Circulations: The art of China-California’s “cosmopolitan in-betweeness”(1)

 

The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. –Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

 

Rachel Kennedy

Discourse is a form of circulation. The purpose of “Love of Sun” is to circulate the works and voices of selected artists working out of both the People's Republic of China and California. By constructing a virtual meeting place upon a parallel of latitude, “Love of Sun” is simultaneously the result of individual artist’s discourse with China-California, and an open door to an international public to discuss current forms of art, power, and media that circulate outwards from certain financial and cultural centers of the Pacific coasts. The economic and cultural dynamics between the two locales is not only longstanding, but is already shaping mainstream cultural dispositions related to monolithic influencers like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, while also influencing more specialized strains of cultural production such as academic art and aesthetic philosophy. Ultimately, then “Love of Sun” is an invitation to join an exploratory conversation that investigates systems of influence between two world leaders in contemporary culture: California and China.

Rian Dundon, Alice Tuan, Chen Zhou, Duo Peng, Jeannie Simms, Calvin Lee, Chen Zhou, and Li Chen each hail from either China or California, at times inhabiting the other as visitor or even new citizen. Works by these artists were selected for their sensitivity to the deep but at times ambiguous cultural relations between California and China. However ephemeral, those relations impress upon our very identities, and more specifically, our aesthetic affinities. The intercultural dynamics between West Coast American artists and China's East Coast urban artists is the direct result of not only a new economy, but a new generation of Chinese artists who are producing work with globally-oriented themes, as opposed to domestic concerns necessitated by the economic and political conditions of the previous generation.(2) This exhibit does not seek after, as Beijing-based curator Philip Tinari calls it, "surface similarities (between Chinese and Western art),"(3) but strives for a genuine dialogue unique to this distinctively “globalized” moment, in which creative discourse is not limited to apprehensive encounters, but instead engages in ethico-aesthetic exchanges and reciprocal education.

Below, each artist is introduced in relation to the cosmopolitan themes that their work investigates. This is followed by reflection on two aesthetic theories currently influencing thought on creative production in California and China.

 

Consuming Identity: Chen Zhang’s Surface Read and Calvin Lee’s Rancho Rodeo de Aguas

Chen Zhang’s play of identity in her series Surface Read could be likened to the early work of American artist Cindy Sherman, yet her entry is staged in history rather than the Western feminist canon: “In “Surface Read”,” she explains in her statement for LoS, “I, as the main character, shuttle between different ages -- both between my personal ages and China’s historical ages.”(4) While her photos direct attention to the impact of Western pop culture on a post-1980s generation in China, the question raised is a matter of how Chinese aesthetics will continue on in parallel, while at times synthesizing with foreign influencers. The value of Chinese cultural continuity to a young, sophisticated generation of artists is subtly analyzed in Zhang’s critical self-portraits. The gentle irony symbolized by backdrops of San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge, appropriations of Western fashion magazines complete with "Chinglish" headlines, and artifical frames for old family portraits in the Modern Chinese social realist style together express an uneasy pluraltiy of concurrent values. Zhang examines the glossy surface of pop imagery by way of historic depth.

A less didactic example of intercultural impacts between China and California arrives with Calvin Lee’s images taken on Beverly Hills' famed Rodeo Drive. His photos of luxury goods and lifestyle marketing help frame, as he puts it, “the fluidity between production and consumption between China and California, of the luxury goods on sale and show there, (the) bodies move unconsciously as the most abstract waters whose banks are defined by complex international economic relations and consumer desires.” These images transcend their locale by directing attention to the symbolic products underwriting an aesthetic of power, of luxury symbolizing flight from need – critical to any nouveau riche, and symbolic of excess on an international stage.

