[9am to 12pm, 6 May 2008]

Li = Li Zhenhua

Qiu = Qiu Zhijie

D = Davide Quadrio

Translated into English by Ouyang Yu

Commented and edited by Davide Quadrio
Commented by Li Zhenhua

Post sense and sensibilities and conceptual art

Qiu: At that time, Zhu Qi or someone else was curating an exhibition in Shanghai. Yan Lei produced something that was title d, Welcome Yan Lei to Shanghai'. Things like that, a kind of mechanism that finds an angle that no-one has yet noticed , setting off a hidden arrow or shooting a gunshot, so to speak . Such worship includes examples of Yan Lei and Hong Hao as well as the one that I always cite: putting a note in the exhibition hall saying: None of the works here is mine' . These things bored me to death then. Such works tried to prove that he was more clever than others, than other artists, and of course they tried to prove that he was also more clever than the audience. Basically, there were no other contents, no emotional contents, no narrative contents. In fact, works can be composite; they can narrate things, with emotions, that can move and affect people. And they can even be visually pleasurable and stimulating. Anyway, they can be composite. However, similar works that appear these days do not have anything like what is described above . They call themselves concepts' but these concepts' only appear to be concepts; there really are no concepts in them . Conceptual art has got into a zone of errors.

D: I agree with what you say. I actually would like to add something to this point . I think that in many works I see and I have been seeing in China lately is that a concept is already an artwork. I think that there is actually a difference between having the concept/idea for an artwork and call the idea the artwork itself. Where is the process of refining the concept, of choosing it or discarding it? Where is the process or realization of the work? It is the same thing I see in a lot of (to make a simple example) abstract painting in Shanghai: there is a huge difference between Rothko and Qu Guofeng or Ding Yi.

NOTE: Question for you though: how do you define conceptual art? I also think that there is a problem in translating What is your interpretation?

Li: I would say there's conceptual art and concept art, I do think that in Chinese is a conflict between those two for long time, and I think the meaning of what we have mentioned in the dialogue is Conceptual art not concept art.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. C Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", Artforum, June 1967.

Li: Is this in fact the reason why you do the post sense and sensibilities' ?

Qiu: It's the real reason to do the post sense and sensibilities'. Later on (I) began to oppose conceptual arts, which is why the symposium held by Huang Zhuan in 1998 in He Xiangning Art Museum ( ) was a real academic forum. The article I presented was The Zone of Errors in Conceptual Art'; it was written for that forum. The forum was on in September or October but I had finished writing it in March or April because, well, a book was intended for publication. In this article I systematically taunt such artistic concepts as mechanical worship, worship of boredom, worship of minimalism, things like a heap of apples slowly rotting away, the eyes of a chicken slowly dying, an extremely long shot that was called video art. After that, the revolutionary masses would rather stay home watching soap operas and MTV, and it's much better watching commercials than see a chicken slowly die fluttering. If art has gone to that extent, it's got a huge problem. At that time, video art had only small shows and such shows were quite underground but were so morbid that one was disappointed. In the beginning, at that time, there was a force that didn't do things that way . At the time, some young people were not into that . They began gathering together, in two forces, one involving my shidi (younger brothers of the same master), shixiongdi (younger and older brothers of the same master) from the same school. Yan Lei and I played the role in bringing into the 1990s things done in the 1980s by Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan and Huang Yongping, all of National Art Academy ( 㽭ѧԺ ) . Yan Lei was a bit young; it was mainly I because I later became the student leader in the school . Then it was Yang Fudong and Jiang Zhi who had both turned into a group. After 1996 or 1997, shidi like Liu Wei, Jiang Zhi and Yang Fudong began arriving in Beijing. Our situation was alike . In the 1996 video exhibition, Gao Shiming and I ran into a conflict of sorts with Zhang Peili and Wang Gongxin. So the symposium became something of a you-die-and-I-live struggle, a life and death struggle .

D: I am actually tired as well of this kind of confrontation or on the other hand, paimapi ( ƨ ) attitude. Like you are saying Qiu Zhijie, in these kind of debates it is impossible to have a constructive intellectual discourse and analyses. I found incredibly tiring to sit and listen to very formalized theory or very stupid comments on who is the next laoda . Li Zhenhu a, do you remember? It was like in Shenzhen for Wang Jianwei exhibition this year. Round table. Wang Jianwei asked a group of people to come to discuss critically his working and comment on development of it. Result: 2 hours of nonsense , of teacher-like comments or compliments for what Wang Jianwei achieved and how important he is for Chinese artistic development. Only few people dared to speak their mindsuch a waste of time.

Li: well, in general this is about how Qiu Zhijie is begin to give a intro about the link of 80s-90s, and that will follow with why they have begin with the post sense and sensibility group.

Li: What sort of form you and Gao Shiming preferred?

Qiu: Gao Shiming and I were of the same gang. Wang Gongxin and Pei Li were of another gang. When they did video art, they insisted that the television should be stripped of its case, be cool and somehow distinguished from home video . It seemed that they argued because of my Present Progressive Tense , my work that featured the wreath but they could not stand the wreath appearing in the video installation.