Wild Shanghi Grass

Wild Shanghai Grass*

MOLLY NESBIT

OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 75–105. © 2010 Molly Nesbit.

In late April 1927 the writer Lu Xun sat as a refugee in the southernChinese city of Guangzhou and wrote a preface to his new group of prose poems,which he was calling Wild Grass. “When I am silent, I feel replete,” he began. “As Iopen my mouth to speak, I am conscious of emptiness.”

Words came to him. Past life had died. Dead life had decayed. From itsclay, no trees grew, only wild grass. “I love my wild grass,” he wrote, “but I detestthe ground which decks itself with wild grass.” He pointed to the fires under-ground that would one day erupt red and devour it. At that point he would laughout loud and sing, he claimed, and he repeated this laughing and singing, becausethis fierce turn of events was the fair proof that he had lived.1

The poems that followed had been written to stand apart from the fray ofthe press. Pulled back and collected, they were a motley group. Freeform medita-tions rife with inversions, vicious observations, visions exploding; cackling, tart,wafting, they were his dreams, he said—his wild grass. These pieces were not uni-form. He shifted voices and cadences. He gave them titles that charted no path:“The Shadow’s Leave-taking,” “Snow,” “The Passer-By,” “Tremors of Degradation,”“The Wise Man, the Fool, and the Slave.”

* A version of this essay originally appeared in Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest(Beijing: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2008), pp. 34–61. The essay was, in effect, begun at UtopiaStation in Venice in 2003, where my conversations with Yang Fudong started. It would not have beenpossible now but for the aid and counsel of many people but I would like to thank especially PhilTinari, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Angie Baecker, and Andrew Watsky. The films that make up SevenIntellectuals in Bamboo Forest were exhibited over the years in the ongoing series of exhibitions and semi-nars that is Utopia Station, broadly construed, but Yang Fudong has had many important, scholarlyexhibitions in which they have been included. These catalogues of record deserve special mention:Yang Fudong (Kunsthalle Wien, 2005); Yang Fudong (Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2006); The Real Thing:Contemporary Art from China, curated by Simon Groom, Karen Smith, Xu Zhen (Tate Liverpool, 2007).1. Lu Xun, Wild Grass, trans. Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang (Hong Kong: Chinese UniversityPress, 2003), pp. 3–4. See also The Selected Works of Lu Xun, 4-vol. ed., trans. Xianyi Yang and GladysYang (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1985); Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (NewYork: Norton, 1990); Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and TranslatedModernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

76 OCTOBER

At the end of the collection he put “The Awakening.” That patch of wildgrass began with Lu Xun sitting at his old writing desk at Peking University inApril 1926; above him, bombers flew in to attack, and, mission accomplished, theydeparted; this had been his baseline reality. He had set himself to editing a pile ofmanuscripts by young writers, their words full of ambition, integrity, and anger—lovely words, he felt: “Their spirits are roughened by the onslaught of wind anddust, for theirs is the spirit I love. I would gladly kiss this roughness dripping inblood but formless and colorless.” He thought of Tolstoy and the thistle; heturned to the pages of the student journal The Sunken Bell. He quoted the stu-dents:

Some people say our society is desolate. If this were really the case,though rather desolate it should give you a sense of tranquility,though rather lonely it should give you a sense of infinity. It shouldnot be so chaotic, gloomy, and above all so changeful as it is.”

China was being torn apart by civil war, and Lu Xun’s students were among thoseshot dead that year for demonstrating, but Lu Xun did not give those details. Hewrote instead of the way events leave their mark. “The Awakening” had takenplace in the depths of the night. It ended quietly:

While I have been editing the sun has set, and I carry on by lamp-light. All kinds of youth flash past before my eyes, though aroundme is nothing but dusk. Tired, I take a cigarette, quietly close myeyes in indeterminate thought, and have a long, long dream. I wakewith a start. All around is still nothing but dusk; cigarette smokerises in the motionless air like tiny specks of cloud in the summersky, to be slowly transformed into indefinable shapes.2

Lu Xun resigned his post in Beijing and escaped to the South. Ultimately,he would settle in Shanghai. Wild Grass, along with his stories like the “Diary of aMadman” and “The True Story of Ah Q” marks the arrival of a modern Chineseliterature. Mao Zedong would be one of his greatest admirers. The wild grass rantogether in the shadow of fire, with echoes of Nietzsche, and Turgenev, and withthe ongoing Chinese revolution, which is also to say, he let it run with the shifts inthe ground we call history.

How Long Does Wild Grass Grow?

In 1991 Yang Fudong went south to Hangzhou, the old imperial cityMarco Polo praised to the skies for the beauty of its freshwater lake, its plea-sures, pavilions, and delights; centuries later, its reputation as a paradiseremained intact. Yang Fudong went there to study oil painting at the Zhejiang

2. Lu Xun, “The Awakening,” Wild Grass, pp. 122–26.

Academy of Fine Arts, which had already been renamed the China Academy ofArt, but no one called it that yet. The time was auspicious. A decade before, theAcademy had become an inspired center of new experiment. Removed fromthe political imperatives of the Central Academy in Beijing, the Academy inHangzhou was a place to think, to paint, to talk, to read. The state culture ofrealism was opening further; underground and overground the avenues oftranslation and exchange that Lu Xun himself had done much to promote werebeing re-connected; at the Academy they were listening to everything thatcame. Texts circulated. The circles of reference were increasingly unpre-dictable, unstable, electric.

They watched the video of Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance in New Yorkwhere he arrived in an ambulance and then, wrapped in felt, lived in an artgallery, confined with a coyote and working on co-existence, proclaiming I LikeAmerica and America Likes Me. On another day at the Academy, the students wereshown a video of an actual airplane accident played over and over again to gaugethe degrees of numbness that came with repetition. Then there were the books.3For example, there was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, fin-ished in the wake of the first World War, a book that draws a limit to the expres-sion of thoughts, as summed up in a sentence: “What can be said at all can be said

Wild Shanghai Grass 77

3. Zhang Yaxuan, “The Power from Behind,” interview with Yang Fudong, first published inChinese in Contemporary Art and Investment (September 2007) and translated into English by Daniel Niehfor Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, p. 170 ff.

Yang Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part One. 2003.

clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”4 It was notunusual to have the echoes ricochet across history from every direction, so muchso that the origin of the sound mattered hardly at all. Things were missing; silencewas full. Scenes that no one could imagine yet were being set.

Yang Fudong’s friends chose to live by the blue lake. He did not. Hetook an apartment by the train station because he liked the whistles and thenoise. Someone gave him the Chinese translation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.Yang Fudong took to the beat of the Beats and read without stopping aboutyoung Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise, Carlo Marx and their friends in 1947, theirdesire to read and write everything, their fever, their need to make tracks. Theywere something more than characters; they seemed to live for real. Carlo Marxhad the dark soul; Dean Moriarty had come to New York City, fresh out of jailand wanting Nietzsche and “all the wonderful intellectual things,” Sal Paradiseremembered, saying he was possessed of visions like holy lightning. Sal Paradiseextolled a new kind of intellectuality that he could only call intelligence—anintellectuality released to the outside. They would all head West. “Somewherealong the line,” Kerouac had Sal Paradise write, “I knew there’d be girls, visions,everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”5