Yet there is another layer embedded in Lee’s Rancho Rodeo de Aguas: the role of paparazzi in celebrity culture. If there is one thing that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and provincial, it is popular fascination with celebrity. Lee takes on the role of a paparazzi while treating luxury goods as celebrities in their own right, thereby challenging the need of a human personality to personify glamour, and all the while showcasing the inhuman fame of consumer products. Ultimately they are vessels brimming over with the irrational excesses of production and consumption. At the time Love of Sun opened submissions, the now famous Foxconn scandal had just hit the airwaves. Meanwhile in Shanghai and Beverly Hills alike, the consumption of luxury goods commonly produced in Chinese factories buzzed in parallel.

 

Globalizing Celebrity: Rian Dundon’s Fan

Rian Dundon also takes a misanthropic approach to the role of paparazzi in celebrity culture. Introducing his Fan series, he writes: "Being from California means never having to be impressed by celebrity. At least thats what I thought before I met Fan Bing Bing.” Aptly, Dundon notes that when he met Chinese movie star Fan Bing Bing, one of the few “English” words she knew was “Louis Vuitton”, a “star” of Lee’s Rodeo Drive. Also noteworthy is that Dundon was introduced to Fan as she was preparing to appear in her debut US blockbuster film, Iron Man 3, for scenes shown only in the movie’s China release, part of Hollywood’s ongoing attempt at catering to that country’s audience.

As both Fan's English tutor and behind the scenes photographer, Dundon articulates the unglamourous side of celebrity life in China. He repurposes the role of paparazzi away from tabloid and toward documentary. Indeed, while the most exciting shots in Dundon’s series are of Fan Bing Bing in uncomplimentary garb and settings, he also documents her paparazzi in action. In total, Fan elegantly deconstructs and reclassifies the various features of celebrity that paparazzi photographers sensationalize into, well, crude desire to humanize through humiliation the day’s mythological figures of popular culture.

 

Urban Dwellers: Duo Pang's Outsiders and Alice Tuan's Shanghailand

Thus far, discussion has centered on image construction as it relates to personality: of an individual, of a product, of a pop culture deity. The never-ending identity construction of a city is also a primary theme for “Love of Sun.” The urban planners of a city curate its culture and history just as a museum of art might - through processes of selection, renewal, and marketing. In just 10 years, the majority of Shanghai’s old horizontal residential structures have been demolished, and vertical architectural whimsies now dominate the skyline. But what has been preserved? Consider Jing’an Temple, a Buddhist temple (dating 247 AD) that had been transformed into a factory during the Cultural Revolution, and today has been renovated to its original form, but with artificial, glitzy materials that make the original temple seem inauthentic, while also serving as a entryway to the ultramodern Jiu Guang City Plaza shopping mall. And while the Beaux Arts architecture of Shanghai’s former French Concession is largely preserved, the colonial history often remains obscure for contemporary nationals and expats alike, treated at best as a historical novelty. The same can be said for the preservation and demolition choices seen across much of China's cities.

While any city is too large an enterprise to be subsumed into a single condition such as “museumification”(5) the application of curatorial methods to cultural and historical narrative at the civic level justifies reflection. Duo Peng and Alice Tuan each respond to both the culturally organic and contrived elements of urban phenomena between CA and China. Duo, raised in Wuhan, moved to San Francisco in the mid-2000s to study photography at SFAI. Arriving from a nation where a civic aesthetic can be wiped out and redeveloped in the blink of an eye, Peng applies an anthropological lens to San Francisco’s Chinatown with his Outsiders. Challenging the “human zoo” thesis,(6) Peng documents Chinatown from the perspective of urban change within China. He writes of the resulting body of photos:

Conversely, Alice Tuan is a playwright based in Los Angeles, whose best-known works include Last of the Suns and Coastline. These plays respond to the experience of being Chinese-American and Californian. In 2008-2009, Alice traveled to Shanghai to work as an English teacher and documented her impressions on a blog she dubbed Alice in Shanghailand. For “Love of Sun” Tuan developed several pieces from that blog into vignettes that survey cultural perspectives and California-China aesthetic correlations with a nuanced humor and intelligence. Her writings, Scene 3. Shopgirl at Shanghai #1 Department Store, Fuxing Park, and The Umbrellas of Shanghai depict the at times gripping sublteties of everyday life in an increasingly globalized city. It’s only appropriate that an artist familiar with the implicit contradictions of an urban landscape like Los Angeles direct our attention to the confusion of a city conditioned by rapid economic expansion.

