HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Zhao Liang

Jerks, Don't Say Fuck (film still), 2001
Zhao Liang
Photo courtesy the artist, Beijing, China

Zhao Liang

Zhao Liang b.1971 (China)
lives and works in Beijing, China

Zhao Liang belongs to a generation of artists who are attempting to create an aesthetic that takes into account the methods of documentary filmmaking and the language of popular culture. On the one hand, he borrows the strict logic of straight documentary and its value in terms of providing historical, social, and political testimony. On the other hand, he borrows an aesthetic from the field of video games, B-movies, and music videos. He merges a language of the political avant-garde with one belonging to commercially driven entertainment, with a flavor of Western, if not American, hegemony. Zhao draws on not only two aesthetics but two cultures, two political identities on the verge of change.

His work could be seen as a comment on cultural invasion. What is at stake in Zhao's method is the search for a shared language--a language capable of reaching an audience that is familiar with only one or the other category of experience. His works could be labeled quasi-documentary, as they question the documentary format by diluting it with images from more popular media. He consciously authors his videos' "image dumps" to signify a moment in our visual culture when an endless profusion of images is canceling out content and meaning. In the meantime, he identifies his own practice as a reconfiguration of the codes of representation that these media are making available.

Informed by these influences, his film work provides a critical, cruel, and ironic record of Beijing's urban shifts. In Bored Youth (2000), using the format of music videos, Zhao films an actor running through the remnants of a traditional Beijing neighborhood that is in the process of being destroyed as a result of urban economic redevelopment. In Jerks, Don't Say "Fuck" (2001), he uses archival images, among other found footage, to develop a relentlessly rhythmic antitotalitarian visual pamphlet. Wait (2000) records in a straight and static way the strange social no-man's-land and no-man's-time that characterize the act of waiting for public transportation.

Zhao's work has been shown both in museum exhibitions and at film festivals, including China Contemporary Art Exhibition: Red Continent, Gwangju, South Korea (2002), and ARS O1, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (2001); the Eighth New York Underground Film Festival, New York, New York (2001); Fictions du Réel, Marseilles International Documentary Festival, France (2001); and the Microwave Festival, Hong Kong (2000).

--Philippe Vergne

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

new practices. Nevertheless, as important and reassuring as the notion of thirdness and in-betweenness is, it might only be the third step on the way to change. It is not sufficient merely to acknowledge the notion of thirdness; one needs to make it active, to pull it toward an alternative center. If not, thirdness might become a definition that restrains and limits new knowledge rather than one that empowers it.[28]

For Atelier Bow-Wow and Can Altay, the starting point for their respective projects involves inventory and documentation. This impetus to record one's own environment is apparent in many artistic practices today, most obviously in the practice of film, but not exclusively. The logic of the documentary has increasingly emerged in the visual arts over the last decade, as demonstrated by the incorporation of moving images into art practices, using models borrowed from popular culture and entertainment, including Hollywood movies, music videos, and video games.

The exigency of information and realism reveals itself in Chinese artist Wang Jian Wei's film Living Elsewhere (1999-2000; pp. 245-247). The film, which documents a failed real-estate development project in the suburbs of Beijing, seems motivated by the need to record a socioeconomical and cultural mutation. The same drive applies to Zhao Liang's film Bored Youth (2000; pp. 253-255), which focuses on Beijing's predatory urban development, even though the pure documentary language is mixed with editing strategies inherited from music videos. In both cases, documentary filmmaking becomes a means for sustaining a tradition that has almost disappeared from art practice: the tradition of storytelling.

Although she does not use moving images as a medium, Yin Xiuzhen participates in this strategy when she documents--through installations or interventions--the way in which memory vanishes with the destruction or dislocation of communities (pp. 249-251). Such artists seem to embrace a sense of civic responsibility that redefines activism as a quiet subversion rather than a frontal and oppositional attack. The powerful body of work that has erupted under this logic of documentary has also allowed the practitioners to reassert their own proximity and to locate their practices, and the consequences thereof, on a very local or regional level. Again, this movement can be seen as an effect of a widely globalized culture. Here, the urgency is to find a way to make a difference. The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The paradox of the increasingly globalized world is that many artists are attempting to reinvent, or to establish, their difference. This movement, which might be the unavoidable flip side of globalization, was the cornerstone of the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.[29] One outstanding feature of this exhibition was the presence of twenty-six collectives or independent organizations from Europe and Asia. These groups have emerged over the last decade as fundamental protagonists in art-making and diffusion, developing alternative strategies that affect the relationship of art to the larger world. These groups/platforms, all active in their communities as exhibition venues, educational structures, or production units, serve as a metaphor for a new arena of negotiation that lies in between the global and the local.[30]

In many ways, the projects of Kaoru Arima, developed through his Art Drug Center in Inuyama-City, Japan, echo such concerns. In his own house, Arima opened an art center to provide a platform for fellow artists who might not otherwise find venues for showing their work. With a similar attention to the value of proximity, the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, composed of filmmakers and new-media practitioners, is working on a series of initiatives motivated by the desire to interpret, understand, and engage the urban construct of the city in which they live and work. One of their projects is based on the creation of a "cyber neighborhood," acenter for digital intervention with kids in a working-class settlement in New Delhi.

28 On this topic see Leslie A. Adelson, "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Unpacking Europe, eds. Hassan and Dadi, p. 245.

29 The 2002 Gwangju Biennale, titled Pause, was co-curated by Charles Esche, director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden,and Hou Hanru, freelance curator, director of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, and member of the Walker Art Center's global advisory committee.

