In Qiuzhuang, a small village in Jiangsu Province, China, there’s a small art library, called A Library. Across the road, there’s a shelter, just a corrugated roof on some poles, under which villagers sit and talk, often just passing the time with each other, gossiping and relaxing. My friend, Li Mu, who was born in this village, told me that there are fewer and fewer public spaces where people can gather. In his childhood, for example, people got together on a bare patch of ground to watch movies. One of the reasons Li Mu started A Library, he says, is to provide a new public space, a center, a meeting place, where people can go to talk, look at the books and watch videos. Li Mu also organizes activities for the children of the village at A Library.
On the first day of my visit to Qiuzhuang, Li Mu and I were taking a walk around the village. My assistant and translator, Zhang Hangya; Li Mu’s assistant and cameraman, Zhong Ming, and another artist who was visiting from Beijing, Na Yingyu, were all walking with us. When we got to the small shelter, Li Mu suggested that I sit down and speak with the villagers. He introduced me and told them they could ask me questions.
I was only the second foreigner to visit this village. Jay Brown, a curator who has lived in Kunming for many years, had been there the week before, leaving just as I arrived. So, an American sitting down under this shelter with the villagers was pretty exotic. The youngest man in the group immediately said that they didn’t want to discuss politics. I didn’t understand this response, but Hangya explained to me that as soon as someone thinks of America, they think of politics. The villagers were shy and didn’t seem to have any questions. To break the silence, I asked them if they liked the library. “Yes,” they said, “it’s great for the children.”
Then, I made a mistake. I persisted. “But do you go to the library?” I asked. “No,” they said, “we can’t read.” I was deeply embarrassed. I should have realized this, if I’d been thinking at all. I felt my error so keenly that I didn’t know how to correct it. “But the books have pictures in them, you could look at the pictures,” I said. “It’s good for the children,” they said.
I’ve been filming in China since 2000, and even, now, as I learn Chinese, and make friends, I am acutely aware of my outsider status. The kind of mistake I made in this interchange, the ignorance I exhibited, and the insensitivity to the “face” of the villagers, is something that I probably have done many times without noticing it. But here I was, an honored guest in the village, with a translator who could explain things to me, and a friend who knew the village well. As a foreigner with Chinese friends, I often suffer from social anxiety, but it was more intense here. I hoped that I wouldn’t make other mistakes during my visit to Qiuzhuang.
I really wanted to go to Qiuzhuang to see Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project, but I didn’t think that I could ever get there. The trip seemed long and complicated and my Chinese isn’t that good. I was afraid to travel alone, to change from the train to the bus, to travel to such a remote place. Luckily, my assistant, Zhang Hangya, had some free time and agreed to come with me. She’s a great travel companion and an excellent translator. I feel safe with her and we have so much to talk about – the time just flies by.
I had traveled on trains and buses in China before, but this time, I was going to actually visit Li Mu and his family, not just pass through as a tourist. I had talked with Li Mu about his project and read about it on his website.
Li Mu (born in Qiuzhuang, Jiangsu Province, China, 1974) was living in Shanghai in 2010, when the Shanghai World Expo took place. He was part of Double Infinity, a show organized by the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia. In 2011, Li Mu went to Eindhoven, the Netherlands, to visit the Van Abbemuseum. After seeing the collection, he proposed that he bring a number of works from the museum to his hometown. This was obviously problematic, but Li Mu persisted, finally proposing that he copy some of the pieces he had seen at the museum and that he place these copies in Qiuzhuang.
Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang project (sponsored by the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia) began in February 2013, when he opened A Library during the Spring Festival, when he always went home to visit his family. This time, he stayed in the village, creating copies of several Sol LeWitt pieces, including Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972, and two wall drawings. He set up a TV in the small grocery in the village to screen videos by Ulay and Marina Abramovic. As the project grows, works by Andy Warhol, John Kormeling, Dan Flavin, Richard Long, Daniel Buren, and Carl Andre will appear in the village.
