About “the Age of Empire” (Hu Fang MSN with Zheng Guogu)

The Age of Empire comes from the construction of a personal utopia of Chinese artist Zheng Guogu. This garden-style utopia is not an imaginary historical model or a goal of personal desire, but a tangible space for living that can be concretely felt, a space within reality capable of transforming reality. His praxis is to traverse this space with certain sensibilities and perspectives. It is a life experiment in which problems can only be solved by the passage of time, and in which a sense of the work emerges only with time.

Zheng Guogu is regarded as something of a legend in contemporary Chinese art. Not only has he created unique art pieces, he has also developed a sustainable ecology initiative and environment for the development of contemporary art. In September 2006, Three Life Scripts of a Gambler, a solo project curated by Hu Fang and Zhang Wei was presented in Shanghai, which included a painting Landscape of the Age of Empire from the body of The Age of Empire as one of his Life Scripts.

The dialogue between Hu Fang and Zheng Guogu is excerpted from instant messenger conversations that took place in early July 2006.

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 Age of 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 whom, 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 can be established?

ZGG: Absolutely. Unless you have good connections it’s impossible to get a license 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.The painting 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” — for which, until now, there has been very little space 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 rightly, actually Age of Empires is the name of a computer game, you were interested in a lot.

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

What is to be done? Tokyo: Faculties of Knowledge, Metronome No.11,ed Clementine Deliss, 2006, pp 134-135 (images), 200-203 (text)