30 For more on this topic, see Hou Hanru's essay on page 36 in this book.

"Le Cinema est un Language Universel"
Cis Bierinckx, Philippe Vergne

PV: You mentioned Hollywood and dominant versus dominated forms of cinema. Do you think that the move toward a more global network is providing a counterculture, a politically counterpublic voice?

CB: There is an urgent need for voices that counter the power of politics and economics. We need more Public Enemies shouting "Don't believe the hype."

Part of our practice and mission is to create awareness. Considering the time in which we are living and what we do for a living, we carry an important responsibility. Whatever we do, whether in visual arts or in film, we need to open a dialogue not only about art for art's sake but about culture, identity, society, politics, and humanity. We can't relive a sixties idealism simply by returning to that political theater or regurgitating those political statements. To reach our audiences, we have to define a contemporary and actual context for speaking and expression. It is absurd to create a new kind of counterculture. More important to my point of view is to pave ways toward as many audiences as possible, to participate in the dialogue we are trying to establish throughout our programs.

The exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age and Rineke Dijkstra's piece in the Walker's permanent collection[2] are proof of our search to fulfill such a mission. Both the exhibition and Dijkstra's video installation tell a great deal about a culture, in the "now." They are not there in the galleries with the intention of bringing future hotshots to public attention to show how smart we are; they are there because we feel that they represent a need to be seen at this moment, that they reflect the pulse of the times rather than being timeless. That's how I select my film programs as well. We need to keep our feet on the ground. We have been entertained enough. In all of our efforts, we should create an awareness or a countervoice (rather than a counterculture) without (I keep repeating this) provoking. I don't know how many people we'll reach, but if we keep on this way and if we are articulate enough about what we are doing, if we tell the story well, people will listen. It is important now to not give up under the pressure of a more popular-oriented tendency that is overshadowing the world right now--mostly directed by power-sick politicians. What we do is, in this overly controlled political and economical world, needed now more than ever.

PV: When you say we've been entertained enough, I think of the etymology of the word entertainment. If you go back to the Latin root, it means "to look somewhere else." It is like creating a fiction, distracting one's attention . . .

CB: I see contemporary entertainment more as a type of easy escapism.

PV: So do you think the cinema that is emerging through a more global model--what you call the cinéma modeste or the cinéma d'urgence--is embracing a form that is different from that of the cinema intended to entertain?

CB: Certainly.

PV: Something else you mentioned, which I find very important, is storytelling. I remember talking with a filmmaker in China who told me, "We do documentaries, we don't do fiction, because what we want to do through documentaries is to tell stories and to embrace storytelling." Is there a link there with cinéma modeste?

CB: I see cinéma modeste as an answer to the realities of television. Chinese filmmakers or a filmmaker like Frederic Wiseman, for example, counter the new "reality TV" and those shows that make entertainment out of the misery of others. Wiseman never makes cuts in his films (which sometimes run four hours or longer) to make the subject more appealing. In television, thirty seconds without a cut is already a sin. Wiseman lets his subjects speak. He keeps everything that passes through his lens: the sadness, the beauty, and so on. You see this as well in Chinese realist and direct cinema. These filmmakers don't want to make their stories spectacular. On the other hand, there also exists a certain desire in Asian cinemas to copy the West. Certainly South Korean cinema is taking a little twist. It comprises a group of serious, independent filmmakers, but the call

2 Reneke Dijkstra, The Buzz Club, Liverpool, England / Mysteryworld, Zaandam, Netherlands, 1996-1997.

Raqs Media Collective

launch interview with Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta

launch conversation with Raqs Media Collective and Steve Dietz

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1991 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta as a way to pursue their interests in documentary filmmaking after completing graduate school in New Delhi. Over the ensuing decade, their practice has become increasingly hybridized, incorporating aspects of media history and research, criticism and curation, archives and databases, the building of open and public spaces for cultural practice, new media and digital art, still photography and graphic design, the Internet and cyberculture.

In 2001 Raqs cofounded, with Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram, the Sarai New Media Initiative, a program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies at the University of New Delhi (www.sarai.net). The word sarai, or caravansarai, has its roots in Mughal India and refers to an enclosed space in a city or beside a highway--a destination and a point of departure--where travelers from all walks of life could find shelter, sustenance, and companionship. For Raqs, Sarai is a space where they have the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary and hybrid contexts for creative work and to develop a sustained engagement with the city and with different forms of media practice.

The Temporary Autonomous Sarai (TAS), Raqs' project for How Latitudes Become Forms, takes its cue from Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. TAS is both a physical space, resulting from a collaboration with the Japanese architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow and University of Minnesota graduate students, and a departure point for visitors to explore cyberart in the parallel online exhibition Translocations, which presents the network-based art of artists from seven countries, including Raqs' own work OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification). OPUS is an open resource of images, sounds, and texts that can be sampled and reconstituted by anyone. It articulates a doctrine of rescension--Raqs' nonhierarchical theory of the copy--in which there is no derivative, and hence no master original, only new variations or, one might say, only local versions. OPUS is conceived as a digital "laboratory where cultures or artworks are grown," and the interface playfully maps genealogies of users' samplings. Underlying the project is a deeply political commitment to the power of open-source creativity and collaboration.

Installations by Raqs have been exhibited at Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002), and included in the exhibitions Kingdom of Piracy at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2002), and Emoção Art.ficial at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil (2002).

--Steve Dietz

Zhao Liang

The logic of the documentary has increasingly emerged in the visual arts over the last decade . . .

"We do documentaries, we don't do fiction, because what we want to do through documentaries is to tell stories and to embrace storytelling."

. . . rescension--Raqs' nonhierarchical theory of the copy--in which there is no derivative, and hence no master original, only new variations or, one might say, only local versions.