One Hand Clapping: Proposing
Visions of China’s Future

One Hand Clapping
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
04.05.18 – 21.10.18

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?

The title One Hand Clapping can be associated with the Chinese phrase, ‘it’s hard to clap with one hand’ ( guzhangnanming ). Xiaoyu Weng, the exhibition’s curator, began with this point, revealing possibilities beyond the idea that ‘it’s hard to clap with one hand’. We can see this as a metaphor for the collision between Chinese culture and the Western world, asking how the West will respond when Chinese culture decides to signal its cultural independence. In other words, in the context of cross-cultural exchange, one side might decide to abandon considering the differences in cultural identity between the two sides and, in internal discussions, completely ignore the theme. Was this the kind of ineffective communication that inspired One Hand Clapping?

In realising this idea, the primary difficulty is that the theoretical world has repeatedly emphasised the ‘identity-lessness’ of artistic expression in cross-cultural exchanges, but in practice there is always an existential issue. When the curator attempts to lead the viewer into engaging in direct dialogue with the work of art, the viewer will habitually focus on discussing questions of cultural difference, regardless of the creative context of the works and the artist’s intentions. For example, in October 2017 the Guggenheim Museum took down three works involving animals from their Art and China after 1989: Theater of The World exhibition, as a result of protests from animal rights groups. After this event, the majority of the debate about the exhibition was about art and ethics in general, and any discussion of the works of art themselves hovered on the surface, or was summarily incorporated into the casual musings of Western scholars on issues related to the use of animals in art. Unfortunately, the curators’ original intention may have been to present these artists’ works as a local branch of global conceptualism, in an effort to prove that Chinese contemporary art was a form of resistance, thereby bringing it into the larger global trend of revolutionary movements around 1989. However, we might equally well envisage another exhibition of Chinese contemporary art by women and marginalised groups, criticising Theater of The World for placing an exaggerated emphasis on the influence of political events on artistic creation.

In fact, ever since the moment that Chinese contemporary artists landed in the ‘theatre of the world’ in the 1990s, they have had to react passively to the varying impressions that their work has made on observers in the West and find other ways of responding to them. Willingly or not, curators and artists constantly have to renew their expressive methods and themes, and this accounts for numerous misunderstandings, meaning that they have to spend their time clarifying stereotyped impressions, explaining their creative motivations, rejecting labels, pretending that there is no superficial relationship between culture and art and Chinese politics and economics, and falling back on the kinds of phenomena that are condoned in Chinese cultural circles. After all, whatever the true purpose of an art exhibition, people attribute meaning to it, as an embodiment, or expression, of cultural identity, and this meshes in with the logic of globalisation that is still dominant in the West today.

The failure of the China Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in the eyes of the public is a good illustration of this. Even if the curators had assumed they were working from a position of mutual regard, this was not enough for them to identify a suitable point of entry, for developing a dialogue of adequate discursive authority. Moreover, this is not the place to discuss whether the inclusion of intangible cultural heritage in an exhibition of contemporary art reflected the curators’ personal preferences or whether this imposed an artificial constraint on the significance of the work on display. Simply attempting to incorporate the concepts of ‘an assembly of scholars’ ( yaji ) and ‘being expelled from office’ ( zaiye ) into the global context was as difficult as it would be for an old man to move a mountain. The Pavilion did not employ the now-popular working methods of socially engaged art, nor did it fit in with the vision of Chinese contemporary art that is held by international curators; and we don’t even need to go into the awkward position of handicrafts in the Western world, or the Pavilion’s disconnection from hot issues in the West. Although the works in the Venice Biennale were undoubtedly from China, perhaps they lost the ability to deepen the dialogue, because they were altogether ‘too China’.

Issues of identity are exhausting for the ‘Other’, in a Western context. Like a hovering ghost, whether or not you attempt to disregard its influence, everyone around you can see it. A ghost represents the unfinished business of a deceased person, just as the identity of the Other is intimately linked to the past. Such identities solidify divisions and become cultural signs that artists cannot escape from, accompanied by an interpretive black hole that cannot be avoided.

What should curators do, when history becomes a brand, when identity becomes a burden, when communication becomes a soliloquy, when background stories become small sub-branches in the larger spectacle of globalisation, and when globalisation has already become a historical product dominated by the West? How should they treat identity and the gaze of the Western Other in cross-cultural practices? After the Theater of The World at the Guggenheim, Xiaoyu Weng was confronted with these difficult questions, and she proposed a seemingly simple, yet profound, solution: trying to understand the future.