On the Road had an immediate effect on Yang Fudong. It upbraidedhim. He stopped going to school for a while. On his return, he picked up hisbrush and went to work. His painting gave way. Yang Fudong’s most notableproject in art school involved a vow of silence. In 1994, he stopped speakingand only wrote messages to communicate, messages on his body if there wasnothing else on hand. Initially, he was put on report at the Academy.6 Five yearslater, the project would be included in the legendary underground Post-SenseSensibility exhibition, put together for two days only in a Beijing basement. Post-Sense Sensibility came out of group discussions among the younger Hangzhouand Beijing artists, and had a substantial theoretical text written by Qiu Zhijie.Its subtit le would read Alien Bodies and Delusion, the post-sensibility beingdefined as “a blood trace in the breast made by [a] razor,” a possibility, a symp-tom, a kind of ability that embraced an aesthetic of violence, unfeeling andextreme bodily dysfunction. Form was being pierced to produce a direct effect,a short-circuiting of art and language alike. Yang Fudong’s Living in AnotherSpace (1992) would be remembered in this context as “a factitious experience

OCTOBER78

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (1922; London:Routledge, 1990), p. 27.5. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957; New York: Viking, 1959), p. 8. 6. See Yang Fudong’s own account of his years in Hangzhou and afterward in The Real Thing:Contemporary Art from China, pp. 143–49, and in the important cycle of interviews with Zhang Yaxuan,beginning in 2002 with “An Interview with Yang Fudong: The Uncertain Feeling. An EstrangedParadise,” Yishu 3 (September 2004), pp. 81–92, continuing with the July 2005 interview “A ChillSpreading Through the Air” and the 2007 interview “The Power from Behind.” The last two ZhangYaxuan interviews have now been translated into English by Daniel Nieh and published in Yang Fudong:Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, pp. 118–41 and pp. 170–88 respectively.

designed to know ‘living in other where.’”7

He launched his work in contexts like this one, group shows organized byartists and friends. In Shanghai, in 1999 they embedded one of these in a section ofa supermarket, placing art on the shelves for sale and fitted into the supermarket’sprice structure. Within lay a separate exhibition room displaying installations andvideos. Yang Fudong showed his short video I Love My Motherland (1999) there andsold a little red flipbook of it.8 Then there was Fuck Off!, organized by Ai Weiwei andFeng Boyi in the fall of 2000 to protest the first Shanghai Biennale. Yang Fudongsent the three photographs that make up The First Intellectual (2000). They show ascene unraveling, laced with black humor: a young office worker bleeding, hit bysomething that has wounded him, aims his brick weakly at something unseen, aphantom enemy on a deserted boulevard. No sign of a barricade, no Liberty leadingany people. The First Intellectual seems to play a part in a cartoon. The ambiguity ofhis position left many questions hanging.9 Yang Fudong did not mind. Coming andgoing, starting and stopping, talking with friends, moving their work through thecities; the polemics and the pressures—this was the ground for their art. They hadceased to be students.

Yang Fudong moved to Shanghai in 1998. There, in late 2001, he beganto contemplate a five-part black-and-white work in film, transferred to DVD,about a group of seven twenty-year-old intellectuals, not scholars exactly, butthinkers starting out. He planned to make one part of the cycle a year, very delib-erately not rushing the pace. He called it Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest.10


7. Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion, ed. Wu Meichun and Qiu Zhije (private publi-cation, 1999), unpaged. The exhibition was held in the basement of Building No. 2, Shaoyaoju resi-dential district, Beijing, January 8–9, 1999. The literature now surveying this past decade of Chineseart is growing rapidly. See especially Phil Tinari’s discussion of the exhibition and its context in histhesis, “Sensation to Legitimation: The Discourse of Experimental Art in China, 1998–2004” (A. M.thesis in Regional Studies—East Asia, Harvard University, 2005); Pi Li, “Yang Fudong: Dream-likeReality,” ART iT 10 (Winter 2006), pp. 66–67; Hou Hanrou’s collected writings, On the Mid-Ground:Selected Texts by Hou Hanru (Hong Kong: Timezone, 2002). Cities on the Move, curated by Hou Hanruand Hans Ulrich Obrist, generated different catalogues at its various venues. See the first for theshows at the Vienna Secession and the CAPC at Bordeaux in 1997 (Ostfildren: Hatje Cantz, 1997) andthe 1999 catalogue for the Hayward Gallery in London.8. Supermarket, curated by Fei Pingguo, Xu Zhen, and Yang Zhengzong, at the ShanghaiSquare Shopping Center, 138 Huaihai Road, Shanghai (1999).9. Yang Fudong’s interview with Charles Merewether, “Yang Fudong, Doubt and Hope: AnInterview,” Art Press 290 (May 2003), p. 33. Invariably, in his interviews over the years, Yang Fudong isasked about this work. See also his interview with Gu Zhenquing in Chinese Artists: Texts and Interviews:Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 2004, pp. 136–138; his interview with Gerald Matt, “Film is Like Life,” inthe Kunsthalle Wien catalogue (2005), pp. 6–17; his interview with Yuko Hasegawa, “Yang Fudong:Beyond Reality,” Flash Art (March 2005), pp. 102–107; and the discussion in Marcella Beccaria’s essay,“Yang Fudong: The Foreigner and the Search for Poetic Truth,” in Yang Fudong (Castello di Rivoli, Turin,2006), p. 21, which is based on extensive interviews in 2004 and 2005. On the exhibition Fuck Off! seeTinari, p. 36ff. The show was held for three days, November 6–8, 2000, at the Eastlink Gallery in aShanghai warehouse. The catalogue would be edited by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. 10. The missing indefinite article “a” does not so much reflect an imperfect English translationas it denotes the remove between the real world and the other realm his characters would inhabit.

When he finished the cycle in 2007, it was exhibited in its entirety at the VeniceBiennale. The Biennale published an anthology of reading recommendations bythe artists. Accordingly, Yang Fudong submitted the following lines—two pagesstraight from the middle of On the Road. He gave no explanation at all for them:

It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey.I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist.“Whooee!” yelled Dean. “Here we go!” And he hunched overthe wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, every-body could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized wewere leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performingour one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved!We flashed past the mysterious white signs in the night some-where in New Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) andWEST (with an arrow) and took the south one. New Orleans! Itburned in our brains. From the dirty snows of “frosty fagtownNew York,” as Dean called it, all the way to the greeneries andriver smells of old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom ofAmerica; then west. Ed was in the back seat; Marylou and Deanand I sat in front and had the warmest talk about the goodnessand joy of life. Dean suddenly became tender. “Now dammit,look here, all of you, we all must admit that everything is fineand there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact weshould realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND thatwe’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING. Am I right?” Weall agreed. “Here we go, we’re all together . . . What did we do inNew York? Let’s forgive.” We all had our spats back there.“That’s behind us, merely by miles and inclinations. Now we’reheading down to New Orleans to dig Old Bull Lee and ain’tthat going to be kicks and listen will you to this old tenormanblow his top”—he shot up the radio volume till the car shud-dered—“and listen to him till the story and put down truerelaxation and knowledge.”

We all jumped to the music and agreed. The purity of the road.The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled andhugged our left front t ire as if glued to our groove. Deanhunched his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night, andblasted the car along. He insisted I drive through Baltimore fortraffic practice; that was all right except he and Marylou insistedon steering while they kissed and fooled around. It was crazy; theradio was on full blast. Dean beat drums on the dashboard till a

OCTOBER80

great sag developed in it; I did too. The poor Hudson—the slowboat to China—was receiving her beating.11

*

The Seven Intellectuals could only have been made by slowing the boat waydown; there would need to be time, hours, years, for the drift. What does the intel-lectual do now? Where do the words go? The dreams? The life? These questions hadhaunted the work of Yang Fudong ever since he heard the trains in Hangzhou.

