Interview with Charles Esche on China

A collaborative encounter between the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia, Double Infinity took place at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai, parallel to the World Expo 2010. Comprising of an exhibition, a performance series, a lecture programme and a publication, Double Infinity marked the first time that a museum opened itself and its permanent collection up to the dynamic responses and contributions of artists and artist collectives in China, where usually exhibitions and collections are “moved” in and out of the country without a deep connection to the needs of the local scene. Could this be considered to be a significant gesture? Could the joint planning and discussion process over the last two years provide a template for an innovative way to work and collaborate in China?

Arthub Director Defne Ayas asks questions to Van Abbemuseum Director Charles Esche about working in China for the first time after avoiding the China hype for years and for a momentary reflection of Double Infinity.
The interview will be published in Yishu Journal, November issue.

Charles Esche (born 1962, England) is a curator and writer. Since 2004, he is Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. He is co-founder and co-editor of Afterall Journal and Afterall Books with Mark Lewis. In 2009 and 2007 he was co-curator of the 2nd RIWAQ Biennial, Ramallah, Palestine. In 2005 he was co-curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial with Vasif Kortun and in 2002 the co-curator with Hou Hanru and Song Wan Kyung of the Gwangju Biennale, Republic of Korea. Between 2000 and 2004 he was the Director of Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden.

Based in Shanghai since 2006, Defne Ayas works as a director of programs to Arthub Asia, and as an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai. Ayas is also a curator of PERFORMA since 2004, the biennial of visual art performance of New York, where she spends part of the year. Ayas serves as an academic advisor to the 8th Shanghai Biennale “Rehearsal” this year.

Defne Ayas (DA)
Charles Esche (CE)

DA: What has been your perception of China at large prior to your arrival? Maybe you can answer this question within the context of the Former West project you are working on, a long-term international research project, which engages in rethinking the global histories of the last two decades in dialogue with post-communist and postcolonial thought?

CE: That is a big question. Clearly, the economic boom of the past 20 years has been down quite simply to the release of resources, energy and human creativity onto the capitalist market since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequences of 1989 in Tiananmen Square. All this talk of technological transformation and paradigm change in capitalism is, to me, so much hyperbole. The fundamentals of natural and human capital remain the determining factor. As if it needed to be said again, the Chinese system proves that free men and women are not a product of free markets (as the US government defines it) though there are perhaps certain more complex relationships between the economy and liberty. For me, the most interesting question for the next decades, in China but also outside, is the extent to which we are prepared as a globe to question free market exchange systems if they don’t fit to other human desires? In that sense we have a lot in common across the world.

At the moment, and despite the financial crisis, the direction of travel away from complexity and towards the simplicity of “if it sells it is good” has been dramatic. Experimentation in forms of political and cultural representation in Europe has dried up. Democracy appears an endgame, as the neo-cons have it “the end of history”. Will this lethargy continue or will new floodgates open for new forms of being together? And will those potential new forms question the nation state as the basic building block of the current global consensus? That would be a challenge for China just as for everywhere else, as well as for our core identity as individuals and groups. But it is a challenge I feel we need to accept. These questions all belong within the research around Former West as a topic that deals with art and contemporary history. How artists answer them, and what possibilities they create for us to understand the world around us differently seem to me of crucial interest in trying to find out where we go next. China has a big role to play in this I believe, but it is not alone – which sometimes I sense is a bit of a surprise to the Chinese themselves!

DA: I could not agree more with the potential role of Chinese intellectuals and artists, but then I find this quite ironical, especially when we are in a constant position to articulate what Arthub does in China in terms of building up a network; what it is eager to do in regards to knowledge-production and dissemination in the face of a heat-seeking missile market economy. You’ve mentioned earlier that our collaboration has turned around your slightly cynical thinking on possibilities in China? Can you tell me more about this?

CE: Well, it is hard for me the make sweeping generalizations about a situation I know only partially, but I have to admit that I did use my initial prejudice against commercial art as a basis to decide to stay away from China during the days of hot sales to rich collectors. My early skepticism was based on perceiving art in China as largely being produced for a very select band of wealthy collectors and those collectors, especially the European ones, having specific financial entanglements with China for which collecting art was beneficial.

DA: This is quite the universal perception for Chinese contemporary art whose soft history mostly spins around Beijing but not near or in Shanghai. Such superficial view seems the Achilles’ heel of the art scene here.