The ingenious side to ‘understanding the future’ is that the future is bound to the chaos of unknown objects and future events. When faced with the future, the similarities between human beings can perhaps transcend cultural identity, gender, race, and many other historically constructed differences. We are all condemned to the same ignorance; we have few clues to share, and we are all equally perplexed. Technology, machines, artificial intelligence and other factors have had a predictable influence on the world today. Under these circumstances, once issues of identity are buried away in visions of the future, this creates the possibility for reciprocal communication in the context of unequal rights.

Importantly, One Hand Clapping does not attempt to discuss a cyborg future that is entirely devoid of identity, thereby emphasising the concept of a ‘future China’. As the philosopher Yuk Hui wrote in ‘Moving Toward a Fork in the Technological Future’: ‘The future is actually a product of globalization.’¹ He proposed that visions of the future full of Western technology are more often constructions of a globalised vision led by the West; academia must question this conformist idea of the future, investigating visions of technology within conceptions of the universe in different cultures, abandoning linear models of technological development, and re-conceptualising a multicentric technological future.

But in today’s context, thinking through the logic of technology and its derivations is not an artist’s strong suit; in Chinese antiquity, artists promoted ‘writing the soul in form’ and no artisans had invented the camera, or used it to create works of art. However, now that artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other modern technologies have entered into contemporary life, it is unrealistic to think about a future China without them. Even in One Hand Clapping, the works of Lin Yilin, Cao Fei and Samson Young all draw on symbols of a vision of the future, such as robots, virtual reality and sound synthesisers. When artists consider the future, the problem is knowing how should they handle these tools, which come from the West.

In response to this issue, the interpretations of the artists in One Hand Clapping take several different directions. The works of Duan Jianyu, Samson Young and Lin Yilin still emphasise the identity and mission of future artists – a marginalised identity that uses multiple media to explore the possibilities of primal senses. As the curator suggested in ‘Poetry and Place Afar’: ‘Although today’s discursive system of the humanities tends to place socially engaged artistic practice on a par with open political resistance, One Hand Clapping suggests another possibility, which is that removing oneself is an alternative mode of resistance.’² Perhaps, in a future surrounded by the virtual world, digging deep into humanity’s primal senses is the final solution to classic romance.

Wong Ping and Cao Fei escaped the role of the artist long ago, becoming visionaries and writers of the future. The wonderful thing about their work is that their understanding of the future does not involve considerations of the future development or destiny of art, or a vast spectacle of some kind. They reduce the future to an independent script of a single individual life, whether absurd or sentimental, but they regale the viewer with deeply felt emotion and profoundly meaningful reflections.

If we accept Yuk Hui’s argument, we may conclude that investigating China’s future is still important, even though that future is bound up with the concept of globalisation. It is worth debating whether China has a tradition of thinking about the future. The utopia presented by ‘removing oneself’ is more like a spatial concept – an alternative world, in which time stops, and which may not even need to be prefaced by the idea of the future. Rooted in Chinese, in the logic of China’s culture, that ‘those who submit will prosper and those who resist shall perish’, I feel that the logic of life and death can provide the core underpinning for visions of the future. At all events, thinking about the future, as a way of intervening in the future, is a precious and valid means for Chinese culture to communicate with the Western world. When the organisers of the next ( 58th ) Venice Biennale came out with the title May You Live In Interesting Times, this suggested that the need to reaffirm Chinese notions of time and space, and life and death, felt more important than ever.

As proposals for a vision of China’s future, the visual spaces of One Hand Clapping are like harmonics, lingering endlessly in the air.

1. Yuk Hui, ‘Moving Toward a Fork in the Technological Future’, in One Hand Clapping, eds Hou Hanru and Xiaoyu Weng, Guggenheim Publications, New York, 2018, pp. 107 – 13. Translator’s note: It was not possible to obtain access to the English in the original translation.

2. Xiaoyu Weng, ‘Poetry and Place Afar’, in One Hand Clapping, eds Hou Hanru and Xiaoyu Weng, Guggenheim Publications, New York, 2018, pp. 19 – 34. Translator’s note: It was not possible to obtain access to the English in the original translation.