Curator: Wei Xing
Game of Identity is a duo exhibition featuring two Chinese-British artists Cai Yuan & JJ.Xi.
Since China opened its door to the rest of the world at the end of 1970s, there were a group of people that has taken the opportunity to go abroad, and started the first wave of migration and attaining overseas education after the end of Great Cultural Revolution. America and Europe were their primary destination. Among them were some of the most pioneer artists who had been very active in launching the country’s first avant-garde art movement in the early 1980’s. Some of them have been lost their cultural sensibility after their migration to the West, become speechless in terms of artistic creativity; while there were others that have been successfully intervened into local cultural systems by employing Chinese political and cultural symbols, using the status of marginality to gain the acknowledgement from the system. There were also some individuals who have been firmly putting themselves in a critical stance, as a speculator, using art as a weapon, to criticize cultural and political phenomena in general, transforming their marginal status as an advantage to attack.
Cai Yuan and Jianjun Xi are the two representative figures of such kind. They have arrived to UK in mid 1980’s and studied visual art at Goldsmith College and Royal College of Art respectively. Although the two artists have received very solid academic trainings in art, they have chosen to carry out their art practices through a very unconventional and alternative way, a method that is anti-academic, anti-mainstream and anti-authority. They executed their radical art performances under the name “Mad for Real”, having gained their fame initially as performance artists. They have actively intervened with the British art scene since the beginning of 1990’s. Due to the difference and discrepancy of social and cultural background, and the years of cultural conflicts and impacts, they have participated in Western cultural and art events as both an insider and outsider. Like many of the other artists living abroad, their 20 years and more experiences gained in living overseas have gained them with broad international vision, so that enabled them to transcend the limitation of the borders between nations, cultures, civilizations, religious and ideologies and geopolitical concept of East and West, therefore differentiated their works from those that were produced within Chinese cultural and social context in terms of pursuits and temperaments.
In 1999, they made headlines on the front pages in major British newspapers and media by jumping on fellow provocateur artist, Tracy Emin’s bed. It was a bold and disputed work of performance. On that day, they invaded the temple of British high culture, Tate Britain, in which the Turner Price nominee’s works has been exhibited, and their notorious jump on the mattress on which Tracy Emin’s autobiographical wastes (including condoms and underwears) that functioned as the carriers of her private memories were displayed, to challenge again people’s limited capability of perceptions and the authority of British high art, endowed this controversial work a new meanings hidden in the look-like irrational and crazy work. This kind of subversion of the subverted dialectically embodied the very nature of avant-garde and experimental spirit in contemporary art. Its antagonism does not appoint to the two different subjective identities, but to the artist’s critical stand against established cultural authorities.
In their recent works, a portrait of young queen Elizabeth that was painted by Warhol in his signature Pop Art style has expressed the artist’s reflections on the relationship between state politics and nationalism. Painted with acrylic, Cai Yuan & Jianjun Xi adopted an image from the coronation of young queen. The technique is not realistic but looks similar to an effect from the silkscreen print. The image of the queen was covered with English and Chinese words; they make people associate these words with the scene when a foreigner is going to have the oath to swear the loyalty to Great Britain. A new work in this exhibition is “Big Ben Tower”, a declining four-meter high work with one side sculpted with the structures and relieves to look identical to the façade of the tower. On another side, a small shrine space is opened, with pictures and miscellaneous objects filled in the space including a statue of Buddha, few Chinese medicine bottles, a bottle of Scottish Whisky and the books “Capitalism” by Karl Marx and “Anthology of Mao Zedong Thoughts”. All these objects are displayed as if they are for oblation. They are the metaphors signifying the history of thousands year’s cultural fusions, conflicts, clashes and mutual creations carried out between the East and the West. So is this installation a symbol of deconstruction of western centralism? Or a sign for the social reality in which cultural hybridity is engendered under the context of postmodernism? Is this ostensible cultural hybridity merely a cover up of the structural world conflicts in terms of race, religion, politics, economy and culture that is brought by global economic Neo-Liberalism? As this declining tower implied, maybe our utopian dream of Community of Diversity is merely an illusion? Or as professor Samuel Huntington has declared in his writing, the clashes of civilizations are human’s foreordination?
In the current social and cultural context, everybody is aware of the issue of identity. It’s the personal label or badge imposed by society. Identity is never a fixed imagination and self-consciousness, instead it’s always in a state of constant shift and transformation, nevertheless its core is never changed. Construction of identity is a social game, a game in which a process of construction, deconstruction, recoding and reconstruction is in constant shaping.
