What Does Not Stand Cannot Fall: Wang Wei's Temporary
Spaces
by Phil Tinari
0. A Radically Condensed Summary of the
Exhibition:
Wang Wei, Beijing artist and
photographer for the Beijing Youth Daily, uses two weeks and ten workers to
build a 100 meter square, 4 meter high brick enclosure on the northeast fringes
of Beijing inside a gallery that fancies itself an "alternative
space" in a re-developed factory compound that fancies itself an "art
district." The kicker is, it's really Wang's brick box that is the
"alternative space," as no one can enter. The bricks are delivered on
donkey carts by peasants who actually collect bricks from demolished buildings
for a living. The artist takes pictures of the box getting bigger by the day,
and of the peasants who make it get bigger. When it is at its largest, he holds
a big party and invites everyone to the space, where they have to squeeze
around each other because there is only one meter of gallery left on each side
of this big brick box. Then, when the party is over, the peasants tear
everything down and buy back the bricks that haven't broken, at less than half
of what they sold them to us for. We all think the bricks are completely gone,
and the whole thing is a neat commentary on construction and destruction and
the leave-no-traces state of development in the capital. But the photographs,
unlike the bricks, are going nowhere.
1. Brickmongers and Bobos Between
Fourth and Fifth
It is summer. It is hot. They are
holding blunt-edged butcher cleavers, hacking rhythmically at the mortar left
mostly on the bottom surface of whichever brick in a very large pile they
happen to be holding. Let's call them brickmongers, charged with salvaging the
cells of buildings that have passed their expiry date and selling them at a
margin. There are dozens of them, squatting in clusters atop the wreckage of
some recently demolished homes. Donkeys, carts, and donkeys strapped to carts
wait around the edges of the pile. It is 8 a.m. and they have just finished
eating lunch; they have been up since 3a.m. Every fifteen minutes or so a man
with a Styrofoam box strapped to the back of his bike comes by selling slices
of watermelon. Their children play in rubble.
They shout back and forth in the
dialect of their native Zhangjiakou, a provincial town in Hebei, just a few
hours north of here by train, or a few days by donkey cart, which is how they
make the journey each year come Spring Festival. "Here" is east of
the East Fourth Ring but west of the East Fifth Ring, among the red clay remains
of what was once a remote farming village and what will soon become an
expensive suburb. The long corridor-houses and their vaguely traditional
Chinese roofs have met the sledgehammer. On the main road just to the west,
large characters on tall walls of brick painted white proclaim the area
"the backyard of the CBD(1)," and provide glossy photorealist
previews of the luxury low-rises to come.
The cleavers hack until about 11:30,
when the brickmongers put them down and begin to make sense of the piles of clean
and semi-clean bricks they have created. Some of the clean bricks are in near
perfect condition, others are short a corner or split in two. Extending a left
arm, a brickmonger stacks six or seven pieces vertically against the crook of
that arm. His or her right arm then stabilizes the stack from above in
preparation for the ten-meter walk from pile to cart. He or she lies the bricks
longwise on the back of the cart, first coating the cartbed, then stacking
three and four high, working around the wheel wells. A cart can hold a thousand
bricks, a typical harvest for one day. Cartful by cartful, the bricks are
hauled off by donkeys and delivered and sold even further from the city center,
at RMB 0.13 a pop. In a day, a brickmonger might make RMB 40, about $5.
Ten kilometers north of here, legions
of native Beijingers are heading to work. They wear name-embroidered jumpsuits
and ride bikes, and are headed down a street that used to be excessively
potholed, but is now smooth, macadam as epidermis. They come up from the
tenements just slightly south of here, turn right at the gaudy red and pink
Hongyuan Apartments, and enter the web of factory chambers that still function
as factory chambers, here beside the Airport Expressway in the suddenly hip
industrial neighborhood of Dashanzi. They use 1950s East German tools and die
to produce components for cell phone batteries and fiberglass boats for
amusement park rides. They work under the Bauhaus skylights of early Second
World solidarity, in rooms that have been earmarked for gentrification months
ago. Metal shavings pile up like sausage curls around the bases of the austere
turquoise machines until it is time for lunch, and then again until it is time
to ride the bikes back to the tenements. They make more than RMB 40 a day, but
not by much.
Elsewhere in the compound, in the
chambers of the former Factory 798(2), a few single women are beginning their
workdays in more-or-less designer clothes. There is Sun Ning at 798 Space, Shi
Shi and Wang Jing at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, Wen Jing at 798 Photo Gallery.
The wonders of development: in what we are now asked to call the "Dashanzi
Art District," a room that used to require a hundred-some sweaty men for
significant GNP contribution requires now just one perfumed alumna of an arts
administration graduate program in London. These galleries are the reason why
the street is now smooth.
Cognoscenti behind flat-screen
monitors, they sit amidst mediocre paintings and sculptures by local artists,
beneath grandiosely vaulted cement ceilings, in the glow of indirect sunlight
as per the Bauhaus precept that nothing in any of these massive rooms should
produce a shadow. They answer the standard questions from the daily string of
upper-crust Chinese and curious foreigners: off-duty CCTV producers, German
radio correspondents, bohemian youngsters from the Central Academy. Everyone
inquires about the rent.
And they sit in halls of brick, brick
that seems permanent, and that has as much of a claim to permanence as anything
in the People's Republic, laid neatly in the early 1950s, before Soviet
friendship and money dried up. The funny part is that this whole postindustrial
mise-en-scene, which looks at the moment completely evolved and in a word
perfect, has really just been blinked into existence in a yearlong series of
half-baked get-rich-quick schemes followed by supplicatory calls and dinner
invitations to a man named He Xiaoming, administrator in the byzantine Seven
Star Corporation(4 )that now administers this land. And despite the major money
poured into renovations, the political clout of the new tenants, a celebrated
drive to have the spaces earmarked as "cultural artifacts," and the
legal obligations of the three-year leases most have signed, no one can promise
that in a few months the brickmongers won't be feasting their cleavers on this
set of demolished buildings.
