Even though the proportion of media art being produced in China is small compared to genres such as painting or sculpture, and although it is still confined exclusively to art schools, it is nonetheless playing an increasingly important role in that country. This »new« interest in using the computer artistically inspired Chinese-American curator Zhang Ga to approach the Swiss Pro Helvetia cultural foundation for assistance with presenting an exhibition of media art from China for the first time in Europe. At [plug.in] in Basel he is now showing eight projects by artists both established and unknown. What one notices first about these works, aside from the heterogeneity of the approaches they take, is the artists’ somewhat naïve-seeming joy in playing and experimenting with the technology of interactivity. Upon looking closer, it is evident that, despite this penchant for technology, the human is nonetheless at the center of almost all the works. The question of how people today are coming to terms with an age of forced technologization is a subliminal theme all the artists address. Miao Xiaochun poses this question most directly with the 3D projection »Last Judgment in Cyberspace. Where Will I Go?« (2006).

The seven-minute film begins with a human figure falling into a void. At some point he catches himself and begins to take giant steps across the space, leaping from cloud to cloud; other people appear, everyone sitting in one boat, moaning; some are violently abducted, fall into the void; a crown of thorns is placed on one person’s head, suddenly the scene, which with its crowds of people now looks like Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, turns around; the people pray, they plead, a one-on-one battle begins; it »rains« miniature people, then the whole thing begins all over again. The figures shown are Asian and male; they resemble jointed marionettes or the androgynous puppet figures in Yves Netzhammer’s computer animations. Again and again, we hear a voice mixing in with the others: »Where will I go? Where do I have no choice but to go? You will go there, right now! We will go there.« Everything is gray.

The puppet men are no doubt metaphors for the exploited human being fighting for a dignified existence – a motif that has recurred in Western culture since early 19th-century capitalism and was even widespread in the discourses on cyberspace that took place in the 1990s. Now the puppet man is back. One look at the creature-like figures and their biblical weight suggests that »cyberspace« has today become an ironic token for the globalized economic sphere. This interpretation is however not made evident by means of a direct reference to the theme of the capitalist robber economy, but is instead evoked symbolically. In fact, the artists in this exhibition do not directly »say« anything at all. This can perhaps be attributed in part to decades of censorship, which has given birth to a culture of circumnavigation and internalization, as Zhang Ga hinted in his opening speech at [plug.in]. Miao Xiaochun, who today teaches photography and digital media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Peking and studied for a few years in Kassel, already focused in earlier works on the theme of the materialistic lifestyle in contemporary China, making it only natural to interpret his »Last Judgment in Cyberspace« as a condemnation of techno-capitalism. But, because all of the characters look the same, the question remains of who is judging whom (and what for, anyway?).

An artistic form of political satire is presented in the interactive installation »18 Coppermen« by Jin Jiangbo, who is likewise already an established artist in China. The piece invites the visitor to stick acupuncture needles in a small figure. Each time a needle is stuck in, a different caricaturish short film starts ups in the background. For example, we see Fidel Castro in a boxing match with various US presidents since the 1950s. Castro succeeds in knocking out each new president, his beard growing longer with every punch. Most of the short films allude to events in world politics, although their content is not always readily comprehensible. Nevertheless, while the thrust of these film caricatures remains strange and inscrutable, the idea of dramatizing interactivity as a storyline oscillating between healing and the administration of violence is realized very skillfully.

Zhang Peili is the purported pioneer of video art in China. For [plug.in], he set up a black wall with a small sunken monitor. From far away, we see a girl doing eye exercises. Each time we draw closer, the picture breaks down and turns into gray noise. The disproportion between the tiny monitor image that can never be seen closely and the black wall as its gigantic frame lets us experience symbolically the discrepancy between the media machinery and its object, so-called »reality«.

While the artists of the older generation have frequently already established careers in another medium and are now undertaking a media transfer toward digital media, the younger generation is still studying. Of the works by the latter, the piece »Drift Bottles« by Huang Shi is interesting because it asks questions about data storage and the progressive loss of secrecy we are experiencing through the new media. Three old-fashioned carafes stand on a pedestal; when I lift the lid I can either whisper »a secret« into the vessel or I can perhaps hear one that someone else left there a long time ago. The carafes become a storage place for free-floating secrets which, precisely for that reason, cease to be secret.
If one compares this exhibition with the large-scale Chinese art show »Mahjong« mounted by collector and patron Uli Sigg at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2005, it is conspicuous that some of these newer works are lacking in aesthetic power and conviction as well as a connection to social contexts. This might have something to do with the fact that some of the artists are still in school and have too little experience in developing a stringent aesthetic or pay too little attention to content. But, particularly in the field of media art, this problem is not new and not necessarily only a »Chinese« one. The media art in the West as well was for a long time characterized by a strange ahistoricity in respect of the artistic aesthetic. In China this problem was exacerbated by the dictatorship of Social Realism, which made any experimenting with art a thing of impossibility.

Following Zhang Ga’s introductory speech, the question was raised of why the media artists do not treat the themes of ecological and social injustice in China – a question that for Zhang Ga, who spent his childhood in the USA, reveals a typically Western perspective. We always expect China to work on coming to terms with its history and politics. But is that really what is all about? Hardly, because one could certainly expect, in an exhibition called »New Directions,« that directions would also be included that represent a socially committed concept of art. Is this expectation purely Western, and do we have to suppress it when we look at Chinese media art? Not entirely, it seems, because even Zhang Ga concedes that this art, even while apparently apolitical, deals in a deep »Marxist sense« with the theme of the »alienation of human beings through technology.«

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»New Directions from China – Media Art from China«, [plug.in], Basel, May 6 to June 17, 2007. Featuring Jin Jiangbo, Lu Yang, Wu Juehui, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Huang Shi, Miao Xiaochun, spylab (Benjamin Bacon/Huang Haiyan).

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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