In a letter that Li Mu wrote to Charles Esche (Van Abbemuseum) and Davide Quadrio (Arthub Asia) he said: “I was born in the village, grew up there and then I left, my family still lives there. Today I am back, to establish a kind of relationship with the village using my art, experience, and knowledge, and to explore the possibilities of influence and the ways we can cope with each other. Maybe I can even find myself and my own direction through these activities. I think that, no matter how complex or difficult this project might be, it should always stay in line with the principle that this project is about a person, so it should always keep that person’s flavor.”
I was moved by the idea of the project – that Li Mu wanted to take the art that he loved to his hometown, to try to explain his life outside the village to his family and the other villagers.
*
The train from Shanghai to Xuzhou takes about four hours. We had to get a taxi to the bus station for the next part of our journey. It took us about two hours by bus to reach the small town of Fengxian. There was nothing particularly interesting about the route, although the taxi driver had told us that the area we were going to was a center of Han culture, with a rich history dating back many thousands of years. This area, known as Subei, is relatively poor, but larger roads are bringing the outside world closer.
Li Mu met us in Fengxian and we walked across the street to the hotel that he had booked for us. Na Yingyu, Zhong Ming, and Jay Brown, accompanied him. One of the first things that I noticed was that Zhong Ming was always filming, his video camera almost like a part of him. He was a very quiet, modest guy, just staying behind his camera. I felt uncomfortable because I’m used to being the one behind the camera. As we had coffee and then dinner, I began to ignore this camera, but I was already planning how I would document the next two days.
The first thing we did in Fengxian was to go to a small restaurant to rest and have something to drink. I had my favorite, (西瓜汁xiguazhi) watermelon juice. I decided to ask Li Mu about something I’d read on his website that was troubling me.
*
While Na Yingyu was visiting Qiuzhuang, he and Li Mu had a number of discussions that were later posted on Li Mu’s blog. In one discussion, Li Mu reported that some artists and intellectuals were accusing him of “cultural colonialism.”
NYY：Have you ever doubted this project?
LM：Yes, for sure.
NYY：For example?
LM：The last time I met Chen Tong in Shanghai, the first words he said were “you are treating the villagers as your laboratory rats in that project”. Many other artists also think that it’s unfair for the villagers. Because they think that the villagers can’t tell whether an artwork is good or not and this project might destroy the village’s cultural and natural environment. They even said that it’s a new form of cultural colonialism.
NYY：What do you think of that opinion?
LM：First of all, I didn’t refute their opinions and attitudes towards my project, and I didn’t try to defend my work. I just told them what I was doing. On the one hand, I didn’t know how to defend it; on the other hand, I won’t know whether it’s cultural colonialism until I’ve completed it. I don’t want to define my work. The intellectuals and artists tend to judge a thing according to their own experience and concepts. They don’t have a lived experience in a village. Their knowledge of the village is based on their own concept.
In our conversation, Li Mu reiterated the idea that this was a personal project, a project about his relationship with his village. Both Na Yingyu and Jay Brown said that, before coming to visit Li Mu, they also thought his project was problematic. I was puzzled by this criticism and decided to investigate this term “cultural colonialism” in its Chinese context.
After the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1970s, there was a rush to publish Western philosophy and teach Western modernism (impressionism, Dada, Surrealism, etc.) in China. Artists, writers, composers, practitioners of all the arts, experimented with new ideas. These ideas had already been part of the Chinese intellectual scene in the 1930s, but had been repressed after 1949.