1(a). Geography Lesson
Beijing is a city of concentric rings.
At the center there is the forbidden city, surrounded by a moat, theoretically
the first ring. The Second Ring runs atop the city's main subway line, tracing
the route once woven by the municipal ramparts. The Third Ring was completed
shortly after 1989, and is dotted with great temples of 1990s urbanization: the
twin-towered China World Trade Center, the Great Wall Hotel, the Lufthansa
Center, Ikea. Finished in 2000, the Fourth Ring does not run quite far north
enough to encompass the great universities of the northwest, but far south and
west enough to take in acres of farmland ripe for re-development, now mostly
inhabited by old Beijingers whose inner-second-ring alleyway houses (called
hutongs) were torn down to make way for glass and steel. Its eastern length
begins just below the Lido, a bizarre hotel, mall, and outpost of Li Ka-hsing
commercial capitalism whose millenial coming sparked a wave of development in
the far northeast. From there it winds around SunPark-a city park that includes
the site of the famed "East Village" of early-90s performance art
fame-and south to SOHO NewTown, the most desirable of yuppie condo complexes.
Though a Sixth Ring is in the works, it
is the Fifth Ring which, at this moment, delineates urban Beijing from its
rural surroundings. Farther out is the land of uncomfortable juxtapositions,
where the concrete shells of bankrupt McMansion developments give shade to
sleeping peasants and forlorn roadside restaurants line the same bumpy streets
as equestrian facilities, golf courses, and $20,000/year international schools.
It is the zone between Fourth and Fifth-greater in area than that between Third
and Fourth or Second and Third, as the rings also get farther away from each
other as they get farther from the center-where new urban space is being
created, and the flavor of Beijing as megalopolis will be determined.
During the determination of this
flavor, a period expected to last at least through that great global signifier
the 2008 Olympic games, (the stadium for which, incidentally, will sit squarely
between the North Fourth and Fifth Rings), a long but finite series of daily
equilibriums will be negotiated with the sweating, breathing collective that is
the capital of the world's quickest-developing nation-state. And at both the
allegorical and the real, physical levels, this negotiation is precisely the
process of picking up bricks from one place, stacking them neatly and
fleetingly on the back of a cart, hauling them farther afield, building
something else out of them, and tearing it too down. Call it urban planning as
alchemy, or progress as kinesis. Utterly unstable, the city is the brick box
writ large.
2. Split Personalities, Running Dogs,
and Biographical Determinism: Wang Wei and Himself
"When I was a kid," Wang Wei
says to me, "you left the second ring and you already felt far from the
city." He is at the helm of a 1996 joint-venture-produced Jeep Cherokee,
and in the back seat is a mound of documentary equipment: cameras, tripod, DV
cam. This stuff is all his. It is morning and we are out together in search of
the brickmongers. He is waiting for the call from his work unit that usually
comes just before noon, sending him first to the newsroom and then on
assignment, dictating the rest of his day. Billboards around the city show
pictures of his smiling colleagues and the masthead of his work unit, the
Beijing Youth Daily. "Where There Is News, There Is Us," the
billboards say.
Wang Wei (b. 1972) went to the Central
Academy, graduating from the mural painting department in 1996. He was among
the very last to get their training on the Academy's original site, at Wangfujing,
in the city center, before the campus was destroyed and rebuilt north of the
Fourth Ring in Huajiadi. He is of the generation young enough to have no real
recollection of the Cultural Revolution, but old enough to have been conscious
of the avant-garde art scene during the brief heydays of the Yuanmingyuan and
East Village artists' communities.
And when the underground exhibition
Post-Sense Sensibility came along in 1999, he became a member of Beijing's last
best avant-garde. Predicated on the idea that a new city was taking shape where
technology and urban consciousness elided individual emotion, that show, or
series of shows, set an agenda-theoretical, formal, political-from which the
city's young art has not yet really strayed. Of the twenty-two artists included
by curators Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun in Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies
and Delusion, all but a few have launched successful solo careers. The show was
the beginning of a major debate over the role of the body in art, which quickly
escalated into works involving human corpses and fetuses. In the four years
since that exhibition, these artists have gotten famous and negotiated their
personal equilibriums with the city and the world beyond it, taking subsidized
trips to Europe and drinking countless lattes. For everyone who said then that
eating a fetus is not art, there is someone now saying that the Post-Sense
Sensibility kids have lost their edge, or even sold out. Wang Wei seems above
the debate, something of a prototype of the new Beijinger, at once native and
international. Let us not forget that it was his work 1/30th of a Second
Underwater that illustrated the story on the Guangzhou Triennial which ran on
the front page of the Sunday Arts section in the New York Times, November 24, 2002.
The fact that Beijing is at the point
where it has what can be called a "leading newspaper" is significant
here. Sparing a discussion of "free press" in a one-party state,
let's just say that there was a time, not so long ago, when the power of consumer
choice in Beijing did not extend into the realm of the media. The Beijing Youth
Daily, which cynics enjoy pointing out, is published by the Beijing chapter of
the Communist Party Youth League, has followed a path into the new millennium
similar to that of many of its readers. An uppity voice of political reform in
the years leading up to 1989, it fell back in line after the crackdown, and
made a shrewd decision somewhere in the early 1990s to attract advertisers and
readers. Its full color broadsheets are now the daily voice of a silent
majority: the consumers, the professionals, the folks who don't need to think
so much about traditional politics-reformist or authoritarian-so long as the
growth rates stay at 8 and 9%. It is the voice of a city that deep down kind of
wants this government to beat SARS and develop the country, that hopes the
cracks in the Three Gorges dam aren't that serious, that can deal with a few
disingenuous Xinhua reports each day so long as they're accompanied by relevant
classifieds and captivating features like "This Day in History." And
its motto, "Where There Is News, There Is Us," which could appear on
the side of a city bus in Peoria accompanied by smiling headshots of local
TV-news anchors, signals a big Weberian shift away from news-as-politics toward
news-as-information. This is Wang Wei's Beijing.
