The ''Peasant Problem'' and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art

GU YI The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art I N T H E E A R L Y 2 0 0 0 S , C H I N E S E art critic Gu Chengfeng lamented the absence of peasants in Chinese contemporary art. Having counted works at various large-scale exhibitions in China, including the Chengdu and Shanghai biennials, he bemoaned the fact that less than 2 percent of the exhibits concerned peasants.1 While it is no surprise that contemporary art is urban in its production, circulation, tropes, and concerns, Chinese critics found this absence highly problematic, as peasants, at that time, still constituted the largest social group in China.2 Although the Communist Revolution succeeded because the party addressed the peasant problem, the interests and well-being of the peasantry continued to be diminished by other facets of the nation-building endeavor in Mao’s China. Deemed the true owners of the regime by the state ideology, peasants were in fact bound to the region of their birth by the household registration system known as hukou, and they were deprived of the rations, medical care, education, and pensions to which most city dwellers had access. While the post-1976 reform era witnessed the loosening of government control of internal migration, the mingong (migrant workers or peasant workers), whose cheap labor had enabled China’s economic boom, continued to be discriminated against economically, socially, and culturally in the same urban centers whose construction and daily operations depended upon them.3 This stark inequality pointed to cities as the only destination for the upwardly mobile. At the turn of the twenty-first century, rural economic stagnation and social disintegration became so prominent that these issues were no longer merely topics for public policy. Instead, the peasant problem received widening attention from the cultural sector, including the art world.4 The first decade of the millennium indeed witnessed a wave of artistic projects focusing on peasants. Critical discussions of these works have so far 54 a b s t r a c t This article examines the time-based artworks involving peasants as participants, coworkers, and fellow artists that were created by Chinese artists during the first decade of the millennium. These works bring into relief China’s postsocialist reality and socialist legacy, offering a unique perspective on the politics of time in global contemporary art. R eprese ntatio ns 136. Fall 2016  The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 54–76. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2016.136.4.54. focused on the ways of seeing—looking up, looking down, and looking horizontally—that characterize relationships that intellectual and artistic elites have with peasants. A consensus was quickly reached that both the glorification and the debasement of peasants was problematic; ‘‘looking horizontally,’’ the only ethical and constructive approach, was also deemed challenging.5 Many works on peasants were denounced as little more than confirmations of the moral superiority of the domestic middle class and one more trope for Chinese artists and international collectors hungry for new symbols of ‘‘China-made.’’6 This article intends to rethink the peasant problem in Chinese art through the politics of time, as many works involving peasants are timebased and dependent on durational experience. Moreover, critical discussions of these works also reflect an obsession with artists’ investment of time, which is considered a guarantee of artistic authenticity in the face of overmarketization, both in the contemporary art world and in the globalizing sphere of socialist China. In addition, the temporal structure of art history is greatly contested when peasants and their works enter the contemporary art world. The works involving peasants provide a unique perspective on the problematics of the specific aspirations, concerns, and anxieties of contemporary Chinese art, echoing larger debates about artistic collaboration in time-based art, its hierarchies of labor, and its criteria for moral and aesthetic evaluation.7 China offers a particularly interesting case, as under bygone eras of socialism, artistic agency was bestowed upon the peasants by the state, even if only in theory. Fascinatingly, that historical precedent complicates contemporary assumptions of the potential of art in a global struggle against neoliberalism, assumptions based in the experience and inquiry of the West. It is to these larger debates on the temporal and regional politics of art that my examination of Chinese artists’ engagement with the ‘‘peasant problem’’ intends to respond. Durational Experience and Labor Together We Are, Comrade Migrant Workers, the title of a special exhibition in 2004 in Beijing, epitomizes Chinese artists’ attempts to show solidarity with peasants.8 The heartwarming tone of the title, stressing a harmonious collectivism, was challenged by the most eye-catching work of the exhibition, Together with Migrants, by Song Dong.9 The piece was a performance staged on the opening day of the exhibition. Song hired two hundred migrant workers to crowd the exhibition space. Viewers were greeted by twenty workers at the front door and had to squeeze into a small elevator already occupied by seven other workers. Viewers then walked along a hallway The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 55 lined with workers before eventually reaching the exhibition, where Song Dong and a group of workers moved rhythmically together (fig. 1). During the performance, which lasted from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the workers were specifically instructed to strip to the waist and not to move if they were blocking the visitors. Well-dressed viewers had to endure a close proximity to workers whom they would normally have been able to avoid, despite their figure 1. Song Dong, Together with Migrants, 2004. Performance piece at Together We Are, Comrade Migrant Workers, Today Museum, Beijing, 2004. Courtesy Song Dong. 56 Representations coexistence in the city. The workers’ bare upper bodies not only represented the common working condition of laborers but also intensified the difference in status between the migrant workers and the viewers. Song Dong’s decision to highlight the discomfort rather than the mutual empathy of the encounter derived from his experience of the labor conditions of peasants’ participation in art from a few earlier works. As early as 2001, Song participated in Dancing with Migrant Workers (2001), probably