ChinaSquare is pleased to present EMPTINESS, Duan Jianghua’s first New York solo exhibition. Duan Jianghua’s expressionist-style paintings struggle with the ramifications of power; power worshiped, pursued, lost, redeemed. Duan’s violent and strong strokes, dark and dense, question the space between man and his surroundings, the present and past, things plundered and revered. Calculated angles and vanishing points placed precisely on the horizon, pull the viewer into the subject matter through strong feelings of loneliness and isolation. An overarching eerie metaphysical darkness sheds light on the conundrum of the self. Revisited from Duan’s youth, resurrected from China’s political past, historical sites and monuments now deserted, give way to a heroic yet tragic expression, a fierce contemplative vision of reality. Careful examination reveals an echoing desire for sublimation, one with the intent of redeeming power among the hidden vestiges of history.
EMPTINESS
About the History of Spectacle in Duan Jianghua's New Work
Wei Xing
Our society has increasingly become a society of spectacle. In physical term, it appears as numerous gigantic modern buildings like skyscrapers; in non-physical terms it's reflected by billions still & moving images produced and circulated everyday by mass media industries.
In the past, the construction of wonder was mainly for building up the authority of ideology, religion and politics, or for military purpose, like the Egyptian Pyramid, ancient Roman's Pantheon and ancient China's Great Wall; in today, the mentality is combined with a collective self-inflation of those social elites who are driven by materialism and technological maniac - they are modern utopias of reality, which oversee the society, thus have nothing to do with the populace. Those modern wonders that floating above the city's sky are so magnificent and dominating, they are the symbol of power and wealth, which could also be used to re-construct the confidence of a nation, to display the massive achievement the society has reached on the way towards modernity. Especially in the society of East Asia, the fanaticism of constructing architectural wonders reveals the formal pursuit of modernity and the underneath psychological structures that is mixed with the nation's traditional culture and the western ideology. Therefore , in our city, the ancient great buildings and the modern wonders glorify each other, they together dominate our city's skyline, and also dominate our fragmented memory of history and the imagination towards contemporary life, as well as the vague longing for future.
As an artist who has once won the golden prize of oil painting in 1994 National Fine Art Exhibition, Duan Jianghua did not follow the main stream contemporary painting styles in China like Cynical Realism and Kitsch or Gaudy art, but projects his sight into the relationship between history and reality, turning to the expression of those ancient as well as modern and contemporary social wonders of which have been engrained in the collective memories of Chinese people . He belongs to 1960's generation, therefore he naturally carries a remnant idealism that was marked by the educational background and the personal life experiences of his generation. For him, artist must have a stand, and art must hold a certain historical view and criticism. Although contemporary avant-garde is no more idealistic, but he still believe the value of idealism. This character has kept him from those contemporary artists whose minds are already drifted away to the other terrains. Art to him should has a sense of gravity, but the art of the post-70's & 80's lack this kind of gravity, they appear as in a collective state of weightlessness. This sense of superficiality is actually the heritage from the 1990's spirit of cynical realism, but the difference is that the cynical realism in the decades ago still carried a hidden emotion of anxiousness, helplessness and furiousness, however, the art of the post-70's & 80's has lost this characteristics, becomes the producer of the petit-bourgeoisie sentiment and the images of surreal dreams. Thus they become a generation of artist that is speechless and marginalised, having nothing to do with the society, so the only way for them is to express their boredness and self-indulgence, but in a more trendy way, in order to cater the market 's taste. This is the biggest problem the contemporary Chinese art has faced, since the prevalence of Post-Modernism in the country. For a nation that lack spiritual belief but is good in pragmatic philosophy, its people has become more and more cynical after the broken of ideological belief and the import of Post-Modernism, and this cynicism has since dominated the contemporary Chinese art scene. Under this circumstance, Duan Jianghua's art appears with the temperament of heaviness and depth, it may look a bit untimeliness, but the artist just want to recall the memory and the envisage of the nation's history, through his artwork, in order to fulfill his critical reflection on the reality.