2(a). Wang Wei, Artist
I first met Wang Wei in Shanghai, at a
very hip exhibition on the northern fringes of that city. It was the day after
the opening of the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, Urban Creation. Under the
curatorship of Xu Zhen, a smattering of young artists in Shanghai and Beijing
had done the obvious: rented an abandoned warehouse for an exhibition.
Depending on whom you ask, this "satellite show" was called either
Twins or Fan Mingzhen and Fan Mingzhu(6). Wu Hung, the famous art history
professor and curator was there with his wife Judith Zeitlin, the famous
Chinese literature professor, grinning. Turning to me he said, "It's hard
to believe they can still have exhibitions like this in China."(7)
The one-step-further was that since the
exhibition was called Twins, each work was to have a doppelganger. In a
confusing but ultimately good-natured attempt to make the viewers (who included
many internationally famous curators and critics, MoMA types with big
horn-rims) laugh at the idea of going to an exhibition, the artists hung cloth
among the square white columns one often finds in a warehouse, forming a number
of disjoined "rooms" and ultimately, in conjunction with the duplication
of every work, disorienting the viewers such that they did not know what they
had viewed and what they had not. Call it a dig at the exhibition-goer in each
of us who feels the heavy burden of having to see it all each time they enter a
display. It was funny.
In that show Wang Wei presented Empty
Space, the first in a series of works predicated formally on the box, a series
that I like to think he has culminated, even concluded here with Temporary
Space. Wang Wei's box measured 3 x 5 meters and stood 3 meters high, the size
of his apartment living room. It had wheels, and it was pushed back and forth
by four students wearing facemasks months before SARS. The box was actually a
steel frame, wrapped in a 360-degree panoramic jet-printed image of the warehouse
before the artists had gotten their hands on it, empty except for the square
white columns. It was lit from inside. The twin to this work was a set of ten
square white columns made similarly of steel and vinyl, also on wheels, also
pushed by guys in facemasks. At the end of the exhibition, the columns were
stacked up and sawed into pieces by the facemask-guys.
A few months later, that work was
re-instantiated in the show Re-Construction 798, curated by Qiu Zhijie at 798
Space, as part of the eponymous festival that marked the formal opening of the
Dashanzi Art District to the public. (8)Much attention has been paid by
journalists and gallerists to the self-contented irony of turning these emblems
of early-PRC heavy industry into spaces for the consumption of bourgeois art.
Wang Wei gave material form to this debate by re-creating his Shanghai box,
this time with pictures of the current Beijing gallery in its earlier state of
dilapidated factory, complete with much-touted Cultural Revolution-era slogans
painted on walls.
But what we take from these
installations is less any exogenous idea he, as an artist, wants to foist upon
us, and more a validation of the things we have been thinking about on our own,
in the form of a theoretically savvy and visually gratifying material
incarnation of this or that intellectual/artistic debate. Both boxes mentioned
above actually served as meta-summaries of the exhibitions in which they were
included: Twins was built on the tension of transforming empty space into exhibition
space, just as Re-Construction 798 was a celebration of the commercial
re-vitalization of a previously useless factory. Wang Wei's boxes were parodies
of winks
He is interested in spaces, but also in
how they work on people. He enjoys the discomfort brought on design not meant
for humans. On this front, the uncomfortably narrow passageways in the current
installation 25000 Bricks continue an experiment he began with his work Contact
from the Sound 1 exhibition of 2000. In this work he used four sheets of glass
to transform a door into a maze, and installed speakers playing the sounds of
hands beating backs in the style of traditional Chinese massage.
As image-makers, news photographers are
some of the most powerful actors in visual culture, often creating pictures
with more staying power and exposure than professed works of art. One of the
ideas behind the current exhibition is to examine a largely false dichotomy
between Wang Wei the photojournalist and Wang Wei the artist. His day job,
which makes him that rare commodity among contemporary Chinese artists-a
professional photographer-provides him with a venue to hone his technique. And
now, it has provided the subject matter for his first solo show: he met the
brickmongers in 2002, on assignment, shooting a photoessay for Beijing Youth
Daily.
Just as journalism has informed his
art, perhaps Wang Wei's art may be best viewed in the way we read good
journalism. Well crafted and astute, it blends the aesthetic pleasure of
beautiful composition -here visual, there literary-with the intellectual
pleasure of subtle exposition. It contains "deeper meaning," hidden
just far enough below the surface to make the viewer's work of digging
enjoyable. After we view Wang Wei's work, we get the joke. He makes us feel
smart.
Maybe it's simpler than all of that.
When we first sat down to lay out this exhibition, I proposed a title, "bu
li bu po," which I thought was a witty reversal of the Maoist proverb
"bu po bu li," meaning roughly, "if you don't tear down [the old],
you can't build up [the new]." Cutely reversed, it would mean something
like "if you don't build it up, you can't tear it down," which seems
appropriate given what he is doing here. In any case, I pitched what I thought
was a very cool title to Wang Wei over iced coffee in another renovated corner
of the Dashanzi Art District. He went lukewarm, thought for a second, and
replied, "that sounds like a title for people who think they're smarter
than they really are."
3. Center Envelops Periphery:
Demolition and Benevolent Hegemony?
Demolition has been a near obsession
not just of Chinese contemporary art but of Chinese mainstream intellectual
culture, and of Western journalistic writing about China. We all know Zhang
Dali's facial silhouette, spray-painted onto or sledge-hammered into a wall
marked for destruction. We have read, or at least heard of, Wu Hung's articles
on ruins in Chinese visual culture, which argue that yes, they still exist,
although they're not going to be preserved in anything like the Roman Forum. We
have seen Erik Eckholm's reports in the New York Times, bemoaning the imminent
destruction of this or that corner of the inner-Second-Ring capital. And if you
hang out at the most fashionable of the bars on Houhai (literally "rear
lake," Beijing's equivalent of Central Park), you may have seen New Yorker
correspondent Peter Hessler sporting a navy blue baseball cap embroidered with
the single character chai, which indicates a building is about to be plowed
over.