He had realized that his work would involve making movies, and in 1996,he wrote a script for the film that the next year became An Estranged Paradise. Atthe time, he told his friends that it was “a minor intellectual movie.” He hadinvented the term (xiao wenren dianying) and so had to explain it. “Minor intellec-tual movies are about walking in the rain on a rainy day,” he told them. “They areabout your emotions and moods; about the dreams that you cannot make true butcannot let go. They are about each detail of your life; they are what you think yourlife should be; they are the books you have read; they may also be a cliché.”12

The film was shot as a pure experiment on expired black-and-white 35-mil-limeter film.13 The actors were non-professionals, in other words, friends. In thefilm, they barely spoke; they were shown submerged in everyday life; they walkedthrough it, disengaged, trying for more. Yang Fudong chose settings that he knew,seeking the kind found on outmoded wall calendars of beautiful Hangzhou in therainy season. The film began with a lecture on Chinese landscape painting. It began,in other words, with lessons from a distant past. As a painter makes a branch, a fig-ure leaning, a bridge, a mountain peak, a voice explains:

Poetic mood is the life of painting and without it, painting justequals a living dead. But how can the poetic mood be achieved? Thegreat poet Su Shi once wrote: ‘One fails to see what LushanMountain really looks like because one oneself is in the mountain,’which suggests that we need to get inspiration from our life.

After the lesson, a modern story of a man. He undergoes a breakdown, anillness crossed by three women, persistent dissatisfaction and a lethargy fromwhich he finally recovers; he learns to compromise with life as it comes. He learnsto enjoy life and love. The story ends inexplicably with a scene. A strange, half-madman climbs up on a platform near the train tracks, does a dance, stripping, andlets out a string of yells toward infinity, or maybe toward the train. The landscape


11. Kerouac, On the Road, pp. 134–135, quoted by Yang Fudong in Paper in the Wind: A Reader.Texts Chosen by the Artists of the 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2007 (Milan: Rizzoli,2007), p. 89.12. Zhang Yaxuan, “An Interview with Yang Fudong,” pp. 82–83.13. Beccaria, “Yang Fudong,” p. 22n6.

painting had provided a prologue, but not this conclusion. On this point, YangFudong remarked, “Actually, well-known adages, to a certain degree, should be theconclusions after compromise. They are all correct . . . ”14 These things are inheritedand carried on. The end is the beginning. The beginning was the end. One is oneselfin the mountain. One is oneself at the West Lake. Another one is beside himself bythe train track.

What Becomes of the Mountain?

The funds to complete An Estranged Paradise came with Okwui Enwezor’sinvitation to exhibit at Documenta 11 in 2002. At Documenta the film received agreat deal of attention from abroad and a different conversation began. Invitationsto exhibit outside China would now come one after the other. Comparisons to theolder Shanghai cinema of the 1930s and ’40s were offered: Fei Mu’s Springtime in aSmall Town, much admired, and in 2002 remade by Tian Zhuangzhuang, also fea-tured a troubled, sickly young man stuck in his troubles and caught in a love triangle.Any similarities were generic at best; the plot lines went in opposite directions. YangFudong volunteered that he had taken his title from Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger thanParadise.15 But the foreign need to see national identities first overwhelmed the otherdimensions. In China, he continued to exhibit in different independent group pro-jects, like The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, organized by Lu Jie in the summerof 2002, which put artists back onto the historic route of Mao Zedong’s Communists,the march that was the test of their strength and understood to be the road to theirvictory. Meantime, Yang Fudong began planning a new project about intellectuals.He began calling it Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, and projected five parts. Itwould become another place to work and live.

The Boat Went Slow. It Had No Motor,It Slipped into the Shadows, the Dark.

As he defined the “minor intellectual” in his long interview with ZhangYaxuan in 2002, he was already sketching the future.

[Minor intellectual] means that from the writer’s point of view, thereis a group of special people, who may not do anything astonishing orremarkable. They may not create masterpieces but they have theirown qualities. Maybe you do not notice them on a daily base [basis]and they will never be anything special, but when you suddenly dis-cover them they are very adorable. They can touch your heart.16

With Zhang Yaxuan, the discussion of the definition of the intellectual

OCTOBER82

14. Zhang Yaxuan, “An Interview with Yang Fudong,” p. 8715. Matt, “Film is Like Life,” p. 17.16. Zhang Yaxuan, “An Interview with Yang Fudong,” p. 90.

deepened. Zhang Yaxuan asked Yang Fudong if he thought of himself as one. Maybeone-half, Yang Fudong replied, and went on to insist that the definition not be literal:

The spirit of intellectuals is the dream you have for yourself and the sen-sation of chasing a dream in dreams. In other words, being an intellectualmeans imposing the status of being an intellectual upon oneself—that isthe flavor. To assume oneself an intellectual—that is the spirit. Being anintellectual also includes the meaning imposed by others. Of course, anintellectual needs to have the spirit in himself and in his bones.

. . . Similarly, each plant will have its own beauty, such as a wildflower.When the rain drops on its petals, or when the sun touches it, the floweris always beautiful. Maybe the power of such beauty is not very strong, butit will somehow touch you one day. Such is the spirit of the intellectual.

The seasons are also this way. One day, when you get up and take yourfirst breath, you know that spring is here. A warm spring is coming, butit is still a little chilly. Actually, I am not the only one who has this feel-ing. Everybody has it. I think the closer you are to being an intellectual,the more sensitive you are.17

And so the seasons met. These words need to be heard against the back-drop, the surge and clamor of social and cultural change in China after 2001. Apanorama with several horizons needs to be sketched. There is the horizon drawnby the rapid development of an overground contemporary art system of commercialgalleries and markets in the cities; it is receiving intensified international attentionand investment, especially with regard to painting and sculpture. There is a horizonbeing drawn by the transition to a colossal market economy, to huge new urbanenvironments, a massive leap marked by China’s accession to the World TradeOrganization in 2001 into a fast industrial economy and a century that many werealready calling Chinese. The Beijing-based curator Karen Smith has summed up thisnew time-economy’s effect on art in China as [email protected] There is yet anoth-er horizon being drawn by the expansion of independent cinema, feature-length fic-tion, and documentary work that puts all the changes, all the speeds, both in frontof the lens and in front of new audiences.19 This was the stage onto which the minorintellectual was stepping. It was larger. It was growing. It was luminous. Its ends wereunclear.


17. Ibid., pp. 90–91.18. Smith, “[email protected],” in The Real Thing, pp. 16–23.19. See Jia Zhangke, “Des films qu’on ne peut pas interdire. Le nouveau cinéma chinois” in Alorsla Chine! (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2003). See also the important anthology of articles TheUrban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhang Zhen(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Yang Fudong’s work on the Seven Intellectuals began by slowing art’s processdown. This was the fundamental critical conceptual step from which all else followed.Forget the whirlwind. This would provide a formal condition as well, but at the begin-ning Yang Fudong hoped only to open the work itself to the real time of his own life,to let everyday time and experience seep invisibly into and out of the project. Timewould be allowed to expand there, fracture, seep, and drain. By 2003, he had madeseveral short pieces for video projection, and they were circulating through the artexhibition networks internationally. His films were being exhibited as installations;increasingly, he considered them to be determined by the dark room in which peo-ple could come and go, only sometimes seeing the entire work. This made it possibleto increase the fragmentation of a story to the point where no story needed to betold. He was now absolved of the temporal conventions of cinema, and of the tightercontrols the Chinese placed on commercial film.20 Art-video exhibition, knowing norules and no better, encouraged a chaos of time. More time, old, slow and real,poured in.

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, by virtue of its title, signals seven forebears:

OCTOBER84

20. See Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air” and “The Power from Behind,” inYang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, pp. 118–41 and pp. 170–88 respectively.

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part One. 2003.

Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Xian, Xiu Xiang, and Wang Rong. Theyare a group of unruly Taoists who withdrew from public life in the Wei and Jin dynas-ties (220–420 AD), sang and drank together in the bamboo grove, and pursued apure conversation and a passion for reckless liberty; their example became the stuffof legend and was taken repeatedly as a model by artists and writers in the centuriesthat followed. Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals revised the model to include twowomen but otherwise he let the type’s longevity outline his characters. They wouldfunction as a group of passionate, introspective individuals, lovely and earnest—friends, not a collective exactly; they were full of questions, trying to find a way to liveas a group. It was all trial and error. These roles remained general. He added detailonly in places, as if to emphasize these certain traits. First, he placed them in thehalf-generation born after his own; the intellectuals would be barely twenty, just outof school, and these questions would be specifically theirs, pointedly contemporary.He asked his younger friends to play these parts. None of them were professionalactors and so they would appear on screen relatively unmasked. However, he thengave his intellectuals costumes, tailored, modern, stylish clothes that dated from mid-century, the kinds of clothes he had seen in photographs of authors like Sartre onthe Chinese editions of their books. The setting of Part One—the crests ofHuangshan, or the Yellow Mountain—set these few certain details into a deep antiq-uity. These were the mountains that had helped form the intervals of absence andpresence in traditional Chinese landscape painting.

He used this certain detail to combine the literary traditions and the mod-ern vernacular in ways reminiscent of writers like Lu Xun, where the combinationsdid not involve the layering of opposites, ancient versus modern, so much as theimplication of one into the other through the use of a sharp accent or a tone. Butother techniques were more visible, at least to him. He had techniques that he hadintuited from movies he had not yet seen but read about; back in school, he had readas much as he could about Fellini in Chinese, so that long before seeing 8 1/2 , forexample, he had an imaginary 8 1/2 in his head.21 Were these providing detail too?Were the waters of an Italian spa, the promenade to its steam room, the stream ofasides and deceptions being remembered as he framed his shots? Was this film toogoing to be a search for an idea for a film? Those movie dream sequences of his ownwould combine with the author photographs, the costumes, the fresh, nonprofes-sional faces and the mountain mist to make a movie begin. He drew the curtain oftime backward into the twentieth century by shooting in black and white. His twenty-year old intellectuals arrive, the film opening gradually; there would be no one time,no one-point perspective; their thoughts would somehow have to contend with allthese things that they had never lived and did not know yet. They try to grasp loss.They try to grasp death. Clouds and a soft rain hold them back.


21. See Michael Donohue, “Beyond Tomorrow,” W Magazine (November 2007), p. 208. YangFudong told Donohue, “Before I saw Fellini’s 8 1/2, I had my own 8 1/2 in my head. See also the inter-views with Yuko Hasagawa, “Yang Fudong: Beyond Reality,” p. 106, and Beccaria, “Yang Fudong,” p. 19.

The film was shot as a series of tableaux and activities. They went to thetop of Yellow Mountain, like so many travelers before them, like so many touristsnow, and set up scenes at celebrated lookout points. The film began at MonkeyWatching the Sea; they lounge nude, then dress. Mists intrude. The film cuts awayto the Seven Intellectuals’ descent, suspended above the eastern side of the moun-tain in cable cars blanketed by fog. A going-down, a going-under, someone like LuXun would have thought of Zarathustra but that would be too much surface refer-ence. The film cut back to take in the time spent on the crests. The film wouldtake this rhythm of knowledge and immersion quietly into itself; it would flow inlong, slow shots. The intellectuals would walk in and out of these long shots; theywould climb the stepped paths along Songling Peak, Stone Figure Peak, LotusPeak. The shots take the mountain’s side. They hold the opalescent close-upsopen. The Intellectuals hold still. There would be no progress: the film marked itsown end in silent tears.

Once down from filming Yellow Mountain, Yang Fudong developed thescript of thoughts by interviewing his young friends about Yellow Mountain itself,about attachments, about fate and the fragility inherent in life, about the need tobelieve. These thoughts give the film a documentary level, a realism. They becomethe interior monologues that float into the slow takes and scenes. Were they them-selves in the mountain? The gravity of the mountain overcame the SevenIntellectuals in different ways. They felt ideas concretely, personally. An archer tookup his bow, aiming, shooting an arrow at the sky, the bow dissolving out of focus tobecome another cloud. They all threw the tourist padlocks out into the celestial sea.Here, there was a reason given. The locks came from the need for security, for belief.They remarked and they questioned belief as a mistake. They called out to nothing.The film did not register their calls as a sound. What lay beyond? Yang Fudongthought of Part One as a prologue, like a prologue to a book.22 Something was miss-ing. The thing they did not know yet might just be Utopia.

*

Part One was shot in April 2003 with another end in mind. Yang Fudonghad been invited to the Utopia Station being planned for the Venice Biennalethat June, and Part One would be finished in time to be shown there. For many,this Utopia Station would always remain a conundrum. It did not look like an artexhibition, it behaved more like a dense village, a campground or an eccentriccountry fair; it grew so full of work, sound, and action that no single image couldpossibly summarize it. This was deliberate. Utopia Station had been designed toexpress the lived complexity of the spring of 2003: dogged by the reality of a stark

OCTOBER86

22. Statement written in 2003 and published, along with the interview with Hans Ulrich Obristdone at the time of the Camera exhibition in Paris in 2003, in No Snow On Broken Bridge: Film and VideoInstallations by Yang Fudong (London: Parasol Unit, Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2006), pp. 119-120. See also the 2005 interview with Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air,” pp. 118–41.

new war, heavy with the weight of the world, the cold machinations of finance,and the specter of the planet-to-come, it sought to create a way-station en route,not Utopia itself. Utopia Station would be a place to rest, reconsider the route,regain some exuberance, ask questions, breathe, eat, sleep, watch, listen, sing, andthink about the next steps. Everything outside and inside became part of the exhi-bition; the exhibition extended into the fiber of everything and everybody pre-sent. It could get noisy. Nothing was fatally separated from anything else.

Upon arrival, Yang Fudong’s immediate response to Utopia Station was tofilm it. He made a private documentary showing the artists and the visitors, thewell-known and the unknown, milling together, working on the installation, set-ting up. He walked his camera down the wooden platform lined with artists’posters; he filmed the door to the cinema room where Part One was beingscreened daily. He caught John Bock’s Theory House of Quasi-Me in the garden. Hetook no particular distance. But it was difficult to find distance in this place.

What Was a Station?

Over three hundred artists, architects, writers, musicians, and performersfrom around the world were bringing something to Utopia Station, which becamea tool, a way to self-organize, a set of options, a platform on which to meet. All thiswas nominally curated by a Swiss curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, a Thai artist, RirkritTiravanija, and an American writer, myself, but once set in motion, Utopia Stationescaped organization. There were several Stations. They were sometimes large, asin Venice and in the exhibition the following year at the Haus der Kunst inMunich, and sometimes very brief and small, but all of them were provisional,informal, and open.23 As a project, it rose and slept according to the logic ofopportunity. Yang Fudong’s work was a constant presence. When they were ready,he would send the new parts of the Seven Intellectuals there.

