Session II: Curating Exhibitions: The Power and Interpretation of Visual Space

Gu Zhenqing:
This afternoon, the discussants will be Ken Lum, editor of Canada's Yishu magazine, and Lu Jie, chief curator of the Long March. I will personally serve as chair of the discussion. This morning's discussion on context grew very long, I think it was a very interesting debate or dialogue that we had going, and I'd like to continue that for perhaps a half hour. But given how much remains to be said, I think that another half an hour is all we can spare, and so let's pick up where we left off this morning.

Gu Zhenqing:
I think given the presence of so many Chinese curators and so many international curators, I think this is a perfect context in which to continue our discussion on context. The Chinese art "fever" was very important in the 1990s, and continues even now, and we should talk about this. As to the question of globalization, and the phenomenon of Chinese artists leaving China and participating in the international field, these international artists that are practicing abroad perhaps don't represent Chinese identity and issues that are internal to China. By looking at their works, you might not know that they were Chinese. In many cases you would have to meet the artist themselves to know that they were Chinese, so removed are they from the China context. I think this kind of attitude toward Chineseness is passive. For many artists, being outside the Chinese context was a way to avoid Orientalist and post-colonial work. So while they may have feel like they respond to things that are happening in China, in actuality, they don't. And as a result, what you see is not the authentic Chinese artist. For instance, the artists participating in the last Venice Biennial, it took me forever to find them. This Long March is different. It actively goes and seeks out Chinese resources and collective consciousness in China. And it looks to tradition, to the past, to memory, to recreate a modernist discourse. It seeks to realize the capacity within China to recreate a discourse, a context. So I hope that this Long March project represents a new model for curating. These are just some thoughts I had based on this morning's conversation. I know that Lu Jie wanted to respond to some things that Guan Yuda said this morning, so I'd like to turn the microphone over to him.

Lu Jie:
I'd like to respond to some of the points made by Wu Meichun this morning. She said that the true importance of the Long March lies in its ideals, but that it is not interactive enough, that it is not effective when really placed in public spaces, in front of regular people. I would first like to explain that when we talk about interaction, we call it the "Long March Method." In that term there are many layers, and we have tried quite our hardest to consider each of these layers. For example, in our ten-plus exhibitions in Kunming, we collaborated with many alternative and independent spaces. Working with artists in Kunming was a form of interaction. At the same time, in the projects we completed in Kunming, we called on some of China's most famous painters-Zhang Xiaogang, Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun-to work outside of this medium and put together conceptual installation works. This is another kind of interaction, between the curator and the artist, and also with the public-a three-directional interaction. Expanding the possibilities available to working artists is another responsibility of the curator. Then there is another layer: for example, when we were at Jiangwutang Military School in Kunming, we gave away original works of Xu Bing's New English Calligraphy to villagers and children, so that they could take them home and study. I was very excited when a New York gallery insider expressed his amazement at this gesture; it makes me think that when we do things in the public space, perhaps it is possible to leave convention behind. Another example which I did not introduce last night is that of the German artist living in New York Ingo Gunther. Gunther plans to open a "Long March Information Center" in Manhattan, a two-month long exhibition in which he will tell New York viewers of what we are doing here, opening up the familiar topics of the Long March for discussion once more. At the same time, he will combine Chinese contemporary art and Chinese modern history, and use these things to interact with New York viewers. Then there are Chinese artists like Xiao Xiong, now doing an exchange work. Xiao Xiong is traveling the route of the Long March in reverse, from Yan'an to Ruijin, and coincidentally he is in our midst today. Each day he takes the object he obtained the previous day, and exchanges it for something new with someone he meets in his travels. He began with a portrait of Chairman Mao, and through this unceasing exchange, he has touched on themes of revolution, experience, history, the Long March, and art. He works quite hard on a daily basis to interact with people from different social strata and professional backgrounds. Finally I would like to address the point Guan Yuda made that the Long March is stuck in the conventional art system and following a conventional exhibition praxis. In making this point he said that we have used the official apparatus to publicize our activities. My answer is that when we debate things in China, it is relatively easy to take an oppositional stance, and that this is not building something new. We have never claimed that there is anything wrong with any of the curatorial praxes now in play in China. Many of the propaganda methods invented during the Chinese revolution or which took shape just after that revolution were quite avant-garde and experimental. Many of these stratagems had an influence on the international art world. Now we think they can have an influence on contemporary art, and the Long March seeks to re-interpret and re-use these methods.