The discourse around cultural colonialism arrived with postmodernism. Intellectuals read Foucault, Derrida, Said, among others. In the 1990s, Western critics and collectors helped to define Chinese contemporary art in a global context by choosing artists who fit their idea that politics and satire were at the center of the Chinese art world. This was a subtle form of cultural colonialism, best defined in an article by Zhu Qi (朱其), who recounts the history of Western interest in Chinese contemporary art as creating a narrowing of possibilities for Chinese artists, mainly because of the domination of Western critics and collectors who held the keys to an international art career. Although his essay argues that the influence of the West, the choice of certain Chinese artists as representative, was a form of colonialism, Zhu Qi is also arguing for the creation of an “indigenous” Chinese contemporary art. (http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_487f2fc60100fkfa.html)
But what is this? Is there an “indigenous” Chinese contemporary art? Chinese artists get training in Western art skills; they read about Western art; and they participate in international exhibits. In this context, what is truly Chinese anymore? This is a problem of globalization, of the influences that flow between borders, cross borders and begin to dissolve difference. This discussion of “indigenous” Chinese contemporary art comes out of a deep anxiety in the Chinese contemporary art world, a fear that Western influence has been too strong, that Chinese artists have lost their way, lost their special identity as “Chinese artists.” A desire to find something truly Chinese in their art and philosophy is an on-going struggle for many artists and intellectuals in China.
In China, the ironies are legion: because art students study Western oil painting, music students play Western classical music, even the philosophy that brought the concept of cultural colonialism to China came from the West, the idea of an untouched “Chinese” art feels nostalgic, a desire for a utopian past. In 2008, Gao Shiming （高士明）described the philosophy behind the Third Guangzhou Triennial, “Farewell to Post-Colonialism”:
“For artists in China, it would be difficult to engage the topic in-depth, given that China has no painful history of colonialism, no experience of being colonized. Without colonialism, how can we talk about post-colonialism, let alone bid farewell to post-colonialism?” (http://www.gdmoa.org/zhanlan/threeyear/4/24/1/12965.jsp)
He explains that the ideology of post-colonialism has limited possibilities for artists and curators. Gao Shiming positions the Triennial against an anxiety of return. For him, there is no original, true place or identity. Leaving home changes the traveler; returning, the traveler finds that home has changed. Therefore, to define art only in terms of politics, especially identity politics, limits curators’ choices and artists’ possibilities.
“After post-colonialism, the main task for the artist is to escape from over- politicized international art sites. In contemporary art, the biggest problem brought forth by post-colonialism and multiculturalism is the politicization of art.
In such a world, Odysseus will never find his way home, because all the fundamental things have changed, his return route is a wrong route, and his hometown is a strange land.”
The Chinese like to say that they were never “colonized,” but the Chinese government uses the “history of imperialism” to create feelings of loyalty to the State. In addition, during the Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese art, with its connection to Confucianism and other traditional Chinese philosophies, was banned. Instead, artists made the Soviet style political posters with Chinese characteristics that we, in the West, are used to associating with that period. Thus, ties to arts, such as Chinese ink painting and Suzhou garden design, were temporarily broken, and a Western form of realism took the place of Chinese “indigenous” art.
Right now, there is, also, in China, a renewed interest in the countryside, a longing for the rural life that many intellectuals have never experienced. Perhaps this is a revisiting of 大串联,(da chuan lian) an invitation from the Cultural Revolutionary Central Committee, in 1966, for students to travel to Beijing and for Beijing students to travel around the country to experience rural life, or上山下乡 (shang shan xia xiang, down to the Countryside Movement), when people were forcibly sent to rural areas to live and work.
Recently, several artists have created works in small villages: Ou Ning’s Beishan Project and Wu Wenguang’s China Villagers Documentary Project are two of the most well known. Ou Ning, in his writing about Beishan Project, references the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1920s. Wu Wenguang gave video and still cameras to villagers across the country, encouraging them to document important aspects of their village life, such as village self-governance.
Looking closely at the situation of Chinese contemporary art as it makes its way into a globalized, commercialized art world is like opening a can of worms. Every time I look inside, I find another complication. “Cultural colonialism,” “indigenous” Chinese art, “anxiety of return,” globalization, nostalgia for village life, all of these and more play into the complicated reasons that a Chinese artist/intellectual, like Chen Tong, might accuse Li Mu of “cultural colonialism.”
After dinner in Fengxian, Li Mu and his friends went back to Qiuzhuang; Hangya and I, back to our hotel. We rested from our long day of travel.
