Broken Power Lines

艾未未到底是誰？他是一個世界知名的前衛藝術家，以及中國人權鬥士,最後有可能是大陸最爭議的人物。基本上他用抽象藝術來批評大陸政府壓迫治理的模式。雖然他早年的事業反藝術傳統（比如，破壞古老清朝的花瓶), 艾未未最知名的作品是替北京奧運設計體育館「鳥巢」.不過，後來他卻對這項目開始感覺到非常噁心，因為他認為中南海用這個場合來挑起熱情愛國感，而掩飾他們人權惡化的情況。

解釋他對政治的觀念， 艾未未說了： “沒什麼事兒不能公開的，凡是不能公開的是一定骯髒”。在香港訪問的時候，他也親口說了：“把任何矛盾公開化是我的最有力的一個武器”。換句話說，他的藝術把政府宣傳暴露裂縫，挑戰它們的正當性。由於他立志批判政府的腐敗，中國當局而監視他的活動與說法，甚至於在他房子的前面放好多的監視器。

據信因“涉嫌經濟犯”，艾未未四月3日在北京首都機場準備搭機前往香港時被警方帶走. 自從那時候以來，他類似泥牛入海－無消息引起他家人的擔憂還有西方一些國家的政府和“人權機構”迅速出面乾預，要求中方立即釋放艾未未.

在一偏社評內：中國當局間接發表它們對這件事的意見。由官方看來，“人權惡化”成了西方政府及媒體的口號。首先，他們無視大陸的主權; 再來他們沒有辦法了解中國司法運行的複雜環境，亦無視艾未未個人行為的複雜特點，像他我行我素的態度。最後，目前 艾未未案例的具體情況不詳， 然而他們有什麼根據激烈攻擊 中國政府？

當地藝術的精髓就是突破文化的設立邊界。不幸的是在大陸和諧社會上，當局想抹殺任何不滿的表達，反映一個趕不上時代的意識形態。從艾未未的最近新聞，我們能隱現大陸社會和政治複雜的程度。一方面，艾未未就是一個大陸人，再加上他的藝術是一個國寶。另一方面，政府艾未未的對待留在一個很大的黑雲。艾未未完美地表示這種衝突的感覺：“實際上我能夠待在中國是因為我無法忍受。 ”

English Version

Who is Afraid of Ai Wei Wei?

Who is Ai Wei Wei?  He is a world famous avant-garde artist, a Chinese human rights activist, and quite possibly the most controversial figure in China today.  Simply speaking, he uses abstract art in order to criticize the Chinese government’s heavy-handedness. His earlier works opposed artistic traditions (for example, he smashed ancient Qing dynasty flower vases), Ai Wei Wei is most famous for his role in co-designing Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium.   However, later on, Ai Wei Wei expressed regret and disgust at having participated in its construction, believing that the government used the Olympics as a platform to provoke nationalist sentiment, and gloss over China’s worsening human rights situation.

Explaining his views on politics, Ai Wei Wei declared that: “there is nothing that cannot be public, anything that cannot be made public is thereby filthy”.  During an interview in Hong Kong, he added to this saying “taking contradictions and making them public is my most advantageous weapon.”  In other words, he uses his art to expose fissures in state ideology, therein challenging its legitimacy.  As a result of his resolve to criticize government corruption, Chinese authorities closely monitor his activities and statements, to the extent of setting up surveillance cameras outside of his home in Beijing.

However, it was his investigation into the reasons for the death of so many school children during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake that drew the attention and anger of the government.  According to Ai Wei Wei, on the surface, the Sichuan earthquake is simply a natural disaster, however, the core problem resides in governmental corruption. The enormous damage and number of deaths caused by the earthquake was by no means necessary.  Conversely, due to the collusion between state and the construction business, many school buildings were not built according to standard, and as a result, collapsed during the earthquake.  In response, Ai Wei Wei created a memorial artwork. Using over 10,000 student back-packs, he spelled out in an installation the words of a grieving mother who lost her daughter in the earthquake “She happily lived seven years on this earth” (See photograph above).  Additionally, he filmed a documentary老妈蹄花 on the subject of his investigation into the earthquake that can be watched on his YouTube Channel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUizD8WDDFI For Ai Wei Wei, the natural disaster is the government’s blood debt.