Qiu Zhijie:
Guan Yuda's remarks this morning seemed to take the Long March as being "sent down" to the countryside, something this unambiguous. I think it is biased to see the Long March in this way. When we take contemporary artists to the people, one goal is transmission, but another is to have the art examined by these viewers. It is also a chance to enfranchise otherwise ignored artists, people like the natural-light photographer Li Tianbing, or the man who has carved a mountain with bas reliefs of Chinese leaders, Jiang Jiwei. Another aspect is that the Long March operates on many levels, as in the works Lu Jie just spoke of. I have two other examples. One is Shi Yong's Long March project in Shanghai. He has created a Long March through the streets and buildings named for sites on the historical Long March, places like Ruijin Hospital and Yan'an Road. Thus, in China's most cosmopolitan city, he has undertaken an experiment which is a call to Shanghai's collective consciousness. The second example is Beijing artist Qin Ga, who is continuously tattooing his body with the route we are following on our Long March. So our interactions are not confined to the villages, but happen also in major cities, with particular individuals, and on all levels of society. This means first that we are unearthing all possible resources to make our hopes into reality. Second, it means that we are drawing on the wisdom of the masses to propel everyone to realize their goals. Third, it is a gesture of respect to Chinese history. Fourth, it is a kind of interaction and cooperation. I make these four points to contend that the Long March is about creation based on an assigned topic. But I would also like to ask: what is so wrong about assigned topics? And if we say that this is creation based on an assigned topic, who has given the assignment: Lu Jie or Chinese history? If we don't want to respond to these so-called assigned topics, then why do we still bother to consider the "Chinese context?"

Edward Lucie-Smith:
I just thought the moment had come to remind the audience of parallel activities which have happened in other parts of the world. The idea of wandering artists and wandering exhibitions occurred in Russia before the period of the Bolshevik Revolution, with a group who were indeed called "The Wanderers." You also had experiments like the art school in Kitev, which was originally run by Marc Chagall, and afterwards by Malevich. So all of these are examples which one has to take into account when one things of how one thinks of "out into the hinterland" of a very large country. And I think one of the things you have to ask yourselves is what mistakes the Russians made, why in the end it didn't indeed work. It's no good saying this hasn't been tried before, because it has. So I think one of the things you need to do in order to make the Long March idea work, is that you mustn't be too entirely Chinese, you must look at examples of things that happened elsewhere in the world.

Gu Zhenqing:
I'd like to ask Ken Lum to speak, someone who has taken part in a great number of international exhibitions. He is also a great writer and critic, as well as the editor of the journal Yishu.

Ken Lum:
Thanks very much. I'm not so sure what I'm stepping into after all these discussions of authenticity and non-authenticity in terms of Chinese essentialism-especially since I don't speak Mandarin Chinese. I do want to continue a little bit on what we started on this morning…For me, the crux of the issue is not so much this debate about authenticity in terms of Chineseness or not-Chineseness, and when I say that, I don't also believe in this idea that somehow an artist is just a world traveler, and can revel in non-identity. I think that's a completely privileged position. So for me issue is not one of Chinese and non-Chinese, or authentic versus non-authentic, or indigenous versus non-indigenous, or official versus non-official. For me I think the important issue is that of historicism versus ahistoricism. There are many taboos that remain in China. And even in a conference like this, sometimes I wonder whether it's possible to fully express all the issues that people want to express, but may not be possible yet in China today. I also don't believe in this idea that somehow the problems here are the taboos…sometimes you get responses from Europeans and North Americans that "oh, we have taboos too" and so on. I think they're of a qualitatively different order. I think what's missing in China, and that's only now beginning to be addressed, is the problem of how does one make an accounting of a situation in which only twenty years ago, there was very little curating, and today you have very sophisticated curated shows. Where twenty years ago you had very few artists making work in a manner that one could say was contemporary. And yet today there are many contemporary Chinese artists doing all sorts of performance, photography, installation, video. So for me it seems to be that there seems to be a kind of missing link. The kind of situation of creative activity today didn't just emerge out of a vacuum. And it's linked to all kinds of historical memories which remain largely unspoken. I also think, just because I have experience with the recent Documenta in Kassell, you can see all kinds of work from Indian artists, Iranian artists, artist from Ghana, Benin, and without losing any of the local concerns, these artists have made work that you could show anywhere in the world now, and actually be able to read this work, be able to appreciate this work. For lack of a better word, I don't like this term, but certainly it's under the rubric of neo-conceptualism, the kind of linguistic framework that ties all this work together. The question that interests me is how did this neo-conceptualism, how did this framework, become stylish in China, and secondly, how did it become established so pandemically? And finally, what are the historical components that are unsaid in this emergence?

