MCLC: The Art of Zhao Baiwei

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: The Art of Zhao Baiwei
***********************************************************

Source: Asia Pacific Arts (10/29/10):
http://www.asiapacificarts.usc.edu/w_apa/showarticle.aspx?articleID=18282&A
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Strange Shells: The Art of Zhao Baiwei
Paul Manfredi traces the creative trajectory of Chinese artist Zhao
Baiwei, from developing artist during the Cultural Revolution in 1970s
China to his American Pacific Northwest self-exile of today.
by Paul Manfredi  

A discussion about the work of the Seattle-based artist Zhao Baiwei (known
as Z.Z. Wei in English) might begin, curiously enough, with the following
question: what do shells and cars have in common?

On the surface, this seems to be rather obvious. Cars and shells share a
similar shape. They also both protect us from threats in the environment,
keeping us safe as we travel from one location to another. Few perhaps
have realized, though, that the real connection between "shell" and "car"
can be found in the fact that they are, phonemically, the same thing. To
say the word "KE-ER" -- shell -- in Zhao Baiwei's Beijing-inflected
Mandarin Chinese, sounds precisely the way a native speaker of (American)
English pronounces the word "car." Thus, when talking with Zhao about the
"cars" in his paintings, one suddenly comes to realize that the entire
conversation has been, in fact, about shells.

Beginning this way, we arrive at the kind of riddle that is typical of
Zhao's work. He is a Chinese artist who is fully at home in the Pacific
Northwest of the United States, a place he has resided for more than two
decades. In those two decades, however, he has not bothered to learn much
English, choosing instead to interact with those who speak Chinese, or
through intermediaries of friends and family. This choice of language
would seem to place him in some sense closer to the China, specifically
Beijing, the place he left behind as a young avant-garde artist in 1989.
His decision to shield himself, so to speak, linguistically from his new
environment situates him in the category of immigrant who never fully left
home. Yet, what actually appears in Zhao's paintings seems as remote from
Chinese reality -- Beijing or other -- as one can imagine. He paints
exclusively American, and largely Pacific Northwestern landscapes, within
which he often places "cars," in fact shells, in the solitary, even
majestic act of simply traveling along. The question of the Chineseness of
Zhao and his work thus presents itself, both symptomatic of a particular
bi-cultural geography, but also of contemporary immigrant art experience
in the United States in general.

 
Beginnings 

Zhao's generation had gone headlong into the Cultural Revolution, a period
both idealistic and stringently ideological when young people in
particular could exult in the novelty of vast social change, just as they
found themselves drifting precariously in the chaos of an increasingly
out-of-control social and political experiment. Mao Zedong's call to
jumpstart a revolution that had run out of steam, although motivated by
ulterior motive of recapturing his own position as leader of the Chinese
polity, galvanized Zhao's generation with a radical vision of total
reform, one led by the students themselves and against all figures of
authority ("class enemies") locally and nationally.

Zhao's location, meanwhile, was Beijing, epicenter of Mao's ongoing
revolution and thus a place from which policy directives were issued and
to which millions of people traveled to participate, one way or another,
in China's ongoing upheaval. Beijing was host to the countless young
people who, at Mao's behest, left their homes, schools and places of
employment to come to Tiananmen Square, the quintessentially public space
of the middle kingdom -- the center of the universe.

In such a revolutionary chronotope, Zhao's artistic education was
variegated, to put it mildly. When the Cultural Revolution began, Zhoa was
nine, schools were closed, and society entered a deep convulsion of
political purification through class struggle, an upheaval that touched
Zhao's family directly as his parents were intellectual class.

For three years, Zhao spent his considerable free time recording
impressions in a notebooks, concerned all the while that such writings
could land himself or those close to him in jeopardy. These Red Guard
experiences afforded him a great deal of freedom, and perhaps a degree of
self-reliance, but of course little in the way of reliable models for
pursuing broad-based education in visual art. The vivid but also acutely
restrictive visual template of Maoist iconography was unsatisfactory, and
Zhao risked severe consequences to get access to the Beijing libraries
where he could further educate himself.

