The Art of Water in China: Dong Zhengyi's Communal Fish Pond (1972) and He Yunchang's Dialogue with Water (1999)
10th February, 2020
The Chinese Cultural Revolution began in May 1966 with the May 16 Notification which was a statement from Beijing warning the public to ‘clear away the evil habits of the old society’ (cited in Phillips 2016) and drive them out with ‘the telescope and microscope of Mao Zedong Thought’ (cited in Osnos 2016). This chilling statement marked a decade of mass purges, persecutions and brutality until the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976. About two hundred million people in the countryside suffered from chronic malnutrition; up to twenty million people had been sent to the countryside; and up to one and a half million had been executed or driven to suicide (Osnos 2016).
Yet, what is astonishing about the Cultural Revolution is that visually it looks nothing like the atrocities just mentioned. For those that were not there (and for those that were), it is challenging to paint an accurate picture of this decade due to the mechanics of the Chinese Communist propaganda and censorship machines. These machines remain indispensable in spreading ideology and suppressing any alternative thoughts. They are so thorough that the narratives around the Cultural Revolution established remain to this day mostly impenetrable. People living in 1960s and 1970s in China lived in a world ‘ornamented with inspiring visual and auditory images from cartoons, paintings and posters to music, movies and local propaganda dramas’ (Andrews 2010, p31). Mao Zedong Thought circulated at all levels of society to ‘educate the masses to understand and interpret the idea as it has been expressed’ (Sun 2017, p108). Communist Chinese propaganda would be so detailed and so repetitive that people could often recite audio-visual campaigns from memory (Andrews 2010, p31).
While it feels impossible to fully grasp what it was like to live through the Cultural Revolution, I would argue that we can turn to an emergent cohort of artists who worked during the 1980s and 1990s who challenged the status quo and began unveiling and dissecting memories and histories of Communist China through the production and exhibition of highly conceptual and mostly performance based art. Artist He Yunchang was a key figure in the development of this new and very challenging art movement in China. Through a contrast with a work from the Cultural Revolution era, by Dong Zhengyi, , this essay explores how He Yunchang’s preferred medium; the artist’s use of specific materials, symbols and sites; and themes present within the artist’s oeuvre are inherently political as a direct result of living in Communist China.
Dong Zhengyi, Communal Fish Pond, 1972.
COMMUNAL FISH POND
Dong Zhengyi’s Communal Fish Pond (1972), alternatively named A Commune Fish Pond (1972), is one of the most recognised examples of socialist-realist art from the Cultural Revolution era. The exaggerated colour palette of glowing salmon against calming vibrant hues of blues and greens make the fish, the landscape and the people look healthy and robust. The disproportionately large limbs of the fishermen emphasise their physicality and strength. The fisherman in the foreground is gesturing onward to someone behind him or her, perhaps the viewer. This gesture, combined with an encouraging over the shoulder gaze from his comrade and the few small fish that spill out of the frame toward the viewer engage and encourage us to participate in the scene. The facial expression of his peer is one of joy or happiness rather than of one occupied in physical labour. And the fish, are they smiling, too? The subject matter feels unbelievable - how is that huge haul even possible in the net of only three fishermen? Not only that, it doesn’t look like the fishermen are met with a struggle or resistance, if anything the hyperbolic sense of movement in the gestures of the workers and the dancing of the fish seem to flow harmoniously with a strong diagonal line anchoring the two parties in unison. Lacking all the compositional features traditionally used to denote time or space, this happy image transcends a specific point in history, existing wherever and whenever in the imagination of the viewer.
Well, not entirely so. Communal Fish Pond is also distinctly mid-Century Chinese in two main ways. Firstly, the fish. Fish, particularly the koi and its ancestral carp (both present in Dong’s painting) have a long and strong presence in Chinese mythology and have become a stand-in for a Chinese myth. Painting the abundance was not necessarily new, as the popular folk art tradition of nianhua (New Year’s prints) often featured images and symbols of abundance, expressed as hopes for the upcoming year (Williams 2014, p286). What the image-makers did, though, during the Cultural Revolution was exaggerate those techniques and employ them for political gain.
