From Writing to Presentation:
On Artist Fiction

Fiction Art
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
23.06.18 – 12.08.18

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

In recent years, various types of artists’ writing have been incorporated into the contemporary art system. If this kind of writing most often serves to reveal the inner structures of a work of art, then we may be inclined to regard it as more of an autonomous category, which goes beyond the role of organising, explaining, examining and defending artistic creation.

The exhibition Fiction Art takes a sampling of artists’ fictional writing and brings them from the digital and physical publication platforms back into the curatorial context. This experiment provides a context for discussing questions that urgently demand our attention: How should we define artists’ fiction? What creative need does it meet? Does it more effectively constitute an artistic medium that synchronically forms a whole with other creative forms?

In Duan Jianyu’s New York, Paris, Zhumadian ( 2008 ), Wang Kefu: The Story of an Art Lover ( 2008 ) and new work Secret Garden ( 2018 ), poor university students, art lovers, and rebels resurfacing from the underground, are restored to reality via important individual and public events. This strategy of using fictional narratives as metaphors for reality is also seen in the works of several of the other artists. Chen Dong has fashioned a middle-aged couple driving along a highway in video and text messages. Feng Feng has fabricated a daughter, who could not have been born, on account of the One Child Policy, from a pre-existent collection of writing and images. Jiang Zhi’s allegories and installations use the Chinese character for ‘mouth’, a square, to tell a tale about the pressures of censorship. Qin Jin’s wall paintings and Kafkaesque fiction are about a wife in a repressive household, who changes into a butterfly.

These artists born in the 1970s inject an intellectual’s humanist concerns into their texts, like an afterglow from the ’85 New Wave Movement. In contrast, their writing departs from long-standing models for artists’ texts, such as Joseph Kosuth’s philosophical considerations, or the Chinese literati’s emphasis on the intrinsic connection between text, calligraphy and painting. After the ideals of avant-garde art had been dispelled, artists’ strategies shifted from the conceptual and abstract to an explanation of specific issues, and larger narratives gradually gave way to individual experiences in times of social change. Consequently, artists have taken up the tools of the novelist and introduced references to social reality into their texts, thereby fighting for space to experiment with materials.

Likewise, Duan Jianyu’s paintings attacking aesthetic formulas, Jiang Zhi’s wordless book, Feng Feng’s archive of ready-mades, and Chen Dong’s video of a performance, respectively, have smoothly shifted the focus of their enquiries, to the extent of questioning the limits to their powers of expression. Fictional narratives provide their creators with a compromise between the idea that art reflects reality and their desire to explore the characteristics of a particular medium.

The fictions created by these artists are usually structurally sound and independent of the visual dimension. In contrast, the younger artists tend to attenuate the divisions between the fiction and the other media employed, strategically keeping their writing closer to literature, in a general sense. As a result, they dispense with the monotonous logic of rooting visual art in a text, or transforming text into image.

For artists early in their careers, the authority of critical discourse has already been lost, and various types of artistic text have become more pervasive. The temporary lack of an outside explanation sparks ‘interpretive anxiety’.¹ Thus, they often organise and defend their practices with theoretical writing, and artists’ fiction becomes a more political use of text, built upon this foundation.

Yang Yuanyuan, Where the Sightlines Cross, 2016. Installation view, Fiction Art, OCAT Shenzhen, 2018. 杨圆圆，《在视线交错之处》( “小说艺术”展览现场 )，2018 年

Shi Zhenhao has written the ‘Visual Research Society’ column in FONGFO under three different pen names; Pu Yingwei has entered a historical site as another kind of character; while Yang Yuanyuan’s Where the Sightlines Cross ( 2016 ) narrates the experiences of several photographers in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and enters the story as the last character in a semi-fictional photographic history of this city. These artists’ working methods reflect contemporary art’s appropriation of field research and other methods from sociology. Artists use fiction instead of field logs to link together real material and artistic recreations, while also blurring the boundaries between research and fiction.