CE: Such self-interest is part of the art system everywhere and I don’t want to oppose it as such. Rather I don’t want to waste my time on such situations that mostly affirm how good it is to be a master of the free market and instead search for something socially and politically more interesting or productive. Such a situation, with my limited access, seemed very hard to find in China. So I simply stood aside after coming here first in 2001 with Hou Hanru. I engaged instead with other geographies such as former socialist Europe and the Middle East where commerce was less dominant. Double Infinity brought me back to China and meeting you and Davide (Quadrio) here made me more curious.

My experience with Double Infinity and especially with meeting some of the artists and attending our two day seminar was that the financial crash seems to have increased the appetite for some kind of reflection of what art’s possibilities are and how we might use them (refer to the excerpts of the seminar transcript in this issue). It was also fascinating talking to students at the China Art Academy about feminism and realizing a similar confusion as in the West about politics. Feminism is perceived as a kind of optional choice for awkward girls rather than a simple and direct response to the denial of life chances. This denial is, it seems to me, where politics begins but we have rather forgotten that everywhere. To talk about it with Chinese students was very refreshing because I think they could also reflect differently on issues of ideology or politics while experiencing a similar vacuum or loss of political horizon as elsewhere in the world.

Also, I greatly enjoyed talking to Xu Zhen about his MadeIn project, which seems, as Gao Shiming said, a way to challenge authorship and market expectations in a smart manner. There was also a rather beautiful moment when I saw Yang ZhenZhong’s “I will Die’ video on a small screen in his studio. Immediately, the intimacy of the work came shining through, something which I had never perceived in the exhibited versions of large scale, multi screen installations. This work was now about the vulnerability of each individual and not about the sameness of our destiny. For me, it was an example of where modesty works, something that you don’t associate with recent Chinese art. There have also been a number of historical surveys of Chinese art recently in both Beijing and Shanghai that point to a more reflective engagement internally. And our own artists in Double Infinity reacted intelligently and irreverently to historical artworks in our collection. To me, this means that contemporary art is finding a more substantial historical ground on which it can build social commitment. If the works are then sold or commodified by rich collectors that is less of an issue than that they are rooted in a non-elitist reality and ask a more widely relevant series of questions. So yes, my interest in Chinese art is restored, or at least art from Shanghai and Hangzhou.

DA: The prospect of creating a critical momentum with you and your institution in Shanghai as well as a sustainable multiple-phased possibility for not only production but also conversation and internal healing was certainly appealing to Arthub. But what was it that really motivated you to accept working on this cross-cultural project, which was presented under the auspices of the Shanghai Expo?

CE: I think I have to explain a bit the background. If you remember, we came in late 2008 for the first time to Shanghai. The idea was to find out what might be possible and fit within our ways of working in the museum. One of our most enthusiastic advisors Paul Brouwer, who has since died, was a former Dutch ambassador and first suggested the idea to work in Shanghai during the Expo. He wanted us to be involved at Dutch national level to increase our profile with the Netherlands government and he saw the connection to John Körmeling as a good point of entry. Generally all ‘national’ projects are limited to institutions based in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and the Dutch cultural elite has difficulty recognising the achievements of the whole country. Given our own sense at the museum that we lacked a Dutch sensibility and firm connections to national politics, this seemed a good idea. We also wanted to support John who is a good friend of the museum and well represented in the collection. But it could only work if we also found a motivation beyond the tactical and local that chimed with our own way of working and thinking about art. Both Ulrike Erbslöh (Van Abbemuseum’s deputy director) and I wanted to come early to Shanghai to see if the combination of good tactics and good art might be possible.

We met a lot of museum directors, curators and educators from private and state institutions on our visit to Shanghai. To cut a long story short, it was relatively difficult to imagine working with any of them. Remember this was before the crisis and art market crash. Money spoke to the institutions above all, and everywhere we went there was the understandable reaction: “Why would we want to make a show with a Dutch museum when we want to showcase our own artists during the Expo?” We understood and respected this, but the fact was that what we were interested in – an exchange and process of learning from each other – didn’t seem interesting to our Chinese colleagues.

Then we met you in Shanghai and I asked you: can you tell me what is going on here? Can we meet some artists? That meeting, the dinner and the subsequent meeting at BizArt were the absolute highlights of the trip. For the first time, we could speak with people who understood us even if none of us had a clue how to make the ideas happen. Nevertheless, very quickly a plan emerged between us.

