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A gasp of breath, one after another, produces the sound of rain,
Which could only be heard after all the dancers exert themselves;
Gathering, the raindrops become our river along which we find the road of bodies.
—Siyang Sawawan, a Puyuma dancer, 2013(註1)
Firmly deny my citizenship emerged only after the secret imprisonment
Freedom and freedom here, freedom is not too far.
—Dhrupadi Ghosh, “Freedom and Freedom Here, Freedom is not too Far,” 2013
Curated by Amy CHENG, Shamans and Dissent: Artist Dispatch Project Exhibition opened at Hanart Square, Hong Kong in July 2013; participating artists were Dhrupadi Ghosh, LIN Chi-Wei, LIU Wei, Prajakta Potnis and ZHENG Bo. It is West Heavens, a comprehensive cross-cultural exchange programme, that makes this exhibition come true.(註2) The relationships should be traced to the project started by West Heavens and Raqs Media Collective in 2011. In this project, artists with Chinese and Indian culture backgrounds would be “dispatched” to the other circle. Monica Narula in Raqs Media Collective used the imagery of “Dispatch” to emphasize the mutual effect and movement observed in the process of dispatching: “The word ‘dispatch’ contains the force and the acceleration while the throw action happens and also implies the courage to deal with an unfamiliar circumstance and the excitement stimulated by a totally different culture background.”(註3) She also anticipated that the energy of cultural shock would bring the artists and their cultural backgrounds the same amount of force as what would usually happen when a boomerang was thrown. The Artist Dispatch programme did not restrict the form of exchange or try to exact any production as a formal result; instead, it focused on the ripples produced during the practice of the artists. Thus, Amy Cheng and Zheng Bo, who were invited to be the representatives then, stayed in Taipei and Shanghai respectively to launch talks sharing their experience after the dispatch programme while their creation or the attempt to conceptualise an instant reply was deferred to accumulate the power for a stronger resonance. In this context, Shamans and Dissent, as an exhibition, is more like a sound field harbouring sound sources from six channels. The multiple sounds penetrating the three-dimension exhibition space will keep resounding by following the dimension of time.
The prerequisite of propagating sound is the existence of a medium. The context built by the curatorial discourse is like a stored medium of a kind of sound, a moment of embodying a facet of a sound. Therefore, how to position the exhibition in the genealogy of West Heavens’s thoughts becomes an essential part of understanding how Shamans and Dissent can be an open text in the process of dynamical formation. Indeed, if we deconstruct “curator” as a term from the perspective of western etymology, “[with] a spiritual cure or charge… [c]urators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest.“(註4) As a paradox, the exhibition was involved in the core of the production institution of contemporary art. Prof. Gao Shiming, one of the initiators of West Heavens, in his conversation with Raqs Media Collective, has suggested curating that “rehearsal” be a working approach. This strategy of his can be traced back to Farewell to Post-Colonialism, the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, where the organizing tasks were done through “Projects in Progress” and “Thinking Room.” The intention is to “display the curatorial landscape as well as the back of the works and to unfold the process of thinking works.” In other words, the main point of the methodology, curating as a “rehearsal,” is “not the finished works of the artists, but through the progress of time, the experience of the artists.” Prof. Gao points:
We are all involved in the global stage of art, playing a variety of roles. Our rehearsal intends to inquire “if we can get rid of the action of playing a role in this rehearsal room.” Thus, from this perspective, rehearsal is an invitation and a kind of drive with the hope that everyone can join this biopolitical emancipation.(註5)
This proposal first confesses the obedience to the production rules in the contemporary art institution, but the resistance in despair changes the dominance of the structure, projecting a direction of fleeting.
