Cultural Evolution: Chinese perspectives on land, art and ecology.

Introduction

Our narration will start from consider first a well-known painting called Chairman Mao Surveys Guangdong Village (1972) by Chen Yanning.‘The painting was inspired by a historical event in 30 April 1958 when Chairman Mao Tse-Tung came to Guangdong province to make his inspections. In the painting it is a bright summer’s day. The Great Leader—healthy and energetic—is walking speedily and vigourously along a ridge, surrounded by the peasants of the Pearl River Delta, children dashing around with excitement, and an atmosphere that suggests a tremendous surge of joy and happiness.’In The Golden Land Reform----Pearl River Delta: Exaggerated Sociological Imagination by Feng Yuan and Yang Xiaoyan,they also describe the landscape 30 years after the painting: ‘Nowadays the village of Tangxia has long been surrounded by the continual expansion of towns, and has become a lonely village that’s today at the centre of a city. In the Pearl River Delta, the boarder between city and country is no longer clear. If you travel by highway to the areas such as Dongguan, Fushun and Foshan, you’ll come across the countryside of yesterday that has faded away into the wild tendency for urbanisation.’

Actually the Land is always the extreme important and sensitive issue of Chinese society,and the dramatic land transformation has been continuning within different social contexts in different historic moments.Contemporary urban China is like a kaleidoscope presenting different kinds of changing landscapes: urban, social and personal subversive daily life. The forces behind the landscapes are functioning at the same time and conflicting with each other. The reality which is shaped and presented based on these forces is more creative than artists’ imagination. The urban city is acted as a huge piece of art project. Whole urban physical space is like a temporary film production site for hosting the everyday dramatic life. It is very confused in terms of real, surreal or not real in this particular moment of living environment.

Based on this perspective,we would like to create a Paper Forum to open up  dialogs with different people to explore how historic/social context, contemporary urban ideology and art practices constructs the relationship between Land and Art in Chinese context.A much further exploration could be raised from this framework,nevertheless we are hoping the Paper Forum here would have mapped the unique contributions as well as creative potenials from Chinese context.

Hu Fang & Zhang Wei

The Land and New National Image of China

From the ancient time when “all the land only belonged to the king” until the age that “people became the master of history”, in the new China, the reform to land actually is the reform to society, also the reform to landscape is the reform to people. The land reform was romanticised at the beginning of new China, which became a visual expression of a new nation and remained at the core of modern revolutionary literature and artistic endeavours. The dialogue between the critic Feng Yuan and Hu Fang will involve the contradictive relationship between violence and aesthetics in the realisation process of revolutionary Utopia.

Hu Fang: My impression is that political change in the understanding of land and resources is a vital issue in Chinese society. It’s also something that you have studied deeply. What interests me most is how the Chinese artist and intellectual constructs the connection between the political issues of land reform—which we’ll talk about here—and  the establishment of New National Image. Take Chen Yanning’s well-known painting, for example.

Feng Yuan: That painting was created in the later period of the Cultural Revolution. The event it depicts in 1958 was during the period known as the Great Leap Forward, a movement Mao started for the purpose of materialising a Communist utopia. Immediately after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 and the redistribution of land was completed, Mao conducted new reform experiments—Collectivisation and the People’s Commune—which ultimately led to the Great Leap Forward’s disastrous fate. Land was the core of Mao’s Revolutionary doctrine: with a profound understanding of China’s history, Mao had indeed grasped the crucial axis of China’s problem. His famous allegation was that ‘China’s problem is the peasants’ problem, and peasants’ problem is the land problem’. Mao’s Revolutionary framework, from start to finish, unfolded before this essentialist thinking.

HF: It’s interesting that the creation of this new image of China image was synchronised with art and literature representing the land reforms. This is the process of reality being transformed to art, utopia being put into reality not only through force, but aesthetics.

FY: Through political propaganda and of course artist-workers’ ‘make-up’, land reform obtained a positive image. This is just one case of how powerful the entire Revolutionary ideology could become—there are many more other examples, but land reform is paradigmatic.

HF: Wang Shilong’s photographs of that time make a deep impression—the grand spectacle of the construction of terraces. Perhaps we can regard them as Land art in the context of  Modern China?

FY: Certainly, the Revolution was to some extent is indeed ‘art’ driven by politics. Such art, through its creator’s charisma and power, could assemble thousands upon thousands of horses and soldiers with an effect that is incomparable to the scale of western Land Art or Performance Art. On the other hand, however, it produced massive societal tragedy. This is a big difference. After all, when a society has become the experiment of the person in power—it’s the worst fate. In the past 300 years, the Western world looked for a system that would avoid such catastrophes. They succeeded. But we failed.