Gu Zhenqing:
Next I'd like to ask Lu Jie to speak from the technical perspective about the power and interpretation of visual space. Everyone is welcome to raise questions.

Lu Jie:
Lum's story and his personal view, along with Gu Zhenqing's comments about the role of the curator among the historical and political changes in China right now, all make me think of some questions. Both talked about the power and interpretation of visual space, but, interestingly enough, from different perspectives. Even so, it occurs to me that both share a binary, almost oppositional perspective. It's almost as if what was being played out here was what Johnson Chang referred to this morning about the black face and the white face in Chinese theater. There's no doubt that what they're speaking about was their own experience, and that it's factual and accurate. But the Chinese context, again, is very complex, it's not bipolar or binary.

On the next topic, the relationship between independent and official should not be considered in a binary way. In China, even deconstruction and construction are not binary. To me the dilemma of the Chinese curator is that it seems like everything is so confused here. As a curator, both personal satisfaction and professional success require you to promote new artists and hold interesting exhibitions. At the same time, it is very popular now to talk about the public space and about independent curating. How do we resolve this binary? I ask this question in order to say that these roles have already come together. I believe that this is precisely an effect of the so-called "Chinese context" on the work of curators, but that the issues this raises must still be debated. Gu Zhenqing just said that in theory, independent spaces are also required to have their exhibitions officially approved, but that in actuality, no one gets them approved-I think this is very interesting.

There is a joke here that when people ask me why I wanted to be a curator, my answer is 'when you're not a good painter, you become an art critic; when you're not a good critic, you become an art dealer; when you're not a good dealer, you become a curator.' That's who I am. I was an artist, I was a critic, I was a dealer, and I'm a curator now. This joke is very serious. I want to say that the Chinese context, in relation with curators' work, my personal experience is that almost all Chinese critics and curators or art dealers were artists before, or are still practicing art. Why does one sacrifice their career to come to this point? It has to do with the coming together of resources, and the emergence of new artistic careers, all of which is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I want to summarize my conclusion about the power of space, the power of the curator. In China this power is not given by the society, but sought by the individual. The work of all curators right now is to continue integrating resources, and in this way to make new things possible. I am interested in whether in this process there might be something new-that perhaps because our context, our situation is different, because of this complexity, our practice might produce something interesting which might become a contribution to the visual art world.

Ken Lum:
I think you may have misunderstood me slightly. I think clearly the most interesting art that's produced today is not produced in America or Europe, but in China and so on. I would define avant-gardism as a kind of creative response to a social situation that is a contradiction between what can be said and what cannot be said. So that you have a situation where officialdom is imposing, then the creative response to that would make for more nuanced, more sophisticated art. That's why it's not a coincidence that you have so much interesting art coming from countries in Africa, coming from Persia, India, and China, all of them responding to their local political and social determinants. I also want to say that I don't think I was suggesting that these terms should be binarisms, but I think they are monadic terms. Several years ago I saw a fantastic show of Polish conceptual art, art dating back to the 1960s and 70s, work that was being produced under conditions of martial rule. If you had the good fortune to see that show…I remember being shocked by how American or Western conceptual art paled in comparison, because they had something specific to say, and it was a specific response. And it was a specific response to a political situation without having to announce itself in a decorative form.

