SEARCHING FOR OZU or PINBALL, 2005

This silver ball is like your life; this is a machine that can liberate stifled lives, an automatic vending machine for dreams and desires.

– Dialogue from Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru.

I have never been to Tokyo, but the game of pachinko (Japanese pinball) has made such a deep impression on me that I can’t stop imagining myself sitting in front of a pachinko machine, one hand cramming little metal balls into slots, the other hand frantically working the control buttons. The balls ricochet blindly along a pre-ordained trajectory, and while this is happening, all I can do is to wait silently to see what fate has arranged for me – perhaps fate also races along its tracks in a similar way, seemingly haphazard and uncontrolled. Suddenly, a wave of shiny metal balls pours out of the pachinko machine, and in that moment I become the richest and happiest man in the world.

Is there anyone who doesn’t yearn for a moment like this? A moment when the door of life’s labyrinth suddenly swings wide open for you, just as if you had accidentally caught sight of an icon without their makeup on. After the protagonist of Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru – a civil servant who has worked busily for over 30 years without ever taking a holiday – learns that he is terminally ill and has very little time left to live, he suddenly becomes addicted to pachinko, and this marks the beginning of his awakening to life.

After the climax, the pachinko machine’s scoreboard returns to zero, and everything starts all over again.

What fascinates me is the ambiguous, carnivalesque quality of pachinko, the feeling of empty substantiality it gives, and its symbolic status in the midst of cruel reality.

The happiness of being in a state of hypnosis…

—Tokyo-Ga, Wim Wenders

Watching Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953), we witness the slow and graceful disintegration of traditional values in modern society. Of course, this ‘Tokyo Story’ has long since gone beyond Tokyo and become a ‘Berlin Story’, a ‘Beijing Story’…an allegory for the fragility of human relationships in a rapidly changing society.

With this in mind, it does not seem at all strange that Wim Wenders dedicated his film Tokyo-Ga (1985) to his parents. The Tokyo he filmed was not Ozu’s Tokyo, but he captured the city that lies behind Ozu’s films: the extensive golf courses, pachinko parlours, wax-modelled food, endlessly circulating traffic, boys who are reluctant to walk, young people dancing in Harajuku, Japanese people posing for photographs in front of cherry blossom and so on. Under Wenders’ observation, these become indications that the city is stuck in an infinite cycle, beyond redemption. Furthermore, in The World, the latest film from young Chinese director Jia Zhangke, a blurry and cold image of Beijing by night appears right after a scene where a migrant labourer dies on the job. At that moment, the music that can be heard faintly in the background is from the score of Tokyo Story.

Without doubt, the reality that is unfolding in China today is not isolated from the rest of the world. The social consequences of the dynamic urbanisation movement that is shaping contemporary China call to mind other periods of history – such as World War II, Paris in the 19th Century or New York in the 1950s – that created similar kinds of historical trauma.1 Amid such immense changes, people are unable to find an ultimate purpose, and can only drift with the tide. The existential reality that forms is like a pachinko game: people are launched, then move bumping and colliding along an unknown path, the results dependent on chance, until finally the whole game starts over.

In a certain sense, the city has become a giant pachinko machine. Nobody knows who is pressing the buttons, but everything and everyone is being propelled at high speed through the system.

Before the mother and father in Tokyo Story set out for Tokyo, they are looking forward to an enjoyable visit with their grown-up children. What in fact happens is that they are put through an ordeal by a system that goes beyond the scope of their cognition, a system that can wear down and destroy individual lives. Like the score screen of a pachinko machine, this system uses an increase in points as the standard for measuring value, and because of its highly effective and realistic functioning, this system has surpassed the cultural divide between East and West to become the standard measure of modern life. So, Tokyo is no longer the Tokyo it once was, neither is Beijing the Beijing it once was; they have both become a type of community known as ‘metropolis’.

Chinese artists’ collective image dizziness is perhaps the result of their encounter with this reality. Surrounded by the dazing, dazzling motions of the machine of modern society, artists do their utmost to keep from falling into a state of hypnosis.

Tout pour moi devient allégorie… (Everything becomes allegory for me…)

– Charles Baudelaire, Le Cygne (The Swan)

Wenders reminds me of Baudelaire, as described by Walter Benjamin. Baudelaire developed his rapport with the city and its inhabitants during his meandering walks around town. Wenders also passes aimlessly and at random through the labyrinth of the city with the professed purpose of searching for Ozu, and by collecting fragments of film related to Ozu’s work, he reweaves the changing meaning of the Asian metropolis. Another Western flaneur, Roland Barthes, once wrote a book called Empire of Signs while in a bewildered state of mind, a book that completely transcended the space of Japan and became a guide to the methodology of reading a city.

Barthes discovered a reality that had been completely exhausted of meaning; for example: the streets of Japanese cities have no names. However, this led him to discover a kind of practical methodology, where position is not determined from a book or a map, but by walking and observing, through habit and experience. Here, every discovery is intense and fragile, and can only reappear or be rediscovered through the traces it left in your memory; thus, to visit a place for the first time is to begin to ‘write’ it.