the first piece to rely deliberately on an extended, multiday experience to forge solidarity between the artists and migrant workers. The piece was organized by Song Dong along with Wen Hui, an experimental choreographer, and her partner, Wu Wenguang, China’s best-known independent documentary filmmaker, together with a team of ten participating artists from Beijing’s experimental art circle and thirty migrant workers randomly recruited from that city’s large construction sector. The participating artists waived their own fees so the meager funding they received could pay each worker thirty renminbi (roughly five US dollars) per day.10 The group rehearsed for eight days and danced together on the last day.11 This was not the first time Chinese artists had featured peasants or migrant workers. As the most affordable laborers available for temporary employment, migrant workers became a part of China’s performance art scene when artists designed pieces involving a large number of participants.12 Dancing with Migrant Workers distinguished itself from previous works by virtue of its durational nature, which was believed to have a transformative power that both enabled the workers to enjoy their own expressive capability and reminded the artists of the power of collectivity. The choreography of the work indeed generated a moving and harmonious synchronization of bodies that would otherwise occupy rather separate social strata. However, the work’s main creators, including Wen, were left with a sense of disillusionment regarding the effectiveness of their interventions. Wen later recalled that the artists, when speaking with the peasants, discovered that the workers were preoccupied with the delay or even denial of wages by their employers. They also had concerns with their temporary residence permits, the loss of which could lead to detention, deportation, and often police abuse, sometimes leading to death.13 The artists found that these real-life problems rendered their goal of transformation and solidarity through a multiday collective experience naive, if not entirely irrelevant. Although the artists imagined a common ground and used their own bodies and choreography to synchronize urbanites and migrant workers, the collaboration with the peasants taught the artists the sobering differences in their conditions and social realities. Song Dong was one of the few artists from that group who continued to engage with peasants. In the years that followed, Song produced a few more The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 57 time-based works including Taking Photographs with Migrant Workers and Watching Movies with Migrant Workers (also known as Potted Landscape). Song was not convinced that durational activities in art making were endowed with transformative power. Although he later hired 160 migrant workers and gave each a camera and rolls of film to take photos for an exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art, Song did not endeavor to improve the migrant workers’ photographic skills, nor was he surprised by the poor quality of their productions.14 Instead, after Dancing with Peasants, Song grew increasingly bored with the reductive portrayal of workers as innocent victims of global development and instead became fascinated with their complex realities and tactics of coping. Song’s insight, then, was that durational works would be the best form for unfolding such complexities in the museum space. The complexities of the migrant workers’ experience in these works more or less surprised Song Dong when he was commissioned to create a piece for a contemporary art exhibition on peasants and peasantry at the Agriculture Exhibition Hall in Beijing in 2002.15 Built in the 1950s after the Soviet model, the grand exhibition hall was decorated with reliefs and murals depicting proud peasants as the true owners of the state. To counter such flattened and empty symbols of the peasant, Song set up a scaffold, a structure ubiquitous to China’s numerous construction sites, as the ‘‘stage’’ for the more than one hundred migrant workers he hired to participate (fig. 2).16 As viewers walked into the exhibition, they were confronted with this wall of migrant workers and their bland gaze. The title of the piece, Potted Landscape—a way of traditional container planting—suggested that the workers on display were an artificial arrangement meant to condense or heighten real-life experience. Song made great efforts to encourage the participants to be themselves. The workers upon the scaffold were instructed to do whatever they wanted, whether that was resting, sleeping, or having meals. These mundane aspects of migrant workers’ daily lives were conducted on the elevated scaffold and watched by visitors who had to look up in order to see them. Song recalled that the participating workers drew pride from the respectful gaze of viewers coming to the exhibition. However, as the piece lasted for five days, their initial pride was later diluted by concerns and actions rooted in their regular day-to-day working conditions, for instance, negotiations for wages and wasteful consumption of free food. Song candidly reflected on his own evolution from the well-intentioned sympathizer bringing attention to the peasants to the efficient manager, whose main focus was to whip the ‘‘undisciplined and hard to organize’’ group into a team with a good work ethic.17 On the first day of Potted Landscape, Song made an unannounced spot check to see how many had come back in time after their lunch break and found some twenty workers missing. He docked their pay. A dispute and a negotiation ensued; nine workers were fired and replaced with new hires. 