2014年6月22日，巴黎南特黃永砯工作室。

文稿整理: 陳聆

與談人，編輯: 李雨潔

Read the english translation here.

讓工具控制自己的藝術家

李雨潔: 1981年年底你有一個畢業創作是《噴槍系列》， 你那時候的各種實驗還是專注在繪畫上面，沒有放棄繪畫，你當時還想要探索新的繪畫方法？

黃永砯: 那個時候可能很難說，當時目標都還沒有完全確定，正處在一個過渡。雖然我們是在美院的這種傳統系統裡面，但是同學都不太願意遵照傳統教學的方法作作品。

李雨潔: 那時候《噴槍系列》受到一些批評了嗎？

黃永砯: 這個繪畫談不上什麼大批評，但他們就是覺得比較離譜嘛。 因為油畫系畢業的，你不用油畫顏料？學了四年，竟然完全沒有體現基本功還有技巧。所以當時這麼做很冒險，但是他們也沒有完全地否定。老師只不過是說，「哎呀你這個有點簡單啊」。

李雨潔: 你在自己的筆記裡面提到要讓工具處在無意識的控制中，「工具由主動轉向被動」。這個要怎麼達成呢？你覺得自己成功了嗎？

黃永砯: 這個語言上表達不是非常精確。 工具本身是一個死的東西，它不存在主動跟被動的問題，這裡是指人—使用工具的人轉向被動。我用的工業噴槍是什麼樣的一個東西呢？ 是很小的噴槍， 帶了一個機器，就是空壓機， 這個東西不是來作畫而是來噴顏色的。譬如說你要把這個桌子塗成黑色的，這個嘩——就這樣噴，就完了，是吧？當時為什麼會提這個問題呢，主要也是因為工具對我們來說變得非常新鮮，我不能完全控制它。不像筆，筆我如果向左就向左，而且從我們的角度來說，以前對繪畫的認識，所謂的顏色都應該是微妙的，應該有變化的，這個工具不存在這個問題，一下子在幾秒鐘就是一大灘的顏色， 速度是很快的，沒辦法讓你去慢慢改變。所以在這個意義上來說，我就提了這個所謂無意識的問題還有被動的問題：就是人處在一個被動的狀態，而且這個被動的狀態不像我們一般意義上說被動就是不好的，它開了一個天地，就像潛意識的時候做作品。所以說我的主動性是很小一部份，被動性是很大的一個天地 。

李雨潔: 你由主動轉向被動的原因很大一部分是是這個工具太難控制了，而且你不熟悉這個工具？這個系列雖然是有這個「無意識」這個元素在裡面，話說，有一種新具象或者某種抽象這樣子的風格在裡面，風格是很強烈的。

黃永砯: 對，風格很強烈。我覺得如果是當時的一些作法呢，可能就接近所謂的冷抽象或者硬邊抽象。因為你靠剪紙噴出來的東西，噴出來的都是硬邊的，硬邊的形狀是比較冷的，所以歸為冷抽象。 其實當時在我們的班裡面，就是其他同學也有類似的作法， 他們是用手畫的。我這個是工具造成的一個更極端的效果。比方說當時非常出色的一個同學查立，他畫的東西我覺得跟後來耿建翌或者張培力他們當時早期的繪畫都有類似於這方面的東西。不是說一種表現的，也不是印象主義的，而是屬於一種比較冷的，比較硬，半抽象的 。

李雨潔: 浙江美院在85新潮開始之前，已經有很多人都有一種對於所謂「冷抽象」的探索， 或者是嘗試去掉個人風格的對於作品的影響，你覺得是為什麼？

黃永砯: 我現在很難說是為什麼，但是覺得這個隱含所謂繪畫從屬於一個政治的目的或者是功能裡面去慢慢解脫出來的一個辦法。就是所有的繪畫，所有的工具，都是一個工具性的，都是要表達一個什麼。但你一旦出現一個比較冷的或者說比較半抽象的一個東西，那他就會游離這個固有的概念。

廈門達達與杜象

李雨潔: 1983年的時候，你跟一群朋友組織了《廈門五人現代藝術展》，這個是內部觀摹的，當時要辦一個展覽有哪些先決條件呢？你們是在群眾美術館，像這樣子的展覽場地要怎麼樣申請，或者租？當時沒有所謂策展人這種角色，這具體是怎麼做的呢？

黃永砯: 也不存在租用，只不過是說， 我在廈門認識了一些人，譬如說有個中央美院畢業的老師，他是在群眾藝術館工作的，我們跟他很熟，他也很支持年輕人做一些東西，他自己也在改變他自己。所以我們就提出可以搞個展覽，就幾個年輕人，他也很支持，說，「就做嘛！」所以很簡單，也不存在什麼問題，只不過當時不是公開展覽，叫做內部觀摩，所謂內部觀摩就是說空間也不大，群眾藝術館大概有幾個大概一百坪米或者可能一百多坪米這種空間， 就是很一般的空間。然後不存在什麼策展人，就幾個經常交流的朋友就在裡面搞，所謂觀摩展就是他們發了一些油印的邀請函，發給有限的，廈門的一些文化圈子的人像老師啊，讓少數的人來看。

李雨潔: 有邀請函才能看？

黃永砯: 所謂邀請函也是非常好玩的，就是一個油印的，差不多那麼大張的一張紙蓋了一個紅章。這些東西我現在還留著。後來還開了一個研討會，所謂研討會就是大家發表了一些意見，還有會議記錄，就這樣。展覽和研討會總共大概三天的時間吧。

李雨潔: 展覽中有很多是抽象畫還有實物拼貼這樣子的作品。你好像覺得這個展覽是重要的，就是跨出了一步嘗試。參加者後來的「廈門達達」是同一群人？

黃永砯: 其中有一個後來不再參與的，其他四個人留下來。所以為什麼有意義？就是說為什麼這個展覽會歸類到廈門達達的活動裡面，是因為差不多是同一批人，移到廈門達達展以後，擴大了活動而已。

李雨潔: 你們1986年還組織了一個「現代美術研究社」，然後好像有小組討論， 印了一些油印的東西。是像讀書會的這樣子的嗎？

黃永砯: 沒有，不算讀書會，其實沒有一個規定的開會時間，是毫無組織的， 完全是自發的。這個研究會呢，其實也就是跟我前面提的一位先生有關係，他叫紀乃進，在群眾藝術館工作。群眾藝術館後來就搬了，搬到後來做廈門達達的那個空間，所以這些都跟他有關係。那時候我開始寫一些東西，比如後來「圖詞物」這個文章，當時有厚厚的這麼一小疊，我給他看過，然後他也感興趣，他也給別人傳閱，後來也油印，就可以散發更多。油印其實是選擇一些比較短的文章，這個基本上是跟廈門達達展覽差不多同時。

李雨潔: 譬如說你拿到了一本台灣人翻譯的《杜象訪談錄》，然後還把它影印發給大家嗎？那是1986年？

黃永砯: 應該更早。我不是直接從台灣印，很有可能是通過一個朋友許成斗，在83年的時候他也參加「廈門五人展」，他是越南的僑民，當時他在西貢，後來他回到廈門，帶了一些關於譬如說印象派的小的畫冊，油印的還是相當好的。 但是我現在不完全確定《杜象訪談錄》是不是他拿來的，有可能是通過廈門大學的一個什麼圖書館裡面找到，然後把它印個小冊子。

李雨潔: 你的筆記裡面提到， 1982年看到有關維根斯坦的書，然後1984年看到維根斯坦的傳記，那其實你是先看到維根斯坦才看到杜象？

黃永砯: 我當時沒有記錄說我什麼時候看到杜象，哪個早哪個遲，這個就很難說了。

李雨潔: 你也寫到1985年的時候《五燈會元》重新出版。但是你是具體什麼時候開始閱讀有關禪宗的東西？應該是更早吧？

黃永砯: 是差不多那時，因為在中國是這樣的，只有再版你才能夠在書店買到這個書。

李雨潔: 對，出版品在八十年代的時候是比較亂，有時候是很隨意的，沒有人知道邏輯是什麼。但是我在看各個藝術家寫的文章的時候，會覺得80年代大家談很多中國的傳統還有西方，但是很多時候可能對於所謂的中國傳統也不是那麼地了解，對於西方可能更多的是想像。我覺得好像當時的中國藝術家對於這兩者有相等的距離。你覺得是不是這樣子？

黃永砯: 是，這個話我好像也曾經說過。就是說當時其實是同時發現了—一個發現西方，一個發現傳統。

李雨潔: 有時候是藉由西方來發現自己的傳統？

黃永砯: 當然你通過西方你可以更好了解傳統，或者說從出版物來說，傳統書籍的再版，是那個時候在文革後才開始有的。當然舊版書還有，但是舊版流通性不大。因為比方說你到圖書館肯定可以找到關於禪宗，關於佛教，關於莊子或關於老子的書，肯定有，但是書店裡面不一定會有，因為書店賣的都是新出版的東西。

燒作品: 「燒作品是我提議的，但我沒有把所有的東西都拿去燒，我燒的主要是繪畫。」

李雨潔: 1986年的時候廈門達達做了一個焚燒活動，你說過是因為你們不滿意那個展覽的狀況。參加展覽的不是只有廈門達達的成員，至於這個小組的成立都還是一個問題，除了你們這群朋友之外，還有其他年輕藝術家參加。那你說過就是對於展覽狀況不滿意，具體是什麼樣的情況？

黃永砯: 其實當時展覽的題目不叫廈門達達，叫做《廈門現代藝術展》。廈門達達的提出其實是在我那個發表在中國美術報的文章裡面，文章題目是「廈門達達——一種後現代？」 是從這個開始的。我認為廈門達達這個團體的真正的組織，真正的誕生是在焚燒的時候才開始的，為什麼這麼說呢？《廈門現代藝術展》，這個從今天來說是一個非常平庸的一個展覽題目，它什麼議題也沒提出。現代藝術在當時的語境裡面，就是說跟這個社會主義現實主義有點不一樣，就是代表受西方影響的藝術，統稱為現代主義或現代藝術。參加這個展覽的人大部份都是一些美院或是師專畢業的年輕人，他們拿出來的東西很多是抽象雕塑。我當時為什麼會認為展覽不成功？包括為什麼要做這個焚燒活動——我是覺得這個展覽的傾向不夠清楚，當時也是沒有策展的，我當時屬於召集人，那有人拿了一些東西來，你不能不讓他展覽，因為沒有什麼理由，當時還沒有一個什麼策展方針，所以，好了，都放進來了，各種各樣，裡面也有一些水墨，抽象畫。展覽的時候我開始思考一個問題，就是說展覽應該要改變藝術的性質，包括問題的提法。現代藝術我認為是非常無力的一個議題，整個的傾向性是不明確的，我希望能夠找到一個非常清楚的一條生路，所以我才明確用了「廈門達達」在文章標題裡。廈門達達當時在這個展覽裡面有一些苗頭，為什麼呢？比方說當時我展覽的一些作品，比較有嘲弄性的，有一些跟歐洲達達主義有直接關係的作品。

李雨潔: 例如呢？

黃永砯: 譬如說達芬奇的鬍子被燃燒《鬍子最易燃》。還有比方說畢卡索的三張照片被燒了一個洞，慢慢地變灰。還有譬如說《會響的手槍》，這些就帶有一種達達式的隱喻在裡面。

李雨潔: 但是你在焚燒的時候，好像只有燒繪畫作品，對不對？

黃永砯: 對，燒作品是我提議的，但我沒有把所有的東西都拿去燒，我燒的主要是繪畫。

李雨潔: 是代表繪畫死亡了嗎？

黃永砯: 可能是。一個是畫比較大，比較起來，其他東西比方說一張照片，燒了有什麼意義呢？而且「燒」在當時的定位也很清楚，不是一個終極的手段。從當時到現在來看，「燒」只不過是一個步驟而已。因為如果終極了藝術的話，我為什麼在今天還要繼續工作呢？不是都燒完了嗎？當時也很多爭論，說「為什麼燒了以後你還要展示錄像呢？」大可告訴人家說你東西都燒了嘛，都完了嘛，那事情就做完了，可是生命還在延續阿？我還年輕啊，那接下去事情怎麼做？所以我一貫抱持這個態度，就是我們沒有一個終極的手段。我們規定藝術的一個消亡，這是我們的一個態度，一個步驟，一個方法，一個策略，絕對不是一個終極。

李雨潔: 所以你才把你要燒的作品都留了一塊下來？作為證據？

黃永砯: 不，這個是另外一件事情。我剛說我燒的都是繪畫，但是繪畫為什麼要留下一塊，它是不是個證據呢？談不上證據，後來我也很少拿出來給人家看。既然一張畫被割了一個12厘米乘12厘米以後，就看不出是一張畫了，完全失去了一個繪畫的涵義，根本只是一塊材料。當時的一些照片我沒有燒掉，還有一些複印件，那些我都留著。這個是一個一樣的道理。它太不引人注目了，它不是一個複製性的東西，所謂的複製性的東西基本上都燒了。當然《會響的手槍》沒有燒，為什麼呢， 它是被人偷走的，它很小嘛，一個釘子釘在那就掛在那裡，可能有人覺得好玩就拿走了。那其他東西，譬如說有幾張關於構想的方案稿子放在塑膠袋裡面，這種就沒拿去燒，但這後來也丟掉了。我覺得留下來的東西就更屬於一種觀念性的東西，物質性的東西都燒了。

李雨潔: 這個展覽有被審查嗎？

黃永砯: 沒有。因為什麼呢，當時確實也沒有審查，而且也沒有對外開放，反正看的人也很少。

李雨潔: 這個也是內部觀摩？

黃永砯: 也沒有寫內部觀摩，但是當時出了一份報紙[圖錄]，因為當時裡面的其中的一個成員蔡立雄，他在廈門日報工作，所以他有一些門路。他在裡面就用報紙的這個紙印了一下，大概印了那麼一兩千份吧。

李雨潔: 譬如說這個《解剖油畫顏料》，是不是你做的第一個行為？

黃永砯: 你怎麼來界定行為呢，其實這個作品有點像義大利藝術家Lucio Fontana，割一條的動作，這樣一個動作顏料就顯出來了。

李雨潔: 你有意識地把解剖的照片也展出了，油畫顏料的剩餘也展出了，好像是記錄一個行為事件的感覺 。但是其實它好像在探索很基本的繪畫問題，因為顏料就是繪畫的材料，就跟你用實物來做作品相似，其實實物也是一種材料。

黃永砯: 沒錯，但是應該清楚，就是那些顏料其實已經長時間不用了，因為當時我已經有好幾年不去動這個油畫顏料了。包括我早期的一些抽象畫，都不是用油畫顏料畫的，都是用油漆，其實這個是延續那種關於噴槍的那個系統來的。還有我做過一個作品，把油畫筆燒焦，當時也可能在展覽裡面把一支油畫筆燒了展出。這些作品更多的可能是在一個潛在的說明，在演繹繪畫，把繪畫的基本的，譬如說工具，顏料，進行一種處理，讓它變得不能正常使用。

「廈門達達——一種後現代？」

李雨潔: 你寫了「廈門達達—一種後現代？」 好像重新創造中式達達的門派，有點像譬如說中國南宗北宗山水畫的歷史，是比照中國禪宗的，南北宗的這種方式來寫的，這是後人杜撰的，不是真的有這件事情。我覺得你好像有在用這個方法⋯

黃永砯: 有意在用這個方法⋯

李雨潔: 那你寫到了這些人，像比方說曼佐尼 (Piero Manzoni)，克萊因 (Yves Klein)和凱基 (John Cage)，還有杜象 (Marcel Duchamp)，都是你比較欣賞的藝術家。但是勞申柏 (Robert Rauschenberg)，因為他來了中國，你把他作為一個現成品事件寫進了你的這個文章。因為其實比較之下我覺得像曼佐尼，克萊因，凱基，都比較好地表達了「藝術品是會消逝」的這個概念。但是勞申柏用了很多現成品，他是用了很裝飾性的方式來做，所以我覺得他是跟其他人有點不同。所以你是怎麼樣把他們包括進來的？

黃永砯: 勞申柏當然我還是比較注意的，這跟他在中國展覽會有關係，但我沒去看他的展覽。但是他對他對實物的應用也屬於在我的這個範疇裡面，譬如說勞申柏他是怎麼從一個平面繪畫變成使用實物？還有實物怎麼在一個平面裡面同時共存？我有一些作品的方式跟這個有點接近，所以我還是很注意勞申柏的東西。比方說他用一張床，還有一隻雞在作品裡，是吧。但是基本上，你可以說他是裝飾的，很多作品只不過是一個立體的畫，這個是一個過渡。當時我正在從繪畫想跳出繪畫，這個過程，他正好成為一個橋樑。 所以他對我來說有一定的重要性，放在這個名單裡面。