Like the two previous Documentas, Utopia Station was part of a widereffort to produce new relations between theory and practice; works of art werebeing asked to follow reality, the arts were looking to enter the space outsidethemselves; the steps being taken were experiments, incremental, concreteresponses to new conditions—call them the future—that no one could claim tocompletely understand or define. The group called “artists” therefore expanded.The ground was not confined to the mapping of markets. Matters crossed languageboundaries as they could; positions were intuited, lectures and texts relayed. Thelegacy of work and debate that preceded Utopia Station was very much on theminds of those involved. The precedents of Brecht, Sir Thomas More, BuckminsterFuller, Charles Fourier, Michel Foucault, Sartre, Marx—everyone had their own


23. Utopia Station began as an exhibition project for the Venice Biennale and then the Hausder Kunst, but it assumed different forms: virtual sites (www.e-flux.com), printed pages, gatherings,seminars, a set of interventions on the oblique at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005, anda centerfold for Le Monde Diplomatique in August 2007.

starting points. Existing Utopias were there to be used as catalysts. The level ofreference and interval in Part One was already in tune with the intensification ofperspectives on display that summer of 2003 in Venice well before it ever partici-pated in them.

The catalysts burned off. Pasts without scenarios, presence without sce-nario; there was nonetheless much talk. The Venice catalogue recorded some ofthe early group discussions in preparation for this thing called a Station. One, asit happened, took place in February 2003 on the weekend of the worldwide peacemarches. Starting points were put on the table. Lawrence Weiner reminded every-one present that the artist’s reality is no different from any other reality. LiamGillick asked that Utopian mirage be avoided and asked for Utopia to become afunctional step, moving beyond itself. Martha Rosler told the story of going to seethe exhibition space in Venice, arriving as night fell. She saw nothing but darknessinside, there being no lights. But no matter: Utopia, she said, is really what moves.Jonas Mekas warned of obsessions with ideas, since the dream could only succeedif we forget them. Leon Golub was apocalyptic. Allan Sekula showed the first fiveminutes of the tape he had made the day before during the demonstration inNew York. Anri Sala showed a tape of Tirana, where the mayor had painted apart-ment block walls into geometric colors of hope. Edouard Glissant came. He spokehis language of landscapes. Only by passing through the inextricable of the world,he said, can we save our imaginaire. Into that passage there would come a tremble-ment, the tremor being fundamental, something gained.24 Glissant’s insistence onthe creolité of our very existence, in language and without, would set islands of van-ishing points going.

The going was thick with people’s words. Some of the artists had acceptedthe idea of writing statements. Many voices ran together there; it was as ifKerouac’s characters had found an afterlife. Taken together, the statements madetrips around the world:

My dear Tacitus, this you must know . . . . There is no ideal Rome.And no one is closer to this than the true believer. And no one isfurther from this than the true believer. That dream is not a map toyour earthen paradise. It is instead a death of straightened pain anddemand. A blank space. If existence were its destiny, its boundswould be more painful than life within the walls we know.

Yet so. In the sorrow of these truths is the key to the living Elysium.Your dying call for this just state, this true state. The hope which you

OCTOBER88

24. The Utopia Station exhibition at the 2003 Venice Biennale was part of the Biennale directedby Francesco Bonami. The catalogue for the Biennale included a section devoted to the Utopia Stationand its projects. It includes the curators’ essay “What is a Station?” and contributions by Giancarlo DeCarlo, Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Edouard Glissant. See Dreams and Conflicts: TheDictatorship of the Viewer, ed. Francesco Bonami (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 319–415.

carry in your chest and mind. The love for this . . . . That is yourgreatest salvation—That is your paradise.

For the true Rome is the fire above dark water. The true Rome isman’s hope for the true Rome. Your blood and brother, E.” (TrishaDonnelly)

. . . The settling of the American West at the end of the nineteenthcentury altered the narrative of the frontier. Exploration shiftedfrom physical to perceptual dimensions. The romance of pioneer-ing, disengaged henceforth from constraints of latitude and longi-tude, became more exclusively its own point. The frontier wasmapped onto itself. Journey and destination became one. The mod-ern wilderness—willed, created, chosen—became a renewablewilderness.

The idea of people specializing in pioneering has something intrin-sically, ascendantly comic about it. (David Robbins)

In Brasil they can pour concrete and build buildings between theirlunch break, can we manage this in Chiang Mai? (Peter Fischli andDavid Weiss)

I do not want to see the same dead dog floating by again and again.(Thomas Bayrle)

Speed boats, slow boats, dogs of all kinds were docking. Yang Fudong didnot write a statement, but in Venice the soundtrack of Part One of his SevenIntellectuals mixed literally into the conversations, the pronouncements, the wordsand the work. The sounds of his film were heard all summer; every day, therewere the Seven Intellectuals in Utopia Station speaking their pieces:

Fate plays us at its own will . . . . I am nothing; I may vanish and ambound to vanish. But my dreams, remaining where they are, will lastforever. Fate rebuilds me, but I can’t feel it. It is like the flowingclouds and water of Yellow Mountain. You can’t reach them but youknow they are yours.

Having beliefs is a kind of mistake. Persistence backs up your goalsin life. But it also leads you to confusion. Is this the life I want?Though it is vulnerable, filled with frustration and failure, I justwant to follow my heart. I think there are times when I’m very faraway from myself.


Utopia Station gave Yang Fudong new panoramas, an expanse, newground to use, a place to find friends, move, and move again toward the enigmasahead. He plunged in. All their work seemed to be a work-in-progress. What theSeven Intellectuals did not know yet was now to be planted into a very large discus-sion. Their vision of the Yellow Mountain would be remembered in UtopiaStation. Utopia now figured when Yang Fudong spoke about the Seven Intellectuals.He too used it as a catalyst.

The next April, Yang Fudong began work on Part Two, keeping to his planto take the scene to the city. He began shooting at three locations in older partsof central Shanghai and in its former French Concession; it was the Shanghai ofimported plane trees and low, European, urban plan. But Yang Fudong was moreinterested in this Shanghai’s stairways and indoor light. He introduced two morecharacters, an arguing married couple; they offered flashes of contrast. The subse-quent parts of the Seven Intellectuals would all have secondary characters passingthrough like this to offset the inexperience, the bravado, and the awkwardness ofthe Seven Intellectuals themselves. The Seven Intellectuals would not be ready formarriage in Part Two; they were still trying to understand the ways and means oftheir sex. They tried to grasp these things by talking about them. The work onPart Two therefore began with their words.

OCTOBER90

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part Two. 2004.

These conversat ions were based, as before, on interviews. Sex wasdescribed, imagined, set out. Interviews of fantasy, interviews of lies, sincere inter-views, winsome and bragging, they gave the film its documentary spine; for therest, the images, the costumes, the movements opened up to time as before. Thescript established, the lines rehearsed, on the set the words were further bandied,modified, and improvised.25 Thinking was dialogue—or was it banter, taken toextremes, to tales of exploits, initiations, cruelty to animals, disappointment withpeople? Words lost their purchase in the mouths of the Seven Intellectuals.

An intense montage of shots overrode them. Here too the film began bylooking backward, this time from a motorcycle. Highway markings receded fast.As the montage of shots scrambled, the time into no-time and the place intono-place, it showed after-hours scenes of daily life, the times for pure co-exis-tence, doors opening and shutting, outside the close turns of a stair, noises trav-eling partly, the disarray left by long exchanges of aperitifs. The archer comesback as a dart thrower. The Seven Intellectuals inhabit a plotless film noir in PartTwo. They live by night. No-place takes form as shadows. The film followed thedream of Utopia traveling down corridors of sexual intrigue. Intrigue did notlead the young intellectuals to answers or peace on earth. Life in town seemed


25. Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air,” pp. 125–26.

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part Two. 2004.

poor in comparison to what they had seen on the mountain, poor in compari-son to what lay beyond their ken. They seemed not to remember the mountain.

Were there other ends in sight? That is the question of the song, writtenby Yang Fudong, sung just at the point of the end. It probed the path of the heart.