Duan Jianghua's work has been obviously deeply influenced by the German Neo-Expressionism. The post-World War II Germany, after the defeat of Nazism, eagerly demanding the re-construction of the nation's confidence and the historical image, the great artist Anselm Kiefer was trying to redeem the traditional German national spirit and the romanticism, in which there embodied the reflection on the German history, and also containing the hidden recall of the glorious and noble Deutsch populism buried in the dark canvas comprised with tar, heavy paint, straws, papers and lead, to counteract the fake classic iconographies of Deutschland that were fabricated by the Nazis. Duan Jianghua is actually also trying to produce a kind of illusionary atmosphere of history by employing dark monotonous colour, rough brush striking technique, non-figurative style and harsh tonal contrast. Therefore, those ancient buildings that functioned as the signs of glorious history and those modern and contemporary wonders that are symbolized as the achievement of modernization have emerged one by one on his huge canvas. Among which the square is just a repeating element in the painting. It's an architectural form originated in the west, in ancient Greek city-states civilians and citizens used the space for free debate. However, its function has been transformed in China into a space connected with political propaganda and publicity of capitals. Setting out from the space of the square, the lonely forbidden city, solemn official buildings and luxurious CBD skyscrapers have stretched out. The artist obviously starts his reflection upon history and reality by following this line of cityscape. His recent series called "Emptiness", focuses on the historical and modern wonders, placing them on the horizon in the painting image, emerging as some kind of phantoms against the backdrop of bloody sunset. In every image there stands a single colossal building in the middle of a huge square space, painted from a long distance perspective, as if the building was an ancient ruins found through an archeological discovery. The image of buildings range from ancient altars to modern and contemporary official and commercial buildings, they occupy the centre of the canvas, painted with coarse and wide brushwork and heavy paint. There is no human figures in the image, but still, we could sense the omnipresent being of human's shadow over there. The imposing sense of the building and the absence of man give the image a kind of sense of nightmare, as if they are the black holes, devouring countless individual lives. The buildings are composed in a more expressive and symbolic way, with no depiction in details, in order to isolate them from the environment, to protruding the symbolic meaning of the building and the illusionary sense of history brought by the image.
At here we would like to ask ourselves, is there the eternal value exists? Obviously we should not view the history and the passage our nation has been followed and walked by through the historical determinism. In the mind of karl Popper, human could not foresee the future course of its history. American scholar Francis Fukuyama has once written a book called "The End of the History", indicating that the conflict of ideology will go to the end by the disaggregation of the former USSR. No matter how effective his idea will be, but the conflict of ideology today in the world is actually giving place to the clashes between socio-religious groups and civilizations, the erstwhile memories of revolution have gradually vanished in the crack of time. In Duan Jianghua's work, we could actually feel a sense of end of history; it has nothing to do with the issue of ideology. It's neither the nostalgic calling of the past, nor the shallow irony towards the reality; it's but the sincere reflection upon the history and its relationship with the reality based on another level of humanistic care, this is something really makes his work powerful and striking.
History is not only the history of spectacle, it's but the composition of numerous important as well as trivial events and figures, just like what the French Annales School historian Fernand Braudel has expounded. For Braudel, history has three levels: one is an imperceptible passage of history, it constitutes the background of the entire human history; second is about the slow social changes brought up by the conflicts and interacts between different social groups; and the third one is about the individual's life. But in the historical textbook, we could only find out the history of those great humans and significant events, and victories and failures, there is no shadows of the throng, they only form a background. Nevertheless, in Duan Jianghua's painting, we could perceive a manner towards the perception of history, through moving out the human figures from the image, the artist trying to tell us that the history without the populace but only the monuments is desolated and empty.
