Parasophia 2015: Xu Tan

VARIETIES OF DISSENT
By Andrew Maerkle


“Social Botany” project (2013- ), video still from Immortality.

Born in 1957, Xu Tan first attracted international attention as member of the Big Tail Elephant group of artists active in Guangzhou in the 1990s. Along with Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiang and Liang Juhui, he helped to introduce conceptual and new media art practices into China. Since then, Xu has become known for his “Keywords” project investigating the intersections between semantics and ideology in everyday language. Videos and materials from his latest project, “Social Botany” (2013- ), are now in view at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art as part of the inaugural Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. ART iT met with Xu in Kyoto at the opening of Parasophia to discuss his practice in greater detail.

Xu’s work remains on view in Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 through May 10.

Interview:

ART iT: Your practice is difficult to characterize because rather than a specific medium, like video or sculpture, you work primarily with words and knowledge. In this sense, I always had the impression that your work is essentially immaterial, but seeing the installation here in Kyoto, I realized that it does have a distinct material element, which is the creation of a space for contemplation. Could you elaborate on your approach to art?

XT: For me, the important thing is how to combine so-called aesthetic experience with my research. Normally, a large part of my practice takes place outside the institutional context – I interview people, conduct research, and analyze information. But after doing all these activities, the next step is composition: creating something with the material. This is the essential part for artists. For me, the primary elements of composition are space and site as the meeting between your concept and the perceptions of others. I don’t think it’s enough to just do research. Through composition you can push the investigation further into society. This is something that I have been thinking recently.


Installation view in “PARASOPHIA 2015” at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 2015.

ART iT: What led you to make this kind of art? When you were with the Big Tail Elephant Group in the 1990s, were you already interested in this approach, or did it develop over time?

XT: I think my current practice is completely different from when I was with Big Tail Elephant. Back then, we were highly influenced by early conceptual art, which we learned about relatively late in China. That was over 20 years ago. After the year 2000, the concern shifted to thinking about what we should do with art and how to extend those concepts.
Basically, once we felt we understood conceptual art to a certain degree, we wanted to do more with it. We wanted to use its methods to think about Chinese society, globalization, and things that are happening in different contexts.

ART iT: Would you say that your work is not conceptual art, and more like what could be called a research-based practice?

XT: Yes. Conceptual art fundamentally dealt with issues of concept and form. The conceptual artists reached the peak of formal art. I think they offer some useful approaches for those of us who have come after them, but we should not limit ourselves to what they achieved. We must go beyond the focus on concepts.

ART iT: But obviously words are concepts, and you work with words.

XT: Well, it’s now more than nine years since I started the Keywords Project. I think it’s changed a lot over that time. The first three years I think of as a period that I call “Searching for Keywords.” I did a lot of interviews investigating many different social groups, and then I searched for keywords within the results – and I also made publications like Dictionary of Keywords (2008) and things like that. Then, between 2008 and 2011, the main project was the “Keywords School.” We made a social forum for different people to come talk about all kinds of topics, using the keywords for exchange. Since 2011, we have entered a new period called “Keywords Laboratory.” The works here in Kyoto and the Social Botany project are just a part of the Keywords Laboratory.
Previously, my practice had been a kind of conceptual word game – and we certainly can learn from games – but in this latest period I am looking to use the methodology of the keywords to extend the work further. After the game, we want to create some new concept, and not just work with preexisting concepts. We have created new words, for example, “social botany.” I checked online and this term has never appeared anywhere else before. Through our research, we also came up with the concept of “animalistic freedom.” There is a lot of research to support this concept. In this latest phase I have been trying to further develop the discipline of the project by collaborating with anthropologists and sociologists. But the important thing is that I also define myself as an artist. There are superficial similarities, but of course I am totally different from scholars in other fields.


“Social Botany” project (2013- ), video still from Visible Speech Writing.

ART iT: In Japanese, the word zoukei, which corresponds to the Chinese zàoxíng, is strongly associated with creative practice – you often find it in the names of art schools, for example. It literally means creating or giving shape to forms. I don’t know if the word has the same connotations in Chinese, but is there some zoukei/zàoxíng aspect to what you do?

XT: I think the basic form of my work follows three or four different modes of expression. The first is that we go to the countryside or different places to talk to people. But the interviews are not just interviews. They are exchanges of aesthetic experience. For example, in Kyoto we interviewed the former director of the botanical garden here, and it was a really good discussion. I felt we entered into deep issues about art. The exchange was full of aesthetic feeling, not just knowledge. So this is the first aspect of my work – a kind of site-specific performance. The second is the conversion of those exchanges into videos and installations, which you see here. I think the video and the installation are still really important.
Next comes writing. I divide language into three cohorts of activity. One is writing and reading. Another is speaking, reading and listening. The third is what I call “visible speech.” So I have two ways for writing. One is to use text, whether typing on a computer or writing by hand. But I also use visible speech to “write.” I simply turn on the video camera and speak into it. In particular, I have been doing this over the past three or four years, and you can see it here in this project. I call this “Visible Speech Writing.”
So the three core elements of my practice are performance, video and installation, and writing. And then I also make drawings from time to time.