More importantly, writing is a dimension that can provide material support to the individual. These artists may also be considered writers, commentators and editors ( even if they seldom call themselves novelists ). Fiction serves to demarcate the boundaries of their own identities, and they become the subjects of their writing. In their fictions, they shape further identities, or set out on nomadic journeys. They seek out their own place in the morass of the cultural system. With their status as authors, they intervene in the production and dissemination of artistic discourse. In the fictions of the middle-aged artists, there are still existential, subject – object relationships between the author and the subject, but these become more blurred with the younger generation.

These age-based observations do not mean that the logic of artists’ fiction evolves over time. On the basis of a small number of samples, we have tried to suggest that artists’ use of different kinds of fiction may be broadly divided into two different tendencies, determined by the methods they use and their underlying creative motivation. In retrospect, we can see that there is nothing new about artists’ fiction, and that the artist’s way of linking their writings to other forms of creation from the publishing world has simply added to the tools at their disposal. The issues raised by this exhibition are certainly very timely, as the show also questions how to mediate the relationship between the book and the work of visual art, at the moment of presenting this to a public.

Speaking of writing a book, Duan Jianyu believes that she is simply ‘borrowing’² from the writer’s domain, which means that artist’s exploration of different media is always embodied in visual creation, not text. There seems to be a general disequilibrium in the way that the languages of literature and art have developed, and this reflects a consensus among artists about the way that books should be made: the subject of their work has always been contemporary art, and does not form part of a linguistic or literary tradition. This does not suggest an absolute equivalence of media ( Jiang Zhi, for example, has published several purely literary novels, and directly exhibited her texts, as works of art ), but it is a precondition for incorporating contemporary art into the discussion of fiction. In addition, we cannot deny that the impact of a text on the viewer always lags behind that of a work of visual art. This reflects the special place that artists’ fiction has in presentational logic and time, but it also places harsh demands on the overall presentation of the work.

In this exhibition, the artists’ works of fiction were independently printed and made into books. In their fabrication, these small books are markedly different from literary publications, but due to the somewhat arbitrary nature of their layout, they do not have the richness of expression of artists’ books. ( Yang Yuanyuan’s independently written book is a special case here. ) In fact, some of these books are actually the compilation of several fictions, so the text is not truly redundant. This means that the books and the visual works show a set but disjointed relationship to one another, though this does make it easier for the books to be related to a novel form of subtext. This arrangement reveals a certain unease about managing the relationship between the books and the visual works in the exhibition, and it also makes the curator’s description of the exhibition – as ‘opposed to spectacles and rapid consumption’ – sound more like a piece of defensive rhetoric.

In the end, the key issue is that artists’ fiction is always a creative form that is not entirely physical. When these fictions create numerous link-ups with contemporary art, they play an indeterminate role between artwork, commentary and documentation, but they also present an ambiguous attitude that rejects convention, but often declares its rationality. This charming quality makes us hesitate about how we choose to present artists’ writing, and even critique it. Of course, it quickly has measurable value, in the name of the production of knowledge, or art, but does this mean that, by confirming the creator as an artist, we can determine the legitimacy of the text as an artistic presence, and endorse the absolute validity of all means of including it in an exhibition? What we can say for sure is that we fall short in our appreciation of artists’ fiction if we have no interest in discussing the above question and simply try to revalidate it, by treating textual art as an artistic byproduct, or an exquisite game.

1. Liu Xinyi, ‘Work at the Art Writing Workshop’, Salt Projects WeChat Account, 27 April 2016. Liu Xinyi believes that his own writing stems from ‘an interpretive anxiety’, because ‘when we cannot look to an expert, we urgently need a text to describe our own practices’.

2. ‘In Conversation with Duan Jianyu: Text is Like a Crutch’, OCAT Shenzhen WeChat Account, 22 July 2018.