Edward Lucie-Smith:
What I really wanted to say is two things, very much linked to the story you just told about Manet. First of all, I think Chinese independent curators should be careful about what they wish for. God often gives people what they wish for, and then they find that's exactly what they didn't need. What I mean by this is that there's now a very strong case for saying that the supposed avant-garde in the United States and Europe is now in fact the equivalent of the 19th century salon. The great museums have turned what we'd like to call the avant-garde into official art. And in fact many manifestations which we still call avant-garde would be impossible in Europe and in the United States without very substantial official support, and without the frameworks applied by great museums. So the avant-garde is no longer simply officially tolerated in the United States and Western Europe; it has become officially necessary. I think that those of you have been concerned with organizing the Long March series of exhibitions would agree with me that a certain amount of controversy is necessary to push the envelope. And that if it weren't doing this, there would be no point in doing the exhibitions at all. So what I am saying to you here is that the curatorial community ought to be very careful in China about allowing itself to become completely official. Officialization won't necessarily mean that the avant-garde will be doing anything different than it is doing now. It will simply mean that the context has changed to the point where what the curatorial community is doing will no longer have that force to change society which perhaps it possesses at this moment. In the United States, it invariably exists in a completely official context. It is only here in China which you remain in opposition. I might be Europeanist, but I feel that you ought to cherish that status, as opposed to the status of Europe.

Charles Merewether:
Before I absolve myself, I'd like to pose one question which of course doesn't have to be answered. The longer I sit here, the longer I feel that contemporary Chinese art is expressing an identity consciousness. We talked about the relationship between the avant-garde and the local, and it seemed to be very disturbing to many people. We talked about the relationship between the Chinese avant-garde and the West, and that seemed to disturb many people as well. We talked about those Chinese artists who remain at home and those who leave, and that seemed to be a disturbing vision as well. We talked about the relationship between the Chinese avant-garde and official art, and that also seemed to be a disturbing issue. Which leads me to a very simple question, to whom does the Chinese avant-garde belong?

Wu Hong:
I think what I was preparing here, the media is a power structure. Websites in China are not considered media. And in that regard we're given a certain amount of leeway in what we can print. And frankly, we're below the radar screen. How long this situation will continue is really hard to say. But inasmuch as we are below the radar screen over at TOM.com, I'd like to think that we can continue to do good and positive things. On the other side, we have commercial pressures. The owner of the website, Li Ka-hsing, is an entrepreneur, a capitalist with no interest in art. I'd like to also comment on something that was said this morning. So the question on a lot of our minds I think is, to what degree the average person needs what we are doing. It is very likely that the people singing karaoke downstairs are finding that as spiritually fulfilling as they would like. So is what we're doing significant to them, or is it significant only to us? Are we driven by another kind of exoticism, a certain aspiration to Shangri-la, the Shangri-la being a position in the official museum hierarchy?

Lu Jie:
I think that has already set up some departing points not in this conference, so I want to question those points, the base of his question. One of the assumptions behind your remarks is perhaps that people in a cosmopolitan or urban environment would perhaps better understand and be able to get engaged with the art that we're doing. Are you suggesting that the people outside the cities do not have a right, or have less of a right to such art? Even with your assumption that people in the city know art or need art more, do we have the right to assume that people outside the city have no right or no necessity to get in touch with art? The third question is that even if the first two assumptions were true, then we have, I feel, an even greater responsibility to bring art to them. The sort of oppositional assumption, the assumption of us and them, also seems to imply that we somehow understand the art that is being done better than others might. So this would lead to the conclusion that Chinese necessarily understand Chinese art better than anyone else. I don't subscribe to this and I don't think it's true. I agree with Per Boym's concept that there are many contexts in China, I think it's very complex. What's interesting about each stop along the Long March that we make is the different reactions, the different degrees of success, the different degrees of understanding that we achieve at each step. There are places at which we succeed, places where we fail, and other places where we can't use the concepts of success and failure to talk about what we have done.

