\u2014The Sex Pistols<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paul Gladston: What the fuck is \u201cBirdhead\u201d when it\u2019s at home?!!!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ge Si Di:<\/strong> It\u2019s who\u2026Birdhead is the name used by the photographers Song Tao and Ji Weiyu when they are working and exhibiting together. Tao and Weiyu\u2026that\u2019s their first names by the way\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: I wasn\u2019t sure\u2026thanks for that.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> Anyway, moving on\u2026Tao and Weiyu were born in Shanghai. They both graduated from the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts in 2000 and they continue to live and work in Shanghai. Weiyu did a postgraduate course at St Martin\u2019s, graduating in 2004, while Tao stayed in Shanghai establishing a solo career as a photographer and video artist. Tao was something of an angry young man during his formative years, check out his early work\u2026he\u2019s calmed down a lot since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: When did they start working together as Birdhead?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> Tao and Weiyu met at art school in 1998. They started working together seriously in 2004. Weiyu started taking photographs as a teenager. Tao picked up the habit at the age of 20 after borrowing a camera from Weiyu. In June 2004 they spent a month taking and developing photographs together. The photographs, which featured Tao and Weiyu and their surroundings in Shanghai, were edited into the duo\u2019s first album,The Beginning of Summer<\/em> \u2014 and so Birdhead were born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: Very poetic. Why did they choose the name \u201cBirdhead?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> Well, the standard answer is that they were saving a new folder on their desktop as a place to store some of their photographs and they typed in the Chinese characters for \u201cbird\u201d and \u201chead\u201d randomly as a title for the folder. The sound of the characters in Shanghai dialect has a scatological significance\u2026you know what artists are like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: I just don\u2019t get it. They just seem to take snapshots of themselves and their friends. It\u2019s like all those bloody friendship websites. You know, kids giving peace signs in front of burning cars during anti-capitalist riots\u2026 that kind of thing. Anyone could do that. That\u2019s not art.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> In principle, yes they could. Have you seen Tony Hancock\u2019s film The Rebel<\/em>? I love that scene with the bicycle and the cow\u2026and \u201cshapism\u201d\u2026indigo octagon, how droll. I used to watch a bootleg copy over and over again with my friends in Shanghai during the 80s. We also used to watch that film The Horse\u2019s Mouth<\/em> with Alec Guinness \u2014 it\u2019s amazing how close the painting in that film is to the much later work of Julian Schnabel and David Salle [laughs].<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: They even got the audience at one of their openings to hang the work on the gallery walls. What a mess that was\u2026a right shambles.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> Yes, at the BizArt Gallery in Shanghai in 2007. The show was called \u201cWelcome to the World of Birdhead, Again.\u201d You must have heard of the avant-garde\u2019s and post avant-garde\u2019s various attempts to problematize the boundary between art and life; or, bringing things more up to date, how about Nicolas Bourriaud\u2019s concept of \u201crelational aesthetics?\u201d You know; artistic intervention into and the interactive remotivation of localized communities as a resistance to dominant forms of social economic and cultural discourse. If you\u2019re not familiar with contemporary critical theory, perhaps you could think instead of the \u201cpunk\u201d photography of Nan Goldin and David Wojnarowicz. That might help you to see something of what Birdhead are up to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: Nan who? I\u2019ve heard of \u201cZhongnanhai\u201d<\/strong>\u2014<\/strong> that song by the Carsick Cars. Where are the pictures of Mao Zedong and the Red Guards? This is supposed to be contemporary Chinese art. Where\u2019s the incisive political critique?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> You\u2019re thinking of Chinese \u201cPolitical Pop\u201d and \u201cCynical Realism\u201d of the 1990s. Errr\u2026things have moved on a bit. You need to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: Yeah, but they still lock up artists for criticizing the government in China. Look at Ai Weiwei. He was banged up without charge for months. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> Quite. But there\u2019s more than one way of skinning a Mao [laughs]. (1) To coin a (para)phrase, Birdhead \u201cmake local art for local people.\u201d They love Shanghai and they feel deeply rooted there. It\u2019s almost a daily epiphany for them. The work is about the city and how it feels to live within it \u2014 an immersive bodily experience. In their view the vastness of Shanghai is an endless source of beauty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: Sounds like Kant\u2019s notion of the mathematical sublime, but without the pain. As an outsider, how am I supposed to understand that? Their photographs could be snapshots of any big city. To return to Hancock, it\u2019s just \u201cconfusion\u201d to me.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> It\u2019s not their job to instruct you. Nor do they want to control your view of their work. The work is primarily for and about Birdhead and their friends. The concerns of audiences outside Shanghai are peripheral. Why should they care about you and your cultural confusion? They don\u2019t care. Who are you anyway?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: Still, where\u2019s the politics? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> By their own admission Birdhead are indifferent to politics. But, within the People\u2019s Republic of China official political ideology is still pervasive; even though government directives are often less specific than they used to be in Mao\u2019s time. It acts as an immanent discursive framework for the disciplining and self-disciplining of Chinese society. To be engaged with and\/or concerned with politics is a form of acquiescence to the dominant ideological order and, in a sense, a retrograde adherence to China\u2019s Maoist past. Indifference to mainstream politics in China \u2014 as well as to Western \u201cCold War\u201d preoccupations with political dissidence \u2014 is, arguably, an obliquely political libertarian stance. It\u2019s also a sign of being young and modern. You were young once\u2026 you must be able to remember how it felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: I\u2019ll overlook that last comment. Is there any link here with traditional Chinese culture? Birdhead\u2019s openness to differing interpretative perspectives certainly has an affinity with traditional Chinese aesthetics and the sense of interpretative \u201ctracklessness\u201d associated with the Confucian concept of wan shang<\/em>. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GSD:<\/strong> You do know something about Chinese culture, then. That could arguably be the case. But what\u2019s tradition? The only contact we have is with the traces of tradition and their remotivation in relation to changing historical circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PG: Could you repeat that? I didn\u2019t quite catch what you said.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This text draws on a conversation with Birdhead published in Paul Gladston, Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists<\/em> (Hong Kong: Timezone 8\u2013Blue Kingfisher, 2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Gladston<\/strong> is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. Between 2005 and 2010, he served as the inaugural head of the Department of International Communications and director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ge Si Di<\/strong> is Paul Gladston\u2019s Chinese pen name. \u201cSi Di\u201d can be translated as \u201cthink about the truth\u201d. \u201cGe,\u201d which is nominally a family name, has no particular meaning in this context. The allocation of this name is an ironic one given Paul Gladston\u2019s contrarian adherence to deconstructivist thought and practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Critic Ge Si Di in Conversation with … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/randian-art.s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com\/2022\/09\/zh-hant\/11_Small-22-2-e1384328438670.jpg\")
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