Duan Jianghua
Searching for a Critique of Culture
Robert C. Morgan
In recent years, a great amount of creative energy has focused on the Cultural Revolution in China and the ideas and personality of its leader, Mao Tse Dong. Many of the artists who have participated in this energy are now in their late thirties and forties, which means they were either very young or teenagers during the time of Mao’s campaign to transform China into a communist state. Many of these artists are blatantly critical of Mao in what is called mahjong art, while others are more sentimentally predisposed to his liking. There are some who are more equivocal, not certain as to what direction to take, and more limited in their field of vision with regard to the influence of Maoism on their work. In any case, the dialogue and differences between these artists has created a vital new discourse in contemporary Chinese art. Many observers, particularly in Europe, interpret this as an avant-garde tendency. From an American perspective, the political insight of these artists is less important than the sheer aesthetic inventiveness. In that not much was known about China during the years of the Cultural Revolution, the hybrid forms of expressionism that American collectors perceive in this evolving period of entry into the international art market is of great interest - less politically, than aesthetically.
In America during the late 60s, copies of “Quotations from Chairman Mao,” otherwise known as “the little red book,” had been translated into English and were being sold in bookstores around Harvard Square and, sporadically, in other college bookstores across the country. For many students in the United States who read the little red book, there was an idealistic expectation that Mao would somehow prove the antidote to the multi-national corporate hierarchy. Instead, they felt a conflicting experience in that Mao’s aphoristic language equivocated between harshness and sentimentality; yet there was little doubt about the visionary commitment of its author. While many students and anti-war activists had a strong antipathy against the presence of the American military in South Vietnam under the pretext of defending the region against a communist invasion and eventual dictatorship, the iron-fisted rhetoric of Mao became difficult to swallow. As reports of human rights violations in China during these years became more visible in the American press, a profound sense of bewilderment occurred among students who discovered that freethinking scholars, artists, and intellectuals were suffering in a way that was unacceptable. In spite of the demonstrations mounted against the Vietnam War, organized in the streets of major American cities, China was regarded, for the most part, as a largely unknown factor in terms of its presence on the world stage. While Mao was clearly a charismatic leader, it was unclear - at least, from a distance - exactly how his revolutionary campaign was going to benefit the large percentage of ordinary working-class people under his command. By that time, it appeared that power was becoming more the issue for Mao than humanistic enlightenment or, for that matter, more important than improving the quality of human life.
While the Cultural Revolution was happening in China, another version of a cultural revolution was going on in the United States. Although, a few American periodicals, newspapers, small press magazines, radio and TV talk shows alluded to the 60s as a time of revolutionary ferment, most of them have disappeared or eventually were forgotten. Forty years ago, however, the term “revolution” represented the aspirations of a youth culture that believed in making a better world. During the late 60s, aspiring young Americans saw the rise of anti-war protests, the Civil Rights Movement, women’s’ rights, ecological awareness, and many other important issues. The desires for change were heard in the lyrics of popular rock bands, such as the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and the Grateful Dead, and signs of rebellion were seen in folk-rock singers, such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and Ritchie Havens. The writings of “revolutionary” writers, such as Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Amira Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, and Tom Hayden, could be found regularly in various counter-cultural books, underground magazines, and pamphlets.
Even as the mainstream media disparagingly referred to anti-war activists as “hippies,” the growing interest in these new political ideas was having an impact on mainstream America. Many of the conformist values, considered sacrosanct in America, were beginning to change as social and political beliefs were also vanishing. It was a period of sustained transformation with moments of heightened awareness in which hundreds of thousands of na?ve young people believed that democracy and free speech could actually work, and that governance, fairness, justice, and equality could be restored to America, even though the manipulations of corporate power and media disinformation were still in control. In essence, it was a period of unbridled hope in a new world on the verge of happening. This courageous and imaginary world was not contingent on a particular nation-state or on a centralized bureaucracy of power. Rather it was about people aspiring to see change and working toward a better life. This idealistic and romantic revolution in America offered an awareness of new ideas of hope that would overturn despair and bring the world into focus in an unprecedented way.
