Mist, The Wall, and Empire: at the Threshold of Zhang Xiaotao’s Art

14th November, 2024

Photo by Kye Fisher

In Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, there is a tunnel flaunting a burgeoning stratum of graffiti art and hinting at a passageway to an enigmatic, inner domain. We came to a halt before this aperture in the bowels of China’s ‘World Class Art Destination.’ Every turn had been uncharted territory, and a moment’s deliberation coursed through our group, a current of hesitation, as we pondered whether to take up the gaping lure and witness what lay in the chamber of these foreign shadows. Air seeping from the tunnel was thick with the acrid bite of fresh spray paint, and beneath the cloak of night we boldly ventured across the threshold.

We were given courage by our guide and translator, the artist Tami Xiang, who led us to this much anticipated encounter. As we emerge into a reverberating underground corridor with mere threads of light seeping in, our once boisterous group quiets, subdued by the suspense of our imminent arrival at our first meeting. A lone figure awaits us in silhouette, while an ominous door stands ajar, beckoning us on into unknown waters.

Zhang Xiaotao ushers us through the heavy, steel door of his hole-in-the-wall studio. He is clad in a militaresque utility shirt of khaki drill cotton, festooned with insignia appliqué. The British and US flags are among the first to catch my attention, along with a blue and gold eagle. Another glimpse and I spot a few gag badges nestled among the collage. An official looking red and blue embroidered patch holds the titular position above Mr Zhang’s left breast pocket. It reads, “IN LOVE WITH A BEER BOTTLE AND A MIRROR”. It’s from punk’s nihilist icon, Sid Vicious — the symbolic bass player and kamikaze riot maker of the Sex Pistols. I recollect one of his calls to action: “undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don’t let them take you alive.”

The room is small and our group quickly fills the space. I have a moment to contemplate a series of controlled watercolor studies pinned to a cork board before my attention is drawn toward an ominous oil painting. The daunting canvas dwarfs us all. It is as if the wall had opened up to reveal an expanse of unfathomable urban vastness. The painting is of a disaster aftermath that is nothing short of harrowing. As Mr Zhang explains, bodies are being burned in the street when 90 thousand people were killed and 375 thousand people injured as a consequence of the nightmarish, magnitude eight earthquake that tore apart the Sichuan Province in 2008. Buddhist monks gather and pray. The sheer volume of people and concrete overwhelms.

Photo by Jemma Yovacic

I’ve been grappling with bouts of vertigo as I struggle to focus my gaze on the mono- lithic scale of concrete facades here in China. Accustomed to the boundless sky and infinitesimal flatness of Australian desert landscapes, I’m out of my functional range of architectural depth perception. This canvas is no exception. The engorged realism of the scene is visceral, invoking a physical anxiety that knots in my stomach. Mr Zhang discusses his disapproval of the way that the government and populace dealt with the natural disaster. He also informs us of his premonition of the earthquake. He was at the time working on his feature animation, Mist. “Artists are like wizards,” he says, “They predict the future,” and elucidates his philosophy of artistry as alchemy: demanding constant reformulations in dynamic exchange with the evolution of technology and the times. ‘Ambitious’ is the word that he uses over and over again to describe Mist.

Mist was first screened as part of the 2013 Venice Biennale, making a name for Mr Zhang on the world’s stage. It’s a monumental work born of the economic boom of 2008, when hope and ambition surged through the Chinese contemporary art world. It took two years and 3 and a half million RMB, using fifty animators. That fervour now seems a distant memory to Mr Zhang and Mist is a relic of that era's boundless optimism. He contextualises the work for us by reflecting on the scars from the nation’s Cultural Revolution, its dramatic economic shifts, and the melancholic wounds inflicted by globalisation and industrialisation. The work, a massive feat of animation, is set to an original symphonic score, and probes the dark underbelly of economic progress. Namely, the lives sacrificed at the altar of capital growth. He cites Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Antonio Negri’s Empire as primary sources of inspiration.

