Theoretically Chinese

A tantalizing piece of fiction is the staged encounter between specific historical figures, allowing for another possible history, or even another possible outcome of history. This trope has been used in both literature and film, in the latter case, for example Ettore Scola’s »That Night in Varennes« from 1982, that placed, among others, Thomas Paine and Casanova in the same coach, escaping from the French revolution, or Nicolas Roeg’s »Insignificance« from 1985, that paired Albert Einstein with Marilyn Monroe, surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover! Such scenarios can create imaginative conversations and juxtapositions, as well as an element of ›what if‹? If these people had been able to meet and engage, other constellations of discourse would have been possible, ultimately to the effect of changing history. It presents, if you will, an ›alternative history‹, not one of alternative facts and accentuations, but of imagination.
An imaginary, as well as imaginative history, is actually at the heart of art history, both in its written and enacted forms, despite its various claims for scientificity. In art history it is of course entirely possible to place two figures next to each other that have never actually met, corresponded or collaborated, and claim a connection through a staged dialogue. Whether in an exhibition, collection, or piece of writing, it is the method of bringing together itself, whether through comparison or contrast, that writes history, not as imagination, but as art–historical facts, either in the form of genre or periodization. The wholly imaginary meeting of artists is made actual through presentation, in space and in discourse. In order for this fiction to be convincing, first and foremost, a certain institutional authorization is required – only authorized personnel such as the curator or historian can make this connection, both in the case of a proposed connection or when presenting a group of artists that were in actual dialogue.
Now, in the above the focus was solely on the imagined encounter, made real through institutional inscription and authorization as the organizing principle. This just means, though, that the museum machinery works in this manner ›in principle‹ only. Art history and its museums employ a principle of constellation that can be all inclusive, and it is simultaneously this very openness that is its undoing as a proper science with a theory of its objects. It is therefore crucial to hide this principle rather than heighten it, and the objects and subjects brought together must appear as plausible connections. A national history must thus be made through geography and style, and placed internationally in a hierarchy of influences from specific masters. It is as if the imaginary and speculative element must be controlled, or even suppressed like an unwanted desirous flow that needs to be articulated in certain directions only.
Secondly, this connection can only be made through a specific mode of history writing and archiving, namely the selection and isolation of singular figures and bodies of work that can then be compared. Art history is always limited to specific objects of art and individual artists, and only more recently and moderately has it been about the discipline and politics of art history itself. Moreover, these singular, meticulously selected objects and chosen artists, that in turn determine art history, have a fundamentally split identity of being simultaneously general and particular, and in such a way that each category guarantees the status of the other. On the one hand artworks that are included in collections are always special, masterpieces even, and thus distinct from all other works of a similar type and time. Simultaneously and mysteriously, all works are also representative of their period and style, and in this way typical. In brief, the objects chosen are both above history and part of it, transcendent and immanent.
Collections of art are thus distinguished from other forms of archiving, such as history museums, that always collect the typical and the extra–ordinary, but as separate entities, never as folded into each other, into a single object. The historical archive attempts to collect the everyday as those objects which are significant of its age, a typology that is contrasted with those objects and events that ruptures its time. The art–historical archive, on the other hand, does not try to cover a period through its most mundane forms, through a cross section of objects and artifacts, but will rather follow the work of one individual, who can then be covered in depth. When dealing with a genius, no object is too small or insignificant to be included in the archive, which then forms a scientific basis for their collection, and the collection on display. Art history therefore does not tell us much about either the conceptual or social histories of a specific period, since collections are mostly devoted to individual artists and works, and not multiplicities, contexts, exhibitions, projects, groups, and so on.
The problem with this approach is that it overlooks the contexts of the work, and the environment in which they were, mostly, created, which was in some sort of dialogue among artists in a given situation, city or scene. Artists do not appear as fully formed subjects and auteurs, but within a discourse. And this discourse is not only, if ever, that of art history and museums, but rather specific times and places. It is this social history that is sorely missed in contemporary art history and criticism. Moreover, this should be coupled with the idea of a conceptual history, i.e. the history of certain concepts, their emergence in discourse and their various accents and constellations. Instead of continually asking and assessing who are the best artists or curators today or in a generation, one could imagine questions such as: Why, for example, are a lot of artists revisiting certain positions and reading certain books at a particular moment, but in different places? And how does it affect artistic production? So, an art history of certain concepts, such as queer space, cinematic time, or post–colonial versus post–communist identity, and so on, would be most useful, and perhaps less involved in supplying the museum industry and art fairs with new products and new stars.
