Interview with Qiu Zhijie by Li Zhenhua

Comments by Arthub’s Davide Quadrio

Li = Li Zhenhua 
Qiu = Qiu Zhijie
D = Davide Quadrio

Translated into English by Ouyang Yu
Edited by Davide Quadrio
Proofread by Edward Sanderson

To access the publication online see Post Sense and Sensibility (1999) click here.

Post Sense and Sensibilities and Conceptual art at the end of the 90s in China

Qiu: When we talk about the end of the 90’s and the artistic atmosphere that was around Beijing and Shanghai at that time, I remember that I felt bored. At that time Zhu Qi or someone else I do not remember was curating an exhibition in Shanghai. For that exhibition, Yan Lei produced something that was titled, ‘Welcome Yan Lei to Shanghai’. Things like that, a kind of mechanism that finds an angle that no-one has yet noticed, setting off a hidden arrow or shooting a gunshot, so to speak. Such worship includes examples of Yan Lei and Hong Hao as well as the one that I always cite: putting a note in the exhibition hall saying: ‘None of the works here is mine’. These things bored me to death then. Such works tried to prove that he was more clever than others, than other artists, and of course they tried to prove that he was also more clever than the audience. Basically, there was no other content, no emotional content, no narrative content. In fact, works can be composite; they can narrate things, with emotions, that can move and affect people. And they can even be visually pleasurable and stimulating. Anyway, they can be composite. However, similar works that appear these days do not have anything like what is described above. They call themselves ‘concepts’ but these ‘concepts’ only appear to be concepts; there really are no concepts in them. Conceptual art has got into a zone of errors.

D: I agree with what you say. I actually would like to add something to this point. I think that in many works I have been seeing in China lately a concept is already an artwork. I think that there is actually a difference between having the concept/idea for an artwork and call the idea the artwork itself. Where is the process of refining the concept, of choosing it or discarding it? Where is the process or realization of the work? It is the same thing I see in a lot of (to make a simple example) abstract painting in Shanghai: there is a huge difference between Rothko and Qu Guofeng or Ding Yi.

Li: When I talk about Conceptual art I think we need to make a clarification. I would say there’s Conceptual art and there are concepts in art, I do think that in Chinese language there is a long-standing conflict between those two terms, and I think the meaning of what we have mentioned in the dialogue is Conceptual art not concept/art.

In Conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.  Anyway, to go back to the main discussion here, is this in fact the reason why you do the ‘post sense and sensibilities’?

Qiu: It’s the real reason to do the ‘post sense and sensibilities’. Later on [I] began to oppose Conceptual arts, which is why the symposium held by Huang Zhuan in 1998 in He Xiangning Art Museum (何香凝美术馆) was a real academic forum. The article I presented was ‘The Zone of Errors in Conceptual Art’; it was written for that forum. The forum was on in September or October but I had finished writing it in March or April because, well, a book was intended for publication…. In this article I systematically taunt such artistic concepts as mechanical worship, worship of boredom, worship of minimalism, things like a heap of apples slowly rotting away, the eyes of a chicken slowly dying, the extremely long shot that was called video art. After that, the revolutionary masses would rather stay home watching soap operas and MTV, and it’s much better watching commercials than see a chicken slowly die fluttering. If art has gone to that extent, it’s got a huge problem. At that time, video art had only small shows and such shows were quite underground but were so morbid that one was disappointed. In the beginning, at that time, there was a force that didn’t do things that way. At the time, some young people were not into that. They began gathering together, in two forces, one involving my shidi (younger brothers of the same master), shixiongdi (younger and older brothers of the same master) from the same school. Yan Lei and I played the role in bringing into the 1990s things done in the 1980s by Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan and Huang Yongping, all of National Art Academy (浙江美术学院). Yan Lei was a bit young; it was mainly me because I later became the student leader in the school. Then it was Yang Fudong and Jiang Zhi who had both turned into a group. After 1996 or 1997, shidi like Liu Wei, Jiang Zhi and Yang Fudong began arriving in Beijing. Our situation was alike. In the 1996 video exhibition, Gao Shiming and I ran into a conflict of sorts with Zhang Peili and Wang Gongxin. So the symposium became something of a you-die-and-I-live struggle, a life and death struggle.

D: I am actually tired as well of this kind of confrontation or, on the other hand, paimapi (拍马屁) attitude. Like you are saying Qiu Zhijie, in these kinds of debates it is impossible to have constructive intellectual discourses and analyses. I found it incredibly tiring to sit and listen to very formalized theory or very stupid comments on who is the next laoda. Li Zhenhua, do you remember? It was like in Shenzhen for Wang Jianwei exhibition this year. Round table. Wang Jianwei asked a group of people to come to discuss critically his work and comment on the development of it. Result: 2 hours of nonsense, of teacher-like comments or compliments for what Wang Jianwei achieved and how important he is for Chinese artistic development.  Only few people dared to speak their mind…such a waste of time.

Li: What sort of form would you and Gao Shiming have preferred?

Qiu: Gao Shiming and I were of the same gang. Wang Gongxin and Pei Li were of another gang. When they did video art, they insisted that the television should be stripped of its case, be cool and somehow distinguished from home video. It seemed that they argued because of my Present Progressive Tense, my work that featured the wreath, but they could not stand the wreath appearing in the video installation.

Li: But what is the reason for their non-acceptance of it? Was it not sufficiently pure for them?

Qiu: Too sensational or sentimental. Not cool. On top of that, the TV set was hidden away and its case was not stripped off. For them, the best would be to put the TV sets in a row and have the floor strewn with cords and plug boards. In addition, the TV cases had to be stripped off, to give a sense of the industrialness associated with television. It hurt them to see so many wreaths of a rural society in my work. Gao Shiming’s work also turned them off. It was jointly done by Gao Shiqiang, Gao Shiming and Lu Lei. An iron frame of an hexahedral house. Where the door was, there were two television sets, the door handle and feet on the floor. Then, where the window was, there was another television set showing the wind rippling curtains. The door handle showed people constantly pushing the door open to enter. On the side of the feet, feet were shown to be constantly going in and out but not synchronously. Then, in one corner of the room there was another television set, a video camera scanning along the corner of the wall because this iron frame was the construct of an abstract space examining ordinary life, matched with quite sensational music. Zhang Peili and others could not handle this because at that time there was a pursuit of cool conceptual art. International taste was anathema to the young people who needed to tell stories and wanted sensationalism. This became apparent in the 1996 symposium on video art. Even for video art, there was a division of two generations until Wu Ershan and Yang Fudong came on the scene. It was probably because Yang Fudong gained huge international success that our tendency gained a toe-hold for our generation.

D: Wait, do you think that there was a sort of coolness in Zhang Peili’s approach to conceptual art that instead was a sort of interpretation of it with a China based understanding of it, it was only trendy and hip to be close to a purified and essential vision of the works?

Li: I like the word purify, I think that the moment after 1996 video art exhibition curated by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun, it was certainly a starting point for video art making: we can say that became a trend in China from that moment.

Li: But Yang Fudong didn’t take part in the post-sensibilities with that kind of work or with the imagistic model that is normal now.

Qiu: He showed I Did Not Force You, that showed a girl on one side of the table and a constant change of boys on the other side, a very short video work. At that time, his Strange Paradise was not yet edited. The Back Yard: Sunrise was not yet complete, either. That was a small practice work, a prelude to the great explosion of his video works. You look at the Image and Phenomena-96′ Video Art Exhibition. In 1998, I wrote an article, titled, ‘In the Name of Art’.

Another group of people (artists who graduated from CAFA). This was academic reasoning, we were all opposed to that whether it was video art or whatever. On one side was Sun Yuan and others. On the first day of 1998, Feng Boyi curated Traces of Existence in Yaojiayuan, in Cai Qing’s space. That exhibition had me, Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wang Jianwei, Zhan Wang and Zhang Yonghe. That was probably all, and probably the best group then in the field of installation. Zhang Yonghe did a level-pull push-pull door, the epitome of Conceptual art. Song Dong cooked noodles for others with pickled sour vegetables. Cai Qing himself planted coins in the soil; and then I dug a hole for archaeology. I intended to dig a very deep archaeological hole in which I would place television sets at different heights and different three-dimensional levels and the television sets would play crows flying in various ages in that space. In the end, it was frozen over in the winter, we southerners had no idea that the winter in the north was like that. The workers spent a week trying to dig a hole but could not move it unless they came in with the forklifts but then who could afford forklifts in those days? Eventually, they worked hard at it for over ten days, managing to get to a certain depth. Later on, I changed the previously recorded video to be something else about the history of changes in this stratum of earth, which used to be a rubbish tip and a pond, containing water and rubbish.

In the archaeological pit, I found a lot of things. I made a museum piece of these things in the exhibition hall. On the third day of that exhibition, Ma Xin, who was working in the Art Gallery of Central Academy of Fine Arts, came to see me and he wanted me to go and see their works. At that time, they were opposite to Shuoyaoju, behind the Sculpture Research Centre where Zhan Wang worked. This was the group that consisted of Qin Ga, Sun Yuan and Zhu Yu. Then, Liu Wei and Wang Wei got in touch, thus getting together and forming two strands of force, one from Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) and the other from National Art Academy (Hangzhou). Then, it was probably Zhu Yu or Sun Yuan who told me directly that only I among the famous could help them because their stuff was fucking too much. There was an obvious division of generations then, one being the famous people and the other being their generation, ambitious and wanting to emerge.

Li: That was in 1998 and was the division already that distinct?

Qiu: Anyway, that gang of people was so rotten. Daily, they were trying to be clever and they wanted to do violent things. They were still painting. Sun Yuan was drawing breasts on real objects. Liu Xiaodong taught at Central Academy of Fine Arts was to lay it on thick, the way Freud did his paintings. Painting a variety of foods. In fact, their earliest scheme was to paint a standard room. For that reason, they began doing an exhibition on post sense and sensibilities. Only Cai Qing was able to finish at that exhibition, it was very successful and he was very excited. In fact, Cai Qing was the first one to do an art space, earlier than Mustard Seed Garden (which Li Zhenhua founded in 2001). It was unfortunate with him, though. The day before yesterday I saw him and several months ago in Singapore I laughed at him. I said to him: You bastard, you could have managed to do the earliest art space and you could also have become the earliest sponsor of post sense and sensibilities but you did not manage to be part of such a top history. His reason was that he was ill. I think there were also psychological reasons because he thought this gang was so young that he did not have much confidence in them. He came to me and to Wu Meichun, saying that he hoped that Feng Boyi would do the first show and that I and Wu Meichun could do the second show. So we said that he’d better get those young people to do it if he wanted to do it because we all knew that there were these young people and that if he wanted, he would better do it with these young people. So, Cai Qing said: okay then, let’s see.

I got everyone together and had a meeting in Peony Garden – where I live. At the time, I’m sure Liu Wei and Wang Wei were also there. Then, a heap of people including Sun Yuan were talking about the scheme. There were Yang Sen and Fang He from Central Academy of Fine Arts, and, later, Chu Yun and Zhang Yu joined us. Zhang Yu is now in Sichuan. Then, Chu Yun mysteriously disappeared before the opening of post sense and sensibilities (alien body and illusion1999). Even a year or two after that, there was still a rumour that he had died of drugs somewhere. At the time, Cai Qing met these people. After a while, I urged him by telling him that our scheme had been put together and was moving ahead. One scheme was by Zhang Huan, from Fujian, who had taken refresher courses in Zhejiang College of Fine Arts as well as in Central Academy of Fine Arts. His scheme was to renovate Cai Qing’s dog house, things like that. Anyway, a variety of schemes were being discussed.

That year I talked about this group of people in my article, titled, The Zone of Errors in Conceptual Arts. So, recently, when I saw works by Xu Zhen, or Huang Kui, or even Yang Zhenzhong, they all very intelligently got hold of some position. Then, these works were characterized by the fact that they could only be established in a group show but not in solo exhibitions. Can Xu Zhen’s work be established in a solo show? He’s good at ambushing and needs people to ambush.

Li: He’d need enough people for him to ambush or else his work would be done in vain.

