Cold Night Without End

Cold Nights
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
15.09.17 – 17.12.17

Translated by Duncan Hewitt

The basis of the exhibition Cold Nights is the novel of the same name, which its author, Ba Jin, completed in 1947. The curator’s request was that artists Liu Shiyuan, Chen Zhou, Li Ran and Nabuqi should respond, in their own creative ways, to four characters in the novel: Shusheng, her husband Wenxuan, her lover Fengguang and Wenxuan’s mother.

Shusheng spends most of her time torn between returning to her family and fulfilling her responsibilities as a wife, daughter-in-law and mother, or retreating into the interior of the country with her lover to seek personal happiness and liberation. Her wavering is demonstrated clearly in the section The Best Is Yet To Come, which depicts her desires: wealth, love, a man she can rely on… This is vivid and colourful, rolling past like the film in a movie reel. However, Shusheng does not dare to shout ‘stop’, because she lacks the courage to face up to her desires.

Later, however, Liu Shiyuan puts Shusheng in the dock, to face either victory ( like the ‘fresh’ oysters ) or destruction ( like the bee, so bloated it will die ). This is a step Ba Jin never went so far as to take; for him, maintaining the continuously developing sense of tension in Cold Nights seems to have been more important. Why did Ba Jin add the sentence ‘She needs warmth’ at the end of the story? It’s unclear whether it’s Shusheng who says this in a monologue, or the author. Perhaps Ba Jin specifically wanted to leave a way out, leading towards new possibilities. But what is the meaning of the certainty and cruelty the trial brings? It seems that all it does is dilute the importance of Shusheng’s role.

In Chen Zhou’s film Blue Hole ( 2017 ), the female lead, Xuanxuan, is a variant of Wenxuan, a trapped beast in a blue hole.As Chen Zhou puts it, Wenxuan is ‘detached from his mother, wife, even from the entire external environment; he can’t communicate, his inner voice… a lonely echo’. But Chen Zhou focuses most of his attention on Wenxuan’s superficial loneliness and neglects the profound interior concealed beneath: the film also includes two girls whose appearance and dress seem cold and science-fiction-like, their dialogue a kind of ‘modernised’ synonym for loneliness, repeated again and again. Wenxuan’s conflicted sense of wanting to cry out but not being able to, his feeling of being ripped apart, caught between his wife and mother, and the pain caused by his tuberculosis, so powerful it crackles from the page – all of these brim with energy – far more so than this version of loneliness coloured by an urban artistic mood.

Nabuqi, At dusk after the rain… setting sunlight…where light spots in all sizes…fade,… washing out… and winding towards… the end, as a sharp honking is heard… disappear, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2017. Still courtesy UCCA. 娜布其，《下过雨的傍晚……倾斜的阳光……大小不一的光斑……退去，……被冲刷……蜿蜒延伸……终点，尖利的汽车鸣笛声……消失了》；媒介: 装置, 200x200x240cm；灯箱，80x36x25 cm；2017 年；承蒙 UCCA 提供用图.

Of the four characters, Fengguang is perhaps the hardest to understand, because he very rarely appears directly in the story. He is always outside the narrative, yet suddenly intervenes like a ghost. The problem Li Ran’s film Night of Patmos ( 2017 ) seeks to resolve is how to depict a ghost-like character who is hardly ever seen. In the section of the film that describes heretical believers ‘performing rituals’, the leader of the religious sect is also a ghostly character like Fengguang. The accompanying narration comes from an essay Li Ran wrote himself. In this simple yet profound text, the high priest does not appear directly on screen either; he keeps himself separate from his disciples, but also has a talent for ‘plunging down to catch his prey’. His ghostly nature, however, does not rely on dialectical description – ‘depicting something that isn’t there’ – but is rather a kind of preordained order: people are told that the high priest must be invisible.

This is also why Li Ran makes use of archival texts on staging, from single-act plays of the revolutionary era; and why he considers that having an improvising actor playing the role of Isaac as a blind man is ‘very effective’; and why Joshua and Caleb can wander for a long time right in front of Esther and yet not see her. Because the stage, blindness and invisibility – as a kind of preordained order relating to what is shown, and what is not, in performing art – represent a metaphorical explanation of Fengguang. The reason Fengguang is not present in the story, is not visible, is probably not simply due to his own ghostly nature, but also to the fact that aspects of his surroundings actively drive him away – including Wenxuan’s jealousy, Shusheng’s desire, the mother’s hatred…

The question that first comes to mind is probably how a spatial installation should intervene in the narrative time of Cold Nights. The good news is that Nabuqi was dealt quite a favourable card – the character she was given was the mother. In the story, this character is actually not just a mother or a mother-in-law: her function also transcends the narrative itself – her stubbornness and her hysterical energy are among the forces that drive the novel forwards like a machine. In other words, she is both inside and outside the narrative – just like the light installation that Nabuqi has placed at the entrance to the exhibition space, which may be either inside or outside. In fact, the subtlety of Nabuqi’s work lies precisely in the fact that she has realised the super-textual nature of the character of the mother, and has therefore skilfully bridged the apparently insurmountable gap between spatial installation and narrative time: her work can suddenly turn on the lights in the exhibition hall, turning this into an intervention into the narrative by the mother. The sloping roof is transformed into a sense of oppression, aimed at the narrative.

However, in Nabuqi’s case, there are also some ‘blemishes’ that are worth reflecting on. For example, the artist hopes to use the reflection from the mirror to illuminate the other objects in the exhibition space, and to stimulate communication and dialogue between them. But it would be hard to describe the result as ideal: the mirror which encircles the room at best gives people a certain sense of the space having been reorganised, shrunk or reassembled.This effect succeeds in expressing some connections, but these remain excluded from the narrative created by the three other artists. It therefore seems ephemeral, even a little shallow. As for effects such as the sense of emotional exchange between the bee in The Best Is Yet To Come and the butterfly in Blue Hole, of course Nabuqi’s efforts play their part, but these little tricks, which are not far from being simply jokes, are not able to build on and develop the installation artist’s successful arrangement of lighting and control of the wind direction, which she turns into interventions in the narrative. Still, this is clearly not just Nabuqi’s fault.

So why choose Cold Nights as a theme? The story originally took place in Chongqing during the war years, when people’s lives were played out against a background of rumours, epidemics, terror and disappointment. The cruelty was blatantly obvious. Yet, although the curators repeatedly urge us to be aware of the links between this type of unsettling existence and the present day ( our information age ), when we stand in this exhibition space, dominated by trendy blue lights and music, and try to make sense of the relationship between the objects displayed in this white box and serious issues such as rhetoric, narration and structure, it’s hard to avoid a sense of awkwardness or embarrassment, as if there were an ‘elephant in the room’.