By 1969, schools were reopened in Beijing, and for the next seven years,
Zhao could develop as a student. Upon graduation in 1976, however, his
forward movement was once again interrupted when he was sent down to the
countryside as one of the "rusticated youth."

His assigned work was as a sheep herder in Yanqing, northwest of Beijing.
This was an important step in Zhao's development as an artist, though that
fact would not be clear to him at the time. After his return from the
countryside, he returned to Beijing in 1978 to take a position with the
China National Opera and Dance Drama Company, working in the design and
painting department. This was in many ways an ideal position for an artist
at this stage in his career, low in terms of its demands on his time, and
also providing ready access to painting materials and other supplies that
could allow him to develop his art. Nonetheless, two years hence he
decided to reenter an educational setting, matriculating at the National
Academy of Arts and Crafts from which graduated in 1984.

Zhao’s development as an artist, both informally as a young Red Guard, and
then formally in the National Academy, corresponded with the largest
transition in Chinese arts and letters of the last half century, since the
founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. In the longer spectrum of
China’s cultural modernization this transition is even more pronounced as
it is the one leading into China’s renewed period of prosperity, a
socio-political security which stands in stark contrast to the upheaval of
civil and world war that followed China’s last cultural renaissance of the
May Fourth period (1919-1925).

Contemporary Chinese art, in other words, opens upon an era of development
and prosperity, a process which carries with it renewed prominence in
geopolitical sphere as well as massive and in many respects painful
overhaul of existing social and political conditions internally. The crux
of these changes, often reduced for convenience sake to the phrase
“Opening and Reform” (改革开放), is the marketization of formerly
state-operated organizations, spanning all dimensions of Chinese economic
and social experience.

In the two years (1978-1980) while Zhao was working for the Drama Company
in particular, Beijing was undergoing a revolution, one which emerged in
fits and starts, with a spectrum of challenges issued to the Chinese
Communist Party, both officially sanctioned and not. Zhao, through the
introduction of veteran artist Tang Pinggang, was put directly in touch
with figures who would go on to global prominence in Chinese contemporary
art, including Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing, as well literary figures such as
Zhong Acheng, Bei Dao, Shu Ting and the entire generation of "Misty Poets."

Collectively, these people launched the first non-official (non-government
sponsored) artistic movement, be they in literature, plastic art or other
creative endeavor, to emerge in China since the founding of the People's
Republic. The year 1979 in particular was a watershed, seeing a return of
many cultural institutions that had been shuttered during the "10 years of
Chaos" (e.g., Art magazine, Poetry magazine, etc.), and various informal
"salons," being gathering places for artists and art lovers to exchange
views, art works, and unofficially exhibit their work.

Zhao's work at the time was groundbreaking in two seemingly conflicting
respects. First, he shared with his fellow avant-garde artists the
imperative to open new artistic spaces, one free from ideological
confinements set by the Central Propaganda Bureau. At the Mural Department
of the Central Academy, the work that Zhao produced included large,
abstract soft sculptures comprised of various materials including wool and
paper and a mode of abstract work that was of course unheard of in context
of communist cultural policy.

However, the art work Zhao created at the Academy developed directly into
a post-graduate position as one of three members of a for-profit company,
the Beijing Arts and Crafts Company, an outfit which provided textile
sculptures for sale to developers of new interiors -- namely office
buildings or hotel lobbies and other service-sector, commerce facilitating
spaces. These spaces were significant in the context of China's urban
development -- a massive redevelopment of China's built environment that
would become the core of China's changing economic policy and lead to the
renaissance in Chinese consumer culture. Thus, Zhao's experience of the
rapid transition from the austere communitarianism of the Cultural
Revolution, into laissez-fare capitalism of the Deng era and beyond,
quickly became one of an actual contributor of discrete artistic details,
to the sudden overhaul of material experience that has continued apace all
across China in the three decades since.