This is the method of transfer, where emotional qualities are projected on to known symbols, objects or people as an ideological device of persuasion. Relating to positive feelings and emotions, such as pleasure, pride, or belonging rather than working on the propagandee’s cognitions , ‘will save people from the chaos of confusing and vague information’ (Žižek in Sun 2017, p110). When a viewer associates an image with an emotion without thinking critically, the viewer will buy in to the ideology of the producer of the image, especially when the image is repeated and widely disseminated. And Dong Zhengyi’s Communal Fish Pond was certainly highly circulated. Like other popular paintings, it was produced as a poster for mass distribution and in 1973 alone it had two print runs totalling more than three million copies (Galikowski 2019, p86).
In addition, Huxian, where Dong painted, was a ‘model art commune’ which received major governmental support and international media attention (Galikowski 2019, p86). In 1973 a major exhibition of Huxian peasant paintings in Beijing drew over two million visitors before it toured nationally to eight cities. Artworks were reproduced in posters and postage stamps, and in newspapers and magazines the peasant painters were described officially as proof of a cultural transformation in China (Williams 2014, p290). Huxian gained international attention too. More than 13, 000 foreigners visited Huxian between 1972 and 1983. A 1976 exhibition of Huxian peasant paintings was a celebrated event in England for the paintings’ positive portrayal of China (ibid.). The artist, artwork and narrative is legitimised by the media and discourse canonising it.
In returning to the Chinese-ness of Communal Fish Pond we look to the three figures working the water: : they are not quite caricatures, but they also lack individuality in their matching Communist garb, and we’d not be wrong to quickly label them comrades. The impacts of a strategic and strong visual campaign on the individual is very powerful.
Billboards, posters, branded textiles, hypnotic jingles, flyers, inserts in magazine and books, transfer through celebrity endorsements are messages that talk to you, you cannot be in conversation with it, because it is ubiquitous and loud and omnipresent. When messages are repeated through similar propaganda techniques and reinforced through the censoring of any alternative messages, the subjecthood-ness becomes cemented. Propaganda goes that one step further, totally destabilising the individual. In conversation with Dorothy Wickenden on the current issues for the protesters in Hong Kong, New Yorker staff writer Jiayang Fan asserts that personal identity becomes so intertwined with the political collective it becomes difficult to seperate the two.
Then almost all of a sudden in 1976, one Party-sanctioned narrative ends and is replaced with Deng Xiaoping’s policies of Reform and Opening. Those who had supported and enforced Mao's policies were quickly demonised, by either being put on public trial or sent to ideology camps. Yunnan, contemporary artist He Yunchang home, was ‘among the very earliest of the provinces to have its leadership purged in the wake of the arrest of the Gang [of Four] third only to Shanghai and Ningxia’ (Solinger 1982, p631). Having life being so drastically shaped by the whims of politics is unnerving.Not knowing what the next day will be is destabilising.
What amplifies this instability, what adds fuel to the gaslighting, is the tactful silence and censorship on the part of the Party. For example, it remains common for natural accidents or disasters to not be reported on or publicised, or downplayed, unless foreigners were/are involved (Kristof 1988, p6). Such was the case with an earthquake which hit Southern Yunnan in 1970 that was estimated to be 7.7 on the Richter scale. An estimated 10,000 people died, but was only reported on in 1988, to an international press delegation outside of mainland China (ibid.). This blatant distortion of facts, amongst the pandering to emotional senses over rationality, feels vaguely familiar from a Post-Truth 2019 perspective. A few Chinese artists references the missing people tragedies in their practice, the commemoration of 80,000 missing peoples in Ai Wei Wei’s Remembering (2009-10) springs to mind. But He Yunchang captures this futile randomness of existence in most, if not all of his works, in a more nuanced way that not only captures the feeling of a specific historical era, but remains relevant today.
Self-taught contemporary Chinese artist He Yunchang was born in China’s Southernmost province Yunnan in 1967, a year after Chairman Mao started rolling out the policies of the Cultural Revolution. Art institutes and places of higher education had been reinstated as part of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening’ policies. The Socialist Realism of the Huxian peasant painting days had been shelved and replaced with formal training in oil painting. He was accepted into the Central Yunnan Art Institute for Oil Painting in Kunming, was formally trained under Mao Xuhui, leader of the mid-1980s Southwest Art Group, and graduated in the medium of oil painting in 1991.