We were thinking from the beginning how to connect our concerns with Shanghai and it became obvious that we should ask 3-4 China based artists and curators on your advice to come to Eindhoven and work with the collection and institution to produce new work for a show in China based on Eindhoven, John Körmeling and the Netherlands in some ill-defined but potentially quite poetic way. It was simple, it could work and it would be a way of getting Chinese cultural players to react/accept/reject a European cultural heritage as well as entangle stories that are usually kept apart.

Anyway, we went back to NL and started working on raising money and planning the project. Yang Fudong and Jian Jun Zhang even came to the museum and things started to be sketched. We then heard about the China Arts Foundation and some still unclear plans to open a Dutch house outside the Expo site. This seemed like an opportunity. We had also come to the conclusion with your help that it would be as cheap to open our own temporary venue as hire galleries in one or other of the institutions – and give us more fun and more independence. So, we went to meet the directors of the China Arts Foundation to see what they thought and whether there was a possibility to work together.

DA: How was the initial idea – that China-based artists can come and visit your museum, select pieces from the museum collection for interpretation and exhibition – received? Can you share more how you envisioned the involvement of the Shanghainese artist into your collection re-reading?

CE: At that meeting with China Arts Foundation, our idea was ridiculed. Exchange such as this was not the issue and the important thing would be to make a John Körmeling presentation in the coming Dutch Cultural Centre. I have to say, I took this dismissal rather hard at the time and it continues to sour my feelings a bit, but soon afterwards it seems things changed because we were contacted and told that, while the original idea was not possible for them, they would be interested in something that had elements of exchange within a Körmeling based exhibition.

This triggered us again. Partly we saw the tactical opportunity but now there was a chance to work with you (while you had since become Arthub Asia and no longer BizArt) and to try and achieve at least some of our initial objectives with finance from the Dutch state. It was also clear that we would need to compromise and listen to the China Arts Foundation but I was especially excited by the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a longer-term connection that could prosper. This was and remains absolutely the core motivation to do the project, alongside the desire to recognise John as a significant international artist.

DA: Körmeling’s playful ideas in relation to architecture and city were certainly welcome in a city where there is barely any urban activism, however a focus on his work only was a far cry from what we wanted to really achieve together. To go back to the dynamics of the collaboration, how has the process been so far in your opinion? Our decision to work with the Van Abbemuseum in the context of this exhibition proved to be rewarding, though we thought we made a strange pair: an established museum institution and a very simply structured, three-person operation (Davide Quadrio, Qiu Zhijie and myself). The two curatorial teams aimed to actualize a static “transportation” of cultural objects (from the Van Abbemuseum collection) into a dynamic process where the locality (artists and thinkers not only “ethnically” Chinese but working in Shanghai and China) will re-contextualize, interpret and critique the core idea of “exchange”, revealing how this very word is most often misused as the tool of an imperialist agenda. The process has been one of constant negotiation: Was it at all possible for both parties to be involved in a cross-cultural artistic and institutional production of substance, which goes beyond the simplicity of the occasion, the World Expo 2010?

CE: Inevitably, the full ambition of what we would like to do is going to take time and patience. What we should aim for is a kind of porous and multilayered collaboration over time. Where artists you work with feel the museum as a European base and a place to act when they want to reach out beyond China. At the same time, we can try to construct funding to send artists and artworks from the museum to Shanghai on an irregular basis. I am interested in seeing the Van Abbemuseum dispersed across more sites and situations. I want to shift the idea of the museum from an architecture (Louvre, Guggenheim, Tate Modern) to something more mobile and productive. This rhymes with the historic experience of Eindhoven which is only interesting because it produced products and knowledge that travelled the world. It would fit into this plan to see Shanghai as a point of presence for the museum and vice versa. In that way, the museum is transformed through its experiences with an outside. It goes back to an old wish of Allan Kaprow for the museum to be “a force of innovation lying outside of its physical limits”. He said that in 1967 but maybe now we are ready to realize it.

In view of this ambition, I was happiest when I saw that we could send many people from the museum, including the registrar, conservators, technicians and others to Shanghai. The collaboration can only work well if it is linked in different levels, and we have made a good start towards achieving this. For instance, I was very happy when a number of my colleagues said they would really like Li Mu from the ShuFu Collective to come back and visit Eindhoven. That warmed my heart because it meant we as a museum were thinking together about the future. I am now working on making it happen and Li Mu has already prepared an initial proposal.