D: Oh, this is interesting indeed. I love the perception you guys have of Xu Zhen. I actually think that, no matter what, Xu Zhen has very consciously created another gang and I contributed to some extent in making this happen. He is, like many artists with a distinctive cleverness, attracted to power and plays it along. I tell you, this is the reality and this is what made many Chinese shows in BizArt so similar.

Qiu: This gang of people could not play leading roles. They were ‘scraping’ along, the kind of works we’d call parasitic. Such works were the ones we were very much against and that were very much despised in the age in which post-sensibilities grew up. But then, ten years on, such things appear again.

D: Maybe in Beijing terms they could not play leading roles but I think that the role of Shanghai in this sense was quite unique. This insular fraternity of people without specific contestants made the group around Xu Zhen, i.e. Bizart truly at the center of everything.  Only few artists were able to be out of this game like Yang Fudong. Now that I am away I can see more clearly. Xu Zhen’s visions of the role of contemporary art in China, ethnically Chinese was and is above everything and anyone. It is the case of what happens to artists like Jin Jiangbo now that you are talking about heishehui: used for a purpose and then washed away!

Li: Still something quite mainstream, isn’t it?

Qiu: No, mainstream only on the heishehui website (art-ba-ba.com). Recently, I also found that the heishehui website thought they were mainstream themselves but it was really not as mainstream as imagined. No one bothers looking at Guangdong-based artists. In Beijing, I was more in touch with the Lu Jie and Pi Li circle. These circles of course would look at the heishehui website but, in fact, it’s not that mainstream. However, to a certain degree, it became the centre of public opinion. So, something intelligent became a standard. Ten years on, have we not progressed? It seems that we’ve had the revolution in vain.

D: I do not think that the real problem is whether it is mainstream or not. I think that the main problem is about growing out of what you built yesterday. The push to change is so important for art organizations and the responsibility for this is also fundamental. I think that in China in the period you mentioned we passed from a total economy in the arts (what you said about not having money to do anything) to a straight power system which was based on power and money and exclusion of people that are not instrumental to your own success. It is exactly what you explained before for post sense and the various groups in Beijing. Same story.

Li: here we try to talk about the ignorance and lack of knowing artists from other areas in China, and the powerless gang (group) in function of being important in these days. It suddenly occurs to me that Xu Zhen has never been in ‘post sense and sensibilities’ exhibitions.

Qiu: We’ve had the revolution in vain. Because back then we were very much against such things, parasitic, intelligent, shooting hidden arrows (behind people’s backs), being clever, ideas-based art, falling from Conceptual art to ideas-based art, then saying cool by oneself or saying cool about people or saying weird things that would easily sound profound and that would sound conceptual and very thoughtful once they sounded profound whereas in fact there was no real thinking in it.

D: Yes I agree, this is the process of most of the exhibitions in Shanghai and not only: it is like the recent exhibition NO NO in Beijing in Long March. The title: needs to be smart. Then the works in it needs to be “smart”. I am not totally against the idea of checking on the quality of the art, but this process very often was about “justifying” only the group of people who were in the same line of thinking. It is what Biljana Ciric defined as the Xu Zhen’s syndrom: the last word is always by Xu Zhen. It is why I was always complaining to Xu Zhen about the choice of the solo exhibitions in BizArt lately: some artists like Jin Feng (xiao) are not at level but still he had two or three exhibitions in BizArt to try to help him out. This sectarian attitude I think is not good for anybody, not for BizArt nor for the artist who simply does not progress. Bizart was about giving opportunities but with time became more and more about being defensive.

Check what is said in this blog: it is so clear! It is so evident how Bizart is closing up.

Li: Can this be turned into an issue? Sometime ago, I met a collector who had a view and said, “In my collection I only collect the best work of an artist”. I then said, “I am skeptical of your view. I mean how can you judge that what you have collected is the best work of the artist! If this artist has a very clear methodology or system, I think you should collect all the works of an artist as all the values are identifiable instead of choosing a certain effective work for collection.”

Qiu: Because ‘the best’ is for others to say. It may be judged ‘the best’ with this standard but not necessarily with that standard.

Li: This is not the issue that we referred to as being clever. Every piece of work looks fine, effective. However, when placed in a system, there is no special need for their existence.

Qiu: Actually, what can I say? What on earth do we want art for? We have now got so metaphysical. This thing keeps turning into your tool and this tool is meant to make you feel good or proud and if you seek expression it’s meant for you to give vent to your feelings. All this is to turn it into a tool. I’d like to have art keeping you, taking you along. This tool is more like a boat and when you get on board you can’t help yourself. It should be enlarging and expanding as you go along, not in a corner where you take something and poke everywhere. Not like that. It’s like you have a dog and you intend to walk the dog but end up being walked by the dog. Art is like such a dog, the kind of a dog that can walk you (the artist). Thus this thing can enrich you.

D: I think that it is good to dare. Art needs daring. The problem is what limits you want to give to it. What you define as becoming too metaphysical I think is actually simply reduced to this basic idea: art when truly genuine shows its best value. I think that in many Chinese contexts (and not only Chinese) we forget about this truly unnecessary role that art has got: it is the art/dog that is walking us that sometimes is the most successful: to be transported, to be passive sometimes is what denies what you said before: “parasitic, intelligent, shooting hidden arrows, being clever, ideas-based art, falling from Conceptual art to ideas-based art, then saying cold things by oneself or saying cold things about people or saying weird things that would easily sound profound and that would sound conceptual and very thoughtful”

Li: In the Buildings Breaching the Regulation exhibition, Yu Ji was intriguing in that there was a person standing inside a cage with needles everywhere. I felt that it would be better if he himself stood inside it. It’s a water prison and one cannot get out. There is a relationship to the body, a very poetic work, moving, like the No No exhibition done by Lu Jie last time. I like Jiang Zhi’s work best; it has a poetic existence that contains the context of the individual. It seems that it does not matter to him whether he is part of this group show or not. The work is not directly related to the concept of the exhibition, space, directions of Long March Space or other artists. He does not happen directly. That is, the artist is a status of a self.

Qiu: That’s what I meant just now by saying that certain works could not be established in solo exhibitions. There are too many group shows these days. There are not just group show works but also works of the opening ceremony. That’s even more disgusting. It seems Le Dadou (Davide Quadrio) at Shanghai BizArt disliked this a little.

Li: I am sure Le Dadou (Davide Quadrio) at Shanghai BizArt will certainly not do that kind of show because we have communicated with each other quite a lot. What is needed more is research, continual research that penetrates other fields of knowledge.

D: Of course I can not not agree on this point. I am so tired of these shows without a beginning or an end. These biennales, these group shows etc. I am so tired of seeing a smart show with smart artists. I want to see the real work. Like you said Zhenhua about Jiang Zhi’s work. I want to see the artist’s self. Let’s get out of this kind of “art system” approach. We need to get back to have time for research, for getting deeper into what we do. It is, as you said Zhenhua, important to make our knowledge wider. I feel after 10 years working in the Chinese context that I know so little of the other parts of the world. I need intellectual knowledge and time.

Qiu: I agree. When you (Dadou) came to seek me out because you wanted to invite me to go to Mongolia, thinking that I might get interested in doing research there, we talked a lot about this point. In fact, it is in my plan! The only problem is time. When can I go? I have to work on the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge Plan this year. I did an investigative tour in Asia that included places like India and Iran; I had that basic experience. At the time when I did the Asian tour, I proposed that Mongolia should be included. In that Asian tour, I also proposed that we should do double times in the first stage. Double times in fact refers to the correlation of Western colonization to Thailand’s Buddhist calendar, China’s rural calendar and Japan’s calendar, talking about Western colonization and Christian colonization. In fact, at the time, we wanted to be double colonizees. Double colonization is colonization by Communism. One of the earliest notions of globalization is Marxist globalization, the Communist globalization. So, in Asia, there once appeared one colonization by Communism, including Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Korea, and Afghanistan. I wanted to do a history of colonization by Communism but of course this is a sensitive issue, not easy to do. I’m still wondering how to work on this leftist colonization.

Li: A colonization by thought, not by people.

Qiu: That is appealing. Those patriots and idealists were all drawn by the ideals of Communism. It did not use violence but it’s an ideology. It’s they themselves going in search of it, they themselves hungrily studying Marxist theory and returning to engage in revolution.

D: They sometimes use violence as well, let’s not forget. Violence of ideas that prevaricates the social-political environment of a community is violent for sure and very disruptive. On the other hand the colonization of Communism has a history of violent and traumatic behaviours: look at what the Russians did to Buddhist temples in Mongolia. The cultural revolutions damaged religious buildings to the point of destroying them, in Mongolia the Russians literally eradicated all signs of temples. When I went to Mongolia I was deeply shocked, I did not expect that at all.

Li: Among all we have seen a pretty damaged world from most leading parties, Communism or Capitalism, what happened after 1900 will not let us forget that we are not far still from the brutal history. I am always wondering if every revolution should based on killing others or violence…and that could be said to be the greatest political and social phenomenon of the 20th century.

Qiu: Apart from the two world wars (1st and 2nd World Wars), the ups and downs of the Communist movement shaped the history of continents.

Li: The World Wars were, in a sense, a conflict of certain mechanisms of an economic society. The appearance of Socialism was the greatest construction, the greatest core and the beginning of a society and political pattern dominated by thought.

Qiu: Socialism is a social experiment that failed prematurely, quite tragically, but of course it did not fail completely. It created icons that were greater than any created by Capitalism. It created Mao Zedong and Guevara. It had saints, saints like Guevara. Such saints were even accepted by its enemies. Its enemies of course introduced it into a system of consumption. Its enemies also accepted its saints. No-one could handle a saint like Guevara because Guevara had the qualities of all cowboys (spirit) from the American West, always with a cigar (a symbol of a dick) between his lips.

Chairman Mao was the same. In China, one would find it very hard to appreciate Mao’s world influence, very shocking! When the Maoists just won the election in Nepal recently, America went mad, as they had been anti-government armed forces. America defined the Maoist armed forces as terrorists. Recently, Nepal pretended to stage a democratic election because the king disappointed them. As a result, Maoism won the election and terrorists won it. And they say they won’t destroy their traditional relationship with India and that China is their example. America is worried to death. They managed to instigate Tibet but Nepal changed its colours. Those terrorists in the mountains persisted by holding Mao’s image in their hands, which is why I am particularly interested in Mongolia. Guo Xiaoyan, from Guangzhou, wanted to do something about Xinjiang.

Recently, when I went to a conference in Huangshan, I had a look at their Tibet Plan. They got Liu Xiaodong to do things like painting Qinghai. I realized that it involved the participation by Goethe-Institute and the whole narrative was entirely Shangri-la, titled, The Disappeared Site. As soon as I saw it I said the title was not right because The Disappeared Site deprived itself of The Disappeared Horizon, that is, the description of Shangri-la by Dr Lee. A girl said, “We want to return to the simplest plateaus, blue skies, white clouds, temples and lakes”. As soon as I heard that I lost my temper, “But temples are not the most important as they are the result of the colonization of Tibet in Tang Dynasty. Nepal and Tang Dynasty jointly colonized Tibet, each sending a princess there, taking Buddhism there. What’s more, the narration here is very confused.” One photograph shows a group of chyrrus passing through an opening underneath a bridge, claiming the construction of a number of bridge openings for the chyrrus to pass through. In fact, it is a forged photograph. In the painting by Liu Xiaodong, two Tibetan youths are walking along the railway lines in parallel to each other, both wearing Han garments. However, as soon as Qinghai-Tibet Railway was complete, they stopped wearing traditional Tibetan attire.

Later, I gave a talk, saying, “why do they say we forced Tibetans to wear Han attire? It is obvious that we Han Chinese were also forced to wear Western suits. However, this western suit is really comfortable and reasonable. You can’t say that Chinese won’t wear it and Tibetans won’t wear it because it was a European invention. We also would like to share the process of modernization. It’s a process of modernisation, not that of Sinicization, nor that of Westernization. This shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place. But I’m sure what I say will sound problematic if I say that the Tibetan railway will be worse if the Communist Party does not control Tibet. Just think of it, the fact that the British got Tibet. The British were the best lovers of railway building in the world. If the Communist Party did not put Tibet under control, Tibet would have been criss-crossed with railway lines and the Tibetan missionaries who had entered and taken residence there in those days would have long ago put on Western suits and been using telephones. Today, only the upper-class aristocrats wear Western suits and the lower class may still wear gowns.” So, their overall narrative is problematic. As this discourse is so pervasive, they got stuck in it in spite of themselves, particularly when they got the money from the Goethe-Institute.