Echoing the methodological frame of “rehearsal,” the exhibition seizes the moment when every sound gathers at the site to intertextualize the article of Ashis Nandy, an Indian thinker— “Shamans, Savages and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilisations.” Through Nandy’s text, this exhibition attempts to discover the agency of artists’ overthrow in historical reality and social contexts and to carry out a movement “to regain one’s other selves who were once lost” through the process of creating works with one’s own body.(註6) It is an examination of epistemology, inheriting the momentum of “revisiting Tianzhu (an ancient Chinese name for India) and understanding Zhongtu (referring to the central plain of China or China itself)” and working with the theory of “Asia as method” to face up to the nature of western region study in the critical theories. It also directly points to the collective crisis of the mainstream way of knowledge production, realising the “alternative frame of reference” suggested by Tejaswini Niranjana, an Indian feminist theorist: “When we transfer the subject we speak to, the multiple frames of reference comes into our view gradually. The anxiety to the problems in the west can be diluted; the critical and productive works can really be opened in a diverse way.” (註7)
Zheng Bo continually researches on the concepts of education and equality. Through “Ambedkar,” which is composed of various ways and techniques displaying equality, he elaborately demonstrates the hierarchy of the established institution, which produces abjection. “Please Imagine an Advertisement Has Nothing to Do with the Nation and Market” (Race Course Station 5774) seems to be an advertising light box representing an artist’s encounter in Delhi with white neon lighting whose arrangement in a minimalist style seems to be the citation of Dan Flavin, an American artist. However, the viewing experience is divergent due to the viewers’ level of understanding of contemporary art. The association which can be made demonstrates the possible social class embodied by the gap produced in the knowledge of contemporary art. “Sing for Her” is the fruit of a long-term reflection of Zheng Bo since he did his master of Fine Arts in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Presented in the mode of karaoke – the daily entertainment consumption in Hong Kong – the work invites a group of Filipino migrant workers to record the accompaniment tape to teach people to sing “O Ilaw.” It is not only a love song but also a resistance song sung during the Filipino independent movement to resist the American occupation in the 1930s and 1940s. In the gallery hang a huge iron horn. Audiences are invited to learn the song with the accompaniment tape, and the song will overflow to the street from the horn in the exhibition room, which reverses the power relations between the master and the servant through the relationship built on teaching and learning. “My First Coloring Book of Politics” starts from Zheng’s encounter of protesting posters of the student movement in Jawaharlal Nehru University when he was dispatched to New Delhi. Compared to the disappearing of the protesting posters in China, the ones Zheng saw particularly possess vitality and tension, displaying people’s right to the public space. Thus, in the form of postcards the public spaces are acknowledged. Combining the idea of the coloring book with which children’s visual ability is cultivated, the installation is named after Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the architect of the Constitution of India, hoping to review the repression of transnational migrant workers formed by the capitalist societies nowadays with the legend of emancipating 500 thousand dalits.
Growing up in China, a country worshipping the communist doctrine, Zheng Bo and Liu Wei, who share the same concern about the nature of “equality,” start to doubt if their understanding and imagination of “equality” is the forceful order, especially in Liu Wei’s process of creation. Liu sensitively senses the outer effects on the subject experience and self-formation, hoping “the emergence of dark subjectivity” can be born from “the suppression of individualism.”(註8) “Colors” is an installation constructed by iron frames in industrial style and screens displaying multiple images. The motion pictures of “the urban-rural transition” near Beijing unconsciously collected and edited are mechanically divided according to common life categories such as clothing, food, accommodation and transportation. They, then, are repetitively played on the screen in the look of natural happenings. However, color blocks intermittently appearing in the belts of linear time interrupt the affective attachment the audiences develop with the flow of the images. “The urban-rural transition,” the human landscape formed due to the governmental policies, is made scenic by the method of sculpture which offers a way to know “the dark matter.”(註9) As Sun Ge, a Chinese historian of Japanese political thoughts, declares “the way of sensing universality must be adjusted to the level of knowing heterogeneity,”(註10) only when understand the impossibility to construct “equality” can the nature of “equality” be discussed.
By the drive of Artist Dispatch Project, West Heavens builds the insight of “viewing oneself.” “There Was a Home” and “Letters Exchanged between Uma Shankar and Zhang Ming” are the feedback of Prajakta Potnis from Mumbai. Being in an alien place, she experiences the lucidity in senses. Making “There Was a Home,” Potnis with the professional training of painting makes use of the accumulated understanding of the materiality of painting, displaying that memory inhabits in the materials in the way a sedimentary rock does. Her body passes the urbanized space in Shanghai where she experiences the forceful displacement and missing of memory. In the gallery, She places the demolished walls and debris of the Shikumen in lanes of Huiguan Street in Dongjiadu. Media, such as flasks of colored pieces with various paints, lace fabric symbolizing the colonial past, and the wallpaper in ordinary people’s lives, are separately piled on the rubble (to be precise, the remains of urban planning). Walking into this scattered but tangled arrangement, the audiences will discover under the shadow of the lighting in the exhibition space the artist’s sketches with charcoal hidden unobtrusively, which lets viewers ignore the possibility of art creations. By doing so, Potnis breaks the circulation of the flow of contemporary art capital, translating the labor of painting into purposeful absence and giving the space of art discourse to those who become destitute and mute in this arena in the past.
