Shen Yuan. Le Premiere Voyage (The First Trip).
Installation 2007

Fairytales of Chinese-ness

TRUTH BE TOLD, I AM VERY RARELY mistaken for a work of art. However, at this year’s Documenta 12, contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale flew 1001 Chinese people into Kassel, and being Singaporean by nationality and Chinese by ethnicity, I was mistaken, time and again, for one of them. Art critics and Kassel residents approached me with friendly curiosity, hoping to hear about my experiences ‘as-the-work’. To their embarrassment, I explained that I was on the same quest – of locating the Chinese.

Locating the Chinese is a troublesome matter, considering how the Chinese allow themselves to be defined, located, and in this case, installed. Fairytale isn’t the first instance of the Chinese body politic theatrically staged as spectacle. The 2005 Frieze Art Fair presented Milan-based Paolo Pivi’s 100 Chinese or 100 London-based ethnic Chinese in grey sweaters and black pants standing in a gallery space gazing mutely at art fair tourists, suggesting the quantitative heft of the Asian superpower and its billion people.

Yin Xiuzhen. Arsenal. Installation of old clothes and
everyday objects. 2007

However, both gestures disregard the difference between citizenship and race, and how these differences play out through the symbolic power accrued to them. Pivi’s 100 Chinese were ethnically Chinese but citizens of Singapore, Britain, Taiwan, etc. – citizens of other Asias inadvertently subsumed under a misapplied rubric of nationalised Chinese-ness. In contrast, Ai’s Chinese were Chinese by citizenship, born and based in the Mainland – which led to baffled viewers seeking out the defining characteristics of nationalised Chinese-ness, when there are none. At Frieze, race was visibly staged, contained, and gazed upon. At Documenta, race was staged with its visual drama diffused – many, myself included, never actually saw the Chinese (or didn’t realise we were seeing them), yet the power of this staging was everywhere – visible in absentia. This was no doubt due to the work’s instructions, or lack of them: Ai gave his ‘live exhibits’ no programme or commitments, other than to document their experiences and not leave Kassel during their stay; Ai also encouraged them to visit the city, exhibition sites, and interact with others, with the preference that they did not move about in a large block.

Cao Fei . China Tracy Pavillion. Video and Internet Installation. 2007

Fairytale’s spectacular figures were then diffused and assimilated, acquiring a status of myth within Kassel’s landscape. Both 100 Chinese and Fairytale are symptomatic of a fetishisation of Chinese-ness and its happy exportation – a fetishisation perpetuated by artists as well as by audiences on self-appointed romantic quests to locate the Chinese Other. (These quests were unattainably dispersed and thereby alternately eclipsed and over-determined other ‘Asias’ caught in its web). However, this did lead you to assess China’s omnipresence in the art world. A fact that was further underscored with the 1001 beautifully-restored antique Qing and Ming Dynasty chairs from Ai’s own collection, which also haunted Documenta venues as part of Fairytale – 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs. These provided the seats (of Chinese power!), from where visitors could indulge their fantasies.