We are treated to a private screening of Mist. In a vivid plunge into an abyss, the animation departs with an underwater vignette of lush blues and turquoise. It feels like an audiovisual immersion into one of Mr Zhang’s enormous oil canvases. Volcanic eruptions cast thick black clouds into an iridescent sea, where bubbles rise and dance over dark billows. This primordial setting feels like a fusion of the of the openings to 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Land Before Time. The real order is on the cusp of establishing a symbolic order. The viewer descends into a cellular cosmos, where wormlike fluorescent structures undulate in a hypnotic ballet. Emerging in mist, a dark cloud unfurls, revealing a fluxing, black-and-white biosphere.

Iguanas animate in frenetic bursts of energy as red ants rupture the mono- chrome earth and pour forth. In a dramatic spectacle an iguana violently charges another off of a cliff, to perish in a stampede of red ants beneath. A carnal, childhood hurt carried since exposure to The Lion King is prodded. Trees begin to collapse and with a bird’s-eye view of upheaval brewing, set against an upbeat, trade soundtrack, we begin to watch the world order trans- form.

The film drifts into a surreal matrix of ant houses of mirrors, marching lines and percussive bells, where mandalas and geometric grids unfold in dreamlike plasticity. This visual symphony transitions to the rise of an urban sprawl, depicted in a stop-motion panorama tracing the saga of globalization and industrial decay of nature. Ants plummet from towering structures, their blood metamorphosing into new substances that saturate and bath the lens in various iterations. Darkness descends as we enter a post-industrial nightmare. Black ants march toward a grim factory, where iguanas toss their lifeless bodies onto a conveyor belt in a shadowed assembly line. Light filters in through cracks in the architecture, revealing a grim scene where crumbled bodily features are dragged toward an inferno, fueling the monstrous machinery of the metropolis. Human bones appear in carts and these too fuel the urn while we observe that translucent crystals and glowing amber bricks are the products emerging from the fabrication.

From this dystopian wasteland, the film spirals into a vibrant explosion of color and chaos. Cellular eruptions of psychedelic mandalas become a heart that beats red arterial tendrils. Every building is wrapped as they weave through the city, pulsating, until they burst turning the world into a seething, blood-soaked landscape. Skeletons gyrate and pump each other in a macabre intercourse algorithm. Army tanks descend; metal falls from the sky destroying lives; and the molten contents of the industry cauldron tears across the land. The chaotic spectacle reaches a fever pitch as skeletons, yielding sickles and wreathed in mechanized madness, engage in a frenzied battle against the ants and lizards. The sky darkens, and red flags flutter in a ghastly breeze amidst the blackened clouds and smoke. Birds descend en-masse on the scene in Hitchockian style. We see water in macroscopic vision collide with the shiny skull of an ant before rain and intensity tears the world apart.

The film transitions from apocalypse to rebirth. Rain drenches the greens of moss, and the water has run to a deep, bloody red, while a rainbow adorns the war-torn sky. A serene Buddha appears, floating in the heavens, prompting the commence of chanting and emblematic Buddha tablets to drift like wafers to- ward the lens, amid white fluffy clouds and a peaceful, teal sky. Sunlight bathes a rock crowned with a rainbow banner of Buddha, signaling a new dawn, as weary ants and iguanas congregate and land their feet atop the banner.

The final scenes reveal the rise of a phoenix city, born from the ashes of its predecessor. Iconic landmarks—the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum—appear amidst the ruins, yet the city pulsates with the chaotic energy of its past. Celebratory parades, red flags, and precision choreography contrast with the earlier sequences of destruction, as a new totalitarian perfection. The city ascends to new heights. Self-replicating buildings, grow like glass dominoes upwardly falling, until a tower of biblical ambition penetrates the sky. It reaches for a divine light before being obliterated in an onslaught of glass shard smithereens and plummeting skeletons. In its closing act, the film delivers a final operatic lament. The sky cascades into a dramatic collapse of light and shadow, leaving us to ponder the seemingly eternal cycle of destruction and renewal that we have just witnessed.

