the best kind of comment that we’d like to get.

PG: When I gave a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai about your (Song Tao’s) work with B6 I was also talking around this idea. One thing that interested me is the sense you give in your work with B6 of being immersed in the city. Something that struck me about your video installation Yard is that the viewer is made to enter bodily into the work; you have to cross a line, enter into the work. The experience of looking at the work is similar to what it feels like to be part of the city, and it opens up a whole range of possible aesthetic responses which are not wholly determined by the work. They are determined by the shifting relationship between the viewer and the work - so different people can have differing subjective or culturally mediated responses. It’s like being in a city because we all have different kinds of bodily points of view about the city in relation to our differing sense cultural identity. 

JW: It shows our work also has some influence on those people outside of Shanghai. 

ST: Well, we’d like to think it’s like the way you interpret it. For us, we had to choose and pick what we really like or dislike. It’s a very direct picking process. We just take photos or videos what we are interested in. So you can always see highways and tall buildings in our photos, which are something we like. 

PG: In the West there would be tendency to view this idea in terms of the sublime: the idea that the city doesn’t have a clear perceptual limit. The feeling you are supposed to have, according to Western ways of thinking, is that the city overwhelms you. It’s not quite clear where the limits are – there’s no correspondence between imagination and cognition, so you can’t see the edges and you can’t intellectualise the edges. You encounter the illimitability of the city and the failure of imagination and cognition is painful. However, in theory at least, you can then overcome that pain through your ability to form some sort of reasoned intuition of the illimitability of the city. That’s also one way of defining post-modernist art – as sublime; an art that has no clear limitations, like Duchamp’s Fountain. But it seems to me that a lot of what you are doing in aesthetic terms doesn’t conform exactly to the idea of the post-modern sublime. Your works don’t have clear limits - that’s true. And in a way they seem to overwhelm the imagination and the cognition of the spectator. But I think the difference is that you invite viewers to enter into and to immerse themselves in the work without any abiding sense of pain, or of tension, disturbance or fear. As soon as the viewer immerses her or himself in the art work - as soon as they have lost their sense of subject-object relationships – they then embark on a kind of generally pleasurable open-ended aesthetic journey; one where the viewer has an unfolding relationship with the work that has the potential to bring about a potentially endless range of changing feelings over time. To use deconstructive terminology – this could be described as a ‘trace structure’ where each individual feeling is marked by the traces of all other possible feelings along a serially incomplete chain of experience. That’s quite different from a conventional Western aesthetic, which points towards something more immediate and circumscribed in terms of feeling – unalloyed pleasure in the case of beauty and pain-pleasure in the case of the sublime. What you are invoking seems more akin to a Chinese aesthetic, I think. You seem to be suggesting the possibility of a ‘non-sublime’ relationship with the city; a kind of unfolding, open-ended aesthetic, a bodily felt aesthetic response. I don’t think that’s the same as the sublime. It’s similar in some ways, but not exactly the same. 

ST& JW:  I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t really know that much of Chinese traditional culture. However, having been born here, as a Chinese habitant, something has naturally been inherited. 

PG: Let’s talk a little bit about your upcoming residency at the University of Nottingham in the UK. What are you going to do there? 

ST& JW:  We don’t know. We really don’t know. Can’t imagine what it would like until we get there. 

PG: Don’t you have any ideas about what you might get out of this particular experience?

ST: We don’t know. I’ve told you before about one of our thoughts. We would like to make a video recording our conversations in English. Of course our English wouldn’t be that good. We would speak English to those native speakers who speak Standard English. We would then edit the voice of native female speakers making it high pitched, which you couldn’t really hear clearly if you don’t try too hard. And also try to edit the native male speakers to make it very low pitched and very slow, so one couldn’t really distinguish the conversations either. 

This is just a thought. But we don’t want to plan too much because we may have more, better ideas while we are there. We would like to make it a kind of ‘brainstorm art’ that is full of ideas that viewers can interpret. 

JW: We’ll think about what we are going to do when we arrive there. Since I’ve been to the UK before and have stayed there for four years, (it’s a place we are familiar with), not like if we are going to the USA. I don’t know what it would be like. 

PG: What other things you might do apart from working in the university and going to galleries. Last time we met you talked about going to see Chelsea play. What other things would you like to do when you are in the UK?

ST& JW:  Going to the second-hand shops; buying interesting clothes and small stuff. By the time we get there in January shops should be having their sales. 

JW: In the morning, we’ll go the open market. Because I stayed in the UK for four years before, but never went to the open market in the morning. I just couldn’t get up before.

ST: We might not be able to get up early this time. Haha.