As an artist, Zhao thus found himself at the very origin of new China, the
one that few could foresee at the time he began working just out of
school. More particularly, the stupendous rise of contemporary art, such
that the work of Zhao's immediate contemporaries Ai Weiwei and Zhang
Xiaogang, transitioned from the most rudimentary transaction on the newly
emerged open market to the apogee of commodity exchange. As Zhao Baiwei's
close friend and fellow artist Yan Li relates, at the time, few of their
contemporaries were even aware that they could actually sell their work.
When asked by interested buyers, who were all foreign students or other
dignitaries living and working in Beijing in the early 1980s, they had no
idea what price a painting could sell for. Three decades later, the works
they created at the time are worth upwards millions of dollars.

 
The Present

Zhao's trajectory, moving forward three decades, is radically different
from other contemporary artists, many of whom are now major figures in
international auction events worldwide. Zhao, by contrast, can be found in
his home studio just north of Seattle, fast at work on some remote strip
of railroad track which he paints and repaints, attempting just to "get it
right." [Image above.]

The work has no particular political significance, and the labor suffers
from no duress. The image itself breaks no new ground, its content offers
little challenge to the viewer. The evaluative assumptions of Zhao's
youth, based firmly upon art as avant-garde practice (both multiple
ideological standpoints), have fallen away from Zhao's work. The only
tension in the entire process, in fact, is that Zhao's attention to detail
in the one canvas slows down the market transaction, and with a high
demand for his paintings, he often feels he cannot afford to spend as much
time as he wants to with each image. The buyers of this work, it would
appear, are not consuming the work of a "Chinese" artist. They are
responding instead to Zhao's characteristic depiction of place and time
not only remote from Chinese experience, but also, owing to the idealized
quality of the images, remote from any contemporary experience.

What was really at stake in that departure -- in content and style -- from
point of origin, particularly when that point of origin (China) has
emerged as major focus of world attention? What has Zhao "traded in" or
sacrificed in his rather deep connection with the Pacific Northwest?

To get to an answer to such a question, it is useful to look at the early
work, for example Zhao's 1987 "Untitled," a work produced shortly before
he left China to take up residence in the United States:
 

 
Art enthusiasts looking at this "paper tapestry"  would no doubt see in it
an aesthetic rooted in East Asia, a recasting of calligraphic tradition in
the black form almost (but not quite) conjuring an actual Chinese
character, with red square bottom left suggesting an ink-stamp signature,
the entire material reminiscent of a bone or early parchment fragment of
some ancient text.

In other words, and whatever else we might want to say about this image,
we can be sure that it was easily associated with "China" in its time. As
Zhao himself put  it:

I use weaving and braiding techniques to give a new look and character to
paper, making it into a sturdy two-dimensional or three-dimensional
surface. Through my handling of paper, I develop new expressive
possibilities for this material. At the same time, I keep its inherent
ability to absorb pigment. If my work has an overall theme, it is an
appraisal and rethinking of cultural traditions.

It was two years after he created this image that Zhao found himself
rethinking these traditions in an entirely new environment, namely Pacific
Northwest of the United States.

He began his US tenure as a recipient of a fellowship, one of two awarded
on the occasion of the 1989 Washington Centennial Pacific Rim Celebration.
His first port of call was the Cornish College of Art in Seattle, where he
was Artist in Residence for a period of three months. After this he took
another position on the other side of Washington State, this time at
Whitman College in Walla Walla.

In fact, Zhao did very little in the way of creating art at this time. As
a result of the combination of the change of environment, coupled with the
ongoing repercussions of upheaval in China's political and cultural
circles the Tiananmen incident of June 4, 1989, Zhao spent his time in
Eastern Washington simply figuring out what to do next.