Slavoj Žižek argues in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) that postmodern capitalism’s handling of reality is deeply influenced by its own symbolic systems, which create and perpetuate a virtual reality that can become overwhelmed with spectral illusions, especially when faced with real-world crises (for example, 9/11). This state is marked by constant neurosis and a need for new ways to deal with the never-ending influx of ‘ghosts’. As capitalism struggles to manage this overflow, it becomes like a war machine in a perpetual state of emergency, with new strategies emerging to cope with the haunting presence of spectral excess. Consumerism is seen as a defense. Yet the economy, in this view, keeps producing more ‘spooks’ as a byproduct of its own insatiable drive.

The critique here, which I see leap out of Mist, is that modern global capitalism (which Hardt and Negri call Empire) serves as a disguise for postmodern communism, providing a façade of revolutionary vigor while perpetuating the symbolic exchange of past and present economic relations (Žižek, 2002). Derrida’s analysis of Marx’s exchange-value reveals that Empire operates more like an automaton, mechanically engaging with the ghosts of its historical context rather than genuinely critiquing or transforming them. While traditional imperialism involved a central power, like a nation-state, Empire operates as a decentralized network without a single central authority. It is a global system that is everywhere and nowhere at once (Hardt & Negri, 2000). Influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri describe Empire as a "rhizomatic" network. Hardt and Negri argue that Empire began with the global spread of American culture and capital- ism. This spread leads to a paradox where power seems both ubiquitous and invisible (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

Reading Mist against The Wall against Empire, it’s impossible to miss the death wish against paternal authority that emerges. I revisit the climax of The Wall. The song Nobody Home sets the score of young Pink venturing into the trenches and corridors that arise before him, discovering corpses of war, abandoned hospital beds and his mad adult self, whom he flees from in terror. All out totalitarian horror ensues once Pink is rendered in a state of disillusioned impotence and “cannot make it to the show”. Drugged by his entourage he is replaced by his fascist body double and images of totalitarian atrocities intersperse with Pink’s fantasies of maternal merging, while hammers goose step the ruins of the city. Just as Nazi control shifted into a different kind of control in post-war America, moving from strict authoritarianism to a more consumer-driven, individualistic society, this shift represents a change from a society dominated by a strong leader (the ‘father’) to one influenced by group identity and consumerism (the ‘mother’) (Rickels, 2002).

As an animated rag doll, Pink puts himself on trial, while his mother tries to take him home; to keep him from trouble. I recall Anne Beverley, mother of Sid Vicious, expressing her acceptance of Sid’s ultimate assault conviction and order of rehabilitation. Following his trial, she told reporters "now the public will know he is a good boy” (Barcach, 1973). Meanwhile, the conviction set in motion a series of consequences which led to his death by overdose. Rickels’ (2002) analysis shows how attempts to escape from past authoritarian controls can lead to new forms of totalitarianism, as exemplified in Hardt and Negri’s vision of global communism. This new vision may still harbor the same underlying issues of control and unresolved desire for a return to a simpler, more primal state.

Photo by Jemma Yovacic

Mr Zhang follows with a screening of Sakya. An animation that he created in 2011, which he describes very briefly as based in “oriental religion” and “responding to reality and the future,” it is a narrative about a Tibetan archeologist discovering the Sakya Monastery in Sa'gya Town, part of the autonomous Tibetan region of China. The shadows of two hands writhe gracefully against a tapestry of clouds or weary marble or wall, where peeling paint dances on a ruin’s skin as waves of geometry pass overhead. A pretty and exquisite scene unfurls. The cosmos ignites in a burst of blood red and then vibrant hues, as though luscious coloured fragments erupt like splinters of a cosmic heartbeat. The universe unfolds—a kaleidoscope of pigment and dust—transcending into ever shifting physical forms. Many repetitions construct an ever-expanding matrix of axons and synapses. A beating heart begins a translucent web of veinous tendrils that in- tersect unto infinity until they evolve into a rhizome network of indefinite expan- sion. A labyrinthine map of old documents and cultural echoes reveals a space at once architectural and psychedelic.

