Orpheus in the Modern World: Han Bing and Chinese Contemporary Art

30th January, 2020

‘The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.’

Albert Camus

In Meinhard Rauchensteiner’s short film, Herbst the disembodied voice of the narrator attempts to teach Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Autumn”, to a stolid plush toy. The film takes a twist through the transformative capacity of contradiction when the assuredly inanimate toy animal unexpectedly responds. Going a step further, Rauchensteiner turns dry humour into absurdity by endowing the plush toy with its own subjectivity through a spoken linguistic system: a pattern of speech characterised by a robotic twang and a perversely insubordinate inclination. For its display of mechanical noncompliance, the unseen teacher decries the upholstered toy turned automaton as incompetent. Having grown increasingly irascible, in the end, the once impassive object become subject revolts: dissenting against the dictation of the narrator.

Han Bing, Walking the Cabbage on the Old City Walls, Old Town, Dali Old Town, 2006.

The ongoing performance by contemporary artist Han Bing, Walking the Cabbage, upends the narrative of Rauchenstiener's absurdist drama. Han Bing’s cabbage does not have a system of speech, yet it speaks to the audience through the schema of symbolic linguistics. An open signifier communicating a message of mute ambivalence, is the cabbage simply a toy, an antidote to the solitude of an itinerant artist? Is it a symbol of ancestral memory, or perhaps bucolic totem tied to an ineffable ritual? Regardless, the incongruous cabbage is idolised, reimagined, and fetishized – like E.T.A. Hoffman’s uncanny Olympia– creatively through absurdity.

Intentional or not, both Herbst and Walking the Cabbage play with the theme of the absurd: the quotidian object turned purposive subject. As such, we might position Han Bing and his cabbage within Albert Camus' framework of the absurd: as a spectre of the mythical Greek character Sisyphus, with boulder restaged as cabbage. To Camus, absurdism is not an inane condition, it is rather more a signifier of the revolt undertaken by the individual confronted by an implacable and irrational world. Herein lies an important distinction – one that differs from the punishing nihilism conventionally read into the Sisyphean allegory – which is that the absurd is purposeful, and therefore both meaningful and entirely rational.

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However, such an interpretation may leave us with the feeling of an itch unscratched. What is left to be said about the contextual factors of locality’s influence upon the production and reception of Han Bing’s art? A question that elucidates a broader question: how has the general function of contemporary art within the People's Republic of China been shaped by the paradigm of Chinese modernity? This paper seeks an answer to these questions by framing locality as an inextricable factor in the socio-political, and historical experience of modernity within the geography of 20th and 21st century China, the former and the latter are jointly considered as overlapping dynamics critical to the interpretation of contemporary Chinese art. Ultimately, I can only hope of sketching an outline of the wider picture within the PRC, and as such, the focus has been given to the formative events that have collated into the general narrative of modern Chinese history.

Incidentally, for many, the narrative begins in Han Bing’s hometown, the East Chinese province of Shandong. An established historical heavyweight, Shandong was once described by the prominent Chinese statesman, Wellington Koo as ‘The Holy Land for the Chinese’ (cited in Ellemen, 2015). It was the birthplace of both Confucius, and his lesser- known predecessor Mencius. Koo’s Shandong-Jerusalem equivalency was salient not only in a sacrosanct bent, but also in a strategically important sense: Shandong’s geographical position presented both major military, and economic advantages to the occupying state power. As such, during the era of New Imperialism, the territory of Shandong became embroiled in a high-stakes game of geopolitical gambling – the USA, the German colonial empire, and the Empire of Japan – wagered over territorial entitlements to the Shandong peninsula. And eventually, beneath the setting sun of World War I, Shandong would be ceded to the Japanese under the Treaty of Versailles. The student wing of China’s emerging national bourgeoise labelled this as an unfair decision. The dispute would quickly welter into the epochal events of the May Fourth Movement (MFM). The MFM became catalytic for the revolutionary events that would give lasting definition to the historical memory of the twentieth century experience of Chinese modernity (xiandaixing). Indeed, within the lens of Chinese political historiography, the MFM would be further memorialised as an intellectual revolution marking a passing stage in China’s democratic awakening, with some academics interpreting this a consequence of cultural exchange with the West and the Enlightenment’s legacy of rationalism (Chen 1970).