I still love the original idea of having artists visit the museum here and using that as the basis for a project. Not realising the challenge and complexity of that idea remains disappointing, but with Li Mu we can make a new start.

DA: What have the challenges been for you professionally within the context of this exhibition?

CE: The challenges were initially in meeting the expectations of the Dutch China Art Foundation for recognition, funding and promotion. Raising the necessary cash has taken longer and been much more fraught than we expected. On the one hand, the majority of the money has come from the Dutch state for a project outside the country, which is typically generous of the Dutch funding system. However, I have seen the hoops that Ulrike has had to jump through to get the various funding bodies not to cancel each other out or feel content with each other’s contributions. More recently the rather high degree of sensitivity of the Chinese authorities to some of the proposed works as been revealing. I think Ulrike would see the challenges also in trying to keep many competitive partners happy who all have certain expectations of the project that we cannot always satisfy. The patchwork of funding that we have brought together has been difficult to manage.

The financial masters of this project are much more diverse than usual – that stretches your negotiating skills or room for manoeuvre. Personally, I have been in despair at times with the elaborateness of the system and sometimes withdrew myself from the process, or tried to steer it through my staff. I regret this a bit but it was probably the only option to keep all on track.
I think positively it was the first external project that involved so many people in the museum. That is excellent for the future, immediately for when we head to Ramallah with one of the Picasso canvases.

I think Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia now have good basis on which to build further.

DA: Any surprises that has made you think differently about it now versus when you first started?

CE: I didn’t really expect the censorship problems. I suppose I imagined the stories of censorship were mostly a question of mistranslation and over-reaction by westerners. I think that is still partly true, but not only. It was sobering to hear Alexander Brandt talking about censorship in the 1990s as feeling like a failure for the artists who had not addressed the right authorities in the right ways. That was also a surprising reaction to me, but one with which I could really identify. How different is that to failing to get funding from the Dutch state authorities? In principle artists in Western Europe are free; in reality, they depend on state or private patronage almost entirely.

DA: Censorship was quite a negotiation process for the exhibition for sure. We ourselves were also surprised with what happened in the process of approval of certain works that were okay to show in Beijing and Guangzhou but not in Shanghai, as in the case of Xijing Men’s video or Cao Fei’s Making of RMB City.
How do you think Double Infinity’s curatorial premise promises to contribute to the field?

CE: I have been recently very struck by something that Sarat Maharaj said to me. He was speaking about Euro-centrism and how we have to avoid throwing out the baby of European political and artistic experimentation with the bathwater of racism and white superiority. He didn’t put it like that but he meant something like it, I think. For me, what he said has a lot to do with how we in Western Europe can perform a function as a region in a globalised context. It means not forgetting the emancipatory, radical, challenging elements of our past in an urge to apologise for our exploitation of the rest of the world. The fact that most if not all of Europe’s noble experiments have failed in one form of another does not mean that we cannot pass on knowledge and experience of them, nor that we should cease to try to develop them in our own way alongside other continents. It is also undeniable that Europe has touched every corner of this planet for better and worse and cannot simply fade into provincial obscurity without facing up to the responsibilities and potentialities this creates.

Now, I think the curatorial premise of Double Infinity by taking objects from one site as the starting point for new work in another has something of these aspects of revaluing European experimentation through the eyes of artists who have received them up to now as, in some ways, revealed truths. The attempt needs to be made, both in China and in Europe or elsewhere, to transform the common understanding of modernist European artistic heritage over the last 100 years. Whereas many museums present the “masterpieces” of modernism as completed, externally determined truths, it is possible to present them as much more propositional and responsive to their own time and place. This needs to be done because there is much of great value in these modernist artistic proposals if their potency can be released again today. As Sarat’s observation suggests, that also means that they are not condemned only to communicate fully with their own origin and generation. Instead they can reach out beyond that, not to a rigid form of universal human experience but through the awkward processes of time and space translation that force them (the artworks and positions of the artists themselves) to take different stances, to reveal other nuances and possibilities while remaining fundamentally themselves. Observing these aspects of weak, or slight change as a result of objects and ideas crossing continents seems to me partly what we are doing in Double Infinity, and I see that it is a potentially significant contribution. What I hope for the future is that we can develop these thoughts together and move on to ideas of entanglement, and even abandonment, of the obsession with cultural origins in the production of new work and positions.

