MCLC: Han Bing's cabbages

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Han Bing's cabbages
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Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (6/20/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/the-latest-icon-in-artistic-
rebellion-a-cabbage/

The Latest Icon in Artistic Rebellion: A Cabbage
By DAN LEVIN 

Every so often, the artist Han Bing likes to play a little prank with a
white cabbage — that iconic, rectangular vegetable synonymous in China
with full bellies and good fortune. Impaled on a wheeled frame and tied to
a length of rope, the cabbage resembles a miniature parade float trailing
along behind him through streets around the globe. In Beijing, Los
Angeles, New York, Tokyo and other cities, the spectacle has triggered
laughter, finger-pointing and questions from bemused passersby. But Mr.
Han, 40, gives no answers.

“I want to create a game for the public and let society answer,” he said
one recent afternoon while sitting in his airy studio on the outskirts of
Beijing. “I’m just a player in this game. It’s your job to interpret the
meaning.”
Mr. Han got a starkly different reaction just once — on a warm day in
2001, in Tiananmen Square. The cabbage did not get far. Nor did Mr. Han.

There is a reason China’s ruling Communist Party is not known for its
sense of humor. Obsessed with maintaining total political control and
suspicious of the masses under their dominion, China’s leaders are
perpetually paranoid that the joke is on them — especially in Tiananmen
Square, a place where preserving state power is a deadly serious business.

“I tried to avoid being seen but the cameras and police noticed me,” he
said, recalling the gaggle of officers who swiftly ordered him to cease
his leafy-green stroll and to depart just as quickly. “A cabbage is not a
bomb, but they don’t allow you to do this.”

A lanky man with long black tresses and supermodel cheekbones, he bears a
squinting resemblance to Cher circa 1970. His androgynous appearance is
heightened with a distinct sartorial flair — bell bottoms, wide-brimmed
fedoras, the occasional dress — that matches his creative objectives.

Despite the occasional risk, Mr. Han has long delighted in toying with
China’s strict conventions. He grew up in the countryside of the coastal
province of Jiangsu before moving as an adult to Beijing, a personal
journey that mirrors the rampant urbanization and increasing materialism
reformatting Chinese society. Much of his work reflects his complicated
emotions about these changes, which he simultaneously enjoys and abhors.
Over the years he has walked cabbages and made self-portraits in which he
has cuddled bricks, kissed scythes and embraced old shoes. In his “Mating
Season” photos, Mr. Han posed seductively with these peasant belongings.
In the “New Culture Movement” series, manual laborers and their children
each hold a red brick. The props fetishize a simpler proletariat era in
China’s past that Mr. Han wants to honor — even as he sells the works for
thousands of dollars apiece.

Critical and creative, Mr. Han struggles with a sense of loss common among
his compatriots.

“Many people feel homeless because urbanization is happening too fast,” he
said. “Someone might go out to buy vegetables and come home to find their
home has been demolished.”

Mr. Han speaks with the wisdom of personal experience. He only recently
moved into his current studio. The last place he lived was demolished to
make way for urban development, as was the studio before that one.

“I’ve witnessed too much demolition,” he says. “Every piece of land, every
brick and tile are made from capitalistic plunder.”

His work, he says, is an attempt to raise questions about people’s
relationships with the fleeting yet important objects in their lives. In
April he took the cabbage performance to a music festival near Beijing,
where he was joined by cabbage-toting friends and fans. The images went
viral, prompting reports in the foreign news media of a bizarre fad
emerging among Chinese youth desperately seeking uncomplicated emotional
companionship in an increasingly alienating world.

Soon it became clear that Mr. Han was behind the scene, though he said he
appreciated others reinventing the act as they see fit.

“Most people are bound tightly around the neck to an object in today’s
materialistic and mechanical world,” he said. “They live with their cars
everyday. It’s the same thing with my cabbage and me.”

Still, Mr. Han feels that the popular embrace of his cabbage strolls
reveals a positive change among Chinese.
“In the beginning they treated me like a psychopath,” he said, recalling
the wary stares and quiet mutterings of a decade ago. “Now the youth are
more open and accept it.”