Yang Zhichao. Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail); 3,000 found books; dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney.
Photo: Jenni Carter, AGNSW.

From 3,000 personal notebooks and diaries amassed by the artist over a period of three years, purchased in Beijing’s Panjiayuan “Dirt Market” (a place where you can buy just about anything, from fake antiquities to genuine Mao memorabilia), Yang Zhichao has created a work that reveals a hidden history. Spanning 1949–1999, these collected diaries, saved for their value as recycled scrap paper, reveal the dramatic transformations that have convulsed China from the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and later the impact of globalization under the Reform and Opening policies following Mao’s death in 1976.

Arranged in rows on a raised platform, the books’ first impression is a sea of revolutionary red. Early books covered in blue or green featuring pictures of traditional architecture, auspicious plum blossoms, or galloping horses give way to triumphant soldiers and peasants, factory chimneys billowing smoke, and Mao haloed by the rising sun. Books from the 1980s have plastic covers in bright pink or pea green with cute cartoon characters. We see only the covers, but pages have been photographed and displayed on iPads; with a slight frisson of voyeurism, we view the self-criticisms, dutifully copied out passages of “Mao Zedong thought,” and notes from meetings and political study sessions. Some contain more personal things—knitting patterns, song lyrics, and shopping lists. Others have keepsakes—photographs or pressed flowers—between their pages. One has a souvenir brochure for a 1979 exhibition of works by Kathe Kollwitz, one of the first international art exhibitions staged in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Part historiography, part sociology, and part anthropology, the work re-presents and reinterprets the quotidian.

Yang Zhichao. Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail); 3,000 found books; dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney.
Photo: Jenni Carter, AGNSW.

Chinese Bible was first shown in November 2009 at Ai Weiwei’s China Art Archives and Warehouse in Beijing, displayed in a massive rectangle “like a patchwork memory quilt.”[1]  The work was then shown at Hong Kong’s 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, where collector Gene Sherman saw it. Despite the decision she and her husband had made to “draw a line” under their collection, she decided it was too significant to overlook. Chinese Bible combines text and the found object, with a subtext of social justice—a narrative thread in the Shermans’ collection of contemporary art from Asia.[2]

Curator Claire Roberts explains the work’s significance: “There has been a trend for a while for Chinese artists to start looking at their own history, and Yang Zhichao’s work fits into that trend. It’s just so evocative of those amazing decades of the transformation of China. Even just by looking at the patina on the covers of the diaries you can see history unfolding before your eyes… These 3,000 diaries each represent a fragment of the lives of actual people. We can appreciate it as a contemporary artwork, but also as a work that opens up all sorts of insights into how individual lives have intersected with the big historical movements… Yang Zhichao is a performance artist, and this work is a performance installation.”[3]

Yang Zhichao. Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail – inside page); 3,000 found books; dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney.

With other avant-garde artists in Beijing’s “East Village” enclave in the 1990s, Yang Zhichao specialized in the transgressive body art that characterized that era. He had tufts of grass implanted into his back for an exhibition in Shanghai; was literally branded (by Ai Weiwei) with his identity number on his  shoulder; had an unidentified metal object surgically implanted in his leg and vials of earth and ash inserted in his stomach. I asked Yang Zhichao to tell me about the change in his practice, from what Craig Clunas describes as “extreme macho abjection”[4] to more reflective works. “From 1995 to 2005 it was kind of a ‘golden age’ of Chinese performance art,” he said. “It was an art form that put the artist in opposition to a variety of things: the artist’s way of exploring themselves in opposition to society in general, to living conditions, to governmental regulations, and of course to the art world itself. It was such a meaningful practice. In the period from 2005–2015 there has been significant change in China that has contributed to a change in art practice. Looking back over the last ten years, there does continue to be some quite challenging or provocative performance art, but in general it has changed into a less confrontational mode. But also, of course, the artists have aged! The relationship between the artist and society, living environments, and political systems, and the artworld itself—there have been significant shifts and changes in each of those realms which have also contributed to changes in practice.”

Explaining his motivation for collecting, washing, and installing Chinese Bible, Yang Zhichao says, “These diaries represented a forgotten history of ordinary people that is not reflected in the official histories.” He and Ai Weiwei pored over these evocative notebooks, finding connections with the events of their own lives and those of their parents. Ai Weiwei was instrumental in assisting Yang Zhichao with the first installation and presentation of the work in Beijing, when people could directly engage with the books, leafing through their pages. For a western audience who cannot read Chinese, the experience is more distant, with a risk that the objects become merely aestheticized. The title of the work, however, reminds us of the significance of the contents. The term “bible,” deliberately chosen despite its emergence from a secular history, denotes an authoritative text and “bestows on the diaries an air of authority that they would not otherwise have, elevating the collective writings of ordinary people to canonical status.”[5] Like other significant installation works from Chinese artists, the massed notebooks of Chinese Bible reference the tension between the aspirations and dreams of the individual, and the enforced conformity of the collectivist past. That was poignantly brought home when Claire Roberts and Yang Zhichao, en route to lunch in Chinatown, invited their Chinese taxi driver to see the work. He could not possibly do so, he said, as it would bring back such a flood of bad memories that it would make him weep.

Yang Zhichao: Chinese Bible is on view at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation through August 1, 2015. It is running concurrently with Go East, an exhibition of works from the Gene and Brian Sherman collection of contemporary Asian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

[1] Claire Roberts, “Yang Zhichao and Chinese Bible: Performing into the Present,” Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015.

[2] This work, and a major installation by Jitish Kallat, have been gifted to the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

[3] Claire Roberts and Yang Zhichao, interview with the author on May 16, 2015.

[4] Craig Clunas, Art in China, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[5] Claire Roberts, “Yang Zhichao and Chinese Bible: Performing into the Present,” Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015.

Chien-chi Chang. Stills from Chinatown Diptych, 1992-2011; digital film, b/w and color, sound; 19 to 23 mins. Images courtesy of the Artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, and Magnum Photos.

HOME is an exhibition of works by two Taiwanese artists, Chien-chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen, that explores this complex and nuanced territory. Entering Sydney’s Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, you encounter a darkened and almost silent space filled with minimalist wheeled “wagons,” cabin-like boxes made of recycled timbers from construction sites. The very materials are redolent of memory, the passage of time, the transformation of one kind of world to another. They are beautiful objects, and in their resemblance to caravans, they evoke journeying. Inside each is a video or audio work by Chen Chieh-jen. Four filmic works focus on the Losheng Sanitorium in Taipei, a decommissioned leprosy hospital built during the period of Japanese rule and controversially slated for demolition. In 2007, thousands of people demonstrated against the forced removal of the last forty-five patients, who had spent their entire lives at Losheng and for whom it was “home.” Chen is interested in bodily memories and elusive states of mind. He documents histories—and people—that would otherwise go unremarked.

Chen Chieh-jen. Realm of Reverberations, 2014; installation view from the exhibition HOME; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. Photo: Brett Boardman.

Sitting enclosed in the wagons, watching slow, dreamlike black-and-white videos of a woman sweeping an abandoned industrial site or slowly stroking the mattress of a hospital bed in an abandoned ward, a sense of melancholy reverie is overwhelming. In addition to the four videos, Realm of Reverberations includes audio interviews with Australian women recorded at a center for the homeless, the marginalized, and the lonely. They attempt to explain what “home” means to them. It’s both moving and confronting, and the final wagon, which requires you to lie down in a space like an enclosed bunk in a dormitory or prison—or a coffin—is claustrophobically unsettling. The installation speaks of dispossession and loss, and the ways in which individual lives are hostage to the demands of the global economy.

The other half of the show is presented in the galleries of the National Art School, which was itself a prison in colonial days. SCAF Chairman and Executive Director Gene Sherman saw Chien-chi Chang’s extraordinary series of photographs The Chain at the 2001 Venice Biennale. They became “etched in her mind,” she says, prompting her desire to commission a new project from the artist and bring his work to Australia. Near life-sized, these portraits of the inmates of a Buddhist temple “sanctuary” for the mentally ill and intellectually disabled show people chained together in pairs, subject to eccentric theories about mental illness and the rejection of conventional psychiatric treatments; victims of family shame and secrecy. They are unforgettable. A young man stood next to me in silence, and after a while he turned and said, “I knew about this place when I was a child in Taipei. We made jokes about it at school. I am ashamed for my country.”

Chien-chi Chang. The Chain, 1993-99; installation view from the exhibition HOME; 45 works; silver gelatin photographs; each 157.8 x 107.3 cm. Photo: Brett Boardman.

A new work commissioned especially for SCAF, Side Chain explores more deeply Chang’s relationship with the Lung Fa Tang temple and its inhabitants. In video footage of the still photographs being unwrapped for exhibition, and then later—mysteriously—destroyed, is a suggestion that in viewing these images, audiences become complicit in the fate of the subjects. This is a very uncomfortable notion indeed in a world in which discourses about the responsibilities of those who have much for those who have little are increasingly shrill and self-righteous. If “home” is about safety and autonomy, and about the connectedness of human beings to each other, then each of these artists raises issues that we cannot ignore.

Chien-chi Chang. Still from Side Chain, 1993-2014; b/w and color, sound; 6:24. Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 2014. Image courtesy of the Artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, and Magnum Photos.

Chang’s photographic essay and accompanying two-channel video, China Town, documents the lives of Chinese migrant workers in New York. As a Taiwanese immigrant himself, first in the United States and now in Austria, it is unsurprising that Chang makes work informed by notions of exile, and by his empathy for those far removed from their homeland. For the last twenty years he has been photographing these men. We see them sleeping in their underwear on fire escapes outside their shared bedrooms, and eating noodles high above the streets of Manhattan, which might as well be another world. Chang has also documented the lives of their wives and children back home in the villages of Fujian Province, villages in which so many children grow to adulthood without knowing their father, and in which almost every family has someone working far away in America. The men are shot in black-and-white, strangely cropped, with compressed space and shallow depth of field a metaphor for cramped and circumscribed lives crammed into tiny spaces. Their families in China are photographed in color, but the averted gaze of each of his subjects evokes the sadness of absence.

Chang works at the intersection of art, documentary film, and journalism, but what distinguishes his work is its unusual depth—he returns to visit his subjects over a period of years—and his empathy. Not so far removed himself from the fragile hopes and constant fears of discovery and deportation so evident in his moving photographs, Chang moved to America in 1988 but was awarded permanent residency only in 1992, as “an alien with extraordinary ability.” “Like a Martian or something,” says Chang. There is none of the compromising voyeurism so often present in sociological photographic narratives. His works are both a social document and a profoundly compassionate statement about human connection. Photographs of sons and daughters his immigrant subjects have never met are taped to the walls next to girlie pinups and scrawled phone numbers. One man has not been home for seventeen years. I came away with a great sense of sadness, and a huge admiration for all of the anonymous cooks, dishwashers, taxi drivers, domestic helpers, and childcare and aged-care workers in the first world, laboring to send money home to make a better future for their families. Sherman says, “HOME is not an easy exhibition. The issues are uncomfortable, the images are unsettling, the people represented share our humanity but not our good fortune.”

HOME is on view at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation through August 2, 2014.