What is the significance of all this
attention to destruction? I'm going to go ahead and say that it is a way of
expressing left-handed loyalty to a phenomenon we see as basically good, i.e.
economic development. At the Asia Society dinner in late April, Clinton,
reflecting the general liberal consensus, noted that:
China's decision to look outward into
the world even as it has tried to maintain more closure within its society than
most of us would like has accelerated the movement of the world toward
inter-dependence. It certainly has done so economically, but it also involves
other things.
Transparency aside, we know that this
acceleration toward inter-dependence comes at the cost of visual landscapes
many of us would like to preserve, if only for selfish, nostalgic, aesthetic
reasons. We also know that a) this isn't our prerogative and b) we'd probably
rather sit in the café, or live in the apartment, that they eventually put up
on whatever site they tear down. So we write and make art about demolition, but
in doing so, voice mainly a reluctant agreement with the prevailing
political/economic/dialectic consensus that moving forward is on the whole more
important than looking back, at least for now.
Notably absent from the tone of
Temporary Space is the moral judgment that demolition is wrong or bad, or even
worth getting very nostalgic about. Wang Wei has been around this block; his
childhood home met the sledgehammer as his parents' current home might any
month now. Facing this, he is less regretful than amused. His penetrating stare
seems to lock not on the fates of the farmers who once lived in these corridors
but on the entertainment value of the way in which this land will now be
marketed as the next hip place to live. This is not advocacy art.
The other major political angle on demolition
is of course that the brickmongers are exploited and overworked. If an Ivy
Leaguer came over here on a summer documentary studies fellowship with a Nikon,
she wouldn't let us forget this. This doesn't seem to be a big concern of Wang
Wei's either. Sure these people work long hours for not much money. In the face
of this, Wang Wei seems more respectful than sympathetic. He describes their
work as "xinku," "hard; strenuous; toilsome; laborious," a
word that not only describes toil but elevates it into virtue. Students,
officials, artists, brickmongers-if they're doing their jobs, they should all
be xinku.
The utterly unpretentious Wang Wei
actually befriended a group of these guys while shooting his photoessay last
year. "Their personalities are like their horses," he remembers. At
the end of that shooting, as at the end of this little construction project,
Wang Wei and his artist buddy Zhao Liang took their brickmonger friends out for
dinner, spending 70 RMB, $9, on a meal for eight. "These guys eat mostly
noodles and vegetables, and were thrilled to have some meat," he recalls.
Absent here is the sense that he had done his good deed for the day, or that he
had discovered himself by helping others. He even sidesteps a common prejudice
in Beijing-that of the native toward the migrant provincial laborer-telling
them that he is not really a Beijinger but a Shanxi person, and thus a
waidiren, a "foreign-place-person," just like them. He is patient and
non-condescending and generally very cool in replying to the questions they
inevitably have about why he wants to tape them with his DV camera or buy their
bricks for this unorthodox purpose. Instead of trying to preach his art, he
just explains that though he is shooting video, the footage will not appear on
the TV news. He also enjoys the idea that the brickmongers are in a sense freer
than most, as they generally own their carts and sell their bricks at their own
will. Even photojournalists have bosses.
And so we arrive at a seeming paradox,
namely that a work that appears surface-wise quite concerned with social and
political issues actually is not. We could call it a sort of lyrical
apoliticality. It is a loaded and hackneyed claim to say that a given artist or
writer is simply presenting the facts. That being said, there is a tendency in
Western interpretation of Chinese art to make things seem more political than
they actually are, summed up best by a wall text from Xu Bing's solo show Word
Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing at the Sackler in 2001. (9)
This section of the essay was supposed
to discuss the movement of center toward periphery in contemporary Beijing, a
trend that includes the urban sprawl that provides a livelihood to the Bobos
and the brickmongers alike. But as any college humanities graduate can tell
you, center and periphery are more than geographic concepts. It is Wang Wei's
position in a relatively central information apparatus that gives him leeway to
visit the social periphery as an image-collector. And it is Beijing's emergence
from the global periphery into a newly and increasingly central position on the
world-stage that gives his newspaper the imperative to do human-interest
stories that sent him there in the first place.
Broader trend: part of China's becoming
a center involves its own right to move in on its internal peripheries. Here I
cite the recent publication of Zhongguo Zizhu You (roughly Independent Travel
in China), a book identical in format to Lonely Planet China. In Orientalism,
Said provides a stinging dissection of 18th and 19th century travel books about
the East. But what happens when the East starts publishing travel books about
itself? China's current standing in the world gives it new power, or perhaps a
new imperative, to navel-gaze. While some of the forms this self-scrutiny takes
may be recognizably similar to, even derivative of, their Western precedents,
there is certainly room for some interesting, perhaps instructive departures.
4. The work itself
Temporary Space makes no pretense of
permanence. On June 30, a stream of donkey carts came up Jiuxianqiao Road and
turned right into the factory compound housing the Dashanzi Art District.
25,000 bricks, harvested from formerly outlying villages torn down to make way
for Beijing's expansion, assumed temporary positions on the sidewalk outside
the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center. 25,000 x 0.13 RMB was paid to the
brickmongers for the load. For five of the next twelve mornings, instead of
making their daily income by hacking at bricks, ten of these men and women worked
with Wang Wei to erect four walls, pasting their bricks together with mortar.
During the afternoons, Wang Wei used his camera to interpret the construction
of a new space. On the thirteenth day, when construction is through, art
luminaries will enter for an opening. On the last few days, workers demolished
what they had built and bought the salvageable bricks back at 0.05 RMB apiece.
Wang Wei continued shooting, the donkey carts arrived once more, and the bricks
left for a new home somewhere else, probably also between the Fourth and Fifth
Rings. The space is empty again.
The exhibition includes three works.