On that note, it is important to consider the manufacturing of cultural memories as they have historically occured in Hollywood and in China. These previously separate cultural and economic landscapes are now converging and so are methods of cultural production with its accompanying political obfuscation. Thus we can interpet the often intentionally hidden agendas underlying mainstream cultural production as deeply politicized processes. In his “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory”, historian and cultural theorist Norman Klein draws an analogy between production processes in mainstream animation studios and Los Angeles’s memory of itself:

 

 

Occupational Amnesia: Li Chen's Aphasia

Klein's insights on “erased versions” of cultural memory are relevant to Aphasia by Li Chen. Aphasia is the opposite of flatness. Rather than a screen to be projected upon, or a screen that projects, it is the manifestation of simultaneously true and false memories re-imagined through lived experiences. Li's memories are expressed in static images which also move. The content of these memories, is the memory of being told not to know something important. (For example, certain events in Beijing in the late 1980s…?)

Chen’s anti-documentary of Occupy San Francisco and Oakland is also a personal essay. A Chinese national, Chen had only recently come to San Francisco when the Occupy movement got under way. The extraordinary complexity and comparative analysis Chen achieves with her video-essay is built from her insights on the nature of memory as a fluid and flexible analytic tool, and at the same time, a tragically evasive controlled process. Though only 10 minutes in length, this work is expansive for its incredible complexity. Viewers are encouraged to carefully read Chen’s statement on the piece, and then turn to media and religion scholar Angela Zito’s engagement with the work, “On Aphasia: Indices of things we would rather not know.”

 

Imaginary Hollywood: Chen Zhou’s Superman-California Dream

Memory is not what is at stake for Chen Zhou. Memory and mourning are far too direct for his video’s misanthropic protagonist. Superman-California Dream focuses on a series of minor incidences over the course of a few minutes, from the perspective of a Chinese youth garbed in Superman cosplay. However, this cosplayer is no exhibitionist. Instead he engages in half-spirited efforts to embody the character before moving on to WeChat, connecting with strangers in the dark via his iphone. Media commentator Wagner James Au has included a short essay explaining the significance of the WeChat social network in China for unfamiliar viewers, and Honora Shea contributed a piece examining the existential qualities of Chen Zhou's ouvre. The peak moment of this pensive video is when Chinese Superman receives a mistaken call from Hollywood, which interrupts but finally extends his malaise.

Three forms of media are stringed together, yet ultimately miss each other in this comically sad meditation on self and mediated self. Chinese Superman's connection to the world is mediated by his costume, social media, and finally a phone call. Unlike with his Superman cosplay and WeChat encounter, our lone hero is most at a loss when his self-reflexive mediation moves away from private reverie and into a accidental encounter with a truly foreign agent. This encounter with the public specter of Hollywood functions in contrast to a fear and longing that is undecidedly private in Zhou's ironic embodiment of an American icon. Superman-California Dream is not coping with memory and forgetting, but instead examines converging lines of mediation, human connection, and fantasy in a space where pop-cultural exports are more comfortable (embodiment-ready) than a live representative of the amorphous identity known as Hollywood. That unexpected call ruptures the fantasy.

 

Labor, love, and migrant workers: Jeannie Simms’ Readymaids

Legendary cultural theorist Trinh Minh Ha once wrote, “There is a Third World in every First World, and Vice Versa.”(9) This is of course still true, and Jeannie Simms takes on the difficult case of migrant workers with her series Readymaids. In contrast to Chen Zhou's piece, where a cosplayer is awakened from his fantasy, Jeannie Simms represents a group of women seeking to construct a fantasy space in between their extraordinarily difficult realities. Today, both China and California are key players in economic growth, and often collaborate at the levels of technological production and engineering for urban and state-wide development.(10) All the while, in California it is impossible to ignore the presence of migrant workers, who arrive from all over the world but mostly from Mexico and Central and South American countries, forming (historically) sustainable communities in major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose.