58 Representations figure 2. Song Dong, Potted Landscape, 2002. Installation view at Agriculture Exhibition Hall, Beijing, 2002. Courtesy Song Dong. Song himself found it highly ironic that he had ‘‘become an overseer’’ in these works.18 Although many participating workers enjoyed the attention, some found the work no different from any other paying job, in which they had to be shrewd to maximize their income: some went by several invented names to earn more wages; some seized the opportunity of washroom breaks to leave the performance site early and only came back on the last day to collect their pay; some left with the camera and film (which were not meant to be taken away) provided by the artist without even participating in the project. In order to control the workers for the sake of a smooth run of his work, Song had to resort to a coercive managerial strategy that confronted the hourly politics of time-based art. Durational Investment and Art Around the same time that Song Dong disavowed the art world’s sentimental embrace of peasants, Chen Shaofeng, a Beijing-based artist who The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 59 had engaged peasants for more than a decade, began to gain attention with his first solo exhibition, The Voiceless People, in Germany.19 While a few contemporary Chinese photographers are known for spending years, if not decades, in contact with their subjects (typically subalterns, including peasants and migrant workers), such investment over a long period of time was rare among visual artists. Chen started engaging villagers in Hebei Province in 1993 and created multiple projects over a fifteen-year period. The central piece of the exhibition Dialogue resulted from Chen’s long-term connection with villagers from the Tiangongsi district. He brought a two-sided easel on which individual villagers could paint his portrait while he painted theirs. For the exhibition, the sketches by the peasants and the painter were mounted together, with a seal spanning the two pieces to stress the equal validity of the two parts, even though one was by a professional painter and the other by a peasant. Chen’s project is particularly important, as it marked two major transitions in the way the peasant problem registered in the contemporary Chinese art world. First, the creative talents of peasants became a promising angle for artists eager for social engagement. In Chen’s own case, putting brushes in peasants’ hands was a breakthrough. In his first project in Hebei, Research in Hebei Province (1993/1996), Chen interviewed and sketched more than two hundred villagers. The results were standardized: for each villager, Chen created a document including information about the person, a passport-size color photograph, and his own drawing of the subject in charcoal. As a typical graduate of China’s art academy, Chen’s skill at naturalistic representation was impeccable, and he designed this project as a way to use this training to fulfill his idealistic aspiration to make art for regular people. Although these records amounted to alternative kinds of knowledge, Chen still seemed bothered by the clear demarcation and hierarchy between the artist as the interviewer and the peasant as the subject. It is worth noting that the artist was keen to ensure that his sketching of the villager and the villager’s sketching of him happened simultaneously, which he guaranteed through the use of the two-sided easel specially made for the project. Dialogue echoes Joseph Beuys’s famous line, ‘‘Everyone is an artist.’’20 After working on this piece for several years, Chen went further, in 2009, by inviting peasants to the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, one of China’s most prestigious art institutes, where Chen was then a graduate student.21 As his thesis project, he had the villagers stand behind easels in an academy classroom, making oil sketches of himself, naked, standing as the model. This development of his work indicates the artist’s ever-growing desire to posit peasants in the role of artists. The peasants’ creative genius was finally celebrated in 2003 with an exhibition launched in Beijing by The Long March Project. Led by curator 60 Representations Lu Jie, a large group of artists went on the road for a few months along the route of the historical Long March (1934–36), a retreat by the Red Army to avoid total elimination by Nationalist troops, and leading to the eventual triumph of the Communist Party. The Long March was a time-based art project, unprecedented in scale and ambition: the participating artists made site-specific works along the route of the march and interacted with local communities that had no knowledge of contemporary art.22 It was during this process that the Long March team encountered the striking works and life stories of four local talents: Li Tianbing, a villager from a remote county in Fujian Province, who took photographs with an old camera and developed the negatives entirely with natural light; Jiang Jiwei, from Quanzhou in Guangxi Province, who spent twenty years carving thousands of reliefs with the goal of covering an entire mountain cliff with a maddening pastiche of images and texts; Guo Fengyi, a grandmother, whose painting to ease her hallucinations after practicing qigong (an exercise combining movement, breathing, and meditation) resulted in stunning images of deities with intricately scribbled lines and patterns; and Wang Wenhai, a retired docent at the Wang Jialing Revolutionary History Museum, who made more than thirteen hundred sculptures of Chairman Mao. Strictly speaking, these four artists are not all peasants: Guo was a retired factory worker and Wang is a low-ranking cultural cadre. However, their shared distance from the art world attracted the members of the Long March team, who presented them in Beijing. Neither the art elite nor the regular public in China had ever seen such ‘‘outsider’’ art, while the media found the rich life stories of the outsiders a great angle through which to reflect on contemporary art. The exhibition became an instant sensation, dwarfing even the Beijing International Art Biennial of around the same time.23 The zeal for the creative genius of the Chinese peasants crystallized in Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis (hereafter Peasant Da Vincis), an exhibition created by Cai Guo-Qiang, who is known for his site-specific pyrotechnic displays.24 Cai was invited by the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai to create its inaugural exhibition, to be launched in May 2010, concurrent with the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.25 While the official slogan of the expo, ‘‘Better City, Better Life,’’ was featured on numerous posters, banners, and billboards all over Shanghai, Peasant Da Vincis and its slogan, ‘‘Peasants—Making a Better City,’’ determinedly pointed to a group whose position in this new, fantastic world of urban achievements was awkward at best. The exhibition showcased Chinese peasant inventors, whose limited education and dire material conditions did not prevent them from exploring high-tech projects such as submarines and aircraft. Cai translated the invention and life stories of these peasant inventors into moving installations, such as Fairytale, which turned The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 61 an airy, three-floor atrium into a fantastic world with submarines, airplanes, and helicopters hung from the glass ceiling; with grass and flowers on the ground; and with birds chirping in the background (fig. 3). Not only did Cai marvel at the machine-age-meet-folk aesthetics of these objects but he also convinced the audience of the creative genius of these peasant inventors by repeatedly comparing their lonely, difficult, yet persistent pursuits to artistic creation. figure 3. Cai Guo-Qiang, Fairytale, 2010. Installation view at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010. Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio. 62 Representations The promotional materials for Peasant Da Vincis emphasized that Cai had collected these inventions for years. In preparation for the exhibition, Cai traveled to eight provinces to meet the inventors in person and to select more pieces. Even the length of this tour—twenty days in the busy schedule of a globe-trotting art star like Cai—was boasted of in the writing that accompanied the exhibition.26 Such obsession with the artist’s investment of time reflected the second new development in the Chinese art world’s engagement with peasants: a new discursive thrust that equated artistic authenticity with investment over time. The shared experience of a few days, as in Dancing with Migrant Workers, was now no longer sufficient for artists who claimed to work seriously with peasants. Only years, if not decades, of investment, as in Chen Shaofeng’s work with the Hebei villagers, would win over audiences and critics. Time was held as the only means of overcoming the distance, both spatial and social, between artists and peasants. Once works on peasants began suddenly to prosper and to win quick market success, a durational investment became the only reliable benchmark for determining whether artists were sincere enough to work with a marginalized group living in a ‘‘time zone’’ different from that of the metropolitan, with its rapid and incessant global flow of personnel, ideas, and capital. This new standard of artistic authenticity applied to contemporary artists who wanted to work with peasants as well as to the peasants whose creative abilities were recognized. One of the four artists discovered by the Long March, Guo Fengyi, made intricate drawings of mythical figures that share formal characteristics and aesthetic qualities with works by a long list of established twentieth-century painters. However, at their debut exhibition, fellow artists, for instance Yan Shanchun, were most moved by the works of Li Tianbing and Jiang Jiwei, who had devoted sixty years and twenty years to their pursuits respectively.27 Similarly, almost every peasant inventor included in Peasant Da Vincis had invested a decade or more in their pursuits. Creative genius is often associated with spontaneity and originality; the creative genius of these Chinese peasants, however, was celebrated as diligence and persistence. Their experience was one full of delays and obstacles. Time and the Forgotten Episode of Chinese Peasant Art Contemporary Chinese artists, even the left-leaning Long March team, who were interested in resuscitating aspects of the socialist legacy, rarely mentioned an earlier episode in China when peasants’ artistic genius was acknowledged by the state. Starting from the last years of the 1950s, peasant painting was one of the most sensational socialist art products to receive The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 63 orchestrated promotion by the state cultural and propaganda machine.28 The exemplary case, the peasant paintings of Hu County, Shaanxi Province, reached its peak of popularity in 1973, during the Cultural Revolution, when an exhibition was launched in the National Art Gallery in Beijing and traveled throughout China and overseas the following year. This glorious moment of peasant painters has been remembered as part of the dark history of state control and propaganda in Mao’s China.29 The content and visual language of the peasant paintings of the 1960s and ’70s are now deemed kitschy. More important, the authorship of the paintings is often challenged, as professional artists were routinely sent down to the country to give workshops, and their involvement in the creative process was at times hands-on and imposing. The generally liberal-minded contemporary art world therefore rarely looks on socialist peasant painting through a positive lens. Neither its large-scale ensembles nor the state’s long-term commitment to cultivate peasant painters have been recuperated under the rubric of contemporary art. This collective amnesia is unfortunate, because the socialist paintings of the ’60s and ’70s help to inform the ‘‘peasant problem’’ in contemporary Chinese art. Although Hu County is an exceptional case, its success nonetheless points to the social support needed for mass participation in creative activity. The peasant painting movement in Hu County would not have been possible without the cultural infrastructure, such as wenhuaguan (cultural centers), which the government made great efforts to establish at the county level as a part of its socialist state building.30 Thanks to a particularly enthusiastic director at the cultural center in Hu County and a couple of devoted art instructors, peasants interested in art were gradually organized into ‘‘art groups’’ at the village level, producing blackboard paintings, wall murals, handouts, and later paintings. As early as 1953, the county cultural center began organizing painting classes for peasants. After Hu County came to be known first at a provincial and then at a national level for the cultural achievements of its people, county peasants gained paid leave for daylong or weeklong training workshops, and funding for meals, pigments, and even lamp oil was secured. Faculty of art academies and professional painters of the provincial art association rushed to Hu County to give lectures and run workshops. Seasoned peasant painters who received these trainings were then assigned as heads of the ‘‘art groups’’ of their villages. The art groups met regularly, both to teach newcomers and to provide peer support. The financial benefits and social recognition for peasant painters were such that, by the end of the 1970s, boys wanted to learn painting and girls who could paint were kept from marrying into other villages. Such long-term investment by the government, socially and economically, was indispensible to the growth and popularity of peasant painting in Hu County, but it was nonetheless impossible to apply nationwide under the circumstances of Mao’s regime. 