DANWEN

Interview Danwen Beijing August 2006

I first heard of you through the online arts newsletter Absolutearts.com. It had an article covering one of your exhibitions. Until that moment the only Mainland Chinese art I had seen, particularly in photography, were not very interesting. However, the first time I visited China I saw a story on CCTV9 about Government concern over the quality of public sculpture – some of it was a now outdated form of social realism and some just plain kitsch. The plan was to remove all examples of bad art. I thought this was interesting because, it seemed, here was a country prepared to legislate what was and what was not art.

So how do I put those two together? Well when I thought about what you might be doing (after looking at examples on the web) it contradicted my concept of Chinese pragmatism. How does it feel to be Chinese, in China, and at the same time be a successful international artist?

I think there is no contradiction at all. First of all because for a long time there are a lot of people who have studied art in China and very famous art schools such as Xi'an Academy of Fine Art, Jiujang(?) in Huangjo, the China Art Academy and many other art academies for fine art in China. Anyone can go to art school to develop their profession as an artist. Also traditional art has been deeply alive since ancient times. So to study art is not unusual in China and to be avant-garde reflects that China cannot stay closed forever. Since we can get more information now, nobody is satisfied to stay the same. They are looking for something new and different. I think to be an artist the main goal is to be avant-garde, to be new, to advance society. I think for 20 years artists have been coming together and the new Chinese art has existed in China. Of course, for political reasons the Chinese society is different now. Basically, until the end of the 90s the new contemporary art stayed underground. The mass market was still for classical art, painting and sculpture were the two major ways to learn art in schools. In those days the Chinese Government didn’t like people doing installations or performance. Also photography and video were not then really available as a technology for artists in China. Photography has been in China for a long time but only serving the basic functions like news, advertising or documentary. Photography did not achieve an independent role as an art form until about ten years ago. It is a major art media now. I really think society needs time to be opened up. A lot of elements have to catch up like the society, policy, economics, technology and education - everything advances to the point where people will start to be more open.

I started doing photography at art school in the late Seventies. The school was open plan with just partitions between the various departments and you could hear conversations from next door. I frequently heard other art students complaining about the photographers – “they just have to press a button, where’s the skill in that compared with painting or drawing?” In the very early 90’s (1992) I met my first Mainland Chinese painter – I am sorry but I can’t remember his name (it was Xue Xiaolin, born in Tianjin, his art education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution but he completed it at the Northwest Academy of Art in Lanzhou). The work he was doing when I met him was his own version of Surrealism; he would take famous news photos, turn them into paintings while keeping the basic composition and content but twisting them into a political comment or a joke. Anyway I was thinking that what we call avant garde art is really just contemporary art – which is also an international style of art. So I suppose my next question is… to what extent do you make it Chinese or is that not something you consciously try to do?

I never think that I have to make a Chinese type of art. I think firstly I AM Chinese. Even if I changed my nationality I am still Chinese because I was born and grew up in China and my mentality, education, everything is China. So even now, if I changed my passport I still cannot change myself. Of course there are Chinese people who were born in a Western country or who grew up and were educated there but I would not consider them as Chinese. But with contemporary art I can live in New York or in Europe to do my work and exhibit. Simply I don’t like to be a Chinese artist. I like to be an artist, I don’t like to be stamped with a region.

I have seen some of your early photography on the web: figurative, documentary but with a sense of humour. Black and white…

Do you mean I Am A Woman?

Yes, …but now your work has changed a lot. Have you heard of the Australian artist Fiona Hall? When I was first at Art School she was Artist in Residence. She is more in to sculpture now but then she was arranging objects on the floor, like a collage, and then photographing the result in colour with a 4X5 view camera. There are some echoes of that in your current images of electrical and electronic waste.