Cui Qiao was brain washed although Guo Xiaoyan wasn’t. She was born in Xinjiang, half-han, and is critical of modernization. However, Cui Qiao represents the Western position. In the end, the Western position was stronger. In the narration of Tibet, they were impulsively concerned with cultural impact and issues of colonization. However, the narration fell into the traps of cultural impact and issues of colonization. Nevertheless, their academic research was open and there was interest in this subject. And they were hoping to expand their research in the direction of anthropology and they had this impulse. That’s when you’ve got to be vigilant. Wherever this discourse goes one faces pitfalls. If you do not hit back, you will fall into the traps dug up for you long ago. There’s something, the catalogue of the Tibetan Investigation exhibition. At the time, I wrote a very long article as I had prepared the whole history of paintings around the subject matter, including the investigative reports. I ended up with thirty to forty thousand characters, approaching fifty thousand characters with the addition of other things. Then, I threw in the material about spray-painting, and Zhou Yi (Zoe Butt) and others translated the lot. Prior to the anniversary celebration of the National Art Academy (Hangzhou), I asked Lu Jie to print the catalogue for distribution on the occasion. Lu Jie said, “Okay. We won’t drag on with this”. Because the design was ready a long time ago, ready to be printed straight away. Just at that juncture, something happened in Tibet.

Foreigners at Long March Project rose in collective rebellion, refusing to do this catalogue called The Tibet Investigation. According to Lu Jie, Dai Wei (David Dong) held a position close to his, relatively neutral. There were other old foreigners who simply stopped working, finding my article too leftist and too Chinese for them to accept. Even the translation of meaning of words was problematic. For example, I wrote about Tibetan artists in my article and they thought that I should only write about Tibetan artists and they found my control over, and distribution of, types of themes unacceptable to them in the process of my writing. Whichever way Guo Xiaoyan and others did it, they had this impulse to use a more anthropological approach. We have been engaged in this activity, doing a certain cultural research, the same way Le Dadou in Shanghai BizArt engaged in academic activity, through the creation of an academic platform in order to probe one experience after another. Dado was critical of BizArt. He wanted to escape to Thailand to stay for a year. His disgust with these things in fact became a contrast, with something else emerging from it.

D: The Tibet Investigation is an intriguing project and it is amazing how Tibet immediately makes people uncomfortable. I have been myself in my preceding life living and working in Qinghai and Ganna, researching architecture and post- communist reconstructions of Tibetan architecture (both vernacular and religious) and the implications of the modernization (can we say that?) on the environment (both on technical/material aspects and the impact of what you Zhijie, described as “a process of modernisation, not that of Sinicization, nor that of Westernization”). I do not want to get into what you described since I see a possible danger in finding ourselves in sterile confrontations: visions of history of China are indeed still too connected to the regime and a deep re-analysis of the history of China outside the Communist heritage is still far from being undertaken.

What I am interested in saying is that, no matter what, it is fundamental to dare the extremes, to dare opinions and to be open to controversy. This is what I think is needed in this historical time. It seems, instead, that we are surrounded by a sort of fear of the change of perspectives: I see this incredibly strong in the way the economy is treated. Globalization failed and still governments are trying to support a system that clearly does not work. The same is for the art system in China: if you remember when we talked, Zhenhua about the craziness among the art market in China and the need for a serious position of the major actors in response to this situation, artists (among many we know very well) were arrogantly thinking only about the short benefits and not really thinking ion the long terms: the clear proof is that all experimental places turned themselves into galleries and when, at the beginning of 2008, talking with BiIzArt people about getting engaged in the financesial of BizArt because I could not support that anymore 100% and after 10 years of doing that so I was tired, the great idea was to open Shopping Gallery namely to support BizArt. The decision was taken without me being aware of it and still I do not know how Shopping Gallery is supposed to support BizArt…

Li: I like what you said: “’ we are surrounded by a sort of fear of the change of perspectives”’ and I found that people are normally against things without knowing the whole concept, even cannot be bothered for with a discussion to give to both sides, I found the danger of being 100% correct in whatever the field, that people forgeot as an artist it is important to give an new perspective contributinge to the existing concept of what we believe in, which causes many misunderstanding and problems with people’s emotional conflicts.

Li: You have been discovering new artists from your work in 1996 on video art exhibitions to the post sense and sensibilities in 1998 and 1999, to when you later worked on China Art Triennial (Nanjing, China 2005), which is somewhat similar to what you are doing now on The Tibet Investigation, a bit like a social survey, in which you discover young artists, particularly in the China Art Triennial.

Qiu: There was a project in the interim, titled, Long March: a walking visual display (2002), which had a different meaning for Lu Jie and I. For Lu Jie, it was’s to solve the “Chinese/foreign” issue, one that involves the internal and external issues. For me, however, when post-sense and sensibilities developed in the 2001’s version, it turned into a curatorial experiment. When split up, it became a critique of the system. In the process of this curatorial experiment, it turned to ‘in-situ art’ in terms of the media and to curatorial experiments in terms of working methods. That the appearance of Long March coincided with that was a curatorial experiment for me on a big scale and it was for me a relationship between the elites and the bottom social stratum.

For Lu Jie, it was a question whether the history of Chinese art was shown to people at home or abroad and whether it was for overseas curators to pick art or for Chinese art to sell overseas. His definition of Long March was to substitute it for sales overseas. His article played a slightly similar role to mine, The Zone of Errors in Conceptual Arts, always preceded by a guiding article. Later, when I wrote about Post Sense and Sensibilities it all read like declarations. Previously, the guiding academic preparation served as a guiding principle. Previously, Lu Jie wrote one, about whether it should be going in from without or going out from within or whether it should be going through the wall for overseas sales or resolving the issue on the spot. Later on, when I wrote the curatorial proposal for Long March, I added many of my initial ideas. We must consider what we could give others instead of what we could gain from outside, including the proposed ‘Chinese contemporary art’, not ‘contemporary Chinese art’. This reversal took the vein of Chinese contemporary art. It does not say that contemporary art is an international club and Chinese contemporary art is its Chinese part and Ccommunism. I don’t think it’s that kind of relationship, the one that tries to link Chinese Communist Party more to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and to Chen Sheng and Wu Guang (?), not to Moscow. Later, there was a change although the basic idea was not about the within and without. For me, Long March, on one hand, was a large-scaled curatorial experiment, and, on the other, an expansion from the bottom. That’s what I got to know in this tour. My abilities at social investigation were greatly exercised. And it is in fact a large-scaled investigation.

D: Zhijie, I am happy that finally I got this comment on the Long March from you. It is clear now that your intention was very different to what Lu Jie, occasionally, wanted to build on top of the research project/long march.  I am also really supportive of the interpretation and the different reading of ‘Chinese contemporary art’, vis a vis of ‘contemporary Chinese art’. I try always to use “contemporary art in China” since this leaves ethnicity more open to differentiation: art in China can also be not-chinese (han) and let the position of artists ethnically Chinese but with international back-grounds, or foreigners, have a contribution in the development of contemporary art.

Li: The 1998 and 1999 post sense and sensibilities seemed to be the two strands of force from National Art Academy (Hangzhou) and Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing). There wasn’t an in-depth investigation and research. Then, with regard to Long March, Lu Jie went to you. Relatively speaking, it was a curatorial experiment for a group of successful artists. The social investigation did not go deep enough into it. It is, however, an example of the spiritual existence of Chinese contemporary art.

Qiu: In fact, there were many small investigations in the interim, such as Jiang Jiwei rubbing the stones in Guangxi. On the one hand, it’s a discovery of minjian art (Folk Art) and, on the other, the opportunity availed by Long March was also used to strengthen the power of post sense and sensibilities that pulled Shi Qing and others down to creative works at the grassroots level and that took Li Yong and others to work in Kunming. The work Ding Jie did at Lugu Lake was great. It was hard to reveal how good she was. Because while she was investigating the species around Lugu Lake, her friend mailed seeds to her. S, she used a local teahouse as a core of her explanation about the ways of planting these plants, planting them right there in the locality, directly changing the ecology of Lugu Lake and the formation of the flora. When you come to think of it now, it’s excellent work but (these things) haven’t appeared on more occasions.

Li: Ding Jie’s creation while in residence in the UK had a particularly mystical tendency. One does not know if that was meant to achieve certain effect. I think it’s especially different from what you said just now. Whether what you said relates to the local flora or species, it’s a seeking for relationships but that one was seeking for something else. Really, they were two directions. My question is: when you did the Ttriennial, had that been long in the pipeline or was it through Long March or even earlier? Or even then you wanted to discover new artists and even younger people at the colleges?

Qiu: It should be said that the way I worked on the Ttriennial was obviously based on my Long March experience. It was an excellent representation. Actually, I began teaching at the time, which is why there was this mode of on-campus experimentation and 1+1 project. Of course, 1+1 was meant for a “famous” person to help a young person and that was obvious. Some people could not even find anyone to help. We even ‘arranged’ marriages! We ‘arranged’ Chen Wei for Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang was very happy. They now have a gorgeous relationship. Xiaogang also told me that the best artist among the young now was Chen Wei. Some ‘arrangements’ wereas very successful. I introduced Sheng Shiyi, the one who had characters written on her skin, to Xu Bing. Later on, Sheng Shiyi met a young American in Xu Bing’s studio and who has now become her boyfriend. This ‘marriage arrangement’ was quite for real but of course nothing substantial has actually happened in terms of relations. There were cases of getting it over and done with, such as Wang Guangyi’s batch of signs, which is just so- so. However, Lu Hao really was a case in which the born after 1968 condition applied. But Lu Hao’s work was quite good, which I think was his best, the one involving a peasant worker teaching a blind person and then cloning a CV that was enlarged on one sand. I don’t think Lu Hao has done anything better than that. Guangyi’s nomination was really not worth it. At the time, I had been teaching in Hangzhou (National Art Academy). It was a very important turning point.

I did the post sense and sensibilities (alien body and illusion1999) then. Later on, Li Xianting curated the corpse gang with Obsession with Hurt (2000). Zhan Wang was head of the Sun Yuan gang. Zhan Wang said: “If you want to do corpses, you have to persist in it”. In addition, Zhan Wang also provided the site for Li Xianting to curate Obsession with Hurt. Because of such an intervention, the original force of post sense and sensibilities soon split up into the alien type and paranoia (illusion). Among the paranoiac, Yang Fudong went to Shanghai and Jiang Zhi went to Guangdong, leaving Wang Wei and Wu Ershan etc. to become the main body of The Retribution Project (2001), moving towards ‘in-situ art’ and curatorial art. Just then, Long March came, bringing out the in-situ art, doing this in a more underground way together with other forces. Meanwhile, curatorial experiment was related to the emergence of independent curators. Curatorial experiment must have its own base.

Long March was at Ye Yongqing’s Chuangku in Kunming (199?), one of the earliest independent art spaces, followed by BizArt in Shanghai (1999). It’s actually one of the earliest three, subsequently replaced by 798 here. Shanghai developed Moganshan Road, with art spaces developed into art zones and art zones developed into art galleries zone. Long March Space was also strung up with things between art zones. After the curatorial experiment, a base was built in Beijing. It was not till 2002 when it got official recognition, the sign being that, after the Saot. Paolo Biennale (Braizil) in 2002, authorities began giving support to contemporary art. Official support produced two results, the beginning of education and the formation of a market as art zones turned into art galleries. There was something even more beautiful which was the beginning of art education in colleges when contemporary art education was completely launched.