ART iT: You mention the term “social botany,” which was also the topic of an exhibition you held at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou in 2013, “Questions, Soil and ‘Social Botanic.'” Is this term conceived as a metaphor, or does it have an application? For example, in the videos we see interviews with different farmers and planters. You gain knowledge about different aspects of agricultural practice, but what happens to that knowledge?

XT: I go to visit different farming places whenever I can. I even went to visit farmers when I was in the US, and I go to the countryside almost every week when I am in China. But the knowledge that I hope to gain from this research is different from botanical knowledge, and it is also different from anthropological knowledge.
There are two directions guiding my research. One is an investigation into the political situation in China, seeking to understand how the farmers and the people can suffer under a dictatorship but still somehow accept the situation. In China, we have a tradition surrounding the intellectuals of the past, which says that if you want freedom, you should escape to the mountains and spend your time collecting chrysanthemum flowers, like the poet Tao Yuanming (365-427). This tradition exerts a strong influence even today. Many intellectuals are guided by the phrase dú shàn qí shēn: because it is impossible to change the broader political situation, they focus on improving their individual morals. This is one way the political plays out in China. But from my botanical research, I have learned more about the planter’s consciousness and “animalistic freedom.”
Another focus of the research is on seeds. In modern agriculture, everybody buys seeds from conglomerates like Monsanto, which is based in the US. The drive to maximize profits results in bad crops everywhere, and I am trying to understand this phenomenon. These are the two directions of research encompassed in “social botany.”

ART iT: The intellectual is unable to deal with the government, but does the planter offer a different solution?

XT: There are a wide range of planters. From ancient times, the intellectuals were essentially the high officials in the imperial bureaucracy, so that’s why the idea came about that if you want to think freely you should turn to farming or go hide in the mountains. As an intellectual, you cannot do anything to resist the king or dictator. This has become the culture, the tradition. There are still many people who follow this mindset.

ART iT: But in any country it is difficult to establish distance from the totalitarian system. The US or the UK are upheld as exemplars of democracy, but they still function in some sense as totalitarian systems – it’s just hard for the people living there to see how it operates. In Japan, too, we have a highly totalitarian system, although many people here also believe that we have a democracy.

XT: But it’s still better than China. You know, what attracts me to the farmers and peasants is that they live almost like animals. The beautiful side of Chinese culture is that it maintains the connections between the human and the animal. For example, we have many words and phrases that describe human behavior through animal metaphors. So in our culture the distinctions between human and animal are not so firm, which I think differs from European culture.


Above: “Social Botany” project (2013- ), video still from Plant. Below: “Social Botany” project (2013- ), video still from Consanguinity.

ART iT: I’d like to return to the Keywords Project. Previously you have made projects with different organizations like the multinational corporation Cowin Global, for Keywords of Cowin Global (2010). In this case the Keywords workshop occupies an ambiguous space between corporate strategies for internal problem solving and activist strategies for organizing workers. Can you explain more about this practice?

XT: Keywords of Cowin Global was almost five years ago. Cowin Global is a Swedish-backed company based in Hong Kong with a manufacturing center in Qingdao, which is where I made the project with the Chinese staff. The San Francisco Chinatown Keywords School I did last year with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and the Chinatown Community Development Center is the latest iteration of the project. The Keywords School in San Francisco ran for an entire year, and I invited many artists and social organizations to participate.
I see these projects as a cooperative thing, and not just about me. But we have a special situation in China, where many artists want to see fast results and achieve success quickly. The society changed after the Cultural Revolution. That’s when neo-liberalism began to arrive. Now everybody thinks we must reject the way of thinking from revolutionary times and be concerned only with personal success. That’s the one and only thing on everybody’s minds. If you become famous, you can get wealth, power, new opportunities. But if you say, I love doing something, and I want to maintain a simple life, then you’re stepping outside of the mainstream.


Installation view at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

ART iT: One of the fascinating characters from Chinese classical literature is the yĭnshì, the hidden sage or scholar who lives a life of anonymity – for example, working in a common trade, as a butcher or so on – but who has tremendous insight into society and the affairs of man, which he shares with the prince at the right time.

XT: Yes, that’s similar to what I was saying about the old intellectuals who withdraw from society. I think it’s an elegant expression of “animalistic freedom.” But, at the same time, they are not really free. We have another phrase, Zhōngnánshān zhī lù: the way of the Zhongnan Mountains. If you want to be famous or noticed by those in power or the government, the first thing you should do is head in the opposite direction and hide yourself instead of participating. Going in the opposite direction will get you where you want to go. Then you will be noticed.

ART iT: Do you consider yourself an yĭnshì of Chinese art?

XT: No. That’s different. Sometimes being an yĭnshì is a strategic choice. The most important thing for me is that I want to do something I like.

Xu Tan: Varieties of Dissent

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