64 Representations The peasants of Hu County invested weeks, months, and years in painting and embraced the creative experience because their creative labor was properly recognized and compensated. The instructors, as well as the cultural cadres that had devoted significant time and energy to peasant paintings, were unwilling to repudiate them as a mere ideological farce. In the last two decades, the original instructors and cadres have advocated for a full recognition of the unique stylistic quality of peasant painting. A revealing example is provided by Cheng Zheng, in the ’60s a young graduate of the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts (XAFA) and one of the tutors sent to help Huxian peasants. Cheng is credited as the tutor of Wu Shengqing, creator of Pumping Station of the Production Brigade (fig. 4), which Cheng considers the most compelling piece of Hu County peasant painting. According to Cheng’s recollection, Wu, no more than seventeen years old at the time, was a newcomer to the training workshop.31 Unable to paint at first, he stood up and asked Cheng, ‘‘Instructor, how should I paint the leaves of corn?’’ Without quite knowing how to respond, Cheng told him to recall his observations of the growth of the corn leaves when he watered the cornfield. This instruction seemed to have an effect. Wu painted with determination; after a design in pencil, he started filling in color. Cheng saw him paint the leaves in bright green and assumed that he would use earthy yellow for the ground. But when Cheng turned back from the other students, Wu had already filled the ground with black. Cheng thought black was a bad choice but did not stop Wu right away. To his surprise, once Wu finished, the effect of the green corn plants on top of the black soil was so powerful that it moved Cheng to question how and what he could offer the students. Cheng attributed Wu’s bold color scheme to the local tradition of embroidery, which featured colored threads on a background of black fabric. In addition to the bright color combination contrasted with the black background, Cheng also identified other visual traits—such as a crowded composition rich with details and small figures with heads no larger than eggs—as characteristics true to the peasants’ artistic expression. The opinions of Cheng and his fellow instructors regarding the essence of peasant art were subdued during the 1960s and ’70s. During the 1990s, however, Cheng felt compelled to make a case for the artistic autonomy underlying the peasant painting of Hu County.32 Although the artists of Cheng’s generation were trained in socialist realism, they were also exposed to such modernist developments in painting as postimpressionism and fauvism, the stylistic novelties of which secretly inspired these young socialist painters.33 Cheng’s description of the peasant aesthetic—abstraction, a bold color scheme, and decorative composition—bears a great resemblance to primitivist modernism. Cheng’s appreciation of Pumping Station of the Production Brigade could only be matched by his dislike of Old Party Secretary (fig. 5), The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 65 figure 4. Wu Shengqing, Pumping Station of the Production Brigade, 1973. figure 5. Liu Zhide, Old Party Secretary, 1972. Courtesy Liu Zhide. 66 Representations the most celebrated piece of peasant painting from Hu County, which depicts a rural cadre studying Mao’s writing. Although Old Party Secretary was also painted under Cheng’s tutelage, Cheng distanced himself from the piece, as it falls squarely in socialist realism, lacks the stylistic innovation of modernism, and confirms the fatal criticism of peasant painting as mere propaganda. Underneath Cheng’s now explicit preferences was his subscription to the theological development from realism to abstract modernism. Voices like Cheng Zheng’s increased after the 1980s, when the aesthetic of peasant painting, as understood by Cheng, synchronized with the Chinese art mainstream, which gradually turned away from the outdated socialist realism and hurried to embrace international artistic currents, from postimpressionism to conceptual art. Art-Historical Time in China It is an interesting coincidence that Cheng Zheng, tutor of peasant painters, ended up becoming an art historian. While some Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century championed the naturalism of Western-style painting as a cultural remedy for China’s lagging modernization, many more believed that the preference for expression over representation in China’s pictorial tradition proved that China was after all ahead of the West and had developed some of the features attributed to modernist art several centuries earlier.34 After the establishment of the People’s Republic, marxist art historians added a class analysis to the chronology of art history: the traditional art of the Chinese elite, they said, is destined to be abandoned by history along with feudalism, but Chinese folk art embodies an artistic essence that is simultaneously modern and quintessentially Chinese. Folk art, such as peasant painting, therefore offers a necessary supplement to socialist realism in order to create a socialist art with specifically Chinese characteristics. After China reconnected with the Western world in the early 1980s, the equally powerful chronology of postwar Western art, from abstract expressionism, through pop and minimalism to conceptualism, made the art production of Mao’s China seem a deviation, as if decades had been lost in art-historical time. Both meganarratives assume an understanding of art-historical time that is singular, linear, and blind to its own temporal assumptions. Contemporary Chinese artists are aware of the potential for exploring alternative forms of temporality through peasant art. The Long March artists embraced Li Tianbing, for example, because he complicated photography with his insistence on an agricultural time. Born in 1933 in an impoverished mountainous area in Fujian Province, Li first encountered photography when The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 67 a British photographer visited his village in 1946. Li worked as an assistant to this photographer and quickly mastered the technique. When his mentor was preparing to leave, Li stole the family cattle and sold it to acquire enough money to buy the photographer’s camera. For the next sixty years, he took tens of thousands of pictures for villagers and of village lives in his area. Because there was no electricity in the mountains, Li had to rely on natural light to expose, develop, and enlarge photographs.35 No aspect of Li’s technique is unique to him, but his continual use of a camera made in the 1930s, and