One professional role that migrant women often take in California is housemaid or au pair. In upscale cities like Santa Barbara and Orange County it is common for a white American child to be largely raised by a Latina woman hailing from another country.(11) Simultaneously, one is as likely to encounter a migrant Filipina housemaid in Orange County as in Taiwan.(12) Discussion of the geographic complexity of documented and undocumented women working for wealthy families can be over-localized when it is crucial to consider the commonalities and divergences of the conditions of female migrant workers, who may arrive in many places while originating from the same region.

Though China is still considered a developing country, it increasingly exhibits First World properties, including suburban upper middle class communities.(13) A growing upper middle class need for housemaids and au pairs is linked to a growing set of migrant workers, often hailing from Indonesia and other neighboring countries, who pack their bags and go searching for opportunity in the People’s Republic of China. Unfortunately, statistical figures illustrating movement from Hong Kong -- a regional hub for recruiters and migrant workers to connect -- are generally excluded from studies, making it difficult to determine the number of migrant workers entering PRC via Hong Kong.(14)

With this background, the significance of Jeannie Simm's Readymaids is readily available. The migrant workers she connected with and documented in Hong Kong were on the cusp of entering PRC and other countries as domestic laborers. This particular community is especially underrepresented in both statistics and elsewhere, simply because they are self-identified lesbians. Simms incidentally points out that contemporary researchers have yet to establish a framework that wraps identity politics into its fixed variables. "Politics" is included due to the necessarily political nature of sex and gender identity being reduced to binaries and thereby often wholly omitted from many international surveys on migrant labor. Readymaids complicates through a deeply humanizing representation, class and sex assumptions about migrant labor patterns internationally.

As the PRC increasingly blurs the first world/third world distinctions by challenging the Western narrative linking economic development and social progress, we must pause to reflect upon what remains stable within global economic hegemony. One of these stabilities is the lack of understanding of the status of migrant domestic workers in China and the need for ethnography to enter the stage. Jeannie Simms is a pioneer of ethnographic documentation, for representing the plight of the women she befriended in Hong Kong.

It is impossible to reflect on labor in China without deferring to the PRC's Maoist past and present. Yet it too far in the future to stake claims of contradiction in policy and procedure for the women Simms met. In any case, those do not have reason to allude to China's historic dance with Marxist thought. That is not the point. Their present, severe reality transcends this kind of theoretical speculation, and might better inspire the concrete actions of those who are able to aid these women, by advocating dignified life conditions for them through friendship, economic support, and advocating changes in labor policy.

While I’ve focused thus far on the specific Chinese/California entries in Love of Sun, it’s also important to reflect on the aesthetic philosophies which at most underlie them, but at least provide interpretive tools. This next section offers some initial thoughts on the major strains of intellect likely to influence artists of this era, in both China and the US (particularly California).

 

Post-scripts: Thoughts on Chinese/Californian Aesthetics

Knowledge production and cultural production can be surprisingly distinct processes.While Cultural Studies researchers in California tend to see these processes as inextricably connected (15), contemporary Chinese aesthetic philosophy must surpass the still-prominent ideology of “Maoist volunteerism,” an ideology based on the conviction that peasants and youth will unreflectively volunteer to labor towards the Maoist cycle of revolution, before fusing theories of epistemology and practice. Leading philosopher Li Zehou’s conception of the role of art in society, while influenced by Marx, is equally impacted by Kant and Confucius. In order to move forward in our reflections of the goals of “Love of Sun,” we must step back to consider the problem of subjectivity as construed by Li.