*
Qiuzhuang is only about 15 minutes away from Fengxian, so the next morning, we took a taxi. The taxi driver wasn’t sure how to get there and Hangya had to keep reiterating that we wanted to go to Qiuzhuang. When we turned down a small road, suddenly, I saw a Sol LeWitt drawing on the wall of one of the buildings and I said: “We’re here. This is Li Mu’s village.”
It was so exciting to actually see the drawing on the wall of this small village, to see something that I’d only seen in pictures on the web. The physical experience of coming upon this wall drawing, so unexpected in this place, was delightful. I felt that I had really arrived in a special village, unlike any other.
A few buildings down the road was our destination: A Library. I had seen many pictures of this small art library, so I was surprised to see that half the space was taken up with the offices of the Qiuzhuang project.
My mother had donated a couple of books to the library, so I looked for them on the shelves. Rodin and Rembrandt.
Li Mu served us some interesting tea – I later learned it was burdock root tea – it tasted very smooth and warm. I set up my camera, facing the door, which was covered with slats of hanging plastic. The plastic moved in the wind, but it obscured the view of the village road, making it seem distant. I felt that, as an outsider, this might be a good first view for me, blocked by the plastic.
As an outsider, a Westerner myself, the complex history of Chinese and Western contact was not the first thing that came to mind when I heard about Li Mu’s project. In fact, I immediately saw it as a life/art project.
The concept of life as art was probably first noticed in the 20th century in the work of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. It was part of modernism, but better seen as an alternative to the main modernist thread. Artists framed part or all of their lives as art, documenting the process of living. A Life/Art Project could be personal or move out into a community. In “Carving: a Traditional Sculpture,” Eleanor Antin went on a diet, taking a photo every day to track the changes in her body. For her “Touch Sanitation,” project, Mierle Ukeles shook hands with every sanitation worker in New York, thanking them for the service they did for the city.
Although there are many examples of life as art in China, it is rarely described in these terms. As afar as I can see, the concept of life as art is not part of the discourse. Nevertheless, Song Dong’s “Waste Not,” Zhang Huan’s “12 Square Meters,” Qiu Zhijie’s “A Suicidology of the Nanjing River Bridge,” to name a few, are all projects that clearly could participate in this discourse.
I had recently taught a class called “Life/Art Projects” at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan. In that class, I presented a number of works in which artists frame their life as art. I included Li Mu’s project and the students were really drawn to his idea. The concept of “hometown” is such an important one in China; no matter where you are from, as a Chinese person, you can relate to the idea of going home and the difficulties of going back after the outside world has changed you.
Li Mu wasn’t thinking about either of these discourses, - cultural colonialism or life as art - when he proposed to the Van Abbemuseum that he bring some artworks to Qiuzhuang. He was thinking about how alienated he felt whenever he returned to his hometown. The farmers were now working in the lumber business; and, he felt, that all they valued was money. Li Mu and his father were always arguing.
Li Mu had learned a different way of life. He lived in Suzhou, where he went to art school, in Shanghai and in New York. He married a Suzhou girl, but sometimes thought he should become a Buddhist monk. He was a deep thinker, questioning the meaning of art and life. He thought of his project as deeply personal. He was trying to figure out what to do next, what direction his art and life might take.
*
After resting, drinking our tea, and looking at the books, Li Mu announced that we would go to the places that were important in his childhood. This is something I’d asked him to think about, so I was excited and ready to start filming. I set Li Mu up with my wireless microphone and we left the library.
I wasn’t really sure why I was filming in Qiuzhuang, but collecting images is part of my process. I might be making a documentary for Li Mu or a more personal essay on my experiences in the village. As a filmmaker in China, I often felt that I was stealing images for my own purposes, so I tried to give something back. My career had slowly moved to China, where my work was appreciated for its interest in Chinese culture and language. I got more laughs in China than in the West.
As we left the library, I began to look at everything with my filmmaker eyes. First, we walked to Li Mu’s family home.