his reliance on natural light, is antithetical to photography’s modernizing role, as the technology has typically been associated with speed and change in the popular imagination.36 What Li took for granted as the elements of his photographic experience—a blanket to darken a bedroom for use as a darkroom, a pipe from the ceiling used to adjust the incoming light for enlargement, and spring water used as developer—all forced viewers to consider the possibility of a time different from the consumer temporality of globalization. The Long March team’s nascent interest in heterochronicity is far from a collective reflection on the assumptions of contemporary art, which still equates conceptualism with criticality and often equates ambiguity with formal and theoretical subtlety. Although the so-called globalization of contemporary art has problematized and expanded the concept of ‘‘contemporaniety,’’ the assumptions of contemporary art based on postwar Euro-American traditions nonetheless remain prevalent in the global art world, including China.37 The curator of the Long March once declared that ‘‘folk works contain the absolute Zeitgeist.’’38 His optimistic conviction was overturned in 2006, when Wang Wenhai, one of the outside artists ‘‘discovered’’ by the Long March, sued Sui Jianguo, a famous sculptor who is also a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.39 Wang spent decades making numerous cute sculptures of Mao in the hope that his renditions would appeal to the younger generations, who would then be lured into learning more about Mao’s great thoughts. After the success of the Long March exhibition in 2003, the ambitious Wang moved to Beijing to actively pursue a career as the ‘‘King of Clay Sculpting.’’40 Wang’s work attracted Sui, who is known for gigantic sculptures featuring such socialist symbols as Mao’s suit, and these works are acclaimed both domestically and internationally. Sui initiated a collaboration with Wang in 2002. Based on Sui’s request, Wang made a sculpture of Mao sleeping under a quilt, to which Sui added color. A contract was drawn up clearly stating that the two were coauthors of the work. Wang was happy to see this piece, entitled Sleeping Chairman Mao, on display at the Today Art Museum in Beijing as another successful promotion of Maoism. However, without Wang’s knowledge, Sleeping Chairman Mao was incorporated into a new piece Sui developed, entitled The Sleep of Reason, which added tens of thousands of small, colorful 68 Representations dinosaurs, a new trademark of Sui’s.41 This piece was exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum in 2005, signed with Sui’s name alone. When Wang learned about the San Francisco exhibition, he was at first quite proud, although a little frustrated that he had not been properly credited. According to Wang, he met Sui a few times in 2005, and Sui did not explain to him the details, but instead offered to buy the copyright from him for 90,000 renmindi.42 What specifically upset Wang—and made it impossible for him to continue to imagine his collaboration with Sui as a service to his lifelong pursuit of promoting Maoism—was the title of Sui’s new piece: The Sleep of Reason, or ‘‘Meng [dream] mei [devil]’’ in Chinese. Wang initially did not recognize the character mei, and was deeply upset when he found its devilish connotations in a dictionary. In November 2006, Wang sued Sui for copyright infringement and won. While the suit caught fleeting media attention, it quickly faded in China, where fairness depends entirely on individual artists being conscientious and taking the ethical high road. But the particularly fascinating aspect of Wang’s dispute with Sui lies in the conflict between two understandings of the nature of art. While Wang willingly volunteered his art toward the promotion of an ideology—or more precisely, the icon that stood for that ideology for some people—Sui approached art as continual innovation, using striking and highly identifiable trademarks to consolidate the mythical cult of individual artistic genius. To Sui, Wang’s approach belonged to a bygone era, one with little redeeming quality except for a few highly identifiable visual icons. Wang’s physical presence in Beijing and his marginal contact with the art world did not seem to synchronize with the art-historical time in his mind or the one of the art world; neither did the art world reflect on this incommensurability. Cai Guo-Qiang’s Peasant Da Vincis offers the rare case of a work that maneuvers successfully through the difficult politics of art-historical time. The various machines made by peasants and included in Cai’s work were not really ‘‘inventions’’; airplanes and submarines, for example, had been invented long before the peasant inventions were created. In the temporality of technical advancement, the Chinese peasant inventors are undeniably far behind: collectively they received little more than a grade-school education and struggled to build, for example, aircraft using old motorcycle engines. However, the exhibition provides an entirely different context for the objects and endeavors of the Chinese inventors. Although Cai initially collected these works because he was struck by their formal appeal, the exhibition presented much more than the mere objects. Instead, the main subject was the pursuit of the inventors. Attentive viewers could learn about the working conditions and life stories of the peasants through wall captions, pamphlets, and a documentary: Tao Xiangli, a migrant worker from Anhui Province, traveled daily four to five hours from his shabby rental apartment in The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 69 Beijing to work on his submarine, parked at a reservoir on the outskirts of the capital; Li Yuming, a peasant in Hubei Province who cared for his paralyzed wife, secured a loan on his own house to make engineless submarines that could be submerged; Wu Shuzi, a peasant living in the deep mountains in Jiangxi Province, made aircraft from school benches so that he could fly beyond the mountains to see the county town; and the list could go on. This biographical information is effectively presented throughout Cai’s installations. Viewers first entered a darkly lit front hall with the wreckage of a plane built by Tan Chengnian (who had been killed in its crash) hanging in the air, with his smiling photograph and a love letter to his wife on a nearby wall. Climbing to the second floor, viewers were encouraged to walk through a small room filled with kites on each of which was projected footage of the peasant inventors. The phantom-like