According to recent reports, Ai Wei Wei was taken away by the police on Sunday April 3rd when he was waiting at the Beijing International Airport to fly to Hong Kong.    Since that day, he has, in the words of a Chinese expression, disappeared like a clay ox entering the ocean – without a trace.  Naturally, this has caused great anxiety among his family, as well as elicited the condemnations and immediate demand for his release by Western governments and human rights organizations.

In response to this reaction, indirectly through an editorial in a state-run paper, the Chinese authorities expressed their opinion regarding this matter.  According to the editorial  http://opinion.huanqiu.com/roll/2011-04/1609672.html “the human rights situation in China is worsening” has become an empty slogan proclaimed by Western governments and human rights organizations.  Firstly, it overlooks Chinese state sovereignty; secondly, Western observers have no way of fully understanding the complexity of China’s administrative and legal situation, and are ignorant of Ai Wei Wei’s complicated character, for instance, his desire to persist in his own ways no matter its effect on others.  Finally, the concrete details of Ai Wei Wei’s situation are as of now unclear, so on what basis are Western governments so virulently attacking China?

Contemporary art’s essence is precisely to break through established boundaries.  Unfortunately, in China’s “harmonious society”, the authorities eradicate any expression of discontent, reflecting an ideology out of sync with our present day and age.  From Ai Wei Wei’s recent situation, we can glimpse the level of complexity of Chinese society and politics.  On the one hand, Ai Wei Wei is a part of China, after all, it could even be said that his art is a national treasure. On the other hand, the state’s current treatment of him remains a black cloud.  Ai Wei Wei, himself, best expressed this conflicted emotion, stating: “In reality, the only reason why I am capable of living in China is precisely because I cannot bear the situation.”

This year I’ve suspended all other forms of my life and devoted it solely to learning Mandarin. I realized my relationship to learning Chinese has taken the shape of a marriage: a volatile combination of patience, commitment, frustration, despair, elation, and overcoming.

What I mean simply is: I need to keep re-freshing my own commitment to the language. At multiple points during the day, I lose heart. I want to throw in the towel. However, those points are delicately balanced with moments of pure joy when I understand what is going on around me, and can participate in entirely new worlds, which open up because I am learning a new language.

Here are some of my daily frustrations:

Simple English sentences come to mind, sentences that I could say with such ease, swiftness, and lucidity (or one would hope) in my mother-tongue that I have no idea how to say in Chinese. When I draw this kind of a blank, I can feel a heavy ache, a sense of failure weigh down my tongue. But then, I remind myself that learning a language or doing anything worthwhile requires patience and practice, and being the son of two Americans with an Italian heritage, Chinese is not something that will come natural to me. Thus, I persist.

There is also the god awful feeling of regression, learning so much vocabulary and grammar, only when the time comes and I want to articulate a phrase I am sure I’ve learned, my mind draws a blank (different from the above mentioned experience of not knowing certain words to begin with). I’ve got nothing. Nada. Just like the irritating feeling of trying to remember the name of an actress or song title, and coming up empty, but-multiply that feeling of frustration by a thousand.

And, finally, there is the daily experience of clumsiness. Trying to attune my ear and my tongue to the living rhythms of the language, what people actually say as opposed to the grammar of the text book, or words looked up in the dictionary. I dread using the dictionary because I never know if what I look up is actually a phrase that is commonly used, or some dusty old relic from the language’s past forms. Every time someone tells me what I just said is 书面 or too bookish and literary, I realize I am out of touch with the normal flow of daily conversation. And the only way to become integrated is to repeat the process, again and again.

Besides, as a person who cannot sing to save his own life, learning a tonal language, has been tremendously difficult. In the middle of the conversation, I stand there, like a clumsy child attempting to juggle: needing to organize my thoughts; listen to what the other person is saying to me, make sure I understand correctly; and, pay attention to my tones, the materiality of my words, the uncomfortable sounds my mouth makes; as I try to make myself understood, and pray, in a very real sense of prayer, that at least a portion of the meaning will be delivered. (we are so misunderstood even in our native languages, that at best, when speaking a foreign language, we are traders in fragments and images).