李雨潔: 你沒有去勞申柏在北京的展覽，但是你有看到那個圖錄？

黃永砯: 圖錄好像也是之後通過什麼其他途徑看到的

李雨潔: 所以你做了這個《給勞申柏的備忘錄》，是備忘什麼呀？

黃永砯: 這個題目是不是跟勞申柏有真的關係？也可以說是完全沒有關係。因為當時我用各種各樣的題目，我當時已經開始把題目當作一種畫外的東西。就是讓意義增加的東西。為什麼要用禪宗，這是關於用一些完全不一樣的東西並置在一起，禪宗之於達達它會產生一些新的意義，已經有意識地把一個東方的東西跟一個西方的東西放在一起，一個公認的思想史的名詞跟一個藝術史的一個名詞放在一起。為什麼不把兩個藝術史的名詞放在一起？這也是拉開兩個概念的距離，創造更大的思考空間。這個其實也預設了我以後的工作方式，從這一點到那一點，從這個史到那個史，這個都是有一定的相關的。

把路上的廢棄物搬進美術館展覽

李雨潔: 後來廈門達達作的那個作品改裝，就是《發生在福建省美術展覽館裡面的事件展》，做的看起來好像很隨意，但其實是你們是執行了一個事先想好的計劃，對不對？其中你們還貼了一個文字，闡釋人必須去選擇什麼是藝術，好像很強調觀者參與，然後其中有一行字被館方審查貼掉了。

黃永砯: 這個完全是一個籌劃好的。《廈門現代藝術展》展覽以後，可以說當時中國的氣氛還是比較開放的，當時我見到了福建省的美術館他們的館長，他說他們對廈門達達很感興趣，說「你是不是可以把展覽放到這裡來啊？」我們就說好啊。但其實當時燒掉了，我也沒告訴他說我燒掉了，而且我們當時已經想要做一些新的東西，所以這是一個半騙來的一個展覽機會，就是說他們同意了我們把作品搬來，但其實沒作品。我們四個人都去了福州，看了他們的空間，然後規劃了一下。時間很短，當時給了我們大概一個星期的時間，因為這個展覽不是屬於他們正式的一個展覽，是屬於比較開放，可以容納一些實驗型性的東西。我們還特地看了周圍的一些環境，而且還對那些路上的廢棄物進行拍照，都是計劃好的，之後才回到廈門。後來我們回去佈展那天，動作很快，把該運進來的東西都運進來，都指定好了，哪些東西可以用，哪些東西不用，然後還有怎麼組織人馬來抬，東西其實很重。所以佈展是非常之快，像一個突然襲擊。為什麼呢？因為你要快，在他們還沒有做出反應的時候，你已經都弄完了。包括上面出現的一些字，還有什麼圖標啊，都是在廈門做好帶過來的，所以是一個完全有次序的。只不過是今天來看，沒有留下一個平面圖。沒有一個規劃圖，都是在腦子裡。當然有很多隨機的東西：搬進來有些東西都破掉了，有些東西是不能搬的，或者說不夠，再搬，目的就是要把空間整個填滿，就這個目的。而且要速度很快。還有邊上還貼了很多像達達的報紙，有一張紙條是說這個作品是不是藝術品是完全根據觀眾來評價的，所以館方把這個給貼掉了。因為他們美術館會要承擔一些責任，就把它貼掉了。

李雨潔: 所以一開始只是有人把一行字貼掉，然後一個小時半以後，另外一個人說不行，要叫停？

黃永砯: 對，他是館長，他說要關展覽，這個展覽就很快撤了。

李雨潔: 其實之前在群眾美術館，你們焚燒作品沒有被審查？後來在福州的這個事情被審查，好像有點隨機？完全根據當地的長官決定，是很亂的一種狀況。

黃永砯: 就是啊！在中國當然是這樣。而且在焚燒的時候因為是在星期天中午，其實很少觀眾。邊上就有一些人在打球什麼的，我們也沒有通知任何人，只是一些學生過來看，有的是當時是過來幫忙的。所以觀眾是很少的。而且燒的時間也很快，大概就持續半個小時或是四十分鐘就完了。所以燒是沒有引起抗議。本來燒是很容易引起干預的，就像你今天隨便在一個廣場上燒東西，消防隊都可以看到很多的煙，他們就過來關心，因為是在公共場合。那美術館還是不一樣，美術館是他們自己害怕出事，如果他們不害怕，其實有人來看，看不懂也就算了，要等到政府有反應了，也要等好幾天。所有的審查都是自我審查，就美術館的人他們覺得他們承擔不了責任。

占卜

李雨潔: 1983年的時候你寫的一篇文章，「現代繪畫在中國命運之占卜」，好像是你第一次提到占卜這個詞。你對占卜的興趣是從什麼時候開始的？你對占卜的理解是完全從易經來的嗎？

黃永砯: 這個可能真的是第一次使用占卜這個詞。但是很多事情是這樣子，當你第一次使用的時候，可能都是比較無意識的，或者說你並不知道使用這個詞的真正的意義在哪裡，那占卜這個詞到後來才變為重要。我有一個1992年的作品叫做「占卜者之屋」，後來在2005年，有一個個展就是用「占卜者之屋」這個作品題目變為展覽題目，其實這個只是說明我某種活動的一個名詞。占卜後來就變成非常地重要，一個來說就是說所謂的占卜就是超出自己的一個能力，借助於另外一個東西，可以來超越自己。而且占卜幾千年前就有了，這裡有一整套非常複雜的系統與傳統，占卜主要是警告你，或者說提出警戒，「你不要做什麼」，但他從來不會給你說「你應該做什麼」。當時我是處在一個我需要有人給我提示「我應該要做什麼」和我「不應該做什麼」。而且占卜有一個很重要的就是他不能所謂的「不二問」， 就是說你不能重複地問。重複問就不靈了，工具就不聽使喚了。就是說，讓你保持跟工具的一個距離。

李雨潔: 你真的學過占卜嗎？

黃永砯: 我沒有啊。我只不過是通過自己看一些書，自己了解一些方法。但這個方法是不是真正的方法？這個我很難說。但是我總是能夠找到一些方法。

李雨潔: 你在寫「現代繪畫在中國命運之占卜」(1983) 的時候，好像做了很多實物的實驗，並且在這個文章裡面，你提到很多門派，像超現實主義，達達主義，野獸派，包浩斯這些。有趣的是這種分門派的方式好像是美國對於歐洲現代主義的角度。這些知識，這些有關藝術史的知識，你是從哪些書裡面得來的？

黃永砯: 這個書肯定不是當時美院教的，關於藝術史，特別是現代的藝術史。但是可以說因為所有的這些信息都是從零零星星的，譬如說當時的各種翻譯，摘譯裡面得來的，所以這個知識都是零散的。

李雨潔: Herbert Read大家都讀得很多，還有Edward Lucie-Smith，你在自己的作品裡引用了這兩個人的書，是不是他們對你有特別的意義？

黃永砯: 沒有。所謂的特別的意義就是說我能得到我就有意義，因為我當時能得到的東西是有限的，所以只能在有限的字眼裡面把它變為有意義。如果當時有更多選擇，我可能會選擇其他東西。但是我覺得這兩本書已經基本上概括了某些重要的知識，是不是？

李雨潔: 後來你到法國才第一次看到杜象的作品，對不對？

黃永砯: 對。我在其他的文章裡面曾經有說過我的想法。我說，原作對我來說並不是特別的重要。所以我到法國以後看到杜象的東西，不會顛覆我對杜象的一個整體的看法。不會說我看了以後我覺得「欸，我以前看到的杜象的東西不是這個樣子的」，「我發現以前錯了」。因為我不是依據眼睛真正看到的東西或是一個真正的實物來形成一個概念，形成一個想像。特別是杜象的東西， 完全是可以通過一些語詞，他的說話，還有一些非常不清楚的模糊的印刷品，你就可以領會他的本質跟精神所在，這個點就是說，他可以游離一種所謂「原作」。當然可能從法國人的角度來看，不太同意這個，因為他們非常注重這個原作的東西跟印刷品跟特別是複製品，可能印刷的很差的，完全不一樣， 但我不看重這些微妙的感受。

轉盤系列

李雨潔: 這邊有一張照片，是1987年在你的工作室的照片，我覺得特別有意思，因為裡面有轉盤，還有一些抽象繪畫，實物。

黃永砯: 這張照片其實還有一個拍攝的人，他坐在這個裡面，當時他是用慢鏡頭拍的，他變成一個模糊的黑影，辯認不出來。這個工作室當時堆放了很多東西，譬如這一個轉盤，還有很多作品已經毀掉了，比方說這是幾個酒瓶及一個塑料管在一個石膏上，後邊是一張畫。這是自己躺在那邊印出來的一個石膏吧。然後這個腳是自己的腳翻模的。

李雨潔: 你那個時候的作品都有很具象的名字。

黃永砯: 是。但很多東西都沒有留下來。

李雨潔: 你八十年代有三個重要的轉盤，第一個是1985年做的，就是做非表達繪畫的那個轉盤。你是先把畫布分成八等分，然後用也劃分成八等分的轉盤來決定現在要在畫布上哪個等分上畫一筆，這畫一筆的顏料是由骰子去選擇25種顏料中的一種，這25種顏料是你選的，然後把它們編碼？那把畫面分成八等分也是你先規定了一個構圖？

黃永砯: 對，這些都是我事先要有一定的規定性。比方說為什麼要找25種顏料呢，這25種顏料到底是有什麼普遍性或者特殊性？其實25種顏料也是我當時容易找到的。首先這裡面沒有常規的顏料，比方說他沒有油畫，他沒有水粉，大部份是一些油漆，洗筆油，還有一些看上去有點像顏色的東西，其實根本不屬於正規的顏料。

李雨潔: 這個轉盤讓我想到杜象的那個腳踏車輪，放在一個凳子上可以轉。那個原作從來沒有在美術館展過，毀掉之後他的複製品才展過。他在工作室裡面的時候常常轉著這個東西玩，然後欣賞它，所以那個東西有一個功能就是好玩。你的這個轉盤的功能就是幫助你畫畫，但是只有你用過，你沒有想說要完全地去掉你自己主觀的判斷力，讓第二個人去用這個轉盤嗎？

黃永砯: 我覺得也不太現實，為什麼呢？首先，如果有人要去做這個事情，他首先要知道這個程序，或者是說他要再造這個程序，不然他不知道要怎麼用。因為這跟自行車輪的轉動不一樣，你要知道，自行車輪的轉動你只要撥一下他就會一直轉，轉到他停下來，所以這個動作是比較容易的。但是你這個轉盤，你可以轉，他會停下來，那他停下來是說些什麼東西呢？他告訴你什麼東西呢？他幫你什麼事情呢？這個都完全是一灘糊塗的東西。所以說，首先我必須意識到說我要有一個程序，比方說我們用骰子，比方說我們要選25種顏料，這些都是我規定的，我不能否認，但是我為什麼要選25號而不選23號？這個就不是由我來決定，這就是靠我用的這個骰子。骰子他告訴我是7，我就用7明白吧？我用這個轉，這個轉盤上面有一個標誌，就是說指他停下來了，然後停下來，停在哪一個上，有一定的規定。是這個意義上。

李雨潔: 所以這個意義上就造成一種你規定的但是又與你無關的一種結果？

黃永砯:沒錯。

李雨潔: 你只有用這個轉盤做過一個作品？

黃永砯: 用這個轉盤其實是做過五張畫。但是展出過的是四張畫，還有一張是沒有完成的，後來就停下來，就不做了。

李雨潔: 為什麼沒有完成呢？

黃永砯: 不知道！當時就這樣停下來了。就四張，然後就完了，後來這個轉盤也就不再使用了。後來是展覽這四張畫的時候，同時把這個轉盤也展出。

李雨潔: 但是從1985年的第一個《非表達繪畫》的轉盤，然後1987年的時候有帶四個輪子的《大轉盤》，《跟六走向小轉盤》。 大轉盤就比較複雜了，他有內圈跟外圈，譬如說內圈有64個條目，外圈有384個條目，內圈條目和外圈條目規定了作品的做法，他們要互相配合的。

黃永砯: 對。

李雨潔: 你大轉盤做出來的作品，標題通常都是該條目，可是你好像通常只有給一個條目？譬如說「潮濕的手段」。從「潮溼的手段」這個條目衍伸出很多個作品，但是潮溼的手段是外圈的條目？

黃永砯: 對。

李雨潔: 那的內圈條目不見了？

黃永砯: 內圈條目一般不出現在我作品的題目裡面。 當時其實是這樣子的，內圈條目是作為一個作品的創作背景條件，它是比較潛在的。那外圈是直接拿來做標題。

《西方繪畫簡史》 和《中國繪畫史》在洗衣機中洗了兩分鐘

李雨潔:你在1987年12月1號同時作了幾件作品，都叫做「潮溼的手段」因為你把赫伯特·里德 (Herbert Read)的《西方繪畫簡史》跟王伯敏《中國繪畫史》這兩本書在洗衣機中一起洗了兩分鐘，但是其實這個兩分鐘是轉盤上的條目沒有規定的。那你又用洗衣機洗了一張自己的油畫洗了五分鐘。還有一個是把沙包捆綁起來？所以你那天剛好轉到了潮溼的手段，然後就做了很多個作品？

黃永砯: 又轉到第二次。

李雨潔: 你在做大轉盤作品的時候也需要很多主觀的判斷才能完成？

黃永砯: 對，我覺得大轉盤沒有像非表達繪畫這個轉盤的規定那麼死：一個是限制沒有那麼嚴格，還有一個他範圍要寬。其實他的目的不在限制，這個大轉盤的目的在擴張各種各樣的想法，這些想法之間有沒有條理，這個是不在我關心的範圍。它不只制訂一個系統，是想要超越一些系統，應該這樣來理解。

李雨潔: 但是有沒有有些時候你轉到某一個條目，發現你今天沒靈感做不出來，你就放棄了？

黃永砯: 嗯，會有的。從一些可以找到的我的筆記裡面，關於轉盤的作品，其實不止我們看到那些，有一些是沒做的但是我有記錄。將來可能有機會的話，可能會把這些東西整理整理，跟這個轉盤一起展出，我覺得這樣可能會更有意義，但是這需要一些時間。

李雨潔: 《六走向小轉盤》有沒有做出相關的作品。

黃永砯: 《六走向小轉盤》是沒有的，這個是88年做的作品，為了大地魔術師(Margiciens de la terre)這個展覽。我當時已經被邀請，我正在考慮這個展覽的方案，所以它其實是為這個展覽作的，但是我從來沒有使用它來做作品過。而且放在一個旅行箱裡面，後來就拿去參加了一個1989年2月份在中國美術館的一個展覽。

李雨潔: 什麼時候開始停止用轉盤做作品？

黃永砯: 其實到了法國以後，92年《占卜者之屋》作品裡面還有一個大的轉盤。是一個像年曆一樣的東西，這個功能也是轉盤。樹了這個年柱，還有下面的幾個盤，譬如說夜，日，還有時間，它是屬於占卜的轉盤，可以使用八字生辰來占卜。這個作品後來發展到一個轉盤車，轉盤車另外有一個題目叫做《六十甲子車》。

李雨潔: 但是這兩樣東西的目的不是占卜藝術，而是占卜生活，是不是？

黃永砯: 基本上還是跟藝術有關係。當然還有一些更小的一些轉盤是一個1991年的《小賭盤》，用來談作品的價格。

李雨潔: 這個占卜價格的轉盤有真的使用過嗎？

黃永砯: 沒有使用過，沒有人會跟我玩這個遊戲，我覺得這個不成問題。這個轉盤是不是可以玩，我覺得問題不大。我這個作品只不過是提了一個問題，就是關於作品的價格怎麼樣才是合適的？

洗書

李雨潔: 你後來做了很多有關洗書的系列。藏書計劃裡面有些書對你來講應該是有特殊意義的，譬如說《純粹理性批判》，還有你當時在看的一些有關美學的書。你洗了很多書，那你洗書的選擇都是什麼？

黃永砯: 其實《藏書計劃》有一張照片是地上一攤書，那就是我書架上的書。我當時買了很多書，美學的書倒是沒拿去洗，美學的書很多我是用膠水黏起來的，雖然我買了很多美學的書，後來我基本上拒絕去看這些書。這些書是不是全部看完以後才被黏起來的？我不是很確定，但是有一些確實看過。一般來說，沒有用的東西洗了就沒有意義。特別是一些比較小件的，譬如說康德《純粹理性批判》，這些都是有象徵意義的，不是隨便洗的。當然後來有很多書就是作為作品的材料， 譬如說我後來也有用報紙洗，那需要很多的量，那是另外一件事情。

李雨潔: 到法國做的那個大地魔術師的作品，為什麼改洗報紙？

黃永砯: 這個道理是非常簡單的。因為它已經轉變為一種材料， 而且這個作品需要一個大量的好幾噸的紙，不是幾本書所能夠解決的問題。

李雨潔: 你好像是選擇了法國共產主義的報紙？

黃永砯: 也有一些解放報，當時沒有完全指定是專門的一家報紙，我沒有這樣指定，我是泛指當時的媒體文化。

李雨潔: 所以到這時候報紙已經變成一種雕塑的材料？

黃永砯: 裝置的材料。可這個其實已經預告了後來工作的一個方式，所有的東西都是通過草圖先探討，最後變為一個實體作品。

躲避美術館

李雨潔: 你在出國之前參加的《中國現代藝術展》，它原本是要在1987年實現的，叫做《各地青年藝術家學術交流展》。原本那個時候你們工作的程序是怎麼樣呢？你們是被組織者邀請，還是是徴件？