DA: Please tell me more about the ideas in terms of sameness rather than only in terms of the exceptionalism of China being of some interest. How can this tie more to the region and rest of the world?

Could we potentially connect Chinese and other non-western situations in cultural production and presentation for a new kind of non-aligned cultural movement? How would that work, if at all?

CE: It is nice that you use the term non-aligned here.

DA: Well, you are the one who reminded me, on our way to the academy in Hangzhou, of the significance of the Bandung conference for an alternative reading of the history of the Leftist movement…

CE: I think looking again at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of the 1950s-1980s would be quite smart both in terms of its geographic spread but also in terms of its current economic and political power. China was, of course, crucial to the NAM but it extended far further. This might be one route to escape the feeling that China always has to answer to or reject models that emerge in the core west of, above all, the USA. How might China start to see its relations to the rest of the world not in terms of old imperial exploitation (which is a danger) but it terms of exchange of common experiences and mutual trust? This might be much easier to do with Brazil or Indonesia than with USA or the Netherlands at a cultural level. The former doesn’t contain so much prejudgment, and that might help speak about sameness. It is also interesting as a Dutch resident to see in China how much the “West” is seen as the USA. I think this makes a project like Former West even more significant, as a way to think about how desirable such a condition might be for the current west and for the rest. If it is possible, we should bring Chinese artists and intellectuals into this project to help us.

I also like the idea that a non-aligned cultural movement would today be neither commercial nor state but somewhere else. Using this term as a kind of search engine to find like-minded people and communities might be very smart and produce surprising alliances that might replace the stagnation of the old Left. In all these ways, sameness can be the tool to unlock what we have in common rather than emphasize what is different between us.

DA: Only very recently, intellectuals, and scholars started dissecting Chineseness with a geographic approach (vs Japan, vs India, vs Vietnam, vs Central Asia, vs Indonesia, vs Russia etc) or with an intellectual stab as in the case of the most recent GZ Triennial. Otherwise, China is usually read within the context of its economic tails (“Tails of the Dragon”) and its diasporic outreach.
But then an exhibition as a format to do this can be quite tricky, as it can be a relatively closed/insular system. Would it be nice to be able to change the format into a process in which the idea of culture, as something that exists in and through dialogue, could be fully actualized? Did we fail to do this with Double Infinity? Did we manage to get somewhere? Can we really represent a larger, more diverse vision of culture, asking “What it can be, where is it in China vis-a-vis the rest of the world, how is it being constituted?”

CE: I think this is the whole project of advanced art and culture at the moment. To understand that understanding itself is a process with infinite possibility for refinement and misunderstanding. Can we get to the point where a museum is neither treasure chest nor entertainment centre but a site where the imagination can be loaded up for use in the world outside? In this sense, the experience of art is an applied experience, something that can be taken and made use of later. Did Double Infinity help this process? Yes, in a small way I think it did. But it is the combination of a million small steps that take far longer than politicians or media are prepared to allow. Remember, it took 29 years for Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon to be recognized fully as the start of modern painting. What happened in those 29 years? Was it seen as worthwhile to have painted it in that period? I think we know the answers to that question today but for contemporary art we are still waiting and working. Such timescales should find more friendly ground in China than in the West these days, so I think that’s another reason to keep working here.

DA: Could the whole process have been any different for all parties involved? (Artists from China especially, then VAM and Arthub)

CE: We could have done it at another time without the Expo. Then funding would have been much harder for sure but the discussions between us would have been much more focused on the why? and what? questions rather than the who? and how?. Why does such a joint project make sense? What do we want to do for the artists and the scene here and there? For the Chinese artists I would have liked to have had them much more present in Eindhoven and in the museum. I think that would have produced unknown results and effects for both us and for them. But nevertheless I think we are about to achieve something important in showing that a kind of collective curating can take place across such a distance and that setting up channels of direct influence can be productive. Double Infinity is an important first step and marker for such kind of projects between us in the future, when we need to go further. If I may say, I hope that for Arthub itself, this model of institutional collaboration may offer a way of working in the future, hopefully with us but also with others. That non-aligned idea is special, we could start with that…