{"id":13325,"date":"2013-03-14T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randian.art\/?p=13325"},"modified":"2023-09-24T09:44:37","modified_gmt":"2023-09-24T09:44:37","slug":"the-afterlife-of-images-yan-lei-and-zhou-tiehai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.randian.art\/zh-hant\/the-afterlife-of-images-yan-lei-and-zhou-tiehai\/","title":{"rendered":"The Afterlife of Images: Yan Lei and Zhou Tiehai"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reiterate, Erase<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the most misunderstood work at dOCUMENTA (13) was Yan Lei\u2019s \u201cLimited Art Project,\u201d the reaction founded on preconceptions and prejudices about Chinese art \u2013 particularly painting \u2013 lazily assuming it merely riffs on Western clich\u00e9s, that it is derivative and repetitive. And if there was pause to ask whether \u201cLimited Art Project\u201d (LAP) was playing on these same prejudices, it seemed only to reinforce the jaundiced view.* But while LAP involved objects we might call paintings, it was not about \u201cpainting.\u201d And to the extent it referenced clich\u00e9s about Chinese art, this was merely a provocative gambit. Ultimately, the LAP was an elegy to images and a tragedy about forgetting. That it was misunderstood was part of its art. A performance that had much to say was predicated on the expectation it would not be heard but ignored, for failing to listen, to reconsider, to reiterate is all part of the process of forgetting. So pay attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yan Lei first selected hundreds of images from the Internet that appealed to him. What unified the multitude was how images are digested. Here was a room heaving with pictures, a mad 19th-century Salon. The walls were jam-packed with them, more hung from the ceiling like so much laundry, and even more hung on racks visitors could roll out. In fact, there was a picture for every day of dOCUMENTA (13), but the impression left was of far more \u2013 an infinite Googlescope of ghosts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yan Lei likes to give the impression that the selection was made through casual internet browsing but in reality it is deliberate. The images were then reproduced on traditional stretched canvases according to his directions, whereby certain dimensional ratios and an etiolated register of hues were maintained. The subjects are frequently but not only people, especially portraits. The backgrounds are often plain, though some include the unifying radiating sunbeams typical of Yan\u2019s earlier works. When hung, the spacing between the images respected the layout of how the source images were displayed in the search engines where they were found (although direct reproduction would be impossible). Themes were supernumerary, including China, art and (Western) art history, celebrity, religion (Buddhism), finance, Ai Weiwei, Coca-Cola, color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yan Lei\u2019s \u201cLimited Art Project\u201d for dOCUMENTA (13), 2012 (installation view).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

dOCUMENTA was also a theme, and it is important to note that Yan Lei\u2019s first involvement with dOCUMENTA was subversive \u2013 sending fake dOCUMENTA invitations to many fellow artists in China (some still haven\u2019t forgiven him). LAP is thus also an index of Yan Lei\u2019s career \u2013 the images a sort of catalogue<\/em> raisonn\u00e9<\/em>, and a personal history of his involvement with dOCUMENTA (sadly, Chinese artists are often defined only by their careers outside China). Of course, the self-portrait is doomed to fail, for how can one ever truly present oneself as a unified, concentrated whole? The allure, tragedy and eventual bathos of self-portraits are that they always remain somehow both incomplete and manipulative, and so inevitably also traduce their subjects. So here is Yan Lei himself, in a brightly patterned shirt, with his messy mop of hair and stubbly beard, standing right in front of one of his earlier \u201ctarget\u201d paintings \u2014 ready for the knives to be thrown \u2013 and which recall the work of so many other master artists, including Jasper Johns, Ugo Rondinone and John Armleder, to name but a very few. One of the most commonly heard expressions of intention by Chinese artists is the desire to make something \u201ctrue.\u201d Yan Lei is far from the first to deride such desires but he does not dismiss their earnestness. He laughs at everything, including himself, but it is the laughter of Lu Xun\u2019s hobo anti-hero, Ah Q, on his way to being executed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it political? There are images of Mao, the door to No.10 Downing Street, the CCTV tower in Beijing under construction, Hillary Clinton at the moment of Bin Ladin\u2019s assassination and a portrait of former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Maybe. Is it sexual? A woman\u2019s varnished fingers load a pistol. A bowl of ice cream hangs beside a naked female torso, hands over pudenda. Maybe. But what of the tiger, the Queen of England, fireworks, cake and sushi? It does not really matter. These byways are interesting but not the point \u2013 all the works could be hung differently and the images interchangeable with infinite alternatives. And anyway, they no longer exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cave<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think what it is like to be in this room. It is a cave, Plato\u2019s cave, and a death factory, and a Pinakothek of a \u201cprolific artist,\u201d and a knock-up cathedral, and a warehouse for go(o)ds, and an \u201cacademic\u201d collection, and a calendar without numbers. It is also a place where dementia is enforced and the shadows on the walls extinguished. Each day of the exhibition, one of the pictures was removed and taken to a nearby Volkswagen automotive factory where it was brightly spray-painted. Volkswagen, the \u201cPeople\u2019s Car,\u201d was born out of democratic ideals but into a fascist world (benefiting from forced labor during the Second World War). After the war it became a colossus. And part of its success has been China, where its Santana taxis crowd metropolitan streets. Again, this is background, not irrelevant but tonal and contextual, because a primary theme of dOCUMENTA (13) was the reverberations and