黃永砯: 《中國現代藝術展》 一開始沒有一個組織， 都是一些自發的，各個地方的活動。有一些人是搞理論的，他們有報紙還有雜誌。一開始他們在珠海搞了一個所謂幻燈展，後來搞了一個黃山會議，黃山會議是什麼呢？就是他們給各地藝術家，寫些信說你們能不能來參加，帶一些幻燈片來，在會場放一放。然後在這個黃山會議上，其實已經在討論說要組織一個全國性的展覽。但是這個展覽到底是怎麼做呢？這都在爭論，當然也不存在什麼徴件，因為這些人與大家都很熟，譬如說高名潞，栗憲庭，費大為，我都見過，他們都是屬於策展的小組成員，很長一段時間我們都通信。然後他們沒有規定藝術家要展什麼東西，我們廈門達達有提一些方案，但有一些方案是做不了的。他們也沒有經費，所以也不可能把作品從廈門運到北京，我們基本上捲了一些照片帶去，我把六走向小轉盤放在一個箱子裡面，這箱子原本的作用也是讓我坐火車的時候可以帶，這些東西都是輕便的。有一些計劃，譬如說在那邊要拖美術館，要撒什麼大米，都不能做的。最後能做的就是貼些照片，還有展出一些輕便的東西。

李雨潔: 你是不是有一個方案要油印空白紙，然後在廁所裡面展覽？有一個提到說要殺豬？

黃永砯: 當時是所謂的「廈門達達」小組一起討論出來的方案，但這個最後的文稿是我組織的。當時的會談的記錄也沒有，只不過是大家坐在那邊聊天，我也很難記住這個殺豬到底是什麼人提的，是誰提出這個那麼壞的主意？我覺得這些可能性都是有意義的，是不是要實施？這是另外一件事情。我覺得那個展覽所有的東西都在挑釁，是吧？但是當時的展覽，廈門達達挑釁是最少的。其實從動作上，它是最少的，倒是別人真的是挑釁的，廈門達達只是把這些有挑釁的想法放在一個文本裡面。

李雨潔: 你在一篇筆記裡面好像也有提到這種擔憂，你們為了解除展覽作為權勢之爭的遊戲，想了一些激烈的方案，但是這樣反而進入另外一種權勢之爭。

黃永砯: 所以我們的一個計劃叫做「躲避」，其實這是一個矛盾的詞，因為你受邀請參加這個美術館，卻是要躲避這個美術館，這是一個悖論。你怎麼能夠既參加又躲避？又進去，又逃出？就在談這個觀念。我覺得這個觀念在當時還是第一次有人這麼提。因為所有人都是說要挑釁，而且這個氣氛就是挑釁，所以後來才出現開槍。這個關於權勢的文章是展覽之後我寫的，另外一篇文章，有關躲避美術館，這個計劃是早一點的時候，1988年寫的。

李雨潔: 具體要怎麼躲避呢？

黃永砯: 提出了一些方案，例如在不是展覽的空間展覽，這就是一個躲避的方式。譬如說在廁所，在過道，在樓梯，不是在正廳，不是在一個引人注目的空間，譬如說你為什麼要撒米，這米是不容易被注意的，因為所有人注意的都是引人注目的東西。但是這些更多的是當時我個人當時的一些想法。

李雨潔: 後來選擇的是《拖美術館》的計劃？

黃永砯: 《拖美術館》計劃也沒有實現，這個拖美術館是單獨寄給展覽組織者，單獨寄給他們說需要這些材料，大概要有幾個柱子，需要什麼東西，要有一個描述，。但是這個沒有下文，也沒實現。

李雨潔: 你對肖魯開槍有什麼看法。

黃永砯: 槍響的時後我不在場，這個槍響之前已經有很多的混亂，我當時我對於在北京這個展覽，該做什麼事情我很清楚，我已經準備躲避了，遠離這個圈子。在黃山會議我已經知道這個圈子是權力慾，大家都來爭名利，有點像農民起義，爭奪座位。開槍是最極端的了，然而藝術家在關於藝術這個行當裡面，特別是這個先鋒藝術，前衛藝術，這些極端應該怎麼來界定？我覺得關於藝術的思考其實是關於更多的人的思考，關於你要做什麼，你該做什麼，你作為一個藝術家，你要達到什麼東西？ 當時我也知道我很快就要去法國，我當然不至於做極端的實情，讓自己在那個時候被抓起來，但我也不知道去法國會怎麼樣，我也可能馬上就回來廈門。但是當時特別是廈門達達這些極端的行為做完以後，我已經開始思考一些極端之後的工作，關於極端化以後的出路 。《中國現代藝術展》開槍之前，譬如說有藝術家在洗腳，在孵蛋，撒什麼避孕套，已經是烏烟瘴氣了。這個中國的前衛藝術已經進入到一種主要是以騷亂為主，但是騷亂，我已經說了，達達主義一開始的目標就是要引起混亂，這方面的工作廈門達達已經做過了，我已經不要再進行新的騷亂了，我應該考慮新的工作。 藝術除了這個之外，還有沒有其他的可能性？這個已經是我在重新思考的。

李雨潔: 你是1989年四月的時候去巴黎參加《大地魔術師》嗎？在那邊待到六月初的時候發生了天安門事件？那沈遠老師呢？

黃永砯: 她是遲了一點，90年來。當時也是我們通過一些《大地魔術師》展覽裡面認識的朋友，還有當時我在Provence美院的一些關係，朋友都幫忙寫邀請信什麼的，需要很多條件，相當困難。以我個人的生活準則來說，我就是隨遇而安，因為我是個被動性的人，這可能跟我以前所謂的一些藝術上的一些想法有關係。 譬如說90年代歐洲有很多的展覽邀請我，然後我就留下來，沒有考慮太多。當我還沒有明白怎麼回事的時候，已經過去了二十幾年，事情就是這樣，是不是？譬如說到法國，也不是我的一個選擇，不是說我已經設計好了我要移民這裡，或者說是換一個社會生活，這些都是機會，只不過我順從各種各樣的機會。

黃禍：住在中國與法國的藝術家

李雨潔: 搬到法國之後，1993年你開始做有關動物的作品，例如「橋」還有「世界劇場」， 你好像一直對爬蟲，蛇還有蟲很有興趣？這種興趣是來自於這些動物象徵的涵義？

黃永砯: 從今天的角度來說，其實我用了一個最大範圍的，不同種類的動物來作作品。最早的使用活的動物是1993年在牛津《黃禍》那個作品，後來就緊接著1994年在舊金山又用了活的烏龜。 在牛津的那個《黃禍》大概用了一千隻蝗蟲，放在美術館的入口的地方。但是這個展覽沒有因為動物保護的問題而關掉，是有問題，但是這裡的動物不構成一個真正的問題，為什麼呢，蝗蟲都是爬在牆上面，只不過幾隻掉下來，地上的蠍子可以抓到來吃，他們彼此很少能夠接觸。而且我想展覽沒有很長吧，大概是一個多月。

李雨潔: 但是它沒有完全審查？就是沒有說你不能用蟲？

黃永砯: 沒有。

李雨潔: 《世界劇場》的狀況就很不同。你在一個烏龜形狀的箱子裡面關了蠍子，還有各種蟲，有蠍子，蜘蛛，蟋蟀等等，讓他們自相殘殺，引起很多爭議。

黃永砯: 第一次展《世界劇場》在斯圖加特(Stuttgartt)，沒有審查，因為是在德國的斯圖加特的孤獨城堡 Schloss Solitude， 那個地方供藝術家駐村幾個月，有一個過道，藝術家有一點點小空間做一點展覽。所以是給少數人看的，不引起爭論 。 後來實現的一次在巴黎，一次在阿姆斯特丹，還有在Walker Art Center，一次在北京。有幾次叫停，出問題的其中一次在溫哥華，一次在巴黎龐畢度中心 。龐畢度那個是一個很大的集體展覽，當時龐畢度的工作人員已經知道有這麼一個計劃，他們寫了很多抗議書給龐畢度的館長，後來引起了法國的動物保護協會的反對，他們的主席是一個以前很有名的一個演員，他也寫了一封很正式的信給龐畢度中心抗議這件事情。後來巴黎市的警察局出面了，其中動物保護協會提出訴訟。這些我是不在場的，是他們的律師去弄的。關於這個事件，有一個法國的社會學家曾經寫過一本書，書裡面有一篇文章談論到這個作品，談關於藝術作品被審查的問題，很多這些也是我事後才知道。

李雨潔: 很多人說有些作品在中國可以做，在其他地方不能做。你可不可以比較一下這些審查制度跟當地的現當代藝術的接受度的關係？

黃永砯: 這個審查制度，分開來說，一個是屬於關於民主社會的，還有一個關於非民主社會的。譬如說以前八十年代我在中國的時候有一些審查，這些審查呢，當然有一些是涉及到關於觀念上的東西，還有譬如說意識形態上面的東西。因為意識形態規定什麼東西是可以表現的， 什麼是不能表現的。但我們今天，譬如說在民主社會，當然在意識形態上已經不存在這個東西，有另外一些安全的限制，比方說我碰到的動物的問題，他們對動物保護的看法有這麼一些界線是不能觸犯的。比方說展覽單位他們就非常小心，他們不希望觸犯這個東西。所以各種審查從總體上說對我的作品，我覺得是積極的。我們換個說法，我們必須要感激敵對者，我們經常會為了工作需要，需要製造一個對立面，這些東西都是正面的，我們不能把審查當做一個完全是負面的東西。因為就我個人的經歷，有一些審查使我產生了一些新的東西。但是我覺得應該劃分清楚，不是為了觸犯而觸犯，這個是又回到一開始我就說到關於80年代末期中國的當代藝術的一些關於要肆意挑起一些挑釁。比方說我在作品中用蟲，我並沒有想到說這個蟲真的會引起紛爭，那麼小的東西，而且也是正常途徑買來的，商店他們都在賣，只不過是方式不一樣。譬如說他們賣的是一個盒子一個盒子的，那也有人買去養啊，那我只不過把盒子變成了一個大盒子，是吧？蟲沒有跑出來， 我也沒有覺得這個蟲影響到別人的安全，也沒有說要特地造成他們的殘酷。因為在我看來，蝗蟲在商店裡面是養的，是為了給蠍子吃的，所有的小蟲是為了讓大蟲能夠活才專門在那邊賣的，只不過是讓他們吃的時候不是在公眾，不在展覽，而是在私下的方式。當時做這個作品的時候，我的用意完全不在於他們的殘酷性，而是用動物的世界來作一個比喻，他們代表很多不同種類的人，他們是不可以共同生活的，那他們共同生活情況怎麼樣？ 所以叫世界劇場，這也是一個社會的隱喻。我覺得作品的意義在提出一些問題，而不是在提出向他們說的這個什麼殘酷不殘酷。譬如說龐畢度那件作品，為什麼會比展出更多的關注，因為邊上還有很多他們展出的文件。譬如說抗議書，這些抗議書，還有當時的政府的文件， 還有他們龐畢度主席跟策展人對這些的回應，他們的態度給了作品新的視野，擴大了作品 。這不是不是藝術家刻意的，而是一些意外的東西。

李雨潔: 你對你今天作為一個生活在中國還有法國的藝術家定位是什麼

黃永砯: 我的工作經常被比較的有兩個方面，一個是在中國，一個是在國外。而且經常會被這麼認為: 我在中國國內好像有很多東西可做，比方說今天的這個訪談，可能有大部分是很具體談到我中國的工作，是吧？但我在西方已經進行了25年的工作了，在廈門，你說作品從1984年開始吧，到1989年，才6年。我覺得前段部分對我來說，只不過是一個學習的過程，我們說得簡單一點，可能人家會認為是個模仿的過程。當然我的疑問在這裡，為什麼我在法國25年做的事情比較少人關心？ 凡是在一個所謂的不開放的一個地方，它的意義完全是在它的背景的封閉性，才引起一個注目。是這樣嗎？還要回到我剛才說的，如果我沒有後來的工作，我難道在中國六年的東西就能夠存在嗎？ 比方說廈門達達不是只有我一個人在做啊，也有五六個人在做，後來我走了以後他們也停下來了，他們沒有再繼續。為什麼他們的工作就被認為沒有意義呢？ 我覺得我出國前的東西跟出國後的東西， 不能完全割離開來，有很多東西是建立在之前的工作基礎上。我為什麼今天仍然在工作呢？因為工作就是生命之所在，是生活之所在，意義之所在，因為活著，工作。

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In this conversation, Huang also discusses his early experiments in Zhejiang and Xiamen in the 1980s, when he aimed to eliminate his aesthetical preferences when making art. He speaks in detail about how his Roulette series functioned as a tool for this purpose. The process of using a roulette to oracle and guide his process eventually bored him, and so he moved on to washing books and newspapers in a washing machine, a series he pursued through the 1990s. His unexpected move to Paris in 1989 was a watershed, marking his transition from ephemeral practices to room-size sculptural works, some of which involved live animals and taxidermies. At this moment, Huang’s focus shifted from that of challenging his identity as an artist to exploring cultural mixing within societies and the clashes and parallels among civilizations. The different censorships he has faced in China and Europe have informed his different approaches to testing and crossing the boundaries—whether through washing books, oracling, or bringing bugs into the museum.

Nantes, Huang Yong Ping’s Studio, June 22, 2014.

An Artist Controlled by a Tool

Li: In late 1981 you presented the Spray Gun series as your graduation project. It seems like you were still focused on painting then, like you hadn’t yet given it up. Were you still exploring new ways of painting?

Huang: I can’t really say. In fact, I don’t think I had my goals sorted out yet. I was in a transitional period. Although as students we were nurtured in the traditional canon of the academy of art, none of us were comfortable with the conventional approaches we’d been taught.

Li: Was the Spray Gun series criticized at the time?

Huang: No, not seriously at least; the faculty just thought it was a bit absurd: You major in oil painting and yet you’re not painting with oils? After four years of mastering the medium, you’re not displaying basic skills? It was a risky move at that time, but our teachers weren’t totally unaccepting of it. They merely said, “Well, this is a bit simple, isn’t it.”

Li: You wrote in your notes that, when creating a work, “the tools should shift from active to passive.”¹ How did you accomplish this? Do you think you succeeded?

Huang: This isn’t so easy to explain. Tools aren’t alive, and so it makes no sense to refer to them as either active or passive; what I was referring to was the people using them. As for the industrial spray gun I used—it was fairly small and came with an air compressor; it wasn’t designed for painting on canvas but instead for coating objects with color. For instance, if you wanted to paint this desk black, you would just spray it and—whoosh—it would be done! So why did I question myself about tools? It was mainly because using nontraditional tools to make paintings felt fresh to us; the spray gun was something we could not control with any precision. From where we stood, painting had always been an art of control and subtlety; all the colors were supposed be delicate, with subtle variations. For example, when you use a paintbrush, you can make it go left or right as you please. However, with a spray gun, you lack control. In a matter of seconds you might have a big splash of color that you aren’t able to manage or change in a subtle way. So it was from this perspective that I was thinking about the powers of unawareness and passivity—I felt like as artists we were standing in a passive position, but not necessarily in a bad way. In fact, being passive opened up a whole new world for us. It was almost like creating with your subconscious. That is why I suggested that activeness had very little to do with it, whereas passivity was something to explore.

Li: So you went from being active to being passive largely because this tool was hard to control, and you weren’t experienced with it? Although this series has an element of “unconsciousness,” it also seems like it falls into a style of New Objectivity or abstraction, and vividly at that.

Huang: Yes, it is a rich and vivid style. Based on the working process, I would say that it resembles so-called cold, or hard-edge abstraction.² When you spray color onto a stencil on a canvas, the results are hard-edge, which has an effect of rigidness, and therefore “cold.” Back then, I had classmates pursuing similar projects, except for that they painted by hand, and I was using a tool that caused an extreme effect. For instance, there was this very talented classmate of mine Zha Li, who painted works that resemble early works from Geng Jianyi or Zhang Peili. It’s not expressionism or impressionism; it is instead a much colder, harder-edged, and semiabstract style.

Li: Before the ’85 New Wave, a lot of artists at Zhejiang Academy of Art were already exploring this so-called cold abstraction, or at least trying to remove the idea of a personal style from their work. Why do you suppose this was?

Huang: It’s hard to say why this was exactly, but I do believe that it had something to do with freeing ourselves from political objectives or agendas. That is, every traditional artistic tool is instrumental in expressing or reinforcing some idea. But once you rid the work of such things by way of coldness or semiabstraction, it deviates from these underlying or presupposed concepts.

Xiamen Dada and Marcel Duchamp

Li: In 1983 you and a group of friends held A Modern Art Exhibition of Five Artists, which was only open for internal viewing.³ What were the prerequisites for hosting a show? For instance, you chose the Xiamen People’s Art Museum as your venue—how did you apply for or lease such a space? There weren’t curators back then, and so how did you execute everything?

