Between Bada and Calvino
- Guangci’s Post-Political Pop Narrative
 
by Zhu Zhu
 
Ⅰ
 
Pop art is an American myth of the 1960s, and “Political Pop” is a Chinese myth of the 1990s. A survey of the theoretical journey between these two terms is an intriguing matter. If we say that Pop art staged an implosion at the core of modernist art, prompting a turn toward post-modernism, then Political Pop dissolved the political myth and faith of utopianism. The former artistically celebrated ordinary objects from ordinary life: coca cola, automobiles, hamburgers, and soap operas. The latter transformed politicized images of socialism to ordinary items: it converted them to soap-opera-like entities. “Pop is not a bad name,” remarked Arthur Danto in After the End of Art, and he went on to describe it: “It is pronounced by inflating the cheeks and then letting out a noise, like the bursting of a balloon.” But when preceded by the modifier “political,” it takes on Chinese characteristics. For quite a few years of being “on the road,” the crutch of politics has been an implement our art still cannot dispose of.
 
Compared to people born in the 1950s and 1960s, the younger generation already has difficulty imagining the pleasure to be derived from hearing the explosion of a political balloon that was tethered to one’s hand. However, Guangci was born in 1969, and his childhood memory retains impressions of the Cultural Revolution. This signifies that he still carries the emotional complex of that period with him. Yet compared to the preceding generation, political strife did not leave a deep imprint on his experience or thinking. This background sets the tone for his agile comings and goings between history and reality, along with his unabashed flirtations with the panorama of consumerist culture. In other words, though his art is rooted in a classic avant gardist Chinese stance of dualism—individual vs. social—he seems even more acclimated to the commercialized reality which has set in following society’s “post-89” shift.
 
Actually, during the “Political Pop” fad of the 1990s, he was still caught up in his post-adolescent phase, and only in the new century did he gradually settle upon a pop-oriented means of personal expression. As an artist his strategy of language would seem to have lagged behind, but it attracted notice because it happened in the area of sculpture. After all, the majority of Political Pop prior to that had been focused in the area of painting. For me, however, convincing evidence of his worth is to be found later: not until the segment of time when his artistic features took shape does a genuinely Pop spirit emerge in China.
 
As the critic Huang Zhuan noted, “In early Chinese Pop art there existed ‘aberrations’ unlike anything in Western Pop art. In the first place, its appropriation of found images was historical and not limited to the here and now. This set it apart from the ‘aleatory’  mode of image selection in Western Pop. By proceeding in this mode, the language technique of de-signification was supplanted by a disposition toward re-constituted meaning.” (See Wei Guangqing, “Historicized Pop Art” in Zuo-tu-you-shi [Image to the Left, History to the Right], Lingnan Fine Arts Press, 2007.) This statement helps explain Chinese avant garde art’s misreading of Pop art during the 1990s, as well as the rush to Pop art strategically. As for the true spirit of Pop, this was not something that Chinese artists could resonate with. In fact, only now that the ferment of commercialism has reached a certain point can the “cultural moment” of Pop be said to have arrived.
 
Right from the beginning Guangci’s creative works showed strong traces of Political Pop. He playfully imitated the public sculptural forms of “worker, peasant, solider” touched ironically on collectivism or bureaucratic institutions, and undermined the conventional view of spiritual guides, idols and heroes. These ultra-political works resembled three dimensional echoes of “Political Pop” from the younger generation. However, Guangci quickly showed his strong interest in, and talent for, transforming current everyday reality and popular culture. His range of topics grew broader, and he revealed indignant, alienated emotions less often, replacing them with bemusement and cynicism. In terms of imagery, he offered his “fat guy”—a fellow whose shape does indeed resemble the inflated balloon alluded to phonetically in the word “Pop.” In his witty, astringent self-account titled “Answered Riddles” he writes:
My fat guys are actually all the same person: no matter whether he is shouldering a rifle, or raising a little book, or riding a horse, or holding a chopping knife, he always shows a features of this era. He walked out of our fathers’ generation, but you will find that he gradually becomes a classmate from your own past, or the fellow in the next apartment, or Old Li from the next building over. He is the one speaking on stage, and he is the one in front of the stage nibbling melon seeds and heckling. He is the judge on the bench and the man in the docket, and so on. He passes through the avenues of this era, and he will go a long way in this profane world. Though I would rather he did not look more and more like our children, my wish is probably in vain, because the soil around us is a fertile medium for his growth. Hasn’t it been said, “Soil is infinitely tillable; only oxen die of exhaustion.”
 