However, the mode of address itself, the insistence on a connection made through placing things side by side, or one after another, also provides the very means for its undoing, or deconstruction. Counter histories can be established exactly by this very act of placement, but through the placement of other figures and artifacts. Additionally, the imaginative, or speculative, aspects of this assemblage can be heightened, positing a truly alternative history, along the possible history of the cinematic narrative tactics mentioned before. In other words, both the canonical list of names to be displayed and historicized and the status of the objects included can be questioned, even circumvented through a practice of exhibition (and writing), and the ways in which speculative connections are made through this practice can be made more visible (as opposed to hidden) and thought–provoking (as in less affirmative). The constellation proposed in the exhibition »Taiping Tianguo«, held at Para/Site in Hong Kong, is indeed one of speculation over assertion. It asks its viewers to consider rather than accept a number of possible connections between four artists, national/ethnic identity, and a particular time and place. According to the curators, these connections are not only »actual and concrete,« but indeed also »tenuous or even possibly non–existing,« which particularly pertains to their Chinese nationality or identity. Of the four grouped artists, only Ai Weiwei is a Chinese citizen, while two of the others come from territories which may be Chinese, but are certainly not China, with Tehching Hsieh originating from Taiwan and Frog King Kwok from Hong Kong. Finally, the fourth artist, Martin Wong, is a Chinese American from San Francisco. In other words, it is not any national history or scene that connects these artists by any stretch of the imagination, even if one was to employ the most outrageously essentialist notion of ›Chineseness.‹A connection that can be established, though, is one of simultaneity and location, with all of the artists residing in the same city in the 1980s: New York. In this way, the exhibition is more than anything about New York, specifically the downtown scene of those years, and not only do the four chosen figures turn up in the collection of Weiwei photographs from the period displayed, but also such luminaries like Allen Ginsburg, as well as documentation of events such as the Tompkins Square riots in the summer of 1988. Their shared experience is thus a New York experience, that is posited as formative and crucial for the development and works of the artists – indeed Tsieh never worked anywhere else – rather then their tenuous connection to Chinese art. For example, whereas Ai Weiwei is nowadays a signature Chinese artist, and an international art star as particularly Chinese, not much is known about his time and work in New York. Here, in photographs both hilarious and touching, Weiwei can be seen posing as Andy Warhol, in front of Warhol’s silk–screened self–portraits, and Frog King can be seen performing at a Free Tibet exhibition, organized, perhaps surprisingly, by Weiwei.
This New York experience is, however, also a situation of exile, albeit a self–chosen one, a migration of intentionality and desire. If we see this condition as the context for Hsieh’s legendary one–year performances, rather than endurance in performance art taken to the extreme, as the endpoint or highpoint of a certain art–history of performance art, another reading becomes primary. Presented in »Taiping Tianguo« were the first one–year performance from 1978–79, which was spent locked in a cage, and the third from 1981–82 spent entirely outdoors, which both now speak of specific conditions of immigration, of illegal aliens, with the first bringing up associations of isolation, alienation and confinement, and the second homelessness in all senses of that word. In both instances, the subject disappears, and literally becomes invisible, whether through incarceration, an almost ultimate self–imposed exile or exodus from society, or through the unwanted presence of the wandering hobo, whom most people try to avoid, and who must also themselves avoid contact and visibility as much as possible in order to not be arrested for vagrancy (and thus, ironically, end up in a similar situation as installed in the first performance).
Whereas none of the artists hailed from New York, they certainly all shared the feeling that New York was the place to be, something they were obviously not alone in sensing, just as their various experiences of acceptance, indifference or rejection were shared by thousands of other hopeful and emerging artists and cultural producers who flocked to New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. No more is this visible than in the biography of Martin Wong, the only American artist in this constellation, who always dreamt of New York, and finally moved there from San Francisco in 1978. It’s a peculiar time to make this move, and one that lends itself to further speculation than is presented in the show. 1978 was, arguably, a high point in the Gay artistic and political scene that Wong had been involved in, with a crossover between art, performance and punk that was also ethnically diverse in a sense that the NYC downtown scene was not, and it was the year that Harvey Milk became a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors. But it was also the year that Milk was assassinated, leaving one to ponder exactly why Wong left San Francisco precisely that year.
The connections made and unmade thus stretch out far beyond the empty center that is New York, the history and setting that is art, and the construction of Chinese identity. It is not pure chance, obviously, that the exhibition takes place in Hong Kong, and is co–curated by an entity calling itself »A Future Museum of China«, since the lines drawn by this exhibition ask us to consider which China we are thinking of, and what history could possibly be made of such a category. In this sense, the title »Taiping Tianguo«, which means the heavenly kingdom of eternal peace, is surely a ruse, with its double historical reference to the South Chinese rebellion of the 19th century and the work of Martin Wong, who was only nominally Chinese. But perhaps we can consider all four artists as nominally Chinese, or moreover, what Winston Tong has brilliantly termed »Theoretically Chinese« in his album of that name from 1985. Winston Tong was, of course, a contemporary of Martin Wong in San Francisco, where he was active as a performance artist and later as singer of Tuxedomoon, itself a crossover between art and music, queer culture and punk, evolving out of the group Angels of Light, for whom Wong had designed costumes.
It is these possible, feasible and unfeasible encounters that the exhibition stages through its usage of four otherwise disparate figures, who were contemporaries, and whose contexts are myriad. This is also reflected in the materials displayed, which are not many singular works placed one after the other, but shown as immersed in contexts and discourses, where documentation, narration and ephemera have equal placing. This also indicates another usage of the archive, and another mode of archiving that is more speculative, and that does not merely substantiate the display, but also allows for a movement of meaning and unmeaning in both directions. It shows, that while history is not unwritten, but rather always overwritten, it can nonetheless be rewritten and reread, constructing alternatives from the very building blocks of hegemony.

Taiping Tianguo – A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York; 12. Mai bis 28. August 2012, PARA/SITE, Hongkong; http://www.para-site.org.hk.