While these abbreviated remarks cannot begin to tell the whole story, it is interesting to compare and contrast what was happening in China and in America in the late sixties and early seventies under the terms of a “revolution” on the occasion of this first exhibition of works by the Hunan-born painter Duan Jianghua in New York. After a glance at Duan’s masterful, expressionist-style paintings - his empty walls, deserted squares, and encrusted monuments, all drenched in an eerie metaphysical darkness - one might consider that the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution in China had a much harder historical impact on artists than the softer repercussions of what happened in the United States. In the United States, the general tendency is to separate culture from politics through kitsch, particularly on the academic level. Undoubtedly some of this is true in China as well, but generally the position of ordinary workers appears more affirmative - in the sense of a quotidian reality - where culture and politics are not separate but indelibly bound to one another. By politics here, one may refer to the organized standard by which people live and interact - physically, mentally, and pragmatically - in order to support their livelihoods. While Duan Jianghua appears very much in touch with these ideas, he is enthusiastic about his predisposition to re-assert the historical position of China both during and since the Revolution. He has been defiant and critical of artist-colleagues whose paintings interpret the recent past in a much more disparaging way. In a recent interview with the critic Zhang Yizhou (2006), he acknowledges his concern for power as a form of identity, that he wants his paintings to express the power and spirit that he believes is missing in Chinese contemporary art:
“I find that a trend of weakness and softness prevails in today’s contemporary art, which lacks a masculine power, or a strong and holy feeling. I want to use my works to express that feeling. My creations have a strong focus on this aspect, which is an outstanding feeling, a powerful and pure thing. It’s the worship to power. I think this is right dealing with the present situation in contemporary art. I express the feeling from another perspective and want to inject a spirit in it.”
In retrospect, the differences between the meaning of power under Mao during the Cultural Revolution and the anti-war activists in America are interesting. During the radical 60s in America, nothing could be more opposite from the concept of revolution than the adoration of power, thus suggesting a semantic and ideological difference from the Maoists. Still, one cannot ignore the Maoist position as deeply embedded in Chinese culture, a concept that many Westerners, at the time, found ironic, if not contradictory. Given that power in Mao’s view emanated from culture, it would appear as one of the great paradoxes of history that his will to destroy culture was the means by which to refine the visibility of power. A sentimental regard for power lurked beneath the substratum of this contradiction. In contrast, the enforcement of power by the American military forces in Vietnam was regarded less in sentimental or patriotic terms than as an imposition of imperialism, specifically by the peace movement on American college campuses of this period.
Today Duan advocates “worship to power” through his paintings. It is difficult to know what this means other than as a kind of nostalgia for something missing from the past. However, his notion of injecting spirit into contemporary art, might be interpreted in a different way, a more positive way, as a means for giving his paintings a signifying force through an exemplary degree of eloquence. This notion is something connoisseurs from the early nineteenth century Salon - or, for that matter, the Ming Dynasty - may have held in considerable esteem, but today is given less credibility. Yet Duan is quite accurate in this respect given the relatively recent transformation of contemporary art into commodities that function on the level of commercial logos ready for speculation and investment. Duan goes on to say:
“The feeling of my paintings and I myself are quite in contrast. I don’t look so strong or violent, nor have much heroism in me. But this kind of thing that lacks in my life is what I want to make up in my paintings. That is a mutual complement of characteristics. So when I first started my painting career, I set up this direction, the pursuit for and expression of power.”
In the West, this kind of power is also identified with musicians like Richard Wagner, the Romantic paintings of Arnold Bochlin, and the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Power becomes a soothing ointment in the aggregate of frustration and despair, a way of controlling the temper and releasing aggression. Yet, it could be said that all great art emanates from a great conflict, that the artist must discover a way of overcoming what is lacking in terms of an ameliorated self-image. One could speak of Picasso in this way, or even Goya. The trick then is to sublimate the conflict, to channel the energy away from the source toward the moment of creativity, and toward the object of creation. It is conceivable that what Duan Jianghua is seeking is less related to power in the conventional ideological sense than a renewed feeling of energy in his paintings, what he refers to as spirit.