It is as if Wenders was trying to touch the heart of the city of Tokyo through ‘rewriting Ozu’; likewise, Barthes ‘writes’ the city as something that can be touched and felt. In this sense, artists must establish their own individual way of ‘writing’, so that their ‘writing’ of the world can outline a new spiritual map, through which we can experience the internal connections of the spiritual world. 2

In the latter half of the 1990s, Chinese artists’ creative centre of gravity had already turned towards the city. Their works destroyed people’s assumptions about ‘unsophisticated China’, and revealed a universal reality where human desires ran rampant within the process of modernisation. Because many works used excessive symbolisation, they were quickly reduced to being market pets, a state of affairs that still persists today. However, in the past few years, some young artists have put increasing emphasis on developing their own ‘writing’, consciously regarding themselves as ‘flaneurs’ who drift freely outside the system, using a method that goes beyond the city limits and breaks through the boundaries of history to observe and analyse their own lives, thus creating a new kind of power. For example, Yang Fudong’s video work Seven Intellectuals in the Forest No.1 drifts between the city and natural landscapes, reconstructing mankind’s relationship with history and landscape, and providing a sudden illumination of the significance of Chinese scholarly traditions in today’s China.

It was the winter of 1970 when I fell into the accursed world of pinball.

– Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

Now it is 2005, and the game of pinball is still going strong.

But without this thing we call a soul, it is unlikely to stir up memories of the past. After Haruki’s protagonist has finally, after a number of setbacks, found the pinball machine he was captivated by in younger years, he also finds that ‘the call of the pinball machine had all but vanished from my life, and was fading into the distance’. His wild enthusiasm has disappeared, never to return, and pinball can no longer ignite the passions of confused and frustrated youth.

Couldn’t it be said that the urbanisation movement currently underway in China is the adolescence of a nation?

This transition, that affects the whole of Chinese society, is close to being the practice of a kind of social evolutionism. City planners, like third-rate artists, are creating urban roadways out of thin air, their visions of a perfect future completely ignoring or covering up the conflicts of reality, and maintaining no connection with history. People, within this kind of development, are no longer the centre of attention.

Conversely, in order that the soul may survive, Chinese art today has had to become a kind of ‘anti-evolutionist social practice’. Artists must heed the call of their consciences; they must set out to rediscover the reality that surrounds them, and reveal the varied possibilities of life.

Ever since the New Wave movement of 1985, Chinese contemporary art has inventively re-enacted and re-written the whole of Western contemporary art history. But now Chinese artists need to jump free of the orbit set by the Western art market and art system, and find an unfinished, entirely individual mode of writing with which to pursue history, query the existing value system, and repeatedly recall the fundamental problems of life. Otherwise, these artists will just be blindly colliding pinballs.

I do not know whether people will be hooked on pinball or pachinko until the end of the world, but I am certain that the films of Ozu will continue to inspire people in different ways at different times, and that there will be many new and different approaches to ‘rewriting Ozu’ or ‘searching for Ozu’.

Perhaps we are now at the point that the architect Arata Isozaki called the ‘ruins of the future’: all cities, at a certain point in the future and a certain point in history, are the same; all cities are already ruins by the time their building is complete. As I see it, this idea dialectically reveals the following fact: all things are gestating their own ending within themselves. ‘As the market economy prospered, we realised that the monument of the bourgeoisie was already in ruins before it collapsed.’ 3

No matter how you work the controls, pinball’s rate of compensation has already been set by someone else well in advance, and after all, life is not the same as pinball – life is not a trap.

Note 1. In an e-mail exchange between Sze Tsung Leong and myself, he talked about why he made his History Images series: ‘My intent is not only to show the changes to cities in China, but to also allude to the cycles of history that are expressed through dramatic changes in urban form: times of warfare, such as World War II; times of social and economic change, such as Paris in the mid-19th century or the US in the 1950s. All these have parallels in China today, with similar traumas inflicted on historical cities, similar exploitation of underprivileged populations, similar exertions of political power and economic opportunism. Only in China it is happening at an accelerated rate, at a greater scale than previous manifestations.’

Note 2. Concerning the possible outcomes of ‘writing’ in reality, we can refer to the image of a ‘palimpsest’ put forward by Nanjo Fumio in his essay ‘Theory of the Metropolis as a Many Layered Palimpsest’: ‘An accumulation of different strata; the old and the new, the local and the global, the Asian city is both a labyrinth of desire and a many layered palimpsest.’ He goes on to point out that, under the surface of the vigorous development seen in Asia’s metropolises, the unique traditional culture and customs of each city still remains: ‘In the midst of contemporary cultural symbols, these traditions are either clearly revealed, metaphorically manifested or suppressed. Thus, metaphorically, these city phenomena are like giant palimpsests’. (Site of Desire, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1998)

Note 3. Quoted from Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, The New Left Press, London, 1973.

Follow Me! Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennuim, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2005, pp.44-48