The first is the building itself, which has been categorized as an installation
and named 25000 Bricks. The second is a video projection in one dark corner of
the space, an eight-minute DV about the brickmongers entitled Dong Ba, after
the former village in which they are currently working. The sounds of
brick-sellers hacking mortar from old bricks waft from a pair of speakers, in
subtle contrast to the sounds of the same brickmongers, physically present in
the space, putting what may be the same bricks together again. The video's tone
is lyrical and documentary. The only text comes in the opening shot of a sign
proclaiming the area "the backyard of the Central Business District,"
and in a closing panel that explains that "around Beijing, three thousand
people survive on the city's destruction." The final shot is a 360-degree
panorama, a classic vista of workers whipping horses, piled debris, and new
apartment buildings-still swathed in green mesh-rising in the distance. And
thus, a video about a project so connected to the ideas of center and periphery
end with a shot that takes in, from a single point, circular landscape.
The third and perhaps enduring work is
a black and white photographic cycle, What Does Not Stand Cannot Fall. Like
Wang Wei's earlier works, the photos, displayed originally on the gallery's
back wall, behind the building they depict, are studies of people (in this case
the peasant workers he has hired for a construction project) in an environment
(in this case the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center, and the 25000 Bricks).
The photos chart the rise and fall of the brick box. Beginning with and
returning to the empty white cube of the gallery, they hint at the instability
that has become one of the few constants of the visual landscape of Beijing.
But they also humanize and obscure its creators: the workers, present in the
first few images, disappear behind what they build.
In subtle subversion of the exhibition
system, we have ensured that at no single point can the all three works be
perceived in their entirety: when the building is at its highest and most
complete, the series of photographs will remain unfinished. Once all twelve photographs
are present, the building will be gone.
And yet while not calling itself
performance art, this experiment is less an installation or a photographic
cycle than a series of everyday interactions with an urban economy that needs
donkeys and brickmongers at least as much as it needs avant-garde artists. In
this economy, perhaps the successful artist is less a creator of permanence
than a practitioner of strategic building and tearing down, someone like Wang
Wei, who captures the zeitgeist if only for a few days at a time. Up and down
and up and down and up and down, from now until whenever.
(1)Central Business District
(2).(3)"Factory 798" and
"Dashanzi Art District" both refer the 1950s military electronics
factory on the northern fringes of Beijing built by in the Bauhaus style with
Soviet aid and East German blueprints in the early 1950s. If you are not
familiar with the artistic topography of Beijing, know that the renovation of
this factory into a SoHo-esque district of galleries and loft apartments has
been the story of the year, summed up by a February 6 New York Times headline,
"A Factory is Transformed by the Art of Real Estate."
(4)A newly assumed name looking to
signify only the most advanced means of production, "Seven Star
Corporation" presumably derives from the 7 at the beginning of the number
for each of the dozen or so factories it includes. One day in recent history,
the state-owned factories decided they weren't going to be numbers anymore.
(5)A Chinese-English Dictionary
(Revised Edition), Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press, 1997. This is
the revised version of the PRC's first Chinese-English dictionary, a pet
project of Zhou Enlai, which appeared in 1978.
(6)These being the names of a pair of
twins, one of whom dates the curator, whose smiling faces appeared on the
postcard/map that served as the exhibition's invitation, which was passed out
just hours before the opening. It contained no actual reference to art, and
looked rather like a perfume handbill. This is how you keep your cover in
Shanghai.
(7)What I think he meant was not that
such an exhibition would be politically sensitive but that the underground
consciousness and general rebellious zeitgeist that produced all the
"experimental exhibitions" of which he is the leading scholar had
more or less changed into one of quasi-official petty capitalist anomie, and
that finding a way in which to be genuinely and creatively underground about
art in China was .now a bigger problem than the traditional hassles of keeping
your exhibition from being shut down by the authorities and your artists from
being locked away on charges of pornographic performance as happened many times
in the 80s and 90s. Twins was successful on all counts.
(8)The managers of the Seven Star
Corporation did not like the necessity implied by a festival title that
translates better as "Re-building Factory 798." An amusing
discourse-control measure was imposed the These being the names of a pair of
twins, one of whom dates the curator, whose smiling faces appeared on the
postcard/map that served as the exhibition's invitation, which was passed out
just hours before the opening. It contained no actual reference to art, and
looked rather like a perfume handbill. This is how you keep your cover in
Shanghai.
(9)An early work by Xu Bing, a series
of oversized chops engraved with the Chinese characters which phonetically
represent the letters of the English alphabet was glossed for the uninitiated
by curator Britta Erickson. The characters for the letter "X,"
(ai-ke-si), were taken as a pun on the transliteration for "Marx"
(ma-ke-si), as the second two characters-"ke" and "si"-are
identical. While the transliteration characters are the same, English letters
are rendered in Chinese according to long established lexicographic convention.
Xu Bing was laughing not so much at the impossibility of transplanting Marx as
at the queer system by which letters become characters.