But I don’t think I planned for any change. It was just progress as I started doing more about myself… and I was a painter, I was not a photographer at all. I never think I am a photographer. I use the photographic media. The early pictures indicate the history of contemporary art photography in China is basically how people start taking pictures but later how they start understanding photography is not just about taking pictures. Because I had no education about photography at all, I did not even have a chance to see a book on it. I just liked photography because I found it has a different language for the visual and I was suddenly attracted by it and I started taking pictures and also I was trying to explore how the picture seemed to me. I think the very early pictures before 1993 are basically how I learned photography by myself. I did street photography, travel photography, but I still don’t think that my photography can be considered just simply as street photography or documentary because I think I realised that basically I didn’t care where I was photographing, what I was photographing. I was looking for something that interested me about human existence in the environment. The first time I went to Europe I was taking pictures the same way I did in China when I was travelling everywhere and I realised that basically I am taking pictures the same way, just in a different location. So I am looking for the same thing – it doesn’t matter if it is a Westerner or a Chinese or a minority Chinese in that picture but I was still looking for something that I was interested in and I think I am very good at conversation and for this instinct moment that are how to create an interesting image without an interesting content. So that was my early pictures and later in ’93… basically my work from ’93 to ’98 was my early experiments with photography as an art from. I was very conscious that I was taking pictures to make my art work but before ’93 was the moment that I tried to learn to use the camera. So from ’93 to ’98 I was very conscious to create my artwork with camera because that was the most probable convenient tool for me at that time when my life was not stable and I could not really keep painting at all. So I was trying to find my own personal subject like the black and white series I Am a Woman that is about myself… I was looking for what woman means for me in a social context, in sexuality, as a professional and as a human being – everything that I was questioning about who I am as a woman. At the same time I started to photograph all the underground art scene, which is also about me because first, that is my field (?). Second I was more interested in exploring the generation born in the 60’s. They are all my fellows in my generation with the same aims and  the same goals.

This must have been a fascinating generation in China. I have a Chinese friend that I met in Hobart at my university. She was born in the late 60’s, her parents were denounced during the Cultural Revolution and the only reason that she did not go to Tian An Men on that day in 1989 was because she had a cold.

Yes, I have to say that I was very lucky to be born in the right time in the right place because, like, people say that my latest work, Urban Fictions, really has a sense of the extreme changes in China. I say yes, if you understand when I create any of the new work in my back head I have a picture of my past where life was. At that time the high buildings and the dense city is a dream for us. We were trying to catch up with the West, which was so attractive to us. I remember seeing pictures and film clips, so we think that is the West. Somehow we can only dream of that, it’s a kind of a goal and we want to catch up but we never could believe that it could become really true. But today we live in the dreaming like we had in the past. It is too extreme. That’s why my work has a really strong effect to anyone, it doesn’t matter whom, they see that picture they say it is very interesting. That affects everyone, because, just think about the last 20 years I have lived in so different conditions of life. All this change happening in such a short period, basically think of the real changes from the last ten years, maybe fifteen. Basically from 1995 all the changes happened to the country, to the society, to the living environment, also to myself. So how can it not be interesting? So intense!

…And compressed.

Yes, yes.

Do you think you could change art forms again?

Yes, because first I was a painter and I started my professional training in painting, when I was 15, in a professional art school so I feel that somehow it is freer, without any study of the media. The reason I stopped painting was that my life was not allowing me to sit in a studio in a stable place. At the same time I also found it very hard to break the boundary of the systematic study of painting and I think that when I started to touch photography I was freer because I had more education for that, but basically my aesthetics in visual and my concepts in fine art and composition – so basically it is all connected but change the media it makes me more free, and also I think I can present my natural talent more inside the freedom and at the same time I can be more brave to experiment and to take the risk because I care less. So I think that was the reason make me from the beginning in photography was very outstanding – especially as a female because not many female work with photography in China. Especially the more conceptual work. I am sure there are now many students studying photography in Art School, being more critical than just taking pictures.

What do your Chinese contemporaries think of your work. Obviously your focus is the world, you are an international artist but you choose to live in China.

I didn’'t choose, – it just  happened to me like that. Basically I would like to live in New York. I was in New York before I came back to China and because I met my boyfriend here I came back.

Do you exhibit much in China?

I do exhibit here but not as much as in the West. I just had an exhibition close in the Beijing Cubic Art Center. It was a group show. I was doing video projections and I think for me I would like to be more experimental with different media. I want that. But one thing is for sure, we are not familiar with that media. It is hard for you to print something and it is hard for you to formulate your purpose with a subject. It is more difficult so last time I was in New York I tried to do everything that was more like for me so I did not do photography but I also did a photography major which covered photography in every medium so it considered photography as a wider range from still, motion, to interactive – everything about the image is covered. So I didn’t take a photography class, I took a more conceptual art and video motion making. I think that make me able to touch video because I always had a big love for movies. But I dare not to touch motion image unless I know a little bit so that gave me the opportunity. I made my own work, multimedia projection 10-minute movies installation. I did very good work and was selected for commissioned work for the ……. Biennale that is a very important international biennale. It was the first one, they only selected 100 artists from the world. I was the most unknown but some people said my work was their favorite. So I think your ability to handle the medium sometimes limits your creativity. If you want to conquer this medium you have to study it, be more experimental and have the courage to take risks. You should not always be aiming for a finished product but rather be able to play with it. That takes time, right? But the problem is when you are getting older and older you don’t like to waste any time. You want to be more efficient and that is good but also sometimes bad.

The website of Xing Danwen is www.danwen.com

Chapter from "On the Edge" is here.