Last night was the opening of the new CEAC gallery space. There was an exhibition and I did a performance, well actually I did two performances. First I did a short performance with Jia Zhixing in which I spoke Chinese and he ‘translated’ it into English. Although this was a much simpler piece than what followed, it basically consisted of saying some lines of Google translated text back and forth, the fact that I had to perform it in Chinese in front of a Chinese public made it quite a challenge. As I suspected, a Chinese public can be quite forgiving if a foreigner tries to speak Chinese and I think I got some goodwill as a result of trying it at all. We stood side by side in the same position where 20 minutes earlier the opening speeches, also spoken in English and Chinese, had taken place. It was fortuitous that we could do this and thus link the performance to life. I thought that the sentences I spoke, almost all from memory, were quite absurd Chinese, the result of intelligible language passing through the Google translate scrambler. However, people said that it was not so bad and that they understood me very well. Maybe they were being polite, but I honestly cannot tell. This makes me wonder if the idea of doing the show in Chinglish – Zhonglish is necessary or whether it needs to be reframed slightly. I though Jia, who is not used to doing performances and was just as nervous about speaking in English in front of an audience as I was about speaking Chinese, did very well. By keeping it simple and not making too much a performance out of it we were able to stay focussed enough to make it to other side in one piece.
Round 2 was 2012 a quite different sort of performance. I was able to use the Chinese translation of the piece that I had made in 2009 and project this alongside my images. This helped bring people in, particularly those who were not fluent in English. The public was just about an ideal size for the space and they were very concentrated. I don’t think most of them were so familiar with the form of a performance lecture but they seemed to go with it and get some of the humour. It was a challenge working out how to deliver the performance to a very mixed public some of whom were native English speakers but most of them not, and some of them art professionals and others completely new to what I was doing. I was also aware that there was potential for misunderstandings and due to the nature of the piece, it being about conspiracy theories and having a serious Chinese focus to it, people might not get the ironies or deeper intent. It is after all quite an ambiguous performance and even doing it in the UK people are often not sure what to make of it. I thought that given all the potential pitfalls it went well, people were very concentrated and I later spoke to many who took it in a good way with the performance provoking thought and discussion.
Something that struck me about the opening was the fact that there were quite a number of press and media there who stayed for the performance. I had to compare this to the typical situation in the UK where such attention for the type of work I do is extremely rare. These were not specialist art press but rather regional papers and TV covering a rather ambiguous performance art lecture. It felt positive that such a thing was deemed newsworthy. In the UK I have the feeling it is usually considered by the media as something for the initiated only and therefore not of relevance to normal people.
Today I have to put all that excitement behind me and get back into my Chinese lessons as the performance took me away from them for a few days.
Yesterday seemed to be all about money. In the morning I found an action that I like as it is simple and gets to the point. It can combine well with others. In the evening I went to the lantern festival closing night and whilst most of it was quite similar to what I had seen previously, I did come across a very amusing art auction in a small marquee. It looked like a market trader style auction and the seller had a good rhythm and patter. The crowd were more entertained by him than they were serious about buying the various prints and fans. I made a short video of it which seemed to adapt better with the harsh lighting but I cannot post it for now. It gave me the thought that maybe I should sell something too, in my performance. I like the salesmen with their portable hands free amplification and now I have a little one of my own I feel I can compete on the marketplace. It is small but really rather loud, I’ll be doing some sound checks in the coming days. Oh and finally I cracked and bought some rabbit ears for 5 yuan (£0.50). I don’t know how long they will last and maybe they will find a way into the performance or else make a present.
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I was looking again at some photos I took when I arrived in Beijing and one in particular caught my attention. It shows the skyline at dawn and the moon still glowing in the early light. What struck me was that the shape of the moon in Beijing was not as it is here in Xiamen. I had begun to think that what I was seeing here in Xiamen was a specifically Chinese or Eastern moon shape but no, it has more to do with the the Southern position of Xiamen as opposed to Beijing being in the North. I don’t know why I didn’t make this connection earlier. Maybe because I have not spent so much time in other Southern latitudes. Anyway I looked online and found my answers here: http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/applets/eclipt…
where there is a computer model of the shape of the moon as viewed from any point on the earth’s surface and also here:
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/teaching/moon….
where there is an interesting observation on the design of Singapore flag and how it does not accurately reflect how the moon appears in the sky from Singapore but rather was adopted in 1959 for more political reasons.
I had a little test read of a short ‘googlized’ text with Jia and it does indeed sound quite funny when the two of us read it. For Saturday we will try it out as an introduction to the main performance. I’m trying to learn this text and it is hard to cram it into the brain. If I were learning proper Chinese that would be one thing but learning nonsense texts is maybe more hard still. Staying on this theme, I saw a nice hoarding the other day, one of a series of equally scrambled translations. It struck me when reading it that it might have not been translated for the benefit of Westerners like me but rather translated for Chinese readers of the sign. The presence of an English text on the hoarding could be understood as making it appear to be more international and potentially of higher value. I get the impression that the English language, has a quality here that is quite independent of the meaning that the individual words convey.
As can happen, I ‘the customer’ am often wrong about things here, so I welcome correction if I have got the wrong end of this. I was looking at my different translation software last night and then asking around in person too and it seems there is no precise word in Chinese for kitsch. It can be called ‘vulgar arts’ or similar combinations, but nothing cuts to the bone quite in the way that the word ‘kitsch’ does. I remember reading a while back the book by Gilo Dorfles ‘Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste’ a collection of rather perceptive critical essays on the subject. One thing that stuck was the discussion over the etymology of the word. It seems that it was first used in Munich and soon after within Italy, because these two places had the greatest problem with kitsch in the mid 19th Century. I was just looking online now and refreshed my memory with this summary of kitsch which says more or less the same: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/kitsch.htm
In the context of China it becomes interesting for me to revisit this idea of kitsch. I think the fact that the term does not properly exist is interesting, not because there is no kitsch here but rather because there is not a problem with kitsch. From my Western point of view I can easily be led to believe this country is drowning under a tidal wave of it yet, the nuances that distinguish kitsch (e.g. a false sentimentality) from merely low or popular tastes do not seem to apply precisely. I feel nervous dismissing things here as merely kitsch as I am not aware of everything they represent. Still, I have to admit I do pass a suspended sentence of kitsch over a great many things as that is the term that best captures what they appear to be to me. I should also add that I have seen evidence of camp, though this was in the home of an American so these standards are more fitting.