The first things I noticed as we walked in: two dogs barked at us, and there was a colorful tiled screen directly in our path, bird cages were hanging from a Sol LeWitt sculpture that was placed on the ceiling of the entranceway.
We turned right into a courtyard. This was a typical village house – all on one level, with buildings laid out in a square around the courtyard. It turned out that Li Mu’s father, who used to be a carpenter, now raised birds. He showed us a room filled with birdcages. He lifted up the tails of the mother birds, moving them off the nest to show us small blue eggs, or baby birds, with their big mouths gaping open. When Li Mu gave his father the Sol LeWitt sculpture, he decided to use it as a place to hang birdcages. Li Mu had made 15 copies of the Sol LeWitt sculpture, and gave them to the villagers. Each person eventually found a use for his sculpture, but Li Mu kept one to hang on an outside wall in the village. This sculpture had no practical use (probably as LeWitt might have wanted it). Li Mu told us that an old man came every day to sit under that sculpture; when asked why, he said he sat there because it was beautiful.
As we were sitting down to talk with Li Mu’s parents, the battery in my camera died. I went back to the library to get the spare battery, but it also turned out to be dead. I hadn’t brought the charger from the hotel. This wasn’t like me – I’m usually prepared. But, the truth is, I was already feeling uncomfortable behind the camera. I was meeting Li Mu’s parents; I was an honored guest, and it felt inappropriate to be filming them and trying to talk to them at the same time. Luckily, Zhong Ming was there, always filming; Na Yingyu was there, taking photographs. Suddenly, I had become the subject of the film, not the filmmaker. I struggled against this position, continuing to record audio, but I slowly realized that this was the position I was meant to inhabit.
The day was filled with missed images:
At Li Mu’s childhood school, we found the old blackboard. He crouched down, making himself into the child who had sat there long ago. This school is now part of a factory for sorting bottles, but the space of the former school was strangely empty of the mess of the other spaces around it.
The empty space that used to be an outdoor cinema now has a building on it, a clinic. We met the doctors and saw an old man receiving some kind of IV treatment, just sitting on a bench in the hallway.
We walked to the river. Li Mu explained that this was the place where he could see far, this was the place that gave him the idea that there was something else out there, that there were other places in the world. We looked out, far, down the river. Li Mu is the only person to have left his village.
It started to rain, so we sheltered in the grocery where we saw another part of Li Mu’s project. He had set up a TV monitor to show Ulay and Abramovic’s piece, “The Lovers.” They walked the Great Wall of China, each from a different starting point, ending when they met in the middle. We asked the grocer what he thought of the video – he said that he admired their “persistence.” I was interested in every detail of this grocery – who came in, what they bought (vegetables, steamed bread) and how they reacted to the video (“is that the Great Wall?”) I had wondered why Li Mu chose this piece, but now I realized that it contained something familiar and something strange – a great way to ease people into understanding this art that came from outside.
After our walk, we went to Li Mu’s home for lunch. We had all of our meals here, but this one was the most surprising, because I had never seen this way of eating before. We each took a big steamed bread, holding it in one hand. Then, using chopsticks, we took some food from the many dishes in the middle of the table and ate it, holding it over the bread. We took bites of the bread, often infused with the juices that had dripped onto it from the food we were eating. No one had a bowl or plate. Towards the end of the meal, we each got a bowl of zhou (rice porridge) and ate more from the communal plates. The food was delicious; Li Mu’s mother is a great cook.
Another memorable meal occurred on the second day, because Li Mu’s father picked some leaves from a tree growing in the courtyard. I was very nervous for him, because he climbed up onto a precarious woodpile to get the leaves. At dinner, Li Mu’s mother explained that this was a local dish and that it had a strong taste, so maybe we wouldn’t like it. On the contrary, it was delicious. The leaves had been boiled, then chopped, then she’d added some oil and salt. Very simple, fresh and green.