Paul Gladston describes the zeitgeist as a ‘cultural upsurge across China’, manifesting in the PRC as an attitude of both anti-feudalism, and anti-Confucianism, an event historically remembered for its resistance to conservatism, and dogma. In the end, the nationalist campaign to reclaim the sacrosanct Shandong would be successful – and to our earlier point, the protests were credited as a key factor in Koo’s refusal to sign the treaty. For the next generation of Chinese revolutionaries, the MFM demonstrated the possibilities of an organised patriotic front formed by a class unified China – in this case, the rural working class, the urban student masses, and the rising petty bourgeoise (Chen 1970). Shortly after its inception, the MFM would be absorbed into the mass movement for national liberation known as the New Culture Movement. For the inchoate Communist Party of China (CPC), the anti-traditional milieu of the early twentieth century would be leveraged for both rural as well as urban ideological and technological overhaul.

Importantly, if we locate Han Bing’s practice within an historical framework (as mentioned above), postmodern theories of phenomenology such as our earlier reading of Walking the Cabbage are de-emphasized in favour of what Gao Mingalu calls the ‘historical memory’ of the PRC – the May Fourth Movement; the ascension of the CPC; the Great Leap Forward; Mao’s subsequent Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping’s introduction of the Open Door Policy in the immediate years after Mao’s death (Gao 2016). Xiaoping’ Open Door Policy had a domino effect upon the CPC’s management of Chinese aesthetic culture. This was exampled in 1979 in the unofficial exhibition Stars (Xingxing). In an open rejection of political orthodoxy and the PRC’s aesthetic conventions, the Stars Art Group staged an unpermitted exhibition of experimental art by hanging hybridised stylings of recently prohibited artforms from the railings of the China Art Gallery.

Heralding in a liberalisation, artists within the PRC began to directly depart from the strictures of Socialist Realism, with artists, curators and gallerists openly incorporating the stylistic trends of outsider (Euro-American) art into their practices. This would reach a climax during the unrest of the Beijing Spring when Stars Art Group enacted their first formal exhibition in Beihai park. The event incurred the ire of the authorities, with a police crackdown to boot. In one sense, Stars resurrected the moribund corpus of Euro-American art through turning a by then institutionalised practice (Western modernism) into an effective medium for avant-garde political agitation. In the lens of art historiography, it is generally agreed that by melding Western aesthetic culture with contemporary Chinese attitudes, the artists behind Stars had effectively ushered in a new era of Chinese avant-garde art. The Stars Art Group demonstrated the fundamental differences between modern art's function as determined by geography, and spatial factors of cultural orthodoxy, illustrating that socio-political environments and the consequent geological transformations in which culture is produced determines the reception of artists as well as the function of contemporary art.

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Han Bing from New Culture Movement, 2006.

For a more recent example, we can take Han Bing’s New Culture Movement (2006) to demonstrate this effect. The series interrogates a symbolic order unique to post-Mao rural China. The artist writes that:

In the New Culture Movement series, laborers, families and even school children, stand in front of half-constructed homes, construction sites, and school yards, bricks hefted in hand like little red books…the perhaps illusory dream of becoming part of the propertied class in a “society of modest prosperity” that denies their claims of membership.

Without the stylised trappings of the overly present ego of the artiste, The New Culture Movement series comes across more as well researched documentary than overtly political artwork. In stark contrast to the exasperated artist turned social activist (who reflexively scolds) Han takes on the role of the quiet observer, the director who produces poetic effect from the raw materiality of a seemingly uncontrived environment. As such, the artwork obtains a heightened sense of reality – akin to Socialist Realism minus the spins. During the 1980s, the red brick might have been a national symbol for modernity’s progress, however, within the current socio-political context of China – viewed by many as disproportionally benefiting the PRC’s city-based urban class – Han ’s metaphor cannot be dismissed, nor its message misconstrued. The common building block unequivocally transformed into an emblem of national myth: a signifier of the China’s rural-urban class disparity. As such, we can take the New Culture Series to demonstrate a double function. On the one hand, evidencing the viability of contemporary art as an evocative platform for expressing the multitude of marginalised identities within the PRC, on the other, the metaphor of the red brick poses a challenge to orthodox perceptions of Chinese modernity, thus demonstrating how the medium of contemporary art can be a tool for deconstructing the official state narratives that become imbedded in national psyches.