Then reality warps into video game graphical dimensions. I found the iterations of the protagonist discovering and experiencing the temple time-space to be, quite astonishingly, akin to a DMT reverie, in which many representational worlds overlay in metaphysical complexity. Images further themselves toward the intricacies of a circuit board, presenting versions and inversions of human experience, entwined by rhythmic emanations. Next, Paintings of Buddha disintegrate into amber dust, that falls into new formations. Red dust erupts across a black void, a visual symphony ensues with the latent resounding of church bells through the layers of frames that shift and morph. Buddha makes many more appearances in different guise and there is a long Matrix sequence of fluorescent green code spiraling in a void. Constellations, nervous and cellular, mount until a brain is created and then collapses into a line on the impression of a floor. The final vignette is of holographic people walking in spherical patterns over many stacked religious symbols and I’m left seeing miniature Buddhists inhabiting a temple in the tiny universe situated at the nucleus of an atom.

As I incorporate these inundating images, I am struck by how to consolidate them. I can think only of Jorge Luis Borges in the moment, as I recognize flashes of feelings experienced reading The Circular Ruins. Feeling, perhaps, of the uncanny. I resolve to ask Mr Zhang if he has read Borges, once the structured interview is over and the for- mality of the meeting has softened, as it is a gross understatement to say that I am still finding my feet as an investigator of Chinese contemporary art. Instead, I ask about how painting informed his handling of images and ‘vastness’, in sequential and temporal senses, as director of Mist and Sakya. He begins making gestures. I hear him reference Tai Chi and next thing he is heightened into a state of embodying his thoughts as they roll forth. His spontaneity of expression is resplendent. I admire his graceful dance and am itching to know what he’s saying. I attempt to fix tableaus of his gestures in my visuospatial sketchpad, in order to pair them with the translation that is to follow. But the monologue draws on as he enjoys the rhythms of his words and body, and when the impulse ends, I feel that he has communicated so much of his feeling for his work directly. The translation of the ideas is subsequently, for me, like reading subtitles during a Tarkovsky film, they add little that isn’t being absorbed by other faculties. He paints and creates animation with the rhythms and philosophies of Tai Chi at heart, he explains. His paintings are for contemplating “quietly” — meditatively. The animations bring on the state that meditation seeks out: they are to his paintings what Kung Fu is to Tai Chi, he explains.

I ponder if my trouble with fathoming Sakya lies, as Celia Rabinovitch puts it, “with our cultural proclivity to treat art as if it were only a commodity or historical record, as any- thing other than an embodied experience, including the emotional, aesthetic or spiritual impulse to create.” (Rabinovitch, 2019: 7) I contemplate the Surrealist project and how it sought to uncover a heightened aesthetic experience within myriad forms, revealing their unexpected radiance and significance. This flash of insight, akin to the Buddhist concept of ‘suñyãta’ or emptiness achieved through meditation, is a fleeting glimpse of profound awareness (Rabinovitch, 2019).

While Buddhists pursue this clarity through discipline and preparation, Surrealists sought it through the excitation of the imagination by intense exposure. The “edge of danger” as Rabinovitch (2019) describes it, is sustained by an oscillation between the “boundaryless field of the psychological oceanic state and the fixed point of creativity, in the imagination, that turns matter into metaphor” (Rabinovitch, 2019: 51). Mircea Eliade defined the nature of this threshold, which has the potential to infiltrate into a reality frozen by convention:

The threshold that separates two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds, and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where pas- sage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible. (Eliade, 1959: 12)

There is a compelling hybrid form of this threshold that emerges in Mr. Zhang's work as a reply to the inescapable churning out of spectral excess that becomes more overwhelming with each revolution of growth and collapse in China. As Mr Zhang put it, likening the state of industrialisation in China to a ferris wheel, “you have no choice but to sit in your place, and vomit if you like.”