Gu Zhenqing:
I can't let Charles Merewether get away without responding to his question about to whom the Chinese avant-garde belongs. It's interesting, the people in the Ministry of Culture have never laid claim to the title of avant-garde art. Recently, there have been changes whereby the Ministry of Culture is now trying to lay claim to avant-garde art. They found that when they were abroad and said that they dealt only in traditional art, they wouldn't receive respect and attention. But no sooner than they had said they were involved in the avant-garde, they were courted by the overseas curators and museum directors, taken to coffee and to see artists' works. They found an enormous amount of attention. We can see this in the upcoming national art exhibition that's about to take place: the government's attitude toward avant-garde art has undergone a considerable change. They have taken the word avant-garde art and used it to replace "contemporary art." And some institutes and art academies in China now have semester courses in avant-garde art. They teach how to make avant-garde art, everything from installations to video works. So it seems that everybody is trying to lay claim to avant-garde. But I think that ultimately the avant-garde "belongs" to a relatively small number of artists who are practicing, artists who are overflowing with creativity, energy, sensitivity. Their approach is the opposite of the fifty-day course offered at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the rigidification of art. They seek to reach out beyond borders. And in reaching out, only over a period of time do they actually mature and develop their art. We're seeing the sprouts, the emergence of this sort of artist in China today. I hope that in the next twenty or thirty years, China is able to produce and give home to avant-garde master artists. I think this is the real value of avant-garde art in China: ultimately, these artists will be something for both China and the rest of the world.

Wang Gongxin:
Do we really need to repeat what other countries throughout modernism have done to promote certain masters? Is it just because our encounter with modernism is quite new and young, so we must promote certain masters? One view in this world nowadays is that we do not need masters anymore. Why is there this gesture or desire to promote Chinese masters? And the necessity of promoting Chinese masters seems like it is cutting China off from the world, as if China is totally isolated and is trying to build something itself. Are you saying that China needs master artists because the West had master artists when it was developing? Must we travel the same route?

Wu Meichun:
I'd like to respond as the representative of one of the only institutions in China devoted to new media art. I got the feeling that you were against which take up teaching new media, video skills, computer skills, and trying to introduce these into art. Only last year has new media actually become part of the curriculum in Chinese academies. So a lot of the talk of experimental art in the academies really grew out of these departments. I think that much of what is being done in these departments is new and innovative. It sounded as if Gu Zhenqing was implying that the universities do not have any right or claim to teaching new media art, that there is no value in teaching it. I don't think we're trying to lay claim to avant-garde art or to bring avant-garde art into institutions. The net effect is more of a kind of mutually stimulating dialogue, something that has an impact in both directions. Much of the experimental art that has been done in my view is not really experimental. It is done for a circle of like minds. By incorporating this into its curriculum, the academies are actually creating channels for more art and experimentation. I think this movement in the academy should actually be cause for reflection for many of the people practicing experimental art outside the academies.

Gu Zhenqing:
My point was just that artists should follow their own urges and desires, and that by institutionalizing these practices, we somehow harm and prevent them. But of course the introduction of new media studies is something that I fully support. As to Wang Gongxin and his comments a minute ago, my response was directly aimed at answering the question posed by Charles Merewether, which was whose art is it. And so I had necessarily to begin in China. I do think that over a period of time the idea of the master-and by this I don't mean the traditional toothless masters of the past-representative of the best the culture can put forward.

We've asked Mr. Edward Lucie-Smith to speak a little bit about the phenomenon of the YBA, the Young British Artist, as a way of exploring the relationship between the artist, curator, and power. I hope this will be a good reference for Chinese artists.