So, I returned to National Art Academy (Hangzhou) to teach. By now, the video art era had gone by and it was probably in 2000 when I handed the video art work over. Then, there were the 1998 post sense and sensibilities and the Inside Story show in 2004. In 2003, I went to the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing). At that time, based on my experience involving the making of video art, including the discussion of the meaning of making it, I called it Phenomena and Images. Actually, in relation to the discussion of meaning, Wang Lin and Yi Ying both argued that work should have a definite meaning whereas I argued that work should produce effect because effect could move people. This relates to the later in-situ art and post sense and sensibilities. When I later taught at National Art Academy (Hangzhou), I naturally would combine video art, post sense and sensibilities and long march project. So, I insisted that we call the new department Total Art Studio or this working studio of ours might be called Conceptual Art Studio. To this day this department is still called Department of Synthetic Arts but my working studio is called Total Art Studio. Now Gao Shiming has proposed that our department be called Department of Total Art. This department was derived from the Department of Synthetic Paintings. But then I was not willing to go to the New Media Department because what I wanted to do could not be accommodated by their ‘new media concepts’.

Politically, Xu Jiang (the Dean of National Art Academy) was of course hoping that me I could also come. Peili was also trying to fight for the role, working really hard. But no decision was first made at first as to who should be the leader. I was not going to fall for that. Back then when I worked on Long March project, Xu Jiang had asked me to go. However, when I heard that it was about going to the New Media Department, I refused. Later on, when they said it was the Department of Synthetic Arts, I said yes. On one side, Gao Shiming and I were helping with making the school’s display centre, working together on it, and, on the other hand, I was working on the Department of Synthetic Arts. That department had three working studios, one doing synthetic paintings, actually experimenting with paintings, and the other called synthetic modeling, actually doing installations. Relatively speaking, ours was synthetic but, to put it bluntly, it was all about conceptualConceptual arts. However, experience in post-sensibilities was conceptualConceptual arts and consequently it was the culprit. I couldn’t possibly mention conceptualConceptual arts. At that time, when I communicated with Zhao Dingyang and Wang Mingming, I said that it was called Total Art. That was defining it as a tendency against conceptualConceptual arts. It carried the remaining elements of post sense and sensibilities. Then when work was done on conducting cultural research and social investigations it must carry a sense of theory.

In addition, in-situ art was an important lesson. The first lesson in total art was one on curation, showing (what was) curated. Finally, all the material training was directed to in-situ art. Actually, through the concept of total art, I defined it as the art of cultural research. In research, this thing would finally reveal itself in the site in a synthetic manner, as it would eventually enter the site of history; it was not merely the site of post sense and sensibilities. In that Sound show (Sound 2, Beijing, China 2001), one talked more about the body. Finally, I’ll talk about the site of art that was, in the time and space of Tibet, to do an investigation about Tibet as an international issue. I called that total art. There was the source of research and there was final destination, and, finally, there was the putting of it in the society. By the end of 2004, I began getting involved with China Art Triennial. As a matter of fact, my main line of thinking was total art. It of course combined thinking about new media and in-situ art. When I talked about in-situ art in Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), I talked about it with reference to media, talking about video art. Finally, I talked about the marginalization of video art in association with action and with happening art when several strands of power such as dancing, temporary theatre, performance art and video art joined forces and became total art. I talked about it putting it in the media narrative. In this way, I could, in a stately manner, ease into the line of in-situ art. I did that experiment in those curation classes.

So, to a great extent, China Art Triennial was an extension of the line of thinking in the National Art Academy (Hangzhou). But, of course, one wanted to represent the young and the current status of education. Hence the Campus Experiment. Actually, I did a form for every artists and these forms are still there, which I once was about to include in the catalogue at that time. But Ge Yaping (Funder of China Art Triennial, Nanjing, China) said this should be printed separately at the time of exhibition. So, it did not take existence. Sure enough, there was no existence of it. At the time, one talked about using a form to substitute every artist’s CV whereas in fact total art by then had connected with the experience of post sense and sensibilities, the experience of video art and performance art, all concentrated in total art.

L: I found a tendency that there are always too many artists in things like biennales and triennials.

Qiu: This exhibition of course has some of Ge Yaping’s desire, which is to speak out. Others (were there) because they wanted to discover the young people. In fact, the post sense and sensibilities generation were successful, a number of young people have emergeding already. For example, post sense and sensibilities was the most successful exhibition with the participation of 20 artists. In the end, only a few disappeared, such as Zhang Donghui. There was also a Feng Xiaoying who made two documentary films. Others, like Yang Yong and etc, were all filthily famous. So, that exhibition had many people because it had the purpose of uncovering the young; we tried to put in as many people as possible. It was actually quite difficult to deal with Nanjing Museum’s space as the quality of works by the young artists was not sufficient to support a huge space. For this reason, you had to put in as many as possibly if only for the purpose of adding to the weight of the exhibition. But of course there was this wish for general viewing. For that reason, the future artists were included in the show ahead of time and the number of people kept increasing. As a matter of fact, if it was an exhibition that mainly featured older artists, the number then should be smaller in order to show everyone in at his or her best. For something like this, for the purpose of ‘digging’ the young, it had to involve large numbers and quantities. The official participants numbered 100 or so. If you include the On-campus Experiment, say, 20 students from Guangzhou, 9 from National Art Academy (Hangzhou) and 15 from Lu Xun Fine Arts College, the total would be 180.

Li: But one didn’t feel that there were many works at the site.

Qiu: The On-campus Experiment was upstairs. The first frame was the two projectors by the Gao Shiqiang class. One projector may represent 10 students, like Gao Shiqiang’s class. Then there was the total art hospital project, which looked like a very complex installation but in fact was the work of nine students. Their class had different sections, with this person doing the nerves, another person doing surgery, another person doing some other specialty and still another person doing the morgue, so that the whole thing looked like a huge set-up. You think it’s one work but it’s actually nine works.

L: In the curator’s theses of The Future Archaeology, you said that transgeniosis was an overdraft. What is the correlation between future diary and future archaeology in terms of this time?

Qiu: These were mainly correlated to human tendencies because the material you wanted to work with was kind of expected for the curator’s essay [oy: the original Chinese text wasn’t very clear at all]. If when you mention this curatorial essay in reference to the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (2008), I still think it works. When we talked about post-colonialism, we talked about the concept of future, how it had grown up in China, the Chinese concept, the concept of future at present, and we even placed it within my current plan, the Suicide Investigation on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge series. The set of thoughts about future still exists. The article about the curatorial concept of future archaeology exceeded the entity of this exhibition.

What I wanted to talk about was the issue of our society as a whole. This society began to be captured by the notion of success as everyone rushed towards the future but it was a relatively definite future and there were definite standards to judge success or failure, which is why people make overdrafts. The four blocks are based on the samples currently available. The blocks are not necessarily ideal samples for the line of thinking for the Future Archaeology. There wasn’t that much rejection of success in there nor was there rejection of rushing towards the future. It was about the status in which people find themselves today, something in which people understand the future through their body. Future really changes itself through the body status. This we call transgeniosis. It in fact related to the artists born after 1968 who can be divided into several statuses. Under our enquiring eyes, we see them in several expressions although these expressions are not the status I think they should be in. However, in reality, that is their status. This got entangled with transgeniosis and partly with historical consciousness. But, in this historical consciousness, there is the part of the historical issue that is basically questioned, suspected and that is uncertain.

A number of people are more concerned with issues of the reality. They talk about the hurt the consciousness of future may have on the real life that leads to overdrafts and a mad rush towards the ‘future’. Future has commitments through the purchase of insurance. Payment in installments is a typical act of belief in the future. The beginning of payment in installments is the beginning that leads to overdrafts. So, this talk is about the hurt that future consciousness has on reality consciousness. Another part of it is to construct the future in a personal manner, the part of The Future Diary. At the time, I studied the blogs by many young people. Later, at the end of my article, I quoted a diary by a young person written for 2063. These were the futures in a small person’s guesswork, equal to the blocks that hundreds of people could present then and that we could find; it was the way of presenting the issues. The four blocks were more like an investigative report. These people today are in that status. However, what about the article previously written about The Future Archaeology? It was more like the bringing up of a social issue. I actually have an answer in this to what our future consciousness has formed today. Still, every participating artist in here was able to be my perfect sample. What do you think the answer will be? Just like what we said just now about what on earth we wanted to do, like when I talked about total art just now. If we do not do things like ideas art, like you or like Dadou or Lu Jie in certain respects, Guo Xiaoyan and others also had the impulse to do this.

What on earth did we want to do when we did the Tibet investigation and when we did the investigation on the suicides on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge? We were pushed to the in-situ art after experiencing the new media language training, including the spiritual training. In actual fact, I pushed the material site to the body site, to the historical site and to the social site. It was only a one-step shift. After the new media, after the training involving the walk of Long March, after these educational experiences, after the post-sensibilities curatorial experiment, we could see the visible growth of a group of people who succeeded, got bored, split up and degenerated, the construction of these selves. When we come to think of it, what could we do if we did not do that standard Cconceptual art? I think this issue has several levels. In our artists’ work, one relates to how he or she works, the issue of methodology. We are against the very mature methodology that a number of artists have been using. Such a methodology no longer has any productivity, aa la Duchamp, a misunderstood Duchamp, a typical contemporary artistic methodology, in which ‘anti’ takes the lead, intelligence is generated in a hurry and cold bullets are shot.

D: I think Qiu Zhijie that here you are still stressing the necessity of the build-up of a consciousness of alternative possibilities: it is once again the idea of daring the change.

This idea of a future based on trying to control the anxiety of it (which is most of the time merely economically based as you mentioned somehow in what you have just said) corrupts and deviates the depth of what can be alternative models and aspirations: it is not about methodology but about construction/processes/tentatives which, like you are describing, are moving new thoughts, new paradigms. In my way all that you said is related to the concept of freedom: free artistic works from a “model”, post-modern, post-colonialist if you want: play in a free place, a cluster where positive and liberating energies can be put in place.

L: This Duchamp thing you mentioned just now is also an issue. It’s quite serious that everyone imitates these superficial things. The number of people really delving into the thoughts is particularly small.

Qiu: Because UCCA wanted me to do that seminar, I’ve recently been madly researching Duchamp again, becoming the second expert in the Duchamp study. The first one (today) must surely be Wu Shanzhuan, for the top researcher on Duchamp in China, must be Wu Shanzhuan whose research is most detailed whereas the core of my achievement in the research on Duchamp was sex and pornography, not at all practical jokes and stuff. It’s all about sex! The UCCA seminar was excellent, gorgeous. The finding in my research was that the core of Duchamp was sex, including his painting of a moustache on Mona Lisa. It was really no practical joke but just a discussion of androgyny. In 1965, when he took a postcard but did not draw a moustache, he called it the moustache-less, LHOOQ, as it’s all androgyny. That woman’s skirt sprouted many cocks. And that urinal was a receptacle for what men shot out. The naming of it as Fountain was the surge. Then Duchamp photographed women wearing men’s clothes. In French, that was called Rose is life, with the homonym that ‘sexual love is life’. That share was the bond issued by Duchamp, with a photograph in the middle of it that very much looked like Matthew Barney, that is, the face smeared with soap bubbles that shaped the hair into two sheep horns. That was my most important discovery. That image was Pan, the predecessor of Matthew Barney. That’s why I say that the core of Duchamp is eroticism. This includes the work he did that he had spent 20 years on in Spain, featuring a woman lying on the lawn, holding an oil lamp in one hand, the landscape behind her with a waterfall and a door in the front for one to peep into.

This work took him 20 years. Why did Duchamp take 20 years to do this in secret and did not have it shown till after his death? Who do you think Duchamp wanted to challenge? And what work [(did he want to challenge])? It’s like Jin Yong who wanted to challenge Cao Xueqin if he wanted to challenge someone and his Wei Xiaobao was a reference to Baoyu, Wei’s Xiaobao as Jia’s Baoyu. Duchamp’s work in his later years was a challenge to Mona Lisa, and the waterfall at the back was totally Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa was Da Vinci’s self-portrait, the androgyny. This woman lies here, holding an oil lamp in her hand, the voyeur’s hole being the frame. When you get into it in your research, you will find a totally different world. The understanding of Duchamp from the River-Lake point of view is the play of practical jokes, e.g., playing weird tricks and shooting cold arrows, all part of that ‘Duchamp’.