After lunch, on the first day, we went to the retired schoolteacher’s home to see what he’d done with his Sol LeWitt – he was using it as a shelf. Then, we went to his friend’s home – again the Sol Lewitt was used as a shelf, but this time, the things on it were mostly related to art or beauty. One thing that really interested me was the way that the sculpture was placed on the wall, often over a large poster, so that parts of the poster would be framed by the sculpture, fragmenting the image in odd ways.
I suddenly realized that I had my iPhone, so I could take a few photos…
Li Mu knew everyone in the village and they knew him. He understood their limitations and their strengths; he also found it interesting that they were using a Sol LeWitt sculpture as a shelf, because it showed how practical they were. He wasn’t doing this project to criticize them or to educate them, but only to be able to communicate with them more easily. It’s a project that an outsider could never accomplish, because it’s not just about bringing the art to the village from the West. By making 15 copies of the Sol LeWitt piece and giving them away, Li Mu gave up control of these sculptures, letting the villagers interpret and use them.
Later that afternoon, we returned to the library, to prepare for the next day. Li Mu had been planning a picnic with the children of the village to coincide with my visit. This seemed like a really odd idea to me. “Why?” I thought, “why does he think I would be good at this?” I don’t have children and I don’t especially like them. The idea of having to deal with a whole group of small children freaked me out. But Li Mu said that the children had never had a picnic – they didn’t really know what it was – and that meeting me would be very important to them. I worried about this, but never said anything to Li Mu. I decided to trust his plan, to work inside his project, perhaps, even to be a part of his project.
We had a meeting to plan the food for the picnic. The discussion was quite serious, which I thought was rather funny. It’s difficult to get anything Western in China, especially in a small town, but I wanted to give the children an idea of something that Americans would eat at a picnic. I decided on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I also thought we might make potato salad, but knew I couldn’t get the right mayonnaise or the right celery. I decided to use wosun, a delicious Chinese vegetable I’d just discovered. It’s light green and crunchy – so I thought it might work well in potato salad. Li Mu’s parents grew wosun, so it was easy to get.
We also discussed activities that we could do with the children. Here I was at a loss. We decided that each child could ask me one question and we suggested some games, but we didn’t make any decisions. I was feeling annoyed, because I suspected that Li Mu thought that because I’m a woman, I’d be interested in children. Why hadn’t he planned a picnic with the children when Jay Brown was there? I never talked to Li Mu about my doubts. I was embarrassed by them and confused. “Ok,” I said to myself, “stop being neurotic and go with whatever happens. You’re in China, after all, and the best things come when you completely give up control.”
But all through dinner, although I was happy to be just eating and talking, I wondered about how I looked in the footage that Zhong Ming was shooting. Had I made more mistakes when communicating with all the people I had met, mistakes that would be revealed when that footage was viewed? And would I have to hear my bad Chinese accent, always tinged with the Chicago accent I have in English?
After dinner, when we left Li Mu’s home, we walked out into darkness. It was completely dark, the darkest night I’d seen in a long while. Not a city night. I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did. It was a sign for me that I really was in a small village in China, where everyone was inside, with their families, inside those courtyard houses, where inside was private and I had been privileged to be there for a short time.
Back in Fengxian, I charged all the batteries for my camera. I was determined to be behind the camera for at least part of the next day.
*
On the second day, Li Mu and Na Yingyu met us at one of those insane supermarkets that are common in China. They are big, confusing, and loud. Even Hangya said she didn’t like this one. The worst thing about shopping there was that when people saw me, they stared at me and the stares felt hostile. I hadn’t experienced this at all in the village, probably because I was with Li Mu. But here in the town, no one knew him, and I was definitely an outsider. I couldn’t wait to get out of that store. Later, when I asked Hangya if she had noticed this and why the people had seemed so hostile, she explained that the whole shopping experience at these supermarkets is so tense that having a strange person there must have made it worse.
We took all of the food to Li Mu’s house and began preparing for the picnic.
