The Art of Quiet Speaking

Utopias/Heterotopias: Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition
North Silk Factory and West Scenic Zone, Wuzhen
28.03.16 – 26.06.16

Wuzhen, otherwise known as the Venice of the East, is a picturesque water town two hours away from of Shanghai, in the northern Zhejiang Province. It’s a place that feels beautifully tragic, as if one is finding something just as it ends. Chen Xianghong, CEO of Wuzhen Tourism, has plans to make sure that end doesn’t come. Having spent his childhood here, he has been slowly overseeing the revitalisation of his hometown.

Wuzhen is a town of two parts: the modern town, which is where the old Silk Factory resides, and the historic water town ( the West Scenic Zone ), a restored Ming and Qing Dynasty village of cobbled streets, canals, bridges and traditional houses. The Zone is the picturesque, Venice-like part. After paying to enter, one witnesses a vast organisation of about a hundred families, dressed in distinctive blue tunics, living and working here, running the hotels and restaurants, and ferrying tourists in the ubiquitous electric trams.

Under Chen’s guidance, Wuzhen has become a popular tourist attraction, playing host to the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, the Mu Xin Art Museum, the World Internet Conference and, now, Utopias/Heterotopias, a contemporary art exhibition that trails through the West Scenic Zone and the renovated North Silk Factory. Organised by Chief Curator Feng Boyi, with a curatorial committee that includes Hou Hanru and Uli Sigg, Boyi has assembled some forty artists from around the globe, including Xu Bing, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Viola and Ai Weiwei.

The work Coloured House, by artist Ai Weiwei, is a structure made from parts of abandoned trational homes from southern China, painted in modern household paint. It’s also emblematic of the exhibition’s practice of the art of quiet speaking.

In the exhibition’s introduction we are reminded that utopia is an illusory state, an ideal society that embodies human aspiration, whereas heterotopia is ‘a place of transcendence and a place of reality’. A heterotopia, according to Foucault, is a representation of, or an approximation to, a utopia. He likened it to a mirror, which we in the real world look through to the utopia of the reflection, which does not exist. The heterotopia, then, is the action at the mirror’s surface, the friction between the real and the reflection – in other words, the place by which utopias can be approximated in a real space. It can also be a site of contestation, where several spaces operate in the same place – as with Wuzhen, where a ‘real’, historic, tourist attraction exists within a modern town, an imaginary idyll within an ordinary locus.

A third state, one likely to be more familiar to contemporary audiences, is dystopia, which could conceivably be described as the mental state created unintentionally by heterotopias when they pursue utopian visions. Dystopic states, despite their enormous influence on popular culture – think The Matrix, The Hunger Games or The Island – do not feature in contemporary art practice ( within this exhibition the word appears only once in the exhibition catalogue ), which may seem anomalous in the context; however, as with Weiwei’s Coloured House, what is not said, speaks clearly.

Take, for example, Mao Tongqiang’s Tools, which consists of 30,000 hammers and sickles, laid in rows. ‘The metaphor here is self-explanatory’ reads the exhibition essay, but it is also explicitly one about the past. However, one cannot look at the field of tools and not think about the workers who used them, and of the millions of workers who still work in perilous conditions. While the artwork deals explicitly with history, it resonates with today’s dystopic conditions.

Then there is Song Dong’s Avenue Square, an enclosed space, the walls and ceiling of which are lined with a mirrored surface, while the length is dressed to resemble a familiar Beijing street. Song invites the viewer to stop and use the space, ‘gather, eat with friends, pass the time, or entertain yourself on this street’, a seemingly benign invitation to an unremarkable interaction, made complicated by the red-painted rear wall reminiscent of the buildings surrounding Tiananmen, and the antique lamppost, like those on Chang’an Avenue, which leads to the Square. References to Tiananmen are only ever spoken quietly, and so it is quite understandable that the exhibition posits the work as being a sort of ‘every street’ .

What brings this quiet historic reference chillingly forward, from heterotopic past to dystopic present, is when the viewer realises that the fake surveillance cameras, made of detergent bottles, contain real cameras, the footage playing in an adjoining room. Further, the combination of the cameras and the mirrors recalls Jeremy Bentham’s concept of a panopticon, the model prison the design of which allowed for the prisoners to be observed by a single guard. While it isn’t possible for the guard to watch all of the prisoners at once, the inmates can never know whether they are under surveillance, and thus effectively guard themselves. The work is a stark reminder that every action one undertakes – in the age of WeChat and other social media applications – is monitored, archived, and exists as part of the evidence chain.

Eliciting similar concerns is the Dragonfly Eyes trailer by Xu Bing, for a film made entirely from footage assembled from the millions of surveillance cameras around China. The trailer takes footage from convenience stores, roadside incidents and even people’s homes, for what will eventually become a narrative-form feature film. As with Avenue Square, Xu Bing’s work has a cascade effect on the viewer: first, one views with the same voyeuristic fascination as when watching reality TV; then comes a dawning realisation – how many cameras does one pass each day? The thought that there is very little of our lives that isn’t viewable is overwhelming. As with Bentham’s panopticon, we have created a society in which we can never know whether we are being observed.

Among the work of the international artists, there are a few crowd-pleasers – Florentijn Hofman’s Floating Fish, for example, is sure to gather crowds of selfie-takers – but many of them seem to connect obliquely with the curatorial theme. An unquestionable standout is Ann Hamilton’s Again, Still, Yet, which turns a traditional Chinese theatre into a silk loom by connecting the seats with the stage via silk threads. One of the townswomen works each day to weave a 20-metre tapestry, and the inclusion of work songs and bells, and the light filtering through the window behind the stage, transform the space into something that straddles the strata of time. The effect is bewitching – until the weaver stops and laughingly complains of being tired from the effort required, reminding us that utopias also require a workforce.

Another is John Körmeling’s ANYWAY, a deceptively simple piece located at one of the gates leading into the Zone. It consists of a revolving circle, matching the surrounding paving, so that when one stands on it one is both entering and exiting at the same time. Thus, one can look from the utopia inside to the dystopia outside, although with the many workers scurrying after the tourists, playing Morlock to our Eloi, one wonders in which direction dystopia lies.

Other artists, such as Oliver Herring and Jaffa Lam, seem intent on working towards sustainable heterotopias in their practice, seeking to ameliorate the more undesirable effects of chasing utopia. Herring’s Areas for Action collaborates with members of the local community to engage with, and document, the renovation of the Silk Factory in a way not wholly performative, nor object based. By working with locals from the town, Herring invites an element of risk and uncertainty, relinquishing the usual role of artist progenitor for one of social experimenter – a role which seeks to elicit positive change in the volunteering participants while leaving little behind but documentary evidence.

For the work Bleaching, Jaffa Lam worked with members of the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association ( HKWWA ) to unthread, bleach and recombine fabric elements ( from fabric shops closed due to gentrification ) to create new forms which are then suspended as projection surfaces, like small floating worlds. Lam’s practice incorporates elements of education, social justice and community-based collaborative actions. With this, and previous works, she is engaging in a dialogue about what a sustainable artistic and heterotopic practice means in an urban, neoliberal, environment, which more than ever leans towards the dystopic.

As one crosses the threshold when leaving the West Scenic Zone, there is a sense of being expelled from utopian space – albeit one resembling Fantasy Island – much like Adam and Eve after the Fall. That such an ambitious exhibition could have been staged in such a place, successfully, is perhaps surprising enough; yet more surprising is that with the art of quiet speaking it has been allowed to say so much. With the promise of the project having future iterations, one can only hope that it continues to explore utopia, heterotopia and perhaps even dystopia, in order that it might speak a little louder.