Waiting hopelesslyNo one comes back. Lingering, wandering,Though he never changes his wayFlap your wings, Fall into dreamingWho am I expecting To consort with me? For romance, for love, Forget the bitterness, With you, I am myself In the lost paradiseSo long as I’m in your arms I feel I am flying in the sky

Then, just as dramatically, the montage breaks away from the soaring lament. Thesinger speaks. She complains about the advice coming from her mother, the per-son who brought her into the world, unbidden, through the hole in her abdomen.Birth is the last, dark, clinical thought in the mouth of this intellectual. It too is ano-place.

*

From this point on, scripts would be abandoned. The Seven Intellectualswould be separated off from words. The ever-broadening dialogues that wereinforming the project from the outside would have to exist in the films in otherways. What had been a contact between thoughts and words now became a con-tact between silences. The contact between all the dreams coming at the SevenIntellectuals from inside and outside remained. The dreams left a different tasteof speechlessness.

What Happens When Two Dreams Touch?

Such a contact between two dreams actually once produced a dog, UnChien Andalou (1928), the first Surrealist film of Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. In2003, Yang Fudong had traveled to Paris on the occasion of his exhibition at the

OCTOBER92

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and there for the first time saw the filmscreened at the Centre Pompidou. Un Chien Andalou began with the scene of awoman’s eye being sliced through by a razor. A frantic movement of bizarre scenestook off afterward, a ticking, strange trail of upset that ran like a clock through anotherwise normal bourgeois day. The razored eye came from a dream that Buñuelhad had about the moon being sliced like that by a cloud; Dali matched it with adream about a hand crawling with ants. They rubbed these dreams together andmade a blazing image that no history of cinema does without.26 It is impossiblenot to think back to it when struck by the first scene of Part Three of the SevenIntellectuals, where a black ox is beheaded in a rice paddy.

Part Three began with real, headless death. Dreams from Yellow Mountain,dreams from Utopia Station’s jostle and reverie, dreams of one true love, all thesedreams in contact seemed to have ceded altogether to brute reality. This brutereality will be shown to be impossibly beautiful, lingering, even gorgeous, as thewill of the animal, the existence of the animal, the labor of the animal mix out oforder into the consciousness of the city intellectuals. In Part Three the SevenIntellectuals travel to the countryside and learn the labor of the peasant. Past, pre-sent, or future? There, modernity had made no dent; they learn to plough, totend to the ox and the water buffalo, to seed and plant rice. Gone are the aperi-tifs. By night, they try to reflect. But silently. The film’s sounds now are ambientand natural; physical existence has broadened to include much more than sexualexistence; the Intellectuals fall on their face in the mud of this life; it is more thanthey can know. They do not die.

Part Three was shot in Jingning, Zhejiang province in April and May of2005. Shooting without a script, starting with a set of scenes which onsite woulddevelop through intuition, the Seven Intellectuals settled on a set of situations, edit-ed later into an order like before, no progress, no time, no story. This silencewould be hard, broken only by the ploughman’s cries to the ox, the unsteadyrhythm of water sloshing, the exquisite hush of nightfall, the chords made by thecrickets, the frogs, the wind after dark. Existence, as André Breton had written ashe announced the Surrealist Revolution in 1924, was elsewhere.27 But where? Didthe scarecrow have an existence? Was the archaic fire sacrifice of a painted paperbull proof that they too had lived?

Encounters like these between the intellectual and the peasant had setthe classical problem of practice—cast as the relations between theory and prac-tice—in political theory in the twentieth century, be it East or West. Lu Xun,Trotsky, Gramsci, Lenin, Mao, Brecht, Benjamin, Sartre. The century had begunwith hard times—wars, revolution, economic disaster, in rough succession. Reality


26. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel, trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 92. First French edition 1982. First Chinese edition 1994.27. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. RichardSeaver and Helen R. Land (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1969), p. 47.

was obdurate; it overtook the academic problems of theory and practice, hit themrepeatedly and set the problems back on their feet ever more roughly. The addi-tion of the industrial proletariat to the equation would only add severity, and thedrought that came with increasing alienation. The thinkers of the late twentiethcentury built upon these foundations, hardly the sole province of the CulturalRevolution. No one felt that the modern problem of theory and practice hadbeen solved, or could be solved, by language alone. Utopia Station had raised allof this up again, necessarily, for these were the problems inseparable from anydream of Utopia. Merely taking the city intellectuals to the rice fields in 2005 andasking them to learn invoked this century and more of cruel questions, stony andhard under the feet of the Seven Intellectuals too. The film is clear. The SevenIntellectuals can only understand labor by laboring. This physical reality resiststhem more completely than the mountain had. No wonder they fall silent. Butthey are, like all good intellectuals, not defeated. Retreating to their corners, theytake their walks, tenderly, sheepishly, and keep thinking. Reality enters the mindin various ways that they do not know yet. What did the embers of the fire sacri-fice leave there? The film does not offer them formal conclusions or even an oldadage. It ends with the first and fatal blow to the black ox. Death came to the ox

OCTOBER94

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part Three. 2005.

in the rice paddy they had so recently ploughed together.“Film is like life,” he said to Gerald Matt, as he was putting together his

plan for Part Three:

Sometimes it’s like rain on the water, very beautiful and very quiet, thewaves not necessarily very violent. I’d like to advocate a kind of abstractfilm, author film, without regular rules. The artist offers it a limit.

. . . No matter what kind of life, there will always be some ambiguity init. It’s like experiencing a lot of the four seasons. No clear memory ofthem any more.

Sometimes life is contradictory in one’s heart. The heart goes forward,yet the body itself goes in another direction, further and further away,like a piece of cloud, one feels nothing by going through it. But it doesflow beautifully there in the sky.28

The Seven Intellectuals did not represent life itself; they were caught in its contra-dictions, its pulse, its amnesia. “What I shoot is the life of today’s youth and thelife which is aloof from the true life,” he continued. “It [True life] is abstract, exist-ing in one’s heart. It doesn’t have a concrete concept of time. Sometimes I thinkthat life today is changing more and more. Many people seem to have becomenonbelievers. They have lost belief in everything.” He gave Matt a vision, as if tocompensate. He was looking for antidotes. “The ideal, Utopia, and paradise arelike the moon in the sky,” he said. “Some people let it hang up there in the sky;some pull it down and hold it in their hands.”29

It is one thing to speak of death on the Yellow Mountain, or to dream, atthe dinner table, of being mawed by a tiger; it is something else to see death inreal time. In the three remaining parts of the Seven Intellectuals, the mountingcomplexity of reference, of knowledge, of dream would hit the wall of physicalreality again and again, scattering. At the same time, in late 2004, Yang Fudongbegan to speak of the project in a new way. He saw it as an effort to define a newkind of film that he called, in his own way, “abstract.” Abstraction would becomehis new road.

In 2005, during his second interview with Zhang Yaxuan, he said that thisterm he was now employing, this “abstract film,” was a stop-gap, just a temporary wayof describing the experimental techniques now in play, their heterogeneity, theirembrace of the alien element, their move closer to the imagination. He alsoexplained that this abstract film followed from the imagined films of his schooldays,the imagined 8 1/2 or the imagined La Strada (1954).30 Fellini too had worked on the


28. Matt, “Film is Like Life,” p. 15.29. Ibid., p. 16.30. Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air,” p. 137.

mix of dream and reality, just as the Surrealists had before him. Was Yang Fudongreading about Fellini in the criticism of André Bazin? Yang Fudong was certainlyreading Bazin’s classic essay of 1957 on the rules of “montage.” By montage, Bazinmeant the assembly of a scene in a sequence of separate shots: “It is montage,” hedeclared, “that abstract creator of meaning, which preserves the state of unrealitydemanded by the spectacle.”31 In his mind, this abstract creation did not detach.Through montage, one could pass from the imaginary to the real or, conversely,from the real to the imaginary, and the net effect, Bazin felt, would have to be calledan imaginary documentary, or a documentary of the imagination.