Finally, the space is bathed in a cheerful cacophony of conversation and I get to put Borges to Mr Zhang. It turns out that despite not having read much of Borges, he is a big fan of Gabriel García Márquez. He was deeply inspired by 100 Years of Solitude, and affirms that ‘Magical Realism’ is a term we should keep in mind when assimilating contemporary Chinese art and it’s sociopolitical impetus. I'm relieved, as I feel for the first time that I’ve got some purchase on the intimidating otherness of the world this art belongs to. Magical Realism is my preferred literary genre. Admittedly, I no doubt process the unassimilated world that I am confronted with through lenses garnered form my exposure to it, anyway. Yet, thanks to Mr Zhang, I feel a renewed permission to draw links between my Latin American background, and the foreground of our foray into Chinese contemporary art.

In 1982, García Márquez's year of glory, China was beginning its era of reform and opening to the world. Despite the historical trauma resulting from the Cultural Revolution, it was striving to gain entry into the great celebration of modernisation. At the time, Latin American writers had picked up from the European avant-garde “the idea that it was possible to access another type of reality (the fantastic and marvelous) through the unconscious, dreams, hallucinations,” and “ they discovered this form of perception of reality, in turn, in certain literary expressions of pre-Columbian aboriginal cultures present in fantastic stories of oral transmission, popular tales, myths or legends” (Calderón, 1996: 905). Fan Ye (2014) proposed that Chinese scholars learned from Magical realism that, faced with the impact of foreign cultures, each person must find their own identity so as not to get lost and fall into an eternal state of backwardness.

Unsurprisingly, Chinese obsession with Latin American literature of the 1980s coincided with the literary movement of Xungen, “In search of the roots” (Ye, 2014). It echoes with Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s struggle against Macondo’s festival of oblivion in Márquez:

The most fearsome thing about the disease of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, since the body did not feel any fatigue, but its inexorable evolution towards a more critical manifestation: forgetfulness. It meant that when the patient became accustomed to his waking state, the memories of childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even consciousness. of one's own being, until sinking into a kind of idiocy without a past.

With an inked swab he marked each thing with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, saucepan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pork, chicken, cassava, malanga, banana…

It would be his first attempt and first failure against oblivion, the loss of memory and dignity, against the Chaos that imposes, and the Destiny that repeats. (García Márquez, 2004: 136-140)

Photo by Jemma Yovacic

Toward the end of our encounter, Mr Zhang looks around at the group of conscientious and receptive scholars and tells us, “you have a face like you’ve never been bullied”. It’s one of the remarks that stays with me throughout my entire expedition in China. It is difficult to adjust — not only to the monolithic scale of concrete bodies in China, but to the massive ambition; suffering; and resistance incarnate in contemporary Chinese art. Mr Zhang’s hole in the wall, unveiled strong personal roots that have been unearthed to anchor an imagination teetering on the ‘edge of danger’, amid an overwhelming presence of spectral excess that is churned furiously out of ever intensifying iterations of industry.

References

Barcach, Ann Louise. "Another Break for Sid Vicious, Jan 1979".

Bardach Reports. Eliade, Mircea (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt, Bracer and World.

Estébanez Calderón, Demetrio (1996). Diccionario de términos literarios. Madrid: Alian- za.García Márquez, Gabriel (2004). Cien años de soledad. Madrid: Cátedra. Galvis, Silvia (2007). Los García Márquez. Medellín: Hombre Nuevo Editores.

Rabinovitch, Celia (2019). Surrealism and the Sacred : Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art. London ; Routledge.

Rickels, Laurence A. (2002). Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. 1st ed. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Rushdie, Salman (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. Lon- don: Granta Books.

Ye, Fan. “El olor de la guayaba y el sabor del sorgo rojo.” Co-herencia 12, no. 22 (2015): 27–39. https://doi.org/10.17230/co-herencia.

Žižek, Slavoj. (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real! : Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London ; Verso.