Huang: Well, we didn’t really need to lease anything. We came to know a few people in Xiamen, among them a teacher [Ji Naijin] who had graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and was working at the Xiamen People’s Art Museum. We were very close to him, and he was supportive of young artists. One day we came up with the idea of organizing an exhibition, and he was encouraging. Because of this, it was all fairly smooth and simple—except for that the show wasn’t open to the public. We called it an “internal viewing” and we held it in a space that was just big enough but not too big; the museum had a standard-size space, which was roughly 100 square meters. We didn’t have a curator, just a few friends who hung out a lot, working on the project. We sent out invitations, made on a mimeograph machine, to a set number of people across the artistic community, such as teachers and professors.

Li: So it was by invitation only?

Huang: Yes. And speaking of invitations—these were really interesting. They were mimeographs printed on a paper roughly this big, with red stamps on them. I still have some of them. Later on we held a conference to discuss the exhibition; we even kept minutes. So that was it. The exhibition and the conference lasted about three days.

Li: There were quite a few abstract paintings as well as collages made from found objects. You seem to consider this exhibition significant, in the sense that you took a step forward in terms of experimentation. Were the five artists in the show the same people who made up the Xiamen Dada group that came afterward?

Huang: Yes. One of the five dropped out of the group, but the other four stayed, which is why the exhibition was considered a project by the Xiamen Dada group [which was, however, established afterwards]. After we established Xiamen Dada, we expanded our activities.

Li: In 1986 you founded the Modern Art Research Group, which I think held group discussions and did some mimeograph works. Did it function like a reading group?

Huang: No, not really. We didn’t have a strict meeting schedule like a reading group would; we were a bit less organized. Meetings were totally voluntary. The whole conference idea had to do with Ji Naijin, the man I mentioned earlier—he worked at the Xiamen People’s Museum. A while later, our meetings were relocated to the space where we started Xiamen Dada, which is where he came in. At the time I had started writing articles, such as “Image-Word-Objects.” I had written quite a stack of them, which I showed to him; he was interested and passed them along to other people. Then we mimeographed more copies. The articles I chose to print out were shorter texts. All this was happening around the time I started Xiamen Dada.

Li: Was this about the time you acquired a copy of Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp,⁴ translated by a Taiwanese into Chinese. You made copies of it and circulated among the group? That was in 1986, I think?

Huang: I think it was even earlier than that. I didn’t acquire the copy from Taiwan—I might have gotten it through a friend, Xu Chengdou. He was also part of A Modern Art Exhibition of Five Artists. He was a Chinese expatriate living in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Later on he returned to Xiamen, bringing some finely printed little albums of Impressionist artworks with him. I’m not sure if the Duchamp book came from him; it also may have come from a library at Xiamen University.

Li: You mentioned in your journals that you read Wittgenstein’s books in 1982 and his biography in 1984. Does that mean you came across Wittgenstein before Duchamp?

Huang: I never chronicled when exactly I came across Duchamp—it’s hard to say who I discovered first.

Li: You also mentioned that An Anthology of the Five Transmissions of the Lamp⁵ was republished in 1985.⁶ When exactly did you start reading about Chan Buddhism?⁷ I suppose it was earlier than that?

Huang: Actually, it was around that time. In China, the only way to access that book is if it gets republished and becomes available in bookstores. An alternative would have been if my father had had such a book in his library, but he didn’t. Surely I knew of Chan Buddhism, but to come across a book as academically professional as An Anthology of the Five Transmissions of the Lamp was only possible when it was republished.

Li: That’s true. Publications in the eighties were a bit sporadic, sometimes even random—no one could tell how the selection of books was made. Judging from the articles I’ve read by artists of that time, it seems that though they talked a lot about Chinese traditions and the West, they sometimes weren’t that sure of their understanding of the so-called Chinese traditions—and in terms of the West, they seemed to have relied largely on what they imagined or speculated. So it feels like Chinese artists of the time were standing equally distant from both when it came to understanding. Do you think this is the case?

Huang: Yes, and I’ve made similar comments. I’d say that at that time, we felt like we were discovering both the Chinese traditions and the Western ones.

Li: Would you say that sometimes you discovered your own traditions through the West?

Huang: Surely you can better understand traditions through the West. Bear in mind that traditional works and canons were only republished after the Cultural Revolution. Of course, earlier publications existed, but they weren’t available for circulation. For example, you could definitely find books about Chan Buddhism, Buddhism, Lao Zi, or Zhuang Zi at a library, but it was hard to find them in a bookstore, because bookstores only sold newly printed books.

Burning Artworks: “I suggested burning the artworks, but I didn’t burn everything. I burned mostly paintings.”

Li: In 1986 Xiamen Dada held a burning event, and you said that it was because you weren’t satisfied with circumstances surrounding the exhibition. The exhibition consisted of more than just works by Xiamen Dada members—that is, besides your group of friends, there were other young artists involved. Would you care to elaborate on what happened exactly?

Huang: The title of the exhibition was, in fact, not “Xiamen Dada” but rather Xiamen Modern Art Exhibition. I coined the term “Xiamen Dada” in an article I wrote for the art newspaper Fine Arts in China. The title is “Xiamen Dada—A Kind of Postmodernism?”(1986) and it gave birth to the term. As for our Xiamen Dada organization, it was formed when we worked on the burning project. How so? From where we stand today, A Modern Art Exhibition of Five Artists is much too mundane a theme for an exhibition, because it doesn’t really deal with any issue. “Modern art” is, in the context of language, different from terms such as “socialism” or “realism”; it represents art influenced by the West, which we call modernist or modern art. Most of the artists who took part in the exhibition were young graduates from art academies or liberal arts colleges, who brought with them their mostly abstract sculptures. And yet, why didn’t I consider the exhibition a success, and why did I hold the burning event? Because I felt that the goals and intentions of the exhibition weren’t clear. I served as the organizer because we didn’t have a curator, and when someone came to me with an artwork, it was hard not to let him or her in, because we didn’t have a clear guiding principle and therefore criteria for rejection. In the end, we had piles of artwork—some of it ink painting, other of it abstract painting. So by the time we set up the show, I had begun to think about the essence of the exhibition. I believe that exhibitions should be able to change the perceived nature and quality of artworks and to raise meaningful questions. “Modern art” as a theme seemed to me to be too vague and powerless, because it lacked a clear goal or foundation. I hoped to find a way out, which is why I proposed “Xiamen Dada” in the title of my article. And the idea of Xiamen Dada resonated quite a bit during the exhibition. For instance, I had a few pieces that were satiric and closely related to European Dadaism, and that was interesting.

Li: What are some examples?

Huang: For example, I made The Beard Was the Easiest to Burn on Da Vinci’s beard; I made a piece in which I burned holes in three photos of Picasso; and I also made Ringing Pistol, which suggests a Dadaist metaphor.

Li: But you only burned paintings, is that correct?

Huang: That’s right. I was the one who suggested that we burn artwork, but we didn’t burn everything; mostly we burned paintings.

Li: Were you suggesting that painting is dead?

Huang: Possibly. Another reason is that most of the paintings were larger in size—whereas other pieces, such as the photos, were comparatively smaller—and so it made more of an impact when we burned a painting. On another note, we made clear that “burning” was not the ultimate objective—it was only a move or a phase. Because if burning was indeed the ultimate objective, then we really would be terminating art, and it would be ridiculous to continue working as artists after art is terminated. In fact, the burning generated a lot of discussion at the time. People would ask: “Why do you have to display the video footage after you burn them [the artworks]?” Wouldn’t simple words suffice and wouldn’t it be easier just to tell people that you burned the works and be finished with it? But the truth is . . . life goes on and I was still young, and so I was always wondering what would be next. That was my philosophy—that we didn’t even have a method of terminating artworks; we decided to annihilate artworks to make a point; burning them was merely the strategic means of getting there. It definitely didn’t mark the “end” of art.

Li: Is this why you kept pieces of some of the works you burned at the event? To serve as evidence?

Huang: No, that’s a different story. What I just said refers to the paintings. As for why I kept these pieces and whether I intended them as evidence—I can tell you that that’s not the case. In fact, I rarely ever showed these works to anyone after the burning. When you carve out a 12-by-12-centimeter piece from an artwork, the original artwork is no longer whole and so it loses its essence as a painting; it becomes a useless piece of material. There were photographs and xerox copies that I didn’t burn simply because they were too unnoticeable; these weren’t things that you would want to reproduce. In fact, anything that you would reproduce [such as drawing and painting] got burned. Then again, we didn’t burn Ringing Pistol because it was stolen. It was small and nailed to the wall; perhaps someone found it interesting and so took it away. As for other things, such as a few manuscripts placed in a plastic bag—we didn’t burn those, but later on we threw them away. I think we only kept conceptual items; basically, anything material was burned.

Li: Was this exhibition censored?

Huang: No, there wasn’t any censoring of it. After all, the show wasn’t even open to the public, and so not that many people saw it.

Li: So this was an internal viewing as well?

Huang: We never specified, and we actually printed out leaflets [as a catalogue]. One of the members, Cai Lixiong, worked at Xiamen Daily—he had some connections and so was able to print out about a thousand or two leaflets there.

Li: Was Dissecting Oil Paints your first performance artwork?

Huang: Well, how do you define performance art? This piece sort of resembled the Italian artist Lucio Fontana’s cut paintings. When I cut the oil paint tubes, colors seeped through.

Li: You intentionally displayed photos of the performance of the dissection of the paint tubes along with the remains of the oil paint, in a way that recorded a performance piece. However, it seems like you were also exploring fundamental painting issues, especially since oil paint is a painting material—sort of like how you worked with found objects, in which the found objects are a kind of material.

Huang: That’s right. You should bear in mind that I hadn’t used oil paint in a long time; in fact, it had been years since I had laid hands on any oil colors. Some of my earlier works, including abstract paintings, were created with house paint, and so this was, in a sense, a continued exploration of my Spray Gun series. Speaking of which, I had previously done a piece in which I burned oil painting brushes—and, in fact, I think we may have burned oil painting brushes at the exhibition. All these pieces are more about latent illustrations of painting—we took the basics of painting, such as the tools, and processed them to the point they could no longer be properly used.

“Xiamen Dada—A Kind of Postmodernism?”

Li: When you wrote “Xiamen Dada—A Kind of Postmodernism?,” you seemed to have created a whole new school of Chinese Dadaism—a bit like how the history of southern/northern schools of landscape painting in China was written following the example of southern/northern schools⁸ of Chan Buddhism; this history was fabricated by later generations and didn’t exist. I feel like you did the same thing.

Huang: Yes, that was my intention.

Li: You named a few artists whom you admire, including Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp. Interestingly, Robert Rauschenberg came to China, and you treated him like a readymade object when you wrote about him in your article. In comparison, I think Manzoni, Klein, and Cage all better expressed the concept of ephemerality. However, Rauschenberg used a lot of readymade objects and worked in a decorative manner. Therefore, I think he stands out in the crowd. How did you manage to include them?

Huang: Well, naturally I had more interest in Rauschenberg. This was because of his exhibitions in China. I never went, but the way he applied found objects fell in line with my creative work. For example, how did Rauschenberg turn from painting to found objects? And how did he make found objects coexist with a flat platform? I have works that explore similar issues, and so I take great interest in Rauschenberg’s work. For example, in one piece he used a bed and a chicken—that felt familiar. But overall, I would say that his works are decorative; many of them are just three-dimensional paintings. All this marks a transitional phase. At that time, I was trying to transcend traditional painting, and he served as a bridge in my process. This is why he was quite significant to me and was included in the list of Dadaists.

Li: You didn’t go to Rauschenberg’s exhibition in Beijing, but you saw the catalogue?

Huang: I think I saw the catalogue somewhere else.

Li: So you made A Note to Robert Rauschenberg. What was its message?

Huang: Well, was the title really referring to Rauschenberg? You could say that he was irrelevant. I was using all kinds of titles as a way of adding meaning; I treated titles as if they were individual elements of the painting. I applied Chan Buddhism because I believed that the juxtaposition of Chan Buddhism and Dadaism would create new meanings, especially since I placed an Eastern element with a Western one—a term from intellectual history with one from art history. Why didn’t I use two terms from art history instead? In order to create more distance between them, and to create more contrast. This set a foundation for my future artwork, especially in the way I moved from this history to that history; these ideas are all relevant.

Taking Waste from the Streets and Exhibiting It in a Museum

Li: The installation that Xiamen Dada made in late 1986, the one titled Exhibition of the Happening in Fujian Art Museum, looks as if it was done spontaneously, whereas it was actually an execution of a formulated plan, is that correct? You also added a wall text that forced viewers to interpret what art in general is—in a sense that emphasized the participation of the audience. I think one of the sentences was censored and eliminated by museum officials.

Huang: Yes, it was all planned out. After A Modern Art Exhibition of Five Artists, China was a relatively more open atmosphere. I met the curator of an art museum in Fujian Province, and he said that they were fairly interested in Xiamen Dada and asked if we could move the exhibition there, and so we said yes. In reality, we had burned all the artwork, but I didn’t tell him that. I was already onto something new, and so this was an exhibition opportunity earned through half-deceit; we agreed to move our exhibition, but we had no artwork to show. All four of us went to Fuzhou,⁹ inspected their space, and planned out everything. We were given only a week because the show wasn’t part of their official program—they were more open-minded, more tolerant of experimental stuff. We not only inspected the area, we also took photos of the waste on the street—it was indeed all planned out—and then we returned to Xiamen. The day we went back to install the pieces, we moved fast; we brought in everything we needed, put everything in its designated space, specified which objects were to be displayed, and organized the logistics and everything. The installation went fast and efficient like a sudden attack. Now, why did we need to be fast? Because we needed to get everything done before anyone could react. We planned it down to every detail, including the words and graphics to go on the artworks; everything had been completed in Xiamen beforehand. It was all very organized. It’s a shame we didn’t keep a floor plan of the project; we kept everything in our heads. Of course, some things were random; some of the stuff was damaged in transportation, and more stuff was added in order to fill the space. We pasted a lot of Dada newspapers and notes onto the pieces—such as a note stating that the audience had the authority to decide whether the piece was an artwork or not. However, the museum didn’t want to be liable, and so they covered it up.

Li: So at first it was just one person covering up a line of a sentence on the sign, and then a half an hour later, someone else came and put a stop to everything?

Huang: Yes, that was the museum director. He said that he was shutting down the exhibition, and the exhibition was taken down pretty soon after.

Li: Yet, previously, in Xiamen People’s Art Museum, you hadn’t been censored for burning artworks, correct? So getting censored for what happened in Fuzhou [at the Fujian Art Museum] seems a bit random. It seems like the decision was based solely on the opinions of local authorities—a very chaotic situation.

Huang: Yes, it was! But, of course, that is the way things were in China. The truth is that we held the burning at the Xiamen People’s Art Museum on a Sunday at noon, and so the audience was small. There were just a few people playing sports nearby; we didn’t notify anyone—some students came by to watch and a few people came over to help. There wasn’t, indeed, much of an audience. Plus, the burning was pretty fast; it was all done within thirty or forty minutes, and so the burning itself didn’t generate any complaints. The fire department saw smoke and came by out of concern, because we were in a public space. The problem we had was with the museum; they feared mishaps and accidents. Visitors would either understand the work or, if they didn’t, they would up and leave; it would have been days before the government showed up, that is, if they cared. So all in all, the censoring was really self-censoring; if anything, it was museums fearing for themselves.

Oracles

Li: In 1983 you wrote an article titled “An Oracle on the Fate of Modern Painting in China.” This seems to be the first time you mentioned the term “oracle.” When did you start taking an interest in oracles? Did your understanding of them come from the I Ching?¹⁰

Huang: It’s quite possible that I first used the term “oracle” in this article. Often, the first time you use a term, you aren’t fully aware of its meaning. In fact, you might have unconsciously chosen to use it. It was only a while later that the term “oracle” became significant. I have a piece from 1992 titled House of Oracles; in 2005 I used the same title for one of my exhibitions. Over time, “oracles” became very important to me. For one thing, they evoke the notion of a person reaching out to a higher power for help or guidance. Oracling has been practiced for thousands of years. It has a whole, intrinsic, and complicated system and tradition; mainly the oracle’s function is to warn you against something and advise you—that is, to tell you what not to do, but never to instruct you in terms of what you should do. I was in a place where I needed someone to advise me on what I should and shouldn’t do. Importantly, you cannot ask a question twice; if you do, the oracle stops being accurate—the instruments stop working. This protocol keeps a distance between you and your instrument.

Li: Have you ever really learned how to use an oracle?

Huang: Well, no. I simply read some books on the practice and have come to understand some of its methods. But was my practice an authentic one? I cannot say exactly. Nevertheless, I always find something useful in it.

Li: When you were writing the article “An Oracle on the Fate of Modern Painting in China” (1983), you did a lot of experiments with found objects. You mentioned various movements, including Surrealism, Dadaism, Fauvism, and the Bauhaus. An interesting thing is that your criteria for these styles seems to come from an American take on European modernism. Where did you get this knowledge of art history? From books, and if so, which ones?

Huang: I can tell you for sure that it didn’t come from the academy of art, especially the part concerning modern art history. I gained my knowledge from fragments of information, such as translations of pieces or excerpts, and so it was overall a bit scattered.

Li: A lot of people were reading Herbert Read and Edward Lucie-Smith, and you quoted from their books in your artwork as well. Was this because they were significant to you?

