江湖 Jianghu

Comrades, Have A Good Trip!

Written by Guo Peng, Translated by Jian Nei

Since the 1980’s, Chinese contemporary art has gradually started forming it’s own path. Contemporary art in China has already become a rapid and effective medium of transmission in contemporary culture, and artists participating in this are highly aware of what is happening around them. In my opinion, art must ultimately come from an artist expressing their consciousness and individual feelings. Sometimes an artist’s position in society, with their innermost feelings, can lead to expression of a different viewpoint that is clear, strong, and fresh. If this is successful, it represents what contemporary art aims for. Contemporary art in China is unstable, to say the least, and hard to define. Like science, it has a universality that (hopefully) transcends national interests, but unlike science, contemporary art these days is not based on technical skills.

Wrestling the Orange is simply an open exhibition, a platform for various media. The platform of Wrestling the Orange is open to all kinds of people from all corners of the country and completely different trades: artists, artistic amateurs, folk entertainers, even swindlers. In the exhibition you can meet workers, farmers, students, or intellectuals. This is an expansion and extension of the concept and function of the exhibition. Displays here are not works in a tradition, but they fuse various artistic styles and create many subtle relationships, presenting a kind of unique and living artistic language. I hope people do not create works of art as they would make an academic thesis, or try to make their works tight and self-contained. I hope artists and exhibition participants can open themselves up, lose the feeling of self, and connect themselves to a web of uncontrollable life. By activating their work in this way, connecting to the audience, they will realize a connection with the “contemporary,” and actually gain some sobriety and awreness from it. I also hope we can call on all kinds of resources, call on all kinds of occupations, including artists and non-artists to create an interesting and active cultural environment in Yunnan .

If in our contemporary society the Supergirl contest is the most democratic form of participation in China now, then I hope this type of exhibition strategy can improve on that to become a turning point for individual expression and an important contribution in constructing Yunnan’s art ecology .
But this road will be very long, so finally I can only say: Comrades, take care, and have a good trip!

Postscript: After Wrestling the Orange

Written by Lin Shanwen, Translated by Zhou Lei

It’s hard to sum up the themes of an exhibition that runs without themes, restrictions or rules. I think this is a perplexity sensed by every single participating artist. At the time plenty of people expressed spontaneous feelings like “this is funny, this is static, this is sooo old, or this is way out of control.” After one year of exhibition activities the discussion starts to repeat itself, and routine and simplistic thinking starts sapping the rich connotations of Jianghu, making it increasingly narrow and diffident.

When we discuss the messed-up situation of Jianghu exhibition, do the ideas that were alive when the Jianghu exhibition was thematic and forceful -- still ring a bell? All these have been enshrined in the exhibition: Shadow play, comic dialogue, barbeque stand, fortune teller, and a seven-year-old student submit his artwork to the exhibition designer who showed tantamount respect to adult artists.

All twenty-five exhibitions titled as Jianghu have finished. Now that Jianghu is somewhat known in the art world, we are confronting a question: what on earth are you trying to do with Jianghu? What do we do about the skepticism coming from nowhere? We feel lucky for making it possible in Kunming, and finding someone who could fund us and finding an active art community where we can do whatever we want to do. But, do we really understand what we’ve already got?

Some give up, some get excited and jump in; some complain, some sympathize; all these are natural. We can take the fact of people come and go as they got or failed to get the things they coveted. We lower the gate and it’s natural that good, bad, and mediocre all flushed in.

So what to do next? Some say Jianghu should change and a structure something like an academic commission should be organized, but I think that’s bullshit. What we need to do is to rule out the artists who ceased to grow, or didn't make anything of the opportunity. I still remember in the first round we invited a potato-frying old woman into the exhibition, a street portraitist from Green Lake, and a seven-year-old Norwegian exhibition designer who later developed into a talent, capable of drawing all kinds of visages. I still believe in the truly free, equal and sincere aura is a dragon seed, not a frail weed. For all the problems currently haunting Jianghu, I think it’s more related to methodology instead of criticism.

Jianghu has empowered me as an artist. I once asked myself, will I still be an artist after this experience? I questioned the authenticity of this experience time and again. Now when I review all my participations in Jianghu ?C “Give You China” in the first round, Super Reversal in the second round, “One Thousand Good Wishes” in Modern Media round, to the current “Red Carpet” in Wrestling The Orange ?C I have reflected on many issues, such as cultural differences, commerce and art, the sensitivity of media. This is has been a worthwhile journey. To me, to forsake or cling to Jianghu is not a question.

Blaming the limited funds for exhibitions, rash preparation, and many other issues, the Jianghu exhibition is constantly upset by many dilettante artworks. What we can do is to save some spaces for really quality works and spare more for free spirit and communication. If we tag Jianghu as something successful then what we will continue to do is to achieve seriousness out of parody. By no means should Jianghu produce or cater to an audience or a critical body with the same tastes. The enthusiasm coming from the audience is indefatigable. One short message sent anonymously to me read; “Tonight Wrestling the Orange is a hit, brought all the exhibition-goers into a free artistic show, we fling ourselves into the exhibition like you artistic kids do. Congratulations!”

