Family History: Capital and Art in the Rear Window

Li Qing: Rear Windows
Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai
07.11.19 – 19.01.20

Translated by Duncan Hewitt

In 1937, when Shanghai fell to the Japanese, the Shenxin Cotton Mills Nos. 5, 6 and 7 were taken over by the occupiers. The Japanese made a point of seeking to co-opt all of Shanghai’s top business leaders. The Chinese Nationalist Party ( Kuomintang ), however, placed those it suspected of collaboration on its assassination list. Soon afterwards, Lu Bohong, who had cooperated with the Japanese, was stabbed to death. The Japanese also planned to invite the entrepreneur Rong Zongjing ( Yung Tsoong-King ) to work with them. But in early 1938, as rumours swirled, he fled to Hong Kong, and died there soon afterwards. Rong Zongjing never had the chance to return to his mansion on Seymour Road.

Since it was taken over by Fondazione Prada, the Rong Zhai ( Rong Mansion ) has become an important landmark on the Shanghai exhibition scene. After three previous shows, its current exhibition, Li Qing’s Rear Windows, is perhaps the one most closely linked to the history of the Rong family. According to the introduction to the exhibition, ‘Li Qing imagines things in this empty mansion which seem to be present yet are not actually here, rousing the mysterious yet vibrant life force of the story, and connecting it closely to modern life in Shanghai.’ And a visitor entering this exhibition would probably get such an impression: the exhibition does actually live up to the image that the artist and ordinary people have of life in such a grand mansion – the opulent exterior scenes of Shanghai, the hierarchy of eroticism and power with the family, the peeping at each other from inside and outside.

The Tetris Windows series inlays paintings into wooden window frames. This series depicts Shanghai buildings, including the Overseas Chinese Town, the Ampire Co. building, the K11 mall, the Amber Building, the Royal Asiatic Society building, the Shanghai Exhibition Centre and the Rong Mansion itself. The description of the work states that ‘[t]hese buildings are mainly taken from Shanghai’s colonial era, early socialist era and the more recent stage of the era of social transformation… They highlight the reallocation of space within the city, and the link between culture and innovation in Shanghai.’

This description is actually a kind of cover-up. In fact, the most obvious thing these buildings have in common is simply the fact that they have all become well-known venues for exhibiting or dealing in contemporary art in today’s Shanghai. When combined with two of the other works situated upstairs – Dark Magazine, which consists of piled-up art magazines, and the collage Writer’s Wall, made up of postcards, tickets and the like, collected by the artist on his travels around the world – Li Qing has, intentionally or not, revealed the environment in which he operates: an art market driven by capital, real estate, media and ordinary people’s material needs, particularly at a time when Shanghai’s real-estate industry has become one of the main driving forces of the local contemporary art scene. For anyone working in the art world in Shanghai – whether in a gallery, auction house or the media – these three works accurately sum up their everyday life.

In the two Neon News installations, Li Qing displays trashy tabloid news stories, such as a wealthy businessman cheating on his wife and getting a divorce, or a celebrity retreating into the mountains to rear chickens, then going on TV to pontificate about how to attain enlightenment. The inspiration for these stories came from news headlines that Li Qing received on his smartphone. But, in fact, during the Republican era, all Shanghai’s major newspapers and tabloids also used to publish lots of similar news stories. This makes us realise that Li Qing’s exhibition is not about the ‘contemporary’ at all – it’s about the ‘modern’. We may have assumed that the ‘modern’ era was over, and that the postmodern or the ‘contemporary’ ( which Heidegger called the destruction of metaphysics ) had already arrived. In this old ‘foreign-style’ house, however, from the time Rong Zongjing acquired it right up to the current exhibition, a particular, adapted Shanghai version of ‘modernity’ – known as modeng – has stubbornly persisted. Leo Ou-fan Lee, in the opening chapter of his important book Shanghai Modern, defined Shanghai’s ‘modernity’ by discussing a scene in Mao Dun’s novel, Midnight ( 1933 ):

