Final week in Beijing
Artist talk at Institute for Provocation
Visit to the former artists village of Fuyuanmen
Research into pre-print history of ‘Bei Ta’
I was invited to give a talk at the Institute for Provocation, a Beijing-based organisation that hosts residencies, research projects and talks spanning art, architecture and design. The organisation has a focus on cross-disciplinary and public space work. I decided to talk about a number of my ‘Performance Publishing’ works and showed video documentation of work made in both Manchester and Beijing. As described in a previous post, a street performance in Beijing was stopped short by a worker from a restaurant, angered by the effect it might have on his business. This provoked an interesting discussion about the underlying dynamics of public space in both cities. A suggestion was made that I ask a Chinese person to re-make the same performance in order to observe potential differences in response. Having suggested this to Quge at HomeShop, he declined on the basis that it would be much more dangerous for a Chinese person as it may be perceived to be a form of protest, which could quickly involve the police. This provoked an interesting discussion around the special privileges that an outsider might have, their difference in appearance allowing them licence to behave differently.
Later in the week, Quge took myself and some Australian artists, currently in residence at Red Gate studios on a visit to the former artists village ‘Fuyuanmen’, where he and a large group of artists lived during the early 1990’s. Lasting for over 10 years, the village was shut down in 1995 by the Government, nervous of any sort of unsanctioned gathering. Today the area is home mainly to migrants from other provinces. While walking there, a number of unlicenced street traders were packing up rapidly as police approached (the new Chinese prime minister was due to visit the area the next day). Quge got chatting with one of the traders, a young man of around 25 and next thing we knew, we were visiting him in his home, a one-room residence that he shares with his wife. In the end we stayed for a while chatting with him, hearing about his job, family and his hopes for the future.
This week I also met Sun Cheng Sheng, an academic based at the Institute of Science and Technology in Beijing who kindly allowed me access to its library. Some research there into the ‘Bei ta’ (literal translation: stone hammering) pre-printing technique uncovered an interesting story from the annals of the Chinese Han dynasty in A.D. 175. Fearing that the Confucian ‘Six Classics’ were being distorted through errors arising in the hand copying process, the Emperor agreed to a suggestion that they should be cut in stone and erected outside the state Academy, thus creating an unambiguous standard for the future. The annals record that ‘as soon as the stones had been set up, the people who came to see them and to make exact copies were so many that there were thousands of carts every day and the streets and avenues of the city were blocked by them.’
If true, the story suggests that this point in history could well be considered as the birth of publishing, the first recorded incidence where copies are made and distributed and the moment that information becomes mobile. It’s an irony then that efforts to finally ‘fix’ knowledge for all time is precisely the thing that set it free.