Li Mu had boiled the potatoes earlier, so I was taking them out of the pot and cutting them – very slowly. His sister came to my rescue, taking each piece of potato out of the pot with big chopsticks and laying them on the board so I could cut them more quickly. There was something so sweet and loving about this gesture.
Li Mu and his father laid out a big plastic sheet to sit on. They were outside in the courtyard, sweeping the dirt from it. We were worried about rain and wet ground. Earlier that day, led by Li Mu’s precocious nephew, we had visited the picnic site and I said it was too damp to sit on if we only had cloth. I kept thinking it was going to rain and stop the whole picnic, but we were lucky and the rain didn’t come.
Then, it was time to meet the kids at the library. I went outside of Li Mu’s house with my camera and began shooting scenes on the street. I was dreading all those kids and I was greedy for the shots I’d missed the day before. I really wanted to hide behind that camera. Basically, I’m a shy person, and meeting all these new people had been a strain. I stayed away as long as I could, filming on the street. But, of course, people gathered around me to see what I was doing. I tried to speak with them in Chinese, but was happy when Hangya turned up to translate. Li Mu’s nephew asked me questions, and spoke as much English as he could. Although I don’t like kids, once in a while, I really like one and this kid was great, very courageous. I was happy that he would be coming along on our picnic.
Finally, the children came out of the library, the retired teacher in the lead. They were lined up in rows, very obedient, good Chinese children. It was time to give up my role as filmmaker again and join the procession. I felt that I had to be engaged in a way that I can’t be when I’m behind the camera. Hangya and I took up the rear and headed off to the picnic site.
As we approached the picnic site, I was struck with how Li Mu and his helpers (his sisters, Na Yingyu) had laid everything out perfectly square, all the food on one side placed in a straight row. It reminded me of the art that Li Mu was bringing to his village.
In spite of my fears, the picnic was a success. Li Mu explained to the kids that we were eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because American kids liked them; and that I had prepared an East/West potato salad by combining potatoes with wosun.
The kids loved the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; the potato salad wasn’t so popular. I was very lucky that Hangya was there or I would never have known what to do with those kids. Li Mu’s nephew, a born leader, was the first to raise his hand, to ask questions, to participate in any activity we could think up. But I had to keep asking Hangya, “what should we do next?” I was really out of my comfort zone.
The kids were shy to ask me questions, so we had them recite poems, sing songs, and we asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. Boys: policeman, officer in the military, airplane pilot; girls: teacher, doctor. Finally, we decided to let them run around and burn off some energy. Many of the parents had arrived and they wanted to have photos of their kids with me. I look terrible in photographs and usually refuse, but here I felt pressured to agree. I hope I acquiesced with some grace.
And finally, it was over. Li Mu told me the next day that the picnic had been really important to the kids. Since it had been such a trial for me, I had to think hard to figure out why this would be. I remembered something that Arturo Lindsay had said to me many years ago. Arturo is an artist with a PhD who grew up poor in the ghetto in Harlem. I asked him how he got out. He said that he saw poverty as a big glass bottle with a wide bottom and a narrow neck. People have to get out through that neck, but only a few can figure out how, usually because they’ve met someone from the outside. Could this metaphor work for these kids in China? I told Li Mu’s sister, that when her son was older, he could visit me in New York. Whether this was possible wasn’t the point. If I could be that way out to the wider world for this kid, I’d be happy to be that. I’m so curious about what will happen him.
*
When we left the next day, we took the bus from Fengxian to Xuzhou, got to the train station and had a four hour wait for our train. Hangya and I decided to compare notes. What had she, from a small village near Hangzhou, noticed in Qiuzhuang? What was different for me? Hangya had been living in Shanghai and is coming to New York this year to study fashion design at FIT. Like Li Mu, Hangya left her village to go to college, so she identified closely with Li Mu’s situation. As I might have guessed, she compared her village and Li Mu’s, noticing the things that were the same and those that were different. As she put it: “there weren’t as many shocks for me.” While I was surprised by so many things, things I’d never experienced, she was thinking about what it would be like to do a project in her own village.