In a world that is “fraught with churches but every one feels lonesome to the bone”, it is of primary importance to save this stage for comedy. I designed Wrestling the Orange as a three-act play and it would not be complete if either the crème de la crème or chaotic masses were left out. I like that short message guy saying “artistic kids” and I think that demanding devotion, simplicity and sympathy. In retrospect, all the artists like Xiang Weixing, Luo Fei, He Libin, and Guo Peng who have fought to the finale, have all witnessed their own growth in this last exhibition. I still believe good artworks can keep their strength no matter what the environment. No matter what identities we are wielding, all discussions can fit into the artistic debate. This, at any rate, is what I get out of Jianghu.

Jianghu 2006 "Wrestling The Orange"

In January 2005 Lijiang Studio and ALAB began to mount experimental exhibitions together, under the name Jianghu. In 2005 we made 12 (or really 24, since Jianghu 11 was made up of 12 distinct exhibitions) very different experiments in Kunming, Lijiang, Lashihai, and Amsterdam, each organized and attended by different people posing different questions. The energy of the artists involved, particularly the group of artists associated with ALAB, astonished me. Images of all these Jianghu events are posted on www.lijiangstudio.org.cn.

In general, Jianghu is a platform to explore particular topics, such as: modern media (Jianghu 6); time, direction, and causality (Jianghu 4); attention and the moving image, (Jianghu 3, 10); the meaning of being an artist (Jianghu 1). Jianghu is also an opportunity to engage students and young artists, giving them an opportunity to work with older artists, and in many cases, a chance to make their first exhibition ever. And since Jianghu is an event - not a product ?C demanding participation from its audience, it became a fresh and unpredictable topic of discussion for people in Kunming, Lijiang, on the internet, or wherever it strayed.

Perhaps most characteristically, Jianghu is a kind of energy with which to dive into an experiment. So far, Jianghu events have had a positive, open attitude, and have taken big risks. At the first Jianghu, many artists invited people from other trades to make work in their stead - more than half of the participants in that exhibition were not artists. This, like much of the work in Jianghu, could very obvious or boring in a quiet setting, but the energy, freshness, and enthusiasm of that first Jianghu event brought people together so they forgot entirely about who was an “artist” or who was not, making the experiment work and setting the democratic tone for future Jianghu events.

By the end of 2005, Jianghu was getting old, starting to repeat itself. It needed a rest, and Lijiang Studio, which has supported the whole Jianghu cycle, as an “activation” experiment, needed to concentrate on its stated mission and primary goal, which is our artist-in-residence program in Lashihai, near Lijiang. But by the end of February 2006 we realized that there were a huge number of artists, poets, students, curators, media, etc., who had not had yet participated in Jianghu, so we found ourselves being asked - in some cases demanded - by the community at large to provide an outlet for this desire to make and show new work. The result is this show tonight, organized - or perhaps facilitated - by Lin Shanwen and Guo Peng, at ALAB. At the very least, I am very happy that Jianghu has created such a demand in Kunming, and I sincerely hope that people in Kunming who have participated in Jianghu will use it’s precedent to make new and unexpected events.

Jay Brown
Director, Lijiang Studio
March 28, 2006

Jianghu 2006·Wrestling the Orange Exhibition Plan

By Lin Shanwen, Translated by Zhou Lei

When preparing the exhibitions titled Jianghu, most decisions come from group discussions. This is not to say the curator or organizer lacks the power of decision-making, but that they are making decisions in order to elicit more participation and enthusiasm from the artists, which has come constitute the game spirit of Jianghu exhibitions. The unification and populism which spin out of this game spirit have been very successful at attracting attention from all spheres of social life.

The concept of Wrestling the Orange comes from Tianji’s strategy for horse-racing, from the Spring and Autumn period, where Tianji used the principle of “best of three,” where whoever wins two out of three times wins the contest. As the story goes, Tianji first put his worst horse against the Empreror Qi’s best horse. Then he put his best horse against the emperor’s second-rate horse, winning, and finally beat the emperor’s worst horse with his own second-rate horse. This ruse is a classic Jianghu.

The discussion begins with the weaknesses of “art” and “artists”, which in this case call for the artists to find a new way to make art. The initial brain-storming session summoned up weird names and concepts like “everybody coming up for a renaming game,” “serve you,” “kaleidescope,” from Chen Kaige’s The Promise to the online mockery of The Promise called “Murder caused by a Steamed Bun,” to “an exhibition stemming from an interview,” and so on. All these concepts were later dismissed as too theoretical or prankish, then silence fell on the room and everyone is brooding over a new idea. We keep fantasizing a scene from a movie like The Hacker and The City of the God, a scene without too much methodology or -isms. Finally the name Wrestling the Orange materialized.

To name it as art exhibition, the artists are more or less expected to fulfill some requirements, though we can not demand a great art from every individual artists. The rules are pretty much flexible: with no consideration for the money he burned for an artwork; for whether making art is his strong point or his hobby; for whether he or she is using a real or a fake name; or for concentrating on one work or elaborating on a multitude. The Jianghu exhibition will embrace any possibilities the artists can imagine. Fairness and productivity often prove to the major working features of Jianghu: in the end, to confront yourself as your own enemy is all you need to do to participate. So welcome aboard! Our ad line goes: “Who will rule in a world where good and evil all mixed up? Keep your eyes on Wrestling the Orange!”