 Ai Weiwei, Tilted House, 2000. Concrete and bronze, Soho New Town, Beijing. Courtesy of Soho China Ltd., Soho Art Collection. |
A hundred years of modern culture have proved Simmel s analysis an necessary step in understanding the ontological boundary between the cult of the Self and the State: nowadays subjective adjustment to social forces has turned into the preponderance of an objective spirit, while the individual s progress has moved into a mission of transversal struggles against power relations and the sovereignty of political realities.
The inner life of the metropolis, as Simmel states, rests upon a perpetual mediation enabling the fulfilment of a personal position within the space of the city, whose forms and administrations are increasingly dictated by the intrinsic connection between money and the intellect. Approximation is largely disapproved, while calculative exactness of practical life has overflowed the extravaganza of personal ethos and individualized formulas of freedom and transgression.
Despite the increasing interdependence of the world economy and cultural production, the historical chasm separating the western and eastern block (here specifically referring to China) is producing spatial development where the individual s participation in the moral construction of the city and its entropy (between potentiality and actuality) is seemingly bringing history back, or somehow offering a platform for unprecedented formulations and theoretical critique. The sort of permanent provocation insistently propelled by economic and social reforms is benefiting the country in the search for the essential quality of modern life, where the romantic quest voiced by Monsieur Guys in Baudelaire s The Painter of Modern Life recalls the make-up of a perspective contemplating both the "direction of nature and the tyranny of circumstance."
Chinese society is confronted with history of a different sort, mostly linked to the late/ephemeral rise of democratic structures where human rights issues are still unsolved and tensions stretched over deregulated land use, the displacement of workers, and soil despoliation. All these matters are under tight political surveillance. The "place" where the Party leadership guarantees stability stems from a renewed launch of free thinking, the opening-up of new creative fields of economic and social initiative demanding self-release in the form of professional empowerment, self-invention and cultivation. Compelled to create personal originality, man embraces the task of producing himself within a steady power structure and discipline assuring him prosperity, success and protection of his rights, and covertly landing back to the country unlimited national strength. "Hero: This is We."
This is not an official message that the new Enlightenment is beginning. It is the title of a video work presented in the Italian Pavilion at this year s Venice Biennale, by Yang Jun, a Chinese artist from Qingtian currently living and working in Vienna, Austria. A documentary piece in a 10 minute loop, where images from recent Chinese history of social revolt and upheaval (from June 4th 1989 until the latest anti-Japanese demonstrations and riots) are shown with commentary from the author, in a poignant socio-psychological portrayal casting the new Individual within the realm of a capitalistic cultural revolution. Issues of personal perception distortion and spiritual crisis, highlighted by the ever-changing negotiation of youth s identity, have been famously recounted in the so called "debauched literature" like that of Zhou Weihui or in the hooliganism of Wang Shuo s generation.
But here the topic seems to recognize the rising "antagonism of strategies" that Foucault sees as the real "double bind, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern institutional structures."
The place not taped but screened here, is the invisible space of Publicness, the transparent soil that contains the "state of the soul," and the place where great individuals as Yang Jun claims are expected to discharge their contribution inside the process of truth construction. China, continues the voice in the video, is celebrating a new self-esteem. And where political freedom is not granted, economical manoeuvering is offered instead in pursuit of material remuneration and comfortable livelihood. Which is incidentally the point and place in time where the western tradition of ancient philosophy began that is, the point of ethos, the practice of life, an attitude of self-decipherment for the administration of a "beautiful existence." This respectful and non-interfering cohabitation inside the original ethical-philosophical discourse of antiquity, has been lost in what is, for Foucault, merely a form of control.
"Who are we?" is the question that not only China is asking, but others must answer too. While Europe is lost in transactions, and seeking direction, China goes fast and does nt want to stop. "Wealthy people don t stop revolutions," reminds Yang Jun. And economic capacity is what China is offering. Contemporary metropolises are growing and multiplying, and strenuous organizing is finding a correspondent in the ideal of natural science. To use Simmel s words: "to transform the world into an arithmetic problem" of demographics and rated suitable-for-building land. Echoed by de Certeau almost a century later, now "we witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administration, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips or darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets."
This expropriation of personalized spatial disposal is somehow undertaking a reversed course in China s cities, where high-speed urbanization has produced a landscape of contrasting densities, but boundless experimentation.
The enclave of high-rise residential blocks is more and more stylized on modern comfort, devoting attention to the ranks of Bobos (short for bohemian and bourgeois), the new class with economic power influencing decision making and trend setting. They inhabit and demand new spaces, and they correspond to the quest for modernity that the country is encouraging to gain. It is in this mixed category of literati and business people China s new creative class could come from. It is the new creative class that can make the Chinese dream come true, turning utopias into an effective self-reproducing mechanism, fed with local intellectual and material resources.
These Chinese cities are the physical sites for units of liberation and fixation to coexist, where traditional public space (the symbolic manifestation of staged power) is estranged. This scattered membrane appears in visionary architectural objects mingled with the preset containers of the traditional Chinese neighborhood. This juxtaposition is committing the individual to a prophetic experience of the schizophrenic pace of the city.
The urbanite merges his singular and cellular ethos in many different common spaces. This initial adaptation to endemic forces eventually shapes the city s "tyranny": it forces the subjectivization of the urban theater, and a grasp of the hexis of the city, which is its active condition of having-and-holding never passive, always at work. More specifically, the Aristotelian concept of hexis is conceivable as a personal recovery from disorder or distraction, the sort of receptivity to the Other that depends on an active effort to hold oneself ready. The Chinese city forces this point-like momentum during the process of actualization, when the soul is in possession of it own knowledge, and transgressing its own truths.
Under these premises, the status of independent art in China is still precarious and not totally integrated within the national cultural discourse. Collaboration and networking are limited to private promotion by artists, cultural operators and international professionals, attracted by the immense potential since 1990s. So far, the survival of art in the local context has depended on the wavering approval of official acceptance.
Living on the fringe of social space and consciousness, the power of contemporary local art resides in its ability to forge psychological and conceptual room in which acceptance and refusal can be performed. Accustomed to this practice of swinging apparition, art is able to connect the floating space of prophecy compelled by the urban fabric to the urges of its human content. It does so by regulating the interaction between insulated realities.
In this view, art can function as an anchor space to shape imagination into concrete options. The metropolises of China produces an already hyper-real world, where the surprised gaze is incessantly pushed by a world of magnitude. The space of art can be a loose and hospitable platform where ideas and visions can accrue. Such practices, where personal engagement and participation in national identity is brought to public fruition, are often promoted by market-ruled fashion and internationalization.
The images here show a few of the public art pieces commissioned by Soho China real estate developers, Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, who have created an outstanding collection permanently viewable inside the Soho New Town buildings in Beijing. Ai Weiwei, Yin Xiuzhen, Yang Zhichao, Lin Yilin, Ding Yi, Wang Xingwei have produced sculptural and installations that intersect the common spaces inside the living and working compounds. Conceiving art as a solid space with its own openings and closures, able to zip together far flung lands of inner perception and invented stories, he exhibition shares regions of thought with the public. By resisting real space it invents a possible one.
The flat scope of the photo, of the canvas, and the three dimensions of a sculpture emanate much more than what they can contain. They build up an aura of existence filling the gaps of the interrupted reality we live in, filling up the pauses of speech. In this sense much of the art that doesn t permanently dwell the urban space, but is addressing issues of urban ethos and space perception, is enlarging the scope of the city hexis.