The harbor – as I think [Mao Dun’s] rather purple prose seeks to convey – also exudes a boundless energy: LIGHT, HEAT, POWER! These three words, together with the word ‘NEON’, written originally in capital letters in English in the Chinese text, obviously connote another kind of ‘historical truth’: the arrival of Western modernity, whose consuming power soon frights the protagonists’ father, a member of the traditional Chinese country gentry, to death… They are in short emblems of China’s passage to modernity to which Mao Dun and other urban writers of his generation reacted with a great deal of ambivalence and anxiety. After all, the English word ‘modern’ ( along with the French moderne ) received its first Chinese transliteration in Shanghai itself: the Chinese word modeng in popular parlance has the meaning of ‘novel and/or fashionable’, according to the authoritative Chinese dictionary Cihai. Thus in the Chinese popular imagination Shanghai and ‘modern’ are natural equivalents.¹

Much of the exhibition also focuses on relationships within the family. As the head of a large family, Rong Zongjing was well aware of the problems that can easily occur within such a group. This great tycoon of the Republican era actually wrote an essay entitled ‘What is happiness within a family?’, in which he said, ‘When male or female servants are well fed and have nothing to do, they often pick petty quarrels, and no one takes responsibility for such trivial matters as daily necessities.’

In contrast to people of the previous century, Li Qing clearly does not intend to provide such an understated analysis. In the work Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity: Ghosts No. 4, he first painted portraits of Rong Zongjing and his granddaughter ( as imagined by the artist ), then pressed the two paintings together to create another face – even though it’s plain to see that this portrait is obviously derived from a photograph of Rong Zongjing’s granddaughter Malina Yung ( Rong Hailan ). Why does this ‘granddaughter of Rong Zongjing’ have to be an imaginary character, rather than the real, renowned Malina Yung? We can only assume that Li Qing has other intentions, which stem not from the actual, historical Rong family, but from his own vision of a ‘granddaughter’, a young girl.

How does Li Qing imagine the stories that took place within this old foreign-style house? A row of different editions of Lolita from around the world, and the kneeling maid in an oil painting, provide the clearest evidence. In the series of portraits Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity – Love, Li Qing has selected expressions of women having sex from films from all over the world. The artist’s method in this series was to ‘choose pairs of expressions, adjust them to similar angles, paint them individually on two separate canvases, and then, before the paint dried, press the two images together’.

Shanghai is probably the city with the most erotic temperament in China. In her book Shanghai Love, the historian Catherine Yeh, a specialist on the brothels of the early modern era, interprets the lithograph Only When Looking Very Far Does It Become Clear:

 The courtesan became part of the city’s self-staging as a marvellous playground […] One of the courtesans gazes with intense curiosity at Shanghai’s unique landscape, while another views it through a pair of Western-style binoculars. Both direct their attention towards the steeple of the Holy Trinity Church, considered by many to be one of the wonders of the Foreign Settlements. In this fascinated gaze at urban Shanghai, the cityscape and the courtesans join in conveying the arcadian associations of Dream of the Red Chamber.²

This description reveals how the urban landscape of Shanghai and the world of intimate relations observed each other. Moreover, Yeh also notes that in Zou Tao’s science-fiction novel Shanghai Dust ( 1904 ), courtesans fly from their garden into the city using hydrogen balloon technology. And it’s true, of course: to fly from your own garden to the centre of the city – isn’t that precisely what people want to do when they peep at the world from their rear window?

Yet what is the difference between the ‘outside world’ of Shanghai, and the world in your own garden? What is the difference between the historical city of Shanghai and today’s Shanghai? The banks, the shopping malls, the old foreign-style buildings are still there – it’s just that the opium dens, the brothels and the casinos have been replaced by restaurants, galleries and shops that have gone viral online. Whether you’re on the inside or the outside of the rear window, in the end all you will see is capital, power, gossip and lies, modeng-style modernity and desire. None of these evil, beautiful flowers has ever left Shanghai, not for a moment.

1. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930 – 1945 ( Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press ), 1999.

2. Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850 – 1910 ( Seattle WA: University of Washington Press ), 2006.