images on the kites shivered in the wind, evoking memories of the past or dreams of the future (fig. 6). The highlight of the exhibition, the aforementioned Fairytale, simultaneously resembled a monument, a cemetery, a paradise, or a parking lot. The installations gave the strong impression of time suspended, while the void left in its place enabled an imagination of the coexistence of multiple temporalities. Although Cai gave unreserved praise to the peasant inventors, marveling at their courage, openmindedness, charisma, and even good looks, he did not approach them as the bearer of the Zeitgeist or the holder of a superior primitive power that could be used to stimulate the art world. He simply celebrated the unquenchable desire for creative expression and the infinite possibilities of its manifestation. In Peasant Da Vincis, the peasant inventors were certainly not behind, but neither were they ahead of time. Linear time had no place here, nor could creativity be evaluated using a temporal measure. Cai set out to bypass the hierarchies and antagonisms of creative labor, and resorted instead to individual drive as the bedrock of creativity. The great difficulties these peasant inventors encountered, most of which were a direct result of the continual exploitation of the peasantry by the Communist state and global capitalism, were treated sentimentally in the exhibition as proof of the inventors’ creative drive. More important, the heterochronicity promised in Cai’s installations could hardly be sustained throughout the entire exhibition space. On the fourth floor, Cai had Wu Yulu, an inventor of robots, run a workshop designed for real-time demonstrations and audience interaction. The most eye-catching displays were a few robots commissioned by Cai representing iconic twentieth-century artists: a Jackson Pollock robot dripping paint, a Damien Hirst robot making dot paintings, and a striking Yves Klein robot reenacting a ‘‘living brush’’ work by dragging a plastic mannequin dipped in paint as if it was an oversize brush (fig. 7). For easy recognition, photographs of these artists’ faces were pasted on the robots. The artist robots delighted audiences more informed 70 Representations figure 6. Cai Guo-Qiang, Kites, 2010. Installation view at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010. Photo by Justin Jin, courtesy Cai Studio. figure 7. Cai Guo-Qiang, Wu Yulu’s Robot Factory, 2010. Installation view at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010. Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio. about modern and contemporary art, but they presented an undeniable difference from Wu’s other creations, like the robot lighting his cigarette and calling him ‘‘Daddy’’ and the robot pulling a rickshaw. The artist robots seemed a nervous footnote, intended to strengthen the contemporaneity of the exhibition, where the space of heterochronicity cracks to reveal the persistence of an art-historical time that has brought global practitioners of postwar contemporary art onto the same page. In the most recent decade, time-based art that engages with the peasant problem in China has entered a new stage. Starting in 2011, Ou Ning, a curator, filmmaker, and editor whose previous works focused on China’s excessive urbanization, and Zuo Jing, a curator and editor whose career has been closely linked to the booming contemporary art business in Beijing, moved together to Bishan, a small village in Hui County, Anhui Province, known for its magnificent Hui-style architecture as featured in the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Ou told reporters that he spent 80 percent of his time in Bishan, despite his busy traveling schedule all over the world. Ou and Zuo contextualize their endeavors both in the Rural Construction Project of 1930s China and in the neo-anarchist movement of the global antineoliberal campaign as theorized by David Graeber.43 The project has so far been celebrated as a creative venture to revive the highly disintegrated countryside. Simultaneously, critics have questioned what appears to be an imposition of elitist taste on the peasants and the possible exploitation that might ensue. Ou and Zuo write explicitly about the potential of nonindustrial traditional time they discovered in Bishan, and they meanwhile rely on the synchronization of the global market to help villagers to sell produce, handcrafts, and lodgings through Taobao (one of the largest E-commerce markets in China) and Airbnb. The concern with time will continue to haunt the Chinese art world. To acknowledge the entanglement of labor, durational experience, and artistic lineages might be a first step for moving beyond the simple dichotomy between elite and peasant art and imagining a politicization of time that retains genuine heterogeneous contradictions. Notes 1. Gu Chengfeng, ‘‘Dangdai yishu zhong de nongmin xingxiang’’ [The image of the peasant in contemporary art], Meiyuan, no. 6 (2003): 54. 2. It is no longer the case that peasants form the majority, as in 2012 the urban population of China for the first time surpassed the rural population. The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 73 3. Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, 1993); Cheng Tiehun and Mark Selden, ‘‘The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System,’’ China Quarterly 139 (1994): 644–68. 4. For the most in-depth analysis of the debates on the peasant problem, see Alexander F. Day, The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism (Cambridge, 2013). 5. See Fan Di’an, Nongmin.nongmin zhongguo meishuguan cangpin ji yaoqinzhan wenxianji (Anthology accompanying Peasants. Peasants, an exhibition of works from the collection of National Art Museum of China and invited artists) (Beijing, 2007); Wang Lin, ‘‘Nongmin ticai huihua de chuangzuo yu piping’’ (The creation and critique of paintings on peasants), Wenyi yanjiu, no. 7 (2007): 129–35; Du Shaohu, ‘‘Ershi shiji nongmin xingxiang de lishi fanguan yu wenhua chongjian’’ (History of the representation of peasants during the twentieth century and a cultural reconstruction), Wenyi lilun yu piping, no. 5 (2007): 115–18. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 6. Ge Shiheng, ‘‘Guanzhe de youyue: dangdai yishu zhong de ‘mingong chao’’’ (Superiority of the viewer: the ‘‘fever for peasants’’ in contemporary art), in 2009 zhongyang meishu xueyuan qingnian yishu pipinjiang lunwenji, ed. Zhongyang meishu xueyuan (Beijing, 2009), 50–63; Gu Chengfeng, ‘‘Cong zhurengong dao kanke: 1942 nian yilai meishu zuopin zhong nongmin xingxiang fenxi’’ (From master to spectator: analysis of representations of peasants in art works since 1942), Nanjing yishu xueyuan xuebao, no. 1 (2006): 74. 7. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York, 2011); Claire Bishop, ‘‘Live Installations and Construction Situations: The Use of ‘Real People’ in Art,’’ in The Art of Welfare, ed. Marta Kuzman and Peter Osborne (Oslo, 2006), 61–86. 8. This exhibition was curated by Yang Xinyi and displayed at the Today Museum in Beijing. It was sponsored by UNESCO as well as the Chinese Research Institute of Social Science. For Yang Xinyi’s account of the exhibition, see ARTLINKART, http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/1d3atAql/about_ by2/Y/833arAql. 9. For an overview of the artist’s work, see Song Dong, Song Dong (Chengdu, 2012). 10. The author’s email correspondence with Song Dong. 11. The whole process was recorded in a documentary of the same title. For a brief discussion of this piece, with an emphasis on Wu Wenguang, see Chiu Kuei-fen and Zhang Yingjin, New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place (New York, 2015), 87. 12. For instance, Zhang Huan’s Raising the Water Level in the Fishpond, a now iconic piece that adorned the cover of the catalog of 1998’s blockbuster exhibition Inside/Out: New Chinese Art, employed some forty migrant workers. See Gao Minglu, ed., Inside/Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley, 1998). 13. See Wen Hui’s reflection, reported in a profile by Lu Yinyin published in the digital version of Nanfang zhoumo (Southern weekly), http://www.infzm.com/ content/109934. The temporary residence permit was finally canceled in 2015. 14. Qian Gangnan, ‘‘Zhiyou jiefang ‘tazhe,’ caineng zuihou jiefang ziji: dui nongmin ticai chuangzuo qinxiang de yizhong fenxi’’ (Only after you liberate ‘‘Others,’’ can you liberate yourself: an analysis of works about peasants), Wenyi Yanjiu, no. 7 (2007): 121. 15. For an analysis of the circumstances under which these exhibition halls were built, see Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (London, 2005), 106–14. 74 Representations 16. Song discusses this piece in detail during his interview with Gao Minglu, ARTLINKART, http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/artist/txt_ab/911brz/8c8dyAl. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Chen Shaofeng, Chen Shaofeng: The Voiceless People—Dialog Mit Den Bauern (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). 20. Ibid., 6. 21. ‘‘Chen Shaofeng: Huajia yu mote’’ (Painter and models), SINA, http://blog. sina.com.cn/s/blog_4c3b5af70100dnbe.html. 22. Lu Jie, ‘‘Long March on the Road of Revolution,’’ in Art and China’s Revolution, ed. Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian (New Haven, 2008), 201–11; Lu Jie, ‘‘Long March Yan’an Project,’’ Yishu 5, no. 3 (2006). 23. ‘‘Changzheng lushang faxian minjian liliang’’ (The discovery of power in the public realm), http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/c58iwut/genres/ media/Z. 24. Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang (London, 2002). 25. For the exhibition catalog, see Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guoqiang: Nongmin Dafenqi (Guilin, 2010). Peasant Da Vincis gained an extended life in 2013, as an altered version of the exhibition traveled through Brazil. 26. Wang Yin, Yixiang tiankai: Cai Guo-Qiang yu nongmin dafenqi (Wild flights of fancy: Cai Guo-Qiang and peasant inventors) (Guilin, 2010). 27. Interview of Yan Shanchun, http://www.longmarchproject.com/huayu/meiti78.htm. 28. For a brief overview of peasant painting in Mao’s China, see Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘‘Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958–1976: Amateurs and Professionals,’’ Art International 27, no. 1 (1984): 2–12. 29. Liu Weidong, ‘‘Shijue tuxianghuale de zhengzhi kouhao: shidu huxian nongminhua’’ (Visualizing political slogans: a tentative reading of peasant paintings of Hu County), Meishu guancha, no. 3 (1999). 30. Cultural centers have received surprisingly little attention both in Chinese and English-language scholarship. Brian DeMare’s discussion on the cultural center’s role in the promotion and management of local drama troupes is one exception, see Brian DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army (Cambridge, 2015), 209–37. 31. Interview of Cheng Zheng, see Wang Shenghua, ‘‘Xinzhongguo de nongmin yu nongminhua yundong’’ (The peasant and peasant painting movement of the New China) (PhD diss., China Art Academy, Beijing, 2012), 158. 32. Duan Jingli, Huxian nongminhua chenfu lu (The rise and fall of peasant paintings of Hu County) (Kaifeng, 2005); Yanjun Li and Xiping Wang, Zhongguo huxian nongminhua shilue (A brief history of peasant paintings of Hu County) (Xi’an, 2008). 33. The students of China’s art academies during the 1950s and 1960s had access to reproductions of a wide range of styles. 34. For instance, see Julia Frances Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, ‘‘The Japanese Impact on the Republican Art World: The Construction of Chinese Art History as a Modern Field,’’ Twentieth Century China 32, no. 1 (2006): 4–35; Tang Xiaobing, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley, 2008), 1–4; Aida Y. Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu, 2006), 54–76. 35. Bo Jiao, Chinese Stories, trans. Zhou Xiaozheng (Beijing, 2003), 50–55. 36. Martin Lister, ‘‘The Times of Photography,’’ in Time, Media and Modernity, ed. Emily Keightley (New York, 2012), 49–52. The ‘‘Peasant Problem’’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art 75 37. Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC, 2013); Tomii Reiko, ‘‘‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,’’ Japan Review 21 (2009): 123–47. 38. See Lu Jie’s interview published in Shidai dichan zhoukan (Weekly of contemporary real estate), October 17, 2003, http://www.longmarchproject.com/ huayu/meiti-78.htm. 39. For the most comprehensive collection of reports on Wang Wenhai’s life, work, and the lawsuit, see ‘‘Shuijiao de Mao zhuxi he qinquan’an’’ (Sleeping Mao and copyright infringement suit), http://nisuwang.net/qqa/index.htm. 40. Ibid. 41. For a brief analysis of the work, which was exhibited again in 2008, see Jeff Kelley, Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection (San Francisco, 2008), 122. A photo of the work is featured on the cover of this volume. 42. Wang’s monthly retirement pension was 1,400 renminbi, on which he relied to support himself, his wife, and his mother. 43. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Copenhagen, 2015). 76 Representations