Born in Kolkata, Dhrupadi Ghosh was trained in the art school, pursuing further study in France. Now she spends more time on the organizing and networking of student movements, which can be regarded as the result of the bodily experience of the artist whose artistic practice urges the emancipation movement. “Freedom and Freedom Here, Freedom is not too Far” chooses many protest posters Ghosh created during 2012 and 2013. Printed again and stuck on the walls of the gallery, the posters display the body of social society in declarative, aggressive, or reflective way by occupying the public space of civil society. With the inner conflicts and the complexity of contemporary historical experience in India, Chatterjee responds to the idea of “civil society” formed under the western enlightenment tradition by suggesting the counterframework called “political society”: “it seems to me useful to think of a domain of mediating institutions between civil society and the state… I think a notion of political society lying between civil society and the state … By political society, I mean a domain of institutions and activities where several mediations are carried out.“(註11) In the practice of Gosh’s poster production, the discourse of “political society” is constantly changing and moving freely without restraint, which aims at making the lower orders in the third world visible. Through occupation, they become a temporary entity carrying issues of the caste system, neoliberalism, historical justice, the anticipation of democratization and so on. As the labor of art, “Freedom and Freedom Here, Freedom is not too Far” embodies the body of Gosh’s critical thinking. The audiences’ impact may not come from the tension of visual images but from the weight of Gosh’s dialectical thinking which leaves a solid footprint on the entangled and muddy reality in India.
Inviting Lin Chi-Wei to participate in the exhibition, the curator further clarifies the core issue about the support of subjectivity and its challenge to the framework of modernity. As the only artist who doesn’t belong to Artist Dispatch Project, Lin Chi-Wei embodies the debate about framework of modernity and radical bodiliness, spotlighting Nandy’s emphasis on “non-co-optable” of the dissent(註12) or in Chen Chieh-jen’s term “un-incorporation.”“Days and Nights” exhibited this time collects the constant creative practice of Lin since 1999. “Tape Hindi Version,” Lin’s project during his residency in KHOJ International Artists’ Association in India in 2013, is also included in the exhibition. Forty-four pieces of works form an installation space. The wall painted with ink summons the very few ghosts in the archive. On the one hand, this installation space extends the self-referencing in The Last Strike of Lin-Chi-Wei’s Noise House, which through rehearsal performs his style; on the other, different from the sharing gesture in the past, Lin’s works are curated in a way for audiences to examine the trace of the context contributing to his thinking. Some creations serving as the hyperlinks bring audiences to the sites of previous live performance, such as “Masked Visionary.” Some stick to the attached nature of voice to make sketches, like “Sing-Ying-Song-Om (馨音松嗡).” Among all works, “24 Hours” is the brain and body work which has been kept for six years. The collage of photos presents the multiple space and time of the sound field. Viewing the artist’s reactionary practice from the material traces is like the dissent described by Nandy: “The shaman’s dissent is against the conventionality of everyday life and thought.”
Shamans and Dissent is not only an exhibition but also the reflection of the intellectuals of a generation, especially on the mainstream way of producing and understanding contemporary visual art. Through practical questioning, this exhibition further transforms the selves and bases. Nandy points out that “Shaman is the protest of the non-protesting.“(註14) The oppressed, under the extremely complex outer conditions, lose their voices or languages; they even are excluded from the public discourse by fixed power relations, being unknown. LIU Jen-peng and DING Nai-fei, Taiwanese scholars on gender studies, reread the conversation between Penumbra (wangliang) and Shadow (Ying) in “The Adjustment of Controversies” and “Metaphorical Language” in Zhuangzi. According to Guo Xiang’s explanation, Penumbra is ‘shade’, “indiscernible shadow of a shadow.” “Ying” is a shadow, whose subjectivity relies on the existence of the “form-substance(xing)” and will always follows it, wandering all the time. With this allegory, the two scholars criticize the traditional virtue and discursive politics which fatally oppress those subjects who possess no visibility; for example, the oppression from the idea of “reticence and tolerance (kuanrong)” on non-normative gender subjects. (註15) With the descriptive-analytical mode of “Penumbrae Query Shadow,” Kuan-Hsing Chen demonstrates “the objective existence of the hierarchical dispositions of human subjects”: “If the structure is capitalism, the capitalist is the subject, the working class is the shadow, and the penumbra is the migrant worker who cannot be presented in civil society except through mediating ‘shadow’ organizations such as churches or activist labor groups.”(註16) As a matter of fact, this thought reformation project has been fermenting in different corners in the third world for some time. Through invoking the bodily experience of people in Asia and through inter-reference which makes self-reference possible, Shamans and Dissent can be viewed as the overflow of this thinking project, trying to form a text by penetrating the intertwining relationship of western modernity and contemporary art practice and to pinpoint the crack and gap created by the capitalized institutionalization of artistic production. If Shamans and Dissent is deemed an exhibition, it is the thinking traces left by the collective debate that contribute to this way of reading. No matter what it is, the point is how the audiences can practice in their life with the experience they have after departing from the exhibition space, this sound field with multiple sources of sound.