But the moments when it comes together, the moments when I hear a short story being read aloud, a dialogue in a movie, or the confessions of a friend, and I understand it…. The moments when I am flowing with the language, anxiety-less, dissolving into what I knew all along, becoming part of the conversation… The moments when I am researching the history of the characters, or various proverbs, and a different, entirely new perspective comes into view, that would be lost in the English translation…. Those moments are so damn sweet, I savor them dearly.

A friend of mine recently wrote in a personal e-mail to me, in disagreement with my last post on love that: “the places where one feels most vitalized are places where you confront the boundaries of your self most forcefully.” I agree entirely with her statement because it precisely defines my marriage to learning Chinese as a constant confrontation, sliding backward, and pushing across the boundaries of my self. For me, learning Chinese is a labor of love, a life-time commitment.

Damn that was cathartic. Too bad it was in English.

Happy New Years from Taiwan!  In the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, we heard a lot of buzz here that the Taipei 101 fireworks display would be awe-inspiring.   According to my friend Chris, the government spent the most money it ever has on the fireworks this year in order to celebrate Taiwan’s centenary.  Usually the downer when it comes to big celebrations, I reluctantly agreed to go to Taipei 101 to see the show.   I went mainly because, recently, I’ve been feeling a tender urgency to be around the people who have made Taiwan feel like a home to me (you know who you are).  And, of course, in part to indulge my perverse curiosity to see  fire-works exploding from the gigantic phallus looming in the horizon that frames our daily comings and goings.

The fireworks were indeed moving, but often we are moved in ways we don’t expect, and what moves us perhaps is precisely this element of being surprised, and overtaken by a feeling at once familiar as much as it is strange.  For me, this NYE’s fireworks display provided an experience of what Freud called the “uncanny” or in German, “unheimlich.”  In German, heimlich means “home”- in a sense that is richer in meaning than a physical dwelling – it connotes a place that is also warm, recognizable, and familiar.  The prefix “un” interjects distance and strangeness into the intimate.   When the fireworks began, and the smoke shrouded the building obscuring (for the most part) the dazzling pyrotechnics of the show, I could not help but imagine that I was witnessing 9-11, for the first, but also for the millionth time.

However, this time, it was a 9/11 absent the hatred, terror, and retributive wars in which so much more than two skyscrapers burned into cinders…..

Later, I spoke with my friends, and we all hesitantly broached the issue.  ”Did you think the Taipei 101 looked like …..”  a long pause…. “9-11…?”  ”yes, me too….” accompanied by a sigh of relief that other people shared the same aesthetic unconscious as I did, and it was not merely my morbid imagination alone imposing a scene of catastrophe on a mundane annual celebration.

So, what happened that blurred the line between disaster and enjoyment?  I would not dream of calling what I experienced  a PTSD recollection, because, for one, I was not directly affected by 9-11, as a survivor, rescuer, new york resident, or person whose loved ones were among its causalities.  Instead, I can frankly say, that the firey glow of Taipei 101 made me feel strangely calm.  I knew everything would be alright.  It was only a spectacle staged for entertainment.  I enjoyed a benign sense of annihilation with the knowledge that life would continue.

I am not exactly sure how to analyze or name this feeling.  Maybe I should go read more Baudrillard.  But, at times, reading can be a way of avoiding this uneasy inability to name.  I guess this blog is a space for thinking about feelings that have pushed themselves into my awareness, without politely declaring their identity, and obediently sitting in their proper place.

Taipei Subway Advertisement

Location: Taipei City Hall Subway Exit 6

Translation of advertisement:

Straighten up your chest ;  Who is afraid of who? (top from left to right)
To hit/beat up Envy (bottom-middle)

At the level of the text, we are told that her “bruise” represents the overcoming of envy, and the advertisement seemingly encourages her to buy the purse, push her chest out, and become the one who is envied by others.  She is overcoming/beating up her own envy through her purchase.  However, there is something much more disturbing & fascinating at work than the typical advertising formula of lack/desire/consumption/fulfillment.

Disclaimer: I want to suspend my initial feminist/liberal outrage and follow the train of my reflections without regard to political correctness.  At first, when my friends and I saw the advertisement, we all reacted with disgust and shock, including myself.  Uttering, “this is wrong”, or “how could domestic abuse possibly be used in this way to sell products”?  However, when I was at home, analyzing the photograph, attempting to compose this blog post, the initial outrage started to subside and I became increasingly fascinated with the image, its composition, its subterranean flows of desire between the possession of objects, the need to define ourselves through what consume; the drive to achieve and protect a fragile social status in a state of continual flux and negotiation; and sex, during which we open ourselves, become vulnerable, engage in various power dynamics, and share intimacy in a way that both combines bodies as well as shatters subjectivity (to be less abstract, we forget daily preoccupations in the heat of the moment).