不立不破--王卫的《临时空间》
田霏宇
序：展览概要
王卫，北京的一位艺术家及北京青年报的摄影师，花了两个星期的时间，雇用了10位民工，在北京东北边一个以“另类”自居的展览空间中用25000块旧砖修建了一个100平方米大小，高4米的“砖房子”。展厅位于一处重新开发后的工厂区内，这里现在已经变成一处充满活力的文化艺术区。王卫在这里修建的这个“砖房子”其实也象个另类空间，因为没有谁能够走进这个没有一扇门窗的砖屋里去。建房子的砖是那些靠在拆迁工地收拣旧砖以养家糊口的农民赶着骡车送来的。当“砖房子”在民工的手中一天天长起来时，王卫把这个过程定格在了照片上，理所当然，砌墙的民工也被装进了照片中。最后，“砖房子”完工，王卫搞了个开幕，遍邀朋友参观。可是大家来了后却只能你挤我我挤你，因为这个巨大的房子与展厅的四堵墙之间，仅留下了60公分宽的通道供人通过。开幕式结束后，农民们三下五除二拆了那个房子，把那些还完整的砖买了回去，付每块砖的钱不到卖出它时的一半。在我们眼里，所有的砖都不见了，整个过程很像是发生在首都的一次修建与拆除并且没有留下任何痕迹的突发事件。
1.四环与五环之间的砖贩子和波波族
夏天，天气闷热。这些人拿着形状很像是肉贩子卖肉使用的砍刀，有节奏地挥舞着，清理掉每块砖头上残存的灰浆，让我们姑且称这些人为砖贩子吧，他们干的活儿是“挽救”那些从完成了使命的建筑上拆下来的砖头，卖掉它们以获得利润。他们一般都是十数人一群，成堆成堆地蹲在那些刚被拆掉的建筑废墟上，而他们的架子车和骡子们则就在一边守候着。早上八点，他们已吃完了自己的午餐，要知道他们在夜里三点钟就起床出门了。这些砖贩子大多来自河北张家口地区。每年春节之后，他们赶着骡车花五天的时间从老家回到“这儿”。“这儿”，指的是东四环和东五环之间的一片地区，目前这里还是北京的一片郊区农村，但过不了多久就会被建成一个高消费的新兴社区。村庄里原来的胡同式平房，和它们那看上去带点中式传统的房顶，早已被敲打得七零八落。往正西的大道上，在刷成白色的砖墙上大书着“CBD的后花园”。清理旧砖的活儿会一直干到约莫中午时分，然后砖贩子们会认真地看一看那一大堆他们砍出来的干净或半干净的砖块。一辆骡车可以装上千块砖，他们要再花几小时的时间把旧砖装车后运到郊区卖掉，每块砖可以卖人民币一角二分钱。一天干下来，一个砖贩子有可能赚上40元人民币。
从“这儿”往北十公里远，每天有一大批北京人蹬着自行车匆匆赶去上班。他们在有着华丽粉红色外墙的宏源公寓那儿右转，进入一片密如蛛网般的工厂区域，这儿就是紧邻机场高速路旁的大山子工厂区。这些工人们每天依旧使用着上世纪五十年代产自东德的各种机具和模具，现在他们每天只生产手机部件及公园里的玻璃钢游船。在发达国家早期普遍可见的那种包豪斯风格屋顶下，工人们一天又一天地工作着，他们每天的报酬超过40元人民币，但不会超出太多。
在这个厂区的另外一些地方，原798厂的几个车间里，几位衣着入时的女士也在忙着她们各自的事儿。孙宁在“798空间”，史诗和王菁在“北京东京艺术工程”，而文琳在“百年印象”。发展所带来的神奇之处便是，我们现在叫做“大山子艺术区”的这个地方，从前可能得有一百来名工人为了国家的生产总值在这里汗流浃背地工作。而现在呢，只要一位从伦敦的艺术管理专业毕业的一身香水味的女孩儿就可以了。艺术空间的管理者们坐在宽大的穹隆状水泥屋顶下不停地回答着人们的一串串提问：他们有下班后的CCTV 制片人，德语电台记者，还有中央美院来的波西米亚式的年轻人，而每个人都少不了会问起场租这个问题。
这片工厂区建于上世纪五十年代，那时来自前苏联的友谊和经济援助还没有干涸。有意思的是这个前“工业舞台”，现在的“大山子艺术区”实际上只是在短短不到一年时间的酝酿与努力后才闪亮登场的。虽然投进来的钱绝大部分都已用于改造这些厂房，虽然进入这片新区的人有一些背景，虽然人们为建成这片被标签为“文化产业”的地方而举行了一次庆祝仪式，虽然为期三年的法律租用合约也已基本签妥，但却没有谁敢百分之百地保证，几个月后会不会见到那些砖贩子们坐到这儿来，在一片拆毁的建筑物废墟上“宴请”他们手中的砍刀。
1(a). 地理课
北京是一座城市道路多环同心的城市，心就是紫禁城，围绕紫禁城有条护城河，边上的路构成理论上的一环。二环循老北京城墙遗迹而建。三环完工于上世纪90年代初，现在道路两边星罗棋布着 90 年代城市化进程中矗立起来的巨大“神殿”：双塔式国贸中心、长城饭店、燕莎中心、宜家家居等等。2000 年建成的四环向南和向西延伸得很远，大片大片的农田被囊括其中，如今这些农田已被重新规划成新的社区，而新区的居民很多是来自二环内胡同平房里的“老北京”，为了给今天的玻璃幕墙楼群让道，他们居住过的胡同早已消失。四环蜿蜒绕过朝阳公园（因90 年代初行为艺术表演而闻名的“东村”原址就在这个公园里）再向南延伸到 SOHO 新城，一个十分引人动心的“雅皮”居住社区。
虽然六环已经开工，但到目前，还是只能以五环作为北京城乡的分界线。五环之外呈现出的是一派让人见了感到极不舒服的情景：那些已经破产、尚未完工的混凝土框架大楼，成了农民遮风蔽雨的休憩场所。一排排门可罗雀的饭馆与出售马术器械、高尔夫用具的商店以及每年2 万美元学费的国际学校在路面高低不平的街道两旁共享秋色。四环与五环之间形成的面积比二环到四环之间的面积都大，而今的北京正在建设一个新的都市空间，然而这个空间的完全确立还需要相当一段时间，至少要到北京 2008 年奥运会（奥运会的主要体育场馆就将坐落在北四环与北五环之间）开幕前才会停止。在这段时间里，汗流浃背、心潮起伏的人们必须要以一种平衡的心态去适应每天发生的各种变化，这就是世界上发展速度最快的国家的首都里所发生的情形。