Edward Lucie-Smith:
The YBA artists were associated with sex and violence, and also with a morbid interest in many cases in death and mutilation. Their sensibilities are not new. It derives from the attitudes and public gestures of the punk rock bands of the 1970s. But there is also in a broader sense a strain in British culture which is obsessed with ideas of death. There is a very strong strain in classical British literature beginning with poet John Donne at the beginning of the 17th century which expresses exactly the sorts of ideas which you find in Damien Hirst's work. So it is absolutely understandable that this group of artists seized the British public imagination and afterwards have became internationally famous much quicker than has been the case with British artists in the past. The reason was that there were already elements in their work which were subliminally familiar and which were already embedded in British popular culture. Damien Hirst is the first artist since Henry Moore to have become a staple of caricatures in the newspapers. So just as in the 1950s, British newspaper caricaturists used to make jokes about statues with holes in them, so, in the 1990s, they actually made drawings of sharks in tanks, and everybody knew what was being referred.

But there was another element as well. The YBA artists were largely backed with private money, not with official money. I think in particular, they were funded by the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi, who had a private gallery in North London which he used to show their work, and he also used his advertising skills to publicize them as personalities…However, even though museums were not initially directly involved in the YBA phenomenon, the YBA phenomenon itself has had a great impact on museum practice. It imparted the idea that avant-garde artworks were no longer simply artworks, but that they were also newsworthy events. And it also suggested to museum curators that a mode of directly theatrical presentation was the way in which to reach the public…Well this formula has proved extremely successful with the British public and with tourists who come to London, and the Tate Modern is now averaging something like five million visitors a year. In fact it is the biggest tourist attraction in Britain, next to the Blackpool amusement park and beach in the north of England. So to conclude, what one can say about the YBAs is that though the Tate possesses very few key works by these artists, they have transformed the way in which art is perceived in Britain. The only question is, what happens next?

Gu Zhenqing:
Next I'd like to hear from Yao Rui-chung, a curator and an artist from Taiwan.

Lu Jie:
I hope he can will talk about the his different perspectives in these two different roles

Yao Rui-chung:
I'm going to talk about some exhibition experiences in the 1990s in Taiwan. Actually, Taiwan has been through its own struggle to get to where it is today…If you look at art as a free, concrete manifestation of truth, then many artists when they are making art look to and raise different voices. It would be the artist's instrument to open up human minds and to bring in new knowledge. So similarly to what we are doing now with the Long March, in the early 1990s in Taiwan, artists and curators were starting to work together. Concetely speaking, this took four forms: to get organized; to create an informed curatorial practice; to build independent space; and to construct a discourse. In Taiwan, the task was to re-examine and re-construct the discourse that had been championed by the authorities, to make a real departure from there. At that time, it was a collected group, a collaboration. We did not have the word curator yet; the artists were doing the curatorial work…We did not have support from the government, so what we did was to have a strong presence in the news media. In this way we opened up a space. And now I want to talk about artists and curators in that context. I mostly work independently as an artist, and we normally do not have to work with the curatorial side on our suggestions. We tried to create new interpretations and provocative practice. The visual arts had always served the elite class, so what I do is more like cross-border, cross-disciplinary work. When they gain their power and actually achieve their goal and actually occupy a space, my works receive very strong support from the media. And at that point the government is not involved because what we've done is useful. They use the power of the structure to try to drive us out, but it's not the same as in the Mainland. For us making art is not like a gesture or creating icons. For us it's more important to look for possibilities throughout this making process…Curators are like artists, there are many different types. In Taiwan we have a saying that there are six different types of curators: commercial, academic, authoritative, trendy, emotional, and the artist-curator. We've discovered that in Taiwan there are many possibilities. It's a quite open structure, and being a modern society, the roles are already clearly divided. So the question of whether the curator is more of a director or a producer is a big one. This kind of structure may have an impact on art-making, especially when it gets commercial. Like the management of a business, the job of the curator can become to make a product, and to promote that product. In conclusion, the Long March project is taking meaningful art to contextualize history, collective memory and the current developments of society to make art useful and meaningful.

Gu Zhenqing:
I'd like to ask Mr. Jiang Yuanlun to speak.