Li: One must say that he has got his own system of knowledge except that he has never shown it.

Qiu: Right. Very secretive. Duchamp’s early best friend was Francis Picabia and his best friend in his old age was Daliey (also Spanish). And then the source of his secrecy is Spain, really weird. That day, when I called Wu Shanzhuan, I said, ‘Shanzhuan, my recent reading of Duchamp reveals that Duchamp’s core is sex and eroticism. What do you make of it? He then said that’s absolutely (right) and that we all know this absolutely. There is only one person who does not know about it and that person is Huang Yongping because there is no sex in Huang Yongping’s work, no body, only brains. However, there was divinity at work. You look at his early painting of Mona Lisa and Da Vinci. You look at his work, the Soonest Burnt Moustache, that was about androgyny. However, all this disappeared from his later works.

Li: The use of so-called divinity actually has an implication but, that way, it has done away with the body.

Qiu: One does not see any of the body in his later works, particularly the concept of sex. That totally disappears from Huang Yongping’s work and it does not exist there at all. However, he also treats Duchamp as a saint but Duchamp’s core is sex, but I’m digressing again. First we talk about what we do and the first level involves the use of methods. We cannot simplistically utilize an existing methodology. We have to create new methodologies and this creation of methodologies is achieved in their involvement in the reality. It is impossible for an individual to stay indoors and exercise a new methodology. It is not possible to create a new fist. For example, when Yang Guo fights with ocean waves, he creates the Anran Xiaohun Fist (Sadly Soul-softening Fist). And that’s because there were new enemies. If you keep fighting with people no new martial art skills will appear; new martial art skills will only appear when you change and specialize in taking the stones that roll off the mountains and when you change and fight the ocean waves. That is to say, new methodologies and new languages are born out of tempering in the new realities. You can’t stay indoors and create a vehicle behind the closed doors by creating new methodologies. So, you need serendipity and have to accept it. That is when you went to Tibet to work on Tibet and you went to Mongolia to work on Mongolia. All those investigations need life. However, many works now do not have life in them.

D: Do you not think that the last 20 years in China were exactly that kind of new territory where to experience and create at the same time new methodologies? I think that, talking about the three of us, we all three were involved in a sort of progressive learning: learning by doing, doing and learning by mistakes, finding new ways, being extremely critical yet not afraid to open up to new challenges. Our practice more or less is also trans-media and we never gave up the “artistic” productions made by ourselves (visual art, poetry, etc.)  In a way we are a representation of the last 10 years of questioning contemporary art in China at different levels and with different priorities maybe. One thing makes us linked: curiosity for “living” sense and art. This is what made us moveing and exploreing for so many years. In an article I am writing now I say something that I feel is important to explore with you. The last years of my professional life in China made me feel progressively “compressed” and  “stuck”. I had to deal with on one side a certain boredom/lack of truly innovativeon spirit and openness that I find in China at the moment and that I described in few of my recent texts, on the other the need of not being not instrumentalized neither nor “corrupted” by a certain cynicism that seems to be the trend in China. I find myself tired of fighting, tired of being at the edge of a system, of being always the stupid alien.

Difference (as a chosen life condition in an alien cultural and social context) is not always an easy thing and this can be endured only if at least the situation around you is positively energetic and open. I feel that what you are saying Qiu Zhijie is that there is a sort of lack of life in our work in China at the moment and not only in the artworks themselves. I think the problem lays lies in the lack of daring… a certain “methodology” or a “system” is about to be put in place. A system that does not differ from other countries or the West. The moment where we could create something really different is not there anymore…

Li: (Li comments on the above and follow with the question) However, I have
problems about the investigations by such artists, such as archaeological issues. What are the differences between them and sociologists, anthropologists and archaeologists?

Qiu: Okay. I’ll talk about it shortly. This thing needs new opportunities to grow new methodologies. We have to go and live, to step into life or to go and live in the history. We do not like that part of the work, such as that section of the white wall done by Xu Zhen (No No exhibition in Long March Space). In my opinion, he was totally divorced from history and from life, an inevitable product of the fine arts museum system and a product of something that can be inferred. I slightly like Yang Zhenzhong’s work because I still retain some memory of the life. The Pulling the Brakes is passably acceptable but I really dislike the bricks by Huang Kui and Xu Zhen’s thing. That was what we post-sensibilities were against then. Yang Zhenzhong’s Pulling the Brakes was, after all, a practical joke, which could induce memory and made it possible for us to recall the movement against the switching off of the lights in the school.

Li: That brings us back to one word, the contextual relationship in culture. Xu Zhen’s thing cannot be established in relation to personal experience although a certain grafted experience can be established as it is useful to the opening ceremony of an activity.

Qiu: That’s because he accurately predicted what was going to happen at the opening ceremony. It was the knowledge that he possessed of the opening ceremony. But if Yang Zhenzhong’s thing reminded you of the switching off of the lights in the student dormitories, he still had some life. We now want to interfere in life, to live a better life in life because, most of the times, that life is an unconscious life, but when you go and conduct the investigation it becomes an interesting life. Then you live at a deeper level and that becomes part of the work. Then (you have to know) how you do it in life, to temper your skills in life. The issue at the second level then is what you do. You want to talk about the issue of the subject, things like what is painted on the wall; it’s the methodology, the fixed methodology, the methodology of practical jokes because he has got nothing to say, no words, no emotions, no stories to tell. To put it earthily, (he has had) no content. It’s an issue of how to do it and what to do.

Not long ago, before I researched Duchamp, I did a good review of Beuys and I studied why America refused Beuys who was not recognized in America. It is said at the Guggenheim that Cai Guoqiang’s exhibition was even more successful than Beuys in those days. When I heard that, I found Beuys really niu (wonderful), who did things that America found totally unacceptable. What Cai Guoqiang did was the Hollywood blockbusters, which is why there was universal American acclaim. Beuys was rejected by all the American people and he was madly rejected by the American art world. Then, Professor Benjamin Bucklohw, professor of fine arts from Harvard University, wrote an article denouncing Beuys as a Nazi. The article was so influential that no museum director dared collect Beuys’ works in America. There awere only a few scattered pieces in MOMA. Most of the works by Beuys are in the UK, a few important ones with Tate but no important works in the USA. That article led to a wholesale rejection.

In fact, Beuys was shut up with the wolves. In fact, there were very few people who went to see him, a smpattering, equivalent to the Chambers Fine Art Gallery by Christophe W. Mao. If we look at this today, that’s where he is niu. But why was Beuys was so objected to by Americans? What Americans worshipped was exactly poverty, blankness, minimalism and nothingness whereas Beuys, in his works, had memory, connection to every item, traces of behaviour or props of future action. He came from somewhere in the world and became a prop somewhere else. As he became a relic somewhere he would walk elsewhere. I am running classes on installation. In the Second Working Studio, I also told them about installation, which is at least not sufficient. I do not even want to say it’s not correct because this thing should not be a landscape that has a relationship to the incidents. This landscape is a symbol. In fact, it rather resembles a mandala, the reflection of a world. When we make something it should be a moment in the world and it should have a place it comes from.

For this reason, every object must be something that has been used and that knows who has used it and, when placed together, it generates a relationship, and when placed together, it can be constructed. It is not simply like a  teapot or a teacup. Then it has a place that it goes to. This teacup was used by Li Zhenhua but that was sent to Guo Fengyi. This [(the teapot]) was used by Wang Wenhuai but that was sent to Sui Jianguo. Its projection backward carries a certain recollection. It establishes a relationship. That is what we refer to as the source. There is a connection. This work, this teapot, numbers 10 in this world. It has a link. Works by Joseph Beuys have this quality. His works have materiality, really at odds with the minimalist pursuit of the American style.

D: this process I think can also be seen in many contexts around the world, of course including China in the recent time for instance. The socio-political situation influences the “acceptability” of artwork in a given time and place. This is obvious. You can say that even with a simple example like what happened to the Mozart music style of Mozart when he was alive and the great success he had after death… Anyway, I think that you are touching a very interesting point which for me has always been in the center of what I am doing: and it is the meaning: the art we support, produce, push, like and the connection with the Meaning (as an intricate connections of meanings). What defines a good art work and which artworks are “too easy”, too smart and too direct. The case of Xu Zhen is a good example. Some of his works are a sort of intellectual exercise, but some others are incredibly “cold” as you define them but also they do touch complex meaning and they do react on the viewer on the esthetic and message they bring in. What do you think about this? Maybe your judgment on this “not-rooted-into-research-art” is because what you feel art should be and do does not compel with this cynical art? This is also why there is a conflict with Zhang Peili’s view of the thing? But I agree on the point that there is nothing revolutionary in the approaches to of artistic creation brought in by Xu Zhen or Zhang Peili in the specific cases mentioned.

Li: I think Americans are giving indirect recognition. Matthew Barney has been recognized and by America as a whole.

Qiu: Right. They were then against Beuys and the icons smashed were Duchamp. They thought that that was the way art should be. They misunderstood Duchamp because they assumed that that was the Duchamp tradition. I’ve also studied Duchamp’s relationship to Americans. Americans, not by the French, worshiped Duchamp.

Li: The other person is Andy Warhol. At the end of 2007, I saw his solo show in the Netherlands. What is most interesting is that that show had very few of his famous paintings but it was all Warhol’s video works and TV programs. I had misunderstandings about him prior to going to that exhibition. In fact, there was much that was mysterious about Warhol’s methodology. He was a voyeur. Although many claim that Warhol’s stuff is empty and that his stuff is a reflection of a ghastly and hollow reality but that is not right. His stuff is a discussion of contemporary values, ones represented by the media, and he was the teacher of all who were doing media arts. It was not till then that I saw programs like that but he had done it them in his days, things like adult TV, internet TV and every aspect of today’s TV productions.

Qiu: He is a media researcher and he was also interested in death. And that’s what I refer to as the second level. Artists must have material. The first level is the creation of new methodologies, e.g., ways of doing things. The second level sounds traditional but then I’ll also talk about the third level, that is, what is the difference between this research and this archaeology done by artists and researchers from the professional archaeological teams. Actually, in the final analysis, it is an issue of jingjie (realm, ideal state, ideal, extent reached), quite like water-ink paintings.

Li: Is that jingjie or visual angle? Isn’t jingjie a bit too abstract?

Qiu: Visual angle is a bit too small. This jingjie is like something of Wang Wenhai’s an artist who has beenve mentally and physically involved in with Mao’s figure for his whole life. Then, in a special way, in a vein in which I have been doing things, there is the appearance of yijing (mind status, artistic conception) and this yijing takes on an independent existence. Then, it began to be detached from this thing; it’s in this thing and, at the same time, it’s detached from it. Gao Shiming made an excellent remark. I did the Tibet Investigation and, in Nanjing, I took part in rescuing people, talking to those attempted suicides on a daily basis. That way of doing those social investigations is the field investigation that is currently popular, directly spreading the photographs featuring my recorded conversations with the attempted suicides across the walls, laying them out all over the place.

In the end, I will probably not be doing that. What I probably will represent eventually may be a pit of archaeology made of coal containing many crows, a completely black archaeological pit entirely made of coal. Gao Shiming said: You are right in doing that and the previous investigations you did were part of a new birth. The difference between those social investigators and I is that I got deep into life, completing a new birth, a complete transfer of myself. For this reason, the final stage of appreciation of The Tibet Investigation was completed through an investigation of Tibet-theme-based paintings. A student wanted to use a skull to burn it into Buddhist relics. It is with this method and through these investigations a new birth is reached, to complete a lift in the self so that the self may ascend to a new jingjie.

Li: This method sounds like book reading; it is not limited to a space but is placed in an infinite space.

Qiu: It is in fact a reading of the characterless sky book, meaning a journey that covers ten thousand li. However, whether it is for the purpose of reading ten thousand volumes of books or covering ten thousand li, it is eventually for the purpose of shaping a person, for the purpose of shaping a new person.

Li: This is where it differs from the archaeologists. Just now I was about to ask you another question about training of the consciousness as a group or of the consciousness as an individual. Basically, all the investigations and surveys seek the collective spirit.