Bazin took his examples from films involving live animals. He remarked atone point that the spectator did not need to know that the horse appearing in thefilm was actually three or four horses, nor was it necessary to be told that someoneneeded to pull a cotton thread in order for the horse to turn its head on cue.32 InPart Three there were in fact five or six animals playing the role of ox and doubtlessmany tricks were used to get them to play their part. Then there were the momentswhen illusions broke and bled and illusion became real. Montaged shots carried the

OCTOBER96

31. Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, ed. and trans.Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 45.32. Ibid., pp. 41–52.

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part Three. 2005.

dreams forward, but at the same time it brought them up short in Part Three. Abstractfilm, or montage, was a means to an end, not an end in itself; it was the means to themoon, not the moon. Nothing was easy. The limit the artist offered in his edit wasshown in a context of greater and lesser limits. Part Three was a weave of limit condi-tions that seemed to extend infinitely, floating on hills, looking out, at the point thatcomes just before looking up.

A New Moon, Standing Alone

Part Four was shot over November and December 2006 at two different loca-tions by the sea, in Weihai in Shandong province and in Xiangshan in Zhejiang. Thefilm would splice shots from both places into one another to fabricate a single fic-tional island, like the desert islands of the mythical historical Utopias. Which is to sayit was a heightened reality being set up as a future. For Yang Fudong, this reality alsoheld the dream of the legendary Island of Peach Blossoms known from The CondorTrilogy, the contemporary martial arts epic written by Jin Yong.33


33. See Yang Fudong’s synopsis of the project in Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in thePresent Tense: La Biennale di Venezia 2007, ed. Robert Storr (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), p. 374

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part Four. 2007.

Two, or three, at least, become one setting. The one becomes increasinglyunsettled; the montage serves to heighten the effect. The place is awash withundercurrents, mysteries, and challenges that seem to go beyond the simplegivens. This time the intellectuals go to the sea to learn the labor of the fisher-man. The film opens with a long tracking short showing each of them, one by one,dressed in fisher clothes, posed stiffly with a trophy. A catch takes the place of athought. A curtain call without a curtain, an end again is used to begin. As in PartThree, they do not speak. The sounds here too are ambient and natural; noisealone tells a truth. It is broken only once—by sobs.

Different actors have been stepping into the roles of the intellectuals, whoare still operating as before, as a group whose internal dynamics keep turningaway in time. There are small attempts at character definition in Part Four. In oneof the first shots, the intellectual who never takes his glasses off, not for bed, notfor bath, is shown face down on the beach, his head rising out of the sand in close-up; he turns—one of his lenses is broken. He seems not to notice. It is a shot thatrings straight back to Battleship Potemkin (1925), to the moment on the OdessaSteps when Eisenstein makes a montage out of the face of an old woman, herglasses cracked and bloodied when she is shot in the face by the Cossacks’ guns.Such an echo makes the ensuing activity in Part Four all the more poignant. TheSeven Intellectuals have come late to the beach, late to something mysterious inthe form of a dead shark, in the harvest, in the place where they are alone, likeRobinson Crusoe; no revolution is beginning in fits and starts. World events areelsewhere. The place seems abandoned, obsolete. The Seven Intellectuals hoveraround it and enter the slow rhythms of a fisher’s life. The man in the eyeglasseswill have to work. Increasingly he seems unable; he combs the beach, wanderingoff into the state of the holy fool; he brandishes an old ladle covered in barnaclesas if it were a scepter. The montage breaks into highly theatrical moments whenthe Seven Intellectuals seem to be inventing rituals, parading in bathtubs, bathingnaked alongside a flock of cranes. But this is a place of water, not fire. They havenot died. They bend themselves to the gutting of a great shark, to cleaning anddrying the day’s haul. The shots are long, they let the real time of manual laborset the pace, they change like the waves, they ebb.

Cutting across limits? Cutting into dreams? The montage clarifies nothingin this new variation on action and check. Yang Fudong planned for this part ofthe Seven Intellectuals to be set on an island of belief, like the legendary Island ofPeach Blossoms. But the Island of Peach Blossoms is present in the same way thatthe Russian Revolution is present: as a reference that lies deep beneath the sur-face of what can be seen, like the knowledge of a tide. The Intellectuals have noaccess to the ocean floor, or to the initiation of the warrior, any more than theyhave access to the life of the fisherman or the peasant. The Seven Intellectuals arehamstrung by their limitations, their city ways, their untapped manual dexterity,

OCTOBER98

their beginners’ luck, their beginners’ hopes, their sadness. No peach blossoms,no sages lead them out of their maze. They are left to live as they can.

Bazin wrote an essay on the characters in Fellini’s early films, notingthat they do not evolve. They ripen, he noted, or at the most become trans-formed vertically, not horizontally. Their time is purely internal.34 He saw themas part of the new Italian aesthetic of reality, an aesthetic that took the depthsof reality seriously and developed forms to convey them. These forms involvedeep focus; they compose scenes via montages of detail; they imitate real time;they forego theatrical propping; they move close to the grain of the present.Against this ground, there are figures, with their vertical time registered in thechanges on a face. The time of a character becomes measured in the events thatmap a consciousness in a film like La Strada, La Strada being the Italian idea oflife on the road.

Inside the ebb and flow of Part Four of the Seven Intellectuals, there withthe promise of the wuxia and the waning glow from all the old Utopias, all theworld’s voices. Time also goes down, registered vertically in eyes filling withtragedy, setting on a watchful face. In the end, the Intellectuals, who have come,


34. Bazin, “Cabiria: the Voyage to the End of Neo-Realism,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, p. 85.


will go. The film ends as they mount a small boat which is then lifted into the air,over shore, over sea. They rise to the sky. Alas, the boat is the only island availablenow. The suspense is literal, beautiful, and awful. But this film has lived all alongin the foreknowledge of its sequel. Part Five begins with a great cargo ship sound-ing its horn as it comes into port in Shanghai. The city now will rise to greet them.They will now be swallowed up by it.

Part Three of the Seven Intellectuals was first shown in the fall of 2006 inLondon in the China Power Station exhibition organized by the Serpentine Galleryin the halls of the abandoned power station in Battersea.35 It was being unveiled,in other words, just as Part Four was being shot on the coast of China. Part Four andPart Five were being made to be shown, along with the entire cycle, in June 2007 atthe Venice Biennale curated by Robert Storr. Parts Four and Five, as a consequence,were made hard on the heels of one another. Part Five has its own water music.The Seven Intellectuals enter Shanghai underwater, at the sea bottom of the oldcity Aquarium, where they move, fully clothed, in scuba gear, unprotected, amongschools of fish, sharks, and rays.

OCTOBER100

35. Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones, and Gunnar Kvaran, China PowerStation was an ongoing exhibition starting with Part One (Serpentine Gallery exhibition in theBattersea Power Station, London). The October 2006 issue of Fused Magazine served as the catalogue.