HF: What in your opinion is the relationship between reforming land, changing landscape and reconstructing people? Somehow, these processes are also occurring in the guise of so-called urbanisation. Has an ideology of ‘changing the face of land’ (大地换新颜-Note:I would like to put the orginal Chinese text here,it’s a idiom)determined the speed and pattern of Chinese history?

FY: If we look carefully we can see the difference. The reform by Mao, to ‘change heaven and earth’ as he said, comprehensively revealed his attitude towards nature and human beings. People were nothing but his bargaining chips used to fulfil his political ideals, with the land of course being these ideals’ experimental domain. Today urbanisation indicates that people are embracing a more advanced market economy despite the relatively old political system—which brings about contradiction. We must discern that everything is dominated by a political framework; China’s urbanisation is a totally lop-sided grand narrative of space. Sun Liping has explored the contention that China is still a divided society, i.e. rich versus poor, city prosperity versus country backwardness. Nevertheless, I want to clarify a point about China’s transformation since Mao’s time. Changes have of course taken place in political structure and political strategy, but in essence politics is still the dominant factor. This is the crux of China’s problem. Consider that whether we are talking about land in Mao’s time or today, does not each context respond to their respective political strategies?

Bird’s eyes Ideology?

With bird’s eyes ideology and based on the name of urbanisation, the land reform was invented in the middle of 90 s’ urbanisation in China. Same as a movement, the land has become the demesne of ideological confliction, and the urbanisation is romanticised into a radical revolution. The land again inevitably became visual expression. But this time, it is the urban ideal leading the land reform. The dialogue between Jiang Yun the editor in chief of ‘Urban China’ and Hu Fang will start from the question “Who is in charge of and inventing the land vision in today’s China”.

Hu Fang: Do you think the city planners in China are acting more like artistsconsider the designers of today’s cities to be like artists? -Utopian ideas are put into practice, risks taken, visible and invisible forces are encountered...

Jiang Jun: Not really. City planners designers are just a tool, although the tool is used to draw grand and conspicuous forms and lifeless statistics. But in terms of art, governments and developers are more fanciful. I am sending you a picture of The Palm and The World island which is developing developments in Dubai. These projects and the Window of the World theme park in Shenzhen are similar as they’re both supposed to represent the Earth. Nevertheless the World islands are being made in the shape of a global map—a more romanticised idea than the Window of the World. Both these phenomena might lead us to suspect that the image of today’s city is more direct, more external, and more suited to media expression than ever before.

HF: And We even have to be high up, flying, in order to see the panorama of a city’s complete architectural plan. In a sense, the city becomes a vast article of consumption that needs be easily absorbed and comprehended by mobile global capital. So design in order to promote has become a significant strategy, alongside whoever has the power to create a city image, and who has the power to create a landscape.

JJ: Land and economy run parallel to each other in China. The government takes the lead, the developer steps in, the designer serves, and people look on. In a panorama, we can see at least three types of landscape: grand narratives by the government, e.g. highways, junctions and plazas; local operations by developers, e.g. masses and masses of thriving buildings or idyllic paradise-like communities; as well as ‘inherited’ landscape transformed by the people themselves, e.g. lots occupied by many households, shanty towns or villages in the middle of city.

HF: From the rural land reform of the past, to the current reformation in the cities, This radical imagination owns the characteristic of continuity.

JJ: Government landscapes are often very recognisable, due to their huge scale, conciseness and symmetrical structure. But such symmetry cannot conceal the chaos of an entire city, especially if you see it from the air. The grid is made futile, as it is overwhelmed by other disorderly textures.

HF: Disorder within extremely huge structures has always been a characteristic of Chinese society, one that’s reflected in cities, spaces and landscapes...

JJ:To comprehend land, one must have the control of the sky. Those who can see the blueprints, can afford to go up the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, take a helicopter flight or can climb skyscrapers like King Kong have the privilege to read the landscape. With Google Earth we have another imaginable perspective. Any internet user is able to download the programme for free and explore satellite imagery of the earth from any point above the globe. So perhaps more and more governments and developers will make grander and grander landscapes to be seen from the air, as in Dubai.

HF: Having a  A bird’s-eye view is becoming an ideology(Aerialology)?