2 ．多重性格，奔波的苦力，传记：
王卫与他自己
王卫对我说：“我小时候，一走出二环就觉得不是北京了。” 说这话时，他正开着一辆 1995 年产的二手切诺基吉普，车后座上搁着一堆摄影器材。这时是上午，我们正一起去找砖贩子。平时报社的电话通常在中午以后打来，然后分配给他一些拍摄任务。城里到处可以见到印有他的同事们笑脸的照片和“北京青年报”标志的广告牌。广告语这样写道：“ 有新闻的地方就有我们 ” 。
王卫1972年生于北京，在北京新街口附近的一条胡同中长大，那儿在上世纪八十年代末就已被拆掉了。他的父母都是五十年代后期从山西来到北京的；父亲当时来京是因为考上了中央美术学院附中。王卫1996 年毕业于中央美院壁画系，中央美院原位于市中心的王府井地区，后来搬迁到北四环外的花家地，他便成为最后一批在旧校址学习的学生之一。
当先锋派在1999年举办地下展览《后感性：异体与妄想》时，王卫成为了其中的一员。包括组织者邱志杰和吴美纯在内的21位年轻艺术家，多数人后来在他们的艺术事业中都取得了成功。而这次展览，则引发了一场关于身体在艺术中扮演何种角色的大讨论，随后迅速波及到了那些使用了人的尸体和胎儿的作品。展览后的四年里，这批艺术家渐渐有了名气，开始以平衡的心态适应了北京这座城市和城市之外的世界，他们拿着补助去欧洲旅游，豪饮 lattes 。
当时王卫似乎是跳在了那场大争论之外，像一个典型的北京人，集本土特色和国际感觉于一身。我们千万不要忘记，他的装置作品《水下三十分之一秒》，带着完完全全的先锋派思想出现在“广州三年展”上 。王卫现在拥有的这份职业使他可以基本上用自己的钞票去从事创作并在这其中寻找自我实现的满足。
北京青年报成为北京的一个“主流”媒体，这个事实在此很有意义。就在若干年前“北京青年报”还是北京团市委的机关报。到了 90 年代初期它开始采取了吸引广告和读者的精明决策。现在它的彩色大开页广告代言着普通民众的日常心声。它的座右铭“有新闻的地方就有我们”，出现在城市大巴的车身一侧，配着新闻工作者的微笑照片，传递出这样一种信号：一个庞大的媒体网络正从传播政治转为传播信息。这就是王卫所在的北京。
2a. 艺术家王卫
初识王卫是在上海北边一个人流如潮的展览上，应该是
《2002上海双年展：都市营造》开幕式后的第二天。徐震带头，和一小群来自北京、上海的年青艺术家一起搞了个另类的展览，他们租下了一处废仓库来作为他们的展厅。展览的题目被一些人称为“双胞胎”，而真正的题目叫作“范明珍与范明珠”-这对双胞胎姐妹开幕时就分别坐在展厅的两个入口处。著名的艺术史教授与策展人巫鸿和他的妻子Judith
Zeitlin--著名的中国文学教授也出现在展览现场。他一脸微笑地对我说：“真难以相信，在中国他们还能像这样来举办展览。”
既然展览被称为“双胞胎”，那么显而易见，每件作品都有一个“孪生”。参展的艺术家们把偌大的一间仓库分割成了两个完全相似的展览空间，每件作品与它们的“孪生”也各居两边。这种做法的结果是，参观者们在展馆里面完全晕头转向，不知道哪些展品他们已经欣赏过了而哪些却还没有。
王卫在那次展览上展出的作品名为《虚伪的空间》，是正式以“空间”为题材的系列装置作品之一；我自己喜欢把他的这个系列想成是他的颠峰之作，即使是面对当下这件作品《临时空间》也不改初衷。王卫的那个作品，是一个面积为15平米，高3米，和他公寓的起居室大小一致的“房子”，只不过这个“房子”下面被装上了轮子；SARS 流行之前，有四个戴口罩的学生把它不停地来回推动。实际上，“房子”是用金属材料做成的框架，外罩以喷绘出的这个仓库在一个月前的巨幅景观照片，那时仓库里除了柱子以外空无一物。而它的“孪生”品，是10只同样用金属和乙烯基材料做成高3米的长方体柱子，每个柱子也装着轮子，同样由四个戴口罩的年轻人在展区内来回推动。到开幕结束时，那些戴面具的年轻人用锯子把这些柱子锯了个稀烂。
几个月后，王卫在上海展出的作品再次现身于邱志杰策划的展览《回音》中，那次展览是标志大山子艺术区正式对公众开放而举行的开幕活动的主题展。王卫把他原先那个“房子”作品稍做改变，在“房子”的外面罩上了今天这个展厅在几个月前还是一处巨大的工厂车间时的照片，在工厂的墙壁上，到处写满文革时期的革命标语。
应该指出，我们从这些装置作品中所获取的直观感受，已远远超过了我们自己去思考同样事物时所产生的认知。如前面谈到的那两个“房子”，它们实际上本身便是对两个展览空间的刻意复制：被称为“双胞胎”的那次展览，把既是虚构又是真实存在的空间叠加进展览空间后使我们立刻产生了空间的错乱感；而在《再造798》中，又象是对一个丧失功能的前厂房在重焕活力之后的一次时空追忆。王卫的两个“房子”，都成为了当时展览上引人注目的作品。
王卫一直对空间里的空间这个概念有着极大的兴趣，同时也特别关注空间的变迁会怎样影响我们的身体与精神。他很快意于设计的空间作品所产生的那种不舒适感。而这种压迫与不舒服的感觉似乎正是我们面对日常生存空间时的直接反映。籍此也可以断定，眼下这件装置作品《25000块砖》在展厅中出现的那些使人感到非常压抑的狭窄的通道，成了他在2001年《声音2》展览中的作品《亲密的接触》就已经开始了的实验的继续；在那次展览上，他在两个展厅中的一扇门上安装了一个玻璃迷宫，观众经过迷宫时可以从安装了扬声器的狭窄通道中听到在公共浴室中拍背时发出的清脆响声。