As Na Yingyu and Li Mu continued to discuss the criticism of “cultural colonialism,” Li Mu pointed out that he had discovered that what he was doing was actually “a small thing.”
NYY：What do you mean by saying it’s a small project?
LM: I once said that my whole project as far as the village is concerned is like a stone thrown into a mud pool which drowned and didn’t even make a ripple. It was swallowed by the environment. My project can’t change the village’s cultural ecology; neither can it destroy its natural environment nor mentally influence the village people. In fact, it is far from being that influential. At its best, it provides villagers with something to chat about or opens their horizon as they see something that they never saw before.
NYY：The cultural colonialism of the village claimed by the intellectuals is now turned into an entertainment event, isn’t it?
LM：I think so, because the villagers are interpreting and digesting my work in their own way. Also they are using that work (the Sol LeWitt wall sculpture) in their own way.
Will Li Mu be able to change the villagers’ perceptions of him, of the outside world? Or will he only, as he proposes, be able to communicate with them, to understand them, better than he could. Instead of taking up a stance of opposition, can Li Mu become a part of his village again without giving up the things he’s learned outside?
As a visitor to Qiuzhuang and to Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang project, I was positioned in front of the camera and became the subject of Li Mu’s documentation, a part of his project. I hadn’t anticipated this and I didn’t completely enjoy it, but I have come to see how it functioned. When Li Mu first returned to his village, people thought he came back because he had failed outside. His family was embarrassed for him. But as soon as Zhong Ming, Na Yingyu, Jay Brown, and I visited the village, the whole project had a different meaning. The outside hadn’t rejected Li Mu; on the contrary, the outside was coming to visit him, to honor him and his project.
Was my visit, especially, a form of “cultural colonialism?” Or was I part of a life/art project, a friend who helped Li Mu in his attempts to communicate with his past life and to understand the complicated stance he has of both insider and outsider in his own hometown?
When I was sitting under the shelter with the villagers, feeling embarrassed and at a loss, I was saved from further mistakes by the sudden appearance of a cart and a man shouting: 鱼鱼鱼. (“yu, yu, yu” “fish, fish, fish.” ) I was no longer of interest. Everyone rushed over to see what was for sale. It turned out to be some small shrimps, apparently much in demand.
Just as the villagers moved away from me, just as they took Sol LeWitt’s sculpture home to use it for their own purposes, so they will absorb Li Mu’s project into their daily lives. Instead of causing the cultural destruction that Chen Tong feared, the Western art that Li Mu brings to his hometown plays a part in an elaborate and complicated dance between gift and refusal. The villagers pay attention or not, like it or not, discuss it or not, bring it home or not. I always find it best to assume that, instead of influences from the outside overwhelming the people in a place like Qiuzhuang, there will always be the possibility of resistance.
Coda:
As I write this, Li Mu continues to copy artworks and place them in his village. Works by Andy Warhol and John Kormeling have been installed. Andy Warhol’s three images of Mao were installed on one of the outside walls of a house in the village as large posters. But Li Mu also printed hundreds of copies, smaller, more portable, and offered them to anyone who might want to put them on a wall inside his or her home. The potent symbol of Mao is back in the village, but with a difference – three images in three different colors. And there are several more works to come. Li Mu is working hard because time is limited.
I thought I could come back in a year or two to see what had happened, to see the rest of the works and the way that the villagers transformed the works. But things are not as straightforward as that. The village that you have seen in these pictures will be destroyed within the year; the government is building a wider road. People will be compensated for their houses and Li Mu’s father will build a three-story house. His home, the Sol LeWitt wall drawings, A Library, all these buildings will be torn down to make the road. Nevertheless, Li Mu’s father, who argued with him about his decision to quit his teaching job to pursue his art career, who didn’t understand this strange conceptual art project his son was doing in his hometown – Li Mu’s father has promised that as long as he lives, there will be a place for A Library. He will make a special room for it in his new home.