Part Five was shot in April and May 2007 on a variety of locations inShanghai. Compared to the other settings that the Seven Intellectuals hadknown, it was a bewildering range of extremes—luxurious galleries and bars atThree on the Bund, a now-demolished steel factory sprawled in the wastelandsnear the Huangpu River; clubs decorated to hark back to the days of colonialexcess; a few differently appointed public baths; the old Aquarium; the old air-port; the sets available for hire on the movie lots of the Shanghai Film Studio.The Seven Intellectuals would try to navigate all of this at once, spreading them-selves thin. They would lounge, take back their cocktails, apprentice themselvesas chefs, play an antic slapstick baseball game, dabble briefly in seductions, andtry to dance. They fall into the city, fall again away from the present, as if sunkand drunk. Work and play, movie and wasteland and waste blur together. Thereis no sign of their experience from the other parts leading up to this last, grandfinale of theirs.

In 2005, Yang Fudong had imagined a plan for Part Five wherein thereturn to the city would be a return to a positive atmosphere, “in keeping withthe free and open life that the protagonists will lead. Happy, the young peoplewill have no memory of what happened before, over the course of the four otherfilms. Theirs will be a life without memory; they will recall nothing of the experi-ences undergone in the four previous episodes.”36 It is no surprise that whenYang Fudong read Luis Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh, he rejoiced at thefirst sentence, “During the last ten years of her life, my mother gradually losther memory.”37

Memory, Buñuel went on to say, is at the heart of life; only when it islost, does one understand the role it plays. Memory is not the same as reality.“Our imagination, and our dreams,” Buñuel explained, “are forever invadingour memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies,we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality areequally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relativeimportance.”38 The mix of dream and reality took another turn.

One is born into memories that one has not yet had. One is faced withthe knowledge that one does not know yet. These things are perennial. TheSeven Intellectuals drifting in these memories foreign to them, this knowledgeover their horizon, are no different from anyone anywhere. But in Part Five,Yang Fudong set them up differently: their life without memory was being drawnfrom the life he was seeing around him. It led him toward new definitions, newquestions. “What an artist tries to do is to look within himself and work diligent-ly, carefully, even laboriously, so that his art might have some effect,” he said.

To me, the great change that is happening today in society can be


36. Yang Fudong, in Beccaria, “Yang Fudong,” p. 25.37. Buñuel, My Last Sigh, p. 3. 38. Ibid., p. 5.

seen and perceived in various forms. This transformation relates topeople’s mental attitude, the many changes in their way of thinkingand their ideology. Numerous factors come into play, which concernthe loss of traditional values and even the concept of tradition. Inthis sense, there is a loss. At the same time, the arrival and assertionof the new sometimes creates a sort of selfish existence, an existencethat doesn’t have much meaning. What is lost is the idea of livingtogether, a collective search for a better way of life . . . . Many youngpeople—I’m referring above all to the generation subsequent tomine—don’t take the past into consideration at all. They don’t evenneed to forget it, since they didn’t know it in the first place.39

The life without memory being shown in Part Five would be part of thedocumentary spine of the entire project, as specific as the torch songs sung byCoco, the singer appearing there as himself. The life without memory is a contem-porary life, set within a film that loads memory of all kinds into the scenes aroundit: memories of the old Shanghai cinema, memories of Italian neo-realism, memo-

OCTOBER102

39. Yang Fudong, in Beccaria, “Yang Fudong,” p. 25.

Fudong. Seven Intellectuals inBamboo Forest: Part Five. 2007.

ries of the Island of Peach Blossoms, of Utopian dreams and politics, East andWest, memories of deception, memories of wild grass. The scenes in Part Fivebuild a patchwork that ranges over the stages in Shanghai’s history in the twenti-eth century, with hints of the twenty-first. They demonstrate, through their mani-fold mixing of mixtures, the creole nature of the place, the creole nature that italways had had. The scenes come forward; their montage takes over as the SevenIntellectuals go under for the last time.

The Seven Intellectuals are now swamped by the complexity, times mix-ing, the modern city dividing its labor into strata: cooks, steel workers, entertain-ers. They have been reduced to six, joined intermittently by a young woman, anominal seventh, her uncoupling another index of loss. The complexity is givenvariously in the movie sets that splinter any hope of realist continuity. The mon-tage is cut like an old-fashioned thriller; it is interrupted and ultimately bornealong by a dance, the insistent, dominating rhythm of a hyper-stylized cha-cha-cha. The dance becomes a way for the Seven Intellectuals to join the intricaterhythms of the montage, and the city. They have dance lessons; they learn to clapto Spanish dance; elsewhere they learn to applaud together en masse, an applausethat accelerates, faster and faster, toward a total ovation. They begin to vacillate;



they play and pass out with greater frequency. Their minds seem to be vacant.Their independence wanes. They smile. They must work to keep their cool. Is itreasonable to expect more, given the obstacles before them?

The film itself is a different matter. In the end, it has separated itself fromthe Seven Intellectuals. Silent and beautiful, it is ripe with experience; it waits to beharvested, and to be planted. The question of what to do with the material being pre-sented, what to do with the contradictions charging through its time-heavy, stylizedreality, what to do with the press of the outside, what to do with the heart, weighs asheavy as the shadows; the question need not be voiced. It is the old question of prac-tice, of Lu Xun, of Mao, of all those intellectuals who forged their ideas of themselvesby plunging them, like hot steel, into the ice water of the events of their time, tryingto forge new tools. It is the question asked long and hard by the man whose photo-graph had helped inspire the clothes the Seven Intellectuals wear. Sartre stands out-side these scenes in ways that he would have appreciated. Fudong saw the writer:

Suspended between total ignorance and all-knowingness, he has adefinite stock of knowledge which varies from moment to momentand which is enough to reveal his historicity. In actual fact, he isnot an instantaneous consciousness, a pure timeless affirmation offreedom, nor does he soar above history; he is involved in it.40

For the last time, the film ends. The last end is an awakening. It has comedown to a large older restaurant, the dining room of Xian Qiang Fang, in a buildingthat housed a Western-style department store back in Lu Xun’s day. The SevenIntellectuals have come for dinner, they will try to dance, they will begin to brawl. Asthey do, a huge corps of chefs in bright white uniforms, toques in place, file in toform a chorus and begin the acceleration of clapping that ends in a great, round ofapplause. All the slowness, the infinite variations on the dream, sought for so longheretofore, is being sacrificed to this new pace; the sound rushes to catch up withsomething ahead. The camera pulls away. The present has come.

On the back wall, in the distance, two screens play a video: it is Part One ofthe Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest; there they are, twice, seen descending YellowMountain, peering out of the cable car, floating into the mist. The scene turns thetables on each and every illusion: the shot reveals itself to be nothing more than astage, a theatrical reality. The shot pours itself out. The applause reaches the view-er outside; the viewer now has a part to play, the part of the audience. All thematerials, the questions, the irresolution have come, like a curse, or a gift of life,to us in our present. Who will be the next Intellectual? Behind the film creditsplays the song of underground rock stars Zuoxiao Zuzhou and Shanni Chen. It istitled When I Left You.

As Yang Fudong wrote his synopsis of the Seven Intellectuals for theVenice Biennale catalogue, he said this and only this about Part Five: “Part Five is

OCTOBER104

40. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: PhilosophicalLibrary, 1949), p. 69.

about the return to the city and to reality. We live in the city and belong to it. Ifany problem arises, we are able to solve it.”41

We are there. Shanghai is here. We have assumed the burdens of theSeven Intellectuals, the singing, the dancing, the questions that lie on the hori-zons of the future. They burn the grass; they shake the Utopias. Smoke now risesinto our skies and we wonder. It is drizzling and mysterious at the beginning.Perhaps it is time to go get the lines Mao so long ago held up for admiration.They come from Lu Xun’s couplet:

Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers,Head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children.42


41. Yang Fudong’s synopsis, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind, p. 374.42. Lu Xun, quoted by Mao Tsetung in “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May1942), in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), p. 284.


Documents

Wild Shanghi Grass