作为视觉文化的创造者，新闻摄影师通常可以创造出颇具持久能量和揭示力的影像。随着现在这个展览出现的一个想法:摄影师王卫和艺术家王卫这二者到底哪个身份更具真实性。王卫的职业是一位专业摄影师，这给他提供了打磨自己摄影技术的机会。同时他的这份工作现在还为他的这次展览提供了创作素材：2002年夏天，在为“北京青年报”去拍一个图片故事时，他才与那些砖贩子不期而遇。最初我们坐下来策划现在这个展览时，我提出一个展览题目叫“不立不破”。我自认为这是对毛泽东当年提出的“不破不立”观点的一种很聪明的逆向思维。毛的大致意思是，“如果你不打破（旧的）就别指望能建立（新的）”。我的观点是你“没有建立一个东西，也就不能去打烂它”，而王卫的这件作品好像正好属于我这种思维逻辑。在大山子艺术区一个改造后的咖啡厅里，我把这个题目告诉了王卫。他想了想回答说：“这个名字不够直截。”
3. 中心包围边缘：拆迁与慈善的霸权？
对拆迁所产生的情绪长期以来不仅困扰着中国的主流知识分子，也同样困扰着中国的实验艺术家们。我们都看到了张大力所做的作品，即在北京那些被标明将要拆迁的建筑上用自喷漆或者用镐头猛烈敲打后做出来的巨大头像。我们也读到过，或者至少是听说过巫鸿教授关于中国视觉文化废墟的文章，他的看法是，那些废墟仍会在那儿一直存在着，即使它们不会被像罗马竞技场那样地保护起来。我们也在纽约时报上读到过Erik Eckholm的报道，它为北京二环内到处所发生的迫不及待的拆迁行为而扼腕叹息。还有，假如你经常在后海最时尚的酒吧外闲逛，你说不定会碰到“纽约客”杂志的作家Peter
Hessler，他戏谑性地戴一顶海军蓝色棒球帽，帽上绣着一个“拆”字。
所有这些对拆迁行为的关注有什么意义呢？接下来我可能会说，“拆迁”也可以理解为是一种从根本上说很不错的现象。且不去管它的过程是否透明，但我们谁都清楚，这种使世界迅速走向相互依存即所谓全球化的代价便是各自视觉文化景观的迅速消失。虽然我们当中多数人出于怀旧、审美、以及自私的理由希望它们能保留下来，但是对此我们也很清楚，首先我们不拥有能够让它们保留下来的特权；其次我们也可能更愿意有酒吧坐，或是搬进那些天知道是把什么风景消灭掉后矗立起来的公寓。因此，我们可以就“拆迁”行为奋笔疾书、创作相关的艺术，与此同时呢，我们发出的声音主要不过是喊喊而已，持续发展的政治、经济、对话的一致性才是最根本的东西，远比怀旧更为重要，至少现在看来是这样的。
我们可以感到王卫在空间系列作品当中更多的是对此现状产生的质疑。王卫一直在围着这片地区转悠，他童年时住过的房子已变成了废墟，而他父母现在住着的平房在今后几个月的哪一天说不定也就被拆了。而对于这些砖贩子王卫给他们的尊敬亦多于同情。实际上，王卫去年在拍摄完这些砖贩子照片后和他们中的一批人交上了朋友。“他们的性格很像骡子”他这样评价道。在完成了他的拍照之后，也如同这个小小的“建筑工程”作品被完成后的那样，他和他的朋友赵亮一起，带上砖贩子们去外面共进晚餐，八个人吃下来只花了70元人民币。他十分耐心地回答了他们提出的各种问题：诸如为什么他要用DV机把他们拍下来，为什么他要买他们的砖去做那个莫名其妙的东西等等。
4.关于作品
6月30日，一队骡车拐进了坐落在一片工厂之中的大山子艺术区。他们运来的25000块砖是从因为北京扩建而拆除的东部郊区的村庄收集而来,付给砖贩子们的钱是每块一角三分钱。接下来的十天里他们要用灰浆把运来的砖在展厅里砌成四堵墙。王卫每天就用相机去记录这个新建筑在展厅里的建造进程。当“砖房子”建好的时候，举办了一个开幕式。在展览余下的几天当中，民工们拆掉了他们几天前刚刚建起的“房子”，并以每块五分钱的价格买下了其中还可以用的砖，而王卫则继续记录这个过程。骡车又一次到来把砖运走，之后这些砖很可能会出现在四环和五环之间的某个地方。展厅内则复归空荡。
这次展览一共展出了三件作品。第一件就是砖贩子们修的这个“砖房子”，它可以被称为装置一类，并取名为《25000块砖》。第二件作品是在展厅里面一个黑暗角落里播放的、有关那些砖贩子的八分钟的DV短片，影片的名字便是那个已被拆毁的村庄《东坝》。砖贩子在废墟上清理旧砖时发出的声音，与同样是这些砖贩子在展厅中动手把也许是同一批砖又砌到一起时发出的声音形成鲜明的对比。短片是一种自由随意完全纪实性的风格，出现的第一个画面是一块巨幅房地产广告牌，它指出这个地区很快将会变为“CBD的后花园”，而在其后则有一段解释说，“在北京的周边有三千多外来人口依靠这个城市的房屋拆迁维持生活”。结束的画面是一个360度全景画面：赶着骡车的民工，凌乱的房屋废墟，以及不远处那些还包裹在绿色网状物下的正在建设中的公寓建筑。
第三件或许可以成为一件“不朽”的作品；它是一组黑白照片系列，名为《不立不破》。这组照片挂在它们画面中所表现的那个“砖房子”后边的展厅墙面上。这些照片记录了这个房子建成与拆除的完整过程。照片从空无一物的白色方形展厅开始，那些民工在前面几张照片中出现后，便消失在自己修起来的“砖房子”里，当“房子”被推倒后，他们又重新回到画面当中。
整个展览过程无论从哪一个单独的角度去识别，这三件作品中的任何一件都不能被理解为是一个完整的作品：比如那个“砖房子”，在它被修到最高点处于最完整状态的时候，有关它的这一组照片并没有拍完；而等到十二张照片都拍出来后，它在展厅当中已经荡然无存了。最后我要说的是，既然这个实验作品没把自己划入“行为艺术”之列，那它也就不应被视为一件装置作品，它更像是一系列与都市发展紧密相联的突发事件，这种都市发展既需要先锋派艺术家同样也少不了骡子和砖贩子。在这种发展当中，成功的艺术家可能并不是“永恒”的创造者，而是一位基于战略考虑的实践者，正如王卫这样的人，他在此捕捉到了一种的永不停息的人类特征，建了拆，拆了建，从现在到永远。
翻译：匡渝光
（田霏宇： 25000文化传播中心副艺术总监
美国哈佛大学东方学系硕士研究生）
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