This was a long process of trial and error, and, as Zhao relates, it
finally amounted to picking up a sketch pad, the like of which he had used
as a child in Beijing, and painting what surrounded him. The pages he
produced in this manner were now populated with scenes of the eastern part
of Washington State, the Palouse fields, barns, and empty roads, and
finally, cars:

The space traveled between Zhao's tapestry work and this painting is great
indeed -- arguably as far as any artist could travel. The conversion is
not merely one of subject matter, or even material, but of semantic
system. The "Chineseness" has been written out of the picture, and in its
place, most prominently, a massive barn staking out a kind of surreal
center of the painting, absorbing light, and attention, like a giant sieve.

Behind it, of course, an impending storm, the principal contrast and drama
of the image. The principal figure, meanwhile, is oft-recurring solitary
vehicle, the first order meaning-making of Zhao's new symbolic world, and
the meaning that goes home with the ostensible collector who purchases the
painting.

On the second order, though, and in practically the darkest region of the
entire painting, is the interior of the car, a blank space, an "I am Not
Here" making its way into the oncoming light of the setting sun.
Such a presence is not easily observed from the outside, so to speak --
which is to say from the point of view of someone who has not noted that
Zhao is painting shells, not cars. Thus the darkness envelopes like
security, a shield from our observation. This is the thing that Zhao
surrounded himself with in the early 1990s, a liberation from social
interaction, a refuge come exile.

As a meditation on exile Zhao's painting takes on ponderousness belied by
smooth and comforting deployment of color, light and, on the surface
anyway, content as well. The cars, so purposeful and emphatically
"destined" in one direction or another, are at the same time significantly
aimless, their drivers rendered indiscernible by opaque windows.

Zhao's windows are not always opaque, however, and when we can see in (to
no people), we find the car is motionless. In many cases, of course, the
sedentary car is parked. In others, however, the car in stasis marks a
larger thematic note, foregrounding the second reading that relates to the
artist's experience as immigrant on the Pacific Northwest landscape.

In contrast to the semantic vehicle of dynamism, with suggestions of
self-determination, fortitude and freedom, the car kaput also relates to
Zhao's experience of the West, a passing landscape that suddenly claims
terminal attention, a "resting" place. In this sense, as the artist
himself relates, the broken-down car is ultimate in individuality, the
moment when a mass-produced object becomes, in Heideggerian fashion,
unique and real. Such stilled cars are often found with crows in Zhao's
painting, as in the following from his "Crow's View" series:

 
 
{Image: "Crows Eve View" series, 48" x 48"]

 
In view of such a car, commonplace phrases come to mind ("end of the
road"), but the open door, as well as the slightly ajar state of the
trunk, at the same time holds open an array of dramatic possibility.
The narratives, though, are irretrievable, and thus irrelevant. Whatever
the particularized circumstance leading to the demise of this particular
vehicle, the demise itself is singular, an undoing that proceeds according
to inimitable circumstance. The time and place all the noisy cliché of the
road are left behind, silent and irretrievable in the ever unique
stillness of death.

This terminal state is not at all, thankfully, the state of the artist
himself, who is alive, well, and thriving in his adoptive land. But the
meditations on mortality that the "Crow's Eye View" series suggests are
felt perhaps more acutely by an immigrant artist who has traveled quite so
far his original state. Such an artist depicts the formed affiliations
with his surroundings that bear both connection and a reiteration of the
space traveled 'in between.'

In other words, Zhao's landscape is populated by the same subtle blend of
comfort, freedom, isolation and alienation that comprises his emotional
world. This nexus of emotions can be viewed in Zhao's work only on second
glance, looking past the lines, through the color, across the spaces
already vastly arrayed. Most of all they can be viewed in the car-shells
in transit, with everything else, until they too die on the landscape.

What viewers of Zhao's paintings encounter is an immigrant artist's
expression of life simultaneously in and outside the comfort zone,
protected from the hard edges of exile by his own shell of solitude
traveling about in pleasant company of the forever strange.