Huang: No, not particularly. Anything that I came across would become significant because there was only so much I had access to. If I had been given more choices at the time, I might have opted to quote something else. But all in all, I think these two books pretty much encompass the most important ideas, don’t you agree?

Li: You first saw Duchamp’s works when you went to France, is that correct?

Huang: Yes, that’s right. I have elaborated my thoughts in other articles, in which I mentioned that I wasn’t partial to originals. Thus, seeing Duchamp’s originals in France didn’t change my opinion of him or his work. It’s not like I would say, “Hey, this isn’t the Duchamp that I know” or “I realize I have been wrong.” This is because I don’t formulate ideas based solely on what I see, on concrete objects, or on empirical experience. Especially with Duchamp—you can grasp his spirit and his work’s essence through reading his words or his speeches, or even through print reproductions or copies. This is to say that he is able to surpass the so-called original. Then again, the French might disagree, because they greatly value originals, and they consider them to be completely different from copies; I, however, see no such significance in the subtle differences.

The Roulette Series

Li: Here’s a photo of your studio in 1987. I find it particularly interesting because it includes the roulettes and some abstract paintings as well as some found objects.

Huang: The person who took this photo is actually in the picture. He sat there and used slow motion to capture the scene, in which he appears as a vague silhouette, almost unrecognizable. A lot of stuff was piled up in the studio, such as the first roulette; many artworks were damaged, such as these wine bottles and this plastic tube on gypsum. I lay there and made the gypsum piece myself. And this foot piece was molded with my own feet.

Li: All of your work from this time had concrete titles.

Huang: Yes, but many of those pieces are gone; I don’t have them anymore.

Li: You made three important “roulette”¹¹ artworks in the eighties; you made the first one in 1985, which is the one you used to create Four Paintings Created According to Random Instructions. You divided a canvas into eight equal parts, and then used a roulette—also divided into eight parts—to determine which parts of the canvas to paint. Once that was decided, you threw dice to determine which of twenty-five colors you would use. Did you personally choose and number those twenty-five colors? Did you make a sketch before you divided the canvas into eight parts?

Huang: Yes, all of this was previously established. For example, why those twenty-five colors? What was so special about them, and do they share anything in common? First of all, I chose these twenty-five colors because they were easy to come by. None of them were conventional paints. For example, the selection didn’t include any oil color or gouache; most of the colors were wall paints or brush cleaner. They just came from stuff that had some pigment in it—they weren’t even regular colors.

Li: This roulette reminds me of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), the one that spins on a stool. The original piece was never exhibited in a museum; it was only after its demolition that a replica was exhibited. Duchamp used to spin and fumble with it when he was in his studio, admiring it, and so you can see that one of its functions is to be fun. As to this roulette, it bears the function of teaching you how to paint; however, you’re the only one who has ever used it. Has it ever occurred to you to rid it of your own subjective judgment and to let another person take charge of the roulette?

Huang: Well, I fear that wouldn’t be feasible. First of all, if anyone was to use it, he would have to know the procedures—in other words, that person would need to re-create the whole process, because otherwise he wouldn’t know what to do. This isn’t the same as spinning a bicycle wheel. With a bicycle wheel, you push it once and it keeps spinning until it stops; that’s easy. But with a roulette, you can spin it and it will stop, but then what? What does it mean or what is it trying to say? All of this is confusing. That is why I had to establish a procedure. For example, I used dice to determine the twenty-five colors; I enacted this rule, but then who decided it was to be twenty-five colors and not twenty-three? It was the dice, not me. If the dice had instructed seven, then I would have chosen seven colors, you see? I spin the roulette, and then the point at which it stops contains a rule. This is how it worked.

Li: So, in a sense, the result was something that was a consequence of rules you created and yet it was independent of you at the same time?

Huang: That’s right.

Li: You have only created one piece with this roulette?

Huang: I have actually created five paintings with this roulette. I’ve only exhibited four of them, however; the fifth one remains unfinished—I never completed it.

Li: Why didn’t you complete it?

Huang: Honestly, I don’t know! I just stopped working on it. I made four paintings, and I was finished—I never used the roulette again. Later on, when I exhibited the four paintings, I showed the roulette as well.

Li: Since the first roulette (1985) that was used for Non-Expressive Painting, you have made Large Turntable with Four Wheels (1987), and Roulette Wheel with Six Criteria (1988). Large Turntable is much more complicated, because it had an inner and an outer rim; the inner rim had sixty-four entries while the outer one had 384. These art statements¹² regulated how to create the artwork, all working together.

Huang: That’s right.

Li: The works you created with the large turntable were usually titled according to the art statement from which the work is generated; however, you seem to have named them with only one of the entries. Take “A Wet Method,” for example—many artworks derived from it, but the title “A Wet Method” was an art statement that appears on the outer rim?

Huang: Yes.

Li: How come the other art statement in the inner rim is gone?

Huang: Normally, inner rim entries don’t appear in my titles. The inner rim entries served to set the background conditions of an artwork; they are underlying. The outer rim, on the other hand, was used to create titles.

Herbert Read’s The History of Western Art and Wang Bomin’s The History of Chinese Painting washed in the washing machine for two minutes

Li: On December 1, 1987, you completed several works that you titled “A Wet Method.” You took Herbert Read’s The History of Western Art and Wang Bomin’s The History of Chinese Painting and washed them together in the washing machine for two minutes, although the instructions on the Large Turntable didn’t specify “two minutes.” At another time, you washed one of your own oil paintings for five minutes. I think there was another piece in which you tied up sandbags? On that day, you happened to spin to the instruction “A Wet Method,” and so you created multiple artworks, or was it a coincidence that you got the same instruction?

Huang: I actually got a second spin with the same entries.

Li: Does it require a lot of subjective judgment when using Large Turntable?

Huang: Yes, Large Turntable wasn’t as stiffly regulated as Four Paintings Created According to Random Instructions—on the one hand, it didn’t have as many restrictions; on the other, it casts a wider net. Large Turntable isn’t about setting restrictions; rather, it’s about expanding all kinds of ideas—and whether there is any logic to or coherence among these ideas is not my concern. I think of it as not only establishing a system, but also moving beyond it.

Li: Do you ever spin to a certain art statement but then feel like you have no inspiration and so give up working on it?

Huang: Well, that does happen. If you look through my notes, you will find that there are more turntable works on paper than there are in reality. That is because some are just ideas that I never carried out but recorded nonetheless. Perhaps in the future I can put them in order and display them with the turntable. It might even be more meaningful that way. Nevertheless, finished works take time to do.

Li: Have you completed any works using Roulette Wheel with Six Criteria?

Huang: No, I haven’t. Roulette Wheel with Six Criteria was finished in 1988 for the exhibition Magiciens de la terre. I had been invited to participate and was considering ideas for the exhibition, and so it was basically tailored for that venue. However, I never actually used it to create any artwork. In addition, I put it in a suitcase and brought it to exhibit at the National Art Museum of China in February of 1989.

Li: When did you stop using those roulettes and turntables to create artworks?

Huang: I used a turntable in another work, House of Oracles, which I made in 1992 after arriving in France. It resembled a calendar, but functioned like a roulette. I set up the year wheel, beneath which were wheels that stand for “day,” “night,” and “time.” It was a turntable for oracles, and you could use it to produce oracles based on the eight characters of your horoscope.¹³ This artwork eventually evolved into a chariot; it also goes by the title of Sixty-Year Cycle Chariot.

Li: So these two works were used for oracles on life and not on art, is that correct?

Huang: They were still basically related to art. There was yet another turntable I made in 1991 titled Little Gambling Turntable, which was used to determine prices of artworks.

Li: Have you ever actually used this gambling turntable for setting prices?

Huang: No, I’ve never used it for that. No one would play the game with me, but I don’t see that as a problem. Whether or not the game is viable wasn’t a big issue. My main concern was to raise a question—what is an appropriate price for an artwork?

Washing Books

Li: You created a series of works that involved washing books. There are books in your Book Collection Project that are significant or particularly meaningful to you, such as Critique of Pure Reason and some books on art that you were reading at the time. You washed a lot of books. How did you choose them?

Huang: In Book Collection Project, there is a photo of books piled on the floor—those are actually books from my bookshelf. I bought a lot of books. I never washed books on art; in fact, I sealed a lot of them with glue. Although I bought a lot of books on art, I ended up refusing to read them. Did I finish reading them before I glued them shut? I’m not sure now, but I think I must have read some of them. Generally speaking, I think it is meaningless to wash things that are already useless. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a significant book, and so washing it was not a random act. Later on, I used a lot of books as artwork material, along with newspaper, which I also washed—but that was partly because I needed a lot of paper; anyway, this is a completely different topic . . .

Li: When you created the work Reptile for Magiciens de la terre, why did you wash newspaper instead of books?

Huang: That’s simple. It was because newspaper is used as a material; moreover, that particular project required tons of paper, which wasn’t possible with just a few books.

Li: I think you opted for a French Communist newspaper?

Huang: I also used Libération newspaper. I didn’t choose to use a specific newspaper; I was referring to the general media culture.

Li: So by this time newspaper had become a material for sculpture?

Huang: It had become a material for installation. All of this was an early example of how I would choose to work later on—when we would discuss, explore, and plan everything out in sketches and then turn the ideas into a concrete artwork.

Avoiding Art Museums

Li: Before you left the country for France, you took part in the China Avant-Garde exhibition. It was supposed to take place in 1987 under the title Young Artists’ Academic Communication. What was the process for getting in? Were you invited to participate, or did you have to apply?

Huang: China Avant-Garde was pretty disorganized to start. Everything was voluntary. Some people focused on art theory; others ran newspapers and magazines. At first they did a conference with a slide show in Zhuhai, and then they held a Huangshan Symposium. For the Huangshan Symposium, they wrote to artists from all over China, inviting them to bring slides and take part in the exhibition. At the conference, there were talks about holding a national exhibition. But how exactly would they to do that? It was up in the air. Naturally they didn’t need to call for work because they already knew a lot of artists, including Gao Minglu, Li Xianting, and Fei Dawei, all of whom I’ve met. They were all members of the curating team; we corresponded for a long while. They didn’t stipulate what the artists should exhibit; Xiamen Dada proposed some ideas, some of which were unfeasible. They were short on funding, and so couldn’t cover the cost of transporting the artworks to Beijing. Basically what we did was to bring photos—and I put Roulette Wheel with Six Criteria in a suitcase I used for train trips, and I made everything light and portable. There were some art proposals, such as Dragging the Art Museum or the project about sprinkling rice, but none of these ideas were feasible. In the end, what we could do was to hang photos and exhibit lightweight and portable items.

Li: Didn’t you propose making mimeographs on blank sheets and exhibiting them in the restroom? Another proposal mentioned killing pigs?

Huang: Well, the idea was brought up in our discussion within Xiamen Dada, but I was the one who organized the final plan. We didn’t keep minutes of our meetings; a group of people was just sitting around talking, and so it’s hard for me to remember who brought up which idea. Who came up with the awful idea of killing pigs? I cannot remember. However, I think the potential of those plans was meaningful enough, whether we actually carried them out or not. I think everyone was trying to provoke something, don’t you agree? Xiamen Dada was actually among the least provocative—at least if you’re judging by actual actions. There were many others who were actively provocative. Xiamen Dada merely translated provocative ideas into text form.

Li: In one of your notes, you mentioned that you were concerned about power structures and struggles in art: You brought up radical proposals in order to relieve the exhibition from a competition of power and influence, however it would inevitably lead to another kind of competition over power.

Huang: That is why one of our plans was titled Avoiding Art Museums. Supposedly this is contradictory; how can you avoid an art museum when you have been invited to take part in an exhibition within it? How do you stay in and out at the same time? These were themes we explored. I believe we were the first to propose this concept. Everyone was about provocation; the atmosphere smelled of provocation, and this is why an artist eventually fired a gun at the exhibition. I wrote the article on power and influence after the exhibition; as for the other article—the one about avoiding art museums—it was written a bit earlier, in 1988.

Li: Can you specify how to avoid an art museum?

Huang: We had some ideas. For one, we thought about exhibiting in a space not meant for exhibition—that would be avoidance. For example, we thought about exhibiting in the restroom, in the hallway, in the stairwell, in any unobtrusive space. On a similar note—why did we propose sprinkling rice? Because rice isn’t noticeable, and anything noticeable is also obtrusive. These were mostly my own thoughts.

Li: So you eventually settled on the plan for Dragging an Art Museum?

Huang: We never realized Dragging an Art Museum. We sent the idea directly to the exhibition organizers, listing the materials we would need—such as a certain number of pillars and other items. However, the plan was never developed, and so never realized.

Li: What are your thoughts on artist Xia Lu’s firing a gun?¹⁴

Huang: I wasn’t there when the shots were fired. There was already great chaos beforehand. I was clear on what I was going to do for the exhibition in Beijing, and I was ready to stay away, to avoid this art circle of power competition. During the Huangshan Symposium, I witnessed how people in this circle were driven by a thirst for power; everyone was there for fame and gain, fighting tooth and nail for it. Firing a gun was the most extreme measure. And yet, how do you define “extreme” when you are an artist, especially in the field of avant-garde art? To me, reflection on art is actually reflection on human beings; it is a reflection on what you should do as an artist. I knew I was going to France soon, and so I wasn’t inclined to do anything extreme, anything that would put me at risk of getting caught. Of course, I wasn’t sure what would happen with France; I could be back in Xiamen soon. After Xiamen Dada finished the extreme performances [the burning event], I started thinking about what to do next and where to head. Even before the firing of the gunshot [by Xiao Lu] at China Avant-Garde, there was already a foul atmosphere; there were artists washing their feet, hatching eggs, even distributing condoms. Avant-garde art in China had entered a period of chaos and disturbance. Then again, Dadaism sets out to cause chaos, but Xiamen Dada had already accomplished that, and we didn’t need any new disturbances. We needed to start thinking about new projects. Were there other possibilities? These questions were my main concern.

Li: Did you go to France in April, 1989? Were you still there in June when the Tiananmen Square massacre happened? What about Shen Yuan?¹⁵

Huang: She arrived a while later, in 1990. It wasn’t easy, though; we had to rely on help from friends we had met at the Magiciens de la terre exhibition and my connections at Provence Academy of Art. Friends helped issue invitation letters and such; we had to satisfy a lot of requirements and it wasn’t easy. Personally speaking, I tend to go with the flow because I’m passive; this probably conforms to my philosophy in art. For example, I was invited to participate in a lot of European exhibitions in the nineties, and so I stayed, without giving it too much thought. Before I could realize what was really happening, twenty years had gone by. I also didn’t plan for the trip to France. It wasn’t a thought-out plan for immigration or a change of scenery or anything like that; it was just an opportunity that knocked on my door, and I generally tend to go with the flow and accept the opportunities that come in my way.

Yellow Peril: An Artist Living in China and France

Li: After you moved to France, in 1993, you started creating works about and with animals. You did Bridge and Theater of the World. You seem to have a special interest in reptiles, such as snakes, and in bugs. Is this interest rooted in what the animals symbolize?

Huang: From today’s perspective, I used a wide range of animals to create artworks. The first time I even used live animals in my work was in 1993 for Yellow Peril in Oxford. Soon after, in 1994, I used a live turtle in a work in San Francisco. I probably used about a thousand locusts in Yellow Peril, placing them at the entrance of the museum. This exhibition never suffered a shutdown due to animal rights issues. The most disturbance it caused was that a few locusts fell off the wall to which they were clinging, and the scorpions on the ground picked them up and ate them; other than that, there was little interaction between them. I think that show lasted for a month or so.

Li: So the exhibit was never censored? You weren’t forbidden from using bugs?

Huang: No.

Li: Theater of the World was a completely different case. You put scorpions and all kinds of bugs, including spiders and crickets, into a tortoise-shaped box and let them fight each other to the death. This caused a lot of dispute.

Huang: The first time Theater of the World was shown was in Stuttgart, and it wasn’t censored. It was in Schloss Solitude, a castle in which artists are invited to stay and work for a few months at a time; there is a small corridor where artists can exhibit their works, and that’s where it was shown. It was meant for a small audience, to avoid disputes. A while later I did the same piece in Paris, in Amsterdam, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and in Beijing. Once in Vancouver and another time at the Centre Georges Pompidou, things went wrong. In Pompidou, the piece was part of a large group exhibition. The staff there had heard about the project and wrote to the curator, fiercely protesting it. Eventually they captured the attention of an animal protection NGO in France, and its chairman, a renowned actress, wrote a formal letter to the museum protesting the whole thing. In the end, the police were involved, and we were sued. I wasn’t there when all this happened, however, and so lawyers handled the situation. A French socialist mentioned my artwork in the context of censorship in a chapter of his book. Anyway, I only learned about all of this after the fact.

Li: Some people claim that there are certain artworks that can only be executed in China. Would you care to elaborate on how you think these censoring systems relate to the local people’s acceptance of avant-garde art?

