Gravity Lost

Zhang Nian

Once upon a time a frog jumped into a pot of boiling water by accident. In a split of a second he jumped out right away. A few days later the frog jumped into the pot by accident again. But this time the water on the stove was just starting to heat up. The frog felt nice in the warm water, when he started feeling different it was already too late. He died in the comfort of a hot bath.

Since when art started to exist for the "comfort"; since when art has changed from the expression of artist's understanding of the world to market commodity; since when art has left its intellectual pursuit and heads toward the material gain; since when art became a social decoration; since when art became the embodiment of power and money; since when the foundation of individual existence was built on the sole purpose of "service;" since when certain artist's absurdity became the loyalty for authority; since when the relationship between artistic value and social value, the public art and the esoteric, marketing and art, have obscenely mixed up; and all this have been the result of yielding.

We are living in an age unprecedented in Chinese history. China is changing from a country of man to a country of law, as the new orders are yet being formed and the old orders haven't completely collapsed. In such transitional period inevitably some people are taking advantages of it and some people are lost. The air is filled with noise, clamor, suffering and compromise. Those elements added together pointing us toward one aim only, and that is money. In the crack of reality and ideal there exist millions of peasants. They abandoned their cherished land and pored into crowded cities where they are caged at the bottom of the city fortresses. What kind of education will their children receive? What kind of social security do they have? How would they fulfill their dreams and desires? What kind of rights do they have in the city? How would the city repay them for their youth and labor? The peasants who have left their earth are not unaffected by modern technology. They are suffering from the loss of soul. Do they must pay such a heavy price? In a strange land called city, they are facing both the challenge of traditional morality and the ruthless competition of modern society, as described in Chen Gui Li and Chun Tao's book, A Survey on Peasants in China, "We have witnessed unimaginable poverty, evil, suffering, silence and struggle."

I cannot pretend to be blind before the changes of the past twenty years. Video as my first choice has carried out what I want yet hard to say. I try to console myself that at least the scenes in the camera lens tell the truth. Behind similar faces there must be different stories and behind different faces similar stories. They are like the twisted faces in the mirror, through which we view the society. And I am deeply moved by these twisted faces. I often ask myself, before all this, should I neglect, be indifferent, or should I use my artic right to deal with it? I am not sure whether I am endowed with such rights, but they do exist in my heart.

According to Bo Wei, "When the condition becomes unsuitable to the existence of a society or a people, the spiritual light will disappear." This is another reason that makes me feel the loss of gravity. We grew up as the progeny of communism, and yet the communist belief was crashed by the market economy before our eyes. We lived through the time when the ideal society of "to each according to his needs and from each according to his ability" walked into its own grave. We were baptized in the Cultural Revolution. Our education was cut off from the connation with our inherited culture. We are like the undernourished orphan left out there on our own.

Living with the societal belief that time is money, spirituality becomes irrelevant. Under the maneuver of such doctrine we lost our freedom in the imaginative and spiritual world. The only possibility left to artists is to observe a world that is evolving, that exists in between the real and the hypothetical, that is prosperous and yet in decline, that has both native and imported cultures, and that exists between life and death. With what language will artists distinguish the good from evil? How will artists detect the germs in the air? Will we be able to retrieve our lost language? How should the creature that is called "artist" think? And how to contemplate on the cause for the formation of absurdity and a world that is utterly different from the real and yet already buried under the hypothesis of another utopia. We are guided by unclear spirit in search of unclear art. The result is like a mute person giving off voice, using an unreal voice to sing about a real world.

"In a free country the level of people's thinking ability is unimportant, so long as they think." Says Montesquieu. If we still possess our faculty to think, it means we are still living in a free country. I often ask myself, what went wrong in our thinking. We are like the lost lamb that cannot find our spiritual home.

A friend who shared my happy times in Yuan Ming Yuan art colony lived in Europe for more than a decade. When he came back to visit I asked him about how he was enlightened by true art in Europe. "What art?" He said, "Art is not anything." How could he become so disillusioned? That was the whole purpose for him to move to Europe.

In the 1980s we believed that art could save the human soul. How could my friend now perceive art as valueless? Perhaps art has already come to an end in the West. Perhaps artists have already done their jobs, from the Renaissance to the colonization of the Industrial Revolution, from the WWII to Cold War and to economic globalization, what's there left? The absolute art and artists no longer exist. The reason why art has become nothing and yet everything is like the necessity of air. Anywhere under 2,000 meters above sea level air is unnoticed, but on top of Mt. Everest air is treasure. From this I realized that the value of art only exits where art is needed, and artists are mere oxygen suppliers. On the other hand if the air is super abundant art might find a reason to be ordinary. It might concentrate on market profit. When art evaporates in the air, naturally it becomes nothing. That's why it is laughable today to discuss whether performance art is art, for art is already not anything.