These links between commodity-social status-desire communicate in the visual plane through the pulsating color of purple, which bathes them in the light of the bruise.  There is something bruising about our entrance into the social, as well as our entrance in tho the sexual; we never simply emerge as fully-formed human beings but are always bruised in the process of becoming; and these bruises can range in variable intensity from traumatic wounds, which disrupt our ability to make sense of the world, to  nicks and scraps, which we may even view or indulge with a secret tenderness.  Perhaps, in the case of the advertisement, the bruise is even relished as a sign of resilience and toughness, a pride in the ability to endure the abuse that inevitably accompanies a deeply sexualized world of market competition.

In Chinese, the term 痕 means both “scar” as well as “trace”, implying that the past traces itself on our bodies, in ways beyond our control.  [As an aside, in post-Cultural Revolution China, an art movement developed known as "伤痕艺术" or "bruise art", which attempted to negotiate the painful legacy and impact of the Cultural Revolution on familial and personal history through artistic representation].  The bruise occurs on the skin at the point of contact with the outside world.  Therefore, it occupies a highly fraught space between the social and personal while belonging to neither.  However, the theme of this image is not about the wounds left behind by a brutal history.  What is captivating about it is the affinity between the “purse” and the “bruise”; and the circular anonymity implied by the question “Who is afraid of who”?  as if the subject has disappeared entirely from the frame.  The fact that the woman’s face is cropped even further reinforces this sense of losing oneself in a world where there are no longer individuals, only objects, bruises, and circuits of anonymous desire.  And since the purpose of an advertisement is to sell the product, and awaken the desire of the potential consumer, my guess, is that the advertisement is addressing a kind of libidinal attachment to what wounds/bruises us.

What is predictable, hegemonic, and troubling though is the advertisement uses the bruised body a a woman, playing on the pervasive phallo-centric logic, in which to be a woman is to be passive, and to enjoy this form of self-shattering [see Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" where he addresses how both women and male homosexuals have been historically discriminated against precisely because of the view that to be penetrated is to lose self-control; Bersani points out that in Ancient Greek culture, homo-erotic love was acceptable with the crucial caveat that to be penetrated was viewed with contempt, and even resulted in the loss of one's right to be a citizen!  To be a good citizen means to be dominant, in control.....male].

The advertisement also should be critically interpreted in the context of a world where sexual violence is a deeply entrenched practice.   The statistics of domestic violence are appalling and mind-blowing [what is even more appalling is how little this is discussed and how it is almost accepted as a normal aspect of everyday life].  In the US, in the year 2000 approximately 1.3 million women were assaulted by a domestic partner.  In 2008 in Taiwan, over 80,000 cases of domestic violence were reported to the police [leaving shrouded in silence the cases that do not go reported].

In the end, I am not sure what to exactly say about this advertisement.  On the one hand, I am absolutely opposed to any form of domestic abuse and violence [hence, my initial outrage when seeing the advertisement].  On the other hand, I am fascinated by the advertisement because it reveals a darker aspect about the way we learn how to desire in contemporary society than most advertisements do that only display the polished end-product.  I also will not pretend like what I am writing contains any authority on the subject whatsoever, I simply was moved by the force of the image and wanted to use this blog space to organize my thoughts.

拾荒往事

有些模糊的照片儿
是我的遗产 ，
一个淘汰的心
是送给你的礼物。

花半天
跟你的幻影
喝着咖啡
辩论
什么时候
世界末日
会来：
你说已经发生了，
但是我怀疑。

也许我们忽略
排山倒海，
忙着在鸡毛蒜皮中挖掘
搜索为了
明天温柔的光环

Gleaning the Past

A few blurred photographs are my inheritance
an obsolete heart is my gift to you.

Half a day spent
drinking coffee with your ghost,
debating when the world will end:
You said it has already happened,
but I doubt it.

Perhaps we have neglected
the mountains collapsing and the seas overturning
too busy digging in the kitchen trash searching
for tomorrow’s gentle halo.