A careful examination of these paintings will reveal the desire for sublimation. They reveal a considerable focus and concentration on the painterly field - their lyrical form embodies desire. The Historical Sites, the Pavilions, the Monuments, the Red Walls, the Tiananmen Square paintings - all are resurrected from places in China’s political past, and all places from Hunan and Beijing that the artist knows well. These paintings are visually articulated with calculated angles and vanishing points precisely placed on the horizon. They all contain the embodiment of desire - a quality introduced in his early visionary paintings from the Red Classics period. Duan Jianghua’s paintings reveal a fierce vision of reality expressed through a unified dark tonality. It is a ponderous, yet exalted vision where the artist seeks gratification through densely painted forms equivalent to acts of redemption. What he is lacking is what he desires to fulfill. The process of sublimation goes from the interior outward into an unknown world where all is empty and yet all is sacred in the sense that it exists as a total moment - a frozen interval of time - an emblematic power caught in the hidden, obsequious reign of light. Here once again we are confronted with the spectacle of Dubord, the lost society seeking its own revenge. Here in the midst we sense this fierce conundrum of the self. Here again we are caught within the context of an imaginary social order. The canvas becomes the artist’s stage - in fact, a series of stages: a tragic stage, an heroic stage, a contemplative stage - all resonant with meaning, and ultimately concealed within a romantic fable: the desire to see oneself personified in the ruins of the past, the old order giving way to the bright light that is only found within the darkness.
Of which revolution are we speaking in these paintings? Are they arguing against oppression or searching for a cultural critique? In either case, there is a type of heroic expressionism that Duan Jianghua has brought to the foreground. It is an expressionism intent on redeeming power among the hidden vestiges of history. But can the sentimentality of power be redeemed on these terms? Duan’s paintings appear to be struggling with a question that looms larger than life while, at the same time, history continues to move in its own direction.
Robert C. Morgan is an international critic, curator, artist, and lecturer. In 1999, he was given the Arcale award by the Municipality of Salamanca for outstanding art criticism.
He frequently travels to China where he is currently working on a major exhibition. During the Vietnam War years, he was a Conscientious Objector and spent two years in Alternative Service working with mentally and emotionally handicapped adolescents.
POLITICAL SPACE AND MASSINESS AESTHETICS
On Duan Jianghua's Square Paintings
Zhu Qi
Duan Jianghua’s paintings embody a political space and massiness aesthetic, in which not a single soul can be found. Yet in the vast and silent square and under the shadows of the pyramid-style monument-like architecture, the existence of human beings can be felt everywhere. People in such a deadly still city re-demonstrate the political city by means of spatialized political structure and sense of massiness. What is the significance of reexamining an already deserted city?
It is a big challenge to take on Tiananmen Square as an image of a painting, for Tiananmen Square has been painted by a couple of generations since 1949. However, it seems that for Duan Jianghua, Tiananmen is an unavoidable site, as Duan’s paintings aim at seeking the spiritual core of his generation. The formative reason being that the spiritual core cannot be separated from concepts of politic, square and monument.
Nearly all of his paintings adopt a central theme or composition. In the very middle of his painting is a flagpole, or monument, or tower, or palace hall, which stands out majestically in the far distance, mourning in silence with immense supernatural power. On the front of some paintings is a wide road, a bridge or a square leading to the core buildings. They are not far away, yet they seem to be far beyond the viewer’s reach. In some paintings, a monument lies right in the front with a tower in the far back, and on the opposite side, a deadly vast square spans to the very middle.
Whatever kind of composition, spissated low key tones are employed. The sky tends to be depicted as shaded with black clouds, or painted dim and pale yellow, or painted as a turbid mixture of red, black, yellow and grey in a hazy night mingled with glimmering twinkles. The heaviness and inhibition of sky makes Duan Jianghua’s square an internalized space.
The void of spatial images and tragic tones are actually a kind of subjectification of space. They endow a political space with a sense of self-experience and a feeling of historical existence. Yet Duan’s paintings are not entirely self representation by dint of images. His architecture actually embodies a political and special noumenon, so the massiness, voidness and inanition reflected in his paintings do not come from a subjectification but, rather from the radiance of the political space itself, as if the massiness is due to the architectural size and weight and the fixedness of spatial patterns.