Huang: The censoring system must be discussed within two contexts; one concerns a democratic society, and the other a nondemocratic society. Back in the 1980s my work underwent a lot of censoring in China. Censorships are based on “concepts” and “ideologies,” with the ideologies determining what could be expressed and what could not be. This was censorship in a nondemocratic society. But today, in a democratic society, censorship based on ideology no longer exists. Instead, other concerns arise, such as general safety or animal welfare. Today, there are certain lines that you cannot cross when it comes to animals. For example, when I was working with living animals, the exhibition organizers were careful about censoring my artworks for fear of crossing any line. Nevertheless, I see those challenges as positive. As artists, we often have the need to create an opposition or a confronting position; however, all this is positive because it aids our creative process. In a similar sense, I don’t think we should necessarily treat censorship as a negative thing. From my personal experience, I have been pushed or inspired to greater things due to its challenges. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that we should never transgress a line just for the sake of doing so. When I mentioned how, in the late eighties in China, some artists were recklessly trying to cause provocation, I meant that as an example of provoking for provoking’s sake. When I used bugs in my works, I wasn’t intending to generate a dispute; provocation was not my goal. After all, bugs are such small, inconsequential creatures; moreover, I acquired them legally from a pet store, and I wasn’t mistreating them—or treating them in a way a pet store wouldn’t. I simply modified their environments a bit. For example, pet stores sell bugs in small cartons; I simply placed them all in one big container. The bugs weren’t crawling out of their box, they weren’t causing any threat to people, and I wasn’t trying to be cruel to them. From my perspective, locusts are being raised in pet stores to feed scorpions—all smaller insects are sold to feed larger insects—and so when I let the scorpions eat the locusts in my piece, I wasn’t trying to be cruel. All I did was to publicly exhibit the eating; the only difference is that pet-store bugs eat each other in private and mine did it in public. I was trying to present a metaphor through these creatures, not to emphasize their cruelty. I was presenting a case in which the bugs represented different kinds of people who supposedly cannot exist together, and raising the question—what would it be like if they coexisted? Hence the metaphoric title Theater of the World. I believe that this artwork is about raising such meaningful questions, not illustrating so-called cruelty. Back to the issue of confronting censorship, I still believe that it can inspire some critical discussions. For example, my work at Pompidou received more attention because it was displayed along with some related documents, such as letters of protest, documents submitted to the government, and correspondence between the chairman of Pompidou and the curator. All of these gave the original art piece a new perspective, which expanded the spirit of the artwork. All this was unplanned; it was gained by chance.

Li: How would you define your position as an artist living in China and France?

Huang: People often compare my artworks from China with those from abroad. I am often told that it seems I have more to do in China. For example, today’s conversation covered more of my works from China, however, I have been working in the West for twenty-five years. My time in Xiamen was short; it was only six years between 1984 and 1989. I feel like this earlier part of my life was a time of learning; some might even say that it was learning through the process of imitation. So, naturally, I wonder why there is less interest in the works I’ve done in France, over a span of twenty-five years. Is it because China is not open and so all works are considered within the context of this inaccessibility, thus gaining significance—and following that, attention and interest? And yet, as I previously mentioned, if I hadn’t created the works I did in the years that followed, would those six years in China count? And I also wonder—I wasn’t the only one working in Xiamen Dada. There were five or six other members who stopped after I left, but why were their works considered meaningless? I don’t think that you can separate the works I did before I left China and those I did after. Many times an artwork is based on a foundation established years ago and over a period of time. Now, why am I still working today? Because this is where my life lies, where my whole being lies; it is where all meaning and essence lies; because I am alive, I work.

Transcription and translation by Lina Dann. Edited by Yu-Chieh Li.

Read the Chinese version here.

The post Book Washer, Shaman, and Bug Keeper: A Conversation with Huang Yong Ping, Part II appeared first on post.

Huang identifies Reptile (1989), a work he presented at Magiciens de la terre, as his first room-size installation. It evolved from his earlier experiments in which he washed books in a washing machine and his strategic juxtapositions of Eastern and Western literary and philosophical traditions. By happenstance, he was still in Paris when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, a turn of events that led him to become a permanent “refugee” and frequent participant in international exhibitions.

Huang also talks about Long Scroll (2001), a drawing in MoMA’s collection that represents various moments in his life and oeuvre, as well as his Roulette series, which includes several roulettes that he designed to “teach” himself to make art through chance.

Read the second part of this conversation, in which Huang discusses his Dadaist practices in the 1980s and 1990s here.

The post Huang Yong Ping on His Autobiographical Long Scroll in MoMA’s Collection appeared first on post.

post is releasing a series of primary documents drawn from the writing of Chinese artists, which presents the original sources in Chinese along with first-time English translations. These distinctive readings of Western art are an extension of an earlier MoMA project, published in 2010 as Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. The materials offer insight into interactions in art that transcend time and place.

Edited by Yu-Chieh Li

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Duchamp Stripped Bare by the Chinese, Even: Rewriting Example No. 5 or A Discussion of the Duchamp Phenomenon

By Huang Yong Ping 黄永砯, 2007 (Written in 1988)

Publication: ’85 New Wave Archives II
Publisher: Beijing Shiji Wenjing Publishing House
Language: Chinese

In light of the death of the old earl, the youngster comes into inheritance; however, this is not the whole truth. In history, a pause is created, and the agent steps into nothingness. —Anonymous ¹

Duchamp died in 1968; I am writing this article in 1988. Even twenty years after his death, Duchamp is still frequently mentioned; in a sense, he is still alive. Would it be at all possible for us not to mention him any longer—to let him truly fade away? Perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn’t; in any case, my reason for writing this essay is to prevent myself from mentioning him in the future. So that Duchamp can be written off our books, just as many others have been. However, this cannot guarantee that Duchamp will be truly put behind us. There is one way to deal with this issue, and that is by killing all of Duchamp’s disciples. Then he will finally die. This is our mission today but that might not suffice. We must also kill all of his opponents to prevent his name from ever being mentioned again. People will only cease to write or comment on him when all those who want to hear about him are dead. Many fictional figures (who have names) found in history books are often mentioned in today’s publications because they are used as counterexamples, as if they truly existed. Having said that, the example we are concerned with here [Duchamp] is real. There are two interpretations of the two characters in the name Du Xiang, which is the Chinese translation of Duchamp. The first character, du, generally has two meanings. First of all, it might be a family name. The family name comes before the given name in Chinese and thus resembles a prefix. Its second meaning is “obstruction” or “prohibition”; it also refers to something that is fictional. Here, of course, it is the first meaning that applies. “Xiang” could mean “elephant,” “image,” or “form.” It also means “copying” or imitating. “Hao xiang” also means “seem” and is an equivocal expression that Duchamp liked to use:

“I don’t ascribe to the artist the sort of social role in which it seems like he is indebted to society and so he feels obligated to achieve something. This is a horrifying perspective.” (p. 79)

Why do we “pull out” Duchamp instead of a dead horse? Getting the horse onto the road might help nurture our brains. In today’s literature, all sorts of characters get pulled out and cited: Dong Qichang, Dong Cunrui, Zengjiasso, Bi Guofan, Laoni, Tzschezi, and so on. We pull them out in order to be able to insert them. In a way, pulling out and inserting are one and the same thing; this corresponds to what a text needs: if you don’t pull out some names, then at least quote some sentences. Hence, people today, whether rich or poor, can barely be considered alive without being placed in relation to the dead. “Those who do not want to be in the company of the dead are condemned to die.” This is a rephrasing of Santayana’s “Those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Rejecting parents as a system.

“Question: ‘As far as I know, your mother was also an artist. She painted still lifes, didn’t she?’ Answer: ‘She even wanted to cook them, too, but in her seventy years of life, she was never really in touch with art. She did some Strasbourgs on paper. It never went any further.’” (p. 11)²

“That is correct.” (p. 51)

52.³ A kind of stored heat or kinetic energy
53. Duplicating a flyswatter
54. The celostomia singing technique
55. Unreliable modification
56. Ways of opening a door
57. The inner model
58. Creating art in a lying-down position
59. Family tree 60. Weighing the weight
61. Liquid solidifying quickly
62. Heating and duplicating
63. Machinery that opens things up
64. Making a mannequin (anatomy)
65. Squeezing out a new path
66. Difficulty recognizing left from right
67. A fast knot
68. To annul ( )
69. Leaning against the mirror and looking into it
70. Checking the drawers
71. The opening of an envelope
72. Pasting paper onto the wall

“Right, Breton once planned to open up a Surrealist office, to offer people ideas. What I was doing was similar to this.” (p. 73)

The back: The consequence of getting out of a crisis or a difficult situation is to end up becoming a hunchback; thus, having a hunched back enables one to escape from a predicament—idea number one. Watering, dust, food, water, wind, time, and austerity are helpful to people—idea number two. No talking—idea number three. Walk straight northeast—idea number four. Lie down or sit directly on the ground without relying on a cushion or a piece of paper—idea number five. Swallow the ashes of the medical prescription form—idea number six. Sit, stand, or lie down to pass time—idea number seven. Stand on tiptoe under the fierce summer sun; bonfires should surround you in four directions (north, south, east, west)—idea number eight. Art can cure inflation—idea number nine. Put on wet clothes in winter and stand outdoors in the northeast corner—idea number ten. Beg for food; begging is a way to survive—idea number eleven. Stand upright with your right foot in front of the left and do three moves: first advance the left foot and place it in front of your right foot; second, bring up the right foot and place it in front of your left foot; third, advance the left foot and again place it in front of your right foot; these three steps equal a distance of seven meters—idea number twelve. Here the possibilities that stem from “sub-sorcery” and “sub-performances” are the most crucial. Sorcery enables you to avoid originality and concentrate on duplication and transmission, whereas sub-performances constitute threatening behavior.

“Surely, in all the discussions about paintings, Manet’s name comes up more often than not. And Cézanne, to most people, is just a piece of meat in a pot of stew.” (p.13)

Conversing—tactics, eating—consuming; before we articulate those many names we must undergo a process of consuming them first. This is what our throat does. On the one hand, it has the esophagus; on the other, it has the articulation of language. More often than not, we exhale more than what we inhale.

“It is just that the old habits keep them on the track of making one painting each and every month, all this. . . . They think that it is as if they owe society an artwork each month or each year.” (p. 100)

“Later on Picasso became a pioneer of a kind. We often need such a character, be it Picasso, Einstein, or anybody else—and the crowd often speaks for half of the whole truth.” (p. 17)

“Many people feel as if they are being constrained by something. If not by some literary movement, then by some woman, but in the end, it’s all the same feeling.” (p. 104)

“Politicians imagine that they are doing something extraordinary! It’s a little like a notary, or like my father; politicians and notaries have similar styles. I remember my father’s documents, the language was ridiculous. American lawyers employ such language as well, and I must say I dislike politics.” (p. 57)

“The are six siblings in my family. When it came to inheritance, my father did a remarkable job, so good that everyone who heard about it was amused. My father split the inheritance into six portions, just like a notary would, and had everything written in ink on paper, along with warnings for us all.” (p. 27) Nowadays everything goes through a notary. A diploma needs to be certified by a notary, getting married—the marital relationship—also needs to be certified by a notary; this is what we all go through if we ever have such experiences. In fact, the notarial profession existed long ago but disappeared for a long time until it came back to existence.

Parents’ veto power is something that our social system has passed down from generation to generation. However, the same system has given us the chance to train teachers, doctors, officers, guards, drillmasters, and foremen, who play the role of father figures for students, patients, soldiers, and workers, respectively. We can draw up a comparative list as follows: oncology clinics—the department of sculpture—the faculty of chemistry—arsenal factory; dermatology clinics—the department of oil painting—the department of Chinese literature—latex workshop; pediatric clinics—the department of ink painting—the faculty of mathematics—cookie factory; stomatology clinics—department of art history—department of foreign languages—shoe and hat factory.

“No, one must live on; I am penniless, and I must earn my living. A man has got to eat, and that is different from painting for the sake of painting. One can certainly pursue both doings at the same time without any conflict.” (p. 72) Dieting or simply eating less can help stimulate the digestive system, and this is very important—recommendation number thirteen—in any case, eating nothing in order to follow the Daoist practice of fasting requires a certain amount of training. By practicing the Daoist breathing method, one reaches a state of “embryonic respiration” (the breathing of a child in its mother’s womb). This is suggestion number fourteen: “eating air” or “drinking water.”

“I firmly believe in artists being a medium. An artist creates art hoping that one day it may be recognized by the world, leaving his name on a page in history. This is why we say that the value of an artwork depends on both the creator and the audience.” (p. 68)

“Any masterpiece is only a masterpiece because the audience says so.” (p. 69)

“Not believing in status, not believing in oneself, makes belief a misnomer.” (p. 89)

“Exhibitions are horrific places.” (p. 80)

“I don’t agree that artists bear social responsibility, as if they owe something to society and must take on the duty of creating something. This is a horrifying idea.” (p. 79)

“The word ‘judgment’ is such a terrible idea. It’s weak and problematic. That a society wields the power and right to decide whether to accept certain works, and then to select a few of them to send to the Louvre. . . . I don’t believe at all in such a thing as absolute judgment.” (p. 69)

Duchamp will never be a fan of Picasso. Here are some examples. Three terrible words: “belief,” “judgment,” and “obligation.” Further frightful words include “intelligence,” “creation,” “innovation,” “perfection,” “absoluteness,” “purity,” “totality,” “thoroughness,” “independence,” and so on—these all represent the terror of totalitarianism. There is also the word “author.” There is something about the nature of an “author” that can be observed at an auction. We all know what an auction is: there are, for example, clothes auctions and idea auctions. Sellers yell, “Shorts? Underpants?” Besides, “bold” and “impudent” both mean “audacious.” When we compliment someone by saying, “You are bold,” we are actually implying “You are imprudent.” The word “dictation” is also frightful for people who have to record words—all dictators are people who dictate. In addition, “dictionary,” “dictum,” “dictation,” and “dictate” have the same prefix: “dict.” “Neo” is a prefix used with great care: “Neo-Expressionism,” “Neo-Kantism,” “Neo-Duchampism.” Of course, there is also the prefix “post.” “Neo,” or “new,” means that something is being used for the very first time: new clothes, a new house, a newlywed woman; the fact that a bride is no longer a virgin could cause a difficult situation. Neo-Expressionism is not the earliest form of Expressionism; this is another difficult situation. Of all the words we have, the most frightful must be “preface,” which starts with the prefix “pre.” A preface is the start of something, such as opening remarks; it is “premier,” “predominant,” “preferment”; it is similar to the status of a university “president”; it is the “premise” of all and is “predictable,” predetermined,” “predecessor,” “preclude,” “prepuce”; it is like a “premature” baby is “precocious”; it is also a “prescribed,” “premarital,” “preconceived,” “precast,” and can be “prejudicial.” All prefixes and prepositions are horrible.

“Picasso is like a powerful lighthouse. He satisfies the audience’s need for a celebrity, and as long as he can keep up that energy, it might as well be good.” (p. 94)

“Question: ‘When Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, were you aware of the revolutionary milestone that painting was going to mark?’ Answer: ‘Not at all. We never saw Les Demoiselles. It was not on display until several years later. As for myself, I discovered Cubism when I happened to visit some gallery.’” (p.16)

Generally speaking, people tend to ask for what they do not possess; if they ask for a child, it suggests they don’t have a child. Therefore, a fortune-teller can safely assume that the person who asks is the one in need. And those who seek or ask are often anxious. So if an old widow seeks a second marriage, her children might be unfilial.

“I realized that there are a lot of things people shouldn’t burden their lives with, such as busywork, a wife, vacation houses, new cars, and such. And I came to this realization early in my own life, which is why I stayed single for a very long time, so that I could avoid such mundane, everyday problems.” (p. 6)

“In 1916, when Michael Knoedler came to New York and saw Nude Descending a Staircase, he offered me $10,000 per year in advance for my future works, but I refused. It wasn’t that I was affluent, in fact I could actually have used the money—$10,000 a year—but no, somehow I felt a threat, a kind of danger that I had been avoiding up to that point. By 1916 I was already twenty-nine years old, old enough to protect myself.” (p. 109)

“When I wrote about Picasso, I said that each and every time in history, the crowd always needs a superstar, be it Einstein in the world of physics or Picasso in the world of art. Crowds and audiences bear such quality.” (p. 83)

“Moreover, I have never really strived to create or felt desperate to push myself to express anything; I’ve never had such a need to paint and create relentlessly from morning to afternoon to night.” (p. 6)

“Anti-art. Basically, it means questioning the artist’s behavior. Feeling as if his technique and some traditional things are absurd.” (p. 51)

There is also the problem of rewriting. The act of rewriting can be comparable to the form of adoption in which a child is transferred from one family to another. “If you don’t possess a stick, I’ll take it away. If you possess a stick, I’ll give you another” (an example found in Chan Buddhism). One way to rewrite this is, “If you have art, I’ll give you art. If you don’t have art, I’ll take it away.” Another example: “Art is a type of politics with colors” (by anonymous) can be rewritten as “Non-art is a type of politics without colors.” One more example: “Art is dead. Dead, but still moving forward; still moving forward, but dead” (by anonymous) can be changed to “Our late father is still with us; he is still with us but dead” (Donald Barthelme).