In the 1970s, “socialist humanism” was the philosophical position de rigueur for China’s intelligentsia. The socialist humanism movement, led by Wang Ruoshui, was built from Marx’s theory of alienation such that all proceeding theorization would refer back to the concept of alienation. Li reacted to this intellectual climate by criticizing socialist humanism for denying any relationship between human subjectivity and objective constraints.(16) He went so far as to argue that this form of (Western) Marxism “reduced the project of social progress to a mere appeal to ethics and culture criticism, while ignoring the importance of science and technology in the transformation of nature.”(17) Furthermore, Li’s anthropology challenged doctrines such as biological reductionism and epistemologies of class and classification, which could hardly be accounted for under the auspices of socialist humanism:

Unlike animals, humans consciously aim at the transformation of their environment by means of "tools" (gongju) or technology. This is what Li means by "practice." Human subjectivity must be defined in terms of the ability to make and apply tools, which is the result of both biological and social factors.9 It is artificial to reduce "human nature" to either.

Li's entire anthropology moves between two poles: on the one hand, humankind is different from animals because of its capacity to mold its own environment in a conscious and goal-directed way, which means that subjectivity is real- humankind can, indeed, to a great extent control its own destiny. This point had to be defended against both biological and mechanistic determinism. On the other hand, human control over nature is subject to limitations that are largely determined by the level of technology and social organization in any society at any particular time. This is the point made by Li's" tools" interpretation of Marx against Maoist voluntarism, which, in his view, ignores the reality of objective constraints on subjective agency.(18)

For Chinese intellectuals and artists, the repercussions of this philosophical debate of the 1970s are at least as strong as the impact of the postmodernism debates that were concurrent in Europe and America. Li’s thought continues to influence theories of aesthetic production because it prescribes a non-relativistic pragmatic theory regarding resources, goals, and accessing nature. The neo-Kantian aspects of this view compliments Confucian ideals of proportionality in ethics.(19) In a sense, Confucius proposed a positive form of the golden rule so demanding is his concept of sociality: "Confucius recognizes the duty of taking the initiative--of behaving himself to others in the first instance as he would that he should behave to him."(20) From here in the Wild West, it is difficult to account for this benevolence of social law, yet if we think about behavioural proportionality in light of social rules, the question of cultural production and knowledge production becomes an obvious synthesis, of later Marx with Kantian aesthetics.

In the highly relativistic aesthetic landscape of California, an aesthetic theory prioritizing subjectivity is utterly appropriate, however improbable. Returning for a moment to Norman Klein’s reflections on animation and Los Angeles, the role of Hollywood in China starts to take on deeper significance in the wake of our very light sketch of Li Zehou’s theory of aesthetics. Klein’s analysis of culture and aesthetics assumes mutuality between cultural production and knowledge production. He deconstructs the processes at work in developing popular mediums and civic structures within and emerging from Los Angeles, to highlight the social repercussions of these constructs. Klein's deconstruction shows us how cultural knowledge is produced in Los Angeles and thus links knowledge production to cultural production. All the while, Klein shows us that these modes of cultural production, a form of knowledge production, further hybridize an already pluralistic society and city.

Li came to similar conclusions about the relationship between culture, knowledge, and society by way of a constructivist, as opposed to deconstructionist, sensibility. Li’s Kantian and Confucian commitments treat human subjectivity as goal-oriented at levels as fundamental as the development and use of tools. Seen that way, the development and use of cultural products also link to a cohesive relation between human endeavor and knowledge production. The link sustaining that cohesion is society. While Klein is probably not working in absolute contradiction of a social cohesion worldview, the comparison is worth drawing into the background before foregrounding Hollywood in China.

Hollywood in China is more interesting than Hollywood in Hollywood. Or so a fresh layer of mythologizing seeks to indicate.(21) While there are far deeper pools we could enter in this sketch of critiques of modernity that developed concurrently in China and California, and the varied modernities being observed in each, the cultural significance of a major animation studio developing an unprecedented international partnership signals a shift in possibilities for both entertainment culture and theories of aesthetics. The recent development of film and animation production studios in China traditionally only located in California suggests that pop cultural homogeneity between China and the US will soon encounter a growth spurt. It's at such moments that artists like Rian Dundon, Alice Tuan, Chen Zhou, Duo Peng, Jeannie Simms, Calvin Lee, Chen Zhou, and Li Chen are needed in society. Artists who interrogate the question of belonging in this world of media vortexes and politicized images serve society by rendering as public what are too often private questions.