distortions between history and memory \u2013 a critical issue for Yan Lei, given the parallels and divergences between China and Germany in their respective histories, and approaches to these histories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is important is the process of erasure that eventually extinguished all the images \u2013 umpteen individual stories \u2013 interring them beneath cheery surfaces, giant DayGlo pixels. Self-censorship is insidious not only because of the refusal to look but the perceived inability to do otherwise (and anyway, a censored world can appear so much brighter!). Our tendency towards self-preservation is understandable but cynical, leading us to absolve ourselves of decision-making, of culpability. In the face of horror, we blind ourselves. But Yan Lei sees how we blind ourselves daily, with every failure to look; with every time we glance away or fail to remember, seeking solace from the opium of bright trinkets and comfortable aspirations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is another side to his machine. For each and every image still exists in the memory cards of cameras and mobile phones and on the vast search engine servers, true Baudrillard simulacra, indices of image algorithms. This is the afterlife of images, the suns\u2019 corona, nothing ever quite forgotten but also never fully understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just Desserts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zhou Tiehai\u2019s Desserts<\/em> is a sequence of hundreds of small-scale paintings of images selected by Zhou but painted by his assistants \u201crepresenting\u201d a variety of \u201cprofessions\u201d \u2013  diplomat, juge, ministre, prof, commissaire, sycophante, caroleuse, blancheresse, financier, bouffon, chiffonnier <\/em>and sabotajnik<\/em> (diplomat, judge, clerical or political minister, professor, policeman, sycophant, dancer\/dessert, washerwoman, financier\/cake, buffoon, ragman and bottom-smacker). A selection was displayed in early 2010 at MoCA Shanghai. Hundreds of small paintings snaked up MoCA\u2019s Guggenheim-esque ramp, a scrabble-tile mix of seemingly random and interchangeable images playing on political, social and cultural clich\u00e9s, literary, artistic and historical, sexual and seductive, na\u00efve and corrupt, with doses of luxury and royalty, Francophilia and necrophilia, celebrations and incinerations of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois taste. Presently the \u201cLe Juge\u201d sequence is displayed in the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia. Originally it was intended that the full cycle would be shown but due to a customs crackdown in China in 2012, it was not possible to export the full series and now portions of Desserts<\/em> have been distributed around the world, making its complete exhibition very difficult. But it is intended that one becomes lost in Dessert<\/em>\u2019s labyrinthine possibilities, whether in the entire sequence or only a part thereof. Critics prone to reading entrails and tea leaves will see all sorts of political reference, some to China, some to France, some to America, some to the West in general. And all predictions will come true; you just have to shut your eyes and wish it. And it will. And everyone does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now everything can be repeated endlessly and everything via the internet is somehow immediately available, among other things Zhou asks what is the purpose of painting now? Why do we still bother? If Desserts<\/em> were a machine it would combine an automatic jukebox, arcade games (particularly involving awkward cranes and teddy bears), a vending machine (coke, condoms, snacks, underwear, parking tickets) and some sort of Duchampian grinder. This infernal automaton plays us both for Dr Faustus and for idiots, a horror-film invitation. You know you shouldn\u2019t say yes but of course you do. Eat me! Alice might get away with it, everyone else gets guillotined, eventually even the Tricoteuse<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conceit and the magic in this most intellectual bon-bon, this work<\/em> of art, is that the frottage between the necessary seduction and delusion is inevitably already corrupt. However we shuffle this huge pack of delicious cards, the deck is stacked against us. In fact, even the magician who devised it is very aware that also he \u2013 of course! \u2013 does not escape unscathed. While at its pinnacle, painting as art aspires to, perhaps even sometimes reaches, a type of epiphany, it remains always tied to our sensual appetites, our greed. The marvelous excess of \u201cDesserts\u201d is never enough and always too much. And at last, and most disturbing of all, it is but a small model of a cosmos of images, endless and expanding, where absolute meaning is impossible and anyway, finally irrelevant. This is not cynical but terminal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seemingly similar<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That both these artists are Chinese is noteworthy but might breed cynicism amongst jaded art visitors \u2013 bitterly ironic, given the cynicism of which both artists are regularly accused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Desserts<\/em> is certainly cynical about<\/em> the \u201cWest\u201d but is not itself cynical. On the contrary it is very sincere. It is an elegant labyrinth with many openings but no exists, that exists at the endpoint of painting. In this direction, there is nowhere else to go. Art history\u2019s road runs out. (Unsurprising then that recently Tiehai was not practicing but the director of a museum.)**<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yan Lei\u2019s \u201cLimited Art Project,\u201d however, is tragic. For all its jokes, it is one of the saddest of artworks, an elegy to the meaning of images great and small, but also a warning. Blindness is often imposed but also often willed or indifferently ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw the model for LAP at the Hong Kong art fair. Shortly after I met Zhou Tiehai and told him his work and Yan Lei\u2019s work seemed similar to me. He went to look himself, talked with Yan Lei, and assured me, no, not even similar. Which in many ways is true but still there are important points of comparison \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n