“Any masterpiece is only a masterpiece because the audience says so.” (p. 69)

“I firmly believe in artists being a medium. An artist creates art hoping that one day it may be recognized by the world, leaving his name on a page in history. This is why we say that the value of an artwork depends on both the creator and the audience.” (p. 68)

In order to destroy art, the audience needs to be annihilated first; an artist or a work of art without an audience is like a street beggar who begs for affection. So why interview Duchamp?—I mean the critic who wrote that book—and why do I want to write this article?—I mean myself. The spectator, translator, and commentator rely on Duchamp for earning remuneration. Thus, it is not that artists only benefit from spectators and critics. It is also unlike what Duchamp said: “Why would you pursue it? You can’t make money from it.” (p. 36).

“I signed Mutt’s name on it to avoid any personal connection.” (p. 49)

The abbreviation for antes de comer, a.c., which is used in medical prescriptions, means that such medicine should be taken before a meal. The handwriting of doctors is always illegible when they write out prescriptions and sign their names, as if the purpose were to prevent the patient from understanding anything from a non-doctor’s point of view. The doctor’s sloppy handwriting on the prescription form actually suggests how proficient he is in his job because he has done it so many times and also implies how such proficiency in this profession is not easy to attain. Being familiar with one’s job and carelessness are both the “child” and the “midwife” of customs. A signature represents “the person himself,” but an original work does not represent “the person himself.” Therefore, an original work cannot be attributed to the person who inscribes the signature, but rather to the person whose name is written there, because the person who signs the name can be separated from the name that is signed.

Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was finished between 1915 and 1923. In 1960 in London, the publication of Richard Hamilton’s book The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even⁴—marked a fourth instance of rewriting.

It was only twenty-one years [after the death of Duchamp] that by chance I had an opportunity to visit the homeland of the creator of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.⁵ ”

The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann and Yu-Chieh Li, annotated by Yu-Chieh Li. Read Huang Yong Ping’s manuscript to the Chinese text here.

“甚至，杜象被汉人剥得精光” 改写例子5或杜象现象研究

By Huang Yong Ping 黄永砯, 2007 (Written in 1988)

Publication: ’85 新潮档案 II
Publisher: 北京世纪文景文化传播有限公司
Language: 中文

These are images of Huang Yong Ping’s manuscript to the text. Image courtesy of Huang Yong Ping and Fei Dawei.

Read the english translation here.

On Andy Warhol: Perhaps Simplicity Outshines Complexity

By Wang Guangyi 王广义, October 9, 2013, Narrated by Wang Guangyi, Compiled by Li Jianya. Translated by Lina Dann and edited by post editors.

Publisher: www.bjnews.com.cn
Language: Chinese
Links: http://epaper.bjnews.com.cn/html/2013-10/09/content_469676.htm?d

Andy Warhol Makes the Ordinary Even More Ordinary

Back in college, I came across Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys almost simultaneously. The first work of Andy Warhol I ever saw was his Marilyn Monroe. It was so simple and so untouched by artificiality, without any trace of “painting.” It was in a sense perplexing, but still, I knew that the adoration I felt for Marilyn Monroe had arisen from the bottom of my heart.

The first time I ever saw a Beuys was in an imported magazine that included illustrations of some of his works. Of course, I could not understand the text because it was in a foreign language, but the pictures were genuinely alluring; to me they seemed less like works of art than like works of what I call “alchemy.”

Appreciating the works of Warhol and Beuys was challenging and puzzling; I was indeed bewildered. It was almost like reading Kant’s books, when often I found myself perplexed by words. But these were words that, despite being baffling, were also fascinating. In my pursuit of art, these two artists have influenced me greatly. To this day, they remain my favorite artists.

Beuys is what I call an “alchemist”; he is an artist who creates enigmas, as he has always created layers and layers of “mist.” For instance, in his performance piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, it isn’t particularly clear what ideas he is trying to bring to the table. “To explain art to a dead hare” is indeed a difficult task. And the degree of such difficulty is perhaps beyond Beuys’s own grasp. All this mystic sense that he presents in his works is what makes me so fond of him. At times it feels as if he is giving serious thought to certain questions, and yet all of these questions are somehow so detached from, or even devoid of, reality. He seems to be discussing art from a metaphysical standpoint. He practically puts himself in a position where neither truth nor falsehood can ever be proven.

As for Warhol, he makes the ordinary even more ordinary—he lives in the light of day. When people tried to discuss his art with him, they would ask, “Is this what you meant?” Then even to the most obvious or foolish questions, he would usually answer, “Yes, that is exactly what I meant.” There is a particularly famous interview with Warhol where, during the whole thing, he answered questions with either “Yes” or “No.” These were his only answers. In the end, all that the media could report about the art was what they inferred or interpreted from his one-word responses.

This is actually related to the essence of Warhol’s works, for he eliminated from them all traces of individuality or personality. You see them as by-products of industrialization, of mass production, and so on. This is exactly where his greatest contribution lies—in industrializing artworks. He chooses meaningless images, transmits these meaningless images in meaningless fashion, and convinces everyone that they are actually meaningful.

Danto Gave Warhol’s Works Their Transcendental Value

The German art critic Klaus Honnef once made a very accurate remark about Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. He said that they are like “the palm and the back of a hand.” From what I see, Warhol’s work only reveals its true greatness when it is appreciated alongside Beuys’s work. The two exist on the same level; without Warhol, Beuys’s art loses its sense, and without Beuys, Warhol’s becomes boringly mundane.

If we look at Warhol and Warhol only, art would seem to be so lacking and superficial. But if we place Beuys next to Warhol, we see that contemporary art has its true aura. Beuys is concerned with politics and even involved himself in political activities, such as those of the German Green Party. But from my point of view, these are not important. What Beuys does is to use politics as a means of doing. From the same viewpoint, Warhol’s art is a means of removing the so-called aura of art.

Yet does this mean that Warhol’s works do not have an artistic aura? Not really. For instance, Warhol has a piece in which he used silkscreen printing to depict numerous pairs of high heels. High heels are are objects that are charged with highly subjective meanings; when you use them in your art, there is always something attached to them. This is the allure of the aura of contemporary art. You inevitably think of the aura, of its reason for being there and of all that is around it or beneath it; otherwise, how would you explain the high heels in the painting?

Perhaps Warhol wasn’t giving much thought to all of this when he created his works. After all, Warhol’s ideas for his works are based on industrialization. Most of today’s high heels are the products of mass production. Warhol’s silkscreen printing technique is also an industrial method. In fact, none of us can claim to genuinely know what Warhol’s true ideas were, but the person who bestowed the aura upon Warhol’s works was the philosopher and art historian Arthur C. Danto. In April 1964 Warhol exhibited Brillo boxes in the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan. Danto went and saw those works, and he was the one who gave Warhol’s art its transcendental value.

We all know that Warhol rarely ever answered questions directly and, of course, we may say that this is how some artists choose to represent themselves, that is, by letting others speak for them, letting others bestow meaning on their art. Thus, if it were not for Danto, who gave transcendental descriptions of those works, Andy Warhol would not be the Andy Warhol we know today.

The simplest and perhaps the most truthful explanation we can give of Pop art is that Pop artists take what is easily found in the everyday world and reinvent or represent it in a particular way. On the surface, this idea seems banal and commonplace. But if this were all there was to Pop art, then it would be meaningless and would have no artistic aura. So in this regard, we must thank Arthur Danto, because not only did he give Warhol his significance, he also gave Pop art its significance. Before Danto, many writers had critiqued and commented on Pop art, but no one had given it a sense of transcendence.

The Connection between the Great Criticism Series and Political Pop Art is a Matter of Historical and Political Circumstance

Whatever Beuys and I have or don’t have in common is pretty noticeable, and the differences between us can probably be explained by looking at Warhol. Warhol’s works are direct and clear; his art comes to us easily—what he shows us is exactly what we see. But this is also the problem with his art: it seems superficial. However, when I try to look beneath this superficiality—while I cannot say I see something deep and profound, I can certainly vouch for the existence of some kind of wisdom.

Warhol’s aesthetic lies in the “beauty” of the ordinary, in the “beauty” of the mass culture. His works are actually technically very artful, well executed, smooth, and abundantly layered. Yet given the conditions at the time—a time when Expressionism and abstraction were dominant, a time when peculiar brushstrokes and bizarre materials were fashionable—Warhol’s values were apparently considered counter to the mainstream. His aesthetics arose from the mass culture, but in my view, this is different than if they had arisen from the people.

The concept of “the people” is a political concept, one that under most circumstances refers to the lower class and is associated with industriousness, hardship, and dedication. The concept of “the masses,” on the other hand, seems to me to be more related to the idea of “citizens”—of people in a society who are more concerned with materialism, consumption, and pleasure. My art refers to the concept of “the people,” and not “the masses.” This is the understanding I bring to Political Pop art.

Li Xianting was the first person to connect my Great Criticism Series with Political Pop art.⁶ Back then I was working on the idea of using newspapers published during the Cultural Revolution⁷ in my work but hadn’t yet figured out the details. Later on, Zhang Peili gave me a book about newspapers from the time of the Cultural Revolution, which eventually helped to launch the Great Criticism Series.

In the collection Zhang gave me, I found campaign posters addressed to workers, peasants, and soldiers.⁸ I used a grid to enlarge and transfer those pictures onto canvas because I wanted to retain the rudimentary, clumsy feeling of the original images. I incidentally included a Coca-Cola logo in a painting and I found it interesting, and so I kept it. This is how I came to create the first piece in my Great Criticism Series, Great Criticism: Coca-Cola.

In the latter half of 1990, I took photos of the five works in my Great Criticism Series and sent them to Li Xianting. Old Li responded by letter and noted the connection between my works and Political Pop art. His remarks were justified back then, given the historical and political situation. Nonetheless, if nowadays the media still sees me as nothing but a Political Pop artist, then they will have overlooked some even more important things.

In Warhol, I See What Society Expects of Me

Frankly speaking, Andy Warhol and I are very different because we come from different backgrounds. In Warhol’s works, you see great quantities of Western, commercialized objects. In my art, you will not find images that have been produced through the manipulation of photographs or advertisements; I build my art via the strength of “the people.”

Western logos are complex to me because they carry a sense of fetishism. In the Great Criticism Series, I tried my best to maintain a neutral stance in presenting the two ways in which I believe human beings operate. One reflects a utopian attitude, the other a fetishistic leaning. I placed both of these things into the same frame. The combination of these two disparate tendencies is one of the things that draws peoples’ attention to the Great Criticism Series.

Comparatively speaking, Andy Warhol’s works are simple, and mine are complex. More often than not, simplicity outshines complexity. Warhol impels the masses to give meaning to meaningless images. Even in response to the silliest or most naïve questions, his response is always, “Yes, that is exactly what I meant.”

But I am different from Warhol. My education and background prevent me from being as extremely simple as Warhol can be. So, when it comes to ideas and concepts, Beuys has a greater influence over me, which is why, when I try to explain my own works, I am more willing to use ambiguous words to interpret them. In me you will see some very complicated, unorthodox things, especially when it comes to ideas—I enjoy a way of thinking that allows for uncertainty, obscurity, ambiguity, and even a twisting of the facts. After all, Conceptual art has ambiguous boundaries, just like ideas—things we cannot touch and cannot see—do when we speak of them.

As for Andy Warhol, his influence on me is mainly in how I see myself when it comes to what society expects of me. On a deeper level, I admire Beuys’s work, but as an artist who bears societal self-expectations, I also relate closely to Warhol. From a popular view, people might be more easily attracted to Warhol’s work because its outward appearance is very worldly and easily understood—even though we might not know what it actually means.

For the original Chinese text, see The Beijing News, October 9, 2013.
The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann and annotated by Yu-Chieh Li and Lina Dann. All images have been added by post editors.

My Soul Mate Magritte

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚

Publication: 《艺术世界》[Art World]: no. 5 (2001): 72–73.
Language: Chinese

The first time I learned of René Magritte was a little after I started painting. My mentor had lent me a copy of The History of Modern Western Art, hoping that I would “sharpen my artistic perception.” It was one of those archaic books printed before Liberation,⁹ with Traditional Chinese characters, vertical typesetting, and black-and-white illustrations, on old yellowed pages that were flipped from right to left.¹⁰ I seem to recall that it started out by introducing French Realists like Gustave Courbet and François Millet, and ended abruptly with the Surrealists and Dadaists on the last few pages. To a seventeen-year-old youngster first entering the world of painting, they [the works of the Surrealists and Dadaists] were certainly puzzling and not easy to appreciate—and much less enticing than the work of Peredvizhniki [Russian Realist painters] like Ilya Repin and Vasily Surikov. I asked my teacher, “Why do modernists portray people in such an ugly way?” The teacher said, “Forget about them; they are simply a bunch of idle people. Now go and work on your still-life paintings!” Nonetheless, a few big names stuck in my head, and one of them was this “humorous” Magritte—perhaps because he drew a pipe and wrote on it, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe [see fig. 1]). What does that even mean? This question bothered me for more than a decade.

As I graduated from college and continued sharpening “my artistic perception,” I found myself growing fonder and fonder of Surrealism, and even mimicking Surrealist artworks and thriving on it during the ’85 New Wave.¹¹ Magritte has since become one of the greatest masters I admire to this day.

Like many of my fellow artists, I started studying art through printed works. This means that when you come across a masterpiece that is poorly printed, not only must you rely on reading and studying related information to understand the background from which the artwork emerged, but also you must develop a good sense of imagination in order to picture the original piece of art. For instance, when I read Van Gogh’s biography¹² back then, I completely believed that this Dutch painter, who spontaneously started a painting career, was an amateur who basically just randomly stirred the yellow paint with the blue and threw it onto the canvas, and then left and walked to a cheap bar where he would have melodramatic affairs with prostitutes—and this is, indeed, the story of a “genius’s tragedy” that has stirred the lives of so many young Chinese artists stepping into art. It wasn’t until one day, when Armand Hammer, who was in the oil business, brought his art collection to China for a museum exhibition,¹³ and I saw paintings that Van Gogh had done during his time in a mental hospital, that I realized the story that I had believed in was completely fallacious. Van Gogh certainly mastered the layering of colors, creating melodious lines on canvas, and so much more. What words can do to art when it comes to distortion and exaggeration can sometimes be truly cruel. To prove the existence of that fine line between genius and insanity, I later paid a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands. When I came out and sat on the stone steps in front of the museum, I was overwhelmed by great awe and gratification. I need not elaborate on the awe, but the gratification was mixed with a sense of relief: I finally saw that I need not belong with those artists who paint on the edge of borders—this approach to art led many Chinese artists to possess a seemingly rich background knowledge of the literature of art, but at the same time to misread or misinterpret it and, interestingly, to form thoughts or appreciations of their own. This is why some say today that the reason why Chinese contemporary art is drawing international attention is because it is relatively closed and self-contained. And yet, while all this apparent energy that comes from being closed might shine now, how long can it last? It’s truly doubtful that it will.

Back to Magritte. Similarly, all those legends or rumors about him (including his fondness for painting on restroom doors, going alone to detective movies, or playing chess with random elders on the street) had me imagine how he handled the oil paints with great delicacy, how he made good use of his solid sketching technique and layered until thickness and firmness were reached.

In early 1992, I finally had a chance to travel to Europe,¹⁴ and when I was faced with Magritte’s original works, firsthand for the first time, including those that I had and hadn’t seen before, I thought to myself, “I can’t believe painting could be done this way!” He had reduced his colors, shapes, and even painting techniques to the least possible, almost as if he “couldn’t paint.” It is thus fair to say that his accomplishment in surpassing traditional art is, in my opinion, beyond what any of his contemporaries had ever achieved. Using a painting language that is simple, subtle, and plain, he rearranges different scenes and objects, placing them in a set-up space, creating a certain sense of dislocation and illusion. Through the painting, we are brought to this dreamlike space of thoughts, where we ponder the art’s multiple meanings and multifaceted spirituality. No wonder he wrote on his painting, “This is not a pipe!”—or better, “This is not merely a pipe!”

He magnifies a bouquet of pink flowers or a green apple and places it in a narrow space (see figs. 2 and 4); sends a roaring train running out from the fireplace (see fig. 5). Magritte even depicts humans as objects, bringing forth a peculiar change in the relationship between humans and reality—humans are no longer users of a space, but instead objects that shares the illusional, set-up space we see with so many other objects. With this manipulation, it is hard not to stir up sensations within the heart of the viewer. It is not hard to imagine that, in an epoch like Magritte’s, artists like himself, who used unusual approaches to challenge what was established in tradition and explored the connection between art, psychology, and philosophy through visual arts, must have faced harsh critiques. Meanwhile, they have brought the history of visual arts into a whole new page, and had a deep impact on up-and-coming artists (including most Chinese artists).

Cool but irrational, imaginative but restrained, realistic and terrifying but at the same time alienating, using visible objects to bring thoughts into an invisible tunnel, depicting an indescribable, mysterious philosophy and pessimistic humor—this charisma of Magritte’s has enchanted me all these years. It has also become the standard to which I hold my art and the state that I hope I will some day achieve. In all these years, something Magritte once said has had unexpected impact on my mentality: “If the spectator finds that my paintings are a kind of defiance of ‘common sense,’ he realizes something obvious. I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.”