D: In a recent experience we had in Sainsbury Art Center, UK we have been put in direct contact/confrontation/exchange with academics and archaeologists. We were strolling, looking at relics in the museum and instinctively we were looking at them with artists’ eyes, we were looking at the magic of the objects but also on the reality that was expressed by the same objects. We were confronted with artworks, religious works and tools, and daily-used objects. Right away we were using this “visual material” as elements to make connections with the contemporary through an artistic mediation (thinking of using them as still “live” objects) or making them part of an artistic process (installation, performance). Archaeologists and academics were instead constructing on the same objects in order to read them historically, philosophically etc. The main difference of our approach was there: objects were taken as “untouchable” by archaeologists (meaning was in the past and their meaning was completed already) while we were seeing the potential that the same objects still have in the now and the future (generating new meanings). Maybe this can be a sort of interpretation of the role of artists in the making of a future archaeology?

Qiu: If the survey is done through a group, I could not have possibly done my Nanjing one because it would have involved a huge amount of preparation. Neither my students nor I dared do it. I took individual graduate students to help me take photographs but dared not let them do it on their own. This would need physical and psychological strength. It would need prior preparation or one would collapse oneself because the thing was in fact quite risky.

Li: Often I myself will be sucked in, influenced by a certain energy. When it gets strong enough, I myself can’t even stop it.

Qiu: For that reason, one has to be strong enough oneself, which means this method can’t be used for the survey. And, certain things have their own specificity. You can only deal with that person by yourself by establishing a trust before that person can begin to discuss it with you and before he can begin to narrate. This narration is often very shocking. In the process of his telling he is changing you and while he is listening you are changing, too. In this way, the entering into this matter was in fact a completion of its own new birth. Prior to that, my scheme had already taken an existence. For example, I used the coal as the archaeological pit. It was an unsuccessful plan involving my digging of the archaeological pit at Yaojiayuan in 1998. I tried to dig deep and I wanted to embed that at different heights in the TV screen, setting the crows flying. I now am trying to do it through this but my plan has turned into the screen and disappeared, turning into real crows flying. This plan of mine involved 200 crows in a space heaped up on the coal. I let them experience the vibrations of this bridge inside the bridge, up and down and repeatedly, over the bridge and below the bridge, with the passage of one train per minute that vibrates as if the heavens moved. I placed one hundred people inside the archaeological pit, everyone holding a hammer. Every three minutes they would hammer at the water pipes placed inside. When this happened, the crows would be stirred.

This installation would then turn into a theatre, invisible to these people. Or they had little hopes to see the audience. There were graffiti on the bridges that stimulated me, things like ‘Wang Lin Loves Lili’ or ‘I hate so and so’ or someone wrote to himself saying ‘xxx won’t cry’, things like that. Those experiences stimulated me with the result that I got their hammers eroded engraved with the hundred family names, the hammers totalling hundreds of them. The hundred family names did not seem visible to the audience as the people were hiding behind the coal hammering this. There were the hundred family names on them, not visible, not visually presentable. What was presented to the audience was black. A thing like this in fact did not present these its contents. All these things were used to temper me, a piece of steel. Now, it was chucked into the water and now it was tempered, all for the purpose of tempering this piece of steel.

Li: Then, in your opinion, is it necessary to present these this data along with your work, or to present it in other place or space?

Qiu: All fine. If these things, I think, are not shown in this exhibition hall, I have got material to show, things like what I videoed or photographed in the process, like words, to be all sorted out. In the exhibition hall, on this side, there’s a number of installations on display. Next to them was a room showing these things. That is a relatively conservative method. Another way of doing it is to show these things in an exhibition hall. In relation to titles, I won’t even call it The Phenomenon of Intervention with the Suicides over the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge. I’d simply call it The Night. But I can, in addition to this, get a book published and have my book in public circulation on the investigation into the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge, so that my work on this takes an existence in the society because all the materials gathered can serve as good books, excellent ones, including the existence of tampered pictures that Zhang Dali has looked into.

D: Sso now you are passing into the discussion of accessibility and availability of the artistic process and the public or audiences. So what it is your understanding on this relationship now?

Li: Just now, you talked about the similarity of an artist to an archaeologist in that, in a certain sense, both resort to self-expression. In your opinion, where are the self-expressions of an archaeologist then? Generally speaking, isn’t it just a book and there’s nothing beyond the book?

Qiu: I’ll talk about why I said that archaeologists were also doing the similar kind of work. Actually, right from the start, anthropology and archaeology were very clear that their rôles was to attack the mainstream society’s concepts of investigation. They had very distinct categories. The purpose of anthropology was to gather alien cultural experiences and the gathering of those was not for the purpose of placing them in an anthropological museum but to use them to reflect upon human living and the mainstream society, about which they have been very clear, right from the first generation of them, including archaeological research. Apart from filling the gap in our historical description and constructing a historical narrative through archaeology, its purpose is to reveal where we came from and to say who we really are. They made it very clear that the gang of people in the British Empire were not living a correct life, a kind of niu life, in which you feel you are advanced and they are barbarian. However, through my research, I (as archaeologist) find that they were not barbarian for their system was extremely complex and I found the certification of life and death and establishment of hierarchy in the cock fighting of the Filipinos or cricket fighting of the Chinese as there was a structure in which the crickets were categorized as the emperor and the kings. Anthropological study is meant to say: Aren’t you the same? Weren’t you also superstitious? Even though you now worship films and car racings, it’s in fact the same as the gang fighting the cocks!

Li: It’s like the French describing Sartre as a representative of a nation’s system of knowledge and ways of knowing.

Qiu: They defined it as sociology, which is why they know what they know and they don’t know what they don’t. If they want to prove a barbarian they will try to present it as it really is. He won’t be stopped by such moral impulses. He will try his best to do this material objectively. In contrast, an artist can take what he needs. But the main difference lies in the fact that, even though we also pursue objective knowledge by taking what we haven’t got, they may present the material while we do it in ways that go beyond their imagination.

Li: There are also many artists among archaeologists. There were people who deliberately created a fake archaeological site.

Qiu: I may turn part of these things into a book. However, there are things that are virtually invisible. I want to use works for psychological treatment; I tried to persuade volunteer learners. The second possibility was that the works I made might end up getting sold. I can then use the money to fund them because some people commit suicide because they can’t help it. And if they do not have this two thousand YUAN (RMB) they can’t go on living. The work includes the website I am doing for them, featuring open accounts for donations, with account numbers; volunteer homes; psychological knowledge; conversation between attempted suicides; and voices from their families. In the process of doing the website, I had the opportunity to photograph them. But what’s the third level? Take this rescued person who had taken the thing that faced them too seriously. I hang the countdown clock in the place where the rescued people stayed. Let the suicide victim thought think of AD5000. If he can’t pursue the woman from what he want of desire. In fact, there is certainly still a difference between lightness and severity in mind of living. This weird intervention is in itself a psychological treatment. I am thinking of hanging that AD5000 clock under the bridge.

Li: This is still related to your concept of the future.

Qiu: Of course it is. If the business goes under, it is because you have a too fixed view of the future. For the suicides at Yanziji on the northern side of the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge, Tao Xingzhi put up a stone: ‘Can’t die on second thoughts’. I now want to make a woodcut based on this stone and trace it in red, containing a turning arrow out of the character. I would like to stamp a batch-load of stamps, for those attempted suicides to trace them. And the process of tracing is a psychological treatment. I’ll include the rescued people and I’ll get them to draw pictures of their parents. They may not be able to but I’ll draw it for them and ask them: Are the eyes like this? Eventually, it will become like a photofacefit at the police station, in which the images of their parents emerge. When their parents’ images emerge, they shed tears and do not want to die. That’s my purpose: turning my work process into a psychological intervention, a psychological treatment.

I believe art has the power of treatment. This is like dividing my plan into three parts. I’ll get them to trace shapes. Eventually, thousands of faces may appear, of those who won’t die on second thoughts and who resemble each other because they are all traced. I’m not sure how to use these things in the end. Right now, I’ll get work under way. The final yijing of this thing depends where you can get in the end. In my opinion, these investigations and these interventions are all about new birth. In the end, you do not know to what position you will be forced. And this position is the yijing that I wanted to talk about. The investigation I conducted on the suicides on the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge is part of bei kuai. There is pain here and also kuai. And the existence of this yijing is independent, similar to when you see the Mount Everest in Tibet, which has nothing to do with anything and, yet, when we see it we are struck speechless. The existence of things like that shocks you. The final product should move in that direction.

Art system, Time and Concept between Asia and Europe

Li: Sometimes when I read your articles, I feel that there is an entanglement with a liking for the tradition and, on the other hand, anger at the West.

Qiu: When we look at Beuys, we are looking at a yijing. He fascinates me. If we think Duchamp is so lihai,that’s because there is yijing in it.

Li: But I’d like to say that the Western art system does not have much to do with them. In a certain sense, it seems relevant but, on a massive scale, it is not.

Qiu: That is because it was distorted in the historical narration. When a narration was formed, it resulted in a kind of violence. In the end, we shall find a way to get rid of these narrative methods, Eastern or Western, to get as low as human beings and things. I do this person and I do this thing and I walk like this. Then, all these ways present a status. The kind of yijing I mentioned can be referred to by using this current word, zhuangtai (status). Actually, the visual angle is part of it; a new visual angle is in fact a new jingjie.

D: It was really interesting, this part of the conversation. It reminds me once again of what Chen Zhen describes as “cultural misunderstandings”. I think that in a way the position we have— of course as you were saying— comes for from a specific cultural back-ground and in the case of a Wwestern built knowledge this background suffers still of imperialistic or post-imperialistic attitudes. On the other hands, listening to what you are saying, this anger/criticism of the Wwest/Eeast seems charged by a sort of ethicalal- centric attitude that somehow responds to the Wwestern imperialistic dominant way of thinking.

This is all true in some cases but I think that here we need to go beyond this kind of misleading discourse and get into the core of the problem. I think that the three of us can very much represent a sort of hybrid personas, we are a very complex cultural beings which are in a sort of unique position: we are able to be in this grey zone of the in-between with abilitiesty of mediation which are, I think, kind of unique and at the same time we have been able to always be a bit beyond the present to think wider about the immediate future, that I always describe as present-future. In different ways, we have been playing at an higher level than ethnicity and we have also been also able to form a special attitude versus the arts in China: this freedom makes us playing with local and international institutions, local and international artists and lets us also plays with a self-indulgenting freedom that lets us lead into the “unexpected decisions”, like for you Li Zhenhua to move to Europe and me to Thailand for the time-being…

Do not you think it is now the time to rethink about the position of intellectuals (in China at least) on this matter?

Li: Yes, Dadou, there is something quite common now, that is, intellectuals in general refer to a non-Western and non-Japanese visual angle. What’s your take on that? I spoke to Zhang Ga yesterday and to Wang Jianwei the day before yesterday about this issue because the theme of this exhibition was called The Asian Position. Zhang Ga said, “Why must we emphasize Asian-ness every time we do an exhibition? Once when I went to a symposium, everybody talked about the new media. Suddenly, a Japanese person said something about the Asian power in the world of new media. I found that quite abrupt. I felt that he was not talking about a whole. In particular, in terms of the new media, there is no such a definition.” Take you, Qiu Zhijie. Are you Chinese or American? But, all of a sudden, someone limited it to the political issue and geopolitics theory.

Qiu: It’s good talking about this but it can be very bad, too. A very bad model is identity politics involving these artists in their traditional culture, Taoist or Buddhist, because they are Asian, special, so that the new media art they make presents a particular kind of specificity. This sometimes becomes an apology for the bad things they do. They do not really make much contribution to the expansion of human consciousness or to that of human experience. However, just because they are Asian, their identity becomes their protection, an apology.

D: Well, it is what I called the ethnicity of the art in Asia and China. This specific attitude of protection/apology from the Asians and as excuse from the dominant colonialist attitude. I feel very bored when we get into this kind of “indulgence”. But be aware that the ethnicity/nationalistic temptation is very present: in a recent transcription of a symposium where Victoria Lu was presentinged, she theorized this as “if you do not have Chinese blood you can not understand Chinese art”. This statement is very dangerous but many people sympathize with this standpoint.