This makes Duan’s Tiananmen Square not so full of Chinese characteristic. It is just a political square instead of one in the modern sense. Since 1949, several generations have regarded Tiananmen as a sign of compliment or irony. However, Duan seems to regard it as a mere political space in the wide sense and without any specific reference or details. Most people depict square simply as a flat image, yet Duan Jianghua treats it as a spatial noumenon bogged amid, which exerts influences on a generation of political main subjects. Although many details are omitted on the paintings, the expressiveness of spatial size and weight, spatial structure and tactile impression is nonetheless reinforced.
Furthermore, Duan’s depiction of the political square surpasses individuals. He aims to seek a sort of Utopia, political space and its failures, meaninglessness as well as a kind of ultimate experience for oneself. It seems that a man who once believed in Utopia would ultimately and unavoidably taste and bear the ultimate end-result, even though he has not, he might still try to arrive at the ultimate end-result as well. Thus this space becomes no longer a daily situation in reality but an internally installed political space.
What is the significance of this internally installed political space then? Duan Jianghua’s paintings actually manifest an individual spatial experience, which surpasses his borders of power. This space must be a symbolic power space with spiritual deterrence and pressure. Every person’s body is a measurement for space. In fact, anyone’s spatial experience is private, and there is no really superpersonal space at all. But the crowd can be organized in a politicalized way. The crowds that form political institutions restrict other people’s scope of body performance, and make the symbolic political space forms of spiritual deterrence and social orientation. For instance, square, palace hall, tower, or flagpole etc. all constitute a superpersonal space.
Superpersonal space is actually a political fiction. Any space that individuals cannot freely visit and explore, and in which people are forced to accept certain obligatory rules, is a political space. Therefore, though political space is objective, sizable, weighty and structural, it always symbolizes a certain person or some men such as the ones with supreme authority or the authority of a specific group. The power system represents a tight organization composed of many people. Only the organization system has the capacity to create such a grand political square and architectural complex.
Duan Jianghua’s pictorial viewpoint represents a change of subjects. It is neither a projection of the object, with the self standing within the body’s border or imaging the self as a member of the great system, nor hostility to the object with the self standing on the opposite side of the power space. The picture is concerned with how an individual’s viewing of an already void system, slightly exceeds the experiential border of some persons’ consciousness and space, and attempts to walk several steps further to watch the symbolic power system. Such a viewing moves toward the power system by a powerless man, yet the significance of the viewing seems to stop just here, for the system has already been a failure or it is void like a waste land.
There is always a fantastic sense of distance and a complicated pro-heavy hue pervading on the paintings. Why isn’t the viewpoint made closer? Is it due to the viewer’s belief that it is not worth viewing since the core areas in the space have been void of people? Or is it because the subject is imagining and thinking over the reasons for the failure? The tower, palace hall and monument are all depicted devoid of interior, just like a solid entity or with its interior forever sealed and beyond access, thus becoming mysterious.
Semiotic painting, as a sheer viewing, treats the object simply as a pure image, yet obviously Duan Jianghua’s painting does not view square as a sign. In fact, he paints not only squares but many power spaces of not so strong symbolic meanings. However, all these spaces are paintings of political noumenon which mainly bases the images of visual experience on the body’s political measurement.
On this basis, Duan Jianghua’s paintings attempt to locate a parent matrix of ultimate experience of the political noumenon, while this parent matrix is just the political space represented by square. This space stipulates not only the basic ebb and flow of political system and its final ends, but also the subjectivity of each individual affected by it. Against this backdrop, Duan’s painting might have found the absolute quality of historical reality and spatial parent matrix, as well as its ultimate significance, thus gaining a sense of tragedy and eternality of the ultimate presentation.
Thus it also becomes intellectuals’ art for self-reflection and salvation, yet throws itself to history and draws out a distance from social main stream, as society has left the deathly stillness for a long time, and run to another rising center. But in fact the political space and massiness has not kept away from us; they are just forgotten by us. Therefore, Duan Jianghua’s painting has initiated a new orientation to re-examine the political parent matrix already discarded by many.
Written in Wangjing, October 27th, 2007