There is such contradiction in our society. Although we talk about national pride, our action indicates otherwise. There are two standards in assessing art; one is national, and the other international. We forgot one basic question, which is, what an art language is in this new age; in other words, it is to say what can be defined as artistic.

What does my art express? I did not know before I start working, but I must think of this question during the working process. Li Xian Ting wisely points out, "Art does not have a bestowed power to change society. If changing society is artists' purpose for creating art, then this kind of art is bound to fail. When viewing a work of art there is no need to wonder about the practical use of it or its function in serving societal purposes. This is not the standard by which we judge a work of art. Besides the practical use and things related to practical purpose, artists are only part of the society. As far as I am concerned, artists are unable to fulfill the tasks concerning those issues in society." But then what does it mean to an artist? I cannot stop wondering. I remember what Nancy Goldin said, "Artists are those hypersensitive souls. To keep a pure heart and to gain confidence, in other words to keep a balance, they create art works. When I am terrified I shoot pictures, and then the terror is dissolved." To release the pain inside me is the reason why I could not give up art. It became the medicine of healing. In art the self is in the other and vice versa. Art is only a kind of result after finished. It's meaning is often misread by the public. I admire the power of words. Words convey the writer's thoughts precisely, or at least the writer is in control of the meaning of his writing. But I remembered what Confucius said on understandings between people. He said in The Analects, " Those who posses the same kind of eye see the same, the same kind of ear hear the same. People who have the same kind of pursuit feel close without meeting one and another. In the same frequency of sound they will echo one an another in different places." Reading artwork is a test of one's intuition. I focused my eye on Station of Changing Connection. It is the splitting point of city and country, where people with different fates take a short stop, a place that tracks are curved to different directions and so is fate and system. In the station nine-hundred-million Chinese peasants head toward the direction of their dreams. I focused my ear on the "portraits" to listen to stories of realized dreams. And then I gave my offering to those who have the same pursuit, Net is my offering to the city, not a particular city, but every metropolitan city that I visited. Once people cross the boarder between the city and the country they fell in the huge net woven with layers of checkpoints, dizzy and disoriented the new comers are lost.

Song Dynasty has always been my favorite period in Chinese history. In Song Dynasty Chinese culture and science reached a new height, the invention of printing, the establishing of art institute and lived many great poets and artists. Wang An Shi lead the nation's legal reform, and even Bao Qing Tian, the most famous judge in Chinese history, also lived at that time. Imagine how magnificent the capital city Bian Jing, was then. But when I reached the Song Tombs, it was a field of desolation with ruins that recorded a once splendid culture. Statues scattered everywhere, emperors, ministers, heroes, and unsung scholars, they all vanished in the passage of time. Here lies the history formed with blood and tear, sword and fire, joy and pain. This is our historical culture, forbidding and purifying.

I named this book Blank Art, because it is neither mainstream nor avant-garde; neither traditional nor "present-day idea;" neither a scholarly document nor a market commodity. It is only a private activity, a form of personal release. Therefore the images contained in this book are merely ambiguous logos.

After a long delay, this book finally came into being in the early spring this year. Thirty years has passed since I began to learn painting from Mr. Wu Zhao Ming in the "cowshed" of the factory, and twenty years since I came to Beijing. I hope that my twenty years of experience living in Beijing converge here, anxiety and hope, love and hatred, frustration and struggle, reflection and expectation, and my fortune and misfortune. All these are blend together with an emotional agitation. During the twenty years living in Beijing, I have moved no less than twenty times, from the east district to the west, from the south to the north, from courtyard compound to high-rise building. Every time I move I fell terribly disappointed with the city. Although living in the city I feel far away from it. I have learned one lesson in these twenty years, which is, the only way for a "floating soul" to gain respect is continuously to work hard. I have witnessed an ancient capital metamorphosed into a modern metropolis. I don't remember since when the sound of authentic Beijing accent have disappeared. Those who lived in the courtyard compounds could not afford the high-rise apartments. They are forced to move to the outskirt of Beijing. Therefore I am tormented by the question of how to approach our history of the past 20 years, 100 years and even 1,000 years. An artist's fate is bonded with the fate of his country, and his soul his people.