Resignation, regret, black humor, and a tendency towards cynicism and hedonism so as to find relief from self-ridicule. Political and cultural heroism have already “imploded” in the fat guy’s paunchy, mediocre physique. This image itself is at once upright and sinister, holing moral judgment in abeyance.  Along with this on-the-scene rendering of post-authoritarian psychic conditions, Guangci begins to extract more and more inspiration and resources from popular culture. This appropriation of imagery is not done with condescending irony in the mode of a cultural elitist. On the contrary, he shows a certain fascination in his re-creations. For instance, his “Invincible East” I & II are tributes to director Xu Ke’s [Tsui Hark’s] movies “The East Is Red.”  The inspiration for “Chickens and Dogs turn Immortals” came from the Bad Uncle character in the Harry Potter series. “Out of Bad Uncle’s unfortunate end, I created a piece that was well-received and made me a lot of money. So I renewed my efforts and made another piece, and that sold for a good price too. I decided I would not paint a third piece. Since even chickens and dogs had ascended to heaven, it was time to call it quits.”…In such works the boundary between elegant modern art and lowbrow daily life was broken down, and a post-modern coloring became increasingly pronounced. If we say that classic “Political Pop” stresses ideological critique while retaining and impulse toward master narrative and inscription of historical testimony, if we say that it remains attached to the classic concept of art as something independent from mass culture and everyday life, then Guangci un-inhibitedly extends his feelers into the reality of commercially produced images. He enthusiastically consumes everything, sometimes elatedly, but sometimes moaning due to an unexpected twinge. He reconverts all of this to “art that does not resemble art.”
 
It would seem that this is a Chinese version that is closer to the spirit of Pop itself. It foregoes pursuit of life’s inner mystery and focuses watchful attention to surface layers of the here and now. Its lowly gestural language even makes art seem less remarkable than other fields in terms of status and vitality. Art becomes a pickpocket, a plagiarizer of lurid imagery; it becomes a thing that is “like a thing,” as Andy Warhol put it. “It is weighty, vulgar, recalcitrant, sweet, and foolish, just like life itself.” (Claes Oldenburg) However, between the social configurations and cultural contexts of East and West, there is no genuine matching of counterparts; everything results from misreading, collision, re-imagining. For instance, Pop represented by Warhol comes close to thoroughly deconstructing concepts of auteur, creativity, originality, genuineness, and art’s iconic status. For Guangci, or at least for his creative methodology, the center of gravity is still placed on structure and image-forms, and like a classic narrative novel that aims to portray an unforgettable character, the fat man he creates fulfils the dual duties of protagonist and narrator, implying and confiding the complex ambiguous predicament of this era. At the same time, in terms of his works’ rhetorical and expressive modes, he does not adopt Pop’s technique of duplicating visual fragments numerous times to present a panoramic array; rather, he tends to shape scenes theatrically:
I want the figures in my works to be like in a classic stage drama, ordered to hold one position under the stage lights. All the figures are frozen in that moment; you can recall what they were doing in the previous moment or imagine their next posture. The relations among the figures are revealed for all to see.
 
From this we can observe that Guangci is more Pop than “Political Pop”: in comparison to the latter’s language, which is deliberate dissolution of ideological myths, he has a stronger sense of present reality and a more random approach to subject matter. Nevertheless, his creative center of gravity still lies in a dualistic mode of thinking, and is still directed at ideological myths. As for American Pop, it is a bid to undermine and terminate modernism which emerges from considerations intrinsic to art. Previously it never was taken as the basis for Political Pop, and currently it does not serve as the driving force for Guangci’s personal narrative. Perhaps we can frame the statement this way: the switchman of Political Pop redirected Pop onto a political track, and Guangci’s Post-Political Pop extended the political track into the motley, absurd ordinariness of current society.
 
II
 
“Do not ignore the relation of Guangci’s fat guy to his pedestal. He likes being in a high position, or we can say that aside from occupying a high position, there’s nothing else he can do.” This remark was made by a prescient observer and close member of Guangci’s circle. (Xiang Hua, “King and Jester”)  Indeed, such a high pedestal often appears in Guangci’s sculptures, and it can be interpreted in many ways. First of all, it is a playful ironic take on a motif of revolutionary romanticism. Pedestals originally used to indicate iconic bearing and status now appear like stilts beneath the four luminaries of Chinese Marxism (Four Great Men,), making them look farcical and vulnerable, as if an inch from toppling over. Considered along another vector, the elevated pedestals hint at a wish to transcend real-world institutions and settings, to separate oneself from the “infinitely tillable soil” beneath one’s feet, thus constituting a personal space suspended in mid-air. Thus such a pedestal, through distortions of form, can be “promoted” to being the core portion of a piece, and trees are an important example of such a distortion.
 
Though trees appeared in his previous works, his piece “Birdy” created in 2008 marks a turning point. This piece is quite straightforward in appearance: perched in a withered tree is the shape of a birdman, sporting a bulging head, hunched down on a branch and turned for a backward look. Its one-legged stance makes the composition look simple but precarious.
 