Jiang Yuanlun:
I've been involved in the publishing of China Avant-garde, it's a book, it has an ISBN, but it's published on a monthly basis. The people around me are mostly involved in literature and literary criticism. In the beginning the magazine was focused on avant-garde literature, criticism, and other written forms of art. I asked Li Xianting to join our editorial advisory board to help on visual arts. After two or three years of publishing, I found that the impact of China avant-garde was actually much greater in the field of visual arts than it was in literature. Why was this? There's one reason which I consider quite obvious: literature, after its high tide of developments in the 1970s and 80s, already began to decline. The visual arts, on the other hand, were just beginning to take off. Another reason is that avant-garde literature actually has gained a certain acceptance within society. Visual arts on the other hand were somewhat suppressed by the official cultural infrastructure.

Unlike literature, where it was really a form of technical control, in the art field, the officials were more concerned with questions of ideology. They put up a lot of hurdles for people in the visual arts and film. Of course there were technical issues also at play. But formally, when works were put down or refused exhibition, it was because of ideological concerns, very much unlike in literature. The outcome, interestingly enough, is that you're seeing a lot more interesting things happening in the relatively ideologically controlled area of the visual arts, and literature, on the other hand, has somewhat gone down. So the most interesting things we're seeing now are things that are grassroots, things that are organic, that are almost oppositional in the visual arts. And I think that's why we're seeing so many interesting things happening both in film and in art. Most illustrative was in yesterday's visual presentation by Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie was the repeated interference by local officials in what could be seen and what couldn't be seen. Thank goodness for the Public Security Bureau and their intervention.

Gu Zhenqing: I want to thank everyone for the insightful comments, they were very much overview comments. Now I'm going to turn the microphone over to questions.

Guan Yuda:
I'd like to respond again to the two curators of the Long March. They've emphasized over and over again that Chinese exhibitions must have Chinese characteristics. Official hierarchy in China now is much looser than it's ever been before. I think that has reduced the binary qualities of our art. I do want to emphasize that we live in a fairly optimistic and free period. But for a history with such strong political forces at play, those forces often being used to stifle art, we are lucky now. I'd like to borrow a quotation from Mao Zedong, "The Long March's manifesto is propaganda." So we shouldn't make compromises. I want to raise some doubts about the optimistic picture of Chinese contemporary art raised by the curators who just spoke. If their hopes come true, we'll finish what we're doing now, finish with biennials, finish the Long March, and be left with great masters exhibitions!

Wu Hong:
The "you" and the "they" I just referred to, it was only a descriptive necessity. In actuality, contemporary art has all happened in a small circle. If we say that art has a connection with the larger population, it becomes a fashionable and consumerized. As far as the media are concerned, I'd like to explain further, China perhaps doesn't have pure, non-official formalism, and we can't say that the media have no power, but its power is more a kind of governmental power. For example, last year several state-controlled media organizations ran reports about performance art, saying it was bad. I'm curious whether we can use our identity as people on the periphery of officialdom to go deeper. I'm certainly not saying that I want to consciously protest against officialdom.

Lu Jie:
The topic just introduced by Gu Zhenqing is very interesting. As far as the "contrived nature" of the Chinese avant-garde is concerned, this is not to say that avant-garde art is the same as new media art. When we talk about contemporary art, talk about new media art, talk about avant-garde art, talk about experimental art, we often get a bit confused about how to use the term "avant-garde." As to the question of where the Chinese avant-garde actually exists, how modern it is, I wonder how much of a negative or positive impact Chinese curators have had on the question. I sincerely hope that everyone can have a debate about these questions.

Zheng Shengtian:
I'd like to introduce two simple points. First, the notion of "the power of the curator" sounds almost scary, it almost grates on the ears. But the point made by Zhang Qing about the curator as a "servant," that also sounds a bit too modest. I think we're ignoring the fact that a curator is to a very large extent a mediator, especially here in China. In this so-called "Chinese context," if a curator wants to put his own ideas and the artists whose work he likes into an exhibition space, in the Chinese environment, he must use all sorts of knowledge to negotiate with the system. We don't need to say "self;" I also find this word grating on the ears, but it is nonetheless a form of mediation. Today we have spoken a lot, and people are very worried about being incorporated into the system. But we also can't ignore the question of being incorporated into the market; that's another danger. What we were just saying about why the Western avant-garde is no longer an avant-garde, it is actually a result of incorporation by the market and by the system, a result of both of these phenomena.

