"100 Chinese"

"100 Chinese" by Zhang Dali, Beijing. Ajr
I saw a row of mannequin heads the other day that reminded me of this fabulous sculptural work that I saw in Beijing in 2001. It’s by avante garde Chinese artist, Zhang Dali, who made a name for himself during the 1990s as Beijing’s only graffiti artist. Back then he created an ongoing work called “Dialogue”, which comprised 2000 giant heads spray painted around Beijing on buildings marked for demolition. He often hired workers to chip out the shape of the head in walls - it was his protest at the relentless demolition of old hutong areas to make way for modern construction. The whole series is documented in photographs. I saw this work, called “100 Chinese,” at Beijing’s classy Courtyard Gallery. Between 2003-2005, Zhang created 100 resin casts of migrant workers’ heads and a series of full size body casts - the latter he ‘tattooed’ and suspended upside down in a work called “Chinese Offspring.”

No, I am Not Related to Rewi Alley

Yesterday I was asked if I was related to Rewi Alley. When I was in China I understood the confusion given the Chinese predilection for inverting christian and surnames; here in New Zealand the question just puzzles me. People seem to see the name ‘Rewi’ and assume we are related, overlooking the fact that his was a christian name and mine a surname.
On my last visit to Beijing I visited the former residence of New Zealand-born Rewi Alley, who gave so much of his life to working in China. Given his Communist beliefs, I imagined Alley living in a modest little backstreet dwelling. I was flabbergasted when I arrived at a large, two-storied stately home. Turns out Alley spent his last 29 years languishing in the grand elegance of the former Italian Embassy. He had not been alone. From the beginning of the 1950s the house, now The Friendship Museum of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (succinctly, CPAFFC), had been home to five “important foreign friends” including American journalist Anna Louise Strong, Japan’s Saionji Kinkazu, Jose Venturelli from Chile and Robert F.Williams from USA. They each had a large apartment within the mansion. It was a surprise to learn that Alley had sat in his sunny sitting room surrounded by stunning pieces of antique furniture from the Imperial Summer Palace. Large portraits hung on the walls, blue and white porcelain mingled with carved dragons and a crystal chandelier hung above. It is an understatement to say that Rewi Alley is highly regarded in China. He was considered their “number one foreign friend living in Beijing” and his surroundings made it clear that if you were ‘a number one friend,’ you were well looked after. Deng Xiaoping hosted Rewi Alley’s 80th birthday and he was honoured again by the Chinese heads of state when he turned 90. He died in Beijing in 1987 and his ashes were spread in Shandong, where he had spent much of his time establishing a technical school. When I left Friendship Museum, it was without a concrete impression of Rewi Alley. I wasn’t sure who I had ‘seen.’ Certainly I had a sense of the elderly, sociable, number one friend of China’s elite; but a vision of the younger, dedicated man who lived in austerity in rural China with the working folk, seemed a much more ephemeral thing. From ‘Travels in Beijing, a manuscript, Ajr

China Blue

Shenling, Redgate Gallery, Beijing, 2003

I have just visited a Christchurch home where the owner has a passion for blue and white china from around the world. It brought to mind a rather stunning ceramic sculpture I saw in the Redgate Gallery in Beijing in 2003 - a statue of Mao embellished with the traditional blue and white patterns of Ming Dynasty China.

Chinese contemporary art is some of the most exciting in the world. Chinese performance art particularly is pushing boundaries - and has been for a number of years. Shanghai's ‘Fuck Off Show’ for instance, which presented images of decapitated bodies and dead stillborn human babies. Not surprisingly the Ministry of Culture put out a circular after that stating that such shows could no longer be held in public places. That put a dampener on things and according to Brian Wallace of Redgate Gallery, the performance art scene has never returned to that ‘high point.’
When I visited Beijing in 2001, I was lucky enough to be able to interview leading Beijing artist, Sheng Qi, one of the early forces in Chinese performance art in the 1980s and co-founder of the performance group Concept 21. It took me some time to notice that he was missing his smallest finger on his left hand. That was because he had chopped it off with a cleaver after the Tiananmen Square Incident on June 4, 1989.
Liberal thought in China suffered seriously from the social and political changes after Tiananmen Square and Shenq Qi, “in an act of despair and agony, cut off the small finger of his left hand and buried it in a flowerpot before leaving Beijing for Rome.” He stayed in Europe for eight years and his mutilated hand later figured in many of his photographic works.
He returned to Beijing in 1999 and in his first performance he wore the upper part of a military uniform with a small red AIDS ribbon attached to the jacket, while his head was covered with red cloth. The lower part of his body was naked, with his genitals wrapped in gauze and tethered to a parrot. And I’m not saying anything more about the fact that he went on to create performance works that involved small transparent balls, closed eyes, toy soldiers, his hand down his own underpants and urinating, naked, on decapitated chickens. But I am prompted to ask – and I don’t why I never did when I had the chance – if he ever unearthed his little finger from the flowerpot; and if he did, what he subsequently did with it?
All that is nothing compared to Zhang Huan, who dabbed his penis in black ink and slapped it between the pages of Encyclopaedia Britannica for a time. (He’s fortunate my mother never found that out. She always put great store in Encyclopaedia Britannica and she would have been scandalised by his actions. I’m sure she would have hunted him down and put his penis under a large pile of bricks until he had come to his senses).
In a rather more attention-grabbing moment, Zhang also chained himself to the roof beams of a barn in eastern Beijing and let blood drip from a tube bored into his neck, down onto roasting trays below where, much to the concern of the audience, it bubbled and evaporated with rather a nasty stench. Then there was Wu Gaozhong, who curled up inside the freshly-slaughtered buffalo carcass; others with live chickens in their mouths; others getting branded; others buried to their neck in stones; and my favourite: the quirky fellow who dragged a cabbage through the streets on a chain. Naturally this work was called Pet No.2.