 

 

Footnotes:

1. Angela Zito, director of NYU’s media/religion program, refers to the cosmopolitan in-betweeness of Love of Sun here.

2. "Curator Philip Tinari Discusses China's Newest Generation of Artists", canadianartmagazine on Youtube. Accessed April 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r1kGPTGnqs

3. Ibid

4. On each artist page of Love of Sun, a artist statement is found when scrolling down from the work. Chen Zhang's statement is located here. All other allusions to artist's descriptions of work refer to their statements included in this project.

5. Clifford, James, “On Collecting Art and Culture” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp.215-251.

6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Ethics of Slumming”, The Atlantic Online.  Accessed September 2013: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/01/the-ethics-of-slumming/70146/

7. Duo Peng, Outsider.

8. Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Verso, 2008, pp. 2-3.

9. Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Difference’, Discourse, 8. Reprinted in James Clifford (1998).

10. "Gov. Jerry Brown heads to China to boost trade and investment, "KCRW blog. Accessed Semptember 2013: http://blogs.kcrw.com/whichwayla/2013/04/gov-jerry-brown-heads-to-china-to-boost-trade-and-investment

"Governor Brown to welcome his excellency Xi Jinping, Vice President of the People's Republic of China, to California," gov.ca. Accessed September 2013: http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=17421

11. Leo R. Chavez, F. Allan Hubbell, Shiraz I. Mishra and R. Burciaga Valdez, "Undocumented Latina Immigrants in Orange County, California: A Comparative Analysis," International Migration Review , Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 88-107.

12. Pei-Chia Lan, "Maid or Madam? Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor," Gender and Society, Vol. 17, No. 2, Global Perspectives on Gender and Carework (Apr., 2003), pp. 187-208.

13. Mike Anton and Henry Chu, "Welcome to Orange County, China," LA Times (March 09, 2002). Accessed September 2013: http://articles.latimes.com/2002/mar/09/news/mn-31967

14. Allan M. Findlay and F. L. N. Li , "A Migration Channels Approach to the Study of Professionals Moving to and from Hong Kong," International Migration Review, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 682-703, p. 686.

15. Many program description for arts and humanities in (at least) California articluate this connection. For example, UC Berkeley's Cultural Studies department: http://gse.berkeley.edu/language-literacy-society-culture/scs

16. Woei Lien Chong, "Combining Marx with Kant: The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou," Philosophy East and West , Vol. 49, No. 2, "Subjectality" 主體性: Li Zehou and His Critical Analysis of Chinese Thought (Apr., 1999), pp. 120-149, p. 122.

17. Ibid

18. Ibid

19. Jane Cauvel, "The Transformative Power of Art: Li Zehou's Aesthetic Theory," Philosophy East and West , Vol. 49, No. 2, "Subjectality" 主體性: Li Zehou and His Critical Analysis of Chinese Thought (Apr., 1999), pp. 150-173.

20. Confucious, Confucion Alelects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, Tr. James Legge (1893), Commodius Vicus (E-publisher), USBN - 9781456453428 (p. 2012), p. 49. Accessed September 2013: http://books.google.com/books?id=8tDsm3RESSoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepa

ge&q&f=false

21. We were lucky enough to have one such journalist, the excellent writer Jonathon Landreth, produce an article about “Love of Sun” artist Rian Dundon’s “Fan” series.

See also: Landreth et. al., “Hollywood in China—What’s the price of admission?”, Chinafile. Accessed Septmber 2013: http://www.chinafile.com/hollywood-china-what-s-price-admission

 

About Rachel Kennedy:

Rachel Kennedy is a writer and independent curator living in Los Angeles, CA. Prior to "Love of Sun," Rachel served as editor-in-chief of the online photography and digital arts journal MOH Online. She is currently a candidate for the MA Aesthetics and Politics at California Institute of the Arts (Calarts).

Contact Rachel Kennedy: rachel@moholyground.org