This piece appropriates the pictorial form of a bird painting by Bada Shanren, and atmosphere-wise it also has something of Bada’s disdain for worldly things and his defiance of heaven’s dispensation. “Bada’s art was the Pop of that generation,” as Guangci told me once during a conversation. There is not need to sound out the strict validity of this claim, because what he is indicating here is an attitude of reading the classics creatively. In fact, explorations of Bada and traditional painting in general are increasingly having an influence on the sense of form and spiritual atmosphere of his paintings. But viewed from another aspect, the birdman image originates from Italo Calvino’s “The Baron in the Trees.” In this story, which Guangci tells me he has read three times, the protagonist Cosimo is unhappy with the stuffy, stagnant atmosphere of his patriarchal family, so he climbs a sacred oak tree in the courtyard and will not come down. This fantastic literary image is rendered here in visible form by Qu. Of course, this does not stem from Guangci’s search for a visual equivalent of the baron in Calvino’s story. Rather, it is an image which he skillfully incorporates into his own artistic development. What is more, for him this is a merging of images, with Bada’s bird and Calvino’s man being fused into the fat man image he had shaped, giving it features of both. If we say that Bada’s visual expression of disdain for reality, rooted in indignation, is a paradigmatic traditional treatment of extremely personal emotions and ideals, and if we say that Bada’s “untrammeled” quality cannot shake off a sense of heavy burdens, then Calvino provides an aesthetic quality that is more free and flexible, with a richer coloring of fantasy. Such is precisely the “lightness” stressed by this Italian writer:
I always endeavor to lessen the sense of heaviness: the heaviness of human beings, the heaviness of heavenly bodies, and the heaviness of cities. First of all, I endeavor to lessen the heaviness of a story’s structure and language.
 
At any rate, what Bada’s “untrammeled” quality and Calvino’s “lightness” both want to manifest is a sense of completeness in one’s own existence, and this dovetails with Guangci’s inner needs at this stage. In 2007 he left the university where he had worked for eight years; what is more, his works have been rewarded remarkably by the art market in recent years. The shift in his personal fortunes prompted him to contemplate a new point of departure. In “Artworks and Personal Growth,” a recent interview with the young critic Hang Chunxiao, he remarked:
As politics and institutions become increasingly marginal in my life, I fee that even my mode of working has to change….Right now I feel more like a bamboo shoot, with a strong sense of my own growth. More and more I have a sense of my own mode of existence, a sense of experiencing my own existence, and no longer just responding to external things as before.
 
This free-fall-like experience of self eventually prompted the creation of pieces titled “Twittering.” Compared to the isolated figure in “Birdy,” “Twittering” posits a relation of dialogue and response between two birds, which gives an added sense of self-sufficiency to this mid-air life. The birdmen seemingly are not concerned any ore with revealing their own attitudes or standpoints to the world. Rather, they find spiritual comfort and satisfaction in their back and forth exchanges. Such a scene or narrative implies the emotional fulfillment, much celebrated in Chinese tradition, to be gained by singing for someone who can appreciate and understand. In an earlier piece titled “Invincible East II,” Guangci touched upon this subject, and now he has developed it into a series of works. However, compared to lyrical expression of this subject in poems and paintings, Guangci’s works have a rich vein of his own unique jocularity. A touch of idleness seems to have stolen over his human figures; they show a bit of recalcitrance, a bit of doltishness, and they are given a folksy, grass-roots look, hinting at the idea that great wisdom is like simple foolishness, or that they are returning to their true unebellished nature. Complementing this, in other pieces the sense of breaking away from real-world pressures and entering a carefree state between heaven and earth is similarly indicated. For instance, the fat guy portrayed in “Smoke and Mist” reclines on a lofty boulder, as if looking down on the toiling, moiling world, while memories of his own past fade away like smoke from the cigarette in his hand.
 
Along with this pursuit of lightness is Guangci’s intrinsic pursuit of language and detail. The different expressions of each human figure, the long drooping willow branches, the not-yet-dispersed smoke, and the rockery on which each piece is mounted—all of these testify to his fascination with the creative process, which gives his works a text-like, inscribed feel. Language is no longer a tool for transferring thought; rather, it is something that moves capriciously between poles of grammatical structure and rhetorical structure, transforming into a poetic pursuit. Regarding the exaggerated imaginativeness of his own pieces, Guangci once complained, “I feel that many people see the surface impossibility and call it humor, but they ignore the poetic quality that arises due to the impossible imagery.” Now one can say that a genuine poetic quality arises from highlighted aspects of his own character.
 
Clearly these works have broken away from the expressive framework of antithetical dualism and all-engulfing politicization. They have begun to offer the expression of a personal aesthetic. Just as the birdman image originated from dual insight given by Bada and Calvino, the direction Guangci indicates to us is perhaps this: we have to seek a future somewhere between tradition and post-modernity. This is clearly a path filed with possibility and worth anticipating. Similarly admirable is Guangci’s increasing emphasis on individual artistic identity and intrinsic modes of art. However, for him, there is need of vigilance to see that this attitude of “keeping distant from walls” is not adopted in an overly cavalier fashion. Do the depths of the images he composes contain a winner’s sense of superiority and indifference? More importantly, amid the pursuit of “lightness,” interrogation and recognition of “heavy” real-world subjects needs to be kept up, because in this era in which we find ourselves, the high wall of authoritarianism keeps being extended without limit rather than being deconstructed. In fact this is why, among so many new pieces, I have special affection for the piece entitled “The Immortal Cat.” The cat is curled serenely, high atop a cactus plant; it is not weighed down, but it keeps a sense of the prickly real-world setting in which it is situated.

December 2010