I think that in an artist’s path of growth, over and over again, he encounters a master with whom he becomes infatuated but must later bid painful good-bye to, as he moves on to encounter other forerunners with whom to connect and communicate. On this never-ending path of recognition and substantiation, those who eventually become “soul mates” turn up rarely, and even more so down the road. Magritte and Italy’s de Chirico are alike in that both their magic realism was of great influence and inspiration to me. It was through them that I learned how to “keep a distance” when examining our heavy history or facing our ever-changing reality. Meanwhile, I strive to depict our lives through an internalized language, to mind those souls that are so often neglected, and to create a “Kingdom of Illusion,” where our souls can rest within—if only temporarily.

Note: For the original Chinese text, see《艺术世界》[Art World]: no. 5 (2001): 72–73; He Xiangning Art Museum, ed., Image is Power (Hunan: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2002) p. 269 [in Chinese].

The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann, annotated by Yu-Chieh Li and Lina Dann. All images are added by post editors.

[Chinese version follows]

我的知己——马格利特

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚

Publication: 《艺术世界》: no. 5 (2001): 72–73.
Language: 中文

第一次知道马格利特是在刚刚开始学画不久，我的启蒙教师为了让我“增加艺术修养”，特地借给我一本解放前出版的《西方现代艺术史》，竖排版、繁体字、发黄的纸张、黑白插图、从右翻到左的那种老书。记得好像是从法国现实主义的库尔贝、米勒开始谈起，到了最后几页迅速地以超现实主义，达达主义结束。对一个初学画画的十七岁青年来说，自然是看得云里雾里的，远不如俄罗斯巡回画派的列宾、苏里柯夫来得激动。去问老师，那些现代派为什么要把人画得如此丑陋？老师说，别管他们，他们是一群颓废的人。你现在好好地画静物去吧！尽管如此，但是当时却无意中记住了几位大师的名字，其中之一便有这位“爱开玩笑的”马格利特——可能是他画了一个烟斗，而且写上“这不是烟斗” (图1) 那是什么呢？这个问题困惑了我起码十年。

随着大学毕业，逐步增长的“艺术休养”，开始对超现实主义从接触到发自内心的喜爱，直至以模仿超现实主义风格的作品在85新潮中混迹江湖，马格利特成为了我至今仍非常崇仰的大师之一。

我和许多同行一样，都是从印刷品开始学习艺术的，这意味着当你面对一张印刷得很差的大师作品时，除了通过阅读相关的知识去理解那些杰作产生的背景之外，还得对作品的原貌有充分的想象力。比如当时看《凡高传》，完全相信了这个半途出家的荷兰画家，基本上就是把黄颜色和蓝颜色胡乱搅拌之后甩到画布上，然后就去小酒馆喝劣质的酒、对妓女滥发真情——这便是搅乱了多少初学艺术的中国青年艺术家生活的“天才的悲剧”。直至有一天，卖石油的哈默老先生把自己的艺术藏品拿到中国美术馆来展出，当我看到凡高在疯人院里画的油画时，才发现原本不是那么一回事。凡高实际上非常懂得如何一层一层上颜色，懂得如何经营线条在画布上的旋律感等等。可见文字对艺术的某种过分地渲染和曲解，有时真够残酷的。为了证明天才和疯狂的分界线，后来我还专门去荷兰参拜了凡高博物馆，看完出来之后，坐在博物馆门前的石台阶上，心里真是说不出的崇敬和庆幸——崇敬自不必多说，庆幸的是自己终于发现我不属于这类需要在临界边缘作画的画家——这种学习艺术的结果，曾使许多中国艺术家对西方艺术除了对其文本的背景有深刻的认识外，同时也因为这种种的误读反而在其中摸索出自己的感觉。所以有人会说，中国当代艺术之所以在今天能够引起国际上的关注，其中一个原因恰恰是因为相对封闭的结果。当然，这种由于闭塞而产生的某种程度的鲜活力，究竟能维持多久，值得怀疑。

回到马格利特来。同样面对他的种种传说（诸如他喜欢在卫生间的门口作画；喜欢一个人去看侦探电影；喜欢和街上的老头下棋等等），同样地开始想象他的油画色彩处理得如何如何微妙，他如何运用“坚实的素描基础”，通过反复地描绘达到造型的厚度感和坚实感等等。

直到1992年初，终于有了一次去欧洲的机会，第一次面对大量的见过和没见过的马格利特原作，才发现原来还可以“这样画画的”！他把色彩、造型，以至描绘手段都降低到几乎“不会画画”的地步了。换句话说，他对传统艺术的超越，我认为远远超过了他的同时代的画家。平涂，简洁而又含蓄的绘画语言，将现实中的各种场景、物体重新组合，置放在一个虚设的空间之中，产生出某种心理上的特定的错位感和虚幻感。从而使人通过绘画进入一个梦境般的思维空间，再回头面对视觉艺术的多重含义和多角度的精神指向。如次种种，都曾使我在惊诧之后敬佩不已。难怪他要在画布上写上“这不是烟斗！”或者“这不仅仅

他可以把一束粉红色的鲜花，或者一个绿色的苹果放大，置放于一个狭小的空间之中 (图2, 4)； 将一列火车从壁炉中呼啸着开了出来 (图5) 。马格利特甚至将人作为某种物体来进行描述，使人与现实的关系由此发生了奇异的变化——人不再是一个空间的使用者，它与其他物体共同分享了我们所见到的那个迷幻的虚设空间。这样的处理方式，使人看后难免不为之心理上产生某种异样的悸动。可以想象，在那个时代，像他们这样的艺术家，用如此怪诞的手段去挑战传统的习惯，通过视觉艺术的方式，探索艺术与心理学、哲学的关系，一定引来许多莫名的诽议，同时，也将视觉艺术史带入了一个崭新的艺术领域，对下一代艺术家（包括大部分的中国艺术家）产生了深远的影响。

冷静而又非理性；充满幻想而又保持住应有的节制；真实恐怖却又令人感到陌生；利用可见的物体，使人的思维跨入不可见的隐秘隧道，呈现出某种神秘的哲理和灰色的幽默——马格利特的这种魅力使我长久的着迷。同时也成为我长期以来对自己艺术的某种价值判断和境界追求。许多年来，马格利特说过的一句话，始终在我的潜意识中起着意想不到的作用：“如果观赏者发现我的绘画是一种对‘平常感觉’的挑战，他就意识到了某种特殊的东西。然而，我要说明，在我看来，这个世界就是对平常感觉的挑战。” 我想，一个艺术家在他的成长过程中，总是不断的要与一些曾经迷恋的大师忍痛告别，然后又重新的认识另外一些与之沟通的前辈。在这条不断认知不断验证自己的道路上，最后能成为“知己”的，发现已越来越少。马格利特与意大利的德·契里柯一样，他们的“魔幻现实主义”作品，始终对我产生着深远的影响和启迪。正是通过他们，使我学会了如何“有距离”地去体验我们的深重的历史，以及我们所面临的多变的现实。与此同时，通过使用“内心化”的语言方式去描述我们的生活，去关注那些常常被忽略的心灵，去营造一个使我们的灵魂能够得以暂且栖身的“虚幻王国”。

October 18, Xiaogang’s Letter to Lü Peng

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚 1990, first published in 2010

Publication: Amnesia and Memory—Zhang Xiaogang Letters (1981–1996)
Publisher: Peking University Press
Language: Chinese

Hello, Lü Peng!¹⁵

I apologize for taking so long to gather the slides and for sending them out to you only today. After I returned to Huangjueping¹⁶ from Chengdu,¹⁷ I kept up my good spirits from Chengdu and made another five oil paintings, again in black and white (see figs. 1–5). I used undiluted and unblended paints, laying them on the canvas with painting knives; on the canvas I created a collage of cloths of different textures and colors (black, red, brown), but the overall figures were more squared than what I did in Chengdu, each resembling a cagelike frame. The heads that smile and ponder live freely in the painting; they are human heads and faces, or wolf heads and lamb heads. Grinning, with their ice-brick teeth. But make no mistake—they are not making faces that express emotions to the world (like Expressionist works). Surely my works do carry a hint of Expressionism, like those demons I painted in 1984, but I know in my heart that I disdain Expressionism and don’t belong in Realism. After finishing the fifth painting, I forced myself to stop and undergo some cleansing. On reviewing the history of Western art and observing contemporary Expressionists domestic and foreign, I once again found myself most fond of artists like El Greco, Hieronymous Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, James Ensor, René Magritte, and others along this line, like Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Balthasar Klossowski, who all belong in the same class. And, of course, there is Odilon Redon. Of all the Neo-Expressionists, Germany’s Anselm Kiefer and Italy’s Mimmo Paladino are my favorites. I think what I am trying to express in my art is a concern for the state of our existence as human beings in the modern world (that is, expressing a certain fear of death and the genuine experience of exploring what lies beneath the appearances of things) and our spiritual journeys as well as intuitions concerning life and death. It is a gloomy passage holding both life and death, heading between reality and illusion. Both the realistic (such as early Expressionism and Pop art) and the purely “illusional” (such as the “reverie” explicitly created by Dalí) seem inaccessibly alien to me. There’s simply no affinity between purely rational material and me, or Conceptual art or abstract art and me. As Max Beckmann once proclaimed, “That is hidden behind so-called reality. . . .To make the invisible visible through reality.”¹⁸ Kabbalah’s occultism and China’s Zen also explore this path. De Chirico and Magritte are especially worth noting; de Chirico’s dusky streets contain gloomy, mysterious, long shadows that divide time and space into halves, where the defining lines of ancient monuments and sculptures or human characters are blurred, and we vividly feel the intense power of the reality that is hidden beneath. As for Magritte, to classify him as a Surrealist would be a superficial judgment. His painting The Listening Chamber is beyond what Dalí can achieve or embrace. And Bacon, a fine artist who captures reality through illusion, if looked at closely, reveals how different he is from the Expressionists.

China’s modern art, especially after the May Fourth Movement¹⁹ and Lu Xun’s²⁰ advocacy of “Art for life’s sake” (not to mention Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942), has been wavering between being “instrumental” and “recreational.” The New Wave Movement accomplished its mission of destruction, and afterward along came the motif of rebellion in the so-called New Academic Art and New Ink Painting Movement—a sense of escape from the feudal literati. The materialism in Shanghai, Wang Guangyi’s rational spirit and cultural introspection, all these might seem frigid, but unlike the two “new,” corrupt literati, at least they strive to explore and bring art to a deeper level with a constructive spirit. Rational art isn’t threatened by the dilemma between traditional culture and social reality. If not for its constructive spirit, it might have been at risk of reducing itself to an instrument or a hobby. Sichuan artists love to talk about “feelings,” but I feel that we should elevate that to “sensitivity.” The other day we were all wisecracking together, and I joked that if the southwestern artists continued “feeling” their way, eventually they won’t make their way in “history” and they won’t make it in the “economy” either, ultimately becoming just some “neither-nor community.” And this is what essentially constitutes the lower part of the pyramid—a bunch of recreational artists. But then again, the concept of a pyramid might not suit modern society anymore. In the recent American market, Russia’s long-suppressed avant-garde art and Latin America’s regionally colored art have been very well received; perhaps China’s art will one day travel the same path? To make use of its unique political circumstances or to make use of regional features and express them in an international language in hopes of earning international recognition? Well, this is unless China undergoes an earth-shattering revolution in the next decade or so and builds a whole new picture, like what Spain has been doing. Lü Peng, frankly speaking, at times I think of these “big issues” and my heart is overwhelmed with emptiness. Leaving my country to pursue art abroad was a path I had to resort to—but a desolate one. That being said, what needs to be done has to be done, otherwise all could have been worse.

Zou sent me a copy of The Artist, and I went through the pieces Yi Dan and you wrote on Damao.²¹ I honestly think they are some of the best reviews The Artist has published in a while; I wonder how Damao feels about them. Too bad the reproductions from his slides are awful.

Anyway, these are some thoughts I have had in my mind in the past few months, and I have elaborated a great deal, and so forgive me if they are somewhat unpolished; I hope I’m not making a fool of myself before a critic. How have you been lately? When will the first issue of Art Market be published? Chengdu might be a decayed city, but it sure is so much better than this dreary Huangjueping. I wish I didn’t have to stay!

Give my regards to Xaiohu and Lu Jing!

Xiaogang, October 18, 1990

Note: read the original Chinese text here. This translation is based on the letter published (in Chinese) in Lü Peng, ed., Amnesia and Memory—Zhang Xiaogang Letters (1981–1996) (Beijing: Peking University Press: 2010), pp.158–161.

The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann, annotated by Yu-Chieh Li and Lina Dann. All images are added by post editors.

[Chinese version follows]

10月18日张晓刚致吕澎的信

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚 1990, 2010 出版

Publication: 《失忆与记忆：张晓刚书信集》
Publisher: 北京大学出版社
Language: 中文

请原谅直到今天才把反转片整理出来给你寄去。从成都回到黄桷坪后，我又接着成都的那口气, 画了五幅油画 (图1-5), 仍是以黑白为主。将未经稀释和调和的厚颜料用画刀堆砌在画布上， 画面上也仍是用几种不同质地和色彩 (黑、红、褐) 的布拼贴， 只是整个的图形比之在成都画的更呈方形， 犹如一个个牢笼般的框架。 那些在微笑和沉思的头颅在其中自在地生存着，它们或是人形的头颅、脸面，或是狼、羊形的头颅。龇着冰砖般的牙齿。但是它们并非在做着某种表情面向人们展示某种情绪 (如表现主义的作品那样)。的确，我的作品也许有了某种表现主义的倾向，就像我1984年画的那些魔鬼，但我知道我是不属于表现主义的，更非现实主义的。画完第五幅之后，我强迫自己停下来，进行一番清理。 纵向地翻阅西方艺术史和横向地观察国内外的表现主义画家们，我再次发现自己喜欢的艺术家，仍然是像格列科、布什、契里柯、恩索、马格丽特，这条线下来的人物，如贾克梅蒂、培根、巴尔丢斯也属此类。当然，还有雷东。新表现主义画家群中，德国的基弗尔，意大利的帕纳迪诺是我最喜爱的。可以说，我所试图通过艺术来表达的是一种我对当代人的存在状态的关注(简而言之，表达某种对死亡的恐惧和对事物表面之下的内部真实的体验) ，以及对生命与死亡的心灵体验和感应。这是一条通往现实与幻觉之间，包容着生与死的幽暗通道。不论是现实的 (如早期表现主义，波普艺术) 还是纯“幻觉”的(如达利所刻意制造的“梦幻”)都给我一种堵塞的陌生感。纯理性的材料，概念艺术，包括抽象艺术与我更是无缘。如贝克曼所言: “表现在所谓的现实背后隐藏的东西。从‘可见的’通向‘不可见的’。卡伯莱神秘哲学和中国的禅宗正是这条道上的发掘者。尤其值得一提的是契里柯和玛格丽特，契的昏暗街道上那忧郁而神秘的长长黑影，把时空分裂成了两半，在那里，古建筑及雕像与人物的基本定义模糊了，使人震颤地惑受到那内部的真实世界的强大力量。而把马格丽特归为超现实主义不免显得表面，其《收听室》远非达利能企及包容的。还有培根，一位极好地通过幻觉的形式把握现实的优秀画冢，仔细对比，即可看出他与表现主义画家的极大差异。

中国现代艺术，自“五四”之后特别是鲁迅提出“为人生而艺术” (当然 《讲话》就更不用说了) ，就总是在工具与游戏之间徘徊，新潮艺术完成了破坏的使命後，跟着就要出现那些什么“新学院派”，“新文人画”的逆反心理——封建士大夫的逃避意识。上海的纯物质、王广义等的理性精神、文化反思，虽然觉得冷漠，但较之两个“新”的堕落文人来说，毕竟是一种把艺术向纵深发展的建构精神，而非理性艺术也同样面临着传统文化和社会现实的巨大压力，如果不具备建构精神，也有沦为工具和游戏的危险。四川画家爱说的“感觉”一词，的确应当上升为“感性” 了。前几天，大家在一起吹牛，我开玩笑说，如果西南艺术家再这样“感觉”下去，就将成为既进人不了“历史”又进人不了“经济”的“两不如分子”。而这种人正是构成金宇塔最底层的大量游戏画家。 当然，金字塔的概念也许巳不适合今日之时代了。最近在美国市场，苏联被压抑多年的先峰派艺术和拉美充满地域特点的艺术同样走红，也许中国现代艺术将来的命运也会如此，以政治背景的特殊或者以用国际语言表达的地域特征来取得国际艺坛的青睐? 除非在这最后的十年里中国来个翻天覆地的大变化，另立一个山头起来，如目前西班牙所干的那样。吕澎，说实话，有时侯想到这些“大问题”，不由得一片虚无。出国求生存更是我等的凄凉之道。当然，话虽如此说，但还是得干活路，否则情况更糟。

好了, 提笔写了这么多，都是我近几个月来的一些断想，不免肤浅粗糙，还望理论家多多包涵，见笑了。你近来如何?《艺术.市场》何时开张?成都虽然腐朽，比起凄凉的黄桷坪来仍然好多了，我真不想再呆在这儿了。

代问小胡、吕静!

晓剛 1990年10月18日

— An English version of this text is available here as “October 18, Xiaogang’s Letter to Lü Peng.”

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