Li: Or it may be said that they have found the individual’s position in the transformation. This is also an issue that I have been thinking about. Like when I work on the investigative research on the media art, if I call it new media, it sounds terrible, because it does not have a simplistic comparability. It is not as if you can simply say something is new media or something is not. If you compare it with what we have done or what is already there in existence, you may find that there is no comparability for the geopolitics of the new media. I then have to change my visual angle. Can we start from the visual angle of the individuals in which the media begin to pay attention to the artists? Relatively speaking, I consider this issue from an objective angle.

D: I actually think that a medium is a medium; the artist can be free from using it as a tool! New media, as you described, is a problematic term, like art with “Chinese”, “Wwestern” etc. attached to it. I agree with you, I think it is better to get back to the artist as central part of the critical discourse related to the quality of art produced and to the meaning of the art in general.

Li: I have an article in 2005 about what is new media art, and I have consider to separatinge new media art as into Media and Medium art, because the meaning of itself hasve changed through the process of art making and emerging into the transitional status or multi-meaning concepts.

Qiu: Under such circumstances, in the terrible situation I described just now, it’s like drawing a circle around you and turning that into a prison that you can’t get out of. Because I am Asian I have a natural protection, because I have my own pride, because Europeans and Americans have this opportunity to deal with humanity. The Asian path to modernization has been going on like that. At least, the quality of my pictures is completely different from that of yours. The kind of thing that Cao Fei is afraid of forms its own spectacle. This in fact becomes identity politics. It acquires a unique position in the whole new media art through its own specificity. This position wins you the POSITION but, at the same time, it damages you and causes your death as you do not dare confront other artists courageously and you do not dare confront different experiences. Others are already dealing with things like time difference, how big the body really is as it already has extended to the other end of the city or it has extended half across the world to America. They are already considering this question whereas you are still using these small issues to take advantage and at the same time get confused by these little advantages. This is a rather bad result. However, another result may still exist. When we discuss the notion of Asia, we have to refer to the curation of an exhibition as a whole because I’ve done this with Gao Shiming.

At the time, He Benxing said that one must be vigilant about this. He meant the issue of translation, an issue of self-splitting. In addition, the Asian definition is a given. On the other hand, there is the existence of a positive possibility in that while Asian new media are renewing themselves can they do their bit to for the new media art itself? Asian notions of success is are more focused on Asians. Take the Indian notion of time. Their sala is more than three hundred sala per second. The Indian unit is very, very miniscule, with a much deeper experience of time. We now use frame, 25 or 27 frames per second. Our frame is like many of their sala. That is to say, their frames are much finer than ours. If these experiences can be put forward, it will be a contribution to the new media art and it will be an angle that European and American artists have not even thought of. But we do not evaluate values within Asia. We still need to place it in the totality.

Asians are capable of making contributions with their powers, such as our experience of calligraphy; it is quite like the rewind or fast-forward of the video machine. We use traces of ink like a tape and what we record is the movements of the tip of the brush. When you read it you are actually decoding it, the movement, to make the movement come alive, a calligraphic experience. How can we treat it as a calligraphic experience while traveling? In this, I think, there are still possibilities as long as one does not get stuck in identity proof. Gao Shiming and others talked about this post-colonial issue. In fact, Shiming’s impulse is rather simplistic. It is against Cao Fei and it is disgust with Hou Hanru. But of course curators of every show are mutually antagonistic. Actually, it is this identity politics and alternative modernity that Hou Hanru took to, the fact that yours is modernity and mine, too, trying to set up his own specificity by force and trying to say: we are here so special that you can’t use your standard to judge. That, then, is identity politics. And if you say you are so special that no-one can use their standards to judge you, that is in fact the Communist Party’ human rights discourse.

The human rights issue in China is about warmth and the belly (wenbao), so much so that you can’t use your standards of freedom of speech to judge. This alternative modern statement by Hou Hanru is in fact very close to the Communist Party’s human rights description. This of course should be warned against, as it is a statement against China’s progress. Of course, on one hand, we must oppose Western violence and we must talk about human rights on a full belly. But, on the other, at the same time when we have eaten our fill, we must also have freedom of speech, and a greater one at that, to help us eat our fill in a better way, to have better wenbao. The fact that many of us have not got their wenbao is not that we are not materialistically abundant but that there is no social justice. It is freedom of speech that can enhance social justice. For this reason, freedom of speech is a necessary condition for wenbao. It’s not like saying one has wenbao before one can have freedom of speech. But, of course, this is an issue related to the Communist Party’s human rights discourse.

In reverse, it is the same when we consider Hou Hanru’s alternative modernity, a case of you being too special for general standards. On the other hand, it means that your specificity becomes an obstruction to your progress. This is the postcolonial theory that Gao Shiming and others have to re-think because postcolonial theory is positive about your identity politics as all our identities are controlled by the West. Then, everyone goes and engages in identity politics. In this, I thought of the solution. That is, if you talk about culture there is no way out as it is hard for it to dodge identity politics and the talk about Asian particularity. There is only one way, which is talking about life, because our culture is actually not complete.

D: I think that you made a precious point which is the connection between the here and now situation (life) and the future-present contributions of art in China and Asia which is happening beyond post colonialist discourse. I would be interested in talking with Gao Shiming about his vision on this point and how it is trapped in what you define as identity politics. However in my experience in Asia it is always very important to take a flexible position (the zero point) and watch and try to go beyond the given Wwestern (in a sense of Christian based cultures) identity “cages” and buildt on a new problematic and uncertain discourse. In a recent conversation I had with Paul Gladston this problematic issue was always at the center of “corrections” both in the terminology and “concepts’ translation” that I think have so much to do in making misunderstandings and antagonisms.

Li: (And it has) returned to a narrow space of individuals.

Qiu: It is not individuals. When we talk about East and West and compare them, when we talk about West getting East and East attacking back, we assume, in the process, that the West is a fixed one and we at the same time also assume that the East is also fixed. The thing is that the East is changing as the West is also changing. So, we must talk about life. For this reason, once you start talking about postcolonial issues, identity politics issues will appear about representation as misreading or misunderstanding. Then, both parties will have mutual resentment, I misreading you and you misreading me. Okay. Your misreading of me is distortion. You distort me to such a degree that there is only Mao Zedong and Tiananmen in China. That won’t do. Let me tell you what China is. In the end, all we are doing is to reappear and my self-interpretation remains misreading. How, then, can we look at others’ interpretation and try to do our own interpretation?

When the first forum was finished in the Guangzhou Triennial, we took them to Hangzhou. Then, this guy, from Royal Fine Arts Museum, this departmental head who curated the show, said that it had been an issue of misreading just now. No, it’s the museum director. The new museum director talked about the issue of misreading that we interpreted in an avoidant way, that we regarded the world as a stage, that we let Asian, African and Latin American people represent themselves in whatever way without trying to apply subjective interpretation any more because subjective interpretation is always misreading. This is a typically multicultural point of view. So, I went up to him and said: in fact, it’s very good that you helped me interpret. Welcome interpretation and do as much misreading as possible because we have previously treated your interpretation too seriously, which is why we got hurt by it. Now, we think your interpretation is prejudice to a certain degree but even if it is prejudice it helps me understand myself and it enriches my self-understanding. When that person heard it, he became stupid. Is that what a Chinese artist said: misread as much as possible?! This way, various kinds of misreading become a power of self-criticism. I can absorb your stuff to enrich my own self-recognition and our own self-interpretation.

D: Tthis is exactly the point I am interested in. The misreading/the misunderstandings as elements to validate a proper discourse and definition of what you called “life”.  The problem that I always see and that it is actually a huge card in favor of Asia is that Asians know about Western civilization and cultures much more than European or Americans know about Asia. This is a fact. When you talk about contemporary art in Europe or Americas with an artist from Asia, he/she knows much more about what’s going on there than the other way round. Maybe what the artist in Asia understands is not always “correct” but at least he has a knowledge on which to create a discourse with all the misreading you are talking about. On the contrary, often I do not see this happening with Wwestern artists and curators: how many delegations we saw coming to China to curate a “Cchina show” and expecting local artists/curators to literally download information to them?

The other issue is always about what Asia is and how to read it in an historical perspective.

Li: Here we have raised a point about misreading and judgements on people in general makinge easy comments about China, but through the long tradition and history of Asian and oriental study of Asia or China, there’s many more interesting books about Asian and Chinese history written by French, German and Americans, that make me think maybe there’s unequal situation on knowledge- based understanding, but I do not want to gGeneralize the whole issue, and I am expect people have with deeper knowledge involved in the future discussion.

Q: This is an attitude we need today. In fact, when I did that Asian investigation in 2003 at National Art Academy (Hangzhou), I was limited to the issue of interpretation. We were limited to the fact that Asia was represented and that Asia was not a definite geographical concept. How to define Asia? It was hard. Asia itself was a need for Europeans in the process of their self-construction, a tool. In 1848, Asia was east of Vienna, the Austrian dictator. So, Thailand’s Su Bi (苏比) said that Asia was non-Europe. Then Africa was eaten up all by you. In fact, the definition of Asia was a given. According to Arata Isozaki (a Japanese architect), Asia was wherever that Macedonia was not defeated and Alexander was not defeated because they could not settle there and they could not take control there. So, Asia became the second largest continent.

Li: This in fact refers to civilizations that exist outside a certain strong or weak civilization. Should that be called Asia?

Qiu: There is something like that implied. How do you then define cultural Asia in relation to the existence of Muslims? But of course when Turks ran to Berlin then Berlin also became Asia. At that time, I had this idea and this whole plan between Wu Meichun and I myself because both of us were Tibet fans. We wanted to do cultural Asia in Tibet. Buddhism is the core of Asia. That means Afghanistan and places like that where Buddhism used to be believed. Buddhism spread across Asia. All these are methods available for self-interpretation. On the other hand, the West’s definition of Asia is contradictory because Turkey is now going to join the EU. So, there is a constant contradiction. This Asia has always been expediency. This Asia is all for the purpose of establishing the concept of Europe, as it needs an “other”, which is why Asia was established.

That was the main basis for our narration, about the nature of the concept of Asia being given. Whether I am Chinese or you are Japanese or he is Korean, we are all under heaven. Back then, there was only the concept of tianxia (under heaven). So, the centre of tianxia is here with me. One is the nature of Asian being given and the other is the indefiniteness of Asia. And the third is the search for Asian narrativeon. We can narrate it as Confucianism or as Taoism. In the end, it was I who found it when making the video work so that it became my work, Asian Time. The typical feature of Asian life is one in double time. We live in the solar calendar and the lunar calendar. Indians live in a number of sets of time. Muslims also have their Islamic calendar and the Christian calendar. Thais live in the Buddhist calendar. This is a practical strategy we found then. This then became a curatorial experiment in which we went gathering works by Asian artists, their modern experience, as it became such a strategy. Today when I talk about this issue it is slightly different. That is the change of position I talked about just now because I now do not have to make a huge effort to oppose misreading and to oppose representation.

Li: Here I’d like to interrupt you by asking you: what did you mean by representation?

Qiu: It is zaixian. Or it means we use the spokesperson to describe and represent. It is actually daiyan (speaking for someone). Now, when I come out to say the essential nature of Chinese culture is this or that, I am speaking for Chinese culture. Then that American would say: What devil of a culture is Chinese culture in which everyone wants to represent something. The target is to do something accurate and real. However, in this daiyan, it’s all cover up, all prejudice, misreading if not prejudice. In the past, we made a huge effort to oppose prejudice. When we talk about Asia today, the situation is again different. There is more confidence. My attitude seems to be that our culture was not yet complete but our culture is not a stiff and dead culture. Not even American-Indian culture is stiff and dead yet. And there is no possibility for it to be spoken for. It’s like the cup that keeps changing. How can you draw it? It becomes a cup this minute and a teacup the next minute. How can you photograph it? Our culture keeps moving ahead and, at the same time, the camera also keeps changing, this minute wide angle and the next minute long focal length. So, if one wants to put down the task of daiyan, it won’t do if nothing is accurate. After all, we have stopped treating it too seriously because we ourselves keep changing and both parties never stop changing. The representer and the represented never stop changing. That is, placed in this visual angle, life does not stop. Once we talk about Asia we easily slip into culture and once we talk about culture it is assumed dead. So, the basic conclusion is that it is good to be Asia and one can be it repeatedly.