In China, such a mentality does not exist in a vacuum, but is kept alive in the centralised power structure of the CPC, the result of Mao’s ideological endowment to the country. Operating like a neural pathway linked by many minds, the network is tethered to Mao’ Sinified interpretation of Marx’s dialectical materialism in his essay, “On Contradiction” (1965). In this essay, Mao regarded contradiction as a ‘fundamental law of thought’, a tension between opposites ‘which runs through the process of development of things from beginning to end’. Mao’s reading of Marxism would shift into a political philosophy that utilised the aesthetic of Socialist Realism to popularise the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, Mao officiated Socialist realism as the national art for it represented the iconoclastic, pro-proletariat and anti-bourgeoise attitudes fundamental to the Cultural Revolution. 

The PRC’s style of Socialist Realism championed objective realities over abstraction, viewing l’art pour l’art as the superficial illusion of unprincipled idealism. For Mao, the ‘crux of the matter’ was ‘fundamentally of the problems of working for the mass and how to work for the masses’. In effect, Socialist Realism was leveraged by the state to disseminate its idealised brand of patriotism en masse, thus making it more populist marketing strategy than emancipatory artform. Ironically, The New Culture Movement is both antithetical to abstraction, and true to the reality of the present urban-rural class disparity. However, under Han Bing’s socially engaged productions, the effects of China’s nationalist mythology find no reification. In this sense, the remnants of the Cultural Revolution are excavated, its vestigial skeleton revealed as a promotional strategy remembered foremostly for its false promises. However, rather than buried and forgotten, they are portrayed as diverse individuals belonging to an aspirational community. In The New Culture Movement, we witness the artist shifting a degree of agency back to the subject: to those who have been for the most part unconsulted, and thus pressured into taking urbanisation as fait accompli.

Han Bing from New Culture Movement, 2006.

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Publicly recognising the nexus between the myth of the modern dream and the compulsory social transformation of China’s working class does not come without its own risk of marginalisation. In twenty-first century China, politics and culture are cut from the same red-coloured cloth. It is thus, that by belonging to the contemporary Chinese avant-garde – to which Han Bing undoubtedly does – an individual actant becomes visibly more politicized by virtue of the PRC’s socio-political dynamics. Han works with the CPC’s sustained gaze, which negates the perceived gap between public and private space. Arguably then – contrary to Mingalu’s statements – there is no longer a way for the avant-garde to stage art in exogenous (unsanctioned) spaces: when there is no privacy, everything is public. Subsequently, there is no “real” or politically ‘active’ public counterpart to ‘art that merely represent[s] consciousness in materialised aesthetic space’– i.e. what Nicolas Bourriaud termed ‘private and symbolic space’ (venues such as galleries and other art institutions).

Within mainland China, contemporary artists are fully conscious of the fate imposed upon them. The fatalism of the situation is well summarised by the Beijing based artist, Zhu Fading in his statement that ‘Art appears rather powerless against realities’ (Cited in Tomkova) This fact, however, does not stifle the desire to reveal the conditions of the inescapable condition that contemporary artists in the PRC find themselves in. Here, it is timely to return our original metaphor of Sisyphus: of the revolt against futility undertaken by the individual facing who confronts on a daily basis the reality of an implacable, and seemingly unalterable situation. Within the purview of contemporary Chinese art, the Sisyphean figure is invoked with most effect and frequency through the affectations of performance art as seen in He Yuchang’s 10 Tonnes of Water; Zhu Fadong’s Person for Sale; Han Bing’s Mating Season, Lost Paradise and Walking the Cabbage. In varying scales, each of these works are coded with socio-political critique. In the end, these are individuals who triumph over the pressures incumbent upon contemporary artist living in the PRC. Through the performativity of such artists, we see the expression of an unstable world. We see the signs of communities and individuals who poeticize the clockwork of contemporary experience, who deconstruct its mythologising machine. We enter a bio-cultural network programmed by artistic genealogies and political codes, but the contemporary artist is there to disrupt the script before the ink is dry.

Works cited

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Elleman, B. (2015). Wilson and China: A Revisited History of the Shandong Question. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, p.42.

Freud, S. (1997). Writings on art and literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, p.204. Gao, M. (2016). Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art. Cambridge:

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Mao, Z. (1965). Talks at the Yenan Forum on literature and art. (Translation ... made ... from the Chinese text given in the "Selected works of Mao Tse-Tung," Vol. III.). Peking, p.15.

Rilke, R. and Young, D. (2011). Sonnets to Orpheus. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, p.37. Tomkova, D. (2018). Zhu Fadong: Why Art Is Powerless to Make Social Change. Yishu: Journal of

Contemporary Chinese Art, [online] 17(1), p.85. Available at: http://yishu-online.com/back-issues/view/?91&issue=current [Accessed 27 Jul. 2019].