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CHRIS MOORE ON QIU ZHIJIE AT SHANGHAI ZENDAI MUSEUM OF MODERN ART |
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A review can easily be overwhelmed by content, ceasing to have critical form but becoming instead a list of items, or art-ems. So how does one reduce a Carme banquet to a single multi-vitamin pill? - with the arbitrary and bloody sacrifice of a bunch of art-ems. So it is with Qiu Zhijie's 'Ataraxic of Nanjing Bridge - A Suicidology'. The adjective ataraxic means calm, serene, passive, whereas the noun ataraxy is more active: impassive, stoical indifference. From a medical perspective, ataractic means to have a tranquilizing effect. But enough with the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. This exhibition is all about the place of the Nanjing Bridge in Chinese culture. 1968 was the year Russian tanks rolled into Prague. There had been protests and riots in many Western cities, including Paris, Berlin and San Francisco, against the Vietnam War, racism, conservative government and middle class values. It was the year that both Dr Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. It was also the year that the Nanjing Bridge was completed. This was the first modern bridge designed and built exclusively by the Chinese themselves. These days of course China appears to build a new bridge or highway or tower or city about every minute. But in 1968 things were different. The Russian engineers who had been helping China had all gone home after relations between the two countries had soured, but only after Russia had helped China acquire nuclear weapons, their first bomb being detonated in 1964. Mao was at the height of his powers and the Cultural Revolution was well underway. Crossing the great Yangtze River, the Nanjing Bridge was always going to bare cultural and political importance far beyond mere practical usefulness. And hence its image in China is ubiquitous. As an architectural talisman, it is second only to the Tiananmen gate in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The Nanjing Bridge appears on millions of school certificates commemorating every type of success. There are post-cards and memorabilia and everyone who can has their picture taken in front of it. So it is that the almost 7 km long double-decker truss-bridge is commemorated rather than the acquisition of a nuclear capability, but then it's hard to have your photo taken in front of a nuclear explosion unless you like X-Rays and one warhead looks much like another. Qiu Zhijie's Ataraxic is a series of meditations regarding the bridge. He started his career as a printmaker but has moved into conceptual installations, or 'projects', as he refers to them, using his lithographs as drawing-board designs for the main event, and which we see in one of the later tableaus. The first room has a number of calabashes or gourd-shaped bottles, their interiors splashed with varying degrees of ink. One is being filled by a tube from the ceiling. The others lean against the wall, idle, defunct. At the other end of the room a giant version lies on its side, with numerous butterflies inside on the verge of death or passed it. All of which plays on the musings of Zhuang Zi, a famous Taoist philosopher, who wondered about being transformed into a butterfly (themselves transformational insects) and then the butterfly dreaming about being transfigured as someone called Zhuang Zi. Qiu is laying the groundwork for the entire exhibition, which is really about the transformation of people and society, revolutionary metamorphoses, and what is lost along the way: neither butterflies nor humans live forever. The truism could easily be kitsch but Qiu manages to get away with it and with impressive flair. Before entering the next room we have to put plastic shoe-covers on. Inside the noisome room you stand minute within a towering tomb-like excavation. At the entrance the corpses of the butterflies from the first room lie at your feet but as you venture inside you walk upon charcoal casts of hundreds of dead crows while a few taxidermic versions watch on. A couple of people in the middle of the room are hard at work making more casts to replace those crushed by visitors. One thinks of the tomb in Xian of the first Qin dynasty emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, and his 8000 terracotta warriors, whose autocratic and transformative rule greatly inspired Mao. With the walls towering over you, one cannot help but also think of the huge numbers of miners who die in China's coal mines every year. The feeling is one of vertigo, consternation, and contemplation. But also, and this is probably unintended, fun. The exhibition continues upstairs and you have to scramble up some precarious rough-hewn steps in the tomb to get there. At the top there are two directions you can go. To the left is a path that becomes a zigzagging maze, the walls copied from the bridge's hand-rail, including its plaques displaying revolutionary tableaus. Qiu has created a traditional Chinese bridge out of the new one, the zigzagging form a traditional ploy to disrupt the passage of dragons and evil spirits. And clearly Nanjing Bridge needs it. Beyond the maze is an exhibition of Qiu Zhijie's large lithographs, including the one which formed the basis for this exhibition which depicts a large gourd-like bottle, and those which will form the basis for other 'projects'. Before we get there though, half-way along the maze path is a film of a man writing a suicide-note on the balustrade of the bridge. He writes with his forefinger, which has been cut. Blood is his ink. But this is a recreation and the replacement note does not speak of a broken heart but asks instead a bizarre general knowledge question: Where is the capital of Madagascar? Note that it asks not what is the capital, but where. Who cares?! But the distraction is part of the ataraxic strategy, subverting the pointless egotism of suicide with a pointless question. Psychological problems are still seen as a sign of weakness in China, so just think about something else - Madagascar for instance. Back through the dead-end of a maze we are offered a way out. But first we have to celebrate the bridge. The walls are covered in commemorative certificates. In the middle stands a sort-of replica of it, book-ended by two giant photographs of the supporting columns underneath the bridge, now turned into public spaces. The bridge is decidedly weird. At each corner a robotic 'hand' is using a black Chinese ink stick to write on the surface, the ink mixing with water from medical drip-feeds. The ink then runs to the centre of the structure, where it feeds the tube that runs into the room below we saw at the start. Work through your problems. The next room - and I am blithely skipping a mountain of art-ems - reproduces the recovery facility run by SoulCare, a group of suicide prevention volunteers. SoulCare is impressive as NGO's tend not to have an easy time in China, regardless of well-meaning intentions and particularly where matters of honour are involved, and anything to do with the Nanjing Bridge is a matter of honour. This though has improved slightly since the Sichuan earthquake earlier this year, where the government could barely keep up with volunteer efforts. Among other things the room shows photographs of the volunteers, the recovery facility itself and its mantra: We must eat and cry out. Simple wooden beds fill the room but they stand on alarm clocks, synchronised to go off together - like an earthquake, contrasting the uncontrollable loss of life caused by the earthquake (and poorly enforced building regulations) and the deliberate decision to kill oneself. 'An Ataraxic of Nanjing Bridge' is easily the best exhibition currently showing in Shanghai. In scale and execution it is overwhelming. My one quibble is whether it is not excessively large. A more succinct version would have had greater impact. As it is you leave feeling quite numb, relieved to emerge into Shanghai's belting sunshine and choking humidity. Perhaps then, the ataraxic has worked.
Qiu Zhijie: Ataraxic of Nanjing Bridge - A Suicidology of The Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge
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