Like many of his peers, He Yunchang became a performance artist. I think that there are pragmatic reasons for this as well as more poignant ones. The Chinese art scene in the 1980sand 1990s was small, mostly limited to the city in which you practiced, mostly underground, and still had limited access to alternative ways of thinking, making and exhibiting. As a result, it would make sense for small collectives to pursue similar genres to build momentum, establish a movement, remain relevant within and between circles. But I also think, whether intended or not, performance art, particularly this breed of self mutilating, self punishing endurance pieces, is a fantastic F*** you. It is such an expressive way to detach from the indoctrination of art school and to re-learn the body and the mind. It forced the artists to leverage materials and alternative exhibition spaces to successfully pursue art making.
He Yunchang, Dialogue with Water, performance documentation, 1999.
DIALOGUE WITH WATER (1999)
One of He Yunchang’s most renowned artworks is Dialogue with Water (1999). On February 14, 1999, the artist’s assistants tied the artist with metal chains to an industrial crane over the Liang River in Yunnan. Prior to his suspension, the artist had a butcher cut an incision in both his arms, and then using that same knife, “cut” the river for 30 minutes, his blood dripping down the blade in to the river. ‘The river flows at 150 meters per minute. The performance lasts thirty minutes. The river is left with a 4,500-meter-long and thirty- centimeter deep wound, noted He in his project description (cited in Meiling 2006). The action was documented via photography and has been exhibited mostly outside the country.
Seeing an image of Dialogue with Water side-by-side with an image of Communal Fish Pond is absolutely mesmerising. Together, the two could operate as a before and after of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Yet the similarities that the two artworks share are contrasted by the differences between them. The remarkable similarity in colour palettes within the two similar river-scapes is an interesting starting point. Whereas the painterly palette in Dong’s Communal Fish Pond is saturated to allude to an ideal future, the dark tones in He’s Dialogue with Water creates a sad and sombre atmosphere. The rusted industrial crane evokes the fatigue and destruction of long laborious days. The shadows beneath the sagging autumnal trees; the snow-covered riverside with foliage in their winter years; the gloomy grey sky remind us of the endgame of a life-cycle. There is a spot of warmth touching the cultivated hills in the distance, but the artist and viewer are separated from it by a dense row of trees. In this study of contrasts, the sombre landscape with the absence of abundance vis-a-vie the lack of fish is a haunting reminder of the consequences aggressive industrialisation under an exploitative ideology has on land and culture.
The happy Cultural Revolution era imagery transcended a specific point in history so to exist in the imaginations of the viewer. He’s artworks are often imbued with a site specificity that feels layered and complex. For Dialogue with Water, the artist returned to the river near his hometown, the Liang River, to execute the performance. He grew up in Western Yunnan Province, one of the most turbulent areas in the country. This Burmese mountainous border region was a contested space as it was where the highest concentration of minority groups and vestigial pockets of the resistance group the Kuomintang (KMT) found refuge (Solinger 1982, p632). Furthermore, by the late 1980s this Western region - He Yunchang’s homelands - became one of the areas hardest hit by HIV in China as a result of increased drug trade from the Golden Triangle that crosses Burma, Thailand and Laos to the south (Xu et al. 2010, p391). Using this politicised landscape as the backdrop for the performance dredges up and exposes a lot of different memories and histories.
He metaphorically returns to his hometown again, in the futile exercises with rocks in The Rock Tours Around Great Britain (2006-07); and then again in Dream Journey — From Fukuoka Asian Art Museum to Mount Fuji (2000). In the former performance, the artist walks around the circumference of Great Britain with a rock, only to return it to its original place. In the latter the artist, buried in 999 stones, traveled mentally from the museum to the mountain, inscribing the routes of an imaginary three-year journey on each of the stones. Both the British and the Japanese had had a colonising presence in West Yunnan in the early part of the twentieth century. So much so, a British Consulate was in the process of being built until Japan expelled them and temporarily occupied the area in 1942.
The stark images of He hanging above a river as he bleeds into it from his self-imposed mutilated arms, or walking through a pastoral British landscape in tattered clothes, hunching as he carries a rock over his shoulder, echo with images of someone driven to suicide or drug abuse or entrenched in hard labour. As a viewer, you look at a man vulnerable in his nudity, alone in nature, obviously feeling a certain level of pain, and you want to do something about it, but you can’t (it is a photograph, after-all) and the confronting conflict that that tension causes makes you feel complicit in his pain, and by extension complicit in the pain of the other personal histories alluded to in his artworks.
Bibliography
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