Feng Boyi:
I think the Chinese context has a special situation. For example, we talk about the power of the curator. In 1994, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing and I did a book called Black Cover Book. At the time, after the first volume was published, this impact of this book seemed to resemble that of an exhibition. Because back then, this sort of avant-garde art just couldn't be displayed openly. If you say that the curator has power, this is the sort of thing that embodies that power. That's to say, Black Cover Book was able to stimulate the artistic creation of a group of young artists working at that time. Now, like Zheng Shengtian just said, the curator is a negotiator, an intermediary, and a harmonizer. Most of the curator's work is in this vein. Right now I feel that curators have no power at all, though when some artists hear that I'm curating an exhibition, they'll call me up and say "Feng Boyi, I want to take you out to dinner, I just did a new work that I'd love to show you." This isn't power; this is a kind of self-satisfaction. I'd also like to address the worries that the honorable Dr. Lucie-Smith expressed for curators of Chinese avant-garde art. I think he used two key phrases: one was "cherish," the other was "be vigilant." I agree very much with this. But China also has its own unique situation, and Chinese avant-garde art still exists in an atmosphere that is rather repressed. For example, right now I am collaborating with an official museum to curate an exhibition, The Guangzhou Triennial. In this triennial, the Guangdong Museum of Art is going to hold a large exhibition that lasts for two months, and that may have a great number of viewers, many of whom will come from outside of the art circle. This way, regular people will learn that art in China has already developed to this kind of a situation, that art is no longer just easel paintings or classical works. This will present a definite obstacle to these people's habitual aesthetic views, it will be useful. I feel that avant-garde art in China still has a popularizing role to play. A lot of biennials and foreign museums have taken notice of Chinese contemporary art, and perhaps this puts some curators at ease already. But I believe that there will be a new generation of curators who rise to challenge us, and who create a new way of curating in the process.

Wang Gongxin:
We've been bringing up the idea of avant-garde art over and over, and this seems to be a special characteristic in China right now. This morning, Edward Lucie-Smith spoke of the Chinese avant-garde, and in the end, he very passionately encouraged it. When I started to listen, I was very excited, but later I realized that what he was saying lacked flavor. Avant-garde art in the West appeared in the 1960s and 70s, and was in a role of absolute opposition to the government. Today, most countries outside of China no longer have an avant-garde, and I think there must definitely be an objective reason for this. Maybe in the end it was due to its excessive compromise with the government or integration into the culture, but for whatever reason, this notion of the avant-garde barely exists anymore. We still have an avant-garde in China, but I feel like even if the artists haven't compromised themselves, officialdom is nonetheless realizing in its process of "globalization" and "democratization" that avant-garde art is necessary in international cultural exchange. And they have made a gesture to us that they are willing to accept contemporary art. So the question is whether we still need to maintain our independence, or keep up an attitude of protest. We have seen big changes in officialdom over the last two years.

Qiu Zhijie:
Returning to the question of the power of the curator, I want to ask Johnson Chang, do you have more power in your role as a gallery owner, or as a curator?

Johnson Chang:
The only time you have power as a gallery owner is when you're paying the bills.

Qiu Zhijie:
I also want to ask Ye Yongqing, is your power greater when you are an artist or when you are a curator?

Ye Yongqing:
As an artist.

Lu Jie:
I want to jump in here. The kind of "power" I had in mind when I designed this forum was not the kind of power we've been talking about. I was thinking about the intellectual power of the curator, about their professional role, about the power of interpretation. Today we've been talking more about the power to get a free meal, and that's not what I meant. I'm a bit sorry that the discussion has turned out this way, it's my fault.

Gu Zhenqing:
Thanks to all of the critics and curators who spoke today, and thanks to all of the artists in the audience as well. We'll end today's meeting right here.

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