JJ: Yes and then we are free!  :-)

(Il)legal “Empires”

Zheng Guogu is regarded as something of a legend in contemporary Chinese art. Not only has he created unique art objects, he has also created a sustainable ecology initiative  enviroment for contemporary art development. In 2004, he bought about 2 hectare of land in the suburb of the city of Yangjiang in southwest Guangdong province and started Empire Time, a project initiated with a conceptual gardenesque space idea and he is devoting his life to develop it during the process.

Hu Fang: What’s the relationship between the present land ownership situation in China and Landscape of the Age of Empire? Without owning land you would never be able to create the Empire...

Zheng Guogu: I bought land from a peasant, which as you know is illegal in China. So the Empire is illegal at the moment... I will somehow have to make it legal! This is the object of my project—that by making use of public relations, it can become a legal entity.

HF: Public relations with who, the government?

ZGG: Empire is a time that will ultimately disappear. Through stamps and signatures it is being transformed into law, it will undoubtedly exist through the communications I have had with various public departments in government, the Bureau of Land Resources and the Department of Urban Planning and Design.

HF: Doesn’t all land have to go though this process to a degree before it is able to be established?

ZGG: Absolutely. Unless you have good connections it’s impossible to get a licence to develop land.

HF: No public relations,no empire.

ZGG: Unless you are going to plant vegetables on a barren mountainside or a trackless plain. Once you make architecture, problems arise. Landscape of the Age of Empire is an ideal, but in reality everything depends on good public relations.

HF: We might see the birth of a new kind of landscape with Landscape of the Age of Empire—we could call it ‘the individual landscape’—that until now there has been very little space for in China’s policy. It’s very interesting that after breaking all the rules and regulations, you are still going to legalise your Empire.

ZGG: I want to become a peasant, or become a new intellectual going “up to the mountain, down to the village”. [Mao’s policy, begun in 1968, of ordering some 17 million privileged students from the cities into the remote countryside to learn from workers and farmers]

HF:I remember actually Age of Empires is the name of a computer game, you were interested in it a lot.

ZGG: There is no barbecue in the computer game, yet you can find it in my real Empire .

A Parasitized Green Project

Two trees are planted every 1.2 meters, spreading at the office, accommodation and factory districts of the new manufactory area of the Siemens VDO (Huizhou) Company. This is the piece of work named ‘love’ by young artist ChuYun made for the Siemens’s art project ‘what are they doing here?’

They distribute in the manufactory area,not having so big difference from the ordinary factory green zone of the Pearl River Delta. Chu Yun regards ‘love’ as a resource that compares to machine-like system, as a sort of media that can integrate two into one. He cooperated with the garden designer of the manufactory area and parasitize his work within the realistic factory green layout. Thus the realisation process and the final presentation both have the similar appearance of the daily stuffs. They are growing and infiltrating into people’s daily life.

Hu Fang: A very interesting aspect to your work Love is that objectively you created so-called public artwork via a company’s commissioning programme, yet the starting point of your work is completely personal.

Chu Yun: Land has belonged in the political field for a long time and I am interested my interests are the rules for living on this land, i.e. the rules of competitiveness and the assumption that enterprise is the only way of living. Planting trees is compensation for humans, and this is pretentious—it cannot truly rebuild the relationship between man and environment.

HF: So you transform the company’s situation in an invisible way made intangible, conceptual transformations to the company rather than using its tangible, concrete,physical materials constituents such as the grounds or the workshops.

CY: Possession of a piece of land is ideological, and so I didn’t want to directly use land  physical materials such as land as my material. Probably this is the difference contemporary situation from the Land Art in the past.Supposing the pairs of trees had been planted in an open field, the work would have lost its meaning.

HF: It could have had another meaning but would have lost the social dimension it is intended to have?

CY: Maybe, but this is after all is not what I was considering.

HF: We also see from this work how a small space tiny concept has intervened with a seemingly huge system,e.g.a machinery system like company.

CY: We are too credulous at its rationality. The system itself is tedious, full of problems,.

HF: Today we can see artists are working under a circumstance full of paradox, and public art is exactly the concentrated reflection of such paradox. On what level do you think the artist’s individual work will intervene with this reality?

CY: Today’s art still inhabits the problems of globalization. The problems we met in the other fields also exist in art . In my opinion, as for art, ‘image’ is playing the same role in art domain as the ‘capital’ in the economic and political domain. If it is possible to escape from the decisiveness of material and media, it might be more difficult for you to express but more strong potentials actually you can get and it’s possible to transform it into something else.

Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, ed Max Andrews, published by The RSA in partnership with Arts Council England as part of the Arts & Ecology programme, London, 2006, pp.170-179