Li: And it’s not all done on this occasion but more issues need be discussed. I have a thought that one topic for the 3rd Nanjing Triennial should be ‘from Asia to Asia’. This practice is also associated with your investigation, to a certain degree. That is, when a Western artist experienced and researched a certain point in Asia, they eventually finished their representation in Asia, such as Drawing Restraint 9 by Matthew Barney, which is in fact a discussion of American and Japanese issues after the 2nd World War and which I think can be defined in our discussion by providing an example. This Reality Hacking No. 240, a work by another Swiss artist, Peter Regli, was an investigation into the building of Buddha’s images in Asia as all the Buddha images were constructed in Vietnam, all kinds of Buddha images. He included the shape of snowman in Switzerland. The whole show was really interesting, various Buddha images mixed with snowmen (160-300 pieces marble sculptures). When you saw that you could see a humor that was reflected in certain research (iconic research through photograph and objects contain meaning in such background of a broader culture sense). There was also an issue of ocean culture as it involved shipping things to or from Switzerland, and etc. What I found interesting is his ability to accommodate. The angle of his research has gradually divorced itself from the simplistic Western notion of Asia that we talked about.

Take your Asian time and the whole post sense and sensibilities projects, which, in my opinion, is related to me as someone who has experienced and developed with it. In your talk about the issue of Asia, you also want to find real native evidence. What is this native evidence then?

In the exhibition held in March in Italy, one archaeologist, Jack Weatherford, was mentioned. I have been in touch with him. When I read his Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, I suddenly discovered that it really opened a door to our thoughts on this worldview. So I directly got in touch with him, hoping that we could maintain an in-depth discussion. Maybe in the future I may do archaeology with him. That is also a possibility. I also would like to invite him to China.

There’s another issue that is time! Artists, cultural study scholars and an expert with real archaeological aims are particularly different. For someone like Jack who has spent a decade or two, he may spend his lifetime researching one person. He told me that he wanted to research a female (daughter) in the Ghengis Khan family, to find out about the genealogical relationship. I feel that this issue is beginning to change because of the length of time. The values issue has in fact been broken through.

D: In this respect artists can create a sort of speed/stop time sequence: they can do a research and react immediately to that in making an artistic answer to problems generated by the research. I find the example that you Li described about Peter Regli very appropriate: the possibility of oxymora and daring confrontations are the territory of the artists and not of the archeologist or historian. In this process of recreation of past into future (artwork) I find a very refreshing answer to cultural conformism and immobility.

Qiu: I agree Dadou. In this regard, artists have their own advantage. For example, anthropologists observe in more detail and they observe without getting involved. However, in fact, they also investigate by experiment and by creating incidents to gather their attitudes. By contrast, artists can use a large number of experiments and investigative methods. If you mainly rely on experiments and investigative methods, you inevitably say that we will throw the exhibition in Tibet; we want to discuss the Tibetan’s self-imaginings and imaginings about Tibet by outsiders. Then we directly go to the Lama temples to hold exhibitions and we directly go to the market to hold exhibitions but this is not something a normal archaeologist will do nor will he have any resources to do it. We have some unique resources. I once walked with foot shackles in Tibet. In that process, a number of old men thought I was a kuxing (bitter walker) and told me not to. By then I began telling them about how the English colonized Tibet. Most of them heard that for the first time or else you would hardly have found the opportunity to tell them the history of colonization.

Artists sometimes use their bodies to do it and sometimes use their brains to do it. When they use their bodies to do it a few strange things will grow, very strange opportunities. That is to say that the experiments and investigative methods by archaeologists are relatively normal. After all, it’s just about taking a box of coke to see how they would divide it up, to observe the relationship of rights in this, to observe this group of kids, how the kids who’ve snatched the coke divide it, and who is the son of the tribal leader. That’s as far as this so-called experiment anthropology can get. But of course it is already much better than much contemporary art works. It is already better  to deliver a box of coke and a heap of records. However, artists could do it in a more lihai way because you could do more than bring in just a box of coke. You could put in even more weird things, e.g., a guy walking in chains.

Li: Many archaeologists rarely have genuine body contact, as it would violate their professional ethics. The kind of experiments and investigative methods may not be widely used as such investigations become unbelievable.

Qiu: That’s right. It can’t be established. We are in fact creating memory. That’s the big difference. In fact, the Tibet thing I have not thoroughly finished. I am interested in the story of a Vajrayogini-Vajravarahi Temple. She is a living Buddha, reincarnated. There are all nuns inside the temple. When the British army fought their way there in 1904, they decided to sexually harass them. So they launched an attack on the temple on top of the mountain. Just as they were climbing up the hill, Vajrayogini-Vajravarahi made her spirit felt, an epiphany, according to this minjian (folk) legend in Tibet, hundreds of pigs rushed out of the temple and scattered the British army. Thus the British army gave up on their sexually harassing impulse. I found the legend really interesting. I would like to find tangka artists to do the paintings.

Li: This is quite similar to a story, Princess Mononoke, by Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese cartoonist, which tells of a pig god. It’s all about the relationship between nature and modern civilization.

Qiu: Tibetans think that it is an epiphany of Vajrayogini-Vajravarahi and that caused the British army to give up. The fucking idiots wanted to fuck the nuns but the nuns turned into pigs. The story must be “faked” but in Tibet it becomes legendary.

Li: Even when I went to Wuxi, the Wu Culture, last time, for a visit, I found this interesting. When I went to Taibo Temple, there was a divine passageway. Statutes flanking the passageway and the stone carvings on the main entrance were entirely of a different age. I asked the tour guide what these carved statutes were but the guide was confused by my questions. She said that she had never talked about this thing. I found that intriguing.

That is how people understand a certain rumor and the reality the result presents. I do not believe that there is no such a legend nor do I believe that it is true, either.

Qiu: It is a realm pervaded with imagination that penetrates the reality. I now recall the day before yesterday when we talked about Huang Yongping by accident. The problem with him is that he did not have a life. He is a reader and an observer. You can see that he has not been to Tibet. When he did Tibet, he was doing prayer wheels. He was in no way to get the story of a crowd of pigs rushing out of the temple. It was so “art work”. It was a crowd of pigs, an army of pigs! He himself said that he had never been to Tibet nor did he ever want to go. He is just a prayer wheel. All those works he did about Tibet. There is also an installation involving a silk thread taken out of the belly of a Maitreya Buddha setting in flight a group of bald vultures. What is the difference between that and the sky burial? It’s entirely symbolic imagining, things like the sky burial and prayer wheel, using his extraordinary intelligence to imagine what can be taken out of the Maitreya Buddha’s belly. The thing taken out resembles the intestines very much.

In fact, silk threads remind me of hada. Those silk threads are related to hada. I do not know if he did such thinking. His other work is a huge prayer wheel. A box should contain sutras but his was empty. On the window there was placed a variety of Buddha’s images, with their backs towards the audience. They would normally directly face the audience but if they turn their backs towards the audience it is The Story of Butchering the Dragon Standing against the Sky. It’s all about Tibet. All he used about Tibet was pictures, things like a prayer wheel, and the sky burial terrace. In fact, there are many very fine details and they are related to the modern life.

Li: I don’t know about that. After I finished seeing his solo show in UCCA, I felt that it was all about the conflicts between the East and the West.

D: I am actually interested in dividing two terms of discourse that I think we are getting confused about.

On one side the research based artistic process and realization, which is so connected to your practice Li and Qiu as we know. I am in favor of this attitude of in depth analyses and then the creation of the future as an artwork or documentation/artworks. This is only a possibility though. There is also the simple pretext i.e. the exotic fascination and the use of it as a medium. This is risky and sometimes (often actually) can create a mystification of the artwork. In this process, this mystification is misleading and creates “emptiness” and “lack of meaning”. It is what you Qiu Zhijie described as Cconceptual art at the beginning of this conversation.

My position on this matter is the power of abstraction that art implies and requests: this is where a concept becomes a real artwork no matter what. The second possibility which I call the exotic attitude is also at the base of many creations in China or Asia that creates a “symbolic” representation of Asia or China itself. We all are aware of this attitude by many artists: this is what make arts recognizable, appealing and connected to a given system of values (both at the economic and cultural levels).

How to keep an eye on this problem? I think that intellectual honesty is what is needed and that we need to recall every time. There is also, and unfortunately the three of us are in this position as well, the self-criticism and the multi-angle critical discussion that needs to be always be put in place…the question is, are we always able to do so? So, to answer your question Li, that exhibition was not only about Eeast and Wwest, but it was about representations of Eeast and Wwest. The problem is: was this body of work in the position of adding something to that relationship? Was the way the exhibition was technically displayed able to pass new messages on this relationship?

Li: I do think is a enlarge about the difference and misreading both culture through an imagination in artistic practice, but my question is why we need this kind of art to bridgeing both culture or world culture, because that will certainly misleading all possibilities into a clever, unexpected, fast, generalized common culturale scene, whichat hasve raised the discussion of the bad side of globalization…

Qiu: Some even denigrated the saint (Huang Yongping) on the premises that he was my teacher and he was my saint. Talking about the denigration of the saints, my feeling is that he only needed to do one single illustration, that will be enough, such as that of an elephant or a tiger, pounding on George the Fifth (the installation with tiger and elephant…).

Li: I think it’s enough to study that particular time, by finding a number of old pictures and words of that particular time.

Qiu: It’s just a political illustration. One illustration is enough. But of course the exquisiteness of his artwork can bring a smell to you, a shock to the body. This elephant or tiger specimen can bring you a smell. But I still have to ask this question: Is that right? Is it right to simply just turn a political illustration into a bodily sensation?

I highly regard the final representation of the Bat Plan. At first, I did not like it at all. Although I assisted in the video documentation, but I didn’t like it at all in the beginning. Such a speculation, such advantage-taking of the place. However, at last, when I saw a bat taking the wing of an airplane in its mouth, there appeared a jingjie, all of a sudden, like I said just now about how to do and what to do. This bat, with the wing of an airplane, suddenly got up. That’s the jingjie I talked about, the greatest thing, and that’s what attracts you. However, his big plane is in fact used to xiushen (cultivating the body). As someone has just said, after experiencing everything, there appears a bat taking in its bite the wing of an airplane. These are all bricks, piled up one after another, that pave the way for the final jump up there. The wing is an excellent example. Before that I found the bat plan outdated, quite awful that involved so much effort and so many people in the struggle. In the end, though, you find that it is quite possible for the big plane below to exist. So, this is a beautiful example, not just a political cartoon: a bat taking in its bite the wing of an airplane. Don’t you think? The dog producing something in its piss is a political cartoon. The eagle work is the worst, titled, The Next War is There, like a road sign pointed towards China and Afghanistan, with an eagle perched on it. That’s so cartoonish. The bat, the airplane wing. You can hardly imagine that something with so little promise like this plan eventually took off, ofn a sudden. In that instant, he became an artist again but he has done a large number of things that an artist should not have done at all.

D: That is exactly what I was saying: the problem of simplisticcity symbolic representations Western-Eastern. The question still remains: how to evaluate the honesty of the work and if at allany, the greatness of the work? Maybe this can be a good end to ask you both, and example of honest, great, symbolic representative works…

Li: Now, more and more people do huge works and then rapidly reproduce them. I find that quite odd. Like you described just now, it almost takes off.

Qiu: That’s the third level I talked about before. It’s a very good example of how it can turn into a jingjie. The work done previously is not something one could do by meditating in a studio. It does take a few years to walk the roads.

Li: This involves time. By now, five years have gone into the bat plan. It does take that long for it really to come out.

Qiu: In fact, these five years is the nine cups of liquor we have just had before and it is the last mouthful that gets us drunk.

Translation finished at 11:13 pm, Thursday November 27th, 2008 in Kingsbury, Australia
Revision completed at 10:50 pm, Sunday January 4th, 2009 in Kingsbury, Australia