China: Reproductions

Plastic 'wooden' bins at the Great Wall, and some speakers at the imperial residence in Xi'an, purporting to be carved from stone and wood.
Hongqiao Pearl Market, Beijing; electronics section:
Chinese hawker: "iPod! Very cheap!"
Alice: "But that's not an iPod."
Chinese hawker: "China iPod! Cheap cheap!" [It was - US$15 I think]



And here's some of the shit me and Cian got burned for at the same market: a 2gb memory card for his camera and a 4gb memory stick. Even though the memory stick said Sony on it, I never thought it actually was Sony - it never occurred to me though that the memory stick would not work at all. When it's plugged into the USB, a little light comes on, but nothing else happens. The camera memory card is a bit more complicated. Because people can check it at the store, the file allocation information on the card is doctored: your camera thinks it can take 400+ photos, so you go '"ok, i guess it's real, here's your money." Next day though, when you take more than 5 or 6 photos and you try to review them, your camera has trouble showing them - they're not really there.


China is a funny place. Any minute now, it's going to become a world superpower, more important than Russia, the UK, France, nipping at the heels of the US... but I felt that innovation and creativity were being left behind in a short term race for profits. I wonder about an economic sector that figures out very complicated ways of duping tourists, instead of researching ways to, say, produce actual 2gb cards for cheap.



China's recent history has a pretty checkered track record when it comes to nurturing creativity. Soon after the formation of the People's Republic of China, Chairman Mao asked for 'a million flowers to bloom', a request for ideas for the future of China from artists, writers and intellectuals. Many think this was a ploy to determine possible dissenters in the population, and most of those who voiced opinions on the possible trajectory of the state were sent to forced-labour, 're-education' camps, or simply disappeared. The 'Cultural Revolution' which followed entailed the destruction of all books, artifacts, and the attempted erasure of any previous culture, largely destroying the cultural base necessary for the creative arts. The short-lived democracy movement of 1988, which culminated with the massacre at Tiannenmen Square, featured a creative act which directly engaged Mao and his crusade against art: protesting farmers from his home village threw paint on his portrait at the gates of the Forbidden City. A replica, one of many on hand for just such an incident, quickly replaced it.



Factory 798 was a disused electronics factory on the outskirts Beijing. Artists, facing continued persecution by the authorities in their inner-city studios, settled here in the late eighties and nineties. In 2004, it was scheduled for demolition, to be replaced by high-rise apartment complexes that cover much of Beijing, but the artists had at that point formed such a strong community that they were able to resist the takeover: through a combination, I believe, of international awareness, sheer quality of the creative work, and the commercial value such an area would have to the authorities of Beijing.


The creative output itself at 798 has the cohesiveness of a 'school'; confined, I think, by the limits of the cultural revolution and continued censorship to a vocabulary of communist-inspired imagery, which results in a lot of artists exploring similar fields, testing the boundaries of what is permissable, and playing on the ambiguity of juxtaposed semiotics in the same way Pop artists like Warhol used commercial imagery.



Of course, like Pop Art, this particular creative vein is quickly re-commodified by commercial and government interests. Factory 798 at the moment is becoming a lot like Soho in 1990s New York, with fashion boutiques, cafes etc. taking over from galleries and studios. Many of the galleries remaining are selling a type of '798' art which is predictable and obvious, simply rehashing Pop Art techniques in a communist idiom.


One interesting thing about 798 is the street art. It's the only graffiti in the entire city, presumably because it's the only place the authorities permit it. This goes against the commodification present in other aspects there - it can't be bought, and In many ways it completely undermines the authoritarian government in China, with its emphasis on individuality, and its expression in the public realm.


This was my favorite - a simple communist star with a small phallic appendage. With the simplicity of a logo, it combines the symbol of authority with the symbol of masculine aggression, thus (in a playful way) referring to the brutality inherent in that authority. It's repeated all over Factory 798